Thinking about internet cruising and dating, I keep going back to Madonna's "Open Your Heart" video, and its peepshow characters sitting in their viewing booths. They're robotic, mostly motionless, and you only get a limited glimpse of them, front on, waist up, before the screen slides down again. She's looking at them, they're looking at her, but it's not like they're interacting with each other, getting a real impression. In this video, everyone's turning himself (or herself) into a fantasy, and letting the imaginations of others fill in the rest. Internet cruising is kind of similar, no?

On the Net, you don't have to worry about airs and graces, or social mores; you can be as selfish or as generous, and as visible or as mysterious as you want. You get to turn yourself into the peepshow fantasy of your own making. You get to be Madonna.

The Net rocks, doesn't it? And Internet cruising and dating is a fun and happening part of it.

On the Net, you control the space, and the pace and the rhythm of every meeting. You don't have to stand and face someone, talk, say something funny/clever, say something sexy, or try and move the conversation on quickly when you spill your drink, say something stupid or laugh to loudly/high-pitchedly. Nothing's coming in to distract you, at least, nothing you can't handle by selecting "minimize" or "close". On the Net, you can give just the right glimpse of yourself, a little teaser, and attach a few words to it, giving you a quick and defined identity.

Give people too much information, their imagination shuts down, you've drowned it out. Give them not enough and they become curious, obsessed, they feel they know you, because they've had to figure you out themselves - they own the identity they think you have (let this last sentence be your warning - I'm a psycho dater, but please, feel free to send hearts: http://www.fridae.asia/profiles/?billyhayes). You can't keep this sort of mystery up in bars, people who like the first glance of you will usually want to talk to you, and get a more spontaneous picture of you. If you stand motionless against the wall for too long, most people will think you're a creep. Alternatively, they might just jerk their head in the direction of the toilets/back room and you can both run with your first impressions - this is Internet cruising without a computer.

Likewise, you can browse through profiles like you're buying tomatoes at the supermarket, picking up the ones you like the first look of, checking them out, then putting some back, and others in your "basket". As well, you're at home, in private, and you can look into someone's eyes, or stare at their bare chest from as close up, and for as long as you like. You can't do this in most bars either, as most people would ask you what you were doing, staring so intently at them and their parts, from only six or seven inches away. Internet cruising allows you to size others up at your own pace, but the interesting flipside is that you aren't able to see anything but what the other person wants you to see.

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And often, if you meet up with guys you like the look of on the Net, there can be an uncomfortable rupture between your imagined them and the real them. It's at these times you become aware of how masturbatory Internet cruising inherently is. You've shaped your date to your exact liking, from the snippets of words and images they've given you, kind of like a computerised, porno Mr Potatohead.

Having said that, there's nothing new in picking people up solely because of their looks, and a lot of people, I know I'm definitely one, have a truncated bar/club personality, which they employ when talking to cute strangers in public. I prefer to talk about the Oscars, big stars like Barbra Streisand and Michael Jackson, or grind my axe about things I'm not happy about, but in a bar, talking to an attractive stranger I find I usually shelve such talk and replace it with conversation along the lines of "where do you live?" or "insert funny/cool non-sequitur here". That's very similar to Internet dating. Both things involve putting your best foot forward, and leaving your other foot hidden, according to what you think the other person wants.

For me, what's really new about Internet cruising and dating is that, with the Net, you don't have to enter an organised, politicised environment. Internet cruising liberates gay men from the need to go to the scene to access their sex and social lives. There's a communal, tribal nature to gay cruising and dating in that it has almost always takes place in gay bars, clubs and sex venues. By and large, you have to go out in public and participate in the gay scene to get laid, or meet people. That's fine, except that a lot of gay people find cruising, sex and dating private and personal, and they don't want to do it with everyone else, everyone else's way, and in public. Some others wouldn't have a lot to do with the scene if it wasn't the place they had to go to meet people. Sex gets confused with community identity, and participating in the scene is like a toll you have to pay to get laid. If you're not out and about, or into the bathhouse, you're pretty much left out, or you're left waiting for a random, rare meeting with someone in a non-gay specific space. (AUTHOR'S NOTE: this can be the good, as long as you aren't in a rush).

However, Internet cruising and dating isn't all about liberation, privacy and independent sexuality. In a way, Internet cruising and dating drives gay social skills back into the pre-stone(wall) age. As a guy I'm chatting to now, while writing this article, just said, "It's all point a to point b with nothing in between. You like what you see, then it's a phone call or a knock on the door, and you both know what you want and what you're going to do with each other before you even meet".

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We can analyse Internet cruising and dating, but really, isn't it primarily the superhighway to sex? Fine if it is, great actually, but for a culture that's already sexed-to-the-max, could this kind of electronic acceleration be going just a bit too far? I would say no, it's no different in my opinion to dialling up for a pizza instead of schlepping back and forth to the store and cooking, but there is something a little unromantic and mercenary about cruising and dating on the Net.

That is, until you have a Net romance. In the last couple of years, I've had enough heavy crushes on line to fill a book, or at least, a blog. Internet chat creates the same emotional responses as real-life interactions; in fact, I think it triggers them more frequently, and more resonantly. People get very frank on the Net, and in private message windows, all kinds of intimate truths are exchanged, things you would almost never hear come out of people's mouths. For some reason it's easier to type things like "I'm lonely, and I feel nice when I chat to you" to someone you've never met, who lives on the other side of the world, than it is to say it to someone sitting across from you who you see all the time. Maybe it's the luxury of distance, the idea that you may never really meet the person, that frees you up and makes you so honest, but like plenty others, I've said things to guys online that I haven't been able to say to long-term lovers. Sometimes I've looked forward to seeing my favourite guys on line more than I've looked forward to seeing my friends, and I almost always prefer chatting online to chatting in bars. Is this bad - am I being sucked into cyberspace, never to return?

I may be, because I think you can get very spoilt by Internet cruising and dating. It's flattering and gratifying to have people pop up on your monitor and tell you you're cute, and it's kind of nice, in a cyber, futuristic way, to have "relationships" with people you never meet, as you can trust your imagination not to let you down, unlike dicks, phone calls and the uncomfortable beds of strangers, which can fail you when you need them most.

I guess what's missing from the Net is that there's something mechanical about it. It's real people that you're chatting to, and a lot of them are probably just like you, but so much of the whole thing is sort of unreal and self-reflexive. At least in the flesh, you're interacting more unpredictably - you can't backspace
and delete if you want to take something you've said back, and you probably have a more "real" experience. I'm a Net cruising junkie, and I love all things Internet, but nothing beats the sound of somebody laughing at something you've just said, or the little ways their faces change when they smile at you.