GiB#2 | "Gaylebanon on MIRC sent you a message on Facebook”!

It was hard to believe when I read this email subject line last week – way for a single line to take me a decade back in time…

As much as I miss my teens, I can’t say I miss the early days of online GiB dating.

As some of you may remember, to meet fellow GiBs online in the 90’s, we had to log in through the crappy mIRC application to the shady #GayLebanon channel on creepy 192.168.0.1-type Undernet servers – or was it Dalnet?

The nicknames were freaky, people remained religiously anonymous, and dishonesty prevailed. Could have been my young age, or how gay Lebanon was back then, add to it the whole ‘hacker’ culture of the time: in either case it sure felt like we were doing something illegal, something wrong at best.

GiBs had to go a long way to take a breath through this narrow window – it was the times of the shady Internet cafés and the stuttering dial-up Internet connections – but mIRC’s #GayLebanon was all there was. It’s where it started.

As such, #GayLebanon’s dictators clique of “admins” and “operators” can tout themselves today of being the pioneers of online gay cruising in Lebanon!

But is it really much different nowadays? Granted, GiBs can now pick and choose between Manjam, Gaydar, GayRomeo, Helem’s chat, the newcomer gaylebanon.info, Facebook or even the BBM service on Blackberry… then cherry-pick from thousands of GiB faces and asses on display…

As far as I'm concerned it still feels like the same hit-or-miss shooting in the dark, the same fear of fakes, the same hate of flakes, in that everlasting gloomy atmosphere… So come to think of it, it wasn’t that bad in the 90’s!

(Visual concocted by GiB#1)