Part 2 of my story The Internet (or AOL) starts to become a thing and I discover a whole new world… and the “quiet years” when I couldn’t dress
All right - picking this up again. I’m going to talk about how the Internet was such a crucial thing in my dressing development. To understand this, you have to understand exactly when the Internet became a thing in my life. If you do the math on my age, you understand that I’m old enough to be the young end of Gen X (I proudly consider myself a Gen Xer and am damn cynical like one). But the reality is I’m a the cusp of the millennial generation as well. There’s sort of a microgeneration there that some people call “Xennials” of people who were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. What makes us unique is that we were the last kids to have an analog childhood, but we had an increasingly digital teenage experience that become fully digital by young adulthood. The Internet wasn’t a thing in our formative years through the 1980s. But it started to become a thing in the early 1990s - right about the time I hit middle school and puberty. And my parents, typically late adopters of technology, were among the early adapters. We got AOL (remember that - the dial up noises and the “you’ve got mail” when you logged on?) early on. Suddenly I had access to a whole new world - right about the time I was exploring those talk shows and looking through those TV Guides for shows involving drag or dressing.
I initially didn’t make the connection. I do remember a friend having Prodigy (an early competitor to AOL) and showing me that he could see Peter Gammons’ Diamond Notes from Baseball Tonight (I’m dating myself here) before we could hear them that night on TV. To say I was amazed was an understatement! LIke I said, I’ve always had a thing for baseball!
Anyway, I started to poke around on AOL to see if we had something similar and I found message boards. I scrolled through them and lo and behold, what did I find? Message boards about those talk shows I was looking for the topics for - i.e., dressing and drag. I was hooked. Eventually, in reading through the boards I heard about something on AOL called the Transgender Community Forum - all you had to do was type in “gender” in the search box and there it was. I brought it up. Saw the page. And absolutely freaked. What was I doing? And I was using my dad’s AOL handle, would he know? Would he start getting strange emails (yes, I was that naive at the time). I quickly logged off and felt damn guilty about it.
But that came back to me. I figured out - holy cow - I can make my own user name. I made a completely random user name - straight down and up the keyboard - edcvfrtgb (start typing it and you’ll see what I did) - and logged on. I took a deep breath and typed “gender” into the search box. And there it was again. This time I explored. There wasn’t much to it given the level of internet technology at the time. But OMG, it was like discovering a gold mine! The message boards with all the different topics. The links to various groups. The profiles. And holy cow, there were pictures. People posted pictures. You had to download the pictures individually - no previews, couldn’t see them online. Oh crap, was I going to download this pics to my parent’s computer so I could see them?
And then there were the chat rooms that AOL eventually created. Oh the chat rooms. I can’t believe I forgot to mention them in the first version of this writing. I’d go in those at like 14, say i was 21, and gab away. My starter question was always the same: “What are you wearing?” and then I’d describe myself, always saying i was wearing the same thing: a black minidress, black hose, and 5 inch black heels! Which was a complete lie of course (though there may have been a couple of times I wore a short black dress and hose of my mother’s but she was NOT the type of woman to have five inch heels). I’d play the role, chatting, flirting, and… you know… These were my first interactions with people in that role, and I absolutely loved it - at least until the shame would take over. As I think about it, this was probably the place the Amanda side of me tangibly formed, even with the edcvfrtgb user name.
Eventually I figured out how to download and delete the pictures, and so I started. Now mind you, this was in the days of dial-up. Many of the pictures were poor quality, grainy photos, and they still took 5-10 minutes to download. But download them I did when my parents weren’t home. Praying that the downloads would finish (don’t forget to clear that download history!) before my parents got hoe,e so that I could look at them, maybe do my think (and feel the shame afterwards) and delete them. I got in a repeated cycle of doing this, checking every day to see if new pictures had been posted. I quickly learned which users posted good pics and kept coming back to them. Download and delete, download and delete. My parents complained about our phone bill being high from all the time online. I didn’t care. This continue throughout the dial-up days - from probably 7-12th grade. And yes there were a few times I got caught - or got really close to being caught. But no one said anything. So many nights when I didn’t have school the next morning I’d sit there on the computer doing that, praying my parents wouldn’t come out of their bedroom (right down the hall from the computer) and see my doing my thing. Thank God they didn’t. The nights I wasn’t trying to watch The Kids in the Hall or Howard Stern this is what I was often doing. At least if I wasn’t feeling all the shame.
This continued through high school. I’d dress when I could, my mother’s clothes getting smaller and smaller. I’d get on AOL. And otherwise I’d live a pretty normal life - playing sports, trying to make friends (I never had too many), and trying to fit in, though still scared as hell of girls and rejection and highly self-conscious and socially awkward. Over time, I discovered the WORLD WIDE Web (much better than just AMERICA Online - the whole world - wow!!!). I started to surf other sites like the Vanity Club, Above & Beyond Gender, and URNOTALONE. And I found many of my favorites on the Transgender Community Forum were building their own pages. My virtual world was expanding, and there was no way I could fight it, no matter how wrong I told myself it was. But I was growing up - physically at least - and as I grew out of my mom’s clothes, the opportunities to dress started to go away.
These take me to the “quiet years” in my dressing - from around 1996-2006, when most of my activity was internet based and I very rarely dressed (maybe a night here and there where I’d buy something, wear it and have fun, and immediately throw it out).
Starting late in high school, I told myself I was going to move on from this dressing and the questions it raised. I’d still surf AOL and the Internet, but I decided I was really going to try to fit in and get away from the “sinful” stuff to do “sins” that were okay by my friends. I spent less time online, and in that effort to fit in and get past my high social anxiety and self-consciousness, got into drinking heavily with friends with some pot sometimes - it’s amazing how that stuff makes you forget about things in the moments. I could throw back 12-18 beers in a night like no one’s business. Lots of nights camping out, or cruising the dirt roads and getting wasted (yes we should have died). My friends always had girlfriends and I didn’t (other than one terrible 2.5 month relationship that further stunted my development - another story), but I was relatively well liked and firmly in the friend zone with the girls— something I was entirely okay with. At one point near the end of high school, I probably came the closest I’d come to quitting dressing. I was going to fit in, was going to be turned on by the sight of girls, not just seeing them and thinking about wearing their clothes. And that was how it was going to be.
But the universe ruled differently, and once again, the Internet was to blame. I was finishing high school and going to college in the fall. I asked for - gulp - a computer of my own because of course you need that in college. And when I got that and had the computer setup in my bedroom that summer. The Internet surfing became more frequent, I found even more personal sites (including the beloved Geocities West Hollywood neighborhood (anyone remember Tiffany Michelle’s TG Tower?), and, well, the dressing won again. Early college was a more awkward time for me socially than later high school, as I struggled to “find my people,” found it harder to get the alcohol that lubricated the anti-social awkwardness gears - only finding those sources of alcohol over time (fake IDs were getting harder to make at that point and I just didn’t have the network outside of the occasional party). Instead I immersed myself in exploring the wonders of the crossdressing Internet - using Above and Beyond, URNotAlone, and Vicki Rene’s Prettiest of the Pretty to find a huge group of personal webpages. I spent college not being able to dress, but most of the non-studying time on my computer, surfing those sites, doing my thing with myself, feeling shame and logging off, only to come right back to it. Even after I had finally built up that social life by my senior year of college (owing mostly to being able to easily get alcohol once I turned 21). Those Internet surfing habits continued into my 20s and through graduate school. I largely had roommates during this time and other than an occasional night alone here and there (including, and I feel really bad about this, raiding my girl roommate’s closet in 2001 when she was out of the country and having an absolute field day with her wardrobe multiple times - again, a different story, involving my first walks outside). It was only after graduate school when I got my own place that I started dressing again. But that will be Part 3…
Conclusion: I firmly believe that the timing of when the Internet became something I had access to had a lot to do with my dressing and sexual development and ultimately the development of Amanda. If I had been older, it wouldn’t have hit a such a formative time - right during puberty when I was already asking questions. If I was younger, my parents would have been on to the “dangers” and “evils” of the Internet and probably would have restricted my usage. Plus it wouldn’t have been such a novel thing. The fact that it hit when it hit meant I spent a ton of time on it, learning and exploring, and… playing (online and errr…. other ways) and feeling all the shame and guilt afterwards. It stunted my social development as well - with girls, with friends. Who knows what would have happened? Dressing would likely have been there in the background, but maybe much less so. Maybe I would have moved onto other things. Maybe I would have had more of a social life in college instead of hiding in my bedroom surfing the web. And maybe “Amanda” as she exists today never would have been created in 2006.
