"Once I met a guy in a club around 2002, when blogging was still in its infancy and there was no real etiquette," said Matthew*, a gay guy from Malta in his late 30s. "It was strange but flattering to learn that my innermost feelings could attract a tryst."īut the lack of social mores on the burgeoning platform sometimes led to embarrassing scenarios. "He was more of a lyrics poster, while I was the guy who posted my thoughts of the moment, as if I was on Twitter," he said. Michael Davis, a 30-something gay guy, told me he met "a quickie that turned into an ex" on LiveJournal back when it was the kind of place where you'd unload your subconscious. As sites like LiveJournal increased their user bases, the public became enthralled by the concept of blogging (though not without a whiff of judgement about the possibility of "oversharing"). On Grindr, all this back and forth for group sex, but on Craigslist, it was just there for the taking." There were guys who had these things every once in a while where everyone would get naked and fuck around with each other. "On Craigslist back then, you could find more group sex parties than you could ever find on Grindr or Scruff. "It was just a mess."īut he says he misses the freewheeling opportunities for fucking. "For me, it was a pain in the ass because I had to have a separate email address and copy and paste the sender's address, attach my photos, and send it from my email," he said. Chaotic and convoluted, it nevertheless provided him with a steady stream of dick. Perry Miller, now in his late 40s, remembers when Craigslist was the premiere spot for finding hookups. Pixelated avatars were acceptable digital identities, and chatrooms arguably served as an extension of the anonymous cruising culture that gay life had yet to abandon. " No pic / no chat" was yet to become a ubiquitous bio addition on Grindr instead, the less-demanding "a/s/l" reigned. The buffet of low-tech options in the late 90s and early aughts also granted the hookup-minded a level of anonymity we regard with suspicion today. "Chatrooms were less about trading pics and more about being witty and having a back-and-forth banter with people," he says. Compared to Grindr, he says, his anonymous chatrooms interactions were much more intellectually stimulating. Sam looks back on the connections he made on Gay.com with a sense of wistfulness. Today, Elderkin still hears from people who met their forever partners on his site. "We had a community of around 250 chat room monitors who were in there every day, just trying to keep the bashers out and ensure the chatrooms were safe for people," Mark Elderkin, the site's founder, told me. In its heyday, Gay.com was so popular it attracted more than a million users a day. Comprised of hundreds of virtual rooms-there were 122 chat rooms on the "youth floor" alone in 2000-it was a bawdy, freewheeling site that attracted kinky daddies, lonely teens, and the serially monogamous who'd "accidentally" stumbled into a phone sex room. Of all the websites that Egan chronicled, Gay.com was arguably the largest and most vital. When compared to the mindlessness of chatting on Grindr today, these early online communities seem downright enriching. "The remarkable thing is that via the Internet, gay teenagers are now able to partake of the normal Sturm und Drang of adolescent life, which before was largely off-limits to them," she wrote.īut they didn't just change the lives of gay teens-these proto-Grindr sites impacted the lives of gay men of all ages. In a New York Times Magazine feature in 2000, Jennifer Egan wrote glowingly of the rowdy chat rooms that allowed gay teens to become mired in the same drama as their straight compatriots. It's all old hat in the age of Grindr and Scruff-but back then, it was a revelation.Ĭhroniclers of the early internet praised its power to provide young sexual minorities with support, sex, and even love. And in the burgeoning world of cybersex, you could have sex with strangers without revealing your face or lilting cadence. The gay-friendliness of your hometown didn't matter all that mattered was that you had a stable dial-up connection and access to a keyboard.
Suddenly, an AOL screen name granted you access to a world that had hitherto been shrouded in mystery and misinformation. For gay men, the birth of online chat rooms changed everything.