CHAPTER 8. PROTOCOL

“No wonder Africans called it ‘The Horror,’” Andrew Holleran wrote in 1988, in the introduction to Ground Zero. The collection of essays and articles documented the early years of AIDS in New York City, where Holleran, who had recently published his first novel, was writing columns for the gay magazine Christopher Street. At first, his “New York Notebook” mostly covered gallery openings, clubs, and the music that played at them. Then, in 1982, Holleran’s friends and lovers started falling sick.

Week by week, Holleran watched healthy young men go blind and grow emaciated. Lesions appeared on their faces and limbs; they lost their hair to chemotherapy. Holleran recorded his experiences visiting friends in the hospital. He brought them magazines. He searched for places on their bodies with no tubes running in or out, where he might lay a hand.

“Living in New York,” he recalled, felt like “attending a dinner party at which some of the guests were being taken out and shot, while the rest of us were expected to continue eating and make small talk.”

In November 1986, the lesbian artist and activist Jane Rosett attended a party at the home of her friend David Summers. In 1997, she would describe it in a eulogy for POZ, a magazine for people living with HIV. David had full-blown AIDS. His partner, Sal Licata, had organized the gathering to celebrate their seventh anniversary. He invited friends over to their apartment to “hang out in bed and hold David while he pukes.” Despite his suffering, David projected warmth and wit.

“It was a party,” Rosett wrote. “David held court and stressed how honored he was to have lured a lesbian into his king-size bed.” When his guests relayed gossip of who was sleeping with whom, he cheered. “More people are in love than in the hospital!” Within a few days, however, David died. Rosett returned to keep Sal company as he waited for movers to arrive and empty the apartment. He played the piano and taught her a song as they waited. Miss the touch, the touch of your hand, my buddy it went. During World War II, gay men in the armed forces had used it as a code. The next year, Sal passed away in a hallway of St. Vincent’s Hospital.

“Within a few years,” Rosett recalled, “everyone else in David’s bed that day—except me—was also dead.”

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The Centers for Disease Control had noticed the first signs in the summer of 1981. In June of that year, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report noted a strange outbreak of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in Los Angeles. Between October 1980 and May 1981, five young men had been diagnosed with the disease. The article speculated that it might have to do with “some aspect of the homosexual lifestyle.” The next month, the MMWR reported that in the prior thirty months, twenty-six young gay men in New York City and California had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a cancer that was extremely rare in the United States and all but unheard of except among the elderly. By June 1982, 355 Americans were known to be suffering from KS and other opportunistic infections. Doctors and the press had started calling what afflicted them GRID, for “gay-related immuno deficiency.” In July 1982, the CDC would rename GRID “AIDS” and identify four populations that were especially at risk: homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. As shorthand, doctors called them the “4 H’s.”

Of course, AIDS dramatically changed how gay men dated. “A profound panic has crept over men in the major centers of the outbreak,” The Advocate reported in 1982. “Few know what to do or not to do.” But the disease was not striking only gay men.

As early as 1983, Essence magazine reported on CDC findings that 4 percent of HIV-positive patients were not 4 H, and that many new infections were occurring among African American women. By 1996, the number of African Americans with AIDS would surpass the number of whites who had it. At first, many magazines that aimed at black middle-class readers seemed inclined to blame drug users and black men who engaged in homosexual or bisexual activity, despite leading straight-looking lives. “MSM,” the CDC called them, for “men who have sex with men.”

An article that appeared in Ebony in April 1987 warned: “Not only is it killing ‘them,’ but many of ‘us’ as well.” The author of an article that appeared in Essence later that year warned black women to be careful whom they dated. “If I find a guy who’s a little swishy,” the author confided, “I stay away.”

With brutal speed, throughout the 1980s, AIDS would divide daters into Positives and Negatives, straights and swishes. Us and them. For yuppies, niche dating may have been a matter of preference. For those trying to live and love where AIDS struck, it was not snobbery at stake. It was survival.

The communities struggling to cope with AIDS had to rewrite the rules regarding how people talked about sex. For decades, euphemisms like “necking” and “petting” had sufficed to cover everything short of “going all the way.” No more. The AIDS crisis compelled Americans to speak about sex at great length and in great detail. It forced even conservative politicians to do so in public.

AIDS raised the stakes of dating: There had been crises before, but never one with such deadly consequences. It required daters to develop new protocols for how to interact. Combined with new technologies, the new precision about desire that activists invented would change how everyone went about looking for love.

*   *   *

For six years after the “gay cancer” appeared in California and New York, the Reagan administration did almost nothing about it. The right-wing Christians on whose support Reagan depended saw it as a disease of “junkies and queers.” In their eyes, the people who were dying were more than expendable: They deserved it. In 1983, the conservative TV host Pat Buchanan remarked in a moment of faux-compassion: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”

In 1984, researchers at the National Institutes of Health isolated the virus that caused AIDS. But even after his close friend Rock Hudson died of AIDS-related causes in 1985, the president remained silent. He would not address the public on the subject until 1987. By then, it was known to have killed more than twenty thousand Americans. In the face of this indifference, the communities suffering from AIDS had to activate and expand existing social networks in order to bring care to those who needed it. They had to develop strategies for delivering information about how to protect yourself to the people who were at greatest risk.

Well before the first cases of GRID were recorded, LGBT activists in many cities had created their own public health institutions. In 1971, the Fenway Health Community Center in Boston was founded with the mission of providing care to gays and lesbians; the Gay Men’s Collective at Fenway developed a strong track record treating hepatitis B and other STDs. At the University of Chicago, a group of gay medical students founded the Howard Brown Health Center in 1974. They hired the well-known drag performer Stephen Jones, aka Nurse Wanda Lust, to help with community outreach. Donning her signature wig, nurse’s outfit, and round spectacles, Wanda drove around Chicago in a brightly painted “VD van,” giving lectures about sexual health. On Easter Sunday 1979, a group of drag performers based in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco began making public appearances in nuns’ habits and dramatic makeup in order to evangelize similar information. They called themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

In 1980, a New Yorker named Richard Edwards created a “discreet fraternity” of “fuckbuddies” called Meridian. Meridian required prospective members to undergo an STD screening. After receiving a clean bill of health, you got a membership pin. In a series of letters that he wrote to the gay newspaper the New York Native, Edwards—or “Mr. Rick,” as he signed them—explained his thinking: “Buddies care about buddies. It is naturally masculine.” Camaraderie, the fuckbuddies reasoned, was the best protection.

When news of GRID broke, networks like Meridian sprang into action. The problem was that nobody was sure what exactly the “gay plague” was or how it was transmitted. Some CDC researchers thought that GRID might be a reaction to a toxic substance that gay men used in greater numbers than the population in general. Others, like the prominent Greenwich Village doctor Joseph Sonnabend, thought that GRID was caused by repeated exposure to less devastating infections, like syphilis.

Facing so many unknowns, some activists preached monogamy and even abstinence. The writer Larry Kramer became infamous for taking this position. In 1983, Kramer wrote a furious screed for the New York Native, “1,112 and Counting.”

“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” it began. Kramer aimed to inflame his readers to demand action from the mainstream press and from the government. But he also expressed rage at gay men who put themselves at risk. “I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death,” Kramer wrote. “I am sick of guys who can only think with their cocks.”

To many gay men this attitude seemed to come dangerously close to blaming people with AIDS for their disease. Besides, pragmatists realized that the abstinence Kramer preached was impracticable. The best method of prevention was to teach people how to continue to enjoy sex while minimizing its risks.

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In 1983, the young gay writers Michael Callen and Richard Berkowitz collaborated with Joseph Sonnabend to produce a forty-page booklet titled How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. The five thousand copies they printed got snatched up in a flash. The opening chapters urged gay men to treat one another not as conquests but as partners. This required placing a high value on the health of your lovers and speaking truthfully with them.

In a section called “Staying in Control,” the authors recommended discussing sexual health ahead of time with any prospective partner and even treating such conversations as foreplay. “Discussing precautions before you have sex might seem like a turn off, but if you enjoy staying healthy, you may eventually come to eroticize whatever precautions you require prior to the sexual encounter.”

In addition to openness, Callen and Berkowitz insisted on precision. How to Have Sex breaks down gay sex into a menu of discrete safe and unsafe acts, and provides very clear instructions about the difference. For instance, the section “No Risk Sex” makes the following suggestions:

Creative Masturbation offers alternatives to jerking off alone at home. These include: mutual masturbation, group J/O, body contact, fantasy, dirty talk (verbal), voyeurism, exhibitionism, touching, fingers (not fists), titplay, toys, etc. (See section on “Jerk Off Clubs” on page 31.)

Creative Penetration includes the use of condoms, fingers (not hands) and “toys.” (For a discussion of safe dildo practices, see page 24.)

Other chapters offered equally frank practical advice on “Sucking,” “Getting Sucked,” “Fucking,” “Getting Fucked,” “Kissing,” “Rimming,” “Water Sports,” “Dildoes,” “Sadism & Masochism (S&M),” “Fist Fucking,” “Washing Up,” “Closed Circle of Fuck Buddies,” “Jerk Off Clubs,” and so on.

In the years that followed, AIDS service organizations across the country would produce educational material that presented similar terms in similar menu formats. Rather than telling readers to “Just Say No,” these pamphlets offered a wide range of options. The checklist format encouraged readers to mark off new fancies, the way they might dog-ear items in a catalog. It assured them that they could still enjoy an almost infinite variety of sexual experiences as long as they followed the right protocols. The condition was learning to recognize and name what they wanted.

*   *   *

In order to survive the plague, gay men had to become comfortable talking openly about their histories, diseases, and desires, and seek out partners who shared their attitudes. They would have to break sex down into constituent parts and determine which were safe and which were dangerous. These efforts produced descriptions of sexual behavior that were at once explicit and specific.

Individuals and subcultures had surely come up with terms for activities like “rimming” and “fist-fucking” before. But now these terms were being deliberately codified and disseminated. Different descriptions were needed for each act and target audience.

“Safe sex” promised to save many aspects of gay liberation for a frightening new era. But there was a problem: A lot of the people at risk did not think of themselves as part of that movement. Many black and Hispanic men who had sex with men did not call themselves “gay”; some took offense when others did.

In many cities, communities of Men who had Sex with Men were highly segregated. Bouncers at bars and bathhouses would turn away black men by demanding multiple forms of identification when they did not block them outright. This meant that the viral marketing campaigns launched by organizations like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and the Harvey Milk Foundation in San Francisco reached only a limited demographic.

The techniques that the San Francisco AIDS Foundation used to distribute tens of thousands of condoms every month in the Castro did not put them in the hands of African Americans and Latinos who lived in the Mission District or the Tenderloin. And to the women contracting HIV in these poor neighborhoods, risqué pamphlets and posters would have felt irrelevant. Billy Jones, the African American activist who founded the San Francisco organization Black and White Men Together (BWMT) warned that most of the people he served thought AIDS was a “white boy disease” that could not strike them.

Different populations needed their own leaders to speak to them in their own language. In San Francisco, a group of nonwhite community leaders called the Third World AIDS Advisory Task Force stepped in. In 1985, TWAATF started designing and disseminating educational materials. “AIDS is striking people of color,” their first brochure warned readers. In 1989, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and BWMT conducted a series of focus groups with blacks and Latinos in order to try to determine what kinds of ad campaigns might reach them.

SFAF learned, among other things, that the sexually explicit language and images that appealed to gay white men often offended and alienated nonwhites. They realized that to reach recent immigrants from Latin America, the best bet was to go not through bars but through churches. The result was two ad campaigns aimed specifically at each of these populations: “Get Carried Away” and “Listo para la acción.”

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Not all daters found it easy to adopt new safe sex measures. Yet a growing number of Americans recognized that it was imperative that they talk about sex. Don’t decoy, avoid, or make void the topic / Cuz that ain’t gonna stop it, the hip-hop trio Salt-N-Pepa warned. By the late 1980s, even the Reagan administration was realizing they were right.

In late 1986, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop enraged his fellow Christian conservatives by issuing a public report on AIDS that called for franker discussions of sex and for distributing condoms in public schools. “Education about AIDS should start at an early age so that children can grow up knowing the behaviors to avoid to protect themselves,” Koop recommended.

Over protests from the secretary of education, Koop printed twenty million copies and had fifty-five thousand sent to the National Parent Teacher Association. He followed up with a detailed brochure titled Understanding AIDS.

The CDC started mailing Understanding AIDS to American households in January 1988. By June, one hundred million copies had gone out. Koop did not use the kinds of explicit images or sexual slang featured in GMHC pamphlets and posters. But he studied them carefully. Like gay activists, he instructed couples to talk about their desires and the dangers they might entail.

“Some of the issues involved in this brochure may not be things you are used to discussing openly,” Koop warned in a short note that ran on the front page. “I can easily understand that. But now you must discuss them.” The brochure described safe and unsafe behaviors directly and in detail. A section called “What About Dating?” emphasized to readers that they had an obligation to initiate conversations about these subjects with their partners.

“You are going to have to be careful about the person you become sexually involved with, making your own decision based on your own best judgment,” Koop wrote. “That can be difficult. Has this person had any sexually transmitted diseases? How many people have they been to bed with? Have they experimented with drugs? All these are sensitive, but important, questions. But you have a personal responsibility to ask.”

Indeed, in the context of the AIDS crisis, even a conservative like Koop emphasized that being able to talk with each other was the single most important test of whether two daters should take their intimacies to the next level. “Think of it this way,” he admonished. “If you know someone well enough to have sex, you should be able to talk about AIDS. If someone is unwilling to talk, you shouldn’t have sex.”

Communication was paramount. Not formal commitment or community approval. Marriage itself provided no guarantees. Wedding bells did not toll the end of talking about sex. “Do Married People Get AIDS?” an insert on the page dedicated to dating asked. Of course they did. “If you feel your spouse may be putting you at risk, talk to him or her. It’s your life.”

The country had been through a lot since Reagan smirked to voters that free lovers at Berkeley engaged in “orgies so vile I cannot describe them.” Public health officials now spoke with a degree of frankness that would have been unthinkable during the wildest years of the freedom era.

In 1994, Bill Clinton was forced by Republicans to fire his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, for saying—at a UN conference on AIDS—that perhaps schools should teach young students to masturbate. But two years later, her replacement, Audrey F. Manley, went on television to talk about “outercourse”—all the sexually pleasurable activities that one could enjoy without exchanging bodily fluids. And in January 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and everyone in America started obsessing over whether or not penetrating someone with a cigar or fellating him in the highest office in the nation constituted “sexual relations,” even those of us who were still children had opinions. Sure, it may have felt a little cringeworthy to debate the ins and outs over family dinner. But we had already discussed them in sex ed.

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American public schools began offering classes in sex education precisely during the years when dating first became mainstream: the 1910s. As courtship moved out of family living rooms and church basements into public settings, progressive educators recognized that young people might no longer be able to rely on their parents and pastors to tell them what they needed to know, when they needed to know it.

What exactly should be included in the curriculum of sex ed courses had always been controversial. The Chicago teachers who developed pilot programs for the city in the 1920s, for instance, hotly debated whether information about puberty, sex, and family planning should simply be added to existing biology and home economics courses or whether the school should invite doctors and nurses to speak to students during dedicated sessions. Educators bounced back and forth between versions of these two approaches for years. But in the 1980s and ’90s, sex education became a political battlefield.

The effects were paradoxical. During these years, the absolute number of programs grew dramatically. Between 1980 and 1989, the number of states that mandated public schools to teach sex ed went from six to seventeen, plus the District of Columbia. But the fact that federal law left it up to local school boards to set the curriculum meant that students from different parts of the country learned very different things. In many places, conservatives managed to restrict what they were taught to “abstinence only.”

Between 1999 and 2009, states received nearly $1 billion of federal funding to support abstinence-only programs, and as of 2009, 86 percent of schools in the country mandated that the sex ed classes advocate abstinence. Not mine. In the liberal public high school that I went to in New York around the turn of the millennium, we talked about sex early and often.

I still remember my fifth-grade gym teacher crowding us into a room to play a warm-up game. She would throw out a word or phrase that we might have heard around, and then cold-call on someone, who then had to tell the class what he or she thought it meant. “Boner?” the gym teacher would ask. “Wet dream?” She had one lazy eye. The entire room would squirm trying to avoid catching the Eye, while also trying to look like we were not avoiding it, because that would get you called on for sure.

I humiliated myself when I guessed that “oral sex” meant talking about sex, maybe using a tape recorder? (I had just interviewed my grandfather about his experiences in the Korean War for an oral history project.) My ignominy lasted for weeks. But soon even nerds like me became fluent. We learned about anatomy. We learned words like “fallopian” and “frenulum.” In later years, we learned what “crowning” looked like from the childbirth scene in the movie The Miracle of Life. We learned what a pain it would be to have a child in high school from the Baby Project. The New York Board of Ed sent a box of rubber babies to our school, which would wail and wet themselves at all hours; they contained computer chips that kept track of how responsive you were to them. When one of our babies started howling tinnily on the subway, a group of fellow teen passengers snatched it and beat it against the pole. The “father” explained what had happened and argued his failing Baby Project grade up to a B-minus.

The point was mostly to scare us. Classroom slides showed HPV warts sprouting over genitalia like cauliflower blossoms and aching slits that our teacher said were “syphilitic chancres.” They showed us all kinds of discharge. Another teacher taught us that extra-large condoms are for extra-large egos by unwrapping a Trojan Magnum over her fist and yanking it down until it covered her entire fleshy forearm.

The main goal seemed to be instilling terror, and the cure for terror was supposed to be talk. Pleasure was secondary. Still, fear can edge its way toward desire, and wanting to know more becomes its own perversion. It was not as if the abstinence-only line that other kids got at school was keeping them from seeking out information about sex. More and more of us across the United States could find out what we wanted from cable television—from documentary shows like Real Sex and Sex in the Nineties, explicit fiction shows like Sex and the City, or pay-per-view pornography. Otherwise, we could try to learn for free, from the Internet.

Online, we all become autodidacts.

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AIDS forced Americans to develop a shared, detailed language for talking about sex. Programs like my health class institutionalized it. The Internet made it possible for anyone to join the conversation. As a searchable repository of information about sexual practices, it helped further standardize the ways they were described. And it served as an infrastructure over which new subcultures could develop.

The computer dating pioneered in the 1960s, and the video dating that followed it, harnessed the power of machines to match people who lived near a particular database. These services were limited by geography. Project TACT could connect only daters who both lived on the Upper East Side. Today For Singles could connect only daters with herpes to other daters with herpes in the D.C. area. The reach of any of these services was limited.

In the 1970s, sociologists reported that one of the main reasons that couples formerly committed to free love had retired from swinging was that it took so much time and effort to find other couples who were game. Swingers had to place personals, send and sort letters, take and send photographs, then spend weekends driving to meet one another for coffee, before they decided whether to go ahead with a liaison. A decade later, if you knew how to use the right discussion pages and Listservs, you could arrange real-life meetings with umpteen other couples without ever having to leave your desk.

In addition to providing a way for people to find each other, the Internet created new models for romantic relationships. You might say that it turned sexual and romantic energy into connectivity and relationships into interactions.

In the Eras of the Petting Party and the Steady, national advertising campaigns and nationally distributed magazines, books, and movies created archetypes for all daters to follow. Greek and Coed. Boyfriend and Girlfriend. Daters who did not conform to these types were clearly recognizable as deviating from them. They were either not dating, or they were “juvenile delinquents.” But in an age of protocols, there were suddenly infinitely many ways that one might date. The curious dater must simply learn how to communicate his or her desires, and find someone who is receptive to the things he or she wants.

Under these arrangements, a lot of the work of dating becomes the process of setting, testing, and resetting your own limits. I meet a woman at an academic conference who has been dating someone steadily for four years. They moved across oceans and continents to be together, then spent a year and a half “opening” their relationship. She says that it took nearly a year of discussing their fantasies and fears, and speculating about how they might react to certain situations, before either of them felt comfortable actually being with anyone else. They both took for granted that an open relationship—where each partner was allowed to sleep with others, and even to bring new lovers back to their shared home—was possible. They simply had to invest the time in articulating how these interactions would work. Eight months into opening her relationship, a younger acquaintance confesses to me that so far all she and her partner have done is talk.

Today, dating protocols seem to change so quickly that the end of even a medium-term relationship can leave you feeling like a Rip van Winkle. To be back on the market! is supposed to be exciting. And yet, like so many other dating phases, it often inspires anxiety and bewilderment.

“What do the kids do these days?” an old friend wants to know. He is only half joking. We are at a party, sometime in our midtwenties, and he has just broken up with the girl he had been with since we all went to high school together. “Do we just have sex now?” “Does who just have sex?” the rest of us ask. “Like, on what date is it normal to have sex at our age? The first? The fifth?” Having gone to bed with his prom date as a virgin geek and risen to find himself transformed into a well-dressed investment banker, the friend feels bewildered by the sheer number of his dating options. We can sympathize. Everyone agrees that there is no agreement on this subject.

To be adult today is to become responsible for determining the rules under which you will date. “I never lied to you” is a fair defense against many charges of misconduct, not that it makes having been not lied to feel much better. We must each spell out the terms of our own sexual and romantic encounters. Caveat dater. Many people my age first learned how to online.

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I cannot have been the only child of the Clinton era to have stumbled on the porn site www.whitehouse.com while doing social studies homework. I remember furtively clicking on thumbnail after thumbnail in an “Interns of the Month” gallery, watching spray-tanned haunches and balloon-taut breasts of girls posed around a faux Oval Office materialize, bit by bit. When my sister, searching for images of her favorite British pop stars, accidentally typed “Spicy Girls” into Yahoo, the search results made her run, shrieking, from the family computer.

Still, cybering was the safest sex around.

“It is probably no coincidence that this sea change comes on us at a time when AIDS lurks in the alleyways of our lives,” a writer for The Nation mused in 1993. Months later, The New York Times reiterated the point. “Computer erotica appears to provide many people with a ‘safe’ alternative to real, personal relationships in a world where HIV is deadlier than computer viruses.” This was in a book review. The book, The Joy of Cybersex, argued that the World Wide Web was a godsend for this reason.

The author of The Joy of Cybersex, Deborah Levine, had spent several years counseling college undergraduates at the Columbia University Health Education program. Levine encouraged them to use their computers to flirt, start online relationships, and explore their farthest-fetched fantasies without taking real-world risk. “The driving source behind sex in the 1990s, whether you’re partnered or single, is the human imagination,” Levine declared. “Enter the world of cybersex. The place where imaginations go wild, anonymity is the rule, and desire runs amok.”

Like earlier safe sex educators, Levine used multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questionnaires to help readers take stock of what they wanted. She placed more emphasis on expanding your horizons than on safety. Online you had no body to protect. But the format looked almost the same. The chapter “Overcoming Sexual Inhibitions,” for instance, started with a quiz intended to help you assess how uptight you were.

“Are you ready to embark on a mission to learn about the expansive range of sexual expression?” Levine asked. “Answer a few questions and find out:

“1. If your best friend started unexpectedly talking about his or her sex life over coffee one day, you would:

    a. Start choking and try not to spit up your drink.

    b. Nod enthusiastically, and change the subject.

    c. Ask lots of questions.

    d. Feel relieved, and share your own experiences.

2. If a partner asked you (while undressed in the bedroom) to pretend to be something you’re not, say a cashier at a grocery store or a famous astronaut, you would:

    a. Say: ‘Sure, honey, but I’d actually rather be a rocket scientist, okay?’

    b. Hop to it, and get into role.

    c. Think he or she had totally lost his or her mind, and suggest a visit to the therapist.

    d. Think about it for a few minutes, fix yourself a drink, and succumb to the unknown.”

Like earlier safe sex activists, Levine used bullet point lists to introduce the sites her readers should know and to teach them the language that they would need to thrive there. The pages she cited ran the gamut from tutorials for geeks, like www.getgirls.com, to resources for free lovers like the Open Hearts Project and www.lovemore.com. A service called Tri Ess connected heterosexual couples who were into cross-dressing.

The chat abbreviations that Levine lists—like ASAP and LOL—now seem so obvious that it is hard to remember that they once needed defining. But mastering them was critical. Decent webcam technology and the bandwidth needed to transmit high-quality images were still a few years off. In the interim, using the right expression at the right time was the only way to flirt and bond.

Like The Joy of Cybersex, the first issue of Wired magazine came out in 1993. It contained an article about a woman whose prolific activity in “hot chats” transformed her from a “paragon of shy and retiring womanhood” into a bona fide “man-eater.” The author describes a female friend who spent hours a day in the 1980s on a service called the Source. He calls her by her handle: “This Is A Naked Lady.”

“The Naked Lady egged on her digital admirers with leading questions larded with copious amounts of double entendre,” the piece began. “When I first asked her about this, she initially put it down to ‘just fooling around on the wires.’”

“‘It’s just a hobby,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll get some dates out of it.’”

Yet under the spell of her dirty-talking alter ego, the Naked Lady began to undergo a metamorphosis. She ceased to be “a rather mousy person—the type who favored gray clothing of a conservative cut … She became (through the dint of her blazing typing speed) the kind of person that could keep a dozen or more online sessions of hot chat going at a time.” The effects carried over into real life. “She began regaling me with descriptions of her expanding lingerie collection. Her speech became bawdier, her jokes naughtier. In short, she was becoming her online personality.”

Surfing was the new cruising, and it could change lives. In “health” class, the point of our endless discussions was to scare us off of sex for at least a few years. But the safer substitutes for sex to be found online offered whole new kinds of titillation. To talk (or type) about sex constituted its own kind of intimacy.

As more and more Americans got online in the early 1990s, they learned how to enjoy relationships that were text only. Pioneering “cyber citizens” developed forms of dating that were all talk.

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In 1990, only 200,000 households in the United States had Internet connections. By 1993, that number was 5 million. (The upward climb has continued to 43 million in 2000 and 85 million in 2013.) When the price of personal computers dropped dramatically in the mid-1990s, many families acquired more computers and moved them out of their living rooms into bedrooms and private places. There, the experimentation could really begin.

In many ways, the liaisons between early online boyfriends or girlfriends followed the pattern set by earlier generations of daters. You met by chance. After crossing paths in a chat room, if you hit it off, you could start making appointments to come online at the same time and talk together.

This opportunity could be life-changing. In some chat rooms, disabled singles who found it physically challenging to go out or hook up in real life, connected and fell in love. In others, queer teens who felt isolated in the homes they were growing up in could do the same. This was no small thing. By the time he graduated, one in six gay kids who went to high school in the late 1990s would get beaten up so badly he needed medical attention at least once. But the ambiguous setting of these cyberdates made many people nervous.

At the turn of the twentieth century, “tough girls,” “charity cunts,” and other early daters upset their parents and the police by taking a process that had always been conducted in private to the streets. For the first time in history, dating let young people seek mates and life partners on their own behalf, in public places. Spaces like bars and boardwalks shared many features in common with chat rooms. Both were enticing despite being slightly dangerous. Or was it because they were dangerous? Risk was part of their appeal.

Sure, people worried about other people misrepresenting themselves. A cyberlover might say he was tall and strong when in fact he was short and skinny, or thin when she was fat. This was the price of freedom. Back in the day, in your parents’ parlor, or at a church- or synagogue-sponsored dance, any other young person you met would have been screened in advance. A penny arcade or nickelodeon was anonymous. The man who held your hand as you shuddered through the dark of the Tunnel of Love might be anyone. But daters soon discovered that the anonymity of being out in public offered its own kind of intimacy. Without family and friends hovering over you, you could be yourself and frankly express your feelings. It was the strangers-on-a-train thing. If she wasn’t into it, who cared? You never had to see a girl you had picked up at the dance hall again.

Early on, mental health professionals started observing that meeting strangers online often had a similar effect. The psychiatrist Esther Gwinnell decided to write a book about “computer love” after a string of patients came to her office reporting that they or their partners had fallen for a stranger online. In Online Seductions, she coined a phrase for the kinds of relationships that her patients struck up. They were “uniquely intimate” because they “grew from the inside out.”

Gwinnell’s patients said some version of the same thing again and again. “The relationship is all about what is happening inside of the soul and the mind, and the body doesn’t get in the way.” “We met our souls first.” This was the benefit of cyber-dating, especially for singles who felt insecure in the flesh. The downside was that in the absence of visual cues or social context, it was often difficult to tell your interlocutor from the person you hoped he or she might be. The cyberlove of your life could turn out to be little more than a mirage or a private psychosis.

“When internet lovers leave the computer to go to other activities,” Gwinnell reported, “they may feel as though the other person is ‘inside’ them.”

Finding your soul mate online could also leave you feeling dissatisfied in real life. The psychiatrists warned that cybersex addiction would mess up your preexisting relationships by giving you unrealistic standards and stimulating insatiable appetites. Your husband will never understand you as well as your online husband understands you, if the online one lives mostly in your head. Even the lithest and gamest wife will not be able to help you realize all the pornographic scenarios that alt.sex.bondage.golden.show-ers.sheep offers at a glance.

What’s more, the rapid-fire pace of online love raises the stakes of every communication. Gwinnell observed that her patients who were in computer love seemed to vacillate between paralyzing anxiety (when waiting to hear from their online lovers) and exuberance beyond all proportion (when they did hear back). We all know this cycle. Compose, write, revise, send, wait, fret, read, reread, repeat.

It is easier than ever now to spend hours poring over the online ephemera of a new crush or partner. Who has not attached operatic levels of hope and fear to the details of status updates and old photographs? Look at that guitar he is holding! We knew he had a good job, but he must also be artistic. The picture with his niece proves how good he is with kids. The problem of interpretation rarely occurs to us until later, when we realize that the guitar belonged to his ex-girlfriend and the child is his, from a previous relationship.

Love in this new medium trained people to let out sighs of ecstasy at every email. The age of Online Seductions left many computer users less in love with this or that particular partner than with the Internet itself.

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In the 1990s, mainstream news sources told two kinds of sensational stories about online romance. One focused on improbable triumphs of cyberlove—or, as countless articles punned, “love at first byte.” In April 1996, the “world’s first digital wedding” took place when a thirty-four-year-old man named Bob Norris married twenty-seven-year-old Catherine Smylie in Times Square. The couple had met in a chat room the previous August. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani officiated. Their vows were transmitted in real time on a message strip that the Joe Boxer company had added to its six-thousand-square-foot billboard for this occasion, and from there to the Internet.

Other tales of digital love were darker. There were accounts of online affairs splitting up previously happy marriages. Even more prominent were horror stories about online predators. In many ways fears that these inspired resembled the “white slave” panic that had struck around the dawn of dating, when many do-gooders warned young women that to accept a date was to put yourself in grave danger.

In the late 1990s, newspapers and magazines were filled with stories about online predators preying on white suburban children, in particular. Often, the heroes of these stories were online vigilantes who took it upon themselves to police chat rooms. In the early 2000s, the news show Dateline NBC created a whole reality series dedicated to this premise. Collaborating with a watchdog group called Perverted Justice, the staff of To Catch a Predator would impersonate underage people online. They approached users saying that they were thirteen or fourteen. After a few sessions of hot and heavy typing, the decoy kid would suggest meeting in real life. If the adult accepted, he would find himself confronted live on camera, and would be arrested by the police.

While a few cases of abduction and abuse surely did happen, they were hardly common. Early studies of chat rooms showed that some users misled the people they spoke to online, usually about their physical appearance or marital status. And of course cybersexters put on naughty personae like This Is A Naked Lady. But on average, people were in fact far more honest with strangers than they were in real life. It was this accelerated intimacy that was the problem. It was addictive.

Online dating addicts were often the butt of jokes, especially if they were still in high school. They made easy targets. But in retrospect, what was risible about cybersex was not that it was perverted. It was that it was so unproductive. It rarely created real-world couples; most participants never met IRL (“in real life”). And it squandered enormous amounts of potentially valuable attention.

The pioneers who commercialized the Internet rightly saw this wastefulness as an opportunity. When America Online and Prodigy introduced their services in the early 1990s, they offered a slew of “lifestyle” chat rooms aimed at singles, because they recognized that such conversations would be a huge draw. They quickly found ways to derive enormous profits from platforms where people could exchange erotic and romantic attention. Tech companies still do.

Let’s be honest. It’s not like we don’t still spend hours using our computers and other devices to stalk our love interests. “He tweeted twice today and he still hasn’t emailed me back,” a friend seethed to me recently. She stopped and shook her head at her own absurdity. “I know that and I don’t even follow him on Twitter!” It’s not like it’s any less pathetic to check the account of someone you’ve met once than it was to log on to a chat room hoping that the handle you cybersexted with last week might turn up. It’s no less lonely. It’s just less stigmatized, because now the economy runs on these kinds of feelings.

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The same factors that let retailers like Amazon cater to the “long tail” economy enabled dating subcultures to thrive. In the 1950s, if you were one of the statistically small group of people who long for a partner to smear food on them during orgasm, you would likely have to forgo that fantasy. However, the Internet made it easy to find others who shared your fetish, or at least propose it to others at lower risk. The safe sex movement gave daters the vocabulary to examine and define their desires. The World Wide Web helped make these desires central to dating identity.

If people had long thought of dating as a form of shopping, during the 1990s they became more educated consumers. They were more likely to know what kind of sex they were in the market for and to believe that having their desires met was an important part of feeling fulfilled. Instead of just happening upon a sexual position in the throes of passion, lovers were more apt to sample from a series of predefined positions they had seen described or depicted. And they were likely to seek relationships with others who had similar interests. As a growing number of niche media channels, on cable television and online, displayed different lifestyles, a growing number of “sex educators” blurred the boundaries between advocacy and advertising.

Every dating lifestyle had its own expert. As early as 1987, the feminist Betty Dodson sang the praises of female masturbation in her book Sex for One. Like other feisty feminist “sex educators” of the era, Dodson traveled around the country teaching women to give themselves pleasure—and to demand the same from their partners. The long tail economy ensured that anyone interested could buy the tools that Dodson and others demonstrated. In 1993, the sex educators Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning founded the sex toy boutique Toys in Babeland in Seattle. Their motivation was noble: There were few sex shops aimed at women, and the founders wanted to offer the curious information and encouragement. In 1995, Toys in Babeland started a mail-order business with a small print catalog; the website, www.babeland.com, followed soon after. The steady business it did generated the revenues that allowed them to open outposts in Los Angeles and New York.

The Internet made it possible to corner a national niche market, as long as you understood people’s tastes specifically enough. Whatever your Thing might be, you no longer had to yearn for it alone. In 1991, a good friend of a gay video store clerk named Dan Savage told him that he was leaving Michigan, where they both lived, to move to Seattle and start a weekly newspaper. Savage jokingly pitched the friend an advice column and was invited to go with him. The column that he wrote for The Stranger was irreverent and hilarious. It got national syndication, and soon turned Savage into a celebrity. He went on to write books upon books of relationship advice, and, as of 2006, to host a podcast that still has thousands of followers.

Savage Love brings the specificity of the checklist to the advice column genre, promising to help readers navigate a seemingly infinite array of sexual preferences. When readers inquired after sex acts that did not have names yet, Savage invented them. He coined terms like “pegging” to fill in the gaps in an already-intricate taxonomy that readers wrote in about. (Pegging referred to female-on-male strap-on anal sex.) With new words at their disposal, Savage’s readers could describe the acts they hoped for or hated in more and more detail.

Knowing and expressing one’s sexual tastes, Savage told his audience, was a key part of dating. Better to confess a penchant for pegging to a new lover early on than risk suffering through decades of love unpegged. Better to know what kind of relationship a new crush is seeking before discovering a painful mismatch. If you wanted to be happy, you had to learn to understand your desires and express them clearly. If you did, you could renegotiate the terms of conventional romantic relationships.

Even marriage.

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Savage has long recommended a model he calls “monogamish” to long-term couples, whether they are gay or straight. It means what it sounds like. The partners agree in advance that each is allowed to sleep with other people, occasionally, as long as they do not allow it to threaten the primary relationship. Savage insists that most long-term relationships are monogamish already; couples are simply unwilling to admit it. Other advice experts took things further. The 1990s saw a surge of interest in “polyamory”—maintaining multiple open and fluid relationships.

The Ethical Slut came out in 1997. It remains one of the most widely read how-to guides for “the lifestyle.” The authors, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, argue that the world is suffused with enough sexual energy to satisfy everyone. “Many traditional attitudes about sexuality are based on the unspoken belief that there isn’t enough of something,” The Ethical Slut says. “We want everyone to get everything they want.” The chapter “Varieties of Sluthood” insisted that the possible configurations are endless. But the different arrangements that the book describes do share certain basic traits. They are customized and flexible. “Relationship structures,” the authors say, “should be designed to fit the people in them, rather than people chosen to fit some abstract ideal of the perfect relationship.” Individuals freely link up to create new structures. “One woman of our acquaintance has a lifetime lifestyle of having two primary partners, one of each gender, with her other partners and her primaries’ other partners forming a huge network.”

“Relationships that add, and inevitably also subtract, members over time tend to form very complex structures with new configurations of family roles that they generally invent by trial and error.” Rather than networks, Easton and Hardy say, they like to call these kinds of self-defining communities “constellations.” But the utopia of linked communities based on abundant sexual energy, branching out unstoppably and constantly reorganizing themselves, sounds a lot like the Internet. The Web was not just a guide for the perplexed. It also was a model for dating in a global economy whose boundaries were growing increasingly fluid.

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Needless to say, many Americans were horrified. Around the turn of the millennium, conservatives came back at the peggers and polyamorists with purity balls and chastity pledges. Conservative parents started hosting alternative proms on public school prom nights, which young women attended with their fathers; at these events, fathers publicly made vows that they would defend the virginity of their daughters. At colleges across the country, students in the True Love Waits movement began wearing “purity rings” that signaled their commitments to remaining chaste until marriage.

The media called these standoffs the “culture wars.” But culture wars was a misnomer. In the age of the network and the protocol, there was no single American culture left standing to defend. As panic about AIDS subsided from the mainstream, safe sex and the new culture of explicitness remained.

The frankness that AIDS activists had inspired, and the sense of infinite possibility that the Internet evoked, have continued to shape dating in the new millennium. You can make as many chastity pledges as you wish, and date only people who also have, but this will be just one consumer choice among many others. In the 1990s, the purist and the punk were just two kinks in the long tail of a market that was growing ever more segmented—and staying open 24/7.