My name is Jay and I am a 44 year old man (born in June of 1954 which makes me a Gemini, so I have at least two views on everything). Since this page is located in the West Hollywood section of GeoCities, you may correctly conclude that I am gay. I have been in a mutually monogamous relationship (yeah, well same-sex marriage is still a myth in the US . . . to see my views you can read my family page) for 15 years (since December 17, 1983).
I am a computer programmer/analyst and have been working in mainframe environments since 1975. I am currently unemployed (I prefer to explain it as semi-retired as it has pretty much been a voluntary decision to remain so). We recently moved from Abilene, Texas to Charlotte, North Carolina. We decided to leave Abilene back in late 1996 and began visiting and evaluating parts of the country we thought we might like to live. Late last year we decided that Charlotte seemed to fit a lot of our needs, and so far we haven't been disappointed. Here are some useful links for web pages about gay life in Charlotte:
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Gay Charlotte - good collection of links and general information about Charlotte gay life |
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Charlotte Rainbow News - New articles of interest to the Charlotte gay community distributed via email |
| Q-Notes Online - online site of local biweekly gay newspaper distributed free in Charlotte businesses | |
| Gay & Lesbian Switchboard - information, referrals, and peer counseling | |
| Out Charlotte - community organization | |
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Time Out Youth - resources for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth (13-23) |
When I am asked about hobbies or interests, I naturally list reading first since we have a library that is constantly growing. A few years back I entered all the books in a database on the computer (now I really admire all you librarians out there) and at that time we had 2,600 books. Prior to our last move we trimmed down to about 1,800. We have been preparing for the move (that eventually brought us to Charlotte) for more than a year now and have finally gotten it down to about 1,700 (but there are always more books coming from somewhere so it is a never ending battle).
We also like to watch movies on videotape and have a pretty large collection. Because of our geographic location (we have always lived away from major metropolitan areas), the only way to experience a lot of gay films is by acquiring the videotape, so a significant segment of our collection is videos with gay content. We have also found some really interesting gay plays that have been captured on videotape.
Naturally, since I have a home page and because of my profession, computers are a major interest of mine. On a consulting job years ago I worked on a workstation with a multi-tasking operating system and was so taken with it that I rushed to duplicate the environment at home. So I ended up with OS/2 (version 2.0) and have been an OS/2 fan(atic) ever since. However, in the past year I have upgraded my computer and now have 4 operating systems that I regularly use: OS/2 (version 4.0), Windows 95, FreeBSD 2.2.5 (Unix clone), and PC-DOS/Windows 3.11.
The name on my page here is JayTexas because the nickname I was using on Internet Relay Chat was Jay-TX when I created the page. These days, you will find me as Jay-NC. I am not a real IRC addict (and when I return to work full-time I expect my Internet time will need to drop some so that we can have a social life in the real world), so I won't guarantee that you can always find me there, but I do drop in occasionally. I recommend you try #GayChristians or #GayDecentGuys on EFNET or #GayChristians or #GayNiceGuys on Undernet. I added the -TX when I kept being confused with another Jay, but from Connecticut. TX also conveniently alludes to my husband's name (which is Texas, no it really is his name -- not a nickname). If you use AOL Instant Messenger, I use the screen name of JayTX54.
