Coming out used to be a lot more work. There was no search bar to ask, and no app telling you the nearest one of us was 400 feet away.
Before the iPhone landed in 2007 and Grindr followed in 2009, finding your people took detective work and a dial-up connection. We built whole lives out of coded glances, VHS tapes and whatever the family computer could load before somebody needed the phone line.
A lot of it was ridiculous, and we laugh about it now. Some of it was lonely in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.
If you came out somewhere between the mixtape and the iPhone, you’ll recognize every one of these, probably with a wince.
1. Agonizing Over Your AOL Screen Name
Choosing it was a delicate operation. It had to signal something to the right guy and look like absolutely nothing if your sister happened to glance at the screen.
Then you went into the chat rooms, where every conversation opened the same way: “A/S/L?” Age, sex, location, typed with the confidence of a man who had fudged at least one of them.
For a lot of us, that little window with the blinking cursor was the first place we ever said it out loud. Well, typed it.
2. Clearing the History on the Family Computer
The family PC lived in the den, the kitchen or some other spot with maximum foot traffic and zero privacy. And going online announced itself to the entire house with that screeching, beeping dial-up handshake.
So you developed a routine. Close every window. Clear the history. Empty the cache. Delete a few cookies you didn’t fully understand.
Then came the slow, creeping realization that a completely empty history is its own kind of evidence. The truly paranoid among us learned to leave a few decoy visits behind. Nothing says “straight teenager” like some carefully planted sports scores.
3. The AIM Away Message That Was Secretly About One Boy
AOL Instant Messenger arrived in 1997, and with it came the most passive-aggressive art form ever invented: the away message.
Everyone else used theirs to say they were at practice or grabbing food. You used yours to post carefully chosen song lyrics, aimed at exactly one person on your buddy list.
He was, statistically, straight. He almost certainly never read it. And you still checked twelve times a night to see if he’d signed on.
4. The Underwear Pages of the JCPenney Catalog
Before the internet, there was the catalog. And every gay man of a certain age knows exactly which section he flipped to first.
Those stiff, smiling models in their tighty-whities were, for many of us, the first hint that we weren’t looking at the pictures the way we were supposed to. The trick was to linger just long enough, then flip loudly to the lawn furniture.
Later came the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, with its black-and-white shots of shirtless boys frolicking in lakes and a suspicious lack of actual clothing for a clothing company. It did a lot of heavy lifting for a generation of us.
5. Reading Out Magazine in the Bookstore Without Buying It
Buying it meant walking it up to a register and making eye contact with a cashier. Unthinkable.
So you read it right there, in the Borders café or a quiet corner of Barnes & Noble, tucked inside a copy of Car and Driver like a spy in a bad movie. Out launched in 1992, and plenty of us read a good chunk of its first decade standing up, one eye on the aisle.
If someone you knew walked by, you simply became very, very interested in carburetors.
6. Sandwiching the Gay Movie Between Two Action Movies
The video store was a place of great strategy. If you wanted to rent Jeffrey or Beautiful Thing, you didn’t just walk up and rent it.
You built a cover story. Something with explosions on top, something with car chases on the bottom, and the one you actually wanted buried in the middle like contraband.
The teenager behind the counter definitely noticed. The teenager behind the counter did not care. You had a system, and the system was going to hold.
And if it came back late, you paid the late fee in silence rather than explain why you’d watched it four times.
7. Watching Ellen Come Out With Your Family – and Keeping a Perfectly Neutral Face
On April 30, 1997, Ellen DeGeneres‘s sitcom character came out in “The Puppy Episode” of Ellen, a couple of weeks after Ellen herself did it on the cover of Time under the words “Yep, I’m Gay.” Some 42 million people watched.
A good number of those 42 million were closeted gay men sitting on a couch next to their parents, holding their faces in a state of total, practiced neutrality.
You listened very carefully to what everyone in the room said about it. Some of us learned that night exactly who was safe to tell. Some of us learned who wasn’t.
8. Taping Will & Grace and Labeling the VHS Something Else
Will & Grace premiered on NBC on September 21, 1998, and suddenly there were gay men on network TV every week who weren’t there to be pitied. Okay, Jack McFarland was a punchline. But he was our punchline.
Naturally, you taped it. And the tape was labeled something aggressively boring, like “Golf Tips,” so nobody would ever think to put it in.
Then Queer as Folk arrived on Showtime in December 2000, and the stakes went way up. That one you watched late, volume low, thumb hovering over the remote, ready to switch to anything else at the first creak on the stairs.
9. Freedom Rings and Other Secret Handshakes
Before we could just ask, we had a whole system of signals. A little rainbow sticker on a bumper. Freedom Rings, the six rainbow-colored aluminum rings designed by David Spada in 1991, worn on a chain or clipped to a keychain by guys who wanted to be noticed by exactly the right people.
And then there was the language. “Is he… family?” “Is he a friend of Dorothy?” Asked lightly, with plausible deniability built in, and answered with a look that said everything.
Once you learned it, your own town started to look different. The guy at the hardware store with the rainbow keychain suddenly made a lot more sense.
10. Finding the Gay Bar Without Google
You couldn’t look it up. What you had was a free gay paper in a rack near the door of the record store, a friend of a friend who knew a guy, or a name dropped quietly at a party.
Once you had the address, you drove past it. Then you drove past it again. The third time, you parked around the corner so nobody would recognize your car.
The bar itself usually had no windows, or painted-over ones, and an unmarked door that looked like the entrance to a storage unit. Walking through it for the first time took more courage than most of us had ever needed for anything.
11. Printing MapQuest Directions to Meet Someone From the Chat Room
MapQuest launched in 1996 and quietly became essential gay infrastructure.
You’d been talking to him for weeks. You’d seen exactly one photo, which took two full minutes to load, one stripe at a time, revealing his face like a slow-motion game show. Now you were meeting him for coffee, armed with four printed pages of turn-by-turn directions.
You told nobody where you were really going. If you got lost, you were on your own. And if he didn’t look much like his photo, well, neither did you.
12. Seeing Brokeback Mountain in a Theater Full of Straight Couples
When Brokeback Mountain opened in December 2005, it felt like an event. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two cowboys in love, in a real Hollywood movie, playing at a real multiplex.
Some of us went with a group of friends. Some of us went alone to an afternoon showing and sat in the back row. Some of us went on a date with a woman, which is a whole other story.
Either way, you spent the movie very aware of the people around you: the nervous giggles, the straight couple who clearly hadn’t read the reviews. By the time Ennis opened that closet door at the end, the giggling had stopped.
13. Believing You Were the Only One
This is the part that’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t live it.
Before the internet reached your bedroom, a lot of us honestly believed we might be the only gay person in town. The only gay men we knew of were on the evening news, in a sad movie, or in somebody’s joke at Thanksgiving. There was no one to ask and nothing to search.
So you kept it to yourself. For years, sometimes. You got very good at being careful.
And then one night, in a chat room or on a message board, a stranger typed “me too.” You probably don’t remember his screen name. You remember how it felt.
14. The First Time You Walked Into a Room Full of Us
Maybe it was that bar with the painted-over windows. Maybe it was your first Pride, or a college LGBT group meeting in a basement classroom with bad lighting and a plate of grocery-store cookies.
Wherever it was, you remember the moment. The music was too loud, and the room was full of men who were exactly like you and nothing like you at all. For once, nobody was watching you, and you didn’t need a cover story.
You didn’t have to clear the history, relabel the tape or keep a neutral face. For the first time in a long time, you just exhaled.
A lot has changed since then. Kids today can find their people in a few taps, and good. That’s what we were all hoping for.
But those of us who figured it out the hard way got something out of it too, including a secret language and at least one VHS tape labeled “Golf Tips.”
We found each other anyway.