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Comprised of hundreds of virtual rooms-there were 122 chat rooms on the "youth floor" alone in 2000-it was a bawdy, freewheeling site that attracted kinky daddies, lonely teens, and the serially monogamous who'd "accidentally" stumbled into a phone sex room. Of all the websites that Egan chronicled, Gay.com was arguably the largest and most vital. When compared to the mindlessness of chatting on Grindr today, these early online communities seem downright enriching. "The remarkable thing is that via the Internet, gay teenagers are now able to partake of the normal Sturm und Drang of adolescent life, which before was largely off-limits to them," she wrote.īut they didn't just change the lives of gay teens-these proto-Grindr sites impacted the lives of gay men of all ages. In a New York Times Magazine feature in 2000, Jennifer Egan wrote glowingly of the rowdy chat rooms that allowed gay teens to become mired in the same drama as their straight compatriots. It's all old hat in the age of Grindr and Scruff-but back then, it was a revelation.Ĭhroniclers of the early internet praised its power to provide young sexual minorities with support, sex, and even love. And in the burgeoning world of cybersex, you could have sex with strangers without revealing your face or lilting cadence. The gay-friendliness of your hometown didn't matter all that mattered was that you had a stable dial-up connection and access to a keyboard. Suddenly, an AOL screen name granted you access to a world that had hitherto been shrouded in mystery and misinformation.
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For gay men, the birth of online chat rooms changed everything.