Confidence man
Gabriel Jeffrey wants you to tell him all your dirty little secrets
By Rhonda Stewart, Globe Staff
March 2, 2005
Strangers want to tell Gabriel Jeffrey about being abducted by aliens, making waffles while naked, or seeing a parent kill someone. Or that time at the reservoir with that piece of driftwood and, well, the less said about that the better.
People open up to him about goofy things, poignant things, and things so dark and depraved you'd rather not read about them over breakfast. Or any other time.
People confess the most intimate details of their lives to Jeffrey, and millions of others, because they can do so anonymously on the blog he started in 2003 called Grouphug.us. The website drew 2.5 million visitors in its second week and has become so popular it's spawned a new book: ''Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window: The Best Confessions From Grouphug.us." Jeffrey's making the rounds at local bookstores to promote the collection and tonight at 7 he'll be at the Harvard Coop. On March 21, he's scheduled to read at the Boston University Barnes & Noble.
''Personally, I don't see how honesty or just telling your story can be bad. You can certainly learn something from it," Jeffrey says. ''This is not a bunch of people getting away with stuff. They're confessing for a reason. It's more of a how-not to."
There's an audience participation element to Jeffrey's bookstore appearances. He doesn't hypnotize people and make them cluck like chickens or start taking off their clothes -- although some in the crowd would probably be happy to oblige. He passes out pen and paper and invites audience members to write down confessions, with no names attached, for him to read at the end of his talk.
At Brookline Booksmith recently, one woman went a step further. She sidled up and handed him her confession. That's how he learned about her creativity with driftwood. She winked and left without saying a word.
On the blog, people are only identified by a number, and their e-mails aren't traceable.
399282639
I once was waiting for an elevator and when the doors opened, there was a baby there on the floor of the elevator in the car seat. Instead of taking the baby out, I instead waited for the doors to close and take the baby to another floor.
In his Jamaica Plain apartment, Jeffrey explains how Grouphug has gone from what he describes as a social experiment to a must-read blog to, possibly, ''Grouphug: The Opera!" (more on that later). In September 2003 he got the idea for a site where people could confess anything they wanted to anonymously. People's misspellings and egregiously bad grammar are largely intact, but are lightly edited if the confessions would otherwise be unreadable. Jeffrey got the ball rolling with a confession of his own: ''I normally do not smoke, but when I am really stressed out about something I can comfortably smoke nearly a pack a day." Initially it was just a site a few friends knew about, but word spread, and within the blog's first three months, it was visited 13 million times.
Jeffrey says he tries to answer all the e-mail he gets from readers and does so using his personal e-mail address.
''I never tried to maintain anonymity myself, I always put my name on it," he says. ''Part of it was I wanted people to understand the separation between the content of the site and me and my involvement."
When Jeffrey says people's confessions remain anonymous he means just that, as the Secret Service found out. Agents called his cellphone a year ago asking for help tracking down someone who threatened the president's life on Grouphug. He explained that he doesn't keep any visitor logs for the site, and all that's recorded is the date, the text people type, and a random number for their confession. Satisfied, the agents hung up.
Jeffrey, 25, spent a great deal of time working on Grouphug when it launched and even enlisted his brother Logan to help sort through the flood of confessions. Now the site basically runs itself, he says, and he's not involved in its day-to-day operation. Jeffrey is a graphic designer who works as an art director for the Arnold Worldwide ad agency. Born in Nebraska, he's lived in Boston for the past 3½ years.
When he started his blog, he didn't realize there were at least two confession sites already out there: DailyConfession.com and NotProud.com. Both are still running but couldn't be more different than Grouphug in terms of tone.
As the Grouphug anthology's title suggests, ''Stoned, Naked, and Looking" gives a representative sampling of the topics on the site. The categories include: Shame, Cheat, Love, Life, and Kink. Sounding like a circus sideshow barker, Jeffrey writes in the book, ''You will read things that will revolt you on the same page as things that you'll wish to hell you were young/limber/stupid enough to try."
163993154
All the time I find myself wanting to eat flesh. In public, I eat the flesh off the tips of my fingers but at home I eat the soles of my feet the skin is so thick and chewy I bite myself all over I'm sure I've gotten flesh from every part of my body . . . I'm not a cannibal, just one [expletive] of a confused chick, I just love the taste of flesh.
Grouphug is the proverbial car wreck that you're simultaneously too horrified by and fascinated with to turn away from. That's sometimes true within the same confession. Online, they aren't grouped in any particular order, and many are sexually graphic. Despite the religious connotation of confession, most who write in don't seem to be looking for spiritual absolution. As funny, puzzling, and mind-bending as the site is, scrolling through page after page, the confessions can blur together after a while. The people who write in but don't confess fall into two camps. Some write that reading about other people's dilemmas and perversions makes them feel like they're not so messed up. Others accuse those who confess of trying to out-''Jerry Springer" one another with elaborate tales of cruelty or debauchery that must be fake.
But because people post serious confessions on topics including suicide, eating disorders, and domestic violence, the site has a page with links to organizations to help people dealing with such issues.
''If someone could make a real honest case that the website or the book is hurting anyone I'd be the first to pull the plug," Jeffrey says. ''But I can't imagine that's the case any more than with e-mail or an electronic bulletin board or a lamppost with posters on it."
937205178
I'm a 79-year-old grandmother of two, I regularly sit near to people on the bus who I find attractive and purr at them. This does include females.
For those who might find the Grouphug site hard to take in large doses, ''Stoned, Naked, and Looking," put out by local publishers Justin, Charles & Co., offers the same gems in a more digestible format. A young web-savvy editor at Justin, Charles clued her bosses in to the site, and last January the company contacted Jeffrey.
''There are hundreds of thousands or even millions of people either confessing or lurking in the confession booth reading the confessions of others," says publisher Stephen Hull. ''I think any time you have large numbers of people interested in something like that, it's worth looking into."
Hull said that for now Jeffrey will only be making local appearances, but reaction to the book has been positive. Grouphug's popularity abroad has also spawned a British version of the book.
Jeffrey said people in Norway, Sweden, Spain, and Japan have even approached him about setting up versions of Grouphug in their countries. He's also been asked about doing a documentary on the site as well as an opera, but Jeffrey admits he's not sure how serious people are about those projects. Still, people scoffed at the idea of ''Jerry Springer: The Opera" until a production in London's West End drew 1.7 million people.
Jeffrey has no plans to shut down Grouphug but says he may eventually relinquish control of the site.
''I had a lot of fun with it, and any time something new comes along with it I think it's great," he says. ''I also need to move on at the same time."
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