Hey y'all! My name's Jake and I'm almost twenty-four, and I live in Metro Atlanta, Georgia where I work as an human resources manager, or as my fellow brass say, adult babysitter. Too bad that's true.

Before I start yakking about myself I feel that I need to explain my history with Oasis, and while I have no excuse for not writing on here sooner, later is better than never. How I found this site is just plain weird to me.

My parents favorite saying is "shit happens for a reason" and in my case it was in the most unlikely of places: A Metallica chatroom on AOL.

Yeah, you read that right.

It was the beginning of summer vacation in 1999 and I was bored as hell, and in that Metallica chatroom I was engaged in a debate over whether "Master Of Puppets" was thier best CD or not. If your a fan you'll understand what that's all about, if not sorry to bore you here. After a while of arguing I saw a guy with a really weird screenname (Tyomaniac) and just HAD to talk to him. Not that my screenname was any better, but still his WAS out there!

We started chatting back and forth and then he invited me to join him and some of his online friends in a private room, and within a short while we were alone. We talked about Metallica for a while then drifted into other areas, and soon I found out that I was a year younger than him, that we were both born past the cut off date to start school, and that were were the oldest in families with all boys (I have fraternal twin brothers a few years younger than me, he had several younger brothers). He was completely different from any of the friends I hung out with, but I had no idea then that we had much more in common.

From then on we exchanged e-mails, chatted whenever we could, and got to know each other better over the summer. Eventually, like most boys that age, we started talking about sex, and even joked about an activity most boys engage in and what it was like being horny, something I was starting to feel more and more, although I didn't share that I felt that way when I was in the locker room with my PE classmates and couldn't keep my eyes off them as they changed into thier jockstraps. He was a late bloomer like me, and he told me the same thing my father kept saying, just be patient it'll happen soon enough. Somehow hearing Ty say that was more reassuring to me.

While we talked about sex, we rarely talked about girls. When we did, it was if they were some alien lifeform living among us. I'm sure some guys would say there's a bit of truth in that! I was starting to have some feelings for guys then, but I just wrote it off as being curious about how my classmates were developing.

One day I opened an e-mail he sent me, and in it he wrote that he felt I should know the truth about him, and if I didn't want to be his friend anymore he'd understand. In it was a link to Oasis and instructions to look under his name.

When the webpage opened, I'll admit I was horrified. Shocked. Disappointed. All that shit you feel when you discover something that's impossible to believe.

I read what he wrote and I was still in shock, and then I looked at the back issues, taking in every word of every column (as they were called then) with the same energy I took in each Metallica CD the first time I heard them. Here was someone MY age, talking to ME directly about being GAY! The kicker was that he bore no resemblance to any gay person I had ever experienced.

I wrote to him that I was cool with his gayness, and from then on our relationship deepened. He told me his real name and the reasons behind not using it on Oasis, and after reading that like me he was one of the lucky American boys whose parents didn't have part of thier cock cut off, I finally had someone I could talk to about what it was like to be different from most of the boys at school! He made me feel good about that and told me things to try that I would have never thought of. I was caught once doind one of those suggestions by my mother who after that knocked on the door first before entering my room!

Soon we talked about some of the deep shit we had been through. I had recently lost one of my grandmothers to a long battle with cancer, and he told me about his brother's suicide. When I asked why he never wrote about that he told me it still hurt too much. Like me with my Grandma, I understood the loss he felt, although his was much worse.

When I was brave enough I told him about the feelings I was having towards guys, how I thought about them when I "punched one off" (one of his favorite terms) and how scared I was as I faced the prospect of being a fag. He told me to do my own thing and not let anybody pressure me into being less than true to myself. We joked that we were probably the only gay Metallica fans in the world, but I know we're in the minority there!

Ty added me to his "inner circle", a handful of friends he knew online who he trusted to talk openly with. By then he was writing his last columns, and I got to see them before they were published, and he seemed to value my feedback. He was talking about leaving Oasis then, but he always told me that too many people relied on him and he didn't want to let anyone down. He was open with me about the pressures in his life, the struggle he had with being in the closet at school while dating his best friend, and other typical guydrama. Shit I would be dealing with in the very near future.

One day he set me a e-mail with his last Oasis column and I cried like a baby reading it. Here was the only person in the world I had ever come
out too, and he was leaving what was now a huge support system. I understood his reasons but it was a massive loss for me nonetheless.

We kept in touch after that, although we didn't get to chat online very often, but gradually the intervals between e-mails grew wider although he would always write back. I remember him saying that after he left Oasis it was like he fell of the face of the Earth, that few people cared about him. If you can find the issue from February of 2000, not one person mentioned his leaving in thier columns despite the lenght of time he wrote there. I think he was bitter about that, and we rarely discussed Oasis from then on.

Over the years we have still stayed in contact, and at one point he lived within an hour's drive of me, although I was in college then and we could never find the right time or place to meet. He still lives in Georgia, while he and the boyfriend he wrote about so long ago remain together. He calls thier relationship one of the few stable things in his life.

The last time I wrote to him I talked about writing something on here and he joked about mentioning him, just for the hell of it to see if anyone would remember him? I think what I wrote here tonight would make him proud.

Thanks Ty!