Dick Naked

Koji looked like he had just seen Dick Cheney naked.

His face twisted ever so slightly, eyes narrowing, lips struggling to smile.

Apparently, I wasn't his type.

"Hi. How are you?" I said, emerging from the tiny foyer at the Chelsea Savoy Hotel on 23rd and 7th.

"Good, good. And you?" he replied, his stricken gaze still on my face.

Oh god, I thought. Keep the meter running.

Koji and I had made arrangements to meet after talking on-line and on the phone for hours over several weeks. He was 34 and reviewed Broadway plays for a publication back home in Japan. I was a 49-year-old sports editor from Virginia. Somehow, we clicked.

It was a gay.com success story. Or so I thought until that cold April night when we met at the appointed hour for dinner.

"Hangawi OK?" I asked, thinking he might suddenly develop bronchitis and beg off.

"Yes. Should we take a cab?" he said.

A cab? Good grief, no. He could stare at me all the way to Midtown.

"Let's walk," I suggested, wondering if my salt-and-pepper hair looked more black or silver under the neon lights.

By this time, Koji was politely masking the biggest disappointment of his dating life. We had a nice chat as we walked briskly to Hangawi, a soothing Korean vegetarian restaurant on 32nd Street. Dinner went smoothly too, and he even took me to a theater district joint for strawberry shortcake afterward. We parted with a generic peck on the cheek outside of his subway stop at about 11 -- four hours after the date began.

Obviously, Koji's good manners had taken over. But, just as obviously, it was the last time we would see each other. I think we chatted on-line twice afterward -- briefly -- and then he and his gay.com nickname disappeared forever.

It's the nature of cyberspace. Hope fading into reality. Budding friendships dying like too-early crocuses in the back yard.

Koji was an extreme example, simply because we actually met face to face. Other friendships on platforms such as gay.com vanish with less trauma, less personal capital spent.

I still wonder what happened to the Vietnamese-American from the East Village with the Ivy League degree and quick wit, to the Hell's Kitchen Filipino who was almost an icon on gay.com until he too faded, to the Indian dorm-keeper at a New England college, to the Latino in Queens with the keen social consciousness, to the black kid from U.Va. who was trying to make it as a software developer on Long Island, to the Russian economics grad from Columbia, to the 40-year-old from Brooklyn with the taut body who still danced professionally, to the Virginia boy transplanted to South Beach, to ... well, the list is endless.

But another list, a shorter list, exists, too, a list of cool guys who were fun to hang out with, fun to meet face to face. That's what makes cyberspace, specifically gay.com, a lifesaver for gay men. It's a safe, energetic place to meet guys, and not primarily for sex, although -- clearly -- gay.com is sex-driven.

Why Koji and I didn't mesh is anybody's guess. No doubt, he pictured me as far better-looking than I am -- pictures do sometimes dissolve into fantasy -- and found the skin-and-bones version repulsive.

Oddly, though, the incident didn't enter my mind when I dated other guys afterward, guys who never looked like they had just seen Dick Cheney naked.