Computer Love pt. 3

I met this great guy online, an artist like myself. We chatted all morning about things we were both most interested in and it was fascinating and he was great looking, very sexy and smart and funny and I was almost falling in love, or at least as close to it as you can on growl'r. His pictures were a little bit blurry and arty but he's an artist so that kind of goes with the territory and there was enough visible for me to be able to tell that I liked what I saw. Then, after exchanging 120 messages I asked if we could be facebook friends and he said sure unless my page had all kinds of gay stuff on it because if someone back home saw it that could be very difficult for him. So I thought about it and figured that yeah, there probably was some gay stuff there on my FB page, I mean, I'm gay and very sociable and it's New York so I get invited to lots of gay themed events along with a lot of things that have nothing to do with my sexuality. Then all of a sudden my heart sank and I thought about why. This probably touched off the little bit of internalized homphobia still inside me even though me and my shrink work on that regularly but mostly I was reminded of a very specific hurt that I felt when a previous boyfriend treated me as an inconvenience and dumped me around the holidays as his family didn't know he had a boyfriend. So after this Artist guy told me the conditions under which we could be facebook friends, all of a sudden I backed off and he felt it and asked why. I told him of all the feelings it brought up, the hurt of losing someone I knew didn't really want to break with me, the accusations that he had to make up. The whole thing was like some '50's melodrama...a bad B-movie or the scene in STTS where the blond spy dumps his BF for no reason other then a fear of being found out. I stayed with these feeling and examined each new on that came up to make sure I have no resentment towards my ex. and I don't, I thank him for teaching me to love and respect myself and to avoid any situation were I have to hide who I really am.