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.