EVOLUTION OF GAY 'PERSONALS'

This is one of the few 'personal' blogs I intend to write. I prefer writing about history and hypocrisy. But with this blog on the evolution of gay dating services. I can share with the younger generation the pathetic tools we had to work with before the dawn of computers and how we suffered thru the trials and tribulations of primitive technology. To show that they have it so easy these days compared to what we went thru. From hand-written letters & Polaroids to Instant Messaging we've come along way baby. It's a story better told in person but here goes...

MOVING ON UP...
I moved to Hollywood in 1978 after high school. I was finally on my own. Free of small town bigotry and family ties. I had a job that paid a whopping $4.00/hour. My rent for a large single was $160 a month. It was an exciting time to be gay and young, the gay movement was growing. I voted in my first election and we defeated Prop 6, the Briggs initiative that would have banned gay teachers. I was also too young to go to bars (although I did get a fake ID that I used from 19 to 21), the only place I could meet guys was Venice beach, I didn't have a car and the trip took 3 Buses to get there and was a weekend thing. I also frequented a few coffee shops in West Hollywood hoping someone would talk to me. I'd walk Hollywood Blvd listening to my blue wrist-strap Panasonic radio in knee high socks with stripes, white short shorts and blue Adidas sneakers. I was jamming.

MALE-ORDER BRIDES
One day I was reading the gay rags and saw an ad for a Introduction Service by mail. I quickly wrote out a check and eagerly checked the mail. About 3 weeks later I finally got my first 'package'. It was a regular sized business enveloped stuffed to bursting with about ten typewritten, mimeographed pages of gay male personals! For the younger set reading, mimeographs was the precursor to xerox copies. You typed on a sheet of paper with a special carbon sheet underneath. You attached that to a hand-cranked machine drum, added a clear chemical and turned the crank, pages were then reproduced in a very light blue. I can still remember that smell, it was very sweet smelling. My first experience with it was in middle school when I would go to math class early (teacher's pet) and he would let me run that days math quiz. The pages came out slightly wet and you had to let them dry first. I would fan them and sniff 'em. It didn't get you high or anything like that, just a pleasant smell.

I digress...there was about 25 listings per page, 3 lines per listing. First name, last initial, city, state. Most had phone numbers though some still in the closet used PO Boxes or mailing address. This was my first exposure to the 'coded shorthand' of gay lingo, SGWM (single gay white mail), it was very exciting and I would read them from start to finish over and over. All kinds of weird things I had never heard of, but was curious to explore. So after crossing off the bottoms, or the extremely weird kinky descriptions, I was disappointed that there weren't very many locals. Most were out of state.

PHONE SEX
So I embraced phone sex! I had one phone friend from the service that lasted for close to 15 years, and I'd call at least a couple times a week. Some of my best orgasms were with that man and the way he could role-play a sleazy scenario. A couple years later they rolled out the 976 sex lines. I could never figure out why someone would pay when I had been doing it for years for free, lol. I can remember having guys write to 'occupant'. Soon I got a couple letters in the mail, guys wanting to write dirty letters and such, and they sometimes had Polaroids. Now remember this is before computers, before VHS. The only access to pornography was magazines bought from a sleazy bookstore, 8mm films and the XXX theater. So it was very exciting at the time. I don't think I met more than 1 or 2 guys in person, WARNING: guys may be uglier than their descriptions!

MATCHMAKER MATCHMAKER FIND ME A MAN
The next evolution to hit the single scene were known as Introduction Services or Matchmakers. I signed up and went to some spiffed-up office space off Santa Monica Blvd. There you'd be handed a large binder with a single picture of available men. You would have to sign and leave a form of interest or some such nonsense and if the guy was interested the company would give him your telephone number. Not only was there nobody that thrilled me in those binders but it just felt weird to be sitting there with several other people doing the same thing. I'd hurry up and check the new guys and then hit the bars which were hopping in the late 70's early 80's pre-AIDS days.

VIDEO DATING...NOT!
Then came video dating. I didn't even have a desire to attempt that after the failure of picture books. So that one thankfully passed me by. But from the number of spoofs and jokes about video dating I figure it wasn't very promising. The trouble with picture and video services is you have to leave home, sit around with other strangers, and there's that nosey middleman involved in your personal business and peccadillos.

THE DIGITAL AGE..sort of
Finally around 1984 computers hit like a mack truck. They were way to expensive for me to have one. And besides there was no Internet, no email, no reason to have one, except for PORN! One day my lover at the time brought home an IBM-XT that his company was replacing in 1986. The IBM-XT for you youngens out there was primitive indeed. It had a green screen, no graphics, no sound and ran on DOS 1.0 and used 5.25" floppies, had only 64kB memory and a teenie tiny hard drive, 10 megs at the most. List price new $7,545.00! He also snagged an external phone modem at a super fast speed of 1200 baud.

BBS
I had read about guys meeting up on something called BBS (Bulletin Board Systems). Most of these were run by computer hobbyists and many were free. It allowed users to dial into the system over a phone modem and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. They would publish the number to dial and access codes and general area of interest. I signed up for a local gay BBS. It was completely menu driven. Enter 1 to go to bulletin board, 2 to see profiles, 3 to download software, etc. At first there was no simultaneous "chat" or "instant messages" but you did have a primitive email account with them, sort of...only worked internally, you had to log on and could only send to others on the same BBS. Later limited chatrooms came in and there was a new option, #9, the Internet! I had heard of it but at the time there was nothing really to do on it. Mostly download form FTP sights and you had to know the FTP address before hand in order to download the file. Today we have Web-Masters back then they were Sys-Ops.

JOYS OF DOWNLOADING
But you were able to download pictures from the email account that guys would send you, but at 1200 baud even small picture took a long time, I can remember hitting download, and then taking a shower, shaving, getting dressed, all before the download was complete! With great excitement you'd click open file, and more likely than not be very very disappointed. I'd get angry and scream having wasted 30-45 minutes downloading a non-porn pic! lol. And I couldn't even print out the pictures as all we had was a daisy-wheel printer. Again for the youngsters...a daisywheel was a pritner that had a round disk with the letters imprinted on them, it would spin and strike the appropriate letter on the paper (the paper too, wasn't single 8.5x11 it had to be computer paper, fan-folded and with track holes on the side). So it could only print words not pictures. To print italics, the printer would stop, beep, and tell you to swtich to the italic daisywheel, beep again, change back to normal. Dot-matrix would soon appear but wasn't much better, at least it didn't involve switching wheels, and was still black and white, red if you were lucky.

PRODIGY
It pretty much was like that until a nationwide campaign touted a service called Prodigy in 1990. Prodigy was a joint effort between IBM and Sears. Initially, Prodigy had hoped that its service would be much like today's Internet portals, offering news, weather, sports, shopping, banking, and airline reservations. The service provided many lifestyle features too: an array of popular syndicated columnists, Consumer Reports, games, in-depth original features called "Timely Topics," bulletin boards moderated by subject matter experts, and e-mail. Only catch was it required a graphic card. I went to Radio Shack and bought an expensive graphic card, although it was still only in green, but it did render graphics. After days of tinkering with switches, jumpers, config.sys and not having a clue what I was doing, I managed to somehow get it to work. The first time it booted up and I logged on to Prodigy, (which up till then I had only seen BBS's in text), and saw the cute Prodigy logo I screamed with joy! But again it was early in the game and still before the World Wide Web and no browsers. So I didn't make much use of it.

WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE...
One night I went to a party at a friends. I noticed they had a computer with COLOR graphics. Boy was I envious. I non-chalantly asked if they had upgraded from a previous video card, they had, and they gave me their old color graphic card for free! It was one of the happiest days of my life. I couldn't wait to go home and try it out. First though I had to again go to Radio Shack to by a color monitor. I finally got it all to work and was thrilled to see porn in color.

WINDOWS 3.1
I moved to San Francisco in 1993 and left that IBM behind. I bought a then top of the line 286 computer. More as a hobby to keep me busy. Window's 3.1 left you with plenty to tinker around with, whether by choice or not, lol. It was very temperamental and everything had to be just right or it wouldn't work. I spent a fortune upgrading graphic card after graphic card trying to improve performance. I soon signed up for AOL when they had less than 2 million subscribers. I still wasn't into the chat rooms and there wasn't any gay personal sites that I can remember at that time. So I used it mostly to email and/or IM and for research.

CABLE MODEM
Fast forward to 2000 and I moved to Palm Springs. My partner would spend hours online, we would have to take turns as we only had dialup, downloading porn, I never really got into it that much, but one day I asked him for his access code to a porn site. Now I understood what all the fuss was about, search your interest, your kink and voila, thousands of links to click. Soon I had a library of thousands, all sorted by type, age or kink! Went thru 2 or 3 desktops systems and In 2003 bought my first laptop and signed up for cable. I'll never know how we managed on dial-up. I know I can never go back.

THE PRESENT
A friend kept talking about Gay.com and I soon joined and am now hooked as it were. If nothing else they help to sort the men-from-the-boys (bottoms & tops). When I recognize someone from a site, I have a good memory for faces, so I know whether he's bottom, top or versatile and have saved countless hours cruising the wrong ones. I now belong to dozens of personals sites. Most a waste of time but I have made a few contacts (blush). And I have since bought a new laptop every year for xmas and give my partner my old one. We now have 2 desktops and 3 laptops! Amazing. My current one I specifically bought anticipating Vista and got the free upgrade. It is due to ship in March, I'll keep a detailed log on the installation of Vista, so check back in March to learn how it went.