Lost Boys - Rob Browatzke

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Rob Browatzke April 2, 2026 Lost Boys 0 Comments

You showed up on my Grindr again. Seeing your beautiful face is never a bad thing, but in this case, you’ve been gone nearly two months now. I was deep-diving into my starred profiles, and I hadn’t toggled Online, and there you were: a reminder that we now live in a world without you. How far do I have to swipe to reach the past? How fast do I have to swipe to turn back time and say the things unsaid?

Do I leave you starred in Favorites? It would mean seeing you, there, anytime until Grindr removes the profile. But unstarring you feels weird too. Final. Sure, starring you in the first place was maybe weird, because we were friends and its Grindr, but we weren’t “can’t risk ruining the friendship” level friends. Leaving you starred though feels like a recipe for marinating in the possibility. And the possibilities are done.

You won’t be the last and sadly won’t be the first. I can pop over to Scruff and see Ryan’s dimples and abdominals anytime I want. And it’s not just hook-up apps. The numbers remain in my phone – untextable – and then suddenly Snapchat lets me know that my contact Deborah has created a new account; her phone number’s already been given out. The profiles remain on my social media, saving of course those truly unfortunate moments where someone passes during a social media cleanse; those temporarily-deactivated profiles, like the people they represent, are gone forever. But maybe it’s not a legal name on their profile anyway, and it can’t be memorialized, and eventually it will start popping up ads for Raybans or Crypto — but I still won’t want to delete it. To delete you. Because under the hack, there’s the pictures, the memories, the messages we shared, and I’d never want to lose them the way I lost you.

Grief in this age of technology is bizarre. There’s extra layers of complication. There’s new nuance to navigate. Maybe it’s not any harder. What can be harder than the hardest thing ever anyway? Maybe it’s easier in a way, giving some online immortality to people who simply logged off before us. But I saw you on Grindr last night, and god, I just wanted to be able to tap hello.

Right-Click to Forever

Rob Browatzke September 28, 2025 Lost Boys 0 Comments

I talk a lot about my GAY history, but one thing I don’t often write about is my GUY history.

Today, I found out someone I used to see every week passed away last month. Motivated to find a certain picture of him from “back in the day”, I deep dove into a folder that I think many of us have, even though most probably wouldn’t own up to it. Even as I type that, I’m not sure I’ll ever hit PUBLISH on this one.

Because you see, there’s a folder that I’ve copied from one computer to another for years before sticking it in an online photo storage service and letting it collect cyber dust. In that photo, there’s a collection of boys I thought were beautiful, right-clicked and saved off gay.com or Nexopia or dudesnude, back in the days before there were thousands of pictures of everyone all over everywhere. In these pics, they’re still beautiful, because that’s what a picture does: freeze frame captures of a simpler time.

Maybe it’s creepy, this folder, but they’re postcards from my past. Keepsakes of the boys I crushed on, the boys that crushed me. The Ice Princess, the Lifeguard, the shiny happy twins. A gay.dom date that was great. A gay.com that wasn’t. The flight attendant from Toronto. The straight bartender from Play. The other straight bartender from Play. The ex-boyfriend of my ex-boyfriend, pictured with his now ex-boyfriend. The models from my magazine. The Buddys VIP card pics of a few boys I thought were just the MOST beautiful. It’s mostly faces. Well. And butts. A lot of butts. But mostly, a collection of faces lost in time, before the ravages of age and alcoholism and meth and failing health.

But there, in that folder, they’re still young and beautiful. Always young and always beautiful. They’re low-res and grainy and too many have the Nexopia logo in the bottom corner. I can look at the folder, and I’m teleported back to a time before life lifed them the way life always does. I probably did tell them all that I thought they were beautiful, but never enough. Especially for the ones I can never say it to again.

Take a thousand pictures. Tell people you think they’re beautiful.

And if you have a folder that you stored a younger me in, thank you for seeing something I never saw.

Lost Boys Episode Five: Tim

Rob Browatzke November 19, 2024 Lost Boys 0 Comments

My brother was fifteen when I left him.

He was mad about it. I know he was, because years later, he trapped me in a dark corner of The Roost and told me all about it. I was just there to drink and watch the drag show, but instead, I got to just drink and listen.
This wasn’t the first time I’d run into my brother at a local gay bar. That had been Buddys, much earlier, and as I hadn’t known he was any kind of gay, I was much too in shock seeing him there to listen to much of what he said, which was mostly comparing notes on who we mutually knew, what he thought about them, what he thought I should think about them, etc.
That night at The Roost though, it was different. It wasn’t good natured if awkward gay gossip. It was the drunken outpouring of all the ways he had resented me for leaving him. It’s not like I left just for fun. I was off to University; leaving home was mandatory – both for school and for sanity. The year before I left hadn’t been a good year. I’m not saying I was completely crazy, but ask anyone who knew me then and those are the words they’d use. I was in pain – and leaving was the only possible solution.

I’m not sure if I even spoke to my brother at all that entire final year at home.
You see, we weren’t ever close. There were only three years between us, but it was enough of a gap, I guess. He was close to our sister. She was two years younger than him, so five younger than me. They had each other growing up for sure. Siblings and besties. That wasn’t the relationship I had with either. That night at the Roost, I couldn’t help but compare my relationship with my younger siblings with the relationship between my boyfriend at the time and his gay brothers – they were so close. But not Tim and I. No, our relationship was more a classic example of how hurt people hurt people. The anger and violence I endured as a kid, I passed it onto them, rather than protecting them from it as a big brother should. Those are the earliest memories I have of my brother, me raging and violent towards him, him looking up at me for help and protection.

This was a far cry from my mom’s first memory of us. That memory was my brother still in the hospital as a newborn baby. We were there, you see, to choose from one of the kids available for fostering and eventual adoption. My brother was apparently crying, crying, crying, and my response was to tell my mom to stick a bottle in his mouth to shut him up and bring him home. I’ve heard the story enough to be able to see it in my head, but it’s not a real memory, and it wasn’t a proper solution either – a bottle may quiet pain, but doesn’t solve it.

We both learned that lesson. I often think about the way we both self-medicated with alcohol, our parallel journeys deeper and deeper into drunken oblivion. We were so similar, in the throes of our growing addiction, our rage exploding out of us on the other side of the bottle. We started the same; we manifested the same; but we ended so differently.

In 2011, I was able to break the chains of addiction and live sober. That I was able to do successfully, that time, is a combination of luck and will-power and timing, but one of the challenges I’ve found in sober living is an impatience with those I see on the same dark path. Too often, I’ll try to give the tough love I probably needed sooner; too often, they don’t need lectures, just listening and love. But the drunken certainly push my sober buttons, and no one as much as my brother did. He pushed them so regularly that even as grown-ups, we weren’t much closer than we were as kids. And the chance to change that is gone now.

You see, earlier this year, damage from prolonged alcohol abuse took my brother away. Today, on what would have been his forty-fourth birthday, I just find myself thinking – about all the guilt and the regret, but mostly, I find myself thinking about that last time it was just him and I, in the hospital. He was in an out of consciousness, and we don’t know how much he understood about what was happening to him. But on his second-last day, he had a moment more lucid than not, when he asked me when he was getting out. I said, I don’t think you are, Tim. He said, ever? And then he was out again. But the look on his face, there at the end, in that moment, was him looking up at me for help, like a baby brother should be able to get from a big brother, and there was nothing I could do. Even now, months later, that “ever?” lingers in my brain, so broken, so desperate. He didn’t want to be there dying; he had built himself a beautiful life with a loving partner and long-term successful career and he just needed help. All the moments I could have helped him – the way we could have been there for each other coming out, or the way I could have tried to protect him better along the way, or the way I should have fought harder for him to find the same sobriety I found – all those moments had slipped away. Like he did the next morning.

My brother was forty-three when he left me.

Lost Boys Episode Three: Mike

Rob Browatzke December 22, 2023 Lost Boys 0 Comments

Last Seen: Winter 1998

Strictly speaking, we were never supposed to meet.

You see, I was volunteering with Lethbridge’s Gay and Lesbian Peer Support Line (it was 1997, this was pre-acronym). The PSL had a policy: no one-on-one meets. The purpose was two-fold – the safety of volunteers and the protection of vulnerable callers. But you see, there weren’t other volunteers. It was just me, for months and months at a time, and this guy, he needed to meet a real life gay person, badly.

One of those Mormons, you know.

Lethbridge in the late 90s was nestled snugly between fundamentalist Christians and Canada’s main Mormon population, and neither of them had anything good to say about the gays. Having grown up with the former, I certainly empathized with the latter. I’d been out 2-4 years at the time, depending how you looked at it, but I was certainly a lot farther along my coming-out journey than this guy, and knew I could help.

I was also in a horrible mental state and was absolutely desperate for some kind of connection. Which is less noble a motivation, true, but at this stage, honesty trumps nobility.

I was not expecting what I found, when we met for coffee – a smart, funny social work student who was absolutely dreamboat handsome. I would like to say that nobility trumped horniess, and that I stood by my morals and didn’t sleep with him. Oh, I didn’t, but that was likely more his choice than mine. “Doable if dateable” was how I described him – he was too good to be just another notch in a whittled-down bedpost. So, friends we became.

We met up a few times, even had him over to my place – where we looked through photo albums of gay parties (“See Mike, this is the fun you could be having,” I said, trying to convince him to hit up a homo hop or gay coffee night). He pointed out one friend of mine he thought was cute, and so -and nobility definitely trumped here! – I played matchmaker.

And it seemed to work. It worked enough that they both repeatedly thanked me, and I’m sure I wasn’t bitter at all, sitting there single as a pringle while the hot new gay immediately found a happiness I’d been so desperately searching for for years.

Except then he told his parents, who did what so many Christofascist parents do – wanted him to see a therapist to get “fixed”. And he agreed. And broke up with his happiness and his potential new life to focus on the cure.

And then he was dating a girl. But as his friend who had helped him through so much, he kept in touch. And then he wasn’t dating a girl, and was hanging out with another local gay, who got him drunk and took advantage of him, and so now he was gay again, but didn’t want to be. (Ironically, the same predatory gay later called me out for meeting Mike one-on-one in violation of the rules. Kettle, you’re black).

Keep in mind. This is all over about five months. It was August when we first met, and by January of the following year, he called me to tell me he was straight. “I like girls. I want to have sex with girls. I want to marry a girl, and have a family with her. Before, I was confused and experimenting.” I had no idea what to say, other than I didn’t agree, didn’t understand, didn’t think that was something he could just change. “But I’m your friend and I’ll stand by you.”

I don’t think we ever spoke again.

Part of me dreads he became a statistic of conversion therapy, so fucked in the head by it that he drove himself back deep into the closet – or ended his own life. But there’s another part of me that pictures him living his best gay life somewhere. I’ll probably never know, but Mike, if you ever read this, say hi.

Lost Boy Lost Girl
Lost Boys Episode Two: Ashley
Lost Boys Episode One: Paul

Lost Boy, Lost Girl

Rob Browatzke January 17, 2023 Lost Boys 0 Comments

She was at the bar this weekend and it broke my heart.
I remember him at seventeen, the infectious high-energy he filled the Roost with. He shouldn’t have been there, of course, not at that age, but we didn’t know he was seventeen until he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. By that point, the damage was done, and whatever, he’d latched onto our group so he’d been safe anyway.
He was going to be a star, we could see that, the queen that became his mother and I. Even just as that smiling seventeen-year-old, the star power was shining through. It wasn’t long before she was on the stage, riding on a wave of applause.

A few years later, a different bar.
I needed staff, yes, but I needed talent too, talent I knew would deliver a new energy to this new challenge. Of course I thought of her. She was a great fit, and formed a nucleus of the next generation of queens. When the snow began to fall at Buddys, was he in that blizzard? If so, only briefly. It seemed he would be the one that escaped that endless winter.

She was at the bar this weekend and it broke my heart.
She did not escape.
The snow that fell at Buddys is nothing compared to the monster she met, wherever she first met it. Meth is the soul destroyer. It sinks its teeth and claws into the beautiful and the broken and it does not let go. It has taken so many. I have seen people fight it off, only to fall back to it later. And in this case, whether its on or off currently, the damage is done. The talent and the beauty of that long-distant seventeen-year-old has been eroded. Now, all that is left is the permasketch of long-term use, a sketch that shows itself in the sudden outbursts of anger, or enthusiasm, or sadness, none of which are bad by themselves but all that emerge without sense of appropriate or awareness of others. That’s what it does, this soul destroyer, it leaves shadows in the brain that are always there. And her outbursts are at them, more than the people who actually get burst at. But she doesn’t know, she doesn’t see.

I wonder if, inside the shadow-swept sketch of the meth-eaten mind, she is still riding that wave of applause. Maybe she doesn’t see the shadows, just the spotlight. Or maybe it’s even worse, maybe he’s still there, that seventeen-year-old, trapped in a cage, screaming out for help, and no help is coming. The people who might have helped are gone. The people now, they don’t know her. They don’t know who she was or how she was, and maybe they haven’t ever had to watch the soul of a friend be whittled down by addiction. I hope they never do. I understand why they don’t have patience though. Why should they have to tolerate the shadow-swept sketch of someone who means nothing to them? They don’t.

She was at the bar this weekend and it broke my heart.
Because she can’t come back. Somehow, I have to take away from her the remaining tenuous connection to a community she helped to build and one she still needs. Because the gays and theys of today don’t know her, and don’t want to know her, and I can’t blame them. I don’t want to know who she is now. Her behaviour isn’t right, and we all know it. But I still remember the boy she was, and it’s hard to say goodbye.

Lost Boys Episode Two: Ashley

Rob Browatzke December 13, 2022 Lost Boys 0 Comments

Last Seen: February 2011

What I loved about Ashley was how he’d often enjoy just sitting at the bar, same as me, even as our friends danced and flailed about. I hadn’t enjoyed a dance floor for years at that point, and even though I didn’t mind just sitting there with my beer and watching the club, it was always nice when Ash came and plopped down next to me.

Sometimes, it was to check on me. He had a knack for knowing when people were glum and needed a bit of cheer, and he had cheer to spare. Sometimes, it was the opposite, because with that cheer came the occasional burst of drunken darkness.

Still, more often than not, he shone gold. He was dating my favorite bartender when I met him, and they were relationships goals. They were young and beautiful and I was certainly feeling like neither of those things at the time.

He was a huge part of those years at Buddys, those years when I descended further down a spiral of addiction. I think we were both often searching for a “something else” and sometimes, briefly, we touched on it during those kind of barstool philosophy sessions that only happen after Last Call is called and you’re left only with the beer before you and the boy beside you.

In all the years, through all the beers, and in spite of the fact that he was obviously ridiculously attractive, there’d never been anything more than friendship. Now, one would assume that was of course because he was in a relationship, but that had never stopped me before. In fact, that was usually the last piece of the attraction; the unavailable are, simply, hotter.

But I was happy with our friendship being exactly what it was. Ashley was pure, and I wanted what we had to be pure, too, untainted.

I watched the lows and the highs and the literal highs of his relationship with my beautiful bartender, watched it rise and fall, and eventually, fall apart. Neither of them were happy, together or not together, and even though it had happened before, this time, they said, it was over over.

The last time I saw Ashley was not at Buddys, but at my work. I came in for a shift, and he there, and he was Beautiful. He was all suited up and fancy, and had fit a visit into his day (a wedding, I think?). Just to see me.

This was a time in my life when I was never sober. My days began and ended with drugs and alcohol. I was out of control, there was no doubt, and I was desperate to find something real that would slow my fall. That he was there, right then, so handsome and just there to say hi, I took it as a sign.

I asked him out, and at first, he laughed it off. But I knew this was the moment. Eventually, they’d be back together so if I didn’t carpe the hell out of this diem, I’d lose out. He was light, and I needed light. And even when he wasn’t light, well, our darknesses meshed.

His last words to me were “isn’t just friends good enough?”

My last word to him was “no”.

A few weeks later, I quit all the booze and drugs for good, and a few weeks after that, he died.

He shouldn’t have died. It was stupid and senseless. He’d been at a party, drunk and angry and lashing out, and his friends left him there. I would have been at the party, but my sobriety was new and oh so fragile, and I doubted my ability to resist a party bus of temptations.

Later, and to this day, I would think that if I’d gone, he wouldn’t have been left alone. I’d have stayed there with him, if I hadn’t been able to calm him down. None of it would have happened. He would still be in this world.

But that’s not the way it went.

I didn’t go. He was left behind. And the world is a darker place without him.

Lost Boys Episode One: Paul

Rob Browatzke December 9, 2022 Lost Boys 0 Comments

Last Seen: Summer 2004

I think he messaged me first, reaching out across the cyberverse of gay.com for what? A friend? A fuck? He was eighteen and freshly out and just needed what we all needed at that stage: some kind of gay connection. He was still living at home, with just a few months left until graduation, and our chats moved off gay.com onto MSN Messenger, and moved from friendly into flirty and dirty, as they tend to do.

We agreed to meet up at Buddys, a local gay club. It was just some random March Thursday, which in the Buddysverse meant Wet Underwear night, a contest that bordered on a rite of passage for so many young gay boys just coming out; it was a great way to get applause, affirmation, and cash. He was even cuter in person.

Dangerously cute.

See, I was not in a position to be starting anything with anyone. I was trapped living with my recent ex, an ex who was very convinced that we would end up getting back together because, well, that’s what we always did. I was trying to start a business and had zero income so moving out or otherwise asserting independence wasn’t an option.

I don’t know if I was thinking about all of that, yet, though. Not that first night. I just wanted to give Paul what I never got: a good first night out at a gay club, a mentored introduction to gay life. He didn’t seem too blown away by it all, but part of that seemed to be just that he was overwhelmed, and happy having met me in person. That other gay person we first meet in real life can have an almost magical feeling to them, and I guess for him, that night, that was me.

He had a 1AM curfew, so he didn’t even get to watch the wonders of Wet Underwear, but like a gentleman, I walked him to his car. He opened the door as we said good night and I seized the moment and kissed him. He turned away, and I thought I’d misread everything, or that the real life me had been a disappointment. But he slammed his car door shut, spun around, and kissed me back hard.

It was his first kiss, and I don’t know how it was for him, but it was amazing for me. There was nothing else in the world except that kiss, standing there in the street outside the bar. But his curfew was coming up, and the kiss had to end.

Over the next couple weeks, he came in to visit, a lot. But between his curfew and my always-present ex, there wasn’t opportunity for much more than kissing. There was lots of that though. Whenever we had a minute alone, our lips locked. Having such short periods made the making out all the more frenzied. He wanted more, and I did too, but the timing. It was hard to find time for first times when you’re on a couch next to your ex.

Hard indeed.

Then my life intervened. This was 2004 remember, so Internet wasn’t yet such a major necessity that it took precedence over other bills, and when it got cut off, we had no way to stay in touch. It wasn’t like things were at the point I could call him at home and explain to his parents who I was. The connection, so new, was simply severed, inexplicably to him.

By the time I could explain, the damage was done, it seemed. The frantic passion of those weeks was gone, and it never came back.

That fall, he started college, and I started a new job that consumed my life. At some point, he moved to Toronto, as had been his plan all along, to pursue a career in fashion.

A decade and more after our moment, I saw him on Grindr. He was obviously visiting his parents for Christmas, and the cute boy had become a very handsome man. My message reaching out and saying hi was never acknowledged.

I don’t even remember his last name so searching socials is near impossible. Every holiday, I check hook-up apps to see if he’s again home. But there’s been nothing.

Just the memory of a first kiss that makes me smile.

Category: Lost Boys