Article Gorgeous Guy
Summary: A man was accused of using numerous fake aliases in order to create a buzz about himself online.
Dan Baca, aka ‘Gorgeous Guy’ Dan Baca, a 29-year-old network engineer, was going about his life, minding his own business, when suddenly people began staring at him. He noticed it first while he was standing at the busstop in the morning. Crowds of people were gathering, looking at him, whispering to each other. It happened a few days in a row. Finally he confronted them. Why, he demanded to know, was everyone staring at him? The reason, they told him, was that he was an internet celebrity.
On May 11, 2001 Dan’s picture had been posted on a local internet portal, craigslist.org, in the ‘Missed Connections’ forum. The picture’s caption read, “Gorgeous Guy @ 4th and Market at the MUNI/Amtrak Bus Stop (Mon-Fri).” The person who had posted the message talked about how she wanted to meet this guy, but she didn’t know his name. She was hoping he would see her message and contact her.
This initial posting initiated a flood of follow-up messages. The Gorgeous Guy at the busstop became the talk of San Francisco’s online community. People theorized about who he was, whether he was single, straight, gay, etc. Then people began going to the busstop to see him in person.
Eventually David Cassel, a freelance journalist, caught wind of the Gorgeous Guy phenomenon and wrote about it in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. National media then picked up on the story, and soon Dan Baca found himself fielding calls from CNN and the Tonight Show. It was just like something you might see in the movies. He had become a national celebrity just by standing at the busstop looking gorgeous.
Cassel, meanwhile, was suspicious about something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about the story didn’t ring true. So he did some more research and discovered a few interesting facts that he disclosed a month later wrote in a follow-up article. His big revelation? That Gorgeous Guy was a hoax!
No one knows who posted the original picture of Baca, but Cassel discovered that the majority of the initial follow-up messages that drew attention to Dan’s picture had been posted by Baca himself. Baca had created an array of online personalities to convey the sense that a crowd of people were talking about him. This strategy eventually succeeded in attracting the attention of a real crowd. No one had ever sought him out at the busstop.
Baca’s motivations are obscure. Perhaps he just craved attention, or perhaps he was hoping to segue his fame into a modeling or acting career. Either way, the hoax demonstrates how the internet has allowed average people to access huge public audiences without going through the traditional gatekeepers of the print and broadcast media. This access, if exploited creatively, can be used for good, bad, or in the case of Dan Baca, simply self-publicizing ends.
References
- David Cassel, “‘Gorgeous Guy’ is San Francisco’s new cyberlebrity,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 30, 2001.
- Janet Kornblum, Web transforms commuter into ‘The Gorgeous Guy’. USA Today. June 19, 2001.