An Oral History of Hooksexup - Page 3

Why was it an identity crisis?
There was all this economic pressure on us to become more commercial, and these HBO folks really wanted us to be much more sensationalistic, to be something other than what we were. The biggest, craziest party we've ever thrown was shot by HBO. There were five roaming camera crews. Despite our protests, they lit the entire party to be brighter than any room you've ever been in. You're getting a suntan at ten p.m. while drinking a cocktail, and I'm thinking, this is a terrible party environment. And there was a guy at the party wearing nothing but a sock. Now, we'd had some crazy stuff at our parties, but we'd never had a guy wearing a sock. HBO had hired this guy. And the place was full of these buff, muscley Miami waiters wearing Speedos, and all these things that were not at all our aesthetic or sensibility. But HBO was spending like six figures on the evening, so our hands were somewhat tied. Although we really put our foot down on a few things.

Like what?
They wanted us to wear certain clothes that we refused to wear, and we were to drive up to the party in the Hooksexupmobile. It was all very orchestrated.

What was the Hooksexupmobile?
It was this 1975 Buick LeSabre convertible with flames on the side and a big N. It was pretty fantastic. I'd love to get that back. But at any rate, over the course of this evening, I think we as a company blew a fuse. After that HBO party, we didn't throw a party for a few years. And that, I think, marked the apex of the hype. There was this moment where we realized it's not about the hype, that's not why we're doing this.

Soon after all this hype came the dot-com crash. It was the Hooksexup Personals innovation that pretty much pulled the company through. It seems like before Hooksexup Personals, very few people used personal ads. Hooksexup sort of made it seem okay to meet people that way.
Somehow Hooksexup Personals arguably remains the smart, cool downtown dating scene in big cities around the country, and that to me is extraordinary, because we didn't actively cause that to happen. We didn't do targeted marketing, we just threw personals up on the site. And that's what made it possible for us to survive 2001. I was really obsessed with this idea that if you have fifty words to advertise yourself to your future soulmate, never have words been more important. The personal ad is one of the highest stakes genres ever.

Was there ever a moment you considered closing up shop?
No. I had bankruptcy envy in the sense that all my friends' companies were going out of business and they were all out drinking 'til four in the morning. There really was this sense of pre-apocalypse partying, and some of them had squirreled away a little money, so they were traveling and such. Meanwhile, we were working twice as hard. But I was just in a survivalist mode. I certainly never took it for granted that we would survive. But from instinct, I never thought it was dead, and until it was we were going to duke it out.

"I completely horrified my family by starting Hooksexup."

Do you have any favorite stories or columns from the past ten years?
We had a number of cases where writers would give us a personal essay and then call and say, "You can't publish that. It's too personal and too revealing and could destroy my relationship with the community." And that would always make me think, perfect! Lisa Carver wrote lots of pieces that were incredibly brave. Catherine Texier wrote this piece called "Diary of a Breakup" that later became a pretty big book called Breakup about her divorce. Lucy Grealy, who later died, wrote this piece called "Autobiography of a Body." She had jaw cancer and a long series of operations, and to compensate for not feeling beautiful she went through a slutty phase and described it in wrenching detail. There was one guy who had lost his left hand and he described how girls were turned on by his condition and it was this weird power and leverage he had in a relationship. I found these kinds of personal essays particularly powerful and liked the fact that no one else on the planet would publish them.

Is there a single thing you can point to as a measure of Hooksexup's cumulative success?
I would say this: One reason this was all so high-stakes from the outset was that I completely horrified my family by starting Hooksexup. I have a pretty conservative family. My father asked that I be sure to tell all journalists my name should have "Jr." at the end. (I just couldn't do it. I said, Dad, if you decide to give your son your own name, you're rolling the dice, baby.) So that raised the stakes for me considerably. No one told my grandmother for years, and then one day she was in Barnes & Noble and saw our book, and the next time she saw me she pulled me aside and said, "I saw your book, Rufus, and I can only say one thing: You'd better make some money out of this." So that's my grandmother's definition of cumulative success, and she's not alone. it's always been our objective to make Hooksexup both really, really good and commercially successful. Most cultural products are either one or the other. I think Hooksexup was really, really good before it was commercially successful, but I like to think we are in the process of pulling off both.

AN ORAL HISTORY OF Hooksexup