The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover

from the archives, 1985

A note: the following essay is not mine.

It was written by Lindsy Van Gelder and published in Ms. Magazine in October 1985 — over forty years ago. Van Gelder was a journalist and longtime Ms. contributor who had recently gotten a modem and started hanging out on CompuServe’s CB channels, the text-based chat rooms that were the social internet before there was a social internet.

What she found there was one of the earliest cases of online identity deception: a prominent New York psychiatrist who had spent two years posing as a disabled woman named Joan, building deep emotional relationships — and in some cases sexual ones — with dozens of women who believed they were talking to a peer. When the deception unraveled, it broke something. Not just for the women involved, but for the broader community’s belief that the medium’s disembodiment was inherently liberating.

I’m reposting it here as preservation.

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I “met” Joan in the late spring of 1983, shortly after I first hooked my personal computer up to a modem and entered the strange new world of online communications. Like me, Joan was spending a great deal of time on the “CB” channel of the national network CompuServe, where one can encounter other modem owners in what amounts to a computer version of CB radio. I was writing an article for Ms. about modems and doing online interviews with CB regulars. Joan was already a sought-after celebrity among the hundreds of users who hung out on the channel — a telecommunications media star.

Talkin’ Lady

Her “handle” was “Talkin’ Lady.” According to the conventions of the medium, people have a (usually frivolous) handle when they’re on “open” channels with many users; but when two people choose to enter a private talk mode, they’ll often exchange real information about themselves. I soon learned that her real name was Joan Sue Greene, and that she was a New York neuropsychologist in her late twenties, who had been severely disfigured in a car accident that was the fault of a drunken driver. The accident had killed her boyfriend. Joan herself spent a year in the hospital, being treated for brain damage, which affected both her speech and her ability to walk. Mute, confined to a wheelchair, and frequently suffering intense back and leg pain, Joan had at first been so embittered about her disabilities that she literally didn’t want to live.

Then her mentor, a former professor at Johns Hopkins, presented her with a computer, a modem, and a year’s subscription to CompuServe to be used specifically doing what Joan was doing — making friends online. At first, her handle had been “Quiet Lady,” in reference to her muteness. But Joan could type — which is, after all, how one “talks” on a computer — and she had a sassy, bright, generous personality that blossomed in a medium where physicality doesn’t count. Joan became enormously popular, and her new handle, “Talkin’ Lady,” was a reflection of her new sense of self. Over the next two years, she became a monumental online presence who served both as a support for other disabled women and as an inspiring stereotype-smasher to the able-bodied. Through her many intense friendships and (in some cases) her online romances, she changed the lives of dozens of women.

The revelation

Thus it was a huge shock early this year when, through a complicated series of events, Joan was revealed as being not disabled at all. More to the point, Joan, in fact, was not a woman. She was really a man we’ll call Alex — a prominent New York psychiatrist in his early fifties who was engaged in a bizarre, all-consuming experiment to see what it felt like to be female, and to experience the intimacy of female friendship.

Even those who barely knew Joan felt implicated — and somehow betrayed — by Alex’s deception. Many of us online like to believe that we’re a utopian community of the future, and Alex’s experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against deceit. We lost our innocence, if not our faith.

To some of Alex’s victims — including a woman who had an affair with the real-life Alex, after being introduced to him by Joan — the experiment was a “mind rape,” pure and simple. (Several people, in fact, have tentatively explored the possibility of bringing charges against Alex as a psychiatrist — although the case is without precedent, to put it mildly.) To some other victims, Alex was not so much an impostor as a seeker whose search went out of control. (Several of these are attempting to continue a friendship with Alex — and, as one woman put it, “to relate to the soul, not the sex of the person. The soul is the same as before.”)

Either way, this is a peculiarly modern story about a man who used some of our most up-to-date technology to play out some of our oldest assumptions about gender roles.

The medium

More than most stories, it requires a bit of background. A modem, of course, is the device that connects a computer to the phone and from there to any other similarly equipped computer. CompuServe is the largest of a number of modem networks; it charges its subscribers an initial small fee to open an account with a special ID number and then charges hourly fees for access to its hundreds of services, from stock reports to airline information. In addition to its business services, the network also offers a number of “social” services (including numerous Special Interest Groups — SIGs — and the CB channels) where users can mingle.

The unfolding of an online relationship is unique, combining the thrill of ultra-futuristic technology with the veneration of the written word that informed 19th-century friendships and romances. Most people who haven’t used the medium have trouble imagining what it’s like to connect with other people whose words are wafting across your computer screen. For starters, it’s dizzyingly egalitarian, since the most important thing about oneself isn’t age, appearance, career success, health, race, gender, sexual preference, accent, or any of the other categories by which we normally judge each other, but one’s mind. My personal experience has been that I often respond to the minds of people whom, because of my own prejudices (or theirs), I might otherwise not meet. (For example, my best friend online is from Appalachia, which I once thought was inhabited only by Li’l Abner and the Dukes of Hazzard. My friend, in turn, had never had a gay friend before.)

But such mind-to-mind encounters presume that the people at both keyboards are committed to getting past labels and into some new, truer way of relating. In the wake of the Alex/Joan scandal, some online habitués have soberly concluded that perhaps there’s a thin line between getting out of one’s skin and getting into a completely false identity — and that the medium may even encourage impersonation. (One network, for example, has a brochure showing a man dressed up as Indiana Jones, Michael Jackson, and an Olympic athlete; the copy reads, “Be anything you want on American PEOPLE/LINK.”) Still, when it works, it works. Disabled people are especially well represented online, and most of them say that it’s a medium where they can make a first impression on their own terms.

Another positive consequence of the medium’s mind-to-mind potential — and this is germane to Joan’s story — is that it’s powerfully conducive to intimacy. Thoughts and emotions are the coin of this realm, and people tend to share them sooner than they would in “real life” (what CBers refer to as “offline”). Some people, in fact, become addicted to computer relationships, per se. But most use the modem merely as a way to start relationships that may, in time, continue offline. After several online conversations with someone who seems especially compatible, people commonly arrange to speak on the telephone, to exchange photographs, and eventually, to meet in person, either by themselves or at one of the regular “CB parties” held around the country. (Several marriages have resulted from online meetings on CompuServe CB alone.) I’ve met four good computer friends in person, and found them all much the same offline as on. For me, the only odd thing about these relationships has been their chronology. It’s a little surreal to know intimate details about someone’s childhood before you’ve ever been out to dinner together.

The cover

One of the reasons that Joan’s real identity went undetected for so long was that her supposed disability prevented her from speaking on the phone. (Several people did communicate with Joan on the phone, in one case because Joan had said that she wanted to hear the sound of the other woman’s voice. Joan in turn “would make horrible noises into the receiver — little yelps and moans.”) There was also the matter of Joan’s disfigurement; she supposedly drooled and had a “smashed up” face, untreatable by plastic surgery. She was, she said, embarrassed to meet her computer friends in person. Those who wanted to be sensitive to disabled concerns naturally didn’t push. It was an ingenious cover.

Alex supposedly began his dual identity by mistake. One of the social realities of the computing world is that the majority of its inhabitants are male; women usually get a lot of attention from all the men online. (Women who don’t want to be continually pestered by requests from strange males to go into private talk mode often use androgynous handles.) Female handles also get attention from other women, since many women online are pioneering females in their fields and feminists. Alex apparently came online sometime in late 1982 or early 1983 and adopted the handle “Shrink, Inc.” His epiphany came one evening when he was in private talk mode with a woman who for some reason mistook him for a female shrink. “The person was open with him in a way that stunned him,” according to one of the women — let’s call her Laura — who has maintained a friendship with Alex. “What he really found as Joan was that most women opened up to him in a way he had never seen before in all his years of practice. And he realized he could help them.”

“He later told me that his female patients had trouble relating to him — they always seemed to be leaving something out,” said Janis Goodall, a Berkeley, California, software firm employee who also knew both Joan and Alex. “Now he could see what it was.” (Despite their similar recollections, Goodall is in the opposite camp from Laura, and says “For someone supposedly dedicated to helping people, I think he rampaged through all of our feelings with despicable disregard.”) At some point after “Shrink, Inc.’s” inadvertent plunge into sisterhood, Joan was born.

According to both Goodall and Laura (both of whom are disabled themselves), Alex has a back condition, “arthritis of the spine or a calcium deposit of some kind,” according to Goodall, “which causes him discomfort, and has the potential, but not the probability of putting him in a wheelchair someday.” Goodall added that Alex later defended his choice of a disabled persona by claiming that he “wanted to find out how disabled people deal with it.” Others online believe that Joan’s handicaps were a way both to shroud her real identity and aggrandize her heroic stature.

The character

If Joan began spontaneously, she soon became a far more conscious creation, complete with electronic mail drop, special telephone line, and almost novelistically detailed biography (although she sometimes told different versions to different people). She was, by my own recollection and by the accounts of everyone interviewed, an exquisitely wrought character. For starters, she had guts. (She had once, before the accident, driven alone across the interior of Iceland as a way to cure her agoraphobia.) She had travelled everywhere, thanks to money left to her by her family’s textile mill fortune. She lived alone (although neighbours checked on her and helped her with errands) and was a model independent female. In fact, Joan was quite a feminist. It was she who suggested the formation of a women’s issues group within CompuServe, and she actively recruited members. Several women had relationships with Joan in which they referred to each other as “sister.”

Joan was earthy, too, and spoke easily about sex. One woman remembers hearing at length about Joan’s abortion at age 16; another recalls having a long conversation about Joan’s decision not to embark on a particular course of spinal surgery that might relieve her leg pain, but “would also affect her clitoral nerve, and she wouldn’t do that.” She was bisexual. Although her family had been religious (she told some people that her parents were ministers), she herself was an ardent atheist who liked to engage religious people in debate. She was also a grass-smoker who frequently confessed to being a little stoned if you encountered her late at night. Her usual greeting was a flashy, flamboyant “Hi!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Interestingly, the two people who knew Joan and also met Alex in person say that their surface personalities were opposite. Alex is Jewish. He almost never drinks or smokes pot (although one of his medical specialties is pharmacology). He is a workaholic whose American Psychiatric Association biography reports wide publication in his field. “Joan was wild and zingy and flamboyant and would do anything you dared her to,” notes Laura. “A part of Alex wanted to be like that, but he’s actually quite intellectual and shy.” Adds Janis Goodall: “Alex has a great deal of trouble expressing his emotions. There are long silences, and then he’ll say, ‘uh-huh, uh-huh.’ Just like a shrink.”

The heroic neuropsychologist

Above all, Joan was a larger-than-life exemplary disabled person. At the time of her accident, she had been scheduled to teach a course at a major New York medical school (in fact, the teaching hospital that Alex is affiliated with as a psychiatrist). Ironically, Joan noted, the course dealt with many of the same neurological impairments that she herself now suffered. One of Joan’s goals was eventually to resume her career as if the accident had never happened — and when I first knew her, she was embarked on an ambitious plan to employ a computer in the classroom to help her teach. The idea was that Joan would type her lecture into a computer, which would then be either magnified on a classroom screen or fed into student terminals. To all of us technofans and believers in better living through computers, it was a thrilling concept.

Joan was also a militant activist against the dangers of drunken drivers. Early in her convalescence, when she was frequently half out of her mind with anger, she had on several occasions wheeled herself out of her apartment and onto the streets of Manhattan, where she would shout at passing motorists. On one such occasion, police officers in her precinct, upon learning her story, suggested that she put her rage and her talent to more productive use. Joan then began to go out on patrol with a group of traffic cops whose job it was to catch drunken drivers. Joan’s role in the project was twofold: (1) as a highly credentialed neuropsychologist, she was better trained than most to detect cars whose drivers had reflex problems caused by too much drinking, and (2) she was willing to serve as an example to drunken drivers of what could befall them if they didn’t shape up.

Jack

On one of Joan’s forays, she met a young police officer named Jack Carr. As he and Joan spent more time together, he came to appreciate her spirit in much the same way the rest of us had. They fell in love — much to the distress of Jack’s mother, who thought he was throwing his life away. Joan’s online friends were heartened to learn much later that Mrs. Carr had softened after Joan bought her a laptop computer, and the two of them learned to communicate in the online world where Joan shone so brightly. Jack occasionally came online with Joan, although I remember him as being shy and far less verbal than Joan.

Shortly after I met Joan, she and Jack got married. Joan sent an elaborate and joyous announcement to all her CB pals via electronic mail, and the couple held an online reception, attended by more than 30 CompuServe regulars. (Online parties are not unusual. People just type in all the festive sound effects, from the clink of champagne glasses to the tossing of confetti.) Joan and Jack honeymooned in Cyprus, which, according to Pamela Bowen, a Huntington, West Virginia, newspaper editor, Joan said “was one of the few places she’d never been.” Bowen and many of Joan’s other online friends received postcards from Cyprus. The following year Joan and Jack returned to Cyprus and sent out another batch of cards.

“I remember asking Joan how she would get around on her vacation,” recalls Sheila Deitz, associate professor of law and psychology at the University of Virginia. “Joan simply replied that if need be, he’d carry her. He was the quintessential caring, nurturing, loving, sensitive human being” — a Mr. Right who, Deitz adds, exerted enormous pull on the imaginations of all Joan’s online female friends. In hindsight, Deitz feels, “he was the man Alex would have loved to be” — but in fact could only be in the persona of a woman.

Generosity

Joan was extraordinarily generous. On one occasion, when Laura was confined to her bed because of her disability and couldn’t use her regular computer, Joan sent her a laptop model — a gift worth hundreds of dollars. On another occasion, when Laura mentioned that no one had ever sent her roses, Joan had two dozen delivered. Marti Cloutier, a 42-year-old Massachusetts woman with grown children, claims that it was Joan who inspired her to start college. “She made me feel I could do it at my age.” When it came time for Cloutier to write her first term paper, she was terrified, but Joan helped her through it, both in terms of moral support and in the practical sense of sending her a long list of sources. (Ironically, Cloutier’s assignment was a psychology paper on multiple personalities. She got an “A” in the course.) On another occasion, Joan told Cloutier that she was going out to hear the “Messiah” performed. When Cloutier enviously mentioned that she loved the music, Joan mailed her the tape. On still another occasion, when Cloutier and her husband were having difficulties over the amount of time that she spent online, Joan volunteered to “talk” to him. Cloutier’s husband is also a part-time police officer, as Jack ostensibly was, and he and Joan easily developed a rapport. According to Marti Cloutier, Joan was able to persuade him that if his wife had her own friends and interests, it would ultimately be good for their marriage. “She was always doing good things,” Cloutier recalls, “and never asking anything in return.”

My personal recollections are similar. Once, when Joan and I were chatting online late at night, I realized to my great disbelief that a bat had somehow gotten into my apartment and was flapping wildly about, with my cats in crazed pursuit. I got off the computer, managed to catch the bat and get it back out the window — but in the attendant confusion, the windowpane fell out of the window and onto my arm, slicing my wrist and palm. Needless to say, I ended up in the emergency room. Joan dropped me several extremely solicitous notes over the next few weeks, making sure that my stitches were healing properly and that I was over the scare of the accident. Even earlier, around the time I first met Joan, the child of two of my oldest friends was hit by a car and knocked into a coma that was to last for several weeks. Joan had a lot of thoughts about the physiology of comas, as well as about how to deal with hospital staffs, insurance companies, and one’s own unraveling psyche in the midst of such a crisis. She offered to set up an online meeting with the child’s mother. I later heard that Joan had also helped several women who had suicidal tendencies or problems with alcohol.

The impostor hunter

Still another way that Joan nurtured her friends — hilarious as it sounds in hindsight — was to try to keep CB free of impostors. Although Joan was probably the slickest and most long-lived impostor around, she was hardly the only one; they are a continuing phenomenon on CompuServe and on every other network. Some lie about their ages, others about their accomplishments. Some appropriate the handles of established CB personae and impersonate them. (Unlike ID numbers, handles can be whatever you choose them to be.) There are also numerous other gender benders, some of them gay or bisexual men who come on in female guise to straight men. Most aren’t hard to spot. Joan herself told several friends she had been fooled by a man pretending to be a gay woman, and she was furious. “One of the first things she ever told me,” recalls Janis Goodall, “was to be terribly careful of the people you meet on CB — that things were not always as they seemed.”

Sheila Deitz remembers meeting a man online who said he was single, but turned out to be not only married in real life, but romancing numerous women online. Deitz met the man offline and realized that his story was full of holes. “Joan was very sympathetic when I told her about it, and we agreed that we didn’t want this guy to have the chance to pull this on other women.” At some later point, according to Deitz, “Joan created a group called the Silent Circle. It was sort of an online vigilante group. She’d ferret out other impostors and confront them and tell them they’d better get their act together.”

The other side

All of Joan’s helping and nurturing and gift-giving, in Deitz’s opinion, “goes beyond what any professional would want to do. Alex fostered dependency, really.” But at the time, especially among those of us who are able-bodied, there was a certain feeling that here was a person who needed all the support we could give her. Numerous disabled women have since rightly pointed out that our Take-a-Negro-to-Lunch-like attitudes were in fact incredibly patronizing.

The truth is that there was always another side to Joan’s need to be needed. She could be obnoxiously grabby of one’s time. Because she and I both lived in New York, she once suggested that we talk directly, modem to modem, over our phone lines — thus paying only the cost of a local call instead of CompuServe’s $6 an hour connect charges. But as soon as I gave Joan my phone number, I was sorry. She called constantly — the phone would ring, and there would be her modem tone — and she refused to take the hint that I might be busy with work, lover, or children. “Everybody else had the same experience,” according to Bob Walter, a New York publisher who also runs CompuServe’s Health SIG, where Joan (and later Alex, too) frequently hung out. “She would bombard people with calls.” Finally, I had to get blunt — and I felt guilty about it, since Joan, after all, was a disabled woman whose aggressive personality was probably the best thing she had going for her. (My first somewhat sexist thought, when I found out that Joan was really a man, was: Of course! Who else would be so pushy?)

Compusex

Joan was sexually aggressive. Every woman I interviewed reported — and was troubled by — Joan’s pressuring to have “compusex.” This is online sex, similar to phone sex, in which people type out their hottest fantasies while they masturbate. (In the age of herpes and AIDS, it has become increasingly popular.) According to one woman, “one time she said she and Jack had been smoking pot and then he’d gone off to work, but she was still high. She told me she had sexual feelings toward me and asked if I felt the same.” Joan’s husband, who was conveniently off on undercover detail most nights, supposedly knew about these experiments and wasn’t threatened by them, since Joan’s partners were “only” other women. Her m.o., at least with friends, was to establish an intense nonsexual intimacy, and then to come on to them, usually with the argument that compusex was a natural extension of their friendship. In one case, cited by several sources, a woman became so involved as Joan’s compusex lover that she was on the verge of leaving her husband.

Interestingly, Joan never came on to me — or, to my knowledge, to any bisexual or gay women. Sheila Deitz is of the opinion that Alex only wanted to have “lesbian” compusex with heterosexual women, those whom he might actually be attracted to in real life. Some straight women apparently cooperated sexually not out of physical desire, but out of supportiveness or even pity — and this too might have been part of Alex’s game. But it would be misleading to overemphasize Joan’s sexual relationships, since compusex in general tends to be a more casual enterprise online than affairs of the heart and mind. Deitz estimates that at least 15 people were “badly burned” by the revelation that Joan was Alex, and that only a few were compusex partners. Lovers or not, most were caught in Joan’s emotional web.

Janis

Janis Goodall was in a category all her own. Now 37 and cheerfully describing herself as “a semi-retired hippie from ‘Berserkeley,’ California,” Goodall met Joan at a time in her life “when I was a real sick cookie — an open raw wound.” Goodall was herself coping with the emotional and physical aftermath of an automobile accident. (Although she can walk, Goodall’s legs are badly scarred and she suffers from both arthritis and problems of the sciatic nerve.) Beyond her injuries, Goodall was also dealing with a recent separation from her husband and her brother’s death. “It was Joan who helped me to deal with those things and to make the transition into the life of a disabled person who accepts that she’s disabled.”

Joan and Goodall were “fixed up” by other CompuServe regulars after Goodall attended an online conference on pain management. When she and Joan arranged via electronic mail to meet in CB, “it was love at first sight. By the end of that first discussion, which lasted a couple of hours, we were honorary sisters. Later, I went around profusely thanking everyone who had told me to contact her.” The fact that Joan’s disability was more severe than her own gave her an authority in Goodall’s eyes, and her humor was especially therapeutic. “We used to make jokes about gimps who climb mountains. At the time, just to get through the day was a major accomplishment for me, and my attitude was screw the mountains, let me go to the grocery store.” The two never became lovers, despite strenuous lobbying on Joan’s part. (“I often found myself apologizing for being straight,” said Goodall.) But they did become intense, close friends. “I loved her. She could finish my sentences and read my mind.”

Enter Alex

About a year ago, Joan began telling Goodall about “this great guy” who was also online. His name was Alex. He was a psychiatrist, very respected in his field, and an old friend of Joan’s, an associate at the hospital. Largely on the strength of Joan’s enthusiastic recommendation, Goodall responded with pleasure when Alex invited her into private talk mode. “During our second or third conversation, he began to get almost romantic. He clearly thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I couldn’t understand why an established Manhattan psychiatrist his age could be falling so quickly for a retired hippie — although of course I was very flattered. Hey, if a shrink thought I was okay, I was okay!”

Alex told Goodall that he was married, but that his marriage was in trouble. Last winter he invited her to come visit him in New York, and when she said she couldn’t afford it, he sent her a round-trip ticket. “He treated me like a queen for the four days I was there,” Goodall remembers. “He put me up at a Fifth Avenue hotel — the American Stanhope, right across the street from the Metropolitan Museum. He took me to the Russian Tea Room for dinner, the Carnegie Deli for breakfast, Serendipity for ice cream, museums, everywhere — he even introduced me to his daughters.” The two became lovers, although, Goodall says, his back problems apparently affected his ability and their sex life was less than satisfactory. Still, it seems to have been a minor off note in a fabulously romantic weekend. There were also many gifts. Once, Goodall says, “he went out to the corner drugstore to get cigarettes and came back with caviar. I went to Berkeley on Cloud Nine.”

Naturally, Goodall had also hoped that she might meet Joan during her New York holiday. None of Joan’s other women friends had. Some of the able-bodied women, especially, were hurt that Joan still felt shame about her appearance after so many protestations of love and friendship. According to Sheila Deitz, several people were reported to have arranged rendezvous with Joan and were stood up at the last minute — “although you just know Alex had to be lurking about somewhere, checking them out.” Joan would, in each case, claim to have gotten cold feet.

Marti Cloutier says that Joan told her that she had promised her husband that she would never meet any of her online friends, but “that if she ever changed her mind and decided to meet any of her online friends, I would be one of them.” In fact, the only CB person who had ever seen Joan was her hospital colleague — Alex. Over the course of Goodall’s four days in the city, she and Alex both tried to reach Joan by phone, but without success. Goodall had brought Joan a gift — a stylized, enameled mask of a smiling face. Alex promised to deliver it.

Back in Berkeley, Goodall resumed her online relationship with Joan, who had been out of town for the weekend. Joan, however, was anxious to hear every detail of Goodall’s trip. Did she think she was in love with Alex? Was the sex good?

The unraveling

It was the disabled women online who figured it out first. “Some things about her condition were very far-fetched,” says one. Says another woman: “The husband, the accomplishments — it just didn’t ring true from the beginning.” But her own hunch wasn’t that Joan was a male or able-bodied; she suspected that she was in fact a disabled woman who was pretending to have a life of dazzling romance and success.

Although such theories, however, ultimately ran up against the real postcards from Cyprus, people began to share their misgivings. “There were too many contradictions,” says Bob Walter. “Here was this person who ran off to conferences and to vacations and did all these phenomenal things, but she wouldn’t let her friends online even see her. After a while, it just didn’t compute.”

In hindsight, I wonder why I didn’t question some of Joan’s exploits more closely. As a journalist, I’ve dealt with the public relations representatives of both the New York City Police Department and the hospital where Joan supposedly taught — and it now seems strange to me that her exploits as drunk-spotter and handicapped professor weren’t seized on and publicized. Pamela Bowen says she once proposed Joan’s story to another editor, but urged him “to have somebody interview her in person because her story was too good to be true. So my instincts were right from the beginning, but I felt guilty about not believing a handicapped person. I mean, the story could have been true.” It’s possible that many of us able-bodied were playing out our own need to see members of minority groups as “exceptional.” The more exceptional a person is, the less the person in the majority group has to confront fears of disability and pain.

Compumurder

Even with the contradictions, the game might have continued much longer if Joan hadn’t brought Alex into the picture. According to both Goodall and Laura, Alex has, since his unmasking, said that he realized at some point that he had gotten in over his head and he concocted a plan to kill Joan off. But after seeing how upset people were on one occasion when Joan was offline for several weeks, supposedly ill, he apparently couldn’t go through with it. “It would have been a lot less risky for him to let Joan die,” according to Laura, “but he knew it would be cruel.” (Meanwhile, someone had called the hospital where Joan was thought to be a patient and been told that no such person was registered.)

What Alex seems to have done instead of commit compumurder was to buy a new ID number and begin his dual online identity. Joan increasingly introduced people to her friend Alex, always with great fanfare. We may never know what Alex intended to do with Joan eventually, but there’s certainly strong evidence that he was now trying to form attachments as Alex, both offline (with Goodall) and on.

One might imagine that The Revelation came with a big bang and mass gasps, but this was not the case. According to Walter, months and months went by between the time that some of Joan’s more casual acquaintances (he among them) put it together and the time that those of her victims whom they knew heeded their warnings. “People were so invested in their relationships with the female persona that they often just didn’t want to know,” Walter said. And Joan was also a brilliant manipulator who always had an explanation of why a particular person might be trashing her. “If you ever questioned her about anything,” Goodall recalls, “she would get very defensive and turn the topic into an argument about whether you really loved her.”

Goodall now acknowledges that she and others ignored plenty of clues, but, as she says, “Let’s remember one thing — it was a pro doing this.”

Deitz, whose offline work sometimes involves counseling rape victims, agrees that Alex’s victims were caught in an intolerable psychological bind. “Alex zeroed in on good people,” she says, “although they were often good women at vulnerable stages of their lives.” To admit that Joan was a phantom was, in many cases, also to assault the genuine support and self-esteem that they had derived from the relationship. In fact, with only two exceptions — pressuring for compusex and, in Goodall’s case, using the Joan persona to pump “girl talk” confidences about Alex — there seems to have been absolutely nothing that Joan did to inspire anyone’s rancor. What makes people angry is simply that Joan doesn’t exist. “And a lot of what a lot of people were feeling,” Deitz adds, “is mourning.”

The confrontation

Laura ultimately confronted Joan online. She had already “cooled off” her relationship with Joan because of all the inconsistencies in her persona, but while she was suspicious, she had failed to suspect the enormity of the imposture. In February, however, she called another woman close to Joan, who told her she was convinced that Joan was a man. When Laura found Joan online later that night, she immediately asked Joan about the charge. Joan at first denied it. It was only after Laura made it clear that “I believed that we’re all created after the image of God, and that I loved the person, not the sex, and would continue to do so” that Alex came out.

Laura, who is Catholic and says that her decision to stick with Alex is partially motivated by principles of Christian love, admits that it took her several weeks to make the transition. Since then, however, she’s met Alex in person and come to love him “as my adopted brother instead of my adopted sister.”

Marti Cloutier to this day hasn’t confronted Alex, although she has talked with him by CB and phone. “I just haven’t the courage. Once, when we were talking, he mentioned something about going for a walk that day, and I wrote back that it would be a lovely day for Joan to go for a walk. I was instantly sorry.” Cloutier adds: “Joan was a very special person and I loved Joan. I feel as if she died. I can’t really say that I love Alex, although maybe I could, in time. Maybe I wouldn’t have given him a chance if I’d known from the beginning he was a male. I’ve tried to sort out my feelings, but it’s hard. I know I don’t feel like a victim, and I don’t understand why some of these other women have gone off the deep end. I don’t think he was malicious. What I can’t get out of my mind was that he’s the same person I’ve spent hours and hours with.”

Sheila Deitz had been introduced online to Alex by Joan, but found him “not all that interesting” and never became close to him. But as a visible online person known to many as a psychologist, she heard from many of the victims — some of whom formed their own circle of support, and in Goodall’s words, “sort of held each other together with bubble gum.” Some victims, according to Deitz, were so upset by the chain of events that they stopped using their modems temporarily.

Janis Goodall heard it first over the telephone, from Alex himself who mistakenly assumed that Goodall already knew. “I had just come home from the doctor, and was incredibly frustrated at having just spent $155 to have some asshole neurosurgeon tell me I would have to live with what was bothering me. The phone rang, and it was Alex. The first words out of his mouth were ‘yep — it’s me.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he said: ‘Joan and I are the same person.’ I went into shock. I mean, I really freaked out — I wanted to jump off a bridge.”

Since then, she has communicated with Alex by letter but has refused to see him. She emphatically resents those online who have spent efforts trying to “understand” him. She agreed to speak for this interview in part because “although I think this is a wonderful medium, it’s a dangerous one, and it poses more danger to women than men. Men in this society are more predisposed to pulling these kinds of con games, and women are predisposed to giving people the benefit of the doubt.”

Aftermath

Laura thinks that CompuServe and other networks ought to post warnings to newcomers that they might, in fact, encounter impostors. Others believe that the fault doesn’t lie with the medium or the network, but with human frailty. “Blaming CompuServe for impostors makes about as much sense as blaming the phone company for obscene calls,” says Bob Walter. CompuServe itself has no official position on the subject, although CompuServe spokesman Richard Baker notes: “Our experience has been that electronic impersonators are found out about as quickly as are face-to-face impersonators. While face-to-face impersonators are found out due to appearance, online impersonators are found out due to the use of phrases, the way they turn words, and the uncharacteristic thought processes that go into conversing electronically. I also believe that people are angrier when they’ve been betrayed by an electronic impersonator.”

It would have been nice to hear Alex’s side of the story. The first time I called his office, I gave only my name (which Alex knows), not my magazine affiliation or the information that I was working on an article about “our mutual friend Joan.” The receptionist asked if I was a patient. Did I want to make an appointment? I had a giddy vision of impersonating one but decided against it. Although I telephoned twice more and identified myself as a journalist, Alex never returned my calls. He has continued his presence online, however, even telling Deitz that he planned to form a SIG — on another network — for psychologists and mental health professionals.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Joan/Alex case, soul-searching has run rampant on CompuServe. As one man wrote: “I guess I figured the folks here [online] were special . . . but this has certainly ruptured the ‘pink cloud’ of CompuServe.” A woman wrote back: “The feelings remind me of the ending of my first love relationship. Before that, I didn’t realize fully how much hurt could result from loving.”

Some of the reactions were frankly conservative — people who were sickened simply by the notion of a man who wanted to feel like a woman. There was much talk of “latency.” Others seemed completely threatened by the idea that they might ever have an “inappropriate” response to someone of the “wrong” gender online. One message left by a male gravely informed other users that he and his girlfriend had nearly been conned by a male pretending to be a swinging female — until the girlfriend was tipped off by the impersonator’s “claiming to be wearing panty hose with jeans.” The message prompted an indignant reply by someone who insisted: “I always wear heels with my jeans, and when I wear heels I wear panty hose, and I don’t think that is odd, and I am all female!”

What it means

But Alex’s story raises some other questions that have special resonance for feminists. Chief among them, for me, is why a man has to put on electronic drag to experience intimacy, trust, and sharing. Some women have suggested that the fault is partly ours as women — that if Alex had approached us as a male, with all of Joan’s personality traits, we wouldn’t have been open to him. I for one reject that notion — not only because I have several terrific male friends online but also because it presumes that men are too fragile to break down stereotypes about themselves. (After all, we’ve spent the last 15 years struggling to prove that we can be strong, independent, and capable.) On the other hand, in Alex’s defense, I can’t help but appreciate the temptation to experience life in the actual world from the point of view of the other sex. Think of “Tootsie” and “Yentl.” Annie Lennox and Boy George. What Alex did was alien, taboo, weird . . . and yet the stuff of cosmic cultural fantasy. Haven’t you ever wanted to be a fly on the locker room (or powder room) wall?

Sheila Deitz comments that some online transsexualism may be essentially harmless. Where she draws the line — and where I would also — is at the point that such experimentation starts impinging on other people’s trust. Joan clearly stepped over that line years ago.

Maybe one of the things to be learned from Alex and Joan is that we have a way to go before gender stops being a major, volatile human organizing principle — even in a medium dedicated to the primacy of the spirit.

I personally applaud those souls on CB who, when asked “RU/M or F?”, simply answer “yes.”