The Internet is for PORN
I went three days without posting! Mortal sin.
Since Philly is blessed enough to have a free, independent newspaper that solely reports on LGBT-related issues (the PGN/Philly Gay News, in case you’re unaware), I have this marvelous idea. On Friday, or whatever posting day falls closest to Friday, I’ll pick up a copy and comment on something I find therein. I suppose it’s a good way to keep up on local news of all sorts…
Obviously, the first headline is that the Proposition 8 protest drew over 5000 people. I don’t know that I quite believe those numbers, and I’m sure that various organizations inflated the size of the crowd in different amounts, but the key is that there were enough, or perhaps more than enough to get the point across. But I’ve already beaten that event to death in this blog, so perhaps something more amusing…
The secondary front-page headline is about the settlement of a lawsuit in New Jersey against the site eHarmony. Basically, this gay fellow from Ocean County decided that he wanted to find a boyfriend on eHarmony, either not realizing or not caring that it is (primarily) a “family”-oriented dating site. Everyone I know that’s gone on there (which isn’t very many) has either tried it for the express purpose of getting married and punching out some kids, or just to fuck with data. (“I’m a 63-year-old 340-pound pansexual eco-terrorist looking to meet three women of my dreams and move out to The Farm in Wyoming so we can start a hippie commune and raise as many children as you’re biologically capable of producing in the ways of God, the Buddha, and Aliester Crowley. And I need three, to stagger the births. No smokers!) But I mean, just look at that sample photo! A terrifying example of heterosexuality if ever there was one.
In any case, he sued because among their date-browsing options there was no “man seeking man” listed; it was all M/F oriented. So after three and a half years of legal wrangling, eHarmony has now agreed to start a separate-but-equal website for alternative sexualities. What I’d really like to know is if the plaintiff found a boyfriend in all that time (in which case I’d imagine that this was all just to prove a point), or if he’s cheering victory, because now he can find the man of his dreams. I don’t mean that in a malicious way at all, I am actually genuinely curious, because a court battle that long has to have some kind of payoff in the end. Was it for the rest of us lonely homosexuals, so we could find dates on eHarmony as well? You’d think that after Myspace, Facebook, OKCupid, Manhunt, Gay.com, True, Match.com, Squirt, and Yahoo Personals, the last thing gay men would need is yet another option. It’s the Internet, for Chrissakes; how many website can we possibly make for this?
The Internet as a whole is a sticky issue…it’s a small gay world to begin with, but for some reason everybody in the Philadelphia/NJ/NYC area has dated, fucked, been out for coffee, or is friends with someone with whom you’ve done one of the aforementioned three activities. It’s really creepy. Let’s do some hypothetical math: from the Delaware border up to the Connecticut border, you have about 20 million people. If we say that half of those are men (10 million), half of those have computers (5 million), maybe one-fifth of those uses one of the social dating sites (1 million), and one-twentieth of the people on there are gay… that’s still a pool of 50,000 guys. How the hell do we all know each other?
I still maintain that there needs to be a coffeehouse just for single gay men to rub their brains and ankles together; that’s my ideal dating scenario. And speaking of coffeehouses, I’ve been at this one for 5 hours. So, in closing… Internet bad? I don’t know. At least it keeps things interesting. Avenue Q (see tagline) had it right.
~~ PQ
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