Okay, I don’t have much to actually post this morning, so I am allowing a friend to guest-post on here. Patrick has been a pretty good friend of mine for awhile now. Former denizen of New York, he relocated back closer to home and seems to have been pretty decent as of late. His writings are pretty deep and profound; must come from all those years as an intellectual. Yesterday he had sent me a little letter filled with questions, ones that I have always wondered myself. Enjoy the reading, and if you know the answers, please let us know. We would appreciate it.

Somebody showed me how to use gay.com chat this week. It's been a few years since I was in a gay chat room and I forgot about this. I just forgot all this. Please tell me, when does a body become just a body?

Why does that happen? I'm flipping through photos of guys trying to sell themselves online. No. Not porn sites, personals for the people in the chat room now. They're there, the pictures advertising a torso that is missing a head or a face that is straining to intentionally create a vacant manufactured expression. Do these people ever consider the value of what they are selling, or are they really so buried in the race that they've lost the ability to consider what's truly important? Is their need for sex so shallow and so desperate that the person behind the flesh rates second to how flat his stomach is?

What is sex providing for them?

Something that made me concerned was that I noticed myself going back to those chat rooms independently in all my idle moments.... then I'd ask anyone in the room what they are doing. The reply was always the same, "I'm bored." Is this the alternative to idle time? Why is this so addictive? It felt like a drug to me, like a painful alternative or distraction from the things i didn't feel ready or able to accept. In this case, it was doing my homework for French that I was avoiding.

Like a relapse of any vice I know... it is a subconscious rebellion to feeling trapped by something, and when i tried explaining this to anyone in the room they responded as if it was a revelation. How does denial become this powerful?

Are these rooms as rancid in straight communities? Are they necessary?

Fuck, I can not answer either of those questions but I can't help but believe that if it were culturally easier to be accepted... the world I was watching drown in those rooms might not exist exactly as it does.

Quote of the morning: Neither naked asceticism, matted hair, dirt, fasting, sleeping on the ground, dust and mud, nor prolonged sitting on one's heels can purify a man who is not free of doubts. ~Buddha

CD of the morning: Garden State Soundtrack. (Favorite song: Let Go by Frou Frou)

Illustration courtesy of The Village Voice

¶ 12/02/2005 03:29:00 AM