Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
Man Roulette is down right now. The cameras don’t seem to be working. If the prospect of video chatting one-on-one with a man somewhere in the world, a man with whom you may build a small relationship or virtual transaction more or less premised on mutual attraction and sexual interest, appeals to you as it does to me, and you confront this functional blackout, the logical solution is in substitutive logic, a hacker’s logic, exchanging other words for man in the url. They aren’t synonyms, exactly, that you come to know to try: you come to know to try the offensive categorical generalities of pornography, even where your own identity is inscribed, delimited. It is a safe assumption that there are imitation sites, mirror sites if that’s what they are called, though the most obvious, gayroulette, doesn’t open anything. But a second choice, boyroulette, redirects to pinkroulette, which I would have considered only well after cockroulette, for example, I am embarrassed to say; but pinkroulette.com is quite active, with several channels ongoing (or cylinders spinning?)—sixty users in each, apparently—and very nearly identical to the interactive site I discovered for myself in the summer of 2010.
The modus operandi of Man Roulette is quickly appreciated and even mundane, but what it affords and requires of its user is phenomenal, and apprehended only gradually. There is an incoming video image in the image box at the top left of the screen: him, he in his deeply underway life dialing you in, staying on you for the moment at least, your station one of the many. Each successive occupant of the incoming image box is called “Partner.” (Substitutive logic pervades the whole endeavor, really, and is part of roulette erotics.) The outgoing video image in the image box beneath that one, at the bottom left of the screen: “You,” as you appear on camera, as you have chosen to position yourself on this day, relearning that the lean of your head to the left lists to the right rather in the mirror picture, lit as you wish under the overhead wall lamp. I show my face, my entire face, in my image box, which puts me in a minority of users, and since so few do, I wonder if it is unwise to do so, and why. Anonymity is below the mouth, one concludes. I am in a still smaller minority for entering the fray entirely clothed. I look likewise for other faces, other men who like to disrobe later.
To the right of the video stream is a large text field. What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?” The quite separate utility of the text field in Man Roulette returns credibility to the Cartesian mind/body divide (even as opposing theories of self are likewise validated here: the self as instantiated only when relative to others in microcontexts, identity as entirely a matter of performance). Something for sure shifts into gear once the hunter-gatherer channel-surfing gives way to a single engagement and You and Partner partner up; a familiar compartmentalization may be experienced afresh: See something, say something.
The image boxes are a font of eidetic fantasy and comparative self-regard, a kind of fuel for the text field in which you create and remark and send, then watch for effect. The transcript of the date has its slow build here; reading it over later, if you cut and paste and save, you can recall his smile at certain points in the play, a particular surrender, a fidget, a sigh. You can recreate sensation. The text field is where the evening is spent, and the image boxes are where the night ends, typically. A sleepy last look, a wistful goodnight mouthed. If a date, it has been a date in which the two of you exchange as in confrontation but show simultaneously as adjacent, facing outward, as in a journey. The text field is the steering wheel, the handling, and the wending road at once; and your image and his are the chassis and heavy engine, the cruising velocity, the arrival. Partner and I filled evenings and long nights in the text field during the summer and fall of 2010. I know I fell in love on Man Roulette at least once, thought about Partner days on end, and I can recall real, breathing moments together in which I felt Partner fall for me: Albert in Detroit; Diego in Guayaquil, Ecuador; Sean in Franklin, Massachusetts; Bruno in Ouro Preto, Brazil; John Patrick in Milan. “Partner: you are not like other guys.”
Man Roulette is down right now. Try other words for what you want, other words for what you are. Boy is a redirect, but it takes you there. It was on Man Roulette I learned I was an older man, an older man fantasy for some, a station to move right past for many others. Though I had had only younger lovers and boyfriends for some time, I think I hadn’t realized I was no longer young myself that summer. On Man Roulette I was a mustache and a hesitation to smile. I was vain about my hair. The light was best at my desk upstairs. I swiveled into it at key moments. I said thirty-five instead of thirty-six, when asked. I swiveled. In the text field, I would race to establish an unexpected mix of permissive mischief, acute sensitivity and oblique non sequitur, to wager at intervals something true and peculiar about him or his situation. I was, in contrast to Partner, a good deal more controlling, I came to realize, and much more invested in how I came across, and—however much I love to divulge to a stranger—less willing to risk. Partner I liked for being legible in his expressions, for his inability to contain himself, for his freedom in his rooms, for what seemed a freedom from tactics, for his relaxing inhibition.
Meeting someone on Man Roulette and maybe Skyping with each other for a few more dates is, in the end, for all its anonymity and performativity, no different than other love and sex relations, I find. I mean, people find their positions rather naturally vis-à-vis one another. I am, and was that summer, what my friend Maggie once termed a social passive top. (Which sounds like one of eight possible combinations, the most smug of the eight, although private active bottom sounds pretty self-involved too.) I think she meant, I’m scripted to be the catch; to draw in rather than pursue; and then, sure of his interest, to assert a kind of self-governance and skill at scaffolding, building a kind of domicile I can invite him into, a narrative usually, a construction of us with great focus on why he is special enough to belong, very pleasurable for both of us if Partner is dispositionally complementary. I’m attracted to his pleasure. I give him, in short, a fair amount of what I always want and routinely prevent, the experience of being fully seen and understood. You’re lucky if you can read the script you’re acting out.
What is different about Man Roulette is vantage, a kind of inherent third-person perspective on the both of you and your date. You get to see it all. An overburdened pair of blue briefs in Guayaquil, a candy wrapper with funny Italian. You have to oversee it all. His reaction reading your remark, your impulse to get a reaction. It took me a month and a half to tell my therapist what I had been doing. I said it was probably trivial, but we saw it was human.