In December 2003 my friend Chris and I were at the Performance Space 122 holiday party lamenting our single, celibate status. As we got drunker we started sharing stories of the worst sex we’d ever had. Chris and I met through blogging. I had launched a blog at AndysChest.com in August 2000, Chris had started Uffish.com about the same time, I think. We were part of a small, informal community of bloggers in NYC who had started socializing in-person.

It might be difficult for people to imagine this now, but at the time blogging was a niche, nerdy thing to do. It was really exciting and fun; it felt like an Internet version of 90’s ‘zine culture. Even as it caught on and the circle of bloggers grew, the community retained an intimate feel. I still remember the thrill I would get when I met someone for the first time and exchanged URLs. As my blogroll grew, so did my social calendar.

So, we were at this holiday party and Chris had the idea to do an event where we invited our blogger friends to tell their worst sex stories. I was working at Performance Space 122 in the East Village and had just launched Culturebot.org, so we had access to a venue and a platform on which to promote the show, and decided to do it. Two months later, on February 11, 2004, Chris and I, with our blogger friend Dan Rhatigan, produced “Worst. Sex. Ever: An Anti-Valentine’s Day Reading.” We didn’t know what to expect.

People started lining up in the afternoon, by the time we opened the house, the line was down the hall, down the stairs and outside onto the street. Jake Dobkin had just launched Gothamist.com and promoted the show there. The bloggers – among them Blaise K., Choire Sicha and Paul Ford – all had followings of their own. We tried to fit everyone in, fire code be damned, but when we got to more than 250 people it just wasn’t safe anymore, we had to turn people away.

The upstairs space at PS122 was intimate. It had once been a gym, the cafeteria scene in the movie Fame had been filmed there. It was wide and not-so-deep, there were two big poles holding up the ceiling. The room fairly vibrated with the residual energy of more than two decades of live performances. We had set up the stage in the middle of the room, people sat on the floor near the mic then outward in concentric circles of chairs and then filling the bleachers.

I remember walking onstage to welcome everyone to the theater and feeling this wave of excitement, anticipation and, dare I say it, joy, as I looked out at the crowd. The sense of community was palpable. I don’t think I was alone in feeling that something significant was happening; that gathering these people together, at this moment, in this space, at this time, was special, that this was the beginning of something really amazing. And it was.

“Worst. Sex. Ever.” was the very first all-blogger storytelling event in NYC, possibly in the world, and it was the first time that this particular community of writers and readers, who knew each other only from the Internet, actually gathered together in physical space.

The night was a huge success. It provided a space for bloggers and readers to meet each other in real life, to share stories and connect. It was an opportunity make a virtual community tangible, something people had clearly been hungering for.  I know of at least one couple who met that night and subsequently got married.

Chris, Dan and I discussed it, asked our blogger friends, and decided to keep going. The next month we launched the WYSIWYG Talent Show, the first-ever all-blogger reading and performance series. We started doing the series in the downstairs space at PS122, a small black box theater that could seat at most 75 people (legally). Eventually PS122’s programming priorities shifted and we moved the show to the Bowery Poetry Club, which changed the dynamic a little bit, but it was still fun and intimate.

We produced the event for several years and the blogging community grew up around it. Even today I will sometimes run into people who used to attend the shows, or performed in one, and they will share their memories and stories of how much it meant to them.

As much as people were drawn to these events by the stories and performances, they were equally drawn by the format – lots of time to hangout, chat and drink – and especially the opportunity to meet like-minded people.

In some ways, at least at the beginning, the WYSIWYG Talent Show served to galvanize and frame a decentralized community, providing a locus – a regular meeting place, platform and showcase – for the creators at the forefront of an ever-evolving medium. Especially at the beginning, it was powerful for Internet writers to connect with other people writing for the Internet.

We were also writing for each other. In the early days there just weren’t that many bloggers, and the circle of NYC bloggers was even smaller. Just like today, someone would write a post about something and another person would write a response. But it didn’t happen in real time. And people knew each other, they gathered in person, and because this was before social media and smart phones, we actually interacted with each other at bars and parties and nightclubs and dinner parties. We weren’t taking selfies, or documenting our food, or posting to Instagram or even live-blogging. People still held some things back, we hadn’t yet arrived at peak self-disclosure.

And the Internet hadn’t permeated the physical world, it was a separate space. So, we would interact in physical space, go home and craft some writing to be posted and shared after the fact. What developed, I think, was almost a kind of epistolary literature where a post might be public, and publicly available, but at the same time directed at a very specific person. It was both public, intimate and a little mysterious.

Many bloggers at the time were conscious of being writers, not merely diarists, certainly not influencers or brands, and were, in many ways, experimenting with what it meant to cultivate an authorial voice that was at once personal and writerly. Many bloggers in this group used the particular, peculiar conditions of writing on the Internet, in real time, to inform their storytelling, structure and voice. They were cultivating an audience, and a relationship with that audience, that was intimate, immediate, powerful and unprecedented. Bringing this intimacy and immediacy into a live event was electrifying.

We presented writers and artists of all kinds – and lots of comedians – juxtaposing different approaches, voices and styles but connecting them by exploring specific themes at each show. The WYSIWYG Talent Show adapted as the medium of blogging grew. For instance, we hosted the first vlogger video festival, and we hosted a political blogger forum in response to the Republican National Convention held in NYC in 2004. (Here’s some random Flickr gallery of a few shows from 2006 (I think). And here’s some random Dutch newspaper article. Also, check it out the website on the Wayback Machine.)

But nothing lasts forever. Over time the landscape changed. With the advent of LiveJournal, Tumblr, and all the other self-publishing platforms, all of a sudden everybody was a blogger. And, in a way, the success of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media radically transformed the scene by professionalizing it. Blogging became a legitimate media platform and Gawker’s editorial voice – snarky, insider-y – became the lingua franca (if you will) of the new, cool, blogger-y journalism. Everyone wanted to sound like that, to write like that, to get discovered, to get paid. And who doesn’t want to get paid to write?

And as blogging professionalized, and the early, open, personal, experimental, “zine” phase of blogging waned, the community changed too. The world of blogging became at once too big – everyone’s a blogger! – and too small. Anyone with aspirations to commercial success was blogging merely as a stepping stone to something bigger, not as an end in itself. Bloggers no longer had to design their own sites or tweak their own code, they weren’t writing for a small circle of intimates but for the entire world, competing for eyeballs and traffic. That is not necessarily lamentable, it is just the natural life cycle of culture in the age of mass media.

But I don’t think we could have gotten to that Gawker voice, and the subsequent massive explosion of blogging as a way of building a brand and business, if it hadn’t been for that earlier, quirkier “multivocal” phase – and that is the part that interests me.

I go back to that “Worst. Sex. Ever.” reading event on February 11, 2004, that very first in-person gathering of bloggers and readers, that first ever gathering of a dispersed community in the same place at the same time. What happened that night was people gathering and co-creating community, together, in real time, just by showing up, in person.

The stories told were important, they were the focal point of everyone’ attention, but what was actually significant was the gathering, the meeting, the talking, the sharing. That’s where the transformation happens, that’s where the magic is, and that’s what the world needs now, more than anything. Showing up for each other, building friendships and communities in-person, through small group conversations, sharing ideas and creativity (and sometimes food and booze) with curiosity and compassion.