As an E-mail subscriber to John Kilpatrick's Silver Fox Mailing List, I have corresponded with several of the hundreds of men from the age of 18 to decades beyond my own 63 years who also subscribe. We are there because it is one of the few forums and outlets of any kind available to the Senior Gay and his Younger, Same-Age or Older Admirers. We comprise, in a way, a Worldwide Web of our own, spinning dreams for each other that ofttimes translate into the reality of bosom penpals, lovers and friends in and from the farthest corners of the earth. As a certain group of us is prone to pronounce, "We are legion." Yes, by God, we are, and by our divine right as a segment of humanity gifted by the Higher Power with a spark quite different from that of others, we shall so remain.  

In the course of my day on the Internet, I chat by E-mail or chat room with "my guys." Among them are those far younger than I who sometimes turn to me with this question: "What do you think?" Less tried than I only for want of my numbering of years, they seek an answer not from a presumed well of wisdom, but from a buddy whose catalogue of life experience is writ in several languages and many cultures. I always respond ex animo, which is to say, "from the heart."  

One of these fine young men, in a country other than the United States, told me today a sad story of the "break up" of a relationship with an E-mail and chat-room friend in America over an unfortunate exchange of words. "I'm sorry for what I have done," he telegraphed me on ICQ, and has taken all responsibility upon himself. He is a noble guy in my estimation, because after hearing the whole story (one-sided version, to be sure), I believe they share an equal helping of blame.  

My friend, I have asked you to read this column for my answer to you. Pardon us, world, while my buddy and I work this out:  

I think that E-mail and cyberspace chat rooms are not the best places to fall in love. If they do not lead eventually to face-to-face encounters in the real world, they will exist only in a vacuum. Without the substantial contributions made by body language, eye contact and the magnetism of physical attraction, such relationships may be easily aborted by misunderstandings. Why? Because few of us are sufficiently gifted to express the wholeness of our true selfhood in words alone, and photographs are the father of all liars. There is magic in fantasy because we have been cast adrift in our dreams of what we most need and want from the "beloved," without any true element of reality as anchorage when the wind blast of the unexpected hits us, and we find ourselves awash in our own dashed expectations.  

I cannot give you counsel because I am not in your shoes, but if I WERE in them, I would say to myself that this is a time to cool it and let him enjoy his self-imposed silence. He is either suffering for his foolhardiness in cutting you off and doesn't know how to undo the damage, or he is toasting in the New Year delighted to have got you off his back. If the first be true, that he doesn't know what to do about it, I would let him stew in own juices of self-doubt and misery until his manhood, if he has any, comes to the rescue and brings him back to your cyberspace door knocking penitently for readmission. A worthy man admits the possibility he may have been wrong and sets out to put the thing in order. If the second be true, that he doesn't really give a damn, I would feel I have already hurt myself enough in an agony of self-recrimination, and I would toast the New Year in, too.  

This would be my toast: "Live long, love well and prosper, my darling, wherever and with whomever you may be, and so, by God, shall I."  

You know, I have been through this, too. We live, and we learn. Such a situation in my personal life was beyond imagining just six months ago. I was a lonely, sexually unloved and secretly spiritless man with no prospects for personal happiness on the heart level ever in sight for the rest of my days. Then I got a telephone call from a friend outside San Francisco. "Drive out here and see me," he said, "because I want you to meet an old buddy of mine who is visiting from Florida."  

When I walked in the door, that old buddy of his, age 76, patted my prominent tummy and said with a grin, "Hey, baby, they need you at Chardees! Come on down!"  

Chardees, of which I had never heard, is a gay bar in Fort Lauderdale and, I came to conclude, a mecca for the Silver Fox and his admirers. The Florida fellow had met his lover there, a much younger man who had flown in from Paris after hearing in Europe of Chardees. Today, several years later, they continue in love, visiting one another regularly in their respective countries.  

Did I take him up on his offer to fly to Fort Lauderdale? Damned right I did! And among the fine men I met at Chardees in those two weeks and with whom I enjoyed relationships as satisfying as any in my life, I became friendly with one who gave the clue that led me to John Kilpatrick's Silver Fox List.  

I subscribed when I got back to California and became, overnight, the kid in the proverbial candy store, trying a piece of everything in sight. Before I knew it, I was involved in intense cybersexual affairs and protestations of eternal love and all that "stuffs," as I have noticed you put it in your charming English. Baby, I got burnt, but in the singeing lay the lesson: once (or thrice) burnt, ten times careful, and I began to temper the two-edged sword of my eloquent prose because that's where it's at in E-mail and chat rooms - the typed or written word.  

Now, don't think I disbelieve in true love uncovered in cyberspatial connections like E-mail and chat rooms. I do believe. I have seen it happen, right there on the Silver Fox List, but it always leads to the one-on-one of which I spoke, to the meeting face-to-face, and in THAT pudding of personal contact lies the proof of the relationship's ultimate value, of its worth in the currency of love. Millionaires or paupers, it is decided as living, breathing men, not as impulses from Internet to hard drive, and vice versa.  

A week or so ago, I was invited to a lavish pre-Christmas party in Palm Springs in an elegant suite at the Marquis Hotel, hosted by a pair of gentlemen lovers who met through correspondence on the List. One is younger than the other. They are a perfect match, and they are in love. They lived in different parts of the country, met, agreed, and pooled their resources to buy a lovely home in the glamorous desert spa. I had met them at their swimming-pool party a couple of months before when they gave a gathering for members of the List attending a Prime Timers convention in Palm Springs. So I have had opportunities to observe them close in. I tell you, my friend, it works! But not for everyone in every case, like anything else in life.  

I attended the party with a friend from Southern California, a handsome and bright young man of 19 named Shiloh who often posts, or publishes, interesting letters on the List. He is one of many intelligent younger guys among the hundreds of men who subscribe. Shiloh wanted to meet some of those sexy Silver Foxes. I asked him to pick a few and then proceeded to embarrass him half to death by shouldering my way in to make introductions. Ah, well, that's life with Ben Boxer. Your every wish is my command, so you'd best be careful what you wish.  

During the evening, a dashing young fellow appeared before me and said: "You can't be Ben Boxer! He's tall and slim and a military-type of guy, not......" I stopped him with a grin. "Not sort of short and sort of wide and not exactly a macho Marine?" I concluded for him. He snatched off my cap (we were outside on the terrace) and rubbed my bald head. "I like you better," he declared, "and you're kinda cute."  

So was he, Jim Haggerty, owner and administrator of the Silver Fox Web site. I had seen his picture, but he looked a whole lot better in the flesh. As I have said, photographs do lie. Could have gone for him myself, but he was already "taken," by the famous Pair of Jacks you can read about on his site. I wanted to meet Jim to talk about what I call the Silver Fox Syndrome, this thing about mature men and their admirers. Its values are still new to me, and I need to learn. We agreed that I would go to his home the following day. He also extended the invitation to Shiloh.  

The next day we were greeted by some magnificent dogs who accepted me as one of their own. As a dog-lover, I took that as a compliment. In his study, Jim settled back, and the three of us (with Shiloh) talked away the afternoon. As a computer nerd, whatever that means, Shiloh understood everything Jim said about how things are set up. I mostly listened and looked out the window at the guest house and swimming pool and the beautiful, sunny, warm Palm Springs winter day.  

My primary interest lay in Haggerty's heart, where it was placed that he would devote himself so earnestly to bringing strangers together for friendship and love. I did, of course, pick up a few other things, like his fascinating concept of the Internet as a universal library whose shelves are filled with books in which we may browse and may even find each other. Damn, that's a good'un, Jim, as Colonel Brock would say.  

When I asked him for a formal statement of his intent, he said: "My main goal in maintaining the Silver Fox Web site is to provide a tool for the List members to broaden their horizons, open their lives, enlightenment, or whatever term comes to mind that will result in a more full life and self awareness. Pretty lofty goal, but I've found for the most part that this goal has not only been achieved but in several cases exceeded beyond their greatest expectations. It's your Web. I'm simply here to make sure it runs smoothly."  

When I asked him why we call it the Web, he used a metaphor, as we often do in reference to computers which are said to have "senses" and a "memory." He spoke of a spider spinning a web, which led me to think of it as a wispy entity intricately interconnected in its multitude of parts, spanning far-flung spaces, which a fly may touch at the remotest extremity, its relative weightlessness still transmitting impulses which the spider interprets as data or information alerting it to the presence of prey.  

Thus, my friend, do our emotions become prey for spiders of the Web, the unseen demons that attack where we lay open our defenses by overreacting and sometimes taking too literally as substance what is in reality only a hint of substance, not always clearly revealed in the faulty mechanism of mere words.