In May 2002, I finally managed to get a computer. It took me a while to get the hang of it because there wasn’t anyone around to explain how the thing worked. Those first couple of weeks were pretty stressful, and more than once I felt like giving up and throwing the damn thing out the window. But I eventually figured it out well enough to get me going. And by June, I had discovered chat rooms. Most of the ones I stumbled across were high volume places, and the quality of the discourse was extremely low. I mostly observed for a couple of minutes, read a few comments, and moved on. But one day, I found a link to an unusually quiet, low key place. It only had about 20 regular users, and generally no more than five were in there at any given time. And the primary purpose was chat, not sex. The men actually talked to each other about everyday events—work, dinner, movies… I started dropping in regularly, and after a few days, I began contributing to the conversations. The guys treated me with casual indifference at first. They were used to people popping in for a few minutes and then disappearing forever. But once they knew I was interested in joining their group, they gladly began treating me like one of the boys.
Back then, the internet was new to me, and I had heard some wild and crazy stories about deranged stalkers lurking in every corner patiently waiting to gather enough personal information about an unsuspecting individual in order to use it to track and then pounce. I was afraid, so I didn’t give these guys my real name, and I was vague about where I was from. I also lied about my age. I was thirty-six at the time, but I told them I was twenty-two. Of course, that lie was more about my vanity than fear, but I figured I’d never meet these guys, and I assumed that any relationship one formed on the internet would be purely superficial. I wasn’t aware that you could actually get to know someone, really get to know them, and form lasting bonds on the internet.
Well, I quickly realized my mistake when I started to became especially close to one of the men who frequented this chat room. We soon began exchanging emails and communicating via private chat and instant messages. Conner told me he was a twenty-two-year-old boy from Tennessee, a recent college graduate who had to put his dream of becoming an engineer on hold because he now had the responsibility of running a farm which had been in his family since before the Civil War. And this was, according to him, because his parents recently died. First his father from a heart attack, and then his mother from cancer. He said they died the same year, just a few months apart. And since then, he had been struggling to keep the farm afloat.
After a few weeks, I just couldn’t stand hiding behind my mask any longer, and I confessed everything. I told him my real name, exactly where I lived, and I told him I was 36, not 22. I expected a good telling off and a goodbye. I figured that’s what I deserved. But I was forgiven. I was so grateful to be forgiven.
The next several months were utterly magical. I had figured out I was gay when I was eleven, but I didn’t share this information with anyone until I went away to college years later. All through high school, I mooned over various boys I knew, and I had huge crushes on several actors, including C. Thomas Howell who played Ponyboy in the movie The Outsiders. But I kept it all inside, so high school was a lonely time for me. At first, I was ecstatic when I went to college and discovered the local gay community. I went to the gay bar nearly every weekend. But the boys I met were so afraid of being outed, and I was pretty shy and retiring myself, so the few encounters I had didn’t lead to much. I made a few friends, but I didn’t find a boyfriend. I worked at the Dean of Students Office, and there I met and fell in love with a young straight man. For a year, we were close and spent a lot of time together. It was the nearest thing to a real relationship I ever had, but we never so much as kissed, and I dared not reveal the depths of my true feelings for fear of ruining our special friendship. I believed I had the moon, so I didn’t think to ask for the stars. But he graduated, moved away, got married and became a father. My mental health deteriorated and I became withdrawn. I all but stopped meeting new people and making new friends. Then after my head surgeries when I was 31, I moved back in with my parents who were living in the little, conservative town of Fayetteville, West Virginia, at the time. So when I met Conner online, and we started to get close, I thought he was the boy I had been waiting for since I was fifteen. I thought finally, at long last, I had found my beautiful, sweet young prince.
Of course, I worried that I was too old and broken down for him. I told him about my mental health history and my surgeries. I told him I wasn’t a looker. But he told me he didn’t care. I worried that he still had some wild oats to sow. Conner came from a conservative family, and he said he never came out to his parents or anyone in town. He claimed he did have a boyfriend for a time in college, but that had been over for some time. I told him that if he wanted to, he should go to a gay bar in nearby Nashville. In fact, I encouraged him to do this. We weren’t exactly together, not yet, and I hated the idea of a twenty-two-year-old closet case orphan spending his Saturday nights alone in a big antebellum home that had seen better days. I wanted him to enjoy his youth. I figured if he met someone else, we weren’t meant to be together anyway. But Conner told me that he wasn’t interested in going to gay bars or having sex with strangers.
We talked for one or two hours every night for months, and sometimes we exchanged long emails filled with sweet attestations of love and admiration. But then the weekend before Thanksgiving, I got a rather disturbing email from Conner. He told me that there had been a death in the family, and he wouldn’t be online for a while. He also told me that there was some things about himself that I didn’t know, and that he would explain it all when he got back.
I couldn’t stand not knowing what he was talking about, and I missed him so much that I could hardly function. So I used my new internet skills to do a little snooping. Conner had told me that his farmhouse was on the Register of National Historic Places, and he told me the name of the farmhouse. I guess he was so proud of this farmhouse that he couldn’t bear to lie about it, so I was able to find it on the register, and according to it, the farm also went by the last name of its present owners. With that name in mind, I combed the obituaries of nearby communities, and I quickly found that an elderly man with that last name had recently died. He was survived by a wife and two sons, both in their fifties, one was unmarried. I was devastated. The person I thought existed, this person who seemed like a gift too good to be true, this boy I had hoped for since I was a teenager, this boy I allowed myself to believe in was in fact a phantom. I became horribly depressed, and when I was alone in my room, I cried like I had never cried before in my life. I wanted this twenty-two-year-old orphaned farm boy to be real. I allowed myself to need him. I thought he needed me. And I imagined that one day soon we’d be together.
When Conner showed up online ten days later, he confessed everything. His real name wasn’t Conner. He was named after his father, and he had went by the nickname Chip his whole life. He was fifty-three, thankfully, he was the son who was unmarried, he worked at an engineering firm—the work on the farm was handled by a hired man—and obviously he wasn’t an orphan. He had lost his father just the week before, and his mother was still very much alive. He, in fact, lived with her.
I tried to be as comforting as I could given his recent loss, but I made it clear that my feelings were all mixed up. However, I didn’t want to throw our friendship away. When I asked him why he lied, and for so long, he said he was afraid, and he told me he wanted to make believe that he hadn’t spent the last thirty years of his life alone. I could relate, and I forgave him. I went on mourning for Conner. In fact I still mourn for Conner. But I accepted Chip as a friend. I insisted that he give me his mailing address, which he did, and that Christmas, I sent him a batch of cookies that I baked myself.
It was as though we started fresh, and in time we were once again talking about one day living together. I was looking after my parents and he was looking after his mother, but there would come a time when we would be free, and we decided it would be nice to have a companion. I imagined that at some point in the future, we’d move someplace more accepting, maybe someplace in New England, get a little house and live openly as an old married couple.
This new dream lasted for two years. In the interim, my father had another heart attack, my grandfather died, and my mother died. Believing that I had something to look forward to gave me strength as I watched my family fall apart. I was no longer afraid of ending up homeless and alone.
In the fall of 2004, I went on vacation with my sister, and she took some photos of me. Since I had started dieting and walking back when I thought a twenty-two-year-old farm boy was interested in me, I had by that time lost a great deal of weight. I was proud of what I had accomplished, and I sent Chip some copies of the photos. His attitude toward me immediately changed. We continued our nightly chats, but all traces of his romantic interest in me evaporated. He stopped calling me sweetie, he no longer spoke of wanting to kiss me or hold me, and he no longer had an interest in virtual intimacy. I pressed him, but he gave excuses at first, and then around Christmas he confessed that he just wasn’t attracted to me. My heart was broken, again.
Of course, I was angry. I wanted to scream at him for hurting me so much. And I did let him know that he had let me down. But I knew you can’t make someone love you. You can’t demand that of a person. So it was what it was. And I still cared for him as a friend. I still needed him to be my friend.
We carried on for a long time. Our dream of living together as a romantic couple vanished, but it was soon replaced by the idea that maybe one day we’d be roommates. However, that idea eventually faded away, too. And then two years ago our chats became less frequent, and then he stopped communicating with me altogether. I sent him a card last Christmas, but he didn’t send one in reply. This year I didn’t bother.
My wounds are not fresh, and I am getting by. But I fear that all the setbacks, disappointments and deferred dreams of the past thirty years have robbed me of something very important: hope. I got through high school because I looked forward to college. Then in college, I hoped I’d one day have a home and someone special in my life. Then after I became disabled, I hoped I’d one day become a published writer. Then after my surgeries and I met Chip, I imagined that I’d one day live with him. I held onto the idea that no matter how bad things got today, there was always something to look forward to. But now I suspect that my best days are behind me.
I’m not bitter or angry. And I know that if I had just tried a little harder, if I just found a little more courage, things may have worked out differently for me. I can’t really blame anyone. And who knows, maybe a couple of my dreams will come true after all. I’m just no longer expecting them to come true, but maybe that’s a good thing. This is something I wanted to own up to because I’ve never really dealt with it, and it’s something that’s embarrassed me. It seems so foolish now looking back on it that I allowed myself to believe something so ephemeral, so tenuous. But I guess I’m not the only fool around, and there are worse things.
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