Imagine living your life never having to wonder if anyone was interested. Never making the fist move. And never concerned with the public humiliation, tension, confusion of the above process.

Imagine your life without the excitement of realising that the guy/girl sitting across from you/on your sports team/in the park actually was into you, because you never had to do the above.

I guess that’s what I want to reflect on in this post.

So this is one of the things that I start writing having no idea if it will ever be something that I would consider posting online or using for any purpose other than the bittersweet satisfaction of immediate deletion. But if you are reading this online, chances are I did something with it. Or you’ve hacked my recycling bin. Whichever.

So, right. Coming back from “the South” (which refers to the global south, generally much poorer than “the North,” namely, the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, China, Russia, etc, compared to the rest of the world. It’s a phrase which I am not comfortable enough with to use outside of quotation marks, but which I find less questionable than other terms such as “civilization,” “the developed world,” or “modernity.”) I have lately been a bit overwhelmed by technology and the role that it plays in my life when I am in the States or places that have a high degree of IT infrastructure. I am far from an anti technology person. I’m sitting on a train in Japan writing this on one of my three computers, the books I am reading are on an oldschool Kindle (that sounds oxymoronic, now that I write it out), my camera is digital, my communications are done by email, handy since it doesn’t know international roaming fees, my banking and bills are online, blah blah blah. I am a child of the digital revolution, or whatever you want to call it. And I have very little tolerance for people or companies who can’t keep up with the speed and efficiency that digitization has brought those of us on this planet who are lucky enough to live in places with all of this infrastructure and processing power. But one segment of my life in which it is a bit more complicated for me to think about the pros and cons of digitization and such is in dating. Or, rather, not dating. And, honestly, not hooking up. Just in…. guys. Boys. Men. Whatever. I feel like there is politics in which label to use. I could abbreviate… GMB’s? MBG’s? MBG’s? Right. Too confusing. Guys.

First of all, we can acknowledge on the fact that I am reflecting on my lovelife in Tumblr. Which is an alarming development in and of itself. But I think If I am going to be critiquing the internet’s role in my life, Tumblr is the venue for it, considering the fact that it is one of the few social networking technologies that doesn’t make me wish I was dead (I still prefer email to facebook messages, and twitter makes me consider suicide). So here it is. Or, rather, still in openoffice awaiting a final decision on whether or not to delete this, it is.

I don’t know if this is the same for straight people, but I have to imagine that it isn’t. Growing up with facebook and various gay websites has completely revolutionized, and, if I am to reflect on it, quite possibly seriously fucked up the world of attraction and flirtation and such for gay men. Now… I am probably not well equipped to critique this too severely. I was born into it. Since I came out when I was 14 there have been myriad options for finding…. whatever. Guys who were also attracted to guys. There were websites for highschool kids to “date.” There are websites for guys to hookup. And I guess date also (I mean, match.com and all of that have males seeking males sections, I suppose). So I never went through any period of having only gay bars to find guys (thank god. Because for all that I will write about the internet and dating in this section, gay bars/clubs seem potentially even less conducive to finding anything more than mediocre drugged/drunk stranger sex than the internet), or some shady dark corner of Central Park. I also never went through a period of secrecy or insecurity of actually being “in the closet,” that is, knowing I was gay but being afraid to express it. Which is a testament to my friends and school and family and blah blah blah. So using myself as a sample for this reflection is probably not overwhelmingly fair, but I’m what I’ve got.

And in the case of that one person sample analyzed by the most non-objective viewer ever, I am not clear that the internet has been a net good thing for my romantic life. And if it has been a net positive, then there definitely are some sacrifices that have been made.

One thing that is probably simultaneously a pro and a con (and, actually, the phenominon that got me to start writing this a few weeks ago) is the impact that having the internet as a sexual or romantic outlet probably has had on my friendships with straight guys. I didn’t really have problems related to my sexuality with anyone in secondary school, despite the fact that I firstly came out in secondary school and secondly didn’t make any effort to avoid the subject over my four years there. A huge part of this would have to be the fact that I never seriously hit on or made a move on any of the straight guys I was friends with. The closest anything came to that was when one of them made out with me while I was drunk on a floor after prom, and then proceeded to come out to everyone. But… yeah, that didn’t really require any testicular fortitude on my part. My sexuality was less messy, besides the gay jokes and fake flirtation with friends and swapping of hookup stories that is part of being a 16/17/18 year old privileged insensitive guy.

So. Yeah. I was able to virtually completely separate my life (sports, friends, family) from my sexuality while being in a way open about it, by compartmentalizing it and making it exceptionally efficient, essentially the way an electronic reader effects your relationship with literature: making the “life compartment” of your reading more efficient by keeping all of it with you, all the time, with a wireless link to a server farm somewhere where coal is cheap, while taking reading out of your “view,” as there are no longer any books sitting around, or trips to the library. Out of sight, and out of mind, unless of course you want it to be. And, simultaneously, making it very unlikely that you would end up exposed to any material not stored in that server farm. More on that later.

Possibly as a consequence of this, I haven’t ever felt much of a connection to any sort of “gay community.” I have mentioned this in writings before, I have to assume. It was a big point of division between my ex and I, as he liked to spend a lot of his time at gay socials/mixers/”Professional shit” (the latter probably being a label no-one but myself would use.) Then and today, I was/am unsure of the relevance of making one’s friends and networks based on who they are having sex with, instead of a holistic assessment of their personality (in terms of friendships) or a holistic assessment of the cost/benefit ratio of building a relationship with them (in terms of networking. Or using people. In my experience there isn’t much of a line between the two. But let’s call it networking.) Most encounters I have had with the “gay community” when I was new to college or had just moved to Aus revolved around people’s snide comments about other people’s fashion sense (which, until recently, I have been pretty immune from thanks to the amount of free shit diesel threw at me over the years), medium racist or classist comments about everyone else around them, or just the expectation that everyone should look like a super model and have the intellectual capacity/drive of one.

I bought into parts of this for a while. Anyone who knew me when I was 18 will confirm that I was exceptionally image conscious. And I was decent at it. I guess that was a big part of the problem in the long run. I realized that I could go through a bunch of motions and then be “appealing” to all of those people. Regardless of my personality. Or interests. Or intelligence or lack thereof. It was as if the more “involved” I became in the “community,” the more my own identity and assets (or detracting factors, in fairness) ceased to matter. And if people are trying to run away from their identity or insecurities I can see the appeal of that. I probably was for a while. But over the last four or five years I’ve had the privilege of getting to know myself exceptionally well. And as that’s happened that scene ceased to have much appeal to me. Which is lucky. Cause otherwise I probably wouldn’t be all that comfortable talking about my dating shortcomings in the public sphere. But I think this is a valuable conversation in its own way.

So the “gay community” was never a substantial source of meaningful relationships for me, platonic or otherwise. There are obviously deviations from this rule, but I can safely say that I am not in touch with anyone that I met from the “gay scene” regularly today, unless I met them on or with the assistance of the internet.

Let’s just bullit the list of my socio-sexual/technology relationships….

• First highschool boyfriends – were from surrounding school distericts (which perfectly ensured their inability to interfere with my assimmilationish straight friendly lifestyle) met online on various local and national websites.

• One highschool boyfriend was a friend of a friend. We dated for like two weeks. The internet wasn’t a part of that at all.

• I hit 16 and started working 30 hours a week on top of highschool. So boyfriends gave way to something more casual. A couple of kids came out at my highschool, so I wasn’t the “only one” anymore. But they were from different social groups, and were depressed and insecure. So I did what every mature, responsible highschooler does, and picked on them or ignored them, and acted like I was better than them.

• By senior year I was “dating” college kids (which is a little weird, now that I think about it.) from philly, a 20 minute drive away. It gave me an escape from my home life (which by then was terrible) and also completely freed me from the messiness of dating people who weren’t out to their parents, or had parents that didn’t approve, both of which were common occurances up until this point. Mostly, I was a dick, and would be interested in them for a couple of months and make them really like me and then stop talking to them. What can I say. I’m a winner. Or was a crazy 17 year old Senior.

• Fall of freosh year I dated the 2^nd and last person I ever met not on the internet. The RA in my residence hall. It gave don’t shit your you sleep a whole new personal relevance within 3 months.

• Ever since I’ve dated, using the term loosely, just from people I met online, whether that was actual gay websites or facebook searches of my university in Australia or something of the sort. Not that this has been an epic failure… I’ve had one of the longest relationships of anyone I know, regardless of sexual orientation, including a stint living together that was something less than a total failure. I’ve had very short relationships because of my lack of much geographical rooting. But they’ve all started in similar ways.

I don’t think any of this is inherantly bad. It just makes me realize just how much of an impact certain technologies can have. Friendliness and sexual interest can be confused pretty easily, but facebook pages that list sexual orientation can avoid a lot of awkward situations in that department. But, even if the social confusion that these “social technologies” help to reduce is are awkward ones, aren’t we still loosing some element of our own personhood?

One thing really comes to mind here, and that’s Grindr. Or Grinder. Or something. I don’t have a smartphone, so I don’t really know or understand exactly how it works, but esentially it’s an iphone/smartphone app that tells you when gay people are around you, and shows you a profile they have created. Which is fucking crazy. I mean. Come on. So now, you don’t even talk to someone for a while and find out their sexual orientation from facebook, you can just be like “oh, that guy is attractive,” look at your phone, and then, if he isn’t on some website, assume he is straight. Or not. But still. I guess it still works to prevent social awkwardness in its own way, but stuff like this kind of alarms me as well. It is as though interaction has become so automated (and so much about what technology people are willing to buy, but hey, this is the heartland of capitalism and one of the most commercialized subcultures within the country we are talking about) that there won’t be a place for eye contact anymore.

I know that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s just to illustrate my thoughts I guess. And hope that I don’t become too blinded by technology to actually meet people in my every day life.

Andrew