My birthday was last week. I turned 52. And I spent the majority of my day thinking about this guy I used to see on Gay.com.
See, back in the Pleistocene Era of the internet, before there were apps for everything, and before we knew who the Millennials were, we used websites for everything. And if you didn’t feel like hanging out with the people you knew and disliked in real life, you could hang out online in chat rooms with people you didn’t know and disliked.
Gay.com was a mega-site of sorts back then. It had news, interviews, travel features, movie and music and book reviews (Remember when people read books? And news outlets paid people to actually review them? It was the Wild West, let me tell you…), and for a few years, a Java chat applet with a wide array of chat rooms, many regional and location specific. I spent a lot of time in the Atlanta M4M room, which was the basic offering for gay men in the Atlanta area, and where it was mostly people who already knew one another offline. I made several friends there, and I’m still friends with a few of them.
Anyway, I was in my late 20s and early 30s when I hung out on Gay.com. I was living with someone at the time and we were supposed to be serious, but he wanted to have sex with other people, so we somehow ended up in an open relationship where he would go fuck someone, but I’d meet someone for a beer and he’d track me down and go off the deep end. Good times! Like, I don’t even recall how the decision to open the relationship was made. I sat down on a used condom on the floor of our den and the next thing I knew, I was in an open relationship.
But, like I said, I made friends on Gay.com and since my relationship was unraveling, I spent a lot of time in that Atlanta M4M chat room.
Chat rooms back then worked a little like Twitter and Facebook and the apps do now: you made up a screen name, you filled in a brief bio, and you uploaded a profile pic. Yes, people lied back then. They said they were single when they weren’t. They said they were “straight acting” when they were anything but. They said they were hung and muscled. They used old pics and believed no one could tell. Or they used pics of porn stars, like no one watched porn and could easily identify Ryan Idol and Joey Stefano and Tom Chase. They used fake names. They lied in their bios, or they just left them blank. Or, worse, they put their stats in the bio and used a generic crotch shot for the profile pic: 6’2”, 215, blond/blue, tan, work out 5x/week, 8”x5” uncut.
It became easy to spot the fakes if you spent enough time there, and I guess I’m telling on myself: I spent a lot of time there. I was lonely. I hated my boyfriend, and I wanted out. It was cheaper than going to a bar. But I wasn’t the only regular. There were lots of us. And there was this one guy whose screenname I can’t recall, but I remember that his bio started out like this: “50 (Yes, 50!) …”
Like if he didn’t include that, no one would believe a fifty-year-old man would waste his time in a Gay.com chat room? No. He put that in there because he believed—or he wanted other people to tell him—that he did not look fifty years old. Only he totally looked like a fifty-year-old man, and that isn’t to say he looked bad. He was reasonably attractive, albeit not my type. He looked like a schoolteacher or a Baptist minister, and his hairstyle and fashion choices were anywhere from five to twelve years out of style. We all know those people who find their signature look, get a lot of compliments on it, and keep it forever. That guy was like this.
I never spoke to him, but I always wondered why he felt the need to put that in his bio. “Yes, 50!” Like, girl, calm down. My mom is fifty-six, it’s okay. It’s not a death sentence.
But I figured someone had probably said something to him. Maybe it was someone in the same chat room. Because we all know how the younger gays feel about the attractiveness and viability of the elder gays. Hell, guys are even calling themselves “Daddy” and they haven’t even turned thirty yet! What do they call themselves when they turn forty? And am I supposed to call myself a corpse?
I’m in better shape now than I was in my twenties. I’m healthier. I quit smoking and I don’t do drugs anymore and, while I still drink, I don’t do it the way I did back then. I don’t have unprotected sex with men I only know by their screennames. I brush and floss twice a day now. I drink a gallon of water a day. I fucking exercise and I HATE physical activity. But I don’t want to die when I’m sixty, like my father did. Granted, he didn’t really do the things he should have done—that his doctors told him to do—to prolong his life, but still. Genetics are genetics, and anxiety is as Jewish as gefilte fish, so here I am, eight years away and not wanting to kick the bucket before I really need to. I’ve got stuff I want to do.
Anyway, that fifty-year-old guy. (Yes, 50!) Bless his heart, I guess. I hope he’s glad he’s seventy now. Yes, 70! I hope he looks good for his age the way he did back then, and I hope he’s found someone to spend his life with, so he doesn’t have to issue a challenge every time he states his age. I hope he exercises and drinks water and eats cruciferous vegetables, even if they do make him gassy.
I hope he’s happy. Yes, happy!