Authors: Anthony Bidulka
mother during her visit than I had. If only they
could talk and fill me in.
I headed back to the kitchen. On my usually
unburdened stovetop island were three pots of
various sizes. With the stealth of an international
spy I lifted off each lid and inspected the contents.
Borscht. Boiled potatoes. Mushroom sauce. I
picked up the pot of mushroom sauce by its han-
dle and headed for the fridge thinking she really
shouldn’t have left these out overnight. I opened
my fridge and was stopped short. There wasn’t a
square inch of free space. How had this happened
in only two days? I stared at the quarts of cream,
bunches of celery, rows of salad dressings, jars of
pickles and beets and cabbage and other unidenti-
fiable preserves, and even more pots filled with
who knew what. I returned the mushroom sauce
to the stovetop. That’s when I noticed the package
on the counter next to the stove. It was a plate
covered in foil with a note, written in my mother’s
halting script, taped to the top. It simply said, “For
eating for you.”
I peeled back the foil and my eyes couldn’t
believe what they were seeing. Before me was
124 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
something that resembled a bucket’s worth of
fried chicken stuffed inside a blanket. The blanket
was actually some sort of naan-looking bread or
flapjack thing and it was barely secured around no
fewer than four slabs of deep-fried, battered chick-
en cutlets, several stems of green onion, a couple
slices of ham and some sliced tomato. In order to
keep it from falling apart my mother had creative-
ly tied slices of cooked bacon, pinned down with
toothpicks, around the…the thing. Each end was
oozing with a reddish, lumpy sauce, now coagu-
lated on the plate. And suddenly I knew what it
was. Despite all the rest of the food around the
house, my mother had created this dish—her
new and improved version of a Badass Jack’s
wrap. I couldn’t wait to taste her jerk sauce.
I heated the lump in the microwave, then
handed each dog a fake bone treat that they held
delicately in their teeth as they followed me to the
other end of the house and into my cozy den. As I
entered the room and closed the door, I flipped the
switch that ignited the gas fireplace and watched
brother and sister head towards it like bees to a
grove of freshly blooming caragana. I slipped into
the nook created by my desk and several well-
stocked bookshelves and set my wrap, fork and
knife and pile of napkins in front of my laptop.
For a moment I watched Barbra and Brutus luxu-
riate in the heat of the fireplace as if they were
sunbathers in St. Tropez, and took my first bite of
my mother’s wrap. It was, as was everything
made by my mother, to die for. It tasted like no
other wrap, or for that matter anything else I’d
Anthony Bidulka — 125
ever eaten. But it was fried-goodness good on a
polar cold night. After demolishing about half of it,
I turned my attention to the computer. It was time
to try my luck finding SunLover. Daniel Guest
had told me he’d met his Bare Ass Beach con-
quest on the internet through a website called
gays.r.us. Although I’d heard a lot about chat lines
and I even have a friend who met her husband on
one, I’d never tried them out—not out of some
antiquated sense of morality, I just hadn’t found
the time.
As I logged onto my browser homepage, typed
gays.r.us into the search box and hit enter, I felt a
giddy sense of excitement, as if I was about to
delve into an undiscovered world. And I was. In
seconds I was presented with a screen that warned
me I was requesting adult content and gave me the
chance to back out if I wasn’t totally committed to
this course of action. I dutifully read the dis-
claimer and told the computer to keep going.
Naughty boy. I cocked my head to the side to lis-
ten for sirens or my mother’s footsteps. I heard
neither. Another click or two later I was given sev-
eral web page options each offering a meeting
with hot young guys. Would they send them in
the mail? Tempted but not easily fooled, this was
not what I was looking for and I knew I’d have to
start again.
I returned to the browser page and entered
new search parameters: gay chat. Several key taps
later I was directed to a menu asking me to choose
from amongst a list of “floors” on which I could
chat. “Men International—English” seemed the
126 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
closest to what I was looking for so I clicked on
that. An officious-looking dialogue box asked me
for a member name and password. I wasn’t
expecting this. Was this going to cost me money?
A monthly fee perhaps? I wondered if Daniel
Guest would mind a $15.95 charge from gays.r.us
showing up on his Visa every month? And was it
my imagination or were the dimensions of the dia-
logue box actually growing and the intensity of its
words brightening as the seconds passed while I
tried to make a decision? I had this image of a
gays.r.us security guard sitting at a computer out-
side the gates of the gays.r.us complex monitoring
my attempt to enter and waiting to see if I was a
man or a mouse—did I belong or was I an out-
sider? Being one who rarely fears to tread, I hit the
button indicating my willingness to become a
gays.r.us member. As it turned out, the member-
ship was free, but I had to come up with a mem-
ber name and password. I looked over at my furry
companions and went with Brutus and Barbra
respectively. I would have gone the other way
around, but I didn’t want the other chatters to
think I was a girl.
After muddling through a few more sets of
clicks and double clicks I found myself at a screen
which listed gay chat room options from Brasilia
to Yugoslavia. It intrigued me to think there were
young Yugoslav men sitting in front of computers,
just as I was, trying to hook up. Some of the loca-
tions even had sub-set rooms designed for partic-
ular chatter needs. There were rooms for chatters
with certain sexual proclivities like foot fetishists
Anthony Bidulka — 127
and water sport enthusiasts or those looking for
communication with other chatters of a certain
age (Ottawa Teens Only; San Francisco Men Over
Fifty) or even geographically specific locations
(Toronto Riverdale; Vancouver Yaletown). I guess
some people are willing to travel only so far for
sex. I slowly scrolled down the list, amazed at the
breadth of chat activity, and low and behold, in
the Canada section, I found two rooms for
Saskatchewan—one
simply
labelled
Saskatchewan, the other Saskatchewan 30+. I
clicked on Saskatchewan 30+. A room counter on
the upper part of my screen told me there were no
participants in this room. I chuckled to myself.
After all, what self-respecting gay man would
admit to being over thirty if he didn’t have to? I
clicked on the Saskatchewan chat room. There
were thirty-six participants. Not bad. It was late
on a Thursday night, but apparently the
Saskatchewan cyber gay scene was hopping.
I quickly figured out that, without actually
entering the room, I could see the nicknames of
the current participants in the room and even read
their bios (if they’d bothered with one), but I
couldn’t interact with them. To do that, I’d have to
come up with a bio of my own and ask to be let
into the room. I scrolled down the list of thirty-six
nicknames. They ranged from actual names like
George and Dan to more creativity-challenged
pseudonyms such as Guy in Saskatoon or Out of
Towner. And then there were the descriptive alias-
es like Gym Jock, Hairy Bear and Banger in
Bangor with a few in-your-face monikers like Sit
128 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
on my Face and Footlong thrown in for complete
clarity. I saw Horny in Humboldt, Rammy
Rancher and even a Climax Here but no SunLover.
What to do?
I decided if I was in for a penny I might as well
get in for a pound. I knew I’d need to create my
Brutus bio before entering the chat room. If I was
trying to trap SunLover, I’d have to set bait as best
I could based on what Daniel Guest had told me
about their encounter. Obviously SunLover had
been attracted to Daniel, so was that the physical
type he went for, or did he simply go for anyone
willing to meet at the beach—which, given current
weather conditions, would be a tall order.
Reviewing the bios of some of the other chat room
participants, I noticed quite a diversity in what peo-
ple were willing to say about themselves depend-
ing on what message they wanted to send. Some
went with complete disclosure, to the extent of
revealing information that looked like it’d been
gleaned from a gays.r.us job interview. Likes, dis-
likes, physical attributes, type of sexual or non-sex-
ual activity the chatter was seeking and, if you were
lucky, accompanied by a photograph (usually noth-
ing more titillating than a face and chest shot). Most
went with something a little less committal, giving
a line or two of physical description—26, bl/gr, 5-
11, 175, gd lkg—or physical desire—Lkg for r/t,
b/j, d/t. This was dating in the twenty-first centu-
ry—impersonal, cyber-connected and chock full of
short-form words and acronyms. I wondered if
there was a glossary of these terms somewhere that
everyone knew about except me.
Anthony Bidulka — 129
I thought about what to say in my bio and
decided in the end that vague was in vogue. I
typed: “Attractive guy looking for same for dis-
crete fun.” I read and reread my entry, changed it,
changed it back, checked the spelling of discrete
and changed it to discreet and finally decided to
go for it. I hit the Enter Room button and suddenly
another screen opened and I was in the world of
Saskatchewan gay chat. A lot happened at once.
Apparently while I was busy debating my
gays.r.us identity and not formally in the
Saskatchewan chat room, I was not privy to
changes as they occurred. There were now forty-
two chatters in the room and as I scrolled down to
the bottom of the list of nicknames now displayed
on the right-hand side of my screen, I saw that
many of the original thirty-six had come and gone
while I was lollygagging. And for that sloth, I’d
never get to meet All Man in Alsask or Big Baloney
in Balgonie who’d obviously found what they were
looking for and logged off. The area of the screen
meant for conversation was alive with typed mes-
sages involving maybe half a dozen of the room’s
occupants. They seemed to be talking about a
movie they’d just seen. Did all these people know
one another? Wasn’t this chat room stuff supposed
to be about sex or were all forms of entertainment
open for discussion? I had actually recently seen
the film in question and was considering typing in
my own review when the next line of dialogue
read: “Hi Brutus.”
They saw me. They knew I was there.
Suddenly I was nervous. I felt as if I’d just
130 — F l i g h t o f A q u av i t
arrived at a party where I didn’t know a soul.
Then Burt55 wrote, “Welcome Brutus” quickly
followed by “Hey, Brutus” from Downtown Dick.
How nice. How hospitable. Very friendly. I was
about to respond when a new box appeared near
the upper left-hand side of my screen. The header
told me it was a private message from someone
called Looking For Luv. He wrote, “How r u?” A
second box popped up partially covering Looking
for Luv’s message and most of the original
Saskatchewan chat room screen. It was from
Dandy Randy. He asked, “Busy?” Then a third
from Can Do in Canwood, also asking if I was
busy. My speakers were beeping and dinging and
bonging as the world of Saskatchewan gay chat
enveloped me and swallowed me whole like a
snake on a gopher.
My first intention was to type in polite
answers, but I couldn’t find which of the many