Personal website as personal ad
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Riding my bike every day and working out regularly restored my natural and happy sexual itches. Not even knowing another queer - probably had many as customers, some were obviously gay - I turned to the web.
Edifying Spectacle has grown to thousands of pages. Admittedly many of them citations of sexual and metaphysical silliness, but hundreds of pages from old essays to quick weblog entries. Originally I put together a few pages to teach myself MS Front Page thinking I might one day need to create a site for my used bookshop.
I bought a cheap webcam and after fighting with its fisheye effect posted a page of photos of myself. And I wrote a few short pages about myself.
I wrote about my sexuality with what in retrospect seems reticent. Multifarious sexually it seemed prudent to narrow things down lest I frighten someone likeable away. There was the inevitable tension: telling people what they could understand, omissions were dictated not by shame. Even decent folks are confused about sex, have too many prejudices they can't even see.
A natural village atheist, I needed to make my impatience with faith, god, psychics, ufos and all the improvable nonsense the great majority rely on to keep themselves sane, well, calm anyway.
For some reason I've always had a natural affinity for gay men with money (often daddy's) and a taste for frippery (for which I love them). So I wrote my bull in a china shop page, warning them that I tended to be clumsy, some might say uncouth. It was a funny page.
Fondly I recall my little page about 'soft guys.' For the first time I spoke of my love of the feminine gay male. Funnily until I wrote that page my bias, need, quirk wasn't really clear to me. As startled as I was elated to see it clearly for the first time I'd write many pages in my Live Journal before I felt I'd finally honored their place in my life.
My little web site was probably ten or fifteen pages. Oddest thing about it was the tone was mostly bantering. Surprisingly some nice gay guys found it and would say that they'd like to meet me. Sadly they all lived hundreds or thousands of miles away.
But my website was just the beginning of using the web to meet other gay guys.
This is a series of sort: Gay bars (no!), Early 70s Atlanta, San Francisco, Interlude.