#oversharing You know you’re getting old when words and concepts take on new meanings. I’m aware that slang changes constantly, but this isn’t about slang.
For a while now I’ve been seeing the term “backrooms” and only recently realized it doesn’t mean what it used to.
Backrooms used to refer to darkened rooms at the back of gay bars where guys would go for quick, anonymous, usually quiet sex. Not every gay bar had one, and there was only one. Used in a sentence: “I heard the bar has a backroom”, or “some dude I met in a backroom”. If you wanted sex right here, right now, with the privacy that a dark room provides, standing up (there was no furniture, they were just dark, empty rooms), this may be just the ticket for you.
I wasn’t a connoisseur of backrooms, but they weren’t completely unknown to me.
There was a lot of unsafe sex going on, which is one of the reasons why they don’t exist any more. This was at a time when the risks of unsafe sex were very well known, which was one of the reasons I never spent much time there. I lived through the AIDS crisis in the US in the 80s and early 90s, so I knew what to do to avoid seroconversion.
Anyway, imagine my surprise when I finally asked Google “what are backrooms?” (forget UrbanDictionary, it’s just a bunch of bullshit jokes) and learned that the term originated in a 4chan discussion (strike one). Getting to the modern backrooms involves “accidentally no-clipping out of reality” (my eyes start rolling back in my head), which is a term from video games where…. and I’m out.
I guess the truly shocking part of this post is the admission that I don’t play and never have played video games. I’m a dinosaur. Reading was always my escape since childhood. I don’t disparage video games or players, it’s just not my thing. It makes me sad that the concept of reading for pleasure seems to have gone the way of letter-writing. Over nearly 30 years of teaching French literature, I kept having to reduce the amount of reading I expected from my students because they just couldn’t do it.
It’s not that students are less intelligent than they used to be (although I think ChatGPT and similar LLMs are very harmful because they’re being used as a substitute for thinking), it’s that our understanding of “knowing” is changing. I once attended a lecture by Quentin Crisp (that’s
how old I am) during which he said, “The most important thing you can learn about is yourself. Everything else you can look up.” Knowing yourself is extremely important, but so is knowing the world around you. And you can’t just look up the experience of wandering into the backroom of a bar. Or trace the evolution of public gay sex between men from “cottaging” to backrooms to sex clubs to bath houses in large metropolitan areas. The distinctions between sex clubs and bath houses could fill someone’s dissertation, and probably have.
I suppose I’m a product of my times and choices so that I know more about the original backrooms than I do about video games. I do know that 4chan is a huge pile of shit and not worth my time, though. Even dinosaurs can learn things.
There’s a character from Amy Sedaris’ “At Home with Amy Sedaris” who liked to say after offering some unsolicited opinion or an unwanted observation, “I’ve said too much, I’ve said too much!”
Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
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