BootmanLA

If you don't want to be a sex worker, don't be a sex worker. Don't be an asshole on top of it and snidely infer that those who are lack self respect.

You're talking about two different situations here, and some history might make this sound less awful. The Jerry Springer Show started in 1991. Sally Jesse Raphael started even earlier, in 1983 (though only local at the time) and was widely syndicated before the end of the 80's. Oprah's show started in 1986. In that era, men who had been married for 20 years got married in the 1960's, men married for 30 years got married in the 1950's, and men married for 40 years had been married since the 1940's. NONE of those people came of age when there was any sort of even toleration for gay men, much less welcoming support. Men who failed to marry by their mid-20's were considered suspect, and being suspect meant being closed out of pretty much everything - professionally and socially. Does that make the lying a good thing? Of course not - but it's a hell of a lot more understandable when you consider what a gay man's alternatives were back then. Maybe instead of blaming men for having to contort their lives to accommodate the colossally shitty way society forced them to behave, it would be more productive to call out the shallowness and idiocy of society at the time. We have no problem calling out racism for what it was (well, at least outside of Florida), but we still don't want to say people - absolutely MOST people - were homophobic. Public approval of homosexuality didn't exceed 50% until the early 2000's. Barely 1/3 approved of gay people EXISTING as late as 1982. Ditto for a person coming out as trans, except that society STILL hasn't moved nearly as far on that issue. As a youth in the 1970's I knew of exactly three transsexual persons: Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, and Wendy Carlos. I remember the outrage of a lot of CBS affiliates when a set of "All in the Family" episodes featured a trans person (probably correctly identified as a drag queen, but terms were rather imprecise at the time). The last several years have been brutal, legislatively, for trans people as red state after red states seeks to suppress their rights. I'm not going to fault ANYONE for failing to have come out decades ago as trans - it was positively suicidal in many cases.

It's probably true that handicapped/disabled persons have far fewer options than other people for sex - given our society's appalling ableism. But one needn't be such in order to experience a severe dearth of options. Sometimes it's looks, sometimes it's personality, sometimes it's the location, sometimes it's just old-fashioned snobbery, but there are a significant number of gay men out there who go without sex for extended periods of time simply because they can't find anyone interested. Some guys I've talked with said they hated going to the baths, because if they exercised any choice over who fucked them, they didn't get fucked at all - while more appealing (in some way - better looking, better built, better hung, whatever) guys could pick and choose all night long and always get the cream of the crop. One finally admitted he had found a sex worker in the nearest big city who was happy to give him what he wanted, at a reasonable price, and never made him feel bad about paying for it.

That explains my experience just now. Had been using a Texas site with my VPN provider because the speed penalty was negligible, but shifting to a blue state fixed the problem. The speed penalty isn't that bad.

Spokane is indeed much smaller and more conservative than Seattle - Spokane may be a little more liberal than some of the really hard-core right-wing towns on that side of the state, but it's not really liberal in the sense any of us would consider. But you might be surprised at how little a family may know about the exploits of one of their members, especially if he just doesn't tell them. If he was escorting in southern California and that's where he made his videos, how likely would it be that his family - presumably all straight and conservative - would even come across said videos, or learn about his hustling gigs? Not very, in my opinion. Not that I ever did porn (cue: sigh of relief from da gayz), but if I had, I doubt seriously my parents would have ever found out; they just wouldn't have had any reason to go looking, any desire to know, or anyone who was likely to tell them.

For guys who live in urban areas, who come out young, and who are attractive enough to have people clamoring for sex, those numbers are valid or very possibly higher. For guys in much more rural or suburban areas, who don't come out right away at 18, or who for one reason or another aren't model-of-the-week category, they may not have had but a small fraction of those encounters. Especially for the vast part of the country where there are no bathhouses, no public parks with cruisy areas, no adult "bookstores" within reasonable distance. You may find it shocking, but there are large numbers of gay men who can count on both hands the number of times they have sex in a year. So no, not everyone is likely to have had thousands of sexual encounters (many do, but many do not). As I remind people constantly: everyone's experience is different.

I'm going to disagree here, only because I think sex, like any other personal service, ought to be up for negotiation. What's the difference between a woman who accepts $500 for agreeing to let a man fuck her, and a woman whose boyfriend gives her $500 gifts on occasion to show his appreciation? When I pay for a dinner, sometimes I'm just trying to stave off hunger, and sometimes I really, really am craving the meal I'm ordering and will savor every minute of it. The fact that there's a commercial side to that transaction doesn't change the fact that I very much want the meal. And looked at from the opposite perspective, sometimes the chef in a restaurant is preparing a meal because he truly loves expressing himself with food that brings joy to the customer. Sometimes he's doing it to make sure he can pay rent. I don't think the fact that his restaurant charges for the "joyful" meal negates his pleasure in doing a great job. I'm sure there are house painters who truly love the work they do. I suspect the vast majority do not. If I'm paying to get my house painted, I'm not sure I really care how they feel about it as long as they do the work well. There are men (not many) I would happily pay a significant (to me) sum of money for sex, and as long as he did as good a job as I think he'd do, I don't really think I'd care if he "didn't want to be with" me. People sometimes have sex just to get off, and you know what? it's not always bad.

But that's just it. This isn't about outing; this is about extortion. "Pay me X or I'll do Y" isn't about Y nearly so much as it's about the demand for X. And I notice you didn't mention the politics of this elected official; I'm guessing that they weren't the reason for the exposure, but instead the refusal to pay was. Assuming the official wasn't actively working to harm the community, yes, it was a nasty thing to do to him, and your greedy "friend" (or however you want to characterize him) did a shitty thing. Personally, if I found out someone I knew did something that awful, I'd cut off contact with him, but that's just me and my standards.

If you're not on PrEP, you should be. If you are, then relax and hopefully enjoy the experience. As for what you'll experience: nobody else's experiences in that regard are really relevant - you and your body will react the way you and your body will react. For some, bareback sex is a life-changing experience. For others, it's another day of the week. My own suggestion, though, is to not put too many expectations on it - increased expectations = greater opportunity for disappointment.

You sound like someone Aesop wrote about. He must have known you - could you tell us what he was like? I've always been curious.

Well, if I were a closeted gay politician who works hard to block same-sex marriage, or adoption by gay people, or whatever, while cheating on my wife with other men, and I were asked "How would you feel about being outed?" of course I'm going to object. That doesn't mean my own (selfish) desire for privacy over this part of my life trumps exposure of the hypocrisy. In my view, you don't get to invoke the "this is a private matter" cover when you're working to harm others on the basis of THEIR private matters. You're making their private lives a public issue, so yours gets to be one too.

It's not time spent; it's what you do with it. If time as a member was all that mattered, spammers could create dozens of fake accounts, wait the required amount of time (whatever they figured it out to be), and then let loose. By focusing instead on how much you participate - number of posts made, number of replies made, number of topics started, etc. - the system weeds out those who are just here to cause trouble, or those who think this is just another hookup site (it's a discussion forum).

My response to Signorile at the time - which remains the same today - is that there is a difference between harming and failing to aid. There is a streak of activism that wants to dictate for everyone else what level of engagement is not only appropriate, but demanded - and I reject that entirely. Signorile's approach was basically "Fuck your life and your marriage and your kids and anything else you think is important; *I* think you need to be out in order to advance the goals I want on my timeline, and it's your job to shut up and fall in line." To be fair to him: he wrote QIA at a time when the number of HIV/AIDS diagnoses was still rising almost exponentially, and concern for the very survival of gay men as a population was real. I'm not sure whether he'd argue the same today (he might well, or he might have moderated his stance somewhat).

To add to this just a bit, if I may: the problem of not being able to reply to private messages is not due to a bug in the software, but to the fact that you're a new member. You earn the right to send private messages (including responses) by participating in the forums here, making posts and replies and creating topics. The threshold for where you get particular privileges is automated (in other words, it's not that RawTop looks at your participation and manually decides "This guy now can send messages"), but the trigger points of how much participation moves you to the level where you can message is not public information. That's to keep spammers, etc. from gaming the system.

The purist approach, of course, is that everyone gets to decide for himself or herself when and if to come out. So if the question is framed in terms of, say, a right to privacy, it's really hard to say that X has that right but Y does not. After all, one of our most telling arguments for recognizing same-sex marriage was that if a man had a right to have his marriage to a woman recognized, he should have the same right to have his marriage to a man recognized. Ethics, though, isn't about rights; it's about doing what's right. So, for instance, a person may have a right to kill himself, but it may be ethically right to pull a person back from a ledge from which she's about to leap, especially if one suspects she's not completely capable of making an informed decision at the moment. And sometimes the situation is like the classic trolley switch problem: if a trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who can't get off the tracks, and you can throw a switch to shift the trolley to a different track, but it will kill one person who can't get off that track, do you throw the switch? On the one hand, not acting means more people die. On the other hand, acting means that one person dies but it's because of something YOU did. What to do? I think outing a married person who goes to bathhouses or bookstores for sex (but who otherwise is not a public figure) is like flipping that switch when there aren't five people stuck on the track to start with. You aren't saving anyone, and you're inflicting harm not only on the person who's cheating on his wife, but on the wife and their families, too - for no gain other than adding to the sum of brutal honesty in the world. Outing someone in a leadership position - a religious figure who preaches against gay sex, a politician who votes against gay rights - is more like the classic trolley problem - outing is throwing that switch to save the larger group - with the addition that the five people stuck on the track are there in the first place because of the actions of the person on the other track. He's put them in harm's way, and you're not only saving them from harm, but you're helping normalize the fact of being gay for other closeted people. But again, that calculus only comes into play, in my view, when the person being outed has actively, not passively, worked to harm the LGBT community.

And that, in a nutshell, is also my (personal, idiosyncratic, not backed by any study) problem with the on demand method. Once you deviate from a measurable, set pattern (one dose, every day, same time of day every day if possible), you introduce variability that's hard to measure. Conceptually, 2+1+1 makes sense: you take a double dose ahead of time, so that any HIV entering your system hits a larger-than-usual (ie daily level) wall of protection, and then continue to take the medication afterwards for a period, in order to boost the level of protection until it's too late for HIV to gain a foothold. But consider: let's say it's a long weekend and you're going away to some "event" where you plan to be active starting Friday night. You take the first (double) dose about 8 AM Friday before you leave. You end up having sex about midnight on Friday (so 16 hours later). Then you also have sex on Saturday night about 11 PM, and on Sunday night at midnight because Monday's a holiday and you can stay up late, Then you have one last fuck before heading home Monday at noon. Using the "2 doses after the last time you have sex" AND the "24 hours after each dose" rules, both, your final dose would be 8 AM Wednesday. But that puts your last dose at 40 hours after your last sex - is that enough? Does the final "+1" contemplate being close to 48 hours after your last sex? What if, thanks to scheduling, it's more like 36 hours? And all this assumes you can take each dose 24 hours after the first ones. Again, in this example, you started at 8 AM on a Friday; what if you're not up again on Saturday until nearly lunch because you sleep in after a long night dancing/partying/having sex? What if, on one of the "+1" days, you find yourself away from your meds when the 24 hour clock strikes, and you can't get back to them for four or five hours? Obviously, it's still way better than nothing, and I'm not going to suggest it's not helpful. And certainly for people who already have some issue like compromised kidney functions, the less such medication you take, the better, so daily may not be right. But if Apretude turns out to be less damaging to kidneys than the oral medications, it'll be far better than "on demand" PrEP because it's one less thing to have to remember and/or calculate.

One thing to remember: a lot of casual sex just stopped cold when the pandemic started, and I'm sure some number of people stopped taking PrEP if they were not actually having sex with others (outside of whatever "COVID bubble" or similar that they were in). Some of them, no doubt, started up again before getting back on PrEP or before getting PrEP levels back up to par, so some may have been infected then. Bear in mind, too, that most people consider themselves negative and describe themselves as such right up until they find out they're not. Some of them - those who don't grasp the science that thoroughly, in particular - still assume that if they limit the number of sex partners they have, and limit them to "the right kind" of guy, then they're "safe" from being infected. During the pandemic, I'm willing to bet a lot of people ended up getting infected with COVID and in the course of getting long-overdue blood work, etc. done as part of the screening, some number of them found out - surprise! - that they were HIV+. That might account for some of the jump in numbers of infections, in addition to the previously cited factoid that we saw a "clump" of new infections finally diagnosed after labs began catching up on work delayed by COVID. People do lie. They lie about whether they have a wife, a husband, a partner. They lie about whether they have HIV. They lie about all sorts of things. But in my limited experience, there's not much mileage in lying about being Undetectable. If you're going to lie, you'd probably lie that you're negative, rather than UD. But you're also seeing that education is helping people understand the U=U mantra (undetectable = untransmissible). Now that more people understand that, people who were reluctant to admit to being poz undetectable are opening up. The riskiness of sex with them hasn't changed; what's changed is that some portion of them don't feel the need to claim to be negative when their real status is just as safe. What you seem to be saying is that you reject the science that U=U. You don't have to accept that, of course, just like you can believe the earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and Trump won the 2020 election. Your beliefs, however, don't change the facts. Simple answer: Yes. If the person stops taking medications, his viral load can rise to detectable, and eventually, infectious levels. Returning to meds - though they may or may not need to be changed - will usually return the person to an undetectable state. Oral sex is generally considered low-risk activity, yes. And receiving oral sex is safer, in general, than performing it on another man. But then being the penetrating HIV-negative partner for anal sex is far lower risk than being one penetrated by someone else - it's the party who's receiving the ejaculation (orally or anally) who's more at risk in any given situation. That said, if you go to fuck someone bareback and he's already been fucked very recently (ie in the same few hours) by someone who's poz and detectable, you are at some risk of infection even if the guy you're fucking is on PrEP. Because the virus might be present in semen in his rectum and enter through your urethra. It's a vastly diminished risk of infection compared with taking a poz load yourself anally, but it's still a small risk. Again, the only way this is risky is if one of those cocks belongs to a guy who is poz AND infectious. In that case, some of the other tops may - MAY - get infected. But in any event, no one should be both HIV+/undetectable AND on PrEP - PrEP is strictly for guys who are NOT positive, to prevent their infection. You're confusing two different things. A person on PrEP is taking PREVENTATIVE medication to prevent himself from getting infected with HIV. A person who is HIV+Undetectable is taking TREATMENT medication to treat his OWN health, with the side effect/advantage of making it essentially impossible to infect others. You really need to understand that those are two different things. Such a variant may develop - in fact, there are (extremely rare) strains of HIV that do not respond to most or any treatments. But those don't come about because people are having sex with a lot of different guys. When you suggest that, you're just slut-shaming at the same time as showing you don't understand the science of how such strains of a virus develop. There are more than a dozen compounds which can go into making up HIV treatment medications - with each medication (a given brand name) containing three or four of those compounds. The compounds are grouped into "classes" based on how they specifically work - whether by blocking replication, by interfering with the transcription of the virus during replication, by blocking infection of certain cells, or whatever - and most medications contain at least two, often three or more, of these classes of compounds. That enables the medication to attack the virus on multiple levels. PrEP is simpler - the oral version contains two such compounds, but they are sufficient to prevent HIV from gaining a foothold in an uninfected person. The two compounds contained in PrEP are often among the compounds in an HIV treatment medication - but the latter will contain other means of helping control the infection that already exists. Treatment resistant viruses develop primarily when someone is infected and is taking medication for treatment but he does not take it regularly enough to prevent the virus from replicating extensively in his system. HIV is what's called a "retrovirus", and the way it reproduces is sloppy, often producing mutations rather than clean copies. Those mutations are usually stamped out in a person who takes his medications regularly. But when a patient does not take treatment regularly, some of those mutations can also take hold, and sometimes one of those mutations will turn out to be resistant to the medication he should be taking. Once it's established, it may not respond to the medication, meaning he needs to be switched to something else for the treatment to be effective (assuming he can be persuaded to take his treatment regularly). But it has ZERO to do with how many people he's having sex with. Viruses and bacteria don't keep a tally of your sexual partners and develop according to your sluttiness.

You're correct, and I have my wires crossed (I was also responding in a thread that involved PEP as a response to someone getting fucked when he only expected to be fisted). That's my error. That said: Yes, the 2+1+1 method generally works. My own, idiosyncratic view is that it has more room for error. You have to take the initial doses far enough ahead, but not too far, and it's possible to screw that up. Once you have sex, you have to time the post-sex doses pretty accurately (I don't mean to the minute, but being four or five hours off is going to lower the effectiveness). Plus, I can remember more than one weekend in my "dating" years where I had sex with a guy Friday night, again on Saturday morning, and sometimes one more time before leaving Saturday afternoon. The instructions for 2+1+1 don't say when to start counting the 24-hour doses other than "after sex", and they don't really make it clear to keep going for 2 days after the LAST sexual activity. And of course, if you have sex more than 2-3 times a week, you might as well be on daily PrEP, because it's a hell of a lot easier to remember a pill every day than to calculate how many hours since the last fuck. Hence the appeal of a shot that's one time and done for 2 months, especially if you have a conscientious health care provider who makes your next appointment while you're checking out from your current one (like mine does for my treatment, not for PrEP).

That's definitely also a plus. And yes, of course if you're already used to taking daily medications - as those of us of a certain age often are - then adding one more pill to the routine isn't as big a deal. But for youngsters, who are more accustomed to taking short runs of medication for a specific illness, then stopping, it may be a lot more difficult to remember. Especially if you don't adapt well to strict routines (and in my experience, many people in their late teens and 20's do not).

You are describing "PrEP" (PRE Exposure Prophylaxis) on demand - not PEP (POST Exposure Prophylaxis). PrEP on demand is for planned sex - note that you have to take it BEFORE the sex. PEP is used primarily in cases of sexual assault, but can in theory be used by others - it's when you've had unprotected sex WITHOUT taking anything beforehand, so the virus enters an unprotected system. That's why you stay on it for 30 days - to make sure that it doesn't get established.

With respect to effectiveness: the primary reason Apretude is more effective, to the extent that it is, is almost certainly because it doesn't require daily compliance. You take a shot, then return in 60 days, lather, rinse, repeat. For some men, it's a lot easier to take a shot every other month, particularly if the doctor's office sets the appointments and reminds you when they're up, than it is to remember to take a pill every day. So with a pill form of PrEP, there are always going to be some individuals who slip up, forgetting to take the pill every day, sometimes more often than others. That's going to lower the overall effectiveness, even if (for most people, who do take it daily) the pill provides essentially just as much protection as the shot series.

I will take a very slightly different tack from the general chorus here: Yes, I think you should get on PrEP, but not because a FF top might decide to fuck you. I hate to break it to all these guys, but if you only agree to being fisted, and he sticks his dick in you, that's rape. Period. And all these guys thinking it's on YOU to protect yourself from a sexual assault they are hinting (without outright saying it) that they'd be willing to commit can go fuck themselves - consent is consent is consent, and if you don't have a bottom's consent to stick your dick in his ass, don't fucking do it. That said, there ARE such guys out there. There are also guys who may slip you something in a drink to make you unable to stop a sexual assault. And there is also the possibility that, in the heat of the moment, a FF top who has only got permission to fist you asks to stick his cock in, and you - in the heat of the moment - either agree, or don't really make it clear that the answer is no. In all of these cases, you could end up with a poz cock cumming in you. If you're involving other people outside your monogamous relationship (and how that works when you're getting fisted by others, I don't understand, but...) in play - or even putting yourself in the situation where someone might take advantage of you, then PrEP is a good idea. (There's also PEP, post-exposure prophylaxis, where you take medication shortly after unprotected sex and continue to take it for four weeks to prevent any infection from taking hold. But if you're going to do that more than rarely, PrEP makes more sense.)

Just curious: how is one HIV positive "in [anyone's] opinion"? It seems to me it's an empirical fact; either one is HIV-positive, or one is not, and while a person's status may be unknown (because of lack of recent testing), it's not a matter of any opinion. It is, or it ain't.

For some men, "ugly" could include misshaped dicks - ones with a really severe bend right or left, for instance. In the "misshaped" category I'd personally include all those guys who get a bunch of silicone pumped in there to make it grotesquely fat (and basically unusable for its basic function as a sex organ). I realize that some people are turned on by those jelly-like cocks that are much bigger around, circumference wise, than they are long - but then beauty (and ugly) are in the eye of the beholder. This category can also include extreme deviations from the "typical" cock - ie a tiny head with virtually no crown on a much thicker shaft, for instance. Or a head that's weirdly shaped, possibly with an off-kilter urethra. Some men consider dicks with scar tissue ugly (which needn't be from "recent" damage, so I'm assuming it's relevant). Those are things I've heard about others over the years, but I assume it's far from a complete list.

That would cover an awful lot of men with erectile issues, and dismissing all of their dicks as "ugly" because they don't work as well as some might like seems, I dunno, pretty fucking rude to me.