From Floppy Disks to Substack

Writing about Ethan and Eli this week stirred up a memory I hadn’t touched in years. It starts with a website most of my generation remembers—and ends with why I’m writing here now.

Aug 26, 2025

The Hidden Library

After I finished Chapter 5, I came downstairs, ready to share the memory with my partner. To my astonishment, he had never heard of the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive.

He’s only a few years younger than me, but by the time he was figuring himself out, the internet had already shifted. He came out in a world where broadband connections were becoming common—hookup sites, decent .jpegs, and, if you were patient, even video. Desire was visible early, sharp, and available.

For me, it was Nifty.

Nifty.org was clunky—gray background, Courier font, links stacked like an old phone directory. But behind those links was the first place I saw people like me, not as a punchline but as the center of a story.

The college/fraternity folder was my refuge. I’d sneak into the library, pretending to research, heart pounding as I scrolled nervously through page after page of text on a “green-screen” terminal. Sometimes I’d save my favorites onto a floppy disk—1.44 MB of contraband—and slip it into my backpack like it was radioactive. Back in my dorm, late at night, I’d open those files in secret, letting my imagination fill in the laughter, the touch, the heat of a room I couldn’t yet enter.

That was how I learned to want. Quietly. Secretly. In text.

The Power of Timing

The difference between my experience and his wasn’t just age—it was infrastructure.

By the late ’90s, campuses were racing to wire every dorm room. Mine still ran on AppleTalk, piggybacking on plain old telephone wire. It felt like magic: I could plug my Apple PowerBook into the phone jack and suddenly, I was “on the internet.”

Except it wasn’t the internet the way we know it now. Really, my little laptop was connecting to a session on the campus mainframe, which then grudgingly handed me off to the wider web. It was clunky, but at the time it felt like a superpower.

And because it wasn’t video yet—no YouTube, no streaming porn, barely even images—words were everything.

Nifty worked because you had to participate. Visualize the locker room, the hallway, the hesitated glance. You brought the texture. And because it looked like homework, no one blinked.

For me, it was more than smut. It was proof I wasn’t alone.

Still There

Nifty is still online, unchanged for thirty years. Same ugly layout, still updating with new stories. A dinosaur that outlived the comet—one of the last pieces of the old, lawless internet, stubbornly free and unpolished.

It seems quaint thinking back to those days, but at least in my state (and bordering states) laws designed to “protect children” now require proof of age to access adult websites—essentially a credit card, or worse, uploading your photo ID.

I don’t advocate children having access to pornography. But the real issue is how adult gets defined, and who gets to make that decision. For many of us, anything gay was considered adult at best, pornography at worst. Not having access to media that reflected who we were felt very isolating.

A New Archive

When I told my partner about it, he laughed. To him, it sounded like folklore: floppy disks and dial-up, a secret library tucked into the shadows of the web. But that’s exactly what it was.

And in a way, that’s what I’m doing now—writing Line & Verse on Substack, adding my own chapters to a new kind of archive. A serialized story, read week by week, carrying the same charge Nifty once held for me: recognition, desire, proof.

The technology changed. The fonts are prettier. But the impulse is the same.

Because stories like these don’t just entertain. They raise us.

For a certain slice of us—queer kids coming of age in the 90s and early 2000s—Nifty wasn’t just a website. It was a lifeline. A secret handshake.

If you were there, you know exactly what I mean.

And if you weren’t? Consider this your glimpse into how a whole generation of us learned to want—in floppy disks, dim dorm rooms, and lines of text that carried us long before the world was ready to.

If Nifty was your secret too—or if this is your first time hearing about it—I’d love for you to keep following along. New chapters of Line & Verse and the reflections they stir arrive weekly.

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