Let me talk about some of the feelings that I have had as my web site has developed. The link at the bottom of the page will lead you to a good description of events leading up to my current online presence, but it intentionally leaves out any reference to how I felt about being pushed around.

Last fall, I put up a web site on Geocities. Since I was a kid, I was directed to the kids' section. I talked about what struck me at the time as an interesting topic....why kids' sites sucked. I had looked through the kids' neighborhood, seeing mostly slick sites written by adults for kids, with a certain condescending feel to them, or drab sites written by kids. These sites written by kids, which is what I mean when I speak of "kids' sites", all looked alike (at least to me, with no on-page graphics capability). Some were actually a completed questionaire, how tall are you, what are your hobbies, what is your favorite food...in HTML format. Others were a simple "my first home page" with promises of future construction and little else. Dates on them revealed that they had remained in this condition for many months. I sent e-mail to some of them. Seldom did I get a response, and very seldom did the response seem like it was from the kid. Usually from a parent. Thank you and goodbye. OK, guess I've got a lot to learn.

So my first page was about creating your own "home page". How to make it interesting. How to advertise it. How to work with the HTML directly to do things that your web-authoring program would not allow. How to go back and add to it every few weeks. How to treat visitors that e-mailed you. I loved what I had done. No one else did. They might have if I they had ever looked at my pages, but clearly the typical kid who puts up a web page is a lost cause. They are not, as I had imagined, a computer guy like me. They are not even in love with the internet. They put up a web page because someone else wanted them to, did it for them, and then promptly forgot about the whole deal.

"Write about what you know" goes the old rule. Let me take it one better. You should write about what you know better than your audience. In my small circle of friends (4 in the summer, 3 in the winter) I am pretty impressive. On the world-wide internet, I'm a nobody. I don't even know computers better than other computer geeks. What about my life is unusual? Well, there's J.....what's happening between us is a little out of the ordinary. I'll just write about that to the rest of the world....yeah, right.

At this same time, J and I are learning that there are others that live the same challenging life that he does. He has had a few old gay friends that have accepted him through the years, but to discover the BL community on the internet was a minor miracle for J. He still just lurks most of the time. But he encourages me, and does a great deal of behind-the-scenes stuff for me. Collecting interesting material mostly. And seeking out interesting-looking solutions to our software problems. He learned about anonymous e-mail and PGP, and taught me. Not to mention that he pays for the internet access, and lets me use it 80% of the time. He used to collect interesting posts from BoyChat, and put them in digest form on floppy disks, for me. J is very much responsible for getting me started with this web site stuff, and continues to be a trusted advisor (as well as a couple of cyberdads) when it all gets too much for me to evaluate on my own.

I discover and befriend David Alejandro (Stop Protecting Me!) in his early days, help him with some translations (a whole other story), and get the inspiration I need to find a topic for my web site. He also provides a link to my site, which brings me a pipeline of visitors and new friends. In addition to my theme of creating your own web pages, I also start collecting and publishing stories about treatment of kids, at the hands of the courts, the schools, the child "protective" agencies. In the kids' neighborhood at Geocities, you are assigned a "community leader" to assist you with your site (yeah, sure, I believe that). I was careful to work with her, even to run material past her ahead of time. I realize that you can't allow too much truth published in a kids' neighborhood. In time she suggested that I may care to move this material, since it dealt with a very non-kid subject (abuse of kids), to another neighborhood, and suggested the philosopher's neighborhood. They had done the same to David, so this was no surprise. I left the old material, for kids, on the old site. And I moved all of the good stuff to a new Geocities site. During the move, she noticed a piece I had written about how to use anonymous remailers, and asked that I remove it because "they are illegal". I didn't see any reason to continue working with her anymore. And I never mentioned my new site address to her.

You see, the problem was that I had used my home e-mail address when signing up for that first site. Geocities assured me that they would NEVER release this information to anyone (yeah, sure, I believe that too), but I was shocked to find that it appeared on the screen everytime you used the comments form to send me feedback. Luckily, no one ever visited my site in the beginning, and the text on the comment form (you get to look at the completed form - with my real address - right after you fill out the form) was very small and most people would not think to examine a message they had just written. I guess this did me no harm, but I complained plenty to everyone I could find (at that time finding a help/complaint department at Geocities was not easy). They are so careful to protect their kids, yet they give out my home e-mail address that they promised not to give out. I never got any response from them. I removed the form from my site. And I swore never to be that honest in signing up for a web page again. I was learning about the reality of internet security.

So I moved my material, my new friends, and my attention over to the new site. I changed my name, and even stopped mentioning my age. I discovered that some of my new friends preferred not to know that I was under 18. With my new identity, and no published age, I could state that I was 18 in my e-mail if asked to, and that seemed to calm the fears of some of my regulars. Now all this hiding, this required security, was making me feel that cyberspace was, indeed, a very different place. I have since developed a good understanding of the rules for kids in cyberspace. In short, don't be yourself. There are too many people out there that want to hurt you....and most of them work for child "protective" groups.

Once I started getting boylover visitors at my site, and wanting to offer some real material for them even though I had not built up much yet on my site, I started archiving little clips from my e-mail. There was no question about having permission, and they were carefully edited. This did create quite a bit of interest. There was nothing there that would be terribly offensive to the casual reader, but enough to peak the curiosity of those intent on finding out just where I was coming from. Besides, most of my ideas come to me when writing e-mail, and it seemed pointless to rewrite what I had written about some subject before placing it on my site. The "mailbag" feature continued for quite a while, until it was pointed out to me that there were inconsistencies in what I had said to different people. Nothing that I considered a difference, but things that had raised doubts among a couple of my more paranoid readers. I was still young and not as hardened as I am today, and I was hurt by the suspicions of these friends. Since that time both have proved to be true friends, but I scrapped the idea of a mailbag. It served it's purpose at the time. But it just got too big for me to manage carefully, and I underestimated the amount of editing that would be necessary to keep everyone happy. Today the mailbag lives on as a mailing list, helping to keep in touch with friends.

A few months back I received a letter from an admitted CPAC-type, asking me to warn my young readers about the dangers of what happens when they get older and their older friends lose interest. Assuming that I have young readers, and that I am encouraging them to seek out a mentor, his request seemed to be valid. We exchanged letters a bit, and he seemed to feel, after reading through what I had to say, that I was not too big a risk to the youth of the world. But this also tells me that I must be very careful with the Geocities site about what I preach and what my audience may be. I do not intend to convince any young people who do not feel the need for a mentor in their life to go out and find one. I am not recruiting. I needed to make sure that this was clear on that site. It was time to take a new look at what I offered any young people who may have come across the site, or how those who protect the world's young may have interpreted what I said. While I did intend to address the issue of fading attractions, my more pressing concern was to remove anything over there that might cause someone to rethink what their parents and teachers have taught them. It is a tangled world we live in, and I seek to comfort those who are involved it this mess society has created, not to invite others into a clearly difficult existence. They may be poor, abused, uneducated, abandoned, ignored, at risk in a hundred different ways, but by all means lets not allow them to be sexual.

This web site appeared on the FreeSpirits FPC server the beginning of August, on a Saturday. By Monday noon someone had notified Geocities that I now had a site on FPC, and that I had linked to my Geo site from my new site. My Geo site was completely free of anything that they might consider objectionable. I thought it always had been, but before moving here to FPC, I removed even more, to where the site mentioned nothing but the abuse of kids at the hands of schools, society, government. A kid's got a right to complain a little, doesn't he?

Geo pulled the plug on my site immediately, without explanation. The only thing different is that I had spoken up on some other server. They shut me down based solely on who I was. I doubt whether they bothered to look at the site at all. I guess I expected it, but my site had no pictures, stories, political agenda. Just a little philosophy in the philosophy neighborhood. It never ceases to amaze me just how powerful the concept of boylove has become.

I have been a little late getting this site back up after yet another shutdown of Free Spirits pages, this time linked to Microsoft. As if there were not enough reason to hate them for their economic ruthlessness and their contempt for their customers, now it seems they are on a campaign to disconnect providers who host mostly non-family-oriented sites from the internet backbones that they control. How long has it been since the world saw Bell Telephone wield this kind of power?

My interests are widening, and a Loved Boy page is not my only concern online. I am proud that I can offer it to all comers, and I encourage others to do the same. Although my sites have never been called static, this one will not be as interactive as others have been. You will find me around, busy with different projects that relate to the causes I believe in. Each of you have a story to tell, and there is no good method at the moment to archive your life, your experience, your beliefs for the world as effectively as web pages. Consider putting yourself on the web. Become a cyberperson and participate in this great adventure.