Trying to piece together what really happened in the case of the 14-year-old boy who had sex with men he met through the internet is an impossible task at the moment, and the full story will only become clear when the case goes to trial.

Media reports have been wildly conflicting and sensationalised. At the moment, however, all that is clear is that he joined the Gaydar website sometime last year. To do this, he would have to claim to be 18, although there is no proof of age required. At some stage, perhaps more than once, he posted his number publicly, I would guess in the chatroom, and it seems about 12 men wrote it down in the past few months, and started texting him.
At the time of going to press, it appears two men have had sex with him, and the rest sent sexually charged texts back and forth with him. Money has been reported to have exchanged hands. The word rape has been used because it is statutory rape, i.e. with a minor, but there appears not to have been any violence involved, as the lad was apparently willing. The Gardaí are methodically going through the text messages over the past few months, that he sent and received, and slowly piecing together what happened. A cross-section of Irish men, from all walks of life, married and gay, from their 20s to their 40s, have been revealed to have shown an interest in this lad. So far, it appears that they are fairly representative of the men who are Gaydar members.
To make my position clear from the outset: those who have sex with a 14-year-old, no matter how precocious or knowing he is, have committed an offence, morally and in the eyes of the law. I find it repugnant that a man would lose his sense of humanity, his compassion for the turbulence of adolescence, his respect for the dignity of a child, by giving in to his own sexual cravings in the face of such obvious youthfulness, no matter how precocious or cocky the invitation.
There can be no defence of “honest mistake” in such a case, as 14-year-old male youths are inescapably, obviously young, and unlike girls who can appear much older than they are, it is the nature of things that most boys look their age. I can’t conceive, even if I had believed that someone I had been texting was 17 or 18, and I had arranged a sexy rendezvous with him, that I would carry through with my intentions once I met the kid face-to-face. It’s like that wonderful storyline in the film American Beauty when Kevin Spacey’s character, so infatuated with a young girl, finally gets the opportunity to seduce her – but balks when he listens to her childish view of the world, her innocence, and is reminded of his own humanity.

NO STRINGS SEX
When I began mentioning in my own Gaydar profile that I was looking for information and opinions on the case with a view to this column, I was met initially with outrage. Before it had been confirmed (on RTRs Prime Time) that it was indeed the Gaydar site where it all started, I had some hysterical responses. I was apparently linking paedophilia with being gay, and giving Gaydar a bad name. Paedophiles were mostly heterosexual, and it was disgraceful that I should even ask the questions I was asking.
I also bore the brunt of many people’s suspicion of the media, and had to face some tough questioning before it was acknowledged (but not by all) that it would be better I wrote from the perspective of being a Gaydar member, and that I did it openly, without being undercover or underhand. However, most of the men I talked to online were thoughtful and concerned.
Their suspicion of the media is justified. The coverage has been woefully hysterical and conflicting. Central to the popular press’s discourse is that this was a “paedophile ring” that groomed this young lad – a conspiracy of conscious deliberation and intent, to seek out children and exploit them. There has been no understanding of the way men can meet each other, online and off, for sex. On the Late Late Show discussion on Friday night, the gay male sexual perspective was completely absent, although one contributor had earlier been advertising for sex himself on Gaydar. The nature of cruising online needs to be understood in order to put this case in perspective.
There is an atmosphere sometimes of the stockroom trading floor in Gaydar chatrooms – men making bids for sexual encounters, displaying their wares, buying or selling different flavours of contact. It’s capitalism run riot, but it’s sexual, not financial capital, displaying men’s capacity to commodify and market themselves, exploit each other, for the pursuit of pleasure. No money exchanges hands, as a rule, although there are a few prostitutes openly advertising their services, in defiance of Irish law, as well as men soliciting for paid sex, on a daily basis.
But in the main, this is a free market in all senses of the word; it’s a heady, often frenzied, search for hook-ups. Some have more chance of success than others – notably those in major urban areas who are sexually a top and have good photographs to show, as against, for example, middle-aged married men living in rural communities who have little or no chance of instant gratification, and spend their time in a fantasy world, toying with the unattainable.
But this is not a “gay community” – this is a men-only, sexualised, environment. Many members do not identify with being gay – some are married, some keep their private lives to themselves and never enter a gay bar, some are “bi-curious” and flirting with exploring “no strings” sex, the preoccupation of many men, of all orientations. Many, however, are friends who go on the gay scene regularly, and it is a forum for catching up and bitching about last night at The George or hearing about new gay pubs or clubs in towns across the country.

MEAT MARKET
The fact that in the Irish chatroom some intelligent and funny conversation happens is a tribute I think to the Irish character, for it is not so in other national chatrooms. Perhaps because there is only one Gaydar chatroom for all of Ireland, and it is the busiest of its kind in Ireland, with often hundreds of men online at any one time, it is possible for some interesting things to happen. Many enlightening discussions are held, regularly, about HIV and sexual health, about coming out, about all sorts of things to do with life in Ireland.
There are some very funny and entertaining characters, some wise old souls, some obviously disturbed individuals, and some provocative little shits who enjoy stirring things up. There are Polish and Asian and Russian men, individuals of all ages and body types, fetishes and obsessions. Cross-dressers to bears, “lads” to “daddies”, “skinheads” to “chubbies”.
But even the most sensible and serious conversations in the chatroom are constantly interspersed with appeals for sex in all its variety and complexity. A “cumslut” will repeatedly ask for all takers to fuck him bareback in his apartment. An elderly cross-dresser in West Cork will appeal for young men to have phonesex with him. And so it goes on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The fact that any sensible chat happens at all is a miracle, given the atmosphere of sexual anarchy that prevails. And yet, in spite of this, friendships develop, relationships can start, enjoyable sex can be had, and sensible advice and information can be found.
But the truth is it’s largely a fantasy world – many men enjoy chatting about meeting for sex but are only using it for masturbatory purposes and have no intention of meeting anyone at all. Numerous participants use fake photos, and most profiles in Ireland have no photos at all – a feature I think of the Irish need for privacy, not necessarily evidence that everyone is in the closet. But if ever you needed evidence about the prevalence of bisexuality in this country, and the number of married men getting it off with other men, Gaydar is the place to find it.
It is in this milieu that this young lad apparently signed up, pretending to be 18. I imagine he watched and learned for a while – and indeed sometimes youngsters can learn a lot of useful things from being online.
One of the surprising things for me now, at 44, is that I get approached by young men looking for older men, a relationship dynamic that is as old as the Greeks. Quite often I have referred them to the youth group, at belongto.org, believing passionately in the principle of gay youth groups, for I still have friends from that time, nearly 30 years later. It is in youth groups that kids can really explore who they are and make necessary friends, in a safe, non-exploitative way.
However, this lad landed in this meat market, and quickly found that his youth was appealing to a certain kind of man, and, perhaps, something he could exploit, if the reports of him asking for money are true. Was he too young to make this decision? Probably, I would say. But people mature at different ages. What will he think of it all when he’s 17? It is a good question.

FAKED PROFILES
One man wrote passionately to me, deploring the fact that the lad would now be immersed in counselling, being encouraged to see himself as a “victim” when he may have been totally in control and very confident about what he wanted. But my hunch is that this young sexual man won’t lose his penchant for sex, and is on his way to being one of those who enjoy it, in all its exciting variety. A mother may wish him to settle down and find a nice boyfriend, once she gets over the shock of realising he likes men – but in my experience, and from what other men have told me, such early experience of sex will lead him to want to explore it more.
To a large degree, the law is understandably biased towards the values of parenting and protection of children. But in terms of the natural justice for this lad, in terms of his future development, unless he manages to find someone with whom he can talk honestly about sex with men, and figure it out for himself in a reflective way, perhaps with peers in a youth group, he may find that the legal actions, and the attention this case has provoked, may cause much more damage than good in his life.
I’ve had conversations with many men during the course of researching this article, who have told me they were sexually active at 14 or 15. Some faked Gaydar profiles just like this lad did, and some had sex, just like he did. If the internet was around when I was 14 (or perhaps, being honest, 15 for me) I feel sure I would have had a Gaydar profile myself. Many older men like me have said the same, but before the Internet it was the back pages of hotpress that were the obvious route to making first sexual contact.
One 19 year old told me he had indicated he was under 18 in his Gaydar profile text when he was 14, and never got into trouble. He made an informed decision who to choose to have sex with, and did it, and has no regrets. And he’s not the only one by any means. Another man said he had been treated well when he was 14 when he had sex with older men; he believes it’s impossible to have an intelligent debate about underage sex, and that there is a big difference between consensual sex and forced sex. Another man told me he’d have “killed” to have had sex at 14. Someone else said to me that the lad was “a little shit” for fucking up so many people’s lives.
Another young man told me that he was reported to Gaydar when he was online at 16, and his profile was deleted. He now says he is grateful to the person who did it. He had been sexually assaulted before and the guy responsible recognized and harassed him when he rejoined when he was legal; although he reported it to the Gardaí, they told him there was nothing they could do. He was “shocked” by what had happened to this 14-year-old, but felt it was bound to happen.
Another man told me that, about a year ago, he had been approached by a young lad in his rural town claiming to be 19, and they were going to meet. For about 3 weeks they exchanged very explicit texts. However, a friend tipped him off that the lad was in fact only 15, so he immediately terminated the contact. But the teenager continually harassed him, and the fact that the man was a teacher made his position extremely vulnerable. Eventually he had to change his phone number. He made the point that there is no provision in law for younger lads “grooming” older men. His experience frightened him.
Most of the correspondence I have had over the past few days has been full of concern for the young lad, and his family. But many expressed sympathy for those who had been caught up in it, if they hadn’t known he was 14. It is this crucial detail that, I imagine, will only come out in the trial(s).
No one sensible I have spoken to online about this believes that this was a paedophile “ring”. “It’s not the way gay sex happens,” wrote one man. It’s opportunistic, it’s random, it’s chaotic. If someone is hot and looking for hook-ups, their details are passed on to others. It is anarchic, in the sense that the law is ignored, especially in the chatrooms in relation to the laws of prostitution.

HAVING CAMSEX
Personally, I have an aversion to the law when it comes to the realm of personal sexual morality, because when I was a teenager/in my 20s, I believed I was doomed to a life of criminality for being sexual in this country. Happily, it is now being acknowledged that whereas two men went through and had sex with the lad, two others met him and sent him home, proving that not everyone involved in the case is the monster the media would like them to be.
Crucially, we may never see it being understood by the media that there is a big difference between sending sexual texts and actually having sex. Motive is all – and the truth of the matter is that when it comes to internet sex chats, most exchanges never manifest in actual sex, no matter what age the correspondents are. Anyone who has ever cruised online will have had the experience of falling for extremely plausible invitations, detailed and chatty exchanges, with the guy simply not turning up at the time and place arranged.
No matter how persuasive or convincing or lurid the conversations beforehand with this lad, they all should be taken with a pinch of salt. But the demonisation of the texters involved (the “sick paedos”) may not allow for that reality to be understood. I fervently hope that there is a gay man on the jury or juries who can appreciate that distinction, if charges are brought against the men who never met the lad.
As for Gaydar itself – it’s one of the most successful internet sites for men looking for sex on this planet. It has no age verification system in place, and so it is likely that many other 14- and 15-year-olds are using the site at the present time, and no doubt will continue to do so. Were age-verification to be introduced, which normally involves using a credit card, Gaydar would lose a lot of members, and no doubt gay teenagers will find other sites. Gaydar probably won’t change unless it is forced to by law, and apparently so few people in Ireland bother to pay for membership they aren’t really interested in the Irish market commercially, so they may just withdraw from Ireland.
Ideally, boys should be taught about the good sites, the youth group, community-orientated chatrooms and other supportive environments, but that would have to mean that the education system in this country takes seriously the needs and sexual drives of teenagers, which is, sadly, not the case at the moment. Until we realise the importance that many men place on sex outside of relationships, on recreational sex, we are not going to be able to communicate with lads such as this 14-year-old in a language they understand.
In the meantime, gay people are going to be suspect in this country for a while, because in this instance, I believe it is a function of the way men have recreational sex with each other that has allowed these sad events to unfold.
I may be proven wrong, but Gaydar is not the obvious place to look for children, so I doubt that the men caught up in this case are paedophiles in the generally accepted sense of the term, in that they find pre-pubescent children sexually attractive. I imagine they find sexually mature teenagers attractive, and in a sense, if they are legal and sound, their beauty can be extremely intoxicating, even to me, whose tastes are generally for people my own age, or maybe from their 20s up. When a young lad offers himself for gay sex online, it is vastly different to a case where a child is befriended by an adult in a non-sexual chatroom in disguise, and “groomed” for coercive sex.
As I write these words, a 19-year-old is talking online in the public chatroom about how he’d love to have his “fresh hole abused” by someone older. Another young guy is telling the room that he’s just been having camsex (video chat) with another young lad, both of them wanking away, when the other guy’s sister walks into shot and waves at him. This is in the nature of sex, and the way the young generation are having sex. Not everyone, of course, by any means, but a significant minority, and we still haven’t come to terms with it in our culture. It is un-stoppable. It is not going to go away: the internet has transformed the way Irish people have sex forever. There is so much deeper thinking needed about this than is evident at the moment.
In the end, in spite of all this sexual freedom and license, this era of infinite possibilities and dangers, it boils down to individual responsibility and morality. I can’t forgive the men who had sex with that lad. But also for the sake of his own development and maturity, I hope the young lad doesn’t get persuaded to see himself as a rape victim, or buy into the apparently universal media consensus that he fell into a consciously pre-meditated trap, designed by perverts. He knows what he has done, and has to acknowledge his own part in it, for his own sanity, to ensure his own later growth into a sexually confident and responsible man.