BootmanLA

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.

I don't mean this to sound too critical, but part of the problem may be the use of the word "clean". I realize that not everyone thinks this through, but when it's used to mean "no active STI's", it implies that anyone who has an STI is "dirty". For a long time, people used it primarily to mean "HIV-negative", but the offensiveness of taking that to its logical conclusion - HIV-positive men are "dirty" - has helped stamp that out. It's better to be direct: "I've recently been tested clear of any STI's. How about you?" That's a non-judgmental way to ask for the information you're looking for. Of course, guys may well still lie, but that's a different issue.

If you'd read any other parts of this section, you'd know that (a) only RawTop, as the site administrator, can actually delete the account. You'd know that he normally doesn't delete them immediately any longer (the post you're quoting from is more than five years old) because so many people "change their minds" and want back in. You'd know that he's determined that legally, he has up to 90 days to carry out the deletion request, and he ordinarily does that in stages. That makes the poster less visible (deleted profile, for instance) but doesn't remove the ability to log in - so the inevitable change of heart folks can log in and request he cancel the removal request. Most of all, if you'd read any of the rest of this support section, you'd know RawTop is recovering from a stroke and yes, things are taking longer than they might otherwise.

If a private company wanted to do that on a voluntary basis for companies that wanted to use the service, that would be one thing. But there is a fundamental problem with a government mandate for age verification to access something on the web: it's a violation of the First Amendment. You have the right to read and obtain information anonymously. (Anonymous insofar as the government is concerned, that is - a private company can require pretty much any information it desires.) And the only way to prove your age is to prove who you are - to disclose your identity. Telling people "You can't access this otherwise legal content unless you prove your age (and thus who you are)" is unconstitutional.

Suggestion for RawTop: Given that the chat module is so unreliable (for reasons outside your control), might it not be prudent to update the page you access directly from the "Chat" link (ie, before you actually enter the chat software itself) acknowledging that the program has issues, sometimes can't verify your login from your browser, etc., and that while you hope to have this fixed in a future update to the site, users should not expect a smooth experience, and that posting "same here" or otherwise non-informative messages about a problem that is well-known is kind of pointless? Especially since if they bothered to do ANY reading of the seven pages of messages about chat issues before adding their comment, they'd know what's going on?

It may well come in Ohio, but not because of Issue 1. Issue 1 strictly concerns the percentage of the popular vote needed to adopt a constitutional amendment (60% of those who turn out to vote). The legislature can already enact legislation similar to that in these states with a simple majority vote and the assent of the governor, with no vote of the people involved. The only way in which Issue 1 could theoretically get involved in this issue would be if First Amendment activists or the like wanted to put a protection for access to adult sites into the state constitution - under Issue 1, if it passes, that would require 60% of voters to approve of that protection in an election. But it doesn't change anything about the legislature's ability to enact such a restriction.

Also: I'd note that Americans are self-segregating into like-minded communities and states at an increasing pace. One of the stories of America in the post-WWII era was the massive shift of people from rural areas and small towns to larger cities, even if just to the suburbs or exurbs. Coming into contact with an increasingly diverse society is part of what shifted America's social views to the left (a generally good thing, in my opinion). Even if the oldest people involved in such a move didn't change much, their kids and their grandkids did. So even traditionally red states began to shift purple-ish, as we saw with Colorado, Georgia and Arizona, and though it's less far along that process, Texas. But there's a downside to that - many other formerly reddish states are becoming deep crimson, like West Virginia, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and so forth. There just aren't enough progressive people moving to such places to shift anything, really. and the remaining red staters are resentful of the changes they're seeing and becoming even more vitriolic against gays, immigrants, liberals in general. The media landscape changes - where you can pick your influences, rather than having the big three networks address the entire country - haven't helped. Mainstream news media was never the liberal bogeyman as painted by the right wing, but they were, more or less, uniform in their approaches. Now the right can largely insulate itself from contrary opinions both on TV and online. And with the massive decline in newspaper circulation, most people get only highly filtered news that conforms to their existing beliefs. And then there's things like Florida's shift to the right. When 40 and 50 year old conservatives moved to places like Georgia and Arizona, they brought younger family members with them, and those children and grandchildren came of age in a very different environment. Florida's left tilt originally came from (over time) millions of northeast moderate to liberal people retiring to the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale/West Palm Beach corridor, but retirees don't generally bring their families (who have lives established for themselves) elsewhere. Once places like the Villages sprang up, catering to the same warm-weather retirement impulse but among red-state conservatives, that began tilting the state rightward. Now we're at a point where most of the people moving to progressive places are other progressives, and many conservative families would rather wallow in the poverty and ignorance they know, in places like Alabama and Louisiana and West Virginia, rather than risk their kids getting a whiff of an actually diverse experience. So not only are "they" spreading their own messages of what's acceptable and what's not, but they're making it harder for any other message to get through to the minds that matter.

The actual acronym is "DMCA", which stands for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It dates back to the era when piracy of intellectual property - notably music and films, but other forms as well - began to be considered a serious problem by copyright holders (typically, large music and TV/movie studios). The DMCA, among other things, outlines a procedure for online services to handle claims of copyright violation. Under the DMCA, if someone claims that a file posted online on a given service (say, Facebook, Twitter, generic web hosting company, or whatever) is his copyrighted property, the online service can insulate itself from liability by immediately removing (or blocking access to) the specified file. The person who uploaded it may still be liable for copyright infringement. If the person who posted it contests the ownership of the copyright, there's a process by which the service can investigate the claim (typically, if it's a corporate entity claiming copyright, they're likely to win, if only because they're likely to have lawyers and records to back up their claims). Or the service can just tell the person who posted the file to go fight the copyright claimant in court. Obviously, the DMCA was written by lawyers for the big content producing studios, so its terms favor them. It's designed as a carrot to encourage online service providers to promptly take down copyright violations; by insulating them from liability and allowing them to dump disputes on the courts, the services have a strong incentive to just roll over any time a content creator (again, typically a big TV/movie studio or recording company) files a DMCA takedown request.

I think there's a much larger set of problems than a lack of a sense of community, although that's part of it (as I'll mention). There was a time when the options for gay men's lives in the United States (and elsewhere, but I can't speak to conditions in other countries specifically) were very, very limited, even in large metropolitan areas. Although even bars got raided, gay bars were one of the handful of places where men could meet men like themselves; and for men who couldn't bring home another man for sex (whether because there was a wife at home, or mom and dad, or nosy neighbors or roommates, baths filled a niche need for a place to have a sexual outlet. Out of necessity, more than anything else, gay bars and bathhouses became de facto community centers, because the idea of an actual community center, with resources available in broad daylight with highly visible public signage and internet ads and webpages detailing the services the center provides, was a pipe dream. The bars and baths took money from the community and gave back to the community; they WERE the community, in many places. Once the gay rights movement took off, things began to shift (even as our advances were partially offset by losses). In the seventies, the bars and baths were making money hand over fist; the bars reacted by specializing in particular clienteles, the baths by competing on amenities and special attractions. Baths maintained the pretense of being "health clubs" where people worked out and enjoyed the sauna or steam room and where sex was just something "happened" (even when the weight machines never got touched), but actual sex clubs sprang up where there was no pretense at all. But as states began repealing their sodomy laws, or even simply not enforcing them any more (de facto repeal), other venues began to arise: actual community centers, gay bookstores, gay coffee shops - places you could go to and meet other gay people without it having to be about sex or over alcohol, which had been sorely lacking, so competition for the gay dollar. (In smaller cities and towns, of course, the gay bar often remained the only social option, but we're talking about the places big enough to support bathhouses.) Then HIV/AIDS came along, and whether it was prudent or effective to shut down the baths and sex clubs as a way to prevent the spread, that's what was done in a lot of places. Or they were restricted in ways that cut way into business. A lot of that went away, eventually, but a lot of those locations never recovered. Meanwhile, a lot of gays came of age where regular trips to the bathhouses were NOT part of their coming out, so the baths were no longer a cash machine, especially in cities where soaring real estate values made building rents skyrocket. So maintenance and improvements suffered, as owners were unwilling or unable to pony up the cash to keep the places up. And at the same time, increasing acceptance of homosexuality meant fewer and fewer people HAD to go to the baths to have a place to fuck. That's not to say there isn't a transgressive appeal to the places - but the difference in volume of business between "almost everyone has to come to us for sex" and "people who really like indoor public sex with and in front of strangers come to us for sex" can be huge. So the places decline in terms of cleanliness and repair, which lessens the appeal for all but those who want a transgressive experience; which reduces the income stream further, which exacerbates the maintenance issue.... Factor in the losses of customers who actually died of HIV, and those who stopped having that kind of sex because it was deemed "risky". And I'll throw this in, though I know it certainly doesn't apply in all cases: drug usage/"partying" in the gay community. Drug habits are expensive, and I know of any number of gay bar owners who developed a drug habit over the years that sucked up profits from even thriving bars. When bars in Louisiana were allowed to have 3 video poker machines each, back in the early 90's, the typical bar in any of the state's larger (relatively speaking) cities on average got about $5,000 per month per machine as the bar's cut (and remember, that's for doing nothing except letting the machines sit on your bar for customers to play). At least one owner I know had such a drug habit (and so many friends with drug habits) that when a state-ordered local option election forced the removal of the machines in his parish (county) after almost five years, he'd spent literally every dime of the nearly $1 million extra dollars the machines had put in his pocket, most of it up his and his friends' noses. This isn't to say that all bathhouse owners were drug users - but for those who did partake (and I'm guessing it was a significant portion of them), that's a big drain on a cash engine that's already in decline. And as posts by some users here of late have indicated, the remaining places seem to be making stricter policies, removing amenities, and raising prices simultaneously - which might work for a product in high demand, but for one with already reduced appeal is probably a death sentence. In an ideal world, of course, every major city would welcome gay bathhouses like any other business, and there would be enough patrons willing to pay a reasonable fee for access to support maintaining the place in a safe and appealing condition. But that's not the world in which we live. Along the way, a lot of that role of "de facto community center" has been taken up by other institutions, not the least of which are actual community centers. You wouldn't know it from places like Texas or Florida, but public libraries - imagine! - in all sorts of places have LGBT resources often prominently on display. There are predominantly-LGBT groups in sports (gay rugby, gay softball, gay rodeo, you name it), entertainment (gay choruses, especially), hobbies (gay birders, of all things dear to my heart), and more. On the one hand, it's great that there are all these other options for interaction and reaching out and connecting the current generations of LGBT people with the incoming ones; and while I'm not opposed to drinking per se, I think the reduced emphasis on bars and alcohol as the center of gay connection is a good thing. But on the other hand, the fractured nature of gay connectivity in any decent sized community means it's harder to create a sense of community for the whole. I can remember nights in the late 80's and early 90's, out in the bars in my home city, where you could count on seeing about 75% of the "out" LGBT people on any given Saturday night, just by going to the two larger bars in the city (and one of those two, I'll add, was only "larger" compared with the other couple of hole-in-the-wall joints). There's no longer any one place bringing people together that way on a weekly basis. And as one final note: the internet, social media, "the apps". When you can interact with friends by texting - and thus have multiple conversations going - or entertain yourself by scrolling through Instagram or Twitter or TikTok or whatever, or search for sex partners or dates or relationships online, the actual need for places to interact "irl" (as the kids say) gets reduced (and yes, the concept of community further suffers, but that's another topic). All of which is to say: I don't think anyone is going to step in and "save" the baths or even the bars - whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I just don't think the money is really there, any more, to support them as thriving businesses as there once was. LGBT people born in, say, 2050 are going to be learning someday about the weird things their great-grandparents' brothers and sisters once did to interact with each other, and be totally mystified by it. Just like pre-teens today have trouble understanding the notion of a rotary dial phone, or getting a phone call and having to answer it to know who was calling, and not being able to move very far from the spot in the room where the phone was hard-wired into a box on the wall. Or just like no one in my generation would understand the notion of going around the city leaving one's calling card at friends' houses, much less what "turning a corner" on the card meant.

I attribute things to the Republican party when (a) a Republican does that thing and (b) no one in the Republican party of any stature whatsoever criticizes him or her for it. Or (c) when it's in the Republican Party platform. So, for instance, the fact that Hair Furor has the approval of a solid majority of the Republican party, and virtually no one of stature criticizes him for his outrageous behavior and statements, then yes, I consider that something the Republican party endorses. Being criticized by his ex-cabinet members - who are no longer public officials - doesn't count, because they're not major figures in the party. When the House Speaker, House Majority Leader, Senate Minority Leader, or a chairman of a major committee in the House or ranking member in the Senate calls him out, I'll credit that. Until then, he's the albatross around the neck of the party and that means everyone who professes to believe in it - because HE is what the party believes in. And when I say that Republicans want to outlaw all abortion, or ban same-sex marriage, I say that because it's in the party's national platform - at least, the last one adopted. People can mealy-mouth whine about "not all Republicans" but if you belong to a party whose official platform - which starts each section with "We believe that...", you are announcing to the world you support those positions. You don't see that nearly so much on the Democratic side because we welcome internal criticism. We have prominent members who sometimes make outrageous statements, and our leaders are usually quick to announce that the statement in question does not represent the views of the party, merely that member. I think the last time the Republican leadership did that was sometime in the Eisenhower administration. If the Democratic leadership were as weak at calling out members for offensive comments as the Republican leadership is, I would happily hang the worst offenses of a Democrat on the party. But I don't have to, because they aren't that weak.

Again, the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, do not usually demand lock-step compliance with what the party leaders dictate must be policy, under penalty of being primaried out of office. You are always eager to blame an entire party (well, only ONE entire party) for the actions of a few who cross the aisle to join the opposing side on a particular issue. But for some reason you never, ever, ever seem to blame the OTHER entire party for the actions clearly endorsed by the vast majority of its members, even when that party's policy choices are steeped in misogyny, racism, homophobia, and other forms of hatred of anyone who is "other" to them. Are you so secure in your privilege as an (apparently) white male that you think they wouldn't come for you in a heartbeat if they took power in a state you're in?