Alexis

Alexis is best known for his History of BoyChat , which covers the origins of BoyChat up to 1998. He began reading BoyChat upon its opening in December of 1995. His nick has also become most closely associated with the Alexis principle. He was one of the founding members and a major financial backer of the Free Spirits Committee and the creator of MetaBoyChat and Religious Debate Chat.

Alexis created and popularized a set of whimsical categories to describe boys: milk and cookies to describe little boys aged up to about 10, bread and butter for boys of about 11 to 13 and spaghetti and meatballs for teenboys. These terms are now in rare use but for a time in the late 1990s they were often seen in posts on BoyChat.

Alexis was known for thoughtful posts, an almost encyclopedic knowledge of music and for his romance with another poster, Adam TBK, with whom he often made joint posts.

Alexis on Alexis

The following was taken from Alexis's Mindscape which was last updated in 2001. All rights reserved.

About me

If you're really that interested...

My name is Alexis, I'm 31 years old, and I live in the USA, and that's as much as I feel comfortable telling you here. That's because I am a boylover. I love boys in every size shape and form, but I particularly adore boys between the ages of 12 and 14.

Why? That makes as much sense as asking why someone is black or white, or straight or gay. I've had boylove baked into my heart for as long as I can remember. Certainly since I was a child.

For years I thought I was sick or evil or simply a freak. I had close friends, but I kept my closest feelings from them, except in self-loathing outbursts, particularly when I drank too much or did drugs. I did a lot of drugs until a couple years ago, mostly because that was the only way I could talk about my true self.

My friends knew better than to ever ask me about love or sex or boyfriends. I was supposedly an out gay man to them, but in reality everyone knew that the subject of love was off-limits. I was desperately ashamed that I had nobody to love and no experience other than some doomed infatuations when I was a teenager. The older I got, the harder this failure became for me to deal with. I compensated by being successful in other areas of life: academics, career, friendship.

The only thing that kept me going in the dark years of my late teens and twenties was my voracious reading. I read English, Latin, Greek, German, French and Italian. I also know a lot of history. From the age of 12 I knew that although I couldn't tell anyone that I was in love with younger boys, in other countries, other times, and in fictional and fantastic worlds, boyloving was not only allowed, but celebrated. Thank God for Virgil and Petronius, Mary Renault and Guy Davenport, Forrest Reid and Roger Peyrefitte, Henri de Montherlant and Paul Goodman.

These were my friends when I couldn't talk to anyone about my feelings: great works of literature and poetry throughout the ages that celebrated love between boys and between boys and men.

People tend to think that boylove is mainly a sexual thing. They're wrong. Sexual feelings may exist, yes, but they come after deep emotional commitment, the kind of despairing, risky commitment that few straight or gay adults will ever know. In the face of love like ours, the question of sex is almost irrelevant. I certainly cannot imagine forcing a boy to do anything he did not wish to do!

In the last year or two, I've discovered through the medium of the Internet that there are many, many other boylovers like me out there, and yes, boys who love boys and even boys who love men. And we are not monsters or predators or molesters. We are people like everyone else, with the desires that nature or God has given us. If society thought differently, there could be nothing wrong with a boy expressing his love for a man, or a man expressing his love for a boy. Alas, we live in cheapened, sickening, media-superficial times, and most people may NEVER be able to understand.

All I ask is this: open up your heart, imagine yourself in our shoes, and ask yourself: WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Alexis.

More about me

This part gets pretty self-pitying and weird. Exit now if you don't want to deal.

A lot's happened since I wrote my last "About me" statement. That was the end of December, 1996. Now it's early May, 1997.

Some stuff happened that I still have trouble understanding. I fell in love, or thought I did. A couple of times, actually. But one big time. And it happened over the net.

It was the first time somebody else seemed to feel about me the way I felt about him. He wasn't a boy, exactly -- he was 19 -- but that was okay. I wasn't necessarily looking for sex. I was looking for someone to be my best friend forever, if that makes any sense. Yes, with physical touching and everything. But most of all the closeness.

We talked on the phone all the time and wrote tons of letters to each other. Well, he was and is a wonderful person, but time passed and he didn't want to get any closer, to meet up in real life, whatever. So I decided I couldn't risk getting in any deeper, and I told him if we couldn't move any closer to a real life relationship, I couldn't talk to him anymore. That was in February and we haven't talked since.

It was all kind of weird, 'cause he is a boylover himself. Theoretically we're two men who would have no attraction to each other, but there was this intense, intense bond. Maybe words like "love" and "boyfriend" and "sex" are just insufficiently varied to name the kinds of bonds out there. Or maybe I was fooling myself, 'cause I want affection so badly. I wanted to believe I was in love?

I don't know, maybe I was in love. I think I was. Maybe I don't even know what love is. Why do I keep falling for boylovers online? Yes, I'm leary of physical contact, and yes, it's hard to get close to "normal" people that you can't explain your desires and your identity and your history to.

But I think it's something else: it's the longing to be a boy again. Not necessarily in the sense of playing kick the can while the sun goes down (though that's great), but more in the sense of being able to have a best friend. Gay men know a little bit better what I'm talking about, but I want to relate to a boy as another boy. Not roleplaying. But actually depending on someone in that uncomplicated, trusting, taken for granted kind of way. Perhaps it's impossible for an adult to experience that again. I loved it and I want it back.

Alexis.

Even more about me

Well, I realize that my other "About Me" sections were on the down side... but in fact, most of my life, I've been very up. How is this possible??

The last two About Me's dealt with my 20s, particularly my late 20s. In my frustration at not finding love, I simply swept the love side of me away, under the carpet. I focused on other things in life, such as friendship and writing. I found joy and happiness in these things. Eventually the hidden love came back and struck me upside the head, and then I had to experience unhappiness in order to put it back in my life. (Details forthcoming upon request.)

When I was a teenager, though, I was deliriously happy most of the time. I knew I loved boys, and I was secretly proud! Boy, was I proud. I'd always prided myself on being different from everyone else anyway, whether in wearing glasses or being into Roman history, so when I figured out I liked boys too, it just fed into the equation. It sucked not to be able to tell anyone about it, and it sucked that my best friend didn't want to experiment with me, but so what! I was still special.

I turned 17 and got into punk rock and started wearing weird clothing. All of a sudden I was popular for being weird! I was best friends with a beautiful 14 year old, and it seemed that life could not get any better. I was in touch with this vibrant underground world of music that was being made by kids, and I had a companion with which to enjoy it. We were weird together.

Only after my friend said no to me, after high school, did life take a downward turn... still, after freshman year in college, I learned to enjoy things again. Music, literature, history, eating and DJ'ing are still the best things on earth. Oh yeah, and love. That too. Well, I'm learning about it. But I still won't give up being weird!

Alexis.

External links

• Alexis's mindscape