by Michael
One of my guilty pleasures on television is an MTV show called Catfish. No, it’s not a travel show produced by Field and Stream magazine, it’s a reality quasi dating show that explores “catfish,” i.e., people pretending to be other people online for some kind of love connection. If you’ve never seen it I’ll give you a rough summation. A camera crew led by the once catfished Nev helps infatuated men and women finally unmask and connect with their own possible catfish. In some cases they’ve been in communication with these then only digital people for years, in most cases haven’t even talked to them on the phone, and in all cases don’t know how to use Google to do any legwork of their own.
I always watch with fascination wondering who will be unearthed at the end of every episode. Will it be a 40 year old man posing as an 18 year old model?! Will it be an obese telemarketer from Idaho posing as a slim 25 year old gold medalist?! Will this be the one episode where the person at the end is the person they’ve been in communication with all along?! The latter is rare but it does happen, and I hope for it as much as I hope to find my medium french fry had a curly fry stowaway. Who am I kidding. I don’t eat french fries.
I suppose though for honesty sake, and the sake of this post, I am more fascinated by this show because of one truth. I was once a catfish. Yes I know. Stone me. Lock me away and throw away the key in a place where no one will ever find it. Like in a discount perfume bin wedged between a Kardashian fragrance and someone’s errant underwear. I confess. But please, allow me to explain myself.
I discovered catfishing before it was an MTV show. I was a kid in the age of dial-up modems and AOL 2.0. I was also very curious about my own sexuality and even then very much questioning it. Not really understanding my actions I would pose as an older teen girl or boy really only to chat. Picture sharing was difficult, and I didn’t feel like waiting an hour for a megabyte picture to load. I did this for a time but after a while I lost interest in my alter ego and walked away. Probably scared by the possibility of actually being gay.
But in later years when the internet became faster and I became smarter I graduated to more devious schemes. I would find actual pictures’, probably acquired through MySpace, and use them to carry on more elaborate conversations with random men I’d connect with through chat rooms. Pictures were shared back and forth, and then I’d move on to another person. It was a sick thrill for me to convince a stranger to send me a nude picture, and my pubescent gayness was appeased and still never acknowledged. In retrospect, it was probably doing this that helped turn me into such a gifted writer. When you create enough fake people, it starts to become an assembly line of well thought out characters that pop off the presses real enough to feel real.
Out of guilt and remorse I stopped cold turkey for many years. I threw myself into other things like my love of film and writing, and kept away from any distraction that might take me off the “straight” path I was on. But like any addict, eventually you return to old habits when the habit is ignored instead of resolved. I went back to my now catfish named obsession and resumed even smarter and more daring then I had been before. This time I could actually talk to people on the phone through Google Voice numbers, I could use throw away e-mail addresses, and I could find dozens and dozens of pictures of the same person thanks to Facebook and Instagram. If you had thought my characters felt real before, now my Frankenstein creatures seemed to actually breath life. Still through all this, all this lying to myself and lying to strangers, I still didn’t think I was gay. That’s how in denial I was. I was so scared of admitting to myself and the world that yes I like boys that I was willing to become this mad scientist meddling in other people’s emotions.
There are so many stories I can tell of people I pursued and surprising outcomes and hearts broken, but I won’t. I’ll save those for other posts. The whole point of this lengthy exploration into a part of my past is to really give insight to people who don’t understand why a catfish catfishes. Many people do so because we are unhappy with some part of our lives. We’re possibly overweight, look in the mirror and see an ugly duckling that’ll never become a swan, or we feel trapped in a life that isn’t the life we want but are too scared to change. When I finally came out my Frankenstein creatures died. They were struck by lightning and left for dead on the side of the road. I was free. There was no point to catfish when the point of catfishing was dead. I can declare once and for all I am catfish free and I would swear on a bedazzled bible if I had one. It wasn’t easy but I did it
So when I watch Catfish on MTV today I do so not as an average viewer, but as a reformed consort of these trouble souls. I relate to them and I feel for them. I know how hard it is, and especially how ridiculous they look to everyone else that doesn’t understand where they’re coming from. They’re hiding from themselves, and it’ll take years before that internal game of hide-and-go-seek ends if ever. I just hope that when they do find themselves they find some humor in what they did. That’s all you can really do. I don’t regret my actions. If it weren’t for my actions I wouldn’t have turned into the strong gay non-fiction character I am today.