Bridging the gap between gay life before and after the Internet
By Scott King
Episode 4: Dating (Part 1)
Picture it: Johnson City, Tennessee. Summer 2003.
My date and I were driving around. We both grew up here, but we’re young adults now, smoking cigarettes and contemplating whether or not we’re going to have any kind of gay sex later that night. It wasn’t a given. We didn’t meet on Grindr. We met at a restaurant, IRL, as the kids would call it years later.
He worked at Perkins, an all-night bakery and diner with lush carpet and aggressive air conditioning. I worked at Shoney’s. How is that not the cutest fucking thing you’ve ever heard? He was a pinch-your-cheeks adorable 20-year-old in a Björk T-shirt. I was 22, about to graduate college and still wearing short-sleeved flannel in the summertime like it was 1995.
So, 2003. The internet existed, but it wasn’t in anyone’s pocket yet. Hell, it was hardly even on anyone’s lap.
So we drove. We meandered through the late-summer night city streets and country roads, sharing memories and creating new ones.
“Oh, God, is that the old Hampton School? We played them in basketball and they were such rednecks. Like the kind you’d see in a slasher film.”
“Oh, what’s that place?”
“Isn’t that the store owned by the Blankenships? They’re a really weird family, aren’t they?”
Yup. That’s how we shared information back then. Over cigarettes and drive-bys. You gossiped and you talked with authority and that was that. No looking anything up. The only looking up we did back then was at the stars and the streetlights.
The soundtrack was cassette tapes. And crickets. And the smell of asphalt. And those awkward—or not-so-awkward—silences.
In a small town you eventually run out of road. I guess in a big city you run out of sidewalk. Either way you eventually both literally and metaphorically run out of gas.
So we went back to his apartment, which was really just a room inside a bigger apartment. A bed. A stereo. A beanbag chair doubling as a desk. He put on Vespertine. We made out for half an hour. We took off our shirts. I had to feel his body, but that was as far as we went. Somehow, it already felt like enough. I was already orbiting the rings of Jupiter.
Then I drove home. And by home I mean my parents’ house, where I was living before my senior year of college.
I didn’t have a cell phone, so my connection to John mostly consisted of working up the nerve to call him on the telephone, getting a call from our mutual friend Laura who would discreetly update me on the gossip of my own budding relationship, or randomly seeing one of them at the bookstore, the coffee shop, or Perkins.
So much three-dimensional tension.
And then there was the waiting. Tables weren’t the only thing we were waiting on that summer.
Did he want to see me again? Was he seeing someone else? Had he lost interest? Was he out of town? Had he just gotten busy?
I had absolutely no way of knowing.
There were no texts. No Facebook. Email existed, but that wasn’t how you communicated with someone you were genuinely excited about.
You waited. You hoped. You replayed the evening in your head looking for clues. Did I say something stupid? Did I kiss too aggressively? Not aggressively enough? Was he hoping I’d make the first move?
The funny thing is we tend to think the internet eliminated all that uncertainty.
It didn’t.
It simply traded one kind of guessing for another.
Before smartphones, the question was, “What is he doing?”
Now the question is, “What does it mean?”
He’s online, but he hasn’t responded. He viewed my story but didn’t like my picture. He tapped the heart instead of typing a sentence. He looked at my profile twice. He’s taking longer to reply than he did yesterday.
The waiting game has become the sign-reading game.
Twenty years ago, there wasn’t enough information, so we filled in the blanks with our imagination. Today there’s seemingly infinite information, and somehow we still fill in the blanks with our imagination. And our anxiety.
Technology has changed almost everything about dating, but it hasn’t changed the hardest part: trying to figure out what’s going on inside someone else’s head.
That part, to me, still belongs to the fertile playground of imagination. And projection.
Back in 2003, whenever I couldn’t stop thinking about John, I’d put on Tori Amos. Or Rufus Wainwright. Or Sonic Youth when I wanted to escape my own brain for a while. I’d daydream, overanalyze, and wait for the phone to ring.
These days, when I have a crush, I make a Spotify playlist instead.
Different technology. Same hopeless romantic.
Maybe that’s the real lesson. The internet changed how we find each other. It changed how we flirt, how we disappear, and how we keep tabs on one another. But it never solved the mysteries of romance and relationships. It just gave us better tools for obsessing over it.
Right now, somewhere out there, two people are probably driving around on a warm summer night, wondering if they’re going to kiss. I hope they get a little lost before GPS tells them where to go.
