By Scott King
Bridging the Gap Between Gay Life Before and After the Internet
Episode 2: Sex
Sex. The twin flame, and logical conclusion, of hooking up.
I’m talking specifically about the acts of sex themselves, not the awkward literal and metaphorical dances that precede them.
What strikes me now is not even how we found sex before the internet, but how we learned it. During and after college, my best friend and I basically learned how to successfully bottom through a collaboration of gathered rumor, trial and error, whispered conversations, bad advice, fragments of pornography, and what I can only describe as cultural and social osmosis.
We absorbed information accidentally back then. Some older guy would mention something in passing. Somebody at a party would make a joke. Somebody would tell you what hurt and what didn’t. You slowly assembled yourself, and your peccadillos, from scraps.
In 2026, a teenager with a smartphone can watch 9,000 instructional videos before he ever kisses anybody. Despite your local hall monitor’s warnings about the dangers of pornography, that is probably healthier in a lot of ways. There was a lot of confusion back then. A lot of unnecessary shame. A lot of physical discomfort that could have been avoided by fivel minutes of Googling.
But there was also something strangely and deliciously human about not fully knowing what you were doing. You learned another person’s body by being trapped there with it. That is maybe the biggest difference I have noticed between sex before and after the internet: attention itself.
Before smartphones, once sex started, there was almost nothing else to focus on. You just had the room, the awkwardness, the excitement, the breathing, the bodies, the occasional streetlight coming through the blinds. When the encounter was over, it was over. You lingered in it because there was nowhere else for your brain to go.
That’s probably why cigarettes after sex became such a profound part of sexual culture. Cigarettes provided a ceremonial ending. A coda. Something to do while your physical and spiritual body settled back into ordinary life.
Post-internet, the phone enters the sexual encounter almost as a third participant. Most gay sex now is initiated through the phone anyway. The apps have become the infrastructure underneath desire itself. You still occasionally meet somebody at a bar or through friends, but realistically? Most gay sexual encounters now begin with somebody staring into a screen. And the phone doesn’t disappear once the sex begins.
This one time at band camp a young man — probably 25 to my 41 at the time — came over to my apartment. He was incredibly cute, but I could tell from the constant texts he was sending me on the Uber ride over that I was in for a “cultural experience.” He knocked on my door. I opened it expecting eye contact, maybe a smile, maybe a little nervous chemistry. Instead, he walked in looking down at his phone, muttered “hey,” and kept texting. We got to the bedroom, and he finally put the phone down on the dresser. But even lying there with me, I could tell where his real attention was: with that phone five feet behind him, waiting. A few minutes later he said he had to pee and took the phone into the bathroom with him. Then he came back into the bedroom still holding it and set it down beside us in bed.
Those of you who know me know that I am SO not into threeways. I pointed at the phone and said, “You and your lover there need to get the fuck out of here.” I expected attitude in return, which I probably deserved, but he didn’t give me any. He just quietly grabbed his phone, got dressed, and left. I’m not saying he was a bad person. Honestly, he seemed anxious more than rude. Like he physically could not tolerate being unreachable for twenty consecutive minutes. I usually last longer than that, but you know what I mean.
That is the real revolution the internet created. Not just easier access to sex, but the destruction of uninterrupted presence. The internet gave us access, efficiency, abundance, information, connection. It also quietly trained us to divide our attention forever. And sex, maybe more than almost anything else, suffers when attention fractures.
The apps may engineer the meeting, but they still can’t manufacture the feeling of another person’s weight against your chest in a dark room after sex. That part remains stubbornly prehistoric. Before the internet, after the ceremonial cigarette, your lover would leave and you had a few options.
As the Pet Shop Boys put it in “Left to My Own Devices:”
*When I get home, it’s late at night
I pour a drink and watch the fight
Turn off the TV, look at a book
Pick up the phone, fix some food.”
That was pretty much it. And let’s face it, you were probably going to watch tv. TV was the pre-internet internet. The thing we all connected to to get outside of ourselves.
In 2026, after sex, you might fix some food, but when you lie back down on the couch, I’m guessing you go right back to your phone. You know why? Cuz whatever’s happening on the phone is whatever is happening to you. It’s the future. It’s the present. And it contains the entirety of the past.
I dare you not to touch it.