'It's changed the world,' says Peter Ian Cummings, publisher of XY magazine, a title aimed at young gay men. 'The chat rooms are a place where people can be relaxed and reach out without fear.' (On a random night in AOL's Town Square area, 140 of the first 200 chat rooms were labeled M4M.) 'Unless you're John McCain, you can't always look at someone's face and know they're gay,' says Internet-privacy expert John Aravosis, jokingly referring to the candidate's remark about his ability to spot gays in the military.
Now, millions of gay men wait in line-not to pay a cover charge or order a drink, but to get into the men-for-men chat rooms on America Online.Īccording to estimates by Internet demographers, 20% of AOL's 21 million subscribers are gay, and at nearly all hours, the men-for-men chat rooms are filled with guys looking for Mr. Among them: go to a bar, or learn to love solitude. Used to be that gay men who wanted to meet other gay men had limited options.
