404 Not Found: Blogging Off
Remembering my website BoyCulture.com, which — along with scores of other venerable blogs — has vanished along with Typepad
September 30, 2025
About six weeks ago, Typepad — the host of my blog BoyCulture.com — informed its clients that it would cease to exist on September 30.
We were offered a tool within CMS that was supposed to make saving our content as easy as one click, but it never worked for me. One reason could be that my site was two months shy of 20 years old, and had more than 40,000 image-rich posts.
When contacted for help, Typepad promised to provide me with a download of my entire site, urging patience. After the site went down for a few days, their next follow-up was to tell me helping me could risk another collapse since my site was so large, but to reassure me I was still in a cue. Finally, Typepad casually told me to consider an Enterprise plan at WordPress.
For $25,000.
I was on my own, so I spent about 10 days going through every post from 2005 until now creating PDFs of those that felt special — personal essays, image-rich event recaps, including exhaustive autograph-show adventures and Broadway Bares flesh feasts; original interviews with everyone from Jimmy Somerville to Sharon Gless to Janis Ian to Madonna; obituaries, movie reviews, some of my most eye-popping links roundups and my reactions to things like Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump.
As I PDFed the past, it was like reading my diary, except I don’t have one because BoyCulture.com was the diary.
In the mix was a raft of flashback LGBTQ+ and -adjacent content, not always warm and fuzzy: barebacking, Brokeback Mountain, Jazz Jennings, Lance Bass, The A-List: New York, civil unions, Black Spark, monkey pox, Adam Lambert, anti-gay John Mangum twerking on Vine, Jeff Gannon, Rachel Maddow, “Right in front of my salad?”; Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; Magic Mike, Lohanthony, Ronnie Kroell, Dan Choi, Andrew Scott, Laverne Cox, Colton Haynes, Paul Mescal’s shorts, the Cub Scouts, Calum McSwiggan, Shepard Smith, Looking, Jussie Smollett, PrEP, Marcus “Ladybird” Bachmann, gay for pay, gay conversion therapy, Finding Prince Charming, “evolving” on marriage equality, Reichen Lehmkuhl, “Oh, Myyyy!,” Gays Against Guns, Lori Lightfoot, Steve Grand, Matt Sanchez; “no, really, Ellen was super mean to my friend”; Larry Craig, George Santos, Tammy Baldwin, Chadwick Moore, “Angela Bassett / Did the thing,” Milo Yianopoulos, Jon Hamm’s bulge, Richard Grenell, Josh Seiter, Andy Cohen, GaysOverCovid, Call Me by Your Name, no cops at Pride, Neil Patrick Harris hosting the Tonys, Pose, Bruce McArthur, Edie Windsor, Caitlyn Jenner, Mid-Century Modern, gay blood donors, gay adoption, Ali Forney, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Glenn Greenwald, Wanda Sykes, Hannah Gadsby, the Golden Girls Café, Davey Wavey, All of Us Strangers, Artem Bezrukavenko, Sarah McBride, Kim “Motherfucking” Davis and marriage equality … to name but a few.
From the beginning, my site was a personal blog, but its title and my self-appointed desire to cover as much ground as I could made it feel like a legitimate queer news-aggregation source. And it was; it may have been a record of one man’s perceptions, but one person’s thoughts are often reflective of the thoughts of many others, and the comments section back in the day captured many other points of view. (I had 50,000 comments as of 2013, when I switched to Disqus.)
I always knew it would end, and often referred to that eventuality. One friend pretty coldly mocked me when the site really did end, bringing up my past hand-wringing. But as someone who is an obsessive archivist of gay male erotica, of Madonnabilia and of Old (and Middle-Aged) Hollywood, it hadn’t really sunk with me that my blog — aren’t they all by definition sort of diaristic and temporal? — was every bit as potentially ephemeral as a silent movie, '50s TV broadcast or 2000s email.
To be fair, there’s nothing current about any site on Typepad, or a “blog,” or a blog on Typepad named “Boy Culture.” I used to have to sheepishly tell women who I was covering “We like girls, too!”
Part of what I always did was revel in gay male sexuality. That now can seem establishment, but I’m still from the time when being out and having a gay sex drive were acts of rebellion.
As times changed and “gay” became “LGBTQ+” became “queer,” I felt a bit boxed in by the brand. It was never that I wanted a specifically gay male site, but the implications of the name hadn’t been obvious to me way back when. I’m keeping it in this new incarnation because hey, I’m the boy and this is the culture I’m seeking to explore, preserve and spread.
Even if the name had struck me as limiting, I probably wouldn’t have worried too much — after all, there was no evidence anyone would read it.
But I went from 1 view on Day 1 to 218 on Day 2 to 6,472 within a couple of months (thanks to a YouTube embed of Madonna, in high school, with an egg frying on her taut abdomen) to regularly cresting 10,000 views and even going viral at times with 100,000+. (Quoting a lame gossip item from National Enquirer that Zac Efron might be gay far outperformed my vexed opinion of George W. Bush.)
I logged about 86 million pageviews, and I think I created a space that was unique to me in a field of other, similar sites. I don’t think any one LGBTQ+ site is or should be the ultimate, but I know I brought intelligence, dad humor (I loved my wordplay headers along the lines of “Wait, There’s More Butt", “The Candis Cayne Mutiny,” or “In Praise of Shoulder” women — a review of Mildred Pierce parody Mildred Fierce), a tongue-in-cheek libidinous eye and an appreciation for the creativity of others.
In salvaging, I wound up with roughly 2,000 PDFs from all across my history. I used Sitesucker to salvage what I assume is a decent portion of the site and then, hours before the deadline, I found a guy who was happy to inexpensively archive what we believe to be my entire site, preserving it forever.
Or until those files are corrupted or lost, I suppose. But it’s a reprieve from abrupt erasure.
I’m not relaunching that version of Boy Culture. I’m not doing daily links anymore. I thought I should spend more time on longer, more thematically targeted pieces (hence this Substack, and this one).
Even though I haven’t lost everything, it’s left me pondering the things that are lost.
I launched my blog as an excuse to document the rollout of Boy Culture, a 2006 film adaptation of my 1995 novel of the same name, and used it to promote all my other writing, including an updated version of my Encyclopedia Madonnica, pieces for Esquire.com on Playgirl and Mavety Media and even a series — Boy Culture: Generation X. That ability to boost my own work will be lessened.
More broadly important is that I will be less likely to regularly shine a light on new queer musicians, writers and other creatives as I have over the past 20 years. I’ve embedded more music videos with 100 views than I can remember, and I will miss having a daily site to point to when looking for tickets to offbeat and/or off-Broadway shows. (Always made me laugh when friends would question why I received an invite to a show or press conference. “I’m press! I’m press!”)
I can still offer my thoughts on current events without aggregating links, but I’ll have to do it via social media — like everyone else. I fought that for so many years, because I always felt it was better to have my own thing rather than using someone else’s thing to express myself. Even when I relied on social media to goose traffic, it was still traffic to my creation.
I will sorely miss the kick I got when researching a topic via Google, only to see my own site popping up in the search results, and the convenience of remembering a long-ago event and being able to Google it with “BoyCulture.com” because I knew I’d covered it, so I knew my coverage was out there, waiting to be revisited.
I will miss writing about something and getting a great reaction. I once wrote a tribute to my first boyfriend, who died tragically, and received a response from his daughter. I eulogized one my best elementary-school buddies, and his family commented warmly. I beseeched the universe to find me Vernon Gray, a presumably dead gay actor whose belongings I’d bought on eBay, and while the answer came a couple of weeks too late, I did find out what ever became of him — he’d abandoned his old life and had been living in Mexico.
Some famous names reached even out to me about my site, most memorably an old boss. I worked at the short-lived daytime talk show Anderson Live and sent its namesake Anderson Cooper photos I’d snapped of him with Madonna a few months after the show was canceled, only to hear back from him, “How did I never know my Web producer was the creator of Boy Culture? I enjoy your site very much. It must be a lot of work. Next time say hi.”
I’ll also miss the minor ad revenue, which I hope will be replaced via Substack. (Thank you to everyone for subbing, and especially to those with paid subs.)
On the other hand, I will soon be “missing” other things, too — the hourly desire to fill my site with new-new-new; the sometimes bossy notes from publicists who felt my site was a public service or the ones who would invite me to interview a client and then reject me when I agreed; the steady stream of sketchy offers to run posts with gambling links for Ukrainian companies; other sites following my lead on news items and monetizing them more effectively (hey, I was one guy); sometimes not getting invited to gay media events in my own backyard; and would you believe that Typepad’s photo-upload function was on the fritz for years, meaning when I had a post of 50 photos, I would sometimes have to upload each one of them one to 10 times apiece?!
Then there were the occasional pleas or threats from hot guys who used to be underwear models and — now that they were starting careers on Wall Street — felt an ancient post of mine featuring them was damaging their reputations. Or the copyright trolls. I learned the hard way that people can threaten to sue for anything and actually might sue if the stars align against you.
And of course, writing a blog exposed me in ways of which I never dreamed. I would have fans who became haters over minute differences of opinion (like the time I joked “We can’t be friends if you’re a Jay Leno fan,” prompting a person I knew IRL and had met via the blog to tell me this was why my relationship of 18 years had ended), people who would comment angrily as if we were warring spouses even though I had no idea they were building a case against me and endless complaints about things ranging from the inane “I hate tattooed guys” to the valid “you don’t have enough people of color.” I took every comment to heart, even the dumb ones. But the smart ones were in abundance and did help make the site better, even if I did still have to endure Lady Gaga fans writing that they hoped I choked on my AIDS pill and gay Republicans ominously warning that they might be sitting behind me at the next movie I saw.
But all the bad stuff — except for the stalking and the lawsuit — was actually part of the good stuff.
An analogy: Owning two dogs was the joy of my life, even if there were sad or challenging times along the way, and even if that life-changing status came to a life-changing end when they did.
BoyCulture.com was something like that. It was something I worked on for hours every day for 20 years, and is now something I used to work on for hours every day for 20 years.
Which reminds me: I do not like finality, so I often focus on it. In the way that I have eulogized countless celebrities and LGBT+ figures via my obituaries, I felt the intense need to come here — to my next online home — and to note that today, September 30, 2025, was the last day BoyCulture.com (b. November 5, 2005) existed.
RIP BoyCulture.com, and long live BoyCulture.Substack.com. Please stick with me, and please tell a friend. ⚡️
Awwww, Matthew, you made me get misty. I can't tell you what a staple Boy Culture - and you - have been of my daily internet existence, pretty much since the beginning. And what a hole this will leave in my ever-shrinking online life. Thank you for everything you've done, and I look forward to more from you via Substack, or wherever you might show up in the future.
Thank you for all the years of great writing and posts. I feel like we grew up together in nyc across the life of boy culture. . I look forward to your next era on substack. I ll be subscribing xx carmen