Dial-up Access—to the Past
Review of People I’ve Met From the Internet by Stephen Van Dyck
I came to college in upstate New York in the early ’90s with an electric typewriter, and left with a word processor. By the time I was ready to graduate, one computer in the library had Internet access. There was usually no one waiting to use it. I’d sit down and struggle to think of things I wanted to know. I wound up reading a lot of interviews with obscure indie rock bands. I thought the Internet would turn out to be a fad. My whole life I’ve been skeptical about anything with a plug.
As a gay teenager in Albuquerque in the late ’90s, Stephen Van Dyck was more forward-thinking. An early adopter of technology, he remembers—with a kind of reverence—“putting the AOL disc in the [computer’s] CD drive for the first time. Its promise was all of America.” This has since proved to be the lure of the Internet: promises, promises. If only we spend enough time searching, we’ll find exactly what it is that we’re looking for—or who we’re looking for. Van Dyck’s book People I’ve Met From the Internet is a detailed list of all the people he’s met through AOL, early social media (“MySpace was like Friendster but with more people on it”), blogs, gay dating websites, Gmail, Craigslist, Facebook—whatever the platform, contact is always initiated first online. Van Dyck isn’t looking for anyone special. He winds up conducting a social experiment. The book begins with an awkward (you have to turn the book sideways and squint at the tiny type) 17-page chart of all the people Van Dyck has met online: real name, screen name (“Names and usernames have been changed to protect privacy except where permission has been given,” Van Dyck notes in the acknowledgements), website, location, “summary of first meeting,” age, amount of time spent together, and a code (“F=Fucked, S=Sucked/Fooled Around, K=Kissed”). The book’s subsequent entries are numbered and correspond to each name on this list (there are over 200). Some entries warrant a line, some a paragraph. A few warrant several pages. Sometimes people recur, sometimes they are one-offs. Although there are platonic interactions, such as with “a tattooed dad selling a fridge on Craigslist” and a woman with whom Van Dyck finds a home for his pet turtle, sex is the primary motivator for reaching out to people—or responding to their advances. At 14, Van Dyck discovers chat rooms: “I don’t think I had any idea that there were so many gay men in the world, let alone in Albuquerque,” he writes. He meets up with different boys and men for sexual encounters, having receptive anal intercourse for the first time at 15 with a man who was “at least 33.” Traveling around the country for one reason or another, Van Dyck meets up with young men in different cities, often having sex. Later he gets genital warts—“The rectal surgeon said to me, ‘Let’s take a peek at you and see what we have to do’”—recovering in a Boston hotel room while visiting colleges with his cheerfully accepting father.
Van Dyck’s parents figure prominently throughout the narrative. Both now deceased, the book is dedicated to them. The father, an art professor, was 30 years older than his wife, whom he met while she was a student. Van Dyck writes, “Over the years, my father had always been the biggest cheerleader of my writing and art. ‘If you’re not making art then what’s the point?’ he often asked.”
Van Dyck’s relationship with his mother is more strained. “Once, my mother said I walked like I had a stick up my butt. Another time, my mother almost saw me trying to put a stick up my butt.” One day she “pounded on my door, entered my bedroom” for a confrontation: “‘Stephen, are you a homosexual?’ Her tone told me there was a right and a wrong answer.” |
When Van Dyck is a teenager, his mother has a seizure while driving the car with him in the front seat next to her. Van Dyck grabs the wheel and they crash. Van Dyck breaks a collarbone. His mother dies. “The first Christmas after my mother died was only two days after the fact,” Van Dyck writes. “We opened the gifts my mother had wrapped.” A few years later, Van Dyck returns to the scene of the accident with a cousin to stage dramatic reenactment photos. While some will interpret this as morbid, it might also suggest that Van Dyck finds documenting an event is a way to mitigate the emotional pain associated with it—a kind of cerebral distancing. This entire book stands as testimony to that fact, and the book’s reach suffers as a result.
The list format doesn’t give Van Dyck enough time to ruminate, or to unpack his feelings about his more complicated relationships, especially with his mother and with his most important boyfriend, Max. We’re given scenes, often evocative and full of a surprising amount of detail (Van Dyck elsewhere notes he had earlier relied on “a Word document called ‘Time Journal’ where I wrote what I did every day”), but the list arrangement is ultimately constraining. It prevents him from shaping his material. It prevents him from having fresh insights about what it all means now. He just moves on to the next entry. The reader is given puzzle pieces, but no picture to match them up to. Although Van Dyck’s list follows a chronology of when he met whom, he associates freely in his memories of different people, jumping backward and forward in time, which is very confusing. Readers will long for a firm timeline. Van Dyck goes to art school in California and becomes deeply interested in conceptual art. A teacher there suggests that among his many lists of ideas for projects, one of the lists might be a project itself. Van Dyck is further inspired by a casual hookup with “a fifty-something top” who “showed me a book he kept, a record of everyone he slept with at the [NYC] piers.” Van Dyck starts a blog about all of the people he meets on the Internet, repelling at least one prospective date. “I said I wanted to meet him for him, not to make a blog entry about him, which was mostly true,” Van Dyck writes. This book fascinated me, and sometimes turned me on. The material is explicitly sexual, but often tender. Van Dyck has an admirable openness and acceptance of people of all stripes, and their quirks, sexual and otherwise (balking only when one lover, while rimming him, asks him to poop in his mouth; Van Dyck feels repulsed after he complies). Van Dyck is comfortable exposing himself, yet I never felt refreshed by the book’s candor. It feels a little gimmicky; the effect is often calculated. Van Dyck’s feelings feel constrained, somehow, outside the entries of the list he’s making. Pointing to one of the singers who was meaningful to him as a teenager, he writes, “Tori Amos was dark and unapologetic, and she said the things I felt but couldn’t say.” The problem is, as a grown man, he still hasn’t found a way to say them. The list doesn’t evolve, it just ends, and at a certain point before then feels rushed (“Matthew told me something amazing about his mother, but I don’t remember”), like he’s getting antsy to finish. Van Dyck wants to believe that making such a list gives meaning to the relationships, rather than exploring the meaning of the relationships that would warrant such a list to begin with. Does contact always amount to a connection? And does a list amount to a book? Like his accepting father, who went out of his way to put an arm around those who might feel marginalized (“He had a tendency to go up to people with bright green hair and say, ‘I like your hair’”), Van Dyck doesn’t put judgments on things. Nothing is good or bad; it’s all just data. Consider the perspective he relays from his hotel room in LA where he’s hooked up with someone from Gay.com, looking out the window, admiring all the high-rise buildings: “Here everyone was revealed at once in one big matrix, hundreds of strangers flattened into equally measurable boxes. And somehow I was there, too, flattened yet measurable.” |
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL QUINN
Michael Quinn interviews authors and reviews books for Publishers Weekly, for the Adroit Journal, and for his own website, under the heading “Book Report.” His reading list for the reviews he’s not assigned is determined by interest, whim, and chance—and by what’s available at the Brooklyn Public Library. |