SUNDAY, 5 JANUARY 2025

I’ll be honest; I sometimes go on gay chatrooms. In the early days of these chatrooms, only text was available; nowadays there is often the option to use a microphone or a cam. Most initial contacts in these rooms are short and test the water to see if the other person is compatible, while longer chats will usually develop into sexting (stimulating each other by means of sexual chat) which ends with one or both parties climaxing. In many ways chatrooms remind me of old-style cruising in their randomness and impersonal approach to sex. Also like cruising, they’re a totally mixed bag. Sometimes they can be exciting and fun; at other times they seem a total waste of energy and effort because so much of our time on them is spent in repetition, frustration, and even a kind of boredom.

I have noticed that many of the people in gay chatrooms are young guys aged between 18 and 30, or much older men who are discovering aspects of themselves that they denied or suppressed or perhaps didn’t even realise earlier in life. Another common set of users are married bisexuals looking for clandestine sexual pleasures that they find hard to get in real life. (Throughout this essay, of course, I am merely reporting what people have told me about themselves and this may well not be true: in the virtual world of chatrooms it is easy to create a completely fake persona and this is often a big part of the pleasure).

A key attraction of gay chatrooms is that they offer a safe space both emotionally and physically. They involve none of the risks of cruising (getting queer bashed) or of hook-up apps (where the guy who invites you to his home could be the psycho from the movie, Cruising.) A sense of emotional safety may be the reason why there are so many young guys there: chatrooms are places where they can explore their romantic and sexual feelings through role play and fantasy. Research suggests that most young guys these days have watched porn and the next stage often seems to be to act out online the porn scenarios they have seen and discover how they feel as they mimic and take part in them, and these rooms are a perfect place to do this with the reassuring knowledge that it is happening virtually and they can click and leave at any time. They also have the chance to speak to more experienced, older gay men, to try to find out what gay life is like in reality, especially in the bedroom.

Older guys who are new to being gay can use them for the same purpose; however, in my experience, they are far outnumbered by married bisexuals who are looking for furtive virtual sex. The arguments for and against this are complex: it may help to keep their marriages alive by providing an outlet for these husbands and even prevent them from physically straying in the real world, but at the same time it is very unfair on their wives because this is virtual cheating (unless the marriage is open and the wife knows that this is happening), even if the sex is only fantasy. As a result, one of the most common adjectives in gay chatrooms is ‘discreet’, used mostly by heavily closeted gays and these married men who secretly like men.

Another advantage that chatrooms offer is the opportunity to act out fantasies that users might not want to act out in real life because they feel too threatening and extreme, such as bondage and master/slave. This kind of chatting, with or without a microphone or cam, is close to certain types of gay porn in a way, except in porn surrogates perform these acts rather than a chatter with a chat partner. For many, I imagine, chatting is more enjoyable because there is genuine contact with another human being, not the fabricated passion of porn, which reduces the watcher to the role of passive spectator. This may make sexting in a chatroom feel more spontaneous and less contrived since the real human being in the text window feels like a normal guy, not an unnaturally handsome and hugely endowed performer. Perhaps most important of all, the man to whom you are speaking is also truly experiencing pleasure and not merely acting out fake desire.

Many gay men have difficulty finding someone for sex, for both personal and practical reasons. First, there are those who lack confidence in their looks or physique, who can transform in these rooms into muscled, well-hung studs or halve their age at the click of a key (although obviously this rules out camming). Second, there are guys who live in the middle of nowhere, far from big cities, and even those in smaller towns may fear exposure so much that they prefer the total anonymity of virtual contacts. Next, as already mentioned, there are those, for example married men, whose personal life situations mean they prefer not to find sex in the real world around them. Another group are the disabled, who, depending on their disability, can use a keyboard to act out fantasies which they might otherwise find impossible. Then there are those with fetishes they feel ashamed of, but who can find in these rooms someone else who shares their fetish, no matter how unusual. Finally, men with HIV who like to bareback but don’t want to endanger others, or bottoms who are too scared to do what they want most can at least bareback in fantasy. So sexting offers freedoms and opportunities to a wide range of people and can even perform a useful social role, as for example during Covid, where online sex almost certainly helped to reduce the spread of the disease among both gays and straights.

And despite their meat market atmosphere, although it may seem unlikely, a small community often builds up on these sites, gathered around the ‘lobby’ or home page, regulars who get to know each other and take part in general chat, a substitute for what used to happen in gay bars but is less easy to find in an age of dating apps. These little groups texting each other on the home page are like online families, sometimes supporting each other and sometimes squabbling and bitching just like any family except for the Waltons.

The greatest drawback of gay chatrooms is that they tend to be addictive. As with physical cruising, there is always the lure that if you hang around long enough, the perfect sexual catch might come along. The entrepreneurs who set up these sites know this and organise their garden of earthly delights with all the expertise of a supermarket chain. The lobby is like the entrance to the store and in many chatrooms there are ‘open cams’ there, where those who tend towards exhibitionism (and believe me there are many, especially big boys) reveal what they have to offer, and these tempt the visitor in: (a kind of reverse to what happens in supermarkets, where the chocolate is usually at the check-out). Once inside the store, the mix of text, microphone and cam offer a full range of options: texting for the shy and those whose primary concern is discretion; camming (either openly or in private rooms); group action where one guy becomes the room ‘slut’; a range of specialist rooms for fetishes and kinks. There is even often a place for those who are looking for love, or at least a steady relationship, so the minority who are doing this can dream that somewhere in the store they will find their soulmate. The odds don’t seem very promising, but in the end who knows?

So the visitor wanders through the store and views the products on display. Many chatrooms request that people make a profile when they sign up, in which they describe themselves and say what they have to offer and what they are looking for. In practice these profiles tend to be rather predictable. This is reflected in the names that people choose as their nick, and in personal outlines which include their age and the age they are seeking, which country they come from, and, most importantly, their sexual preferences: top or bottom, sub or dom, if they cross-dress or have a particular kink. Penis size is often included in these profiles, and if we were to believe what the posters claim, most guys are blessed with at least seven inches (except for some of the sub bottoms who emphasise how small and unworthy they are.)

We usually find out very little about the people we are chatting with other than these titbits. They become reduced to objects, a masturbatory aid, with little more character or individuality than the actors in porn. As a consequence, these chat rooms can easily turn into a dead-end. There is often an obsessive quality to sexual desire and most of us have preferences and fantasies we repeat again and again. So in reality, just like porn, these sites can end up limiting our imagination and also trapping us in one role, as we repeat the same one with a succession of different contacts whose obsessions complement our own. Also like porn, this makes the experience one-dimensional in the sense that it reduces sexual activity mostly to vision (and sound if a microphone is used), whereas non-virtual sex is above all a tactile and sensual meeting of bodies and minds. In a chatroom there’s no touch or feel, so the rich and complex joys of sex become flattened and predictable and, unless we’re careful, obsessive, repetitive and sterile.

Finally, and worryingly, there is the potential threat of the grooming of underage boys. I suspect that this danger will eventually lead to legislation making people prove their age and identity before joining these rooms (most of them already require registration nowadays, but this tends to be perfunctory and only enables abuse to be reported after the event through the use of the IP). And even this tightening of the law, which sounds sensible on first thought, might lead to chatrooms being set up and based instead in countries which either do not have strong laws against underage sex, or have these laws but rarely enforce them, and many users of chatrooms, wary of giving their private details, would leave the monitored sites for these more dubious alternatives. It is also worth pointing out that chatrooms are at least safer than hook-up apps simply because many of them are global and geographical distance limits the possibilities for grooming, whereas hook-up apps operate at the local level with the express purpose of meeting up.

I acknowledge that much of this essay is anecdotal and is based solely on my personal experience. And I cannot speak about straight ‘dating’ chatrooms since I find the idea of watching or taking part in heterosexual sex, or even merely texting about it, makes me feel queasy, as I imagine any thoughts of same-sex activity repel the majority of straight men. However, I suspect that a lot of what I have said would also be true of heterosexual chatrooms which are built around sex; there might be a few different emphases, perhaps, but otherwise I don’t see why they should be massively different. Also, in any research or discussion about sex, we must always remember that people often fail to tell the truth, especially when we are discussing phenomena which are grounded in fantasy. Because of this, we should always maintain a certain scepticism about what people say and claim when they are in chatrooms.

I’m sure many people who read this article, both gay and straight, will find the whole topic rather sordid and would prefer that I don’t raise it. But these chatrooms are a feature of contemporary life and do much to influence our thinking about romantic and sexual relationships and behaviour, and crucially they are helping to forge how young people regard these things. They are an important aspect of many people’s lives, especially the younger generation, so instead of being the target of moral condemnation, they need to be studied, openly discussed, and their advantages and drawbacks recognised, not least because, in a world with a global internet, it’s hard to imagine a future where they don’t exist.