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CKUT's John Custodio interviews Owen Eric Wood for the radio program QueerCorps, February 16, 2009.
In part one of the interview, they discuss Wood's video Made Up and the concept of masculinity in relation to queer identity.
In part two of the interview, former QueerCorps technical director Paul N. joins the conversation to discuss gay chat sites and Wood's video 'Lost.'
Interview: Part 2
John Custodio:
Let's talk about your other film, I' m really curious about this one, too. It has to do with Internet chat room culture. I'm not all that familiar with this. I don't even do Facebook. Here's why... and people around me are always trying to get me to do stuff.
Owen Eric Wood:
It's probably because you probably have a life.
John Custodio:
I have enough distractions in my life and I just can' t afford another. I really can't. Although, soon, these two, Eric (the new technical director) and Paul, are going to be introducing QueerCorps, the show, as a Facebook phenomenon, which I completely agree with... just not me. So let's talk about Lost. Why did you call it Lost by the way?
Owen Eric Wood:
It's Lost because I felt I was losing myself, I had lost myself, in the online gay chatting community because I found myself having conversations that I would never have in real life. Someone you just met online, you don't even know really who they are because it's anonymous in a way and suddenly you're having the most extreme, x-rated, sexual conversations because you can, because the Internet provides that freedom
John Custodio:
Okay, stop right there. I need to ask you something very quickly, and I ask this of everyone who does Facebook, as well. All told, in a day, how many minutes would you say you spend Internet chatting this way?
Owen Eric Wood:
I gotta say I don't do it any more because I got bored of it, but sometimes I would start chatting at night, like 9 or 10 o'clock, and chat until after the sun rises.
John Custodio:
Okay, I rest my case. (laughter)
Owen Eric Wood:
It became an addiction. (laughter)
John Custodio:
There are too many distractions. So walk me through this. You log in to some site and you...
Owen Eric Wood:
You log in, you create a profile, and this piece is mostly about how profiles try to represent a person but they really never do.
John Custodio:
They really never do because they really never can? They're doomed to failure?
Owen Eric Wood:
I don't think they can really because even when chatting with someone, it's a very restricted, limited medium.
John Custodio:
I just thought maybe it was like part of the course - everyone lies.
Owen Eric Wood:
Oh well, there's the lying, too, but even if you take the lying out of it, it's just impossible to represent yourself with two-dimensional images and a few points of your personality. So what I did was push that to the extreme, create a whole bunch of profiles of myself, represent myself in many, many images repeatedly and then take the dialogue that I actually had online and create a script and read it myself to represent the conversations that I would have and it all kind of blurs together and in the end you've seen multiple images of the same person bu tstil you don't know who they are. So it deals with irony in a way.
John Custodio:
You ask the question and perhaps you are just exploring it and you don't answer it, whether this is a liberating phenomenon for our people.
Owen Eric Wood:
That is also somehting that I've been thinking about. I don't if my video answers it but it wsa one of the questions in the beginning. In a way, I think it is liberating because by being anonymous, it frees to you talk about whatever you want, without the fear of social pressure or social repercussions. So it's liberating in that way, and you can explore your sexuality. You can talk about things with real people and find out what it is you're interested in sexually or socially.
John Custodio:
At least on the level of fantasy.
Owen Eric Wood:
Ya, right. Or when you meet the people, then it's not fantasy.
John Custodio:
That is definitely where this always leads. This was never meant, in your case...
Owen Eric Wood:
In this case, I didn't start chatting online to create a project about it, it just sort of happened.
John Custodio:
Right. But did you start chatting online to meet people?
Owen Eric Wood:
Yes. I actually started chatting because my straight brother had found his girlfriend on Lava Life, but at the time I don't think LavaLife had a sort of gay part to it, so then I had to use the gay chat sites, which are a lot more sexual than straight ones.
John Custodio:
Paul, are you a chat room kind of guy, or were you a chat room kind of guy?
Paul N.:
I used to be. Of course, there is gay411.com which it seems like most gay men in Montreal have probably either heard about it or used it at some point.
John Custodio:
One of my favourite things to do is watch my friends go through their profile and see. That's how I know I could never do this because I would be on there forever.
Paul N.f:
Every day, I would go home and be like 'Okay, do I have any messages from gay411?'
Owen Eric Wood:
I know, me, too. It's like an addiciton.
Paul N.:
It was seriously an addiciton and for a whole, I don't know, half a year I was on that. I met quite a few guys out of it, too. And it was fun, but by the end of it, I felt kind of nausiated by it a little bit, too. It was done. It was over and I wanted to meet someone for real and so I took my profile off there.
John Custodio:
The fairness of characterizing this culture as a virtual bathhouse. Is that fair?
Owen Eric Wood:
Except there's one element of it that I think redeems it in that it's very much based in talking, in communicating and in writing and so you can very quickly determine what people are looking for and you can also weed out the people who are interesting or not and I found my current boyfriend online actually and it was because, when he wrote me back, he didn't write me, 'how r u?' with 'R' 'U' spelled as letters. He wrote me paragraphs. It's rare, but it happens.
Paul N.:
It's very rare. They are a few people that you can meet on these places who are intelligent, who are interesting, who are quirky.
Owen Eric Wood:
And when they write you back paragraphs, it shocks you
John Custodio:
Literacy is a turn on.
Owen Eric Wood:
And you can really get to know a person taking out the physical aspects. But your question, is it a bathhouse, yes!
John Custodio:
Except that, my experiences of bathhouses is that communication other than sexual communication, there's not really a high premium put on it. It's crotch grabbing, you want in, come on in, whatever. It's very much a body signalling kind of thing and if conversation happens, it's not particularly...
Paul N.:
Interesting.
Owen Eric Wood:
I don't know the bathhouse side of it because I haven't done it, but online it's a virtual bathhouse in the sense of instead of mannerism or body language, it's text messaging. And it's surprising how quickly people get to the sex subject. In fact, sometimes social norms of communication and greetings are completely obliterated. I remember one guy, his first message to me, no 'hi, how are you? what are you doing?' nothing like that, his very first message to me was, 'would you like to get yourself off while I humiliate myself over the phone?' That's what he wrote to me. And I never knew what he meant because I was too shocked by it, but shows you how quickly people get into the sex part of it.
John Custodio:
And you're free not to answer, right? You're free to just ignore.
Owen Eric Wood:
Ya, you're completely free not to answer.
John Custodio:
Okay.
Owen Eric Wood:
But that doesn't stop them from writing you back over and over again.
John Custodio:
And I imagine there are ways to deal with that, too.
Owen Eric Wood:
It's delete, delete.
John Custodio:
Okay, so you just can't block someone.
Paul N.:
Sometimes you can. On some you can block a person.
John Custodio:
This makes me want to explore this world more.
Owen Eric Wood:
That's why I did this video, because for me, more than the conversations, the whole societal aspect or phenomenon of it was fascinating to me - how people communicate, how people represent themselves on their online profiles, what pictures they choose, what style of pictures they choose, what they wear...
John Custodio:
That's a huge hurdle, especially for someone like me because I could see myself working on a profile for months.
Owen Eric Wood:
Ya.
Paul N.:
I have some friends who are similar.
John Custodio:
I wouldn't know what to say, what to do.
Paul N.:
What's also interesting, what I found with myself is that you notice how you adapt to the sites as well. I noticed that first I was sending messages but there were times when I was myself going in that mode of sending certain messages that were very sexual right up front and I was also going into that frame of thinking and then I kind of caught myself. I was getting imbedded in that kind of...
John Custodio:
Whore! Just joking! (laughter)
Paul N.:
Gabriel, I hope you're listening. We also met online, but on Facebook.
John Custodio:
Unfortunately, we're running out of time. This has been really interesting. I'm glad you could make it on to the show. Our guest has been Owen Eric Wood. That was great.
Owen Eric Wood:
Thanks a lot.
Links
QueerCorps with John Custodio can be heard on CKUT Radio 90.3 FM on Mondays, 6-7 p.m. Archives of the show can be found on the CKUT Web site:
CKUT Radio 90.3 FM
The Rendez-Vous du Cinema Quebecois festival takes place at various venues in Montreal from February 18-28, 2009.
More information can be found on the festival Web site:
Rendez-Vous du Cinema Quebecois
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