Hard Drive: Cyber Fantasies Come to Life When Men Hook Up on the Net Book

"One of the things I usually like about amateur porn is the giveaway detail: the glimpse of work stacked up on a computer table; an unfortunate choice of carpets of drapes..." So divulges one of the contributors to Hard Drive, this diverse-but-not-so-diverse collection of 19 "true life" tales of online encounters that culminated in real-life hook-ups. What makes erotic writing sexy, interesting, or moving, or what occasionally elevates it to the level of literature, is its context--what it's about besides the sex. But unfortunately in this volume--which accurately reflects the post-political age when gay men have abandoned taking to the streets in protest (or even just in horniness) in favor of "staying in," glued zombie-like for hours to AOL's chat rooms--that context mostly seems the restive desire to numb the boredom and isolation of narrow, workaday urban lives. "So far tonight I've sent Instant Messages to ten guys..." writes one hard-driver here, weighing a night in front of the monitor against hitting the bars. "If I'd bought each of those men a cocktail, it would've cost me more than AOL's $19.95." Another writes of a recent Christmas Eve: "I found myself once again glued to that damned computer while the rest of creation was celebrating." And when they do hook up, both the sex and the sex talk--at least as recollected here in postcoital writerly tranquility--are usually rote, involving the same tired role-playing, dirty-talk glossary, and position playbook as a typical video release from Falcon, the AOL Time Warner of gay porn. There are no writers here of the quality that the late John Preston collected in his gay erotic anthologies, either--with remarkable consistency, the prose is amateur, the language everyday and lazy: vernacular in the worst sense of the word. Not that there aren't some decent standouts. The long centerpiece, stupidly named "OK...Let's Do It!," consists mostly of "transcripts" of online conversations over several months between the writer (an ardently clever cyber-belletrist) and a flirtatious "Cubano papi" on the other coast, and takes on the slow-building and endlessly deferred erotic tension of Nicholson Baker's Vox--and does it with so much real yearning just beneath its silly sex banter that it leads to one of the only truly affecting endings in the book. Perhaps it's not surprising that, in such a cookie-cutter batch of entries, the hottest aren't the standard-issue "kinky" ones, but truly the strangest and most extreme--to wit, a nice, shy Chicago undergrad who boards a plane to Milwaukee to become a "slave" to a darkly tender "Master" he met online. Or "Date Rape" and "Dad's Boy," which provide the only true shockers here--to the certain outrage of advocates of safe sex and HIV prevention. ("I was converting him to my son in more ways than one," exults Dad in the latter story. "I was making him my boy in a truly positive manner." Holy Andrew Sullivan, Batman!) But not often enough in Hard Drive do its hard-typing entrants get off in ways beyond the technical, or the high-tech. Barely any of these cybergenerated rendezvous lead to a relationship of any kind, let alone a conventionally domestic one, and it's that very need not to follow up, to--in Gershwin's words, "do it again"--that many of the subjects seem to find so hot, and so convenient. It's as though these sex partners were mere digital data, all bytes and pixels, downloaded from and then unleashed back into cyberspace. Ending after ending has a sort of jaded, resigned quality, as though we all know men are dogs, inclined by nature to move on to the next tree--or, in this case, the next instant message and GIF swap. ("The night before had given me hopes, given me a dream complete," one writer concludes after one of the book's more romantic pas de deux. "But that day gave me the realization that I would not hear the phone ring.") I'll admit that more than once Hard Drive got me hot. But more than that, it left me wanting a real date, with wine and a midnight walk home--or at very least to get out of the house and join the human race. --Timothy Murphy Read More