New York – When 21-year-old Paul Caparas logs onto MySpace.com, he checks to see if anyone has sent him a message.
Then he updates the dozens of pictures he has posted of himself, many of them shirtless. Finally, he goes through the scores of people who want to join his list of online friends, mostly other young gay men he has never met.
To Caparas and other gay and bisexual men and women in their teens and 20s, MySpace, the online social networking site, has become the preferred vehicle to connect – whether to friends they already know or to those they would like to get to know.
“I’m on MySpace every single day,” said Caparas, who is from Long Island. “I’m on it every time I get a chance.” Gone are the days of meeting someone in a chat room.
Though the Internet has been a haven for gay youths for at least a decade, MySpace has managed to bring together whole communities of gay youths onto one site. Users of the site create profiles of themselves and can then browse other profiles. Someone can request to become another user’s “friend” electronically by a request that links the potential new friend to his or her profile.
MySpace doesn’t release demographic statistics on its 50 million users as a whole, but a few regional searches on the website show a busy network of gay teens and 20-somethings posting profiles.
Within 20 miles of Naperville, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, more than 2,500 profiles of 18- to 25-year-olds identify themselves as gay or bisexual. Within 10 miles of Chandler, Ariz., outside of Phoenix, more than 2,600 gay or bisexual men and women in the same age bracket have profiles.
Part of the website’s appeal is that it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel in the complicated world of youthful socializing – it just gives the whole ritual another plane on which to operate, said Will Neville, a coordinator at Advocates for Youth, a national organization that counsels young people on sex education.
“The explosion of websites like MySpace has been a way for young people to connect to each other by using very traditional avenues,” Neville said.
Yet Elizabeth Casparian, director of educational programs for Health-Interested Teens’ Own Program on Sexuality in New Jersey, says the site leaves young people, and gay teens in particular, vulnerable to sexual predators.
