the web

ive been romping around the web since i was a tyke... im forty now...

i was 12 when TheSource was created by Bill Von Meister. This would eventually become AOL. in 1998 applelink personal edition was released. it sucked. but what you could do with it, and the future promises from it was reaaaaaaaaaly exciting to a 22 yearold wannabe geek. October 2, 1989 AppleLink changes name to America Online. December 1992 AOL licenses software to Apple. This software would become eWorld. eworld sucked... but things were gettin better... July 1993 Jan Brandt starts sending AOL disks in the mail. and in 1992 mac started making bigger desktops and i was in heaven... i loved my little itty bitty mac... but i wanted more power and i wanted to get into the computer itself and tinker...

and thats how the rest of the world found out about the internet... but theres always been a small group of us who knew how to use the net before AOL... there was IRC chat, and we sharpened our pirating skills on anything we could get our hands on, mostly hacking into the gov't databases and gettin in trouble, nobody got arrested we just got letters or a phone call to tell us to quit, or our parents got the phone call or letter... back then, anybody could hack into the gov't shit, it was so weak and confoozled... it was fun, made me feel like a spy...

i dont use AOL anymore, though i used it for the first 11 years it was available... i always beefed that AOL dumbed down the consumer,( just like windows operating system does by makin it almost impossible to get in the innards and tinker and fix up, macs are easy to do shit with, i mean people trick their macs out, some are amazing...) and this dumbing down led people to believe that AOL WAS the internet. even today, you would be surprised at supposedly savvy computer users who dont know about private isp's, other chat clients, the myriad of websites that ARE NOT included in AOL's search engine.

let me tell you one more time...

AOL is NOT the internet, its a very convenient gateway to it...

i was one of the first fifty people to join aol... ever more, AOL, is to not be capitalised cuz i hate the cap key...
and i cant prove it, but i think those first 300 people were all gay...
i never met a strait person online during those first few years...
im sure there were, but i never met one...

there werent so many chat rooms back then, and they were split up into geographical groups... of course the east and west coast had the most activity, cuz thats where the faggots migrated to in the seventies. like i said, we had the first computers cuz we had the most money to blow...

and we've never got ANY fucking credit from steve, but we helped stevecasehomophobiccunt work out all his bugs, and gave him great suggestions and stuck with him even when he was charging 24 bucks an hour... or some other huge amount of money... we stuck with him through the mid nineties when computer prices came down to something reasonable and the whole world came online at once and his servers exploded... we even stuck with him when his wife made a homophobic remark and refused to give money to a charity that catered to the aids population... the next day, she never apologised but the money got to the organisation... we stayed through the rumour that steve didnt want all those homosexual chat rooms on his server, i personally dont think it was a rumour, but i think someone pointed out that if wasnt for us "nasty homos" you would have never got off the ground... these memories are fuzzy, so dont quote me, but the jist of the truth is there...

around 1996, we were able to start creating our own rooms. now that was a riot... as is now, and even more so, some of the strangest phreaks have set up camp in AOLland... lol... it was around this time i saw just how great this venue could be used for community building... the aids epidemic had totally wiped us out, spirit wise, emotional wise, and we were just physically run down from stress and worry... our community was almost starting to come together as a whole, then aids hit it and all the work we had put in in the fifties through the seventies just disappeared... we lost the best of the best, we lost those who held us together...plus, we had to live through the times when the world thought that this WAS a punishment from gawd...

that was really hard on my boys... i would hold them and point to the tv and the tv preacher spewing hate and i would say....

"that preacher dont know gawd, jimmy, gawd aint on that pulpit with that hate monger... jimmy hes right here beside me as i bathe you and feed you and love you and soothe you... gawd is right here taking care of you and loving you just as i am... gawd is no where near that pulpit... that man on the tv lies... gawd loves you just as much as he loves that hatefilled man on tv... but i bet he LIKES us more..."

so when we got a dayton, ohio chat room, i took it over and reigned queen there for about 3 years... i would entertain and make the boys laugh... i cant count the times a guy would email me saying that he just sits there reading my antics with tears running down his face from laughing so hard... that always gave me a woody, the coolest thing to have happen for me is to make somebody laugh...

when the chat rooms started, i treated them as a physical place to be... i pretended we were in a bar and i would quip, harass, insult, act retarded and i added actions by using ::action:: to denote an action, sounds were *sound*, like *fart*,
asides or inner thoughts that had nuttin to do with the conversation that was going on at the moment, were cloaked in ( ) and anything sexual always had these < > around whatever perverse thing i wanted to spew at the time.... id cartwheel into the room wearing a hoopskirt, black army boots and a tiara and the show would begin... i had many personalities and me and the boys had soooo mucho fun... seriously, nobody ever thought you could have so much fun just typing crap into a computer... and thats all it was, crap and silliness... but god it was fun...

as i said, earlier, our community was pretty much in shambles... when aids hit, alot of the community drew together, but more of it became more isolated... we stopped touching each other and we stopped having sex and we stopped talking to each other and we just stopped being... we had scuttled into our safe little shells and was just sittin there rotting away...

well, this little chat room did wonders for daytons gay community... i started hosting dinner parties... it was hard at first, nobody wanted to do it... and thats intimacy issues... most gay men cant interact with other gay men with out blaring music, a cocktail and 1000 other faggots milling around...so having dinner, which is a very intimate event, with other gay men scared most of the boys silly... well, im very insistent, and we eventually began to have monthly dinner parties, we started meeting every sunday at a breakfast diner in town... in its hey day we had 50 screaming queens come to breakfast, and never less than 30... it was fun plus we got to terrorise the catholics who dined there after church... we had dinners out, saw plays and just did stuff with each other...

we made friends, and learned how to tend to that friendship... instead of making friends and then letting that friendship lie between the two, waiting for the friendship to do something... i was very proud of my community... i was very proud that they were working through major intimacy issues and embracing each other as friends... and ill admit, i was the star, and it fed me and i was glad to be the star and i really do try to be the star wherever i go so bite me it dont hurt nobody and most people laugh at me... and thats what i want...

then one day the children came...

one day, every parent in the whole wide world bought their child a computer on the SAME day... it was like they called each other up and said, HEY, lets go buy the kids a computer... all of a sudden there was this inrush of youth... for three years the only people on aol were mostly homos, and there werent that many on the server at all, so it was like our little private club...

well, at first, the kids made their own rooms, and basically we ran em out of our room if they was under 18...

but then those kids grew up and went to college... and became the most rudest pricks ive ever encountered... and they still are the most rudest pricks ive ever encountered... we had lost a whole generation of men who were trying to create a safe and gentle space for homos to hang, so the youngsters had nobody to teach em the rules... the younger gen watched the one ahead of em, and acted accordingly... all of sudden nettiquete is out the window... abuse is common and expected... the anonymity that you have on the web became so abused as to drive most of us away from the whole shebang... the kids wouldnt join in on the fun, they only wanted to take over, abuse the elders, and it was constant, i mean they never let up... we couldnt even have discussions among ourselves without these twinks abusing us... the worst was when they started bitching about chat in general, that the rooms were meant for sex and for sex only, and chat was not allowed... where did the HELL did that come from... we all cruised the chat rooms, we never had a problem with that... you had your neighbourly name and you had your ravingsexbitchpigboy name... it wasnt like we were hiding, it was just sometimes we wanted to chat and sometimes we wanted to get fucked, and people knew by our names what we was looking for... but when the kids came, the rules all changed, and if the kids didnt know the unwritten rules on the web, how were we to stand up to the onslaught...the rules were simple, be nice, dont lie,(if your dick is six inches dont say its nine, we really hate that) dont use other peoples pics and say that they are your own, dont use all caps, but mainly, treat each other with respect and never flame, if you do flame someone, you had better make it entertaining or you will get flamed by a bunch of very experienced mean ass queens who have made a living at flaming, and ALWAYS ALWAYS ABIDE BY THE TEN MINUTE RULE... if somebody pisses you off, you wait ten minutes before responding... anybody else remember that rule?... we didnt think we'd have to write these rules down, and how could we have anyways? its an invisible world, we couldnt tack a piece of paper up somewhere explaining how to act like a human being on the web...

when most of us found out that we had most of the room on ignore, it was time to move on... and we did... now, we mostly use the chat rooms to get laid... im one of the few who cruises daily through the rooms shouting out activities that homos could join in, like, dragqueen miniature gold, miniskirtbowling night, dinner parties and musicals and plays, we have some great theatre here in dayton... ive only been back in dayton for about 6 months, and slowly but surely im gettin the guys to venture out again and come out and have fun... they said that when i left two years ago for AZ, all the fun ended... i was pissed about that, why should you wait for me to produce all the ideas and plan the shit...

guess somebody gotta do it...

i talk about this because these are the reasons why im so wrapped up in the net... im on here alot, but i also live a real life, there are millions of peoples who sit for hours on the computer and never venture out into real life... thats sad and thats an illness... back in the nineties, i could log 6 to 7 hours on the net, and work 70 hours taking care of boys and give safe sex talks and give lectures and classs on tarot, i could go on and on about what i did in real life... i knew how dangerous it was to get hooked on the puter... cuz theres soooooooooooooooo much to do, yaknow... so i made sure i always had a life outside of the puter... and if you dont have a real life, you wont have any stories to tell, and basically, im a storyteller...

or a liar... either fits...

i love this place called the web... to me its always been a real world with an invisible presence... my chat rooms were defined by a place... there was the Writers Cafe that met in an ever expanding cafe, and each person would take a piece of the cafe and make it their own, putting up decorations, knickknacks, posters, plants... whatever one would do to an office that you would write in in real life was written down and it just kept expanding... we put these descriptions in a folder on the web, and newbies could take the tour and would know exactly where and what a chatter was doing...

when i discovered Mailists, i had died and gone to heaven... here is a tool that allows me to write stories and terrorise people at the same time, but it can be longer in length and have more substance than chat... i also found that i drove most people batty on Mailists, which pleased me very mucho... i was chased away from so many maillists in the nineties i was afraid id be banished to newsgroups...my first posts on any Mailists were always veryveryveryveryveryveryveryvery long, most of it being me exploring the place called (whateverthemaillistwascalled)... i turned tarotList into a big ass library with aquariums and bookshelves and man-eating plants, and me and bo and asacreede (two bizarre mutant creatures that i might share later on) just caused big trouble that day... usually spreading rumours about rachel pollack, yacking up lies, never truly introducing myself, yet acting like ive been on the list forever...but i also described the area where dtking would sit, and over there was Rachel's writing table and i described the stained glass windows, and the maneating plant in the corner and the bookcases and maroon plooshy couch that you had to get permission from me to sit in... etc... you gettin the pic?

of course, NO ONE ON THE WEB HAD EVER DONE THIS BEFORE... lmao... i bet people felt like they had just been hit by a tornado, and you either laughed your ass off or got pissed... the ones who laughed are still pretty much around me still laughing...

my fav mail list is my kerrismaticneedleharpooning society one... its a bunch of insane fiber artists who live on a pirate ship and we have a blast... i have a tarot and spirituality maillist that meets in a hundred foot tall windmill, circleink, a prayer circle gathers in an attic in an old victorian house... ive found that presenting mail lists in this form has helped many of my writer friends become mucho better writers, i know its helped me immensely...

anyhow, i live in the web and i live outside of the web... ive met hundreds, and i mean hundreds of people in real life from this place, most good, some so hideous that you cant believe gawd created em, and a myriad of phreaks... i love phreaks, phreaks love me, wherever i go, the phreaks just cluster around me... i collect em... they keep me real and refreshed....

i have strong emotions for this place we call the internet... ive watched love bloom, ive watched people who i have never met die and leave me destroyed, ive found so much laughter here, so much information, ive prayed every saturday evening at 7pm eastern time for the last ten years with probably a billion people world wide who's connected by the web... ive made friends who have stuck with me through thick and thin, and ive stuck through thick and thin with them... alot of us go and meet in person and we find out that we are pretty much like our online personalities... i cant really be like my online personality cuz ill get arrested... but its surprising how you can really get to know a person through this medium... i mean we share things with each other i know we dont share with real life peoples... its amazing, but in the olden days, didnt they do all this with hand written letters...

if the web went away today, id be very sad... its been a place of refuge, its been a compatriot in many revolts and revolutions, its been a wise teacher learning me new things...

its the space where my most favourite people gather and its also the hush, that silence of future meetings of new friends and lovers...

i love this place... it effects me on so many levels... just like real life do... eventually, we will start using it for more than porn, gettin laid, and spamming the hell out of each other... its happening now... remember when the only webpages were businesses and people selling shit? lol... now there are webpages ranging from lesbian fisting videos to granny's selling knitted toiletpaper covers...

its a great place aint it?

in light,
kerris

ps
the pictures are from Deborah Koff-Chapin. they are created by her touchpainting technique. i beleeve she died very young, too young for such good talent... the images are almost always dark, but each emotion is plain and clear... what might at one glance show desperate depression is actually a scene of pure joy and bliss... heres the link if you wanna go see some more stuffs of hers... i use these when im writing stories, when plots hit a dead end, or characters need to be fleshed out, i flip a card and they always send me down a direction ive never would have noticed if not for this womens art work...

Touch Drawing