Subject: Salon: AOL = a 1970s gay bathhouse
From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:10:42 EDT

YOU'VE got male 

How did America Online 
become the bathhouse of
the Internet? Size matters.

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By Michael Alvear 
Posted October 12 on www.salon.com
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Oct. 12, 1999   -   Men and women alike are using America Online to pick up, 
peel off and put out with a kind of glee unseen since the summer of 
love. But for heterosexuals, AOL is merely a swinger's lounge. For gay 
men, it's more like a 1970s bathhouse.

"I can have dick delivered to my door faster than a pizza," says Steve, 
an Atlanta P.R. executive who cruises for men in America Online's chat 
rooms. (Like many of the men in this story, he asked that his real name 
not be used.) Within minutes of entering one of six AOL chat rooms 
designated for gay men in Atlanta, he exchanges naked photos with other 
men -- some with their faces cropped out -- and arranges a sex date.

What AOL lacks in steam rooms and towel-wrapped men it makes up for in 
steamy chat and naked pictures zooming across its servers. "GayOL," as 
many gay men have christened it, is home to hundreds of thousands of men 
"window-shopping" in the M4M (men for men) chat rooms.

There are, of course, several Web sites devoted specifically to the gay 
community -- like gay.com and Planet Out. But none of these has the 
reputation among gays that AOL does as the go-to place to get laid.

Why are so many gay men flocking to AOL?

"It offers an easier means to an end," says Paul, a health-care analyst 
in Atlanta who says he visits AOL's chat rooms nearly every day. "I 
don't have to get dressed up and go to a bar, drink, get my clothes full 
of smoke and wonder if anybody's interested." But avoiding the bar scene 
is only part of it. At 18 million members, AOL is so big you can find 
just about everything -- or anyone -- you're looking for. It turns out 
size does matter, and AOL has become the de facto online meet market 
largely because of its big member base.

"There are a lot of other gay Web sites that have chat rooms, but they 
came after the fact, after AOL," says Ron, a San Francisco marketing 
consultant who maintains two AOL accounts -- one for cruising and one 
for everything else. "They have millions of subscribers, which would 
keep even the most active gay man busy."

The popularity of the gay penis prowl on AOL has more to do with the 
company's technology than any gay-friendly stance on AOL's part. Instant 
messaging, for example, allows private conversation in public rooms. And 
then there's the system's legendary ease of use. "I've tried other sites 
like Gay.com," says Paul. "It's just not that easy to exchange pictures. 
Nothing beats AOL for the immediacy of naked pictures popping up on your 
screen almost instantly."

Rory O'Neill, president of Cybersite, which specializes in building 
online communities, says Paul isn't just imagining AOL's speed and ease 
of use. "AOL uses a local client software resident on the user's hard 
drive," he says. "Which makes it more robust than other sites which use 
HTML or Java. Self-contained systems like AOL's always run better, 
faster and with fewer problems."

Paul doesn't care about AOL's technology but he likes the effect: "With 
AOL it's simpler to evaluate the merchandise."

AOL's chat rooms are overflowing with gay men most nights of the week. 
Steve often has trouble getting into the virtual meat markets like 
AtlantaM4M, AtlantaM4M2 or AtlantaM4Mnow. With a limit of 23 
participants each, the six Atlanta rooms are always packed -- Steve has 
to hit the "return" key over and over to get in. "Persistence is the 
key," he says. 

The first thing you notice upon entering a gay chat room is the absence 
of, well, chat. On repeated visits to different chat rooms, you'll find 
the public area of discussion silent. The point of being in a gay room 
is unmistakable: You're there to attract flies -- literally. The best 
way to do that is with a descriptive screen-name that other chat members 
can click on to see if you have a fly worth unzipping. AOL forces you to 
use a maximum of 10 letters in your screen-name, which serves to weed 
out the creatively feeble. It's a Darwinian process: If your screen-name 
doesn't attract the energy for fueling libidos, you starve, sexually. 

An effective screen-name -- like "Opnwide4me" or "Uinmyass" -- leaves 
little room for second-guessing. Double-click on the member profiles and 
there's even less confusion. "URABTTM," for example, asserts: "You seek 
control and domination by aggressive top."

If the chat rooms are too busy, Steve will do a "member search" of men 
currently online who live in Atlanta and have keywords like "muscular" 
or "hung" in their profiles. Straight men tend to put "looking for 
female" in their profiles, so it's easy to distinguish gay profiles from 
straight. Then, using the instant message feature, he "IMs" the ones he 
likes, usually with an innocuous message like "Hey, I like your 
profile." 

After a flurry of exchanged photos -- "I want pictures of faces and 
bodies. Dicks if I can get them" -- Steve arranges a rendezvous. "Your 
place or mine?" is a refrain reverberating all over AOL's servers. It 
usually takes Steve 45 minutes from the time he starts his computer till 
he hears a knock on the door. His record? Five minutes. "I logged on, 
clicked into a room, exchanged GIFs and bam, I was out the door." 

Not everyone is happy when they finally do meet offline. As Tim, an 
inveterate chat-room user from Long Beach, Calif., says, "You cannot 
believe how much some of these guys lie. If you use their definition of 
a swimmer's body, Orca would qualify." Tim was addicted to AOL chat 
rooms. He'd meet guys on business trips by firing up his laptop and 
entering the chat rooms of the city he was visiting. But no more -- he's 
living with his lover. Guess where they met?

To understand how the squeaky-clean all-American portal of family 
friendly fun got turned into trick central you first have to grasp the 
dramatic impact the Internet is having on any group stigmatized by 
society. Indeed, the Net is changing the way gay men come out. Tom 
Rielly, co-founder of PlanetOut (which operates gay sites both on the 
Web and on AOL), thinks the Net is a lifeline for people unable or 
unwilling to come out in public. "How do you find your kind in a hostile 
world?" he asks. "The Internet provides safety for people too scared to 
come out. You can remain anonymous but participate in a community of 
people like yourself. It's the first medium to reach the closeted."

PlanetOut's mission, according to Rielly, is to help gays and lesbians 
meet each other online and off. "Flesh still matters," he says. "We've 
failed if all we do is connect people in cyberspace. Chat is an 
important part of our core mission to bring people together. Yes, some 
people use our service to look for sex, and I see nothing wrong with 
that, but the majority don't." 

Those who do go online looking for lust say the Net allows them to put 
aside their inhibitions, speak frankly and lay out what the ground rules 
will be for the sexual encounter. "I want to know if they're into oral 
sex or whether they're a top or a bottom," says Paul. "And it's easier 
to ask about their HIV status online than it is in person."

Jeff Bennett, co-founder of Gay.com, one of the largest gay Web sites, 
downplays the steam factor for gay communities online: "For the most 
part, people come to our site to build a sense of community, to find 
somebody like them, not to have sex." He points to a recent meeting in 
California arranged by frequent visitors to an HIV chat room. Seventy 
men from all over the world met for a weekend retreat. "I was there," 
says Bennett. "It was not a pick-up, cruisy scene. It was about 
fellowship." Eighty people showed up at Charlie's Restaurant & Bar in 
Denver after the Gay.com Colorado chat room decided to hold annual 
dinners so the group members could meet each other.

Ron, the San Francisco consultant, says that through AOL he and his 
friends have developed friendships and paid visits to gay men in places 
like Israel and Ireland. "We're building a global community," he says. 
"Most of us use computers."

In fact, the research firm Computer Economics puts Internet use by gays 
and lesbians at 10 percent higher than the general population. The firm 
estimated the figure through a combination of focus groups with 
knowledgeable gay observers and extrapolations from previous studies of 
gay Internet use.

Ad salesmen for the gay press see firsthand how the Internet is changing 
gay culture. "There's been a slow but steady decline for the past two 
years in gay print personals," says Adam Segel, product manager for 
Tele-Publishing International, a firm that handles the classified 
personals for 18 gay publications. Segel believes the Internet is the 
principal cause of the decline. "There's so many more options," he said. 
David Gardner, advertising sales director for Frontiers, a gay magazine 
with Los Angeles and San Francisco editions, agrees: "We've seen a 
general decline. More noticeable, though, is the drop-off of audio-text 
advertisers" (900 or 976 lines that promise hot talk and the potential 
to meet).

AOL has approximately 16,000 chat rooms. Tom Rielly of PlanetOut 
recalls, "A few years ago people thought a third of all their rooms were 
gay. But no one really knows." 

AOL divides its chat rooms into theme categories. An informal count 
during a recent visit to the "town square" category revealed 242 rooms, 
of which 160 had the "M4M" designation. That's about two-thirds of the 
town square rooms. Other sections of AOL don't seem to be nearly as 
dominated by a gay presence.

O'Neill, president of Cybersite, thinks AOL's success in gay hot chat is 
due to its "unthemed" service. "Contextualization is important for the 
direction and quality of conversation," he said. "For the most part, AOL 
is uncontextualized." In other words, many gay men don't turn to AOL for 
"community," because unlike gay.com or Planet Out, it's not a gay-themed 
service. Ironically, it's this very lack of theme that makes AOL, rather 
than the gay Web sites, so popular among gay men hoping to score.

Besides the AOL-created chat rooms, the company allows people to set up 
their own chat rooms. Many create geographically specific rooms, which 
only add to AOL's popularity. Where else are gay men in Harrisburg, 
Penn., going to meet online other than "HarrisburgPAM4M"? Most Web sites 
catering to gays have a New York chat room, but no other online service 
has developed AOL's reach into the gay communities in smaller towns. In 
fact, for every room in gay-friendly cities like San Francisco, there 
are over 100 in the Bible Belt ("Greenvillescm4m"), the rural Northeast 
("PoughkeepsieM4M"), the Grain Belt ("OmahaM4M") and parts in between.

So is AOL aware of its reputation as the preferred penis provider for 
the gay community?

"I think AOL is very well aware of its role in ... in ..." said Jupiter 
analyst David Card, struggling for the right words, "romance-creation." 
A couple of clicks through AOL's chat rooms offer ample evidence. 

But AOL apparently doesn't want to talk about how gay men are using its 
service. With the exception of reading a one-line boilerplate about the 
"amazing diversity" of AOL's community, spokesman Andrew Weinstein 
refused to comment. AOL strikes a gay-friendly stance publicly; it's one 
of three major investors in Planet Out and has a gay-friendly work 
environment (promoting many of its openly out employees). But commenting 
on how gay customers are using the service to score is probably beyond 
the scope of even the most progressive corporate culture. 

AOL would not release what percent of online time is spent on chat, 
probably fearful of the business repercussions. When it charged by the 
hour, AOL was undoubtedly thrilled with its chat-room success: More chat 
meant more revenue. But now, it would probably rather divert those 
chatters to other parts of its site, where advertising and e-commerce 
are bringing incremental revenue. "Some traffic is more desirable than 
other traffic," said Jupiter's Card. "Chat gives AOL stickiness, but 
obviously it's bad for other revenue producers in their system." 

There's a striking contrast between the way AOL ads portray the service 
and how some gay men use it. AOL cultivates a cheerful, wholesome 
entertainment theme in its ads, touting "parental controls," blocking 
software that lets parents restrict content and chat rooms. Meanwhile, 
"URmyNxTrik," "WorkMyAsGd" and "Ikneel4U" are furiously woodpeckering 
the keys, hoping for a little action.

This contradiction deepens when you read AOL's terms of service. "There 
is a difference between affection and vulgarity," states AOL's written 
policy. "For example ... the words 'breast' or 'testicular' would be 
acceptable, but slang versions of those words would not be." In other 
words, you can use AOL to get plowed like a snow-covered Minnesota 
freeway -- but not if you use raw language. While AOL parses cleavage 
and baskets, "BstBtmNtwn" is working the AtlantaM4M room hoping for 
another notch in his bedpost. 

If AOL has a policy, gay men don't seem to know about it. They're too 
busy ordering from what they perceive as an online sex catalog. And why 
not? The items are always in stock, there's a liberal exchange policy 
and you can take delivery in a matter of hours. 

The absurdity is captured by writer John Royce, who -- upon seeing how 
his gay friends use AOL -- quips, "Gay men don't need to support 
theater. They ARE theater." And now, America Online is their stage.

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About the writer
Michael Alvear is the author of "Slouching Through Gomorrah," a culture 
column syndicated to the gay press.