I came of age before the Internet was opened to public commercial use, before the advent of amature computer bulletin boards, before the first home personal computers. So I never had Grindr or anything like it.

All I had to navigate my way through the maze of my own teenage emotions to find love in a world that was screaming hate at me from every direction, when it wasn’t expressing a kind of rancid pity, was the knowledge given to me by that first teenage crush that there was nothing more wonderful than falling in love, and there was nothing wrong with me. I’m in love. I’m gay. It’s wonderful. But I flailed my way through my first teenage crush like someone who doesn’t know how to swim trying to figure out the trick while in the middle of drowning. Because the first thing you know when you know about yourself is you have to hide.

So then I’m a position of trying to say something to my crush from inside my closet, terrified that if I say anything to him next thing is it gets all over the school. Which is bad enough, but then it gets back to mom and she breaks into tears and starts yelling at me, and I get dragged to church to pray it away every day of my life until I turn 21 and have to leave the house. If I don’t get thrown out first. I have never doubted that mom loved me. But the stigma back then was something I reckon you had to be there to experience and really appreciate. For years after grade school, whenever I tried to nudge the conversation some place where I’d feel comfortable coming out to her, the icy glare I got back would scare me to my bones. I’ve often wondered if there had been something like Love In Action or Exodus Ministries whether mom would have tossed me into one of those if she found out when I was an age I could not refuse.

One day after I graduated I discovered my crush’s family had left the country with him and I fell into a dangerously deep despondency, made all the worse for my self perceived cowardice in not telling him how I felt. Because I wasn’t brave enough to tell him that meant I wasn’t worthy of him. Maybe I wasn’t worthy of any love. I walked to one of my favorite bridges where I would watch the trains go by, and decided I would fall off in front of one. Maybe they’d think it was an accident. But while I was waiting I began thinking about what doing that would do to the engineer and I pulled back. The lesson I learned was if you can wait it out the urge to kill yourself will eventually go away. It has been helpful.

In high school I knew of one gay bar in DC, The Georgetown Bar & Grill, which was supposedly located somewhere on Wisconsin Avenue close to M street. It was spoken of like a dirty joke among the other kids and I would have died rather than be seen anywhere near it. I’ve told the story elsewhere about how I found I could get my gay newspapers and magazines in a seedy adult bookstore in Wheaton that sold hard core pornography. That was the world young gay hearts were confined to back in the 1970s, and for decades after. In some parts of this country that’s still where we’re supposed to stay.

Eventually, after I got my driver’s license I found my way to a gay bookstore in downtown Washington DC; Lambda Rising, where I discovered a world of gay literature and history that was much Much bigger than I’d ever hoped. It was as if a parallel universe had opened up to me, and in a way it was. There was a rich and deep history I’d never known or had a chance to explore in grade school. There were books that spoke to the honor and dignity of the love of same sex couples and I devoured those. The books of Mary Renault stand out for me in that period of my life. The books I found there gave me hope.

I attended my first Pride block party in front of what used to be the Earthworks comic book store and headshop, around the corner from where Lambda Rising had moved. I let myself get picked up by a cute guy watching the party with me on the porch of Earthworks, only to discover that being attracted to someone’s looks wasn’t nearly enough to make me ready for having sex with them. Took me some decades more before I began to understand that I am a demisexual: someone who experiences sexual attraction only after forming a strong emotional bond with someone. I still love to look at and draw beautiful sexy guys, but for it to go any further than that there needs to be at least a crush.

When Personal Computers became a thing I bought a Commodore C64 and the modem for it and discovered the world of computer bulletin boards. I found my way into a gay FidoNet echo board and suddenly the whole gay world opened to me and I didn’t have to go into a bar anymore to find it. Eventually that ability to socialize with others like me motivated me to dive into computers and programming, and I built an IBM PC compatible from parts I got at a HAM Fest at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. This would eventually lead me to a career as a computer programmer, and to a job at Space Telescope Science Institute. I found my way to G.L.I.B., The Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS, and I was able to socialize on and offline with the other members.

That was my first experience with the idea of online gay dating which looked attractive because it meant I could try to find a boyfriend someplace other than a hook-up bar. It was a time before graphic user interfaces so we got to know each other through posting messages on the BBS echo boards, by private email, and the occasional meetup at a local gay or lesbian bar. I had high hopes but I got nowhere. Two of the members that I’d fancied ended up dating each other instead, and one of them, a guy I’d managed to coax out a couple times to let my camera, if not me, give him some love, apologised profusely about it which only left me thinking it was just as well he’d pushed me away. Many years later at a Pride Fair I ran across him manning one of the booths, I forget what it was promoting, and asked him how things were. He was single just then and began complaining about how relationships were So Much Work. I wanted to smack him.

At around that time I bought into a gay dating service, and when that one didn’t pan out, another. They never matched me up with anyone even close to what I was looking for in a date, and none of the ones they set me up on resulted in seconds. Usually we would both end our date complaining that the service kept missing the mark. One guy I was matched up with was a sports jock whereas I said one of my interests was hiking and wilderness backpacking and those are two very different sorts of personalities. But since we both ticked of the interested in outdoor sports box it must have been good enough. Except it wasn’t. We met in a parking lot and chatted for maybe five minutes and mutually decided to go our separate ways. I remember the look on his face when he laid eyes on me, and in all fairness I probably gave him the same look. It took a lot of time and money, neither of which I could afford to finally figure out those things only existed to extract money from lonely people.

I got older. The years went by, the universe expanded, I never found a boyfriend.

I have no idea what I might have done had something like Grindr been available to me when I was young, let alone the kind of social media we have now. But I don’t think I would have gravitated to a hook-up app because hook-ups were never my thing. I have always been looking for a boyfriend. Well, until I hit 70 and figured all that was in my rearview mirror. Would I have posted sexy selfies of myself like they used to do on MySpace until they clamped down on it shocked, shocked that anyone would even Think of using social media for such things!? Probably not. I have always had a poor body image, and I mentioned the time I was shocked to learn about group showers in gym class didn’t I?

But I look back at those few photos I have of myself back then and I was pretty cute for someone that skinny whose hair was always a mess. Maybe I would have learned a better body image of myself from the examples of others. Maybe I would have dressed myself better, worn better fitting clothes. (My butt is the only part of my body that ever reliably got complements…and a few straight up feels before I could object. One guy almost got slapped for it. I am not a touchy-feely kind of guy.) Maybe I would have found someone to give me better haircuts and learned to use a straightening iron, and got my teeth fixed so I could smile back at people without hesitating. And then maybe I could have attracted some attention and found a date without feeling like a beggar for asking. Or maybe all that would have just made me a target for sexual predators and gay bashers. For every better world there is an infinite number of worse ones.

[NOTE: This blog post is dedicated to the betraying older gay jackass who kept telling me that I was single because I was too shy didn’t get out more…then fucked me over by keeping a slender probably impossible chance at love from me because people who look like that want people who look like that.]