blogger interrupted

When I learned how to hook up with guys on the internet, I was managing Larry Friedman’s campaign for state representative.  Managing that campaign in 1996 was a lonely affair – underpaid, overworked, and stuck in an office above a car phone installation garage (remember those?), looking at a computer and a phone, by myself, 12 hours a day.  Boredom introduced me to AOL chat rooms, and even then, in 1996, it was like finding the perfect sex supermarket.

Suddenly, anyone’s innermost secret desires were available like a smorgasbord at the click of a mouse.  Every variation on sex anyone can imagine was there, in stark relief, sorted by geography, city, desire, age, body shape, fetish, m4f, m4m, f4m, f4f, group…the world’s most perfect index of sexuality.

It was instant.  And anonymous.  Perfect for a closeted bisexual male.  In less than half an hour I could be hooking up.  

It had been years since I had sex with another man, the carefully crafted defenses of my life had kept me from being in any situation that would allow who I was to breath.  My pent up and denied reality was given a pin prick.   The time bomb started ticking, and it accelerated quickly.

Over the next five years, all spent bouncing from gig to gig, the downtime in between was almost welcome for its suitability to getting laid online.   I’d get home from an extended tour abroad and spend almost the whole vacation time online, cruising for sex.  It was like shooting ducks in barrel.

The other part of me accelerated my bridge burning, a 3-year-old reflex in me vomiting out resignations from jobs for the tiniest slight.  Donna Brazille in the Gore 2000 campaign offered me half the state of Ohio in December, 1999.  Not good enough, how dare you.  Next stop, resignation from Ted Celeste’s US Senate campaign in Ohio – don’t you know who I am?   I got offered a super NDI gig in Kosovo in early 2001, turned it down over the number of flights home they wouldn’t pay for.   Fuck off, I said.  In writing.  With loads of profanity sprinkled about the email.

Maybe I was saying, look, this isn’t me.  This life is not who I am.  This other life is.  Or maybe I was obsessively, compulsively manifesting my hardwired defense mechanisms in the subconscious knowledge that the secret was coming out, and coming out fast.  Or maybe I was just freaking out.  I don’t know, and never will.

Downtime led to more downtime, until there was way too much of it, way too little money, and I was back at my parents’ house for good, sitting online, looking for work in one browser window, for sex in 5 others, completely unaware of the irony of sneaking around for sex from my parents’ house at age 34 just as I had at age 15.

It grew into my life like a spreading plague and warped time itself, until hours spent online felt like mere minutes.  I sat there zombie-like, mornings, afternoons, late nights spent in utterly ridiculous interaction with other men, reduced to mere discussions of bodies and logistics.   Top or bottom?  Into sucking?  Swallow?  Smooth or hairy?  Work out?  Got a pic?  Where at?  When?  Address?  What you driving?  Looking back on it now, I wonder if I was even human anymore.

On September 11, 2001, I learned of a plane hitting the World Trade Center by seeing it pop up as a headline on AOL while I sat waiting for someone to agree to meet for sex.  Only when my mom called me from her office to tell me it wasn’t some small bi-plane did I tear myself away to turn on the TV, where I saw the second plane hit.  

At that very moment, my life was in the crosshairs of the FBI and a local TV news crew.