ada connor

(Published in Better Than IRL: True Stories About Finding Your People on the Untamed Internet)

In July of 2004, a woolly-jumpered New Zealander named Chanel Cole was emptying her water bottle into Sydney Harbour. When the television host asked why she should be the next Australian Idol, she looked directly into the camera and replied, “Because I think there is a severe lack of articulate, brunette, size 12, flat-chested women on television.”

Something about her made me sit up straighter on the couch. At the time, I was a mutedly sad 15-year-old living in a country Victoria town, good at debate but bad at conversation, uncomfortable being a boy but with no words for that yet. I would have told you that I watched Australian Idol with a certain amount of ironic distance—”as trash”—but that posture didn’t last. Chanel began her audition by deliberately sounding like one of the pitchy disasters they let on just to laugh at them (“I’ve just gotta find my note…”), but then suavely transitioned into a flawless Ella Fitzgerald. By the time she sung Portishead in the semifinals, I was toast. I’d never seen anyone as clever and compelling as her on TV, and I drank up every moment she was on screen.

Because my family liked Australian Idol, we were allowed to call in and vote for our favourite —but only once per week. This was grossly inadequate, in my view, and I began sneaking in extra votes for Chanel whenever I could. I shared a room with my brother, and so after our usual meandering pre-sleep chats, I’d lie in bed with my eyes stretched open, which was just uncomfortable enough to keep me awake until I could hear my brother’s snores. I came to know which floorboards in our old house were snitches and padded past my parents’ room quietly enough that I never once woke them. I had a notion that if I voted too much I’d be caught, so I kept myself carefully restrained. Five votes here, seven votes there; never more than ten at a time. I just wanted her to stay on the show so badly. I wanted her to keep showing me how you could be weird and still survive with your humour and happiness intact.

The official Yahoo Australian Idol forums were a place of stark Hobbesian chaos. There were no moderators, zero mechanisms for blocking or banning people, and a pervasive ethos of turf war. All the different Idol contestants had their own subforums, but rather than being a home base for fans, the list of threads tended to read like hate-filled graffiti: fans of other contestants doing drive-by shit-talking and drowning out any positive takes. The Chanel Cole subforum was no different: a scoured battleground, plagued by raiding parties from the Anthony Callea and Ricki‑Lee Coulter subforums (where, I can only assume, the sun never shone and the living envied the dead). But in amongst the pandemonium, I saw an interesting form of resistance.

Led by a funny and enigmatic poster named Sonny, there was a small group of people on the Chanel board who, whenever somebody made an all-caps post about how Chanel was a sucky loser who sucked, would reply, “Aw, thanks! We love you too!” Often, the troll would reply almost touchingly earnestly, trying to correct the misunderstanding—”No, um, I actually hate you, where did you get confused?”—and the Chanel fans would blithely keep on replying as if the troll had just expressed something sweet and loving. It was strangely effective, and (posting under the name The_Rumpled_Academic), I joined in the game. It felt satisfying to stymie them, and Chanel kept not getting eliminated, so I began to sense a superstitious connection between the two. Somehow, I intuited that us being there was helping her survive on the show. We were her vanguard, weeding out the trolls with tactical affection, depolluting the soil so she could take root.

One night, a Chanelite named revolution_rose came up with an even better tactic. She made a post announcing that, since she was a financially comfortable baby boomer with nothing on her hands but time and a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc, she would call in and vote for Chanel every single time she saw a troll post. It was the kind of gambit that would make the narrator of a military documentary breathless; it completely scrambled them. Every time a trollish partisan posted something awful, revolution_rose would thank them for giving her an excuse to vote for Chanel again. They’d try to get back the upper hand (by declaring that they didn’t believe her, or mocking her for wasting her money, or posting disguised links to goatse), and she’d just cheerily inform them that, sure enough, she’d just voted again. It wasn’t long before all the trolls had fled, fearing this profligate madwoman and her undefeatable jiu-jitsu.

This was when the real fun began. To keep revolution_rose voting, the rest of us spent the night creating dummy accounts, posting the silliest and most obvious trolls we could think of, and melodramatically lamenting all the votes we were causing her to cast. As the night went on, our trolling got increasingly hammy and esoteric, culminating in someone posting a version of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses modified to froth with protestant rage at ‘that vile demon Chanel’. Entirely in on the joke, revolution_rose kept letting us know that, yep, she’d voted again—and again, and again, all night—until (she told us the next morning) she finally dozed off in her armchair, her smile as full as her phone bill.

It used to be conventional wisdom that it was the anonymity of the internet that made people act like trolls. Then Facebook taught us that people are startlingly willing to be vicious little shits with their real name and face attached, so that explanation lost a little of its neatness. Now that advertisers track us all over the internet, it’s easier to appreciate the social and introspective upsides of anonymity. It’s easier to see the way that not being pinned to your ‘real life’ can allow you to be more honest about what that life is lacking, and more imaginative in figuring out how to fill it.

With the subforum almost fully weeded of trolls, the Chanelites—like an off-duty regiment having a coffee klatsch between missions—finally got the chance to talk. Conversations about Chanel morphed into conversations about art, into conversations about childhood, into conversations about Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution. On that board were the first openly gay people I ever met, as well as the first closeted trans people. There was an Argentinian-Israeli maths teacher, a Nietzschean Buddhist antifa goth, and a hysterically funny single mum from Perth. We talked about Bananarama and Baudrillard, about bullies and bulimia, and I began to wonder if this was what people meant when they talked about community.

The longest thread on the Chanel subforum was a creation of mine: “Rumpy’s Restaurant”. It grew out of something watt_tyler used to do in the general chat thread, where he’d come in after a long day and write *pours glass of cognac* before getting into it. Pretty soon we were all swept up in the gentle roleplay of the restaurant. People would come in and ask for whatever food or drink they wanted, and I—as the ‘host’—would serve it up for them. It was a general chat thread, but also something more distinct. People talked about the Restaurant like it was a place, like it was their favourite place. It was a warm wooden lamplit space that always welcomed you, where your friends were always either there or coming back soon.

It’s 2004, and watt_tyler is telling me about Spinoza for the first time, a decade before I’d go on to do a masters in philosophy.

It’s 2010, and watt—Yair—has finally convinced me to come with him to a soccer game. He wants me to understand the comradeship of the lunatics who chant in the north terrace all game long. I tell him I do understand, but only because “They’re basically Chanelites, right?”

It’s 2015, and Yair’s talking me though his cancer diagnosis. The nurses and doctors are apologetic that the only reading material they can give him about breast cancer is pink and flowery and clearly written for women. He laughs and says it’s the least of his problems.

The Yahoo message boards closed down after the season ended, but the Chanelites didn’t. Sonny and JB set up a new forum, chanelcole.cc (now an official fan club, with an ACN and a constitution), and most of us made the migration. We held meetups, crowdfunded Chanel’s first CD—long before ‘crowdfunding’ was a term any of us had in our vocabulary—and got even more involved in each other’s lives. There was a new Rumpy’s Restaurant, and then another one, and then another, each running hundreds of pages long.

One regular at Rumpy’s Restaurant, a motherly Christian lady named PurpleGracieGirl, thought my vocabulary was suspiciously large for a 15-year-old and decided to do a little digging. She found a middle-aged doctor in rural Victoria with my name and thought “Aha! This must be Rumpy, pretending to be fifteen online for the attention.” She sent him a very stern email concluding with a righteous ultimatum: “If you don’t tell everyone the truth, I will.” The poor doctor sent her back an utterly bewildered response, and Purps was mortified.  

She only told me about any of this years later, after we’d finally met in person and the very last of her suspicions had been put to rest. I love this story. It’s exactly the kind of thing that was facilitated by this era of the internet: a million opportunities to be suspicious, but also the occasional deep-crimson pleasure of having ‘too good to be’ turn out to be true.

It’s 2006, and my brother is moving to Sydney to be with his girlfriend, rocketfox, who he met on chanelcole.cc. We listen to the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka on three stereos and a PlayStation, and everything seems perfect.

It’s 2007, and our band is playing our first-ever show in a crowded backyard, with Alicey from the forum on cello.

It’s 2019, and Sonny and Lakey are saving money for their wedding. “We already consider ourselves married, but we want to do it right,” Sonny tells me. Plus, you know, “I look awesome in a tux.”

One night that stands out in my memory: Yair and I tag-teaming an explanation of the Russian Revolution for a curious 14-year-old who asked us what we were talking about. We were succinct in our answers early on, but then she kept asking more questions, so then we let loose. We went all the way from Bloody Sunday through the Kornilov Affair and the October Revolution, concluding well after midnight with Trotsky’s assassination. She kept saying how fascinating and sad it all was, and how she couldn’t believe she’d never heard any of this stuff before. Years later, she’d go on to do a BA in history, and Yair and I quietly high-fived in our PMs.

Weekly trivia nights in the chatroom. Jokey forum games stretching hundreds of pages. The miraculous mixtape swaps, where you’d get assigned a person to mail a mix-CD to, and someone else would be assigned to send one to you, and it would all end up in this big adoring circle. I vividly remember cutting open the padded envelope and removing the CD that Timoth had burned for me, feeling like an acolyte entrusted with the ashes of a saint. It was packed to the brim with 700 megabytes of Neu, Diamanda Galás, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Autechre, Mr Bungle—everything a warped and concentrated version of itself, a spell for summoning new shapes I could evolve into.

As far as I’ve been able to research, there are seven couples who met on chanelcole.cc who are still together in 2019. They’re mostly queer—most of the forum was—and for a couple of them, it was their coming-out relationship. I never dated anyone from the forum, but there was this curious running joke between me and fevveryfevs (a girl my age from Melbourne) where we play-acted like we were married. People sometimes thought that it portended something, but it never seemed to me in any danger of porting to reality. Our play‑marriage was companionate and dodderingly sexless, like the old couple in When the Wind Blows. She called me “hubbie”, and I called her “honeybunch”. She photoshopped me saccharine Valentines, and I fetched wood for the fire. I felt like trying to make it real would ruin it. In retrospect, that’s how I’ve felt about a lot of things.

Everyone on the forums seemed so excited at the prospect of meet-ups, but I was apprehensive. I was so much more comfortable being the words that I typed; I felt sure that they were more likeable and interesting than I was capable of being IRL. The internet has always been ‘real life’—of course it has—but it used to more easily facilitate the feeling of multiple lives, each as real as the other. On cc.cc, I was more myself than I could ever afford to be at my school: more vulnerable, kinder, more curious about what’s going on inside other people. It wasn’t a fantasy or a false life or a distraction; it was me practicing myself into existence.

It’s 2005, and I’m posting on the forum about my first kiss.

It’s 2015, and I’m crying into Timoth’s shoulder at the funeral of a mutual friend. Later, outside the wake, I read him an Adrienne Rich poem off my phone (“within us and against us, against us and within us”), and he hugs me so hard I can’t breathe.

It’s 2019, and I’m getting back in touch with people to write this piece. There’s about a dozen I still have on Facebook. I ask for recollections and receive long, scattered messages back, everyone recalling different things. There were things I never even knew about, like the forum providing relationship references for immigration papers, and the mods locating a homeless shelter for a young forum member who’d been kicked out of home. I ask for artefacts and get sent old photos, LiveJournals links, and even some of the custom Chanel-themed forum smileys we used to use. I’m absolutely smitten with the smileys. It may just be nostalgia, but I can’t help but feel that they have unusually kind eyes.  

The culmination of the forum was Colestock 2005: this big, weekend-long meetup held in Chanel’s hometown of Bega. My parents, astonishingly, let me and my brother go by ourselves. We met a bunch of sweet, awkward people, thrilled at hearing our forum in-jokes said out loud, and ate an ungodly amount of cheese. We hung out with Chanel—who was just a person, of course; who was lovely; who recognised intuitively that this community had become about more than her—and sang karaoke deep into the night. On the final night, we had a huge meal at a restaurant with all of us, and someone had printed out custom menus to replace the restaurant’s usual ones. They said ‘Rumpy’s Restaurant’, and when I saw them my heart went supernova.

It will always feel so off to me that the real Rumpy’s Restaurants—the megathreads, first on yahoo.com and then chanelcole.cc—have vanished, and yet this menu is still around, tucked in a box under my bed. At the time, it felt so clear to us where the reality lay. The Restaurants were these authentic, scuffed, lived-in places. Flirtations turned into relationships there. Conversations evolved into conversions. ‘Jokes’ became genders. The menu didn’t feel like it was making the restaurant ‘real’; it was simply a sweet, in-jokey reference to a site of community alchemy that we all already knew to be incredibly real. But now, the real Restaurants are gone. They were never archived by the Wayback Machine—never saved anywhere, as far as I can tell—and the only hard evidence they ever even existed is this one piece of stock paper, signed for me by Chanel, from the one night when the Restaurant was corporeal.

There is one other physical remnant of chanelcole.cc that I know of. When the admins organised Colestock, they kept accepting donations even after all the expenses had been covered. After it was all finished, they decided to donate everything that was left over to the Bega Hospital. Apparently, it was just enough to buy a newborn incubation cradle—which is still there, in that regional hospital in New South Wales, with a small plaque on it that reads, “DONATED BY THE CHANEL COLE FAN CLUB.”