Tuesday, May 13, 2008
What's a nice gay guy like me doing in a chat room like this? Plus: Remembering the most musical voice in baseball; can you still travel off the beaten track?
Oct 19, 1999 | You've got male
BY MICHAEL ALVEAR
(10/12/99)
Alvear seems titillated by the most overtly sexual gay AOL users, and he paints a picture that is extreme and somewhat misleading. He states, "For heterosexuals, AOL is merely a swinger's lounge. For gay men, it's more like a 1970s bathhouse." While I can't argue against the notion that many gay men use AOL for sex, it is also true that many gay men use it for more wholesome purposes. Many gay teens use AOL as a venue to find other teens to talk to; it has nothing to do with sex.
The screen names Alvear selected represent the minority of gay users who choose to express themselves so lasciviously. Of the 100 people on my buddy list (most of them gay), none has a name like the lewd names Alvear recounted. Neither I nor my gay friends have nude photos of ourselves that we trade over AOL. Furthermore, I know firsthand of many straight men and women who use AOL to find sexual partners, just as some of their gay counterparts do.
It is shameful that your writer chose to sensationalize and skew instead of presenting balance and background.
-- Michael Dushane
Ann Arbor, Mich.
I take issue with the implication that gay men congregate in AOL's M4M chat rooms solely for the purpose of getting their rocks off. Though this claim certainly gels with the stereotype of the singlemindedly horny gay male who eschews meaningful long-term relationships in order to fuck a different trick each night, the truth isn't quite this simple.
Perhaps you haven't been in a gay bar recently, but from personal experience I can tell you that it's practically impossible to meet intelligent, educated, considerate, quality guys -- ones in the market for either a genuine friend (of the non-fuckbuddy variety) or for a real, monogamous relationship -- there. That's where AOL comes in. For those of us who aren't gay scenesters who live for bar-hopping and circuit parties, AOL is one of the few places where we can meet queers who share our interests.
Now, yes, it's safe to say that a majority, or at least a plurality, of the gay guys on AOL are only looking for one thing. However, you'll find plenty of chaps there with broader interests too.
-- Jeff Kirk
One critical point that you missed is the recent San Francisco syphilis outbreak that CDC investigators sourced to an SFM4M chat room. Of the seven infectees that had "hooked up" through AOL and another chat service, five were HIV-positive, and had exposed up to 100 partners to HIV and syphilis through unsafe sex. The investigators pointed to the frequency of "barebacking" as well as anonymity and the ease of scoring as major factors in the outbreak. So, your comparison of AOL chat rooms of the '90s to the bathhouses of the '70s holds much more truth than you would allow.
While this small number of cases may not cause much alarm, the 20-fold number of exposed partners is especially alarming and is a clear repetition of the spread of AIDS in the early '80s. With an end of the decline in AIDS cases, especially in the tech-savvy 19- to 25-year-old demographic, I think it's irresponsible for you to publish an article like this without also mentioning the potential danger and consequences of having "dick at the door faster than pizza." Salon owes it to its readers, if not simply to journalistic standards, to publish the rest of the story.
-- John Brown
Michael Alvear talks about "gay men" throughout the story, but he never mentions bisexual men, who make up a good percentage of male cruisers in America Online chat rooms. I don't belong to AOL anymore, but when I did, a great number of chat rooms were named things like "bi men" and "bi M4M" in addition to "gay M4M," "gay in Phoenix" and so on. What's more, not all the men who visit generic man-for-man chat rooms identify as gay. I found many bisexual and bi-curious men in these areas. Bi men were (and I presume still are) everywhere on AOL. Classifying all man-for-man interaction on AOL as "gay" ignores and discredits all bisexual-identified men who use AOL and Internet chat in general to find one another.
-- Keith Bowers
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