Note - the term 'teenage' here is ingenuous in that it refers to my admiration for movies such as 'I married a teenage werewolf', and so on.
When I first posted this (on Misc) I neglected to frame it in a form that could generate responses. I suppose the nature of the article (other than its exhibitionistic vanity) is the presentation of the 'theatre of dreams' I refer to, and a half-formed question: who else, if anyone, has used the net in the way I have?
Who else, if anyone, has found in it a way to explore some facet of themselves that they felt had to be hidden away in the real world? And having made such an exploration did actual behaviour in the real world change, or not? Points to ponder...
I have lived a long, complicated, and highly imaginative life on the net. As a 'virtual being' my true home is chat, not blogging. When I first truly discovered the Internet 'blogging' was unheard of and chat a crude affair exemplified by the likes of mIRC. I was fortunate enought to stumble across Excite's Virtual Places, which was distinguished from all other chat clients that I'd then heard of by the availability of personal avatars.
Virtual Places (VP) became my online home for the next five or so years and nothing succeeded in weening me away from the love I felt for it. It was as a consequence of being involved in VP that I coined the term 'theatre of dreams' as a description of what chat as a whole meant to me. It has shaped my life profoundly, helping to destroy my first marriage, revealing who and what I am to myself, introducing me to my second wife and, prior to her, introducing me to the most exciting, infuriating, maddening, real-time, face to face, lover that I am ever likely to know.
Whoever thought of chat is an utter genius, and I salute him or her unreservedly.
A little background is necessary if you are to understand why I, as a man, would become the most successful CyberDyke ever to haunt the endless rooms of VP.
And I was. Dear God, I was. I was fucking legendary.
At the time I first found VP I was in my early thirties and my first marriage had begun the long slow process that led to its death. VP hastened that death, was instrumental in it. I had left a city I loved, and work that I loved, in order to further my first wife's career. That utterly foolish, utterly romantic decision (and I freely admit, it was my decision to do so) led me to to a tiny town in the midlands of England, to three years of unemployment and the deepest depression I've ever known, to the abandonment of my Doctorate, and to the helpless realization that everything I had thought about myself, everything I had hoped for, everything I had dreamed of, was nothing more than total illusion.
I confronted myself, and in despair, realized that I was false, and that in the falsity of my life I had nowhere to turn. And then I found VP.
I remember my first encounter with VP with enormous vividness. I had heard of 'chat'. I had tried, and been thoroughly disappointed by, AOL's chat client of the time. I had seen mIRC at work, and wanted nothing to do with anything so crude. I ran a search through one of the then-extant search engines (this was years before Google) and found a listing for VP.
I downloaded the client, registered, logged on, and immediately found myself in the ignominous and detested position of being a 'baghead', that is, one forced to make use of the only generic avatar then provided by VP to registered users - a brown paper bag with eyes.
Virtual Places is several years dead, now, and its intricacies can be of no interest to those who have never known it. Suffice it to say that, surfing the rooms I found someone willing to take pity upon my state, who sent me (through the client) a real avatar. I can't remember the person's name, nor the gender under which he or she presented him/herself (I have the feeling that she presented as female) but I will never be less than grateful. The only thing more detestable in VP than a baghead was a mug, an anonymous user who was forced to make use of a generic icon which featured a coffee mug with the word 'Excite' on it.
I played endless games of 'mugball', later, with other VP users, in which mugs were kicked across rooms by the simple expedient of linking a personal avatar to a mug, which sent it flying across the room.
This, the very first of my huge collection of personal avatars (always referred to in VP generally as 'avs') was androgynous in character. I had chosen, as my first screen-name (I later had dozens) the word 'baal'. In my head it referred to the ancient gods of the pre-Israelitic semitic tribes, who were licentious in their sexuality to an unparalleled degree (I later found out it's Dutch for 'fuck' - and nothing could have been more appropriate).
As a real man, one of my most pressing concerns was my sexuality, which was a thing whose nature was an utter mystery to me. I found in VP the perfect forum in which to explore that mystery - anonymous, safe from any contact with disease, or the the risk of violence, and I plunged into that exploration with a gusto that astonished me. The androgynous image in which I had clothed myself became a licence to explore the hitherto always repudiated homosexuality of my sexual nature - and 'one-handed typing' became my favorite sexual activity. I became a homosexual Cyberslut of the worst kind, forever seeking virtual sex, and counting my time online wasted if the evening did not include at least five or six cyber encounters.
And before you ask, orgasm was never the point (at least, not after the first month or two). What was important was the free expression of a sexual impulse that had always before been hidden, and the control (though only in text) of my 'partner'. Without conscious realization on my part, these expressions of my sexuality became ever more violent, ever more sadistic, ever more perverse. And the compliance of my partners, their collaboration in the ultimate victory of my will, became ever more important to me.
In my actual life at the time I was deeply withdrawn, completely closeted within myself. I hadn't touched my wife, even to kiss her, in over two years. In my virtual life I was an androgynous slut of the most prolific kind, experimenting with an overt sexual violence, both given and received, that would have resulted in my death and the deaths of my partners (of both sexes) had it been carried on real-time.
And I was as addicted as any heroin addict. I could no more have given up my adventures in VP than I could have reached the moon by flapping my arms up and down.
One evening, after months and months in VP (and for no reason that is clear to me even now) I decided to try my luck in Grrrls Domain - the generic title given to the series of rooms that were reserved for VP Lesbians. Perhaps what prompted me was an encounter with a person I had met in Pink Triangle, the series of rooms given over to male homosexual activity, in which I was a popular participant. This person presented as female, on the point of coming out as a lesbian, and in need of advice as to how to do so.
We had a long conversation, lasting more than an hour, in which I advised her to have around her a network of friends who would be capable of compensating for the expected violence of her parents' reaction to the news before she came out. I was struck by the attention she paid to what I said, and by her repeated questions as to my actual sex. She made it plain that she thought I was female, or at the very least strongly oriented towards the feminine (and I will say this, almost all the lovers I have known real time have said that I would make an excellent woman - meaning that I listen to them before I speak, that I react emotionally before I react pragmatically, and that while I argue from facts, I understand from emotions).
I met her again, much later, when my career as a virtual lesbian had been thoroughly established. In a private message she said 'I knew you weren't a guy. You were just too nice'.
Perhaps this person tempted me into my career as a CyberDyke - though a particularly cruel, savage, and violent one. And perhaps not. Online I have dommed, as a woman, both males and females. I have had the satisfaction of seeing both those who presented as females, and as males, adore me as their Goddess, and I have witnessed the exposure of the most profound weakness, as well as the most profound strength, as a consequence of my presentation of myself as a woman.
Yet in every case, I have been nothing more, or less, than myself. I freely admit that I have tailored the history of my life to meet the expectations of others, I freely admit that I have lied concerning the history of my life as to its factual content in order to make it conform to the detailed 'backstory' that I slowly worked out in order to facilitate the online adventures that I so craved, and so needed in order to come to an understanding of myself, the understanding that I presently possess.
I apologise for none of it.
Why? Because if the stories I told were factually untrue they were emotionally entirely veracious. If I have altered my name, my face (PSP is a wonderful thing), and my chronological history, I have never once altered the truth of my emotional response to any detail of that history, and in the perpetration of these lies I have discovered what I am.
I've no doubt that I've broken hearts, male and female, in the doing of it. But in the process I've had my heart broken too.
Here is a truth. Let no one tell you that words on a screen cannot reach into the deepest recesses of the human heart and stir the most terrible emotions. They can. I have wept over my cyberlovers, and every tear was wrenched from me in agony.
I've also laughed my ass off. Perhaps the most amusing incident of my career as a CyberDyke is this. I had become involved in a long, intensely passionate, deeply perverse, relationship with a person I will call 'Jane'. Jane had some of the sexiest avs, sexy in a sado-masochistic sense, I'd ever seen. She was one of the most intelligent, poetic, insightful, provocative, articulate people I'd ever met on the net. And I fell hopelessly in cyberlove with her after our first conversation.
I was by now an old hand at impersonating a dyke on the net. I had a coterie of fans who spread my fame throughout VP. I was a legend because of the ferocity of my wit, the cruelty of my will, and the discipline I required of my cyberslaves. I was, in short, the ultimate 'catch'. To be seen with me was a compliment. To have my exclusive attention was the ultimate accolade (all of which is to be contrasted with the disaster which was my life as an actual man). And Jane delighted in all of it.
She cut and pasted to me, in email, conversations with other inhabitants of VP who were in awe of her simply because I condescended to spend time with her. And then one day she told me she had a confession to make.
Her confession was simply this. 'She' was a man, and 'her' name was John. I laughed till I cried and then said something to the effect of 'Well damn. I have a confession to make too. My name is Simon, not Simone'.
The beauty of it is that we continued our relationship for many months more, exchanging virtual roles (Dom versus sub, male versus female) without any lessening of the truth of what we meant to each other.
Each of us had encountered a Person. And I love that man to this day.
In my career in VP (I miss VP even now, when it is long gone) I encountered hundreds, possibly thousands, of others. I have no idea how many of them were being honest when they said they were male or female. Nor do I care. Each of them was honest in their desires, as I was. Each of them told the truth of who they then were, as I did. Each of them participated, knowingly or otherwise, in a theatre of dreams.
Each of them, knowingly or otherwise, contributed to who I now am.
And for that they have my love, honor, and respect.
What and where I am now I owe to them.
Cheers, guys.
