Editor’s Note: This was written a few years ago by an online friend of mine, and I asked if I could re-post because it might give my friends some insight on what it meant to me to come out as having been catfished as a kid, because while we weren’t girlfriends, we were close enough for it to really, really hurt. I still hold out hope that Rainie MacMillan of Swansea Wales who played in a band called Jezebel Spirit is actually a real person. Rainie, if you’re reading this, I love you deeply and our friendship changed me in a lot of great ways. I wasn’t catfished if you were a real person. You just left in such a hurry that I think it happened. One minute, you were there and full of life… the next, you were gone from the world. Disappeared. No rhyme or reason, just absolute cut-off with no denouement or closure.
This essay is the one thing that is making me feel better, because it validates everything I’ve been feeling. This person catfished under a different gender; looking into his past allows me to look into my future. Because I was so young, I never engaged in cybersex or any of the more adult topics here. I just want to prove that even if Internet people aren’t real to you, they are to other Internet people. Aliases that die affect us, and this piece is one of them that shows how much.
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For the first four years of my internet life, I was Karen Camino, an asian girl living in unspecified parts of Texas. I completed my persona with a web site and a bio, lending her an authenticity rarely duplicated in other mediums.
The funny thing is, she became real after about a year or so. She had her own motivations, her own family life, that usually mirrored my own, but she had the ability to act out her family life looking retrospectively at my own.
After a few years, the charade chafed as I began to meet people from online in real life and Karen became revealed for the fiction that she was, shocking many of the people who had grown close to me. To many of them, all they had ever known was Amy and this “Gregory” person had just replaced her, like in a bad horror flick.
This was one of my first and most intense experiences with the ability of modern technology to incorporate two seemingly contradictory truths.
I was/am Karen Camino.
I was/am Gregory Pierce.
While the name of Karen Camino is just a relect of my childhood now, she still exists. Not only in the memories of people she befriended, romanced, and loved, but in myself as well, as she let me become less “man” and more “human”.
Am I a transgendered? androgynous? or something new, made possible only through modern technology? I have no wish to become fully female in the classic transgendered sense. I am not a woman trapped in a man’s body. Nor do I deny both sexes, become a neuter, as the term androgynous implies. Yet I still have the yearning to feel as a woman does, to experience sex as a woman does. It tugs at me as if it were some lost fragment of humanity, once experienced, now gone.
When I engaged in cybersex as a female, my mind imagined sex as a woman. I imagined being penetrated, both riding on top, in control, and being ridden, on the bottom of the couple, releasing my control willingly to my partner. I experienced anal sex as a woman, different than as a man. I enjoyed the shared politics of lesbian sex, and the transgressions of de/constructing gender roles as a lesbian.
All of these things I imagined in my head, eliminating my penis. Did I feel as if power had been stolen away from me in some Freudian penis envy? No. I felt empowered as my boundries broke down, as I tried to understand how sexual relations felt to others. It was perhaps one of the most powerful moments of my life. Would I have felt the same if I was a woman pretending to be a man? I think so, and the number of women I knew during this period who went under the guise of male supports my hypothesis.
Stories That Are All True 