Maybe I could go on dates with a few guys who were out like me, but I didn’t really want to go on dates, so it would’ve been dishonest. There was no way to meet anyone, or if there was, it felt forced, somehow. My college town and my hometown were surrounded by thick lines of trees and post-industrial abandoned factories. Sometimes men go to rest areas because there’s nowhere else to go. I wasn’t nervous, I wasn’t thinking - it seemed like where I should be. Later, on the long drives between college in Massachusetts and home in Pennsylvania, I’d pull over whenever I found a rest stop. When I was 21, on the day I got my first car, I drove to a little parking lot off the highway near where I lived: the gravity of memory – of that day when I was 15 - drew me there. And this freedom is open to everyone, even those comfortable with their sexuality. There is an appeal not just to having sex, but to having anonymous sex - not because you want to hide your identity from the other person surely the other men recognized George Michael - but to feeling your own identity left behind. Larry Craig and pop star George Michael were both discovered having sex at them. Is it any wonder why people who feel the weight of their identities have been caught having sex at rest areas? Sen. Sex at the rest area, instead, abolishes identity there’s a sort of freedom there to not be anything – instead, men just meet other men there men who want the sam. They’re for gay men who want to have gay sex.
For the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding inside of him, the website and the phone apps are just too certain of themselves. The new ways that men meet - endlessly staring into phones, searching on hookup apps like Grindr or sites like Manhunt - haven’t changed the fact that we’re still having sex at rest areas, because they offer something different. This has been going on for a long, long time. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. Time started again and I ran out of the bathroom. We would have stayed there forever, but another man came in and saw what was happening and scowled.
I was electrified, but held to that spot he shook himself at me and I couldn’t move. He was tall and homely, and holding himself. At the urinal, there was a man next to me. On the way to Maine with my mom and stepfather, we pulled off the highway and into a rest area. 10 minutes into 9MONSTERS, I was still an egg.I was 15 the first time I found out that men have sex in public.
With Tamagotchi you began with an egg but only needed to wait five minutes for it to hatch into one of the pets. In that way, it reminded me of the ‘90s handheld virtual pet, Tamagotchi. You start by setting up a profile using pics and physical stats, but the difference is that you’re also assigned an egg. Initially, I found it similar to other gay hook-up and socializing apps like Grindr and Scruff. I downloaded 9MONSTERS the next day, joining approximately 150,000 active users in Japan and 300,000 worldwide. Maybe I’d had too many drinks, but I didn’t get it eventually, he told me to just give the app a try. He described it as a game, though his explanation was convoluted. I first heard about 9MONSTERS from a guy I met in Tokyo’s gay district, Shinjuku Ni-Chome. According to 9MONSTERS, a gay hook-up app popular mainly in South East Asia, I was definitely a wolf-specifically a Muscle Wolf Level 11, by the time I left Japan after about a two month stay.