I was recently at a birthday party talking with some friends about all the really sexy guys there. (When a gay man says “really sexy guys,” he usually means “guys I’d love to fuck,” or GILTF.) There are a lot of GILTF in San Diego, and most of them were at this party.

“Where have they been all this time? Why don’t they go out? Why aren’t we all having sex?” (This last question wasn’t actually a conversation I had with my friends, but it was definitely running through my mind most of the night.) More than that, “Why did they all look so familiar?”

The answer came from a guy I talked to a bit later who said he “knew” me. I have to admit in certain places and under certain conditions, I’ve been known to forget a face, but if you show me an impressive body part, the memories usually come flooding back. Since he wasn’t pulling anything out as a reminder, I figured he must’ve known me from someplace else. The more we chatted, the more I realized we hadn’t actually met, but that he knew me from the deep, dark world of cyberspace.

That’s why all the GILTF looked so familiar! We were cyber tricks, cyber cruising in cyberspace, cyber chatting about cyber sex. Suddenly, faces, pictures and profiles all came to life. There was BIGTRICKPONY4ARIDE, IATETHEHOLETHING and, of course, LOOKING2LOVENOTSEX.

There they were. All of the guys from cyberspace in living color. How odd.

What’s really disturbing is that our cyber tricks know a lot of personal information about us. We tell them what we want to do in the nastiest and raunchiest of details. They may be a hookup, a standup or a step down (one who shows up looking nothing like what we expected. That’s happened to most of us at least once.)

So now we’re at a killer party with friends laughing, eating and having a mah-velous time wondering if we’re on our GILTF’s “GILTF” list. We could walk over and say “hey,” but that might break down the walls of cyber-dome. We could keep glancing over to catch his eye, but that makes us look desperate, and no one wants to look desperate – especially when we are! We could ignore him and later send a cyber message: “Thought that was you. You’re even hotter in person.”

The problem is we don’t know how to behave when we see a cyber trick in real life because we only think of them as existing in cyberspace. There we make judgments, fall in love and be dismissive without ever really getting to know one another.

If we saw each other out every once in a while it could break down the cyber barrier. We’ve got to get out from behind the computer screen and hang out with our friends, go dancing, drinking, partake in various levels of debauchery, meet men and then take them home like we used to.

Chatting online is great fun, but it can’t take the place of spending time with real, breathing people. You can go out with your friends, and cyberspace will be there when you get home with the same GILTF in the same chat room waiting for you.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just discovered video chat, and there’s a GILTF waiting for me. While I’m there, check Rocket clubbing on page 18 for goings on around town like we did before cyberspace.