Confessions of an Anon

On the relationship between digital anonymity and sexuality in the LGBTQ community.

I grew up white, male, queer, depressed, closeted, anxious, affected by childhood sexual trauma, and with physical and emotional scars changing my face — subtle to some, obvious to myself and others. While growing up, I struggled with a sense of duality. I had an urge to be a shadow, hidden and silent, facing opposite the desire to be the brightest, most charming individual in any room. I was always going to live somewhere in between, oscillating from end to end, rarely stopping near the truest center. When I came out at the age of 20 and experienced the freedom of digital connection, I took it as an opportunity to highlight whatever side I wanted.

Growing up, I was always self-conscious of my physical appearance. I took every photo with my head turned slightly to the right, exposing the side I believed to represent the truest version of me. I even wore my hat backwards to attract a more masculine man. This carried over into my first online profiles for Gay.com and Plenty Of Fish, which are perfect examples of the internalized homophobia and insecurities that coerced me to fabricate a different version of myself.

I spent most of my early 20’s living with this digital version of myself. I met most gay men online — some became friends, one became a loving partner, and many more were merely anonymous men who were disappointed with the real version of me. I was too heavy, too femme, and countless other characteristics that did not match their internalized issues and external expression of masculinity. Often, like myself, they presented different versions of themselves online or I allowed my internal narrative to convince me that they were who I wanted them to be.

In my mid-twenties I moved to another province for school in another attempt to redefine who I wanted to be. On my first day of classes, my brother was attacked by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. He was half way through his tour when a man on a donkey holding an improvised explosive device in a pressure cooker prematurely detonated the device, almost killing my brother. He survived, but the incident exposed cracks in our family — parts patched over from years of living with relative privilege and security. The cracks hid the darker parts of our identities. My mother fell into a depression and my brother found himself with PTSD. Meanwhile, the patches in my facade that hid childhood sexual trauma, anxiety, and self-harm tendencies, were blown apart by my brother’s accident, exposing a darkness I had imagined but never experienced. I was now in a new and familiar province, my family was from the same place, but I felt like an unfamiliar person.

To cope, I self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. I began meeting men in ways I had only flirted with before. I went from half-truths on online profiles, to anonymous profiles that exposed the full truth about my body and the primal situations I wanted to engage in. I posted them on hookup sites and online community forums. I was drunk and almost always high, as alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines acted as the necessary enabler of the darkest version of myself.

The first time I wore a blindfold for a stranger was over Thanksgiving holiday. My roommates were gone for the holiday, and I was home alone and drunk. I met him on Grindr (a relatively new gay dating app at the time) and he was close by and able to come to me. He wanted me to wear a blindfold and wait for him alone in my apartment. The experience felt raw and vital. Afterwards, I felt guilty, ashamed, and exposed. While these are common feelings after a sexual encounter, I was missing a vision or identity of the other man where I could channel guilt and fear. I only had darkness, memories of touch, and visions of myself existing for someone else.

I repeated this experience throughout my twenties and into my early thirties with greater intensity and frequency. I would pause for longer stints of travel, a longer relationship, and occasional promises to myself to be a better person. When things were going well, I would find ways to pretend I was a different person. Sometimes I felt like I had made it all up. Then I would find myself in pain and vulnerable, downloading the same apps and using the same email accounts to post to online forums.

Six years after my first encounter, I found myself in a larger city training for a new job. I acquired another new identity, separate and distinct from the others I had created. Family and friends were proud of me for finally “finding my thing,” as if the job was the moment I had worked towards my entire life. It was pure escapism. I was at the height of my addiction and it allowed me to explore new cities — places where I could be anonymous. I spent most of the first month drinking and partying, having unprotected sex with strangers, allowing my rented condo to double as a place where I entertained friends and a place for anonymous encounters facilitated by digital connection and substances.

Each encounter was mostly the same. I would leave the door unlocked, barely moving when I hear them enter. I did not protest when I was being hurt or I felt in danger, rather I accepted the moments when they were aggressive because I knew I deserved it. I had put myself in the situation and it was their right to get what they came for. I felt protected by my anonymity — unknown and unburdened by the knowledge of who I was interacting with. I had to hold up to the promise I created through my online persona. I was their faceless, unnamed desire and I had given myself up to their fantasies and darkness.

A year later, I found myself in the same city. I spent three days physically awake but mentally distant. I had just come back from a trip and was spending time with a friend before heading home. We did MDMA on a Tuesday night and I came home on a Thursday, spent, having consumed GHB, crystal meth, and cocaine and the last of who I thought I could be. A week later I walked into a narcotics anonymous meeting. I found the meeting time and location through an online search with the same phone I used to create my online persona — another anonymous experience facilitated by the connectivity of technology.

Sometimes I feel caught between an argument of morality and circumstance. I hated myself enough to let myself be used. The men who used me, hated me and themselves enough to do it. I was never greeted online by loving and honest men who wanted to connect with my anonymous profile. Instead, I was met by men who didn’t want their wives to know they were in my apartment, while they verbally and physically abused me. Sometimes I wanted to say no. Other times, while high and alone, the only word I knew was yes, then waking up strung out without the opportunity to say no.

I engaged in these behaviors, propelled by self-harm and trapped by the growing distance between who I was to loved ones and who I was online. I was winning awards and taking dream jobs all while I was living a second life online, alone, in the dark, with the only light in the room coming from notifications popping up on my phone — a promise that I was ready and willing to be discreet and anonymous.

Often, I would wake up with google searches left open on my computer for expensive drug treatment facilities in Colorado and Central America. I fantasized about going to 10 day silent retreats or biking across the country. I longed for experiences that would give me my own Wild or Eat Pray Love moments that proved I had overcome my personal adversities and become a better person; moments that ensured I had put my darkest self to rest once and for all. But, I was not ready to sit alone with myself to honestly and compassionately evaluate the anonymous persona I had created. It was too raw.

I am one year into sobriety and celibacy. This time around, working on sobriety felt more urgent and obvious. I tried sobriety before. Each time I quit drinking and partying for a month or two, and each time I would start again — innocently at first, with a beer at a social event or after work with friends,. But my innocence would always end the same way: in multi-day, desperate benders with strangers. In May of 2016, I decided to take charge of my addiction and walked into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. I’ve been sober since.

For the first few months of sobriety, I ended my digital connections. I closed online dating accounts and deleted apps. I closed connected email accounts and changed my phone number. I even stopped watching porn for a time, because the experiences on screen triggered memories and brought me back to my own experiences. I wanted to terminate any opportunity to access my anonymous identity. This made celibacy the next logical step. Because my anonymous encounters were always the result of drugs and alcohol, I didn’t know how to engage in sex without them. I’ve continued practicing celibacy because I don’t know how to have this conversation with a potential partner.

Now I try to focus on personal interactions and the brighter side of social media; however, my anonymous persona tends to find its way back when I start using dating apps again — fluctuating between Grindr, Scruff, Plenty of Fish, Tinder, or whatever else finds its way onto my phone or computer. Occasionally, I am reminded of what I have done in a visceral and urgent way. I receive messages from faceless profiles while home or traveling — anonymous people reaching out, reminding me that I had once had met them in person, yet I don’t know their names or what they look like. It is in these moments that I want to shut everything down again and disappear, but I persist. I am not sure how else I will meet someone in the future, as being queer and connecting digitally are all I know. Sobriety also poses a challenge, as I don’t find myself in so called “queer safe-zones,” because they no longer feel so safe. I don’t know if they ever did.