BootmanLA

It's more likely that a guy who has a small cock and has PE issues becomes a bottom. In other words, I think you have cause and effect backwards; there's not necessarily a lot of demand for tops with small cocks who cum quickly, so by default, many such individuals may end up being, in essence, restricted to bottoming even if they might prefer otherwise. That's completely irrelevant from the issue of condom usage. If you, as a bottom, choose to give up the control of deciding whether a top uses a condom or not, that's your choice, but always remember it's YOUR choice. This crapola of "It's the top's decision" is toxic bullshit. Now, it's true that many tops - and BZ is by no means a representative sampling of tops, even the tops on here aren't necessarily representative - want to fuck bare and only will fuck bare. If they encounter a bottom who wants a condom used, they can pass that bottom over and move on to the next. And it's true that some bottoms may not readily find tops who want to use condoms; in such cases, the bottom has to decide (ie choose) whether to allow a top to fuck him bare, or to wait until he finds a top who will fuck with condoms. In some places, the wait may be long; in others, not so much.

In theory, it's vaguely, faintly possible. But anything you did on Sunday that would cause eye irritation would almost certainly have manifested itself Sunday, or by any means by Monday. Eyes are fairly sensitive, and given how quickly they react to even dust particles getting in there, anything more substantive would likely have shown up well before. Chances are good, I'd think, that it's unrelated.

Not necessarily. It's possible to come into contact with an STI and not be infected, and it's possible to come into contact with it via two methods and only have one infect you. STI's aren't something that, once you have it, it's guaranteed to be spread to anyone you come into contact with. Now, the likelihood of passing it both orally and genitally to him (if you'd had it) is higher than the likelihood of only passing it one way or the other. But that doesn't mean it can't happen. .

I wouldn't count on that. I've known inordinate numbers of closeted gay Republicans who fervently drank the Kool-Aid, and even when it became possible for them to "do something" for the gay community, they didn't. They're perfectly willing to take advantage of the advances we've made (like ending the criminalization of gay sex) but they're completely uninterested in helping with the battles still to be won. Most were never friends of mine (more like casual acquaintances that had to be tolerated). But one was a very good friend, and he has a lovely house perfectly suited for entertaining (spacious, good flow, stunning furniture and art, all the equipment needed for hosting a nice group of people. After the sodomy law ruling, when gay marriage was becoming the next hot button issue, I asked if he would be willing to host a small, quiet, invitation-only fundraiser - not just for rich gays, but also for wealthy socially progressive straight people in this city. He looked horrified - even though, as I pointed out, most of the prospective guest list were straight themselves. But he was convinced that doing anything even tangentially associated with "queer people" would forever tarnish his local reputation. To be fair, several decades earlier, there had been a sweep of a cruising area at a local park, back when all the arrestees' names were printed in the paper. In that sweep, as one friend put it, you couldn't tell if you were reading the crime reports page or the Society section, given the number of prominent men who were picked up (several marriages imploded in the process). But that was a raid on a cruising park, with sex happening in public in the bushes, not a private party where the press wouldn't be informed and in fact would be banned. Still no dice. To this day (and he's around 85 now) I don't think he's ever donated a dime to an LGBT event or cause. Sad.

Moreover: while there are different strains of HIV, medications are generally not strain-specific; if you're on treatment for HIV subtype "whatever", that's generally going to prevent replication of subtype "whatever else" as well. The danger, if there is one, is getting infected by a strain that is medication-resistant. At this point, such strains are rare in the developed world; they exist, but they aren't spreading very fast or very far.

Indeed - the ruling on Texas's patently unconstitutional law pretty much eviscerates the justifications for such bans. While it's true that this decision only invalidates and blocks the Texas law, IF the state appeals the ruling, it will have to be heard at the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers TX, LA, and MS federal cases). You never know what an appeals court might do, of course, and the 5th Circuit is notoriously conservative, but this ruling is so solidly grounded in existing Supreme Court jurisprudence that the 5th Circuit will be hard pressed to find a way to uphold this law and stay within prior SCOTUS rulings. (That doesn't always stop them, but SCOTUS, conservative as it is, tends to slap down those kind of things.) And if the 5th Circuit affirms the judgment on appeal - as they should - that would likely spell doom for Louisiana's similar law, as well as Mississippi's (which, full disclosure, I have not read, but is unlikely to be able to avoid the same problems as Texas).

I vaguely considered watching, but then I realized the following: 1. I'm not going to vote for any of these candidates (or any other Republican) over any Democrat, whether it's Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, or the vivified zombie corpse of FDR; 2. I already know which of these candidates is the worst, which is to say, all of them; and 3. Any minute I spent watching this "debate" would be a minute I couldn't spend in a more uplifting and consequential pursuit, such as cleaning out my belly lint, organizing the twist-ties in my kitchen drawer by length, or attempting to teach my cats how to spell "antidisestablishmentarianism".

I think it's wise to clarify the difference between "open door" and "unlocked door". The latter, I think, is reasonably common; the top has to know the room number, either because it was posted, or because it was given to him in a message/chat, but the door remains closed except when someone's coming in or going out. You can sometimes use the security latch at the top (swung into place before the door closes, it can prevent the door from closing completely); or you can, as someone suggested, use a piece of duct tape on the edge of the door to keep the latches from engaging. This second option lets the door close completely, but it can be pushed open. At home, you can certainly leave your own door unlocked, assuming you don't live in an apartment with security that requires being let into the building. "Open door", on the other hand, means the door is propped open, so anyone walking by the hotel room can see inside and see you waiting. Back in the day at the Parliament House in Orlando (and probably other, similar "resorts", people would prop the door open to advertise they were ready for sex. But that's in a location where everyone is there for the same reason. Doing that in a hotel that also caters to business travelers, families, etc. is asking to be kicked out. And as has been discussed elsewhere: a growing number of hotels (especially in downtowns of cities) restrict access to the building entirely to guests - you need a key card to operate the elevator to get to the guest rooms, for instance. I've also stayed in some where there were fire doors on the hallway that couldn't be propped open (nothing nearby to use) that required a key card to enter that hallway of rooms. In such cases, open door or unlocked door makes no difference; nobody's getting past the lobby/first floor anyway.

I know it's been hot everywhere (in the northern hemisphere, that is) of late, but I kind of have to think they didn't "just melt" or "seem to have melted". One possibility is that they were poorly manufactured, and some defect is showing. A second possibility is that they aren't actually silicone*, but some other sort of vinyl/rubber compound. I'm assuming, for the sake of argument, that you do know the difference, but double, even triple, check the ad listing and/or packaging from the toy. Third, as you note, this looks like heat damage. Did you expose the toy to heat beyond the parameters recommended by the manufacturer? Fourth: Alcohol, even rubbing alcohol, can damage silicone. If you tried to sterilize a toy with it, that could well be part of the problem. *You wrote "silicon", but silicon is a naturally occurring element usually found in crystalline or metal-compound forms. It's a solid material used primarily in electronic chips and in solar panels, among other things. "Silicone" is short for "silicone rubber", a compound derived from silica sand and silicon metal, plus other components that yield a rubbery-like material. It's valued for its heat resistance, in general, which is why silicone is often used for handles on things that are exposed to high heat; but it's not impervious to breaking down under certain circumstances. To be honest, based on the photo, I'm inclined (without further information) to suspect possibility #2 above. This just doesn't look like most silicone rubber I've seen.

I think (and this is just an opinion, not really supported (or contradicted) by any evidence to which I can point, that this is a rose-colored glasses view of why smoking-caused illnesses and obesity-caused illnesses don't generate nearly the opprobrium directed at HIV infection in men who have sex with men, or injectable drug users. I think it's about the residual effects of moral outrage over gay sex and drug use, because those are things that the powers-that-be (or were) would never acknowledge as a possibility in their worlds. The overwhelmingly straight white Christian men who ran the country (not just the government, but the major institutions of society) could see themselves getting heart disease from a lifetime of rich foods, little exercise, and celebratory cigars on a steady basis. Even those who secretly COULD see themselves getting fucked in the ass by a man were not about to let that become an approved (even grudgingly) source of medical need that society wouldn't object to meeting. That's changed somewhat, of course, thanks to decades of hard work on the part of a lot of activists (and a bunch of societal changes as a result). But while I am concerned about the spread of HIV, from a public health perspective, I'm not about to start pointing fingers at chasers regarding the health care cost consequences. In my view, there's not a lot of status difference, frankly, between someone who has bareback sex chasing poz tops, and someone who has bareback sex and doesn't do any particular checking to find out the status of the guy dumping a load in his ass. "Knowing" and "Chasing" put the person in the same position as the guy who eats "hamberders" five or six days a week or who smokes a pack and a half of cigarettes a day.

The point at these events is that bottoms don't move unless the top, or one of the workers, moves them. You don't need to worry about "running into things" because you're supposed to stay where you're placed. If you need a break, you raise your hand and wait to be led out of the room to the restroom or waiting area or whatever. Again, part of the appeal of the HorseMarket events (both those in Europe and those of various flavors in the US) is that the stallions do what they want, and mares accept it (within a few specifically prescribed limits). Imposing a requirement that stallions "inspect" every mare goes against a key ethos of the event - that the stallions are in charge and get to decide which mare or mares they want to mount, with no pushing by the management to inspect or consider every option. That's fine, but that, too, is completely against the spirit of the HorseMarket. What you're describing is a different sort of event - not better or worse, but different. And that goes against the most basic rule of the HorseMarket: the mares don't (ordinarily) learn anything about any individual stallion, other than how a given one fucks (and there's no way to link that to any identity or image of the person). Again, "everyone do what they want" is neither better nor worse than a HorseMarket event, but it's very, very different from what you're describing.

If the person dies, sure. If not, someone, or a lot of someones, is/are going to bear what could be astronomical health care costs as the result of his willingness to risk severe injury or death in pursuit of ... what amounts to a high. I frankly don't see the difference between poor lifestyle choices and chasing. They're both choices. They both have predictable (if uncertain) effects. Some chasers don't succeed; some obese smokers don't have heart attacks. But enough people in both situations do suffer those consequences. We don't, in general, challenge people's right to "socialized" health care (even if it's the quasi-private employer-subsidized group plan type we have in this country) because they are obese due to diet and lack of activity. We don't, in general, tell people they're ineligible for insurance if they go base jumping, even if that's one of the riskiest activities there is. People make deliberate choices every day, sometimes for a lifetime, that directly impact the amount of health care they will require from the system. I get that chasing is perhaps the most extreme example of that, but in a very real sense, just having unprotected sex (once it was known that such activity carried the risk of a fatal disease) was no different, at least pre-PrEP. You can say it was "luck" that kept a lot of people negative, but an awful lot of them contributed to their "luck" by not having bareback sex.

While I recognize that this is, in fact, a concern for many of us, I'd like to remind us that in a well-ordered society (as opposed to the United States), health care, being in large measure influenced by luck more than anything else, would be paid for at the societal level through taxes, rather than our Frankenstein's monster-ish, multi-headed hydra-ish, Gorgon hair-ish system that allows providers, the government, and private insurance to all pass the buck amongst each other to avoid incurring the cost of care. And yes, I understand that there's a philosophical question about whether people who deliberately risk infection ought to bear some of the resultant costs of care. But we don't impose that standard on other risk-takers, like those who enjoy base jumping or high-speed racing (on a track, not on a highway) or rock climbing or big wave surfing or skydiving. We don't impose that standard on people who consume nothing but fatty, highly processed, or overly sweetened foods and beverages. We only mildly impose that standard on smokers. I'm not sure there's much of a philosophical basis for saying HIV chasers ought to be responsible for some or all of their care while not demanding the same for any of these other categories.

I hate to be pedantic (well, not really, but I should say that) - but, technically, you're not stretching your balls; you're stretching your ball sack, or scrotum. The actual testicles inside aren't being stretched at all; in fact, with many stretchers, they end up compressed.

You're right that the types are HSV-1 and HSV-2. That said, for a substantial period of time, HSV-1 was almost exclusively transmitted non-sexually, while HSV-2 was almost exclusively transmitted sexually. That's beginning to change, in particular with HSV-1 beginning to spread readily via sexual contact. If you have any actual published figures to support that "probably above 50%" number for sexually active gay men, I'd like to see them, but I can't find any reference to any number that high. In any event, the original poster didn't say "among sexually active gay men"; he said "almost everyone who has been sexually active". "Has been" means someone who's had sex, ever - and "everyone" includes men and women, gay, bi, straight, pan, whatever. That's a sweepingly large percentage of adults in the US - his formulation of "almost everyone who has been sexually active" covers more than 99% of US adults. There's no way "almost everyone" in that group has HSV.

I second that advice - or at least, go see an urgent care clinic (or the equivalent where you live) if getting an appointment with your doctor presents a scheduling issue. It's almost certainly not severely damaged, but I'm hesitant to recommend any sort of topical treatment - a doctor would be able to determine if any particular topical compounds would react negatively to the solvent's presence. For future reference, I wouldn't use a lotion on something like this because to the extent that the solvent needs to evaporate from your skin, a lotion might lock some of that solvent into your skin, blocking it from leaving. It's probably still not overly toxic - not suggesting you panic - but I would have just kept washing the area with cool water for an extended period of time, But I'd still go see a health care provider.

What I meant is that compared with, say, a single shot of an antibiotic, or a brief 7-day regimen of an oral antibiotic (which is standard treatment for many bacterially-caused STI's, and which ordinarily actually cures them), HSV is managed, not cured. And that management depends on where the infection is, and whether the prescriber is aiming to treat an outbreak or keep the virus suppressed. In the former case, the treatment is more like that of a bacterial infection, except it only knocks the virus back "this time". Any number of things can trigger another outbreak, and some people experience few while others have outbreaks on a recurring basis, sometimes multiple times in a year. That's typically how HSV-1, which has primarily been spread orally, has been treated, but now HSV-1 is spreading by oral-genital contact on an increasing basis. In the case of HSV-2 (the kind normally spread by genital contact), suppression treatment is more common because the virus can shed even when there are no visible symptoms. One area of concern is whether (as is believed) HSV-1, when spread genitally, can shed without symptoms as well. So treatment is much more complex (at least in terms of choices made by the prescribing provider), and as HSV-1 becomes more widespread through genital contact, we may see a substantial number of cases being shifted to "suppressive" treatment rather than the traditional treatment of outbreaks only. Those who are already on suppressive treatment, of course, won't see anything new. And let's face it: adherence to daily medications is something an awful lot of people seem to have trouble with.

A few thoughts: 1. Re the Jeff Stryker scene: I remember another of his films in which an artist was sketching various men, each of whom turned out to be a character in the subsequent sex scene. In this one, Jeff Stryker was sketched as a Native American of some vaguely Southwest tribe who rescues a guy who (apparently) had been tied down and left to die in the desert sun. After being taken back to Jeff's cave abode, the guy recovers and decides to wake Jeff up with a blow job, leading to the immortal line of dialogue: "Suck this red man's cock, white boy" (or something essentially like it). Unintentionally hysterical. 2. All the points about lighting and camera angles in amateur porn are well-taken. It's expensive (and hard work) to do amateur porn well, with the lighting needed and multiple cameras (or phones) recording from different angles, not to mention someone to move one camera around so it's not just one or two fixed points of view. 3. The question was asked why studios would put two performers together who hated each other. That's actually a good argument for porn performers as actors: if they're good enough at their work, you won't know they hate each other. Hollywood history is full of love scenes between people who despised each other (if not before the film, certainly after making it), but you'd seldom know it from the actual product. Amateur work typically doesn't have that luxury - unless someone's really good at faking it and the partner is oblivious, the result is usually mediocre. 4. Along those lines, you can often tell in group scenes when one or more performers either isn't into most of the group, or the group's not into him. Either he never focuses on the guy he's performing with at the time, or no one focuses on him. 5. Remember that when the big boom in porn came - in the 1980's and 1990's - VCR's had totally upended the porn industry. Previously produced for viewing on a big screen in a smutty theater (with limited distribution because most porn theaters preferred to show straight films), the ability to rent (another innovation) a porn film for $5 for a couple of days and watch in private at home vastly expanded the market for gay porn. That meant a lot of studios sprang up (or straight studios branched out) into gay porn. It's a business, and there were (and still are) even industry groups that track sales, rentals, and distribution of porn titles. So the studios could see what was selling well, and produced more of that, just like hit TV shows spawn similar content. A legal procedural is a hit, and suddenly every network has a legal procedural in the works. Ditto shows about: police precincts, hospital ERs, dysfunctional families headed by a mockable father, whatever. If a porn video with a 6'2" blond beefcake with shaved chest and pubes outsells everything else for three or four weeks, every studio out there was going to find another tall blond guy of the same type. Amateur porn can be subject to that, but a lot of it - including some of the most poorly executed examples - are actually more innovative. It's people having the kind of sex they want to have, and hoping to find a market for it, rather than reinventing yourself to slot into a market that already exists.

This is incredibly misleading. The vast majority of people who have the herpes simplex virus have oral herpes, not genital or anal, herpes. And most of them did not acquire it through sexual activity (unless you consider kissing, by itself, a sexual activity) . The actual percentage of sexually active people with genital herpes - the kind you can transfer during actual sexual activity - is far, far lower than "almost everyone". It's more on the order of 15%. It's manageable, but not necessarily "easy" to do.

It's true that they're a crap shoot. Except the longer you shoot craps, the greater your odds that somewhere along the way, you're going to roll snake eyes. On any given throw of the dice, the odds of getting a particular result is X. There are 36 combinations you can get from two dice, but not all number combos have equal odds, because there are two ways to get, say, 3 on one and 4 on the other; but there's only one way to get 1 on both dice). But when you're aiming to AVOID a particular result - say, 1+1 - the odds of five hundred throws of the dice never producing that result are low. The odds of five thousand throws of the dice never producing that result are infinitesimally low.

AFAIK, none of the current "spate" of identity verification laws have been challenged, yet, or at least, if they have been, no injunctions have been issued of which I'm aware. But the jurisprudence from prior efforts at this sort of thing make the unconstitutionality clear. Now, an individual federal district judge may hold otherwise, particularly if the lawyers challenging the law aren't good at their jobs; courts have no obligation to act as the lawyer for either side, pointing out cases that they may have missed citing in their legal briefs. So you could get a crappy lawyer with a not-particularly savvy plaintiff challenging the law in a court with a judge (like many of the Trump Texas judges) who has a proclivity to uphold this kind of shit, and lose the case at that level. Hopefully, the appellate court with jurisdiction over that district court would correct the error, but there are appellate courts (looking at you, 5th, 6th, and 11th Circuits) that issue awful opinions all the time, and more often than not get struck down if they go to the Supreme Court. But that doesn't mean a more successful challenge won't be brought elsewhere, with top-notch attorneys well versed in First Amendment jurisprudence. So we might end up, for a while, with a patchwork of laws that are almost identical on their face, held unconstitutional in some regions and constitutional in others. That's the usual prescription for the Supreme Court eventually acting, but that process could easily take 3-4 years from the date the first challenge is filed.

But, as I pointed out, virtually every company with a Terms of service agreement reserves the right therein to change the Terms as needed, with your continuing use of the service as acknowledgment that you accept the changes. At most, some places require that users get a notification that the terms have changed; but that obligation only extends to notifying you that there's a change, not necessarily what the change is. So if Grindr (or anyone else) says "Our privacy policy is X" and then the powers-that-be at Grindr decide they want the policy to be X-1, reducing the privacy guarantee, all they have to do is change the policy, and at most, notify you that there is a change, which you can review at your leisure (and which no one will do). Moreover, there are almost always loopholes written into the Terms of Service that allow the company issuing them to make significant exceptions under a range of circumstances - complying with discovery demands or subpoenas, for instance.

There are still plenty of guys out there who use condoms (certainly fewer than even just a few years ago, and far fewer than, say, 25 years ago). Your suggestion about drug use for them doesn't belong here in the health forum, but in the Backroom. The question asked wasn't "Who here likes condoms" but, in essence, "What do you bareback bottoms (like me) do when you have a top who insists on wearing a condom?" It may not happen to you, in the "social" circles in which you move, but it certainly does happen to others.

One reason for promoting the use of doxycycline over azithromycin is that doxy has far fewer drug interactions in far fewer people. Azithromycin normally shouldn't be taken by people who take statins (millions do, for cholesterol), blood thinners, certain HIV medications, certain antidepressants, certain antipsychotics, certain heart medications... the list goes on and on. It's also not recommended for anyone with kidney or liver problems or diabetes. Doxycycline also a very old, well-established antibiotic that's dirt cheap to manufacture. Yes, you do have to take it for several days, and avoid certain things like sun and alcohol, but those are not always the primary concern.

Let me preface this with a statement that I'm not endorsing any of these potential reasons. They are, instead, quick recaps of things that people have said and posted online here (and elsewhere). 1. Some people believe in the fantasy of a "brotherhood" - that sharing a disease connects you to other guys who have the same disease, creating some sort of bond. It's horsecrap, of course, but some people really do have this fantasy idea of a sort of toxic Elks Club, where getting pozzed is your initiation into increased levels of debauchery. It's true there are a handful of sex parties, etc. that are only open to positive men - but it's not like there is a shortage of events to have sex at for guys in general. (Shortage of participants you're interested in and who are interested back, maybe.) 2. At one time, some sexually active guys who hated condoms figured it was going to happen to them sooner or later, and they wanted it sooner because then they could stop worrying about each sexual encounter. I think this attitude picked up considerably once highly effective treatments debuted about 15 or 20 years ago, and then has waned somewhat with the advent and widespread use of PrEP. 3. Some guys viewed it as an element in a domination/submission world - where some guys submit enough to a dominant guy that he infects them as part of his demonstrating his dominance. As any number of people will attest here, the idea that it's no big deal because you just take one pill a day for the rest of your life and you'll be fine is bullshit. There are all sorts of increased health risks and things you have to monitor if you're poz (unless you have a death wish, that is). Which I suppose would be #4: people who just want to get life over with, fast. There's a lot of discussion about the appeal of being poz and chasing getting pozzed in the Backroom area. This, however, is the health forum. The site allows some discussion about personal experiences regarding the upsides of being poz here - something I have mixed feelings about, myself - but any discussions encouraging people to get pozzed belong in the Backroom area, not here.