rawTOP

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it here yet, but Mike Dozer is in jail. Judge has slapped a $1 million bail on him, and as far as I know he hasn't managed to come up with the bail, so he's just sitting there in jail. The rest of this gets a big ALLEGEDLY since the precise details are a little in the air, but apparently he hooked up with a 14 year old outside of Philadelphia. The kid had hit him up on the mobile app Jack'd. His lawyer says he thought the kid was legal and tried to break it off as soon as he knew the kid was underage, but the kid continued to pursue him. You do have to state that you're 18 to use Jack'd, so the kid was clearly deceptive. Complicating the whole situation is the fact that Mike is poz. And given his Condoms Are For Pussies t-shirt a few months ago I'm guessing he fucked the kid and blew a load in his ass (somehow I just can't see him getting fucked by a 14 year old - maybe they swapped loads, but I just can't see Mike as a pussy boy bottom for 14 year old). Anyway, the lawyer says he disclosed his status, but clearly the prosecutor (and others?) feel he didn't. If you want more details, start here: http://www.queerty.com/gay-porn-star-mike-dozer-charged-with-statutory-rape-of-14-year-old-he-met-online-20140207/ I did a blog post on it, but it's mostly based on the Queerty post: http://www.rawtop.com/porn/2014-02/mike-dozer-gets-best-dick-in-porn-but-prefers-teens One funny point is that Mike's legal name is Christopher Steele. If he were more of a top he could have just used his legal name for porn - it's totally a porn name. Personally, I think this is a perfect case of how age of consent laws are flawed. We need the laws to deter predators from preying on kids. What the age should be is an active question (that we've covered on another thread), but to me it just seems wrong to wreck someone's life if they didn't intend to break the law. We used to require intent in our criminal justice system. I think it's wrong that that principle is losing ground these days. IMHO, if the adult thought they were having sex with someone who was of age and no coercion is involved the adult should get a suspended sentence. If they do it again within X years, then you throw the book at them. And for those of you living in a hole who don't know who Mike Dozer is - here's a pic of him…

Straight friends of ours from the porn biz come to NYC for vacations from time to time. NYC has pretty strict laws on what's allowed in terms of nudity and sexual interaction in businesses (especially ones serving liquor). All I can say is the things they do in their straight clubs would generate huge fines and possibly closures if they happened in a gay bar or club. There's a huge double standard at play. But somehow people think gay sex is somehow worse than straight sex.

It looks like this (click to see a bigger version of the pic):

In the sidebar of your profile there's a link to see all your posts.

Gilead will cover $200/month. $1000/month means the insurance company isn't paying for any of it. I'm a little surprised by that. Most insurance companies will cover it since they can't tell the difference between Truvada for a poz guy and Truvada as PrEP for a neg guy. Could the $1000 be a deductible that ends after the first month and then you have coverage?

For the record ,nearly 4,000 people have been able to figure out how to permission themselves for the things they want to see. I'm still amazed when people contact me for help on this issue. Yeah, you have to jump through a few hoops, but it's not that hard. JUST READ THE ERROR MESSAGE YOU GET - it tells you everything you need to know.

Don't ever use drugs as a crutch. Just be the pig you wanna be. If you have to use drugs to do it, then you probably shouldn't do it (yet).

I suspect there's a proxy server involved that's cached another user's page result. Thing is, proxies aren't supposed to cache SSL secured pages. What sort of device/computer are you using? What type of Internet connection? If you can change your network connection and try again that will test my theory. Or do something like try the page on your cell phone over a cellular network. Or, if it is a mid-stream caching issue if you give it a little time the cache will expire and when you try again you should see the image.

You can put what you want in the text of your profile, but there will be the ability to specify your neighborhood. You'll be choosing a neighborhood from a huge database of place names. That neighborhood name is meant to be descriptive, not something that people search on (though browsing by neighborhood will be possible - but it's mostly there so search engines can crawl public profiles). For example, let's say you're in a hotel in the West 40s just west of Times Square. That location could be "Times Square", "Theater District", "Hell's Kitchen", "Midtown West", "Clinton", or "Midtown" - they're all completely reasonable. You'll be able to choose whatever you want - and thereby be as descriptive (or indescript) as you like.

You get full protection after 5 days on PrEP. Studies are underway to see if there's full protection at lower doses.

Just an update… I went off for a couple days, then got nervous and went back on for a couple days, then went off for nearly a week, then got nervous and went back on. I also changed which bed I was sleeping in and the change of bed seems to have gotten rid of 90% of the pains I was having. So thinking it was side effects of PrEP was just needless worry, AFAIK. Unless being off for a week was enough to clear things up.

I disagree. I want to know who's within walking distance and I never can tell on zip code based systems like BBRT. Often the zip code isn't where they actually are, and even if it is, there are parts of my zip code that are a long walk away, and parts of other zip codes that are just a couple blocks away. There are better tools for geolocation these days. I'll have a feature on the site to find the location of addresses. Yes, but then it broke and since it was written by someone else, utilized data that's now really old, and not all that important, I never fixed it. However, that map didn't give actual location. It was more of a rough guess of a location that at best was a few blocks off.

I've always heard the best tops are those who bottom on occasion. You need to understand what the bottom is going through to be a good top.

No, Raw & Rough is Dick Wadd. HDK's primary site is HDK Raw.

I want trust to be something which is hard to get. So I want it to be more than just reliable.

That is not going to happen. It sorta makes no sense. It means you can't find guys near you and make connections except when they're horny. If guys just want to chat, they can come here. Also, there's the critical mass issue. If you login and don't see anyone online you won't want to come back. That said, I do understand some of the motivations behind your concerns. I'm trying to figure out the balance between the features you really need without going overboard to the point where there are so many features it gets confusing. This, however, is along the lines of what I was thinking. "Deletion" will mean something like 6 to 12 months of being hidden, followed by actual deletion. That way people can take a break but still reclaim their profiles if they want and start back where they left off.

The problem with hosted services is that if they decide they don't like you, you'll lose everything when they summarily delete your account (with no warning). That's true of Tumblr & Blogspot. For example, neither allow ads on their sites and will terminate you without discussion if they find them on your site. If you're OK with that uncertainty, then personally I'd go with Tumblr. Blogger is fine, but it's not as cutting edge as Tumblr. Just the way Tumblr is structured you're likely to get a bigger audience more quickly. If you're serious about blogging, I suggest getting your own domain. I know Tumblr can publish to a custom domain, and I'm pretty sure Blogger/Blogspot can as well. But with your own domain you can also pay for hosting (cheap shared hosting at an adult-friendly host is sufficient) and use Wordpress. In this scenario you're in control of your data. You can have ads, etc. BUT you're sort of out in a wilderness and will have issues finding viewers. SquaredSpace is another service I'd recommend looking into. I'm not sure if they're adult-friendly though. But they have really great designs and an interesting feature set. In that case you probably would be allowed to have ads since they charge a monthly fee.

My bf and I talked about exactly that. We thought (briefly) about using AirBnB to bring in a little extra month, but then didn't like the idea of having to deal with straight people - we just wanted gay guys (or at least gay-friendly straight folks). But there was also the issue of trust. I'm not sure I want to give complete strangers access to my home. I've been wanting to make BBBH.com different than most hookup sites. I mean clearly the primary use will be for sex, but the "brotherhood" idea really speaks to the fact that there is a community behind all our fucking. I could add an AirBnB like component to the site, so guys could advertise that they have rooms available. And I've already been thinking of implementing the concept of trust on BBBH. There are sorta three ways to see someone on a site like that - 1) how hot/fuckable are they?, 2) how big of a slut are they?, and 3) how much can you trust/depend on them? I would start by designating a certain group of guys as "trustworthy" - they'd get to designate a certain number of guys as trustworthy. For every person who says you're trustworthy, you could designate someone else as trustworthy. The more people who vouch for you the more your trust score goes up. That trust score could be used for the AirBnB-like system. You could designate a minimum trust score for people to see your listing, etc. (since pictures of your home are pretty sensitive). Does that sound like a good idea? Or is BBBH.com the wrong place for something like that? If you guys say yes, realize it'll be late this year that I could get something like that up.

FYI - here are my stats for the past month… Google is driving 13.5 times more traffic to my sites than Big and Yahoo! combined (click to see bigger version of the image). There was a time a few months ago when Google was having issues and I tried out Bing and found it to be decent on some queries and not on others. In fact it reminded me a bit of the old Google. I mentioned to a friend of ours who's pretty senior at Google that I was liking Bing and (despite him being drunk at the time) he was deeply worried that someone like me would prefer Bing. He said there were some internal battles at Google over what type of content was getting ranked. About two weeks later the Google SERPs improved drastically and things went back to normal and once again Google was better. If you're really wondering if Bing is better, try BingItOn.com. Though it's blocked in some countries where their SERPs are pure crap. Most of the people I know say Google wins with 60+% of searches being better on Google. But my point is that even if they were roughly the same, you use the one that's willing to lose customers to defend your human rights. Bing now has a really high bar to jump to get me to use them.

AT&T (sponsor of the US Olympic Team) has also publicly criticized Russia for their stance on gay rights… Thumbs up for that, but it wasn't bold enough to be a defining moment IMHO. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/07/us-olympics-gay-idUSBREA160AX20140207 NBC (the TV sponsor for the US) was giving a fair amount of air time to coverage of gay issues - doing interviews with people like Billie Jean King where they talked about what's going on in Russia at the moment. Hopefully they'll keep that up during their Olympic coverage. I'd like to see Coke do something big and bold – their Superbowl commercial was nice, but they need to do more.

Severance agreements are pretty standard. They have every right to eliminate or outsource your job. So unless you have an airtight case it's probably best to sign, take the money and move on. There are cases where signing isn't the right thing to do, but they tend to have different circumstances (like someone I know who was fired for being a whistleblower - he made millions when he sued his company). Agreed!

I've always noticed that Google was the biggest driver of traffic to my sites. I just never could get the traffic other people talked about when it came to Bing/Yahoo! (which are the same – Big powers Yahoo! Search). My take on it was that gay guys just preferred Google to Bing. So the question was always "why do gay men prefer Google?" Besides the fact that Google generally has better results than Bing, Google is a huge defender of gay rights. These two stories today struck me in how different they are: Google’s “Olympic Charter” Logo Stands Up To Russia’s Anti-Gay Legislation Bing to Showcase Winter Olympics Data in Search Results So while Bing is all "Hip Hip Hooray" about the Olympics, Google is using the opportunity to protest Russia's treatment of gays. They're doing is in a very public way – even on Google Russia and in places like Saudi Arabia – so not just to a western audiences who generally support gay rights. When Ellen came out YEARS ago now, most of her advertisers dropped her. Volkswagen bought the ad right after she came out on her show, and they ran this ad (which given the context is an interracial gay couple in San Francisco)… I had had a VW as my first car, then switched to Honda, but every car I've bought since that commercial has been a VW. In fact VW dropped the dealership here in Manhattan where a sales person had called me a "fucking faggot". Dropping a dealer is a big deal (especially in a market like NY), and I'm sure there was more to it than my one complaint, but I'd like to think that my complaint didn't help their case when they tried to renew their contract with VW. There are moments which define companies for me. VW had theirs when Ellen came out and now I buy nothing but VWs. Travelocity was the first travel company to feature gay couples in general audience advertising (back when it was a big deal to do something like that), so I still use them when I book a flight. And today Google had their moment. I really could care less that Rachael Zoe pushes Bing. Google is the company that is willing to lose customers to defend us. That means something.

When I was a kid there was a woman at church who was blind from diabetes. We'd go over to their house pretty frequently and she'd cook for us. As she was going blind she learned the position of every ingredient in her kitchen - it was pretty amazing. Her bread pudding was incredible. She even had a kitchen fire at one point, and managed to put it out herself (though she called the fire department to make sure it was really out). After a while the swelling in her legs got really horrible and disgusting. A few years later, different church, I had this woman who was like a big sister to me. She and her husband would take me on vacations with their family, etc. She had Type 1 diabetes. She was constantly checking her levels and giving herself shots. It was a ton of work on her part - definitely not easy. But I think she was scared shitless of going blind, etc. So yeah, there's definitely a dark side to diabetes. I think it's gotten easier since the 70's/80's when I was around it, but I imagine it's still pretty rough.

The user is trying to avoid the $2 fee for canceling his account. He said he was 32 years old when he signed up.

Did they say your porn was the reason you were fired or are you just guessing that's the reason? What sort of job was it? Guess you need to find a more accepting place to work. I know Dawson was a chemist or lab geek or something and his employer knew and was fine with it. They didn't think it had any bearing on his work. And that's in conservative Boston! You'll find something, but that's a huge bummer.