Those nights of carefully poking through personals would become the norm. It seems desperate, and a lot of times, it was. I wanted so badly to send a signal: Is anybody there? Lowering the brightness to keep the glow from escaping the room, I would look, and I would wish. On those nights, the world a vacant queerless space, I would tiptoe down the wooden staircase, pausing every few seconds to be sure I didn’t wake my parents, and turn on the computer. And while I understand the Personals section was shuttered in response to the passage of FOSTA-a bill meant to inhibit and protect people from sex trafficking-it still means saying goodbye to the place I learned to acknowledge, and start to love, my sexuality. That would be easy, and frankly, inaccurate. I can’t say Craigslist saved me from anything. At 17, I had no point of connection to my own gayness. I was alone and gay in a conservative religious house-no gay bars, no gay people that I knew of for miles. “Rural New Hampshire” is the sort of redundancy I thought I’d have stopped using after all these years, but it still seems apt. When people ask where I'm from, I tell them I grew up in rural New Hampshire.
