BootmanLA

I hope I don't sound too callous in the following. I've been out for over 40 years now, and have watched a variety of porn over the years going back to some filmed (yes, on film) back in the 1970's. A huge portion of the performers in the porn of the 70's, 80's, and even 90's are now dead, some because of old age (hot guys who were, say, 35 in 1975 would be in their eighties now), a good many from HIV-related health issues, and a not insignificant number from drug-related causes, not counting at least half a dozen I could probably name who met an untimely death through violence. Maybe having been through (not closely, mind you, just as an observer) so many, many deaths over the decades, it just doesn't occur to me to be squicked out watching someone I know has passed on. I certainly don't feel that way about mainstream actors and actresses in movies - you'll pry my copy of All About Eve out of my cold, dead hands - and I don't see much reason to change my view simply because the pleasure I derive from watching the performance is erotic and/or sexual instead of intellectual and/or emotional. That's not to say my way of looking at this is, or ought to be, standard - just stating the facts for me and me alone.

I will add something that people have kind of skirted around: there's a delicate balancing act between a motel/hotel in a really secure, safe area (which is a plus) and motels/hotels that have outside access directly to the rooms (ie not having to go through a lobby, which is also a plus). Unfortunately, these two things to operate to the exclusion of each other; the safer the area, the more likely it is that the hotel will require all guests to go through the lobby, and the more convenient the hotel layout is (with outside access to the rooms) the more likely it's in a less desirable area. Plus there are guys who won't go to a hotel in a "nice" area because they think they might get seen and recognized by someone working there (unlikely, but it can happen), as well as guys who won't go to a hotel in a sketchier area because it's, well, sketchy. I wouldn't recommend a really seedy area (it might seem appealing, but it's likely to cut into your numbers). What you're looking for, generally, is an older motel-style place with outside room doors in a not terrible area - like near a major interstate exit. Scope out the building and find where there's more parking than average (typically, at the far end of the building away from the desk) and request a room in that part of the building. That puts your transient visitors as far from the eyes at the front desk as possible.

A little more background on the DMCA. The law was enacted in 1998, very early in the digital age (back when it was all MSN and AOL and Compuserve, and virtually all dial-up). This was when MP3s were catching on, and people were emailing songs to each other in that format - before there was anything like Napster or Limewire, much less the Apple Music Store or anything like that. Copyright holders could see how improved compression formats like MP3 and increasing speeds for modems (and with things like ISDN, DSL, and cable on the foreseeable horizon) would inevitably lead to rampant piracy of copyrighted materials. It was one thing if people burned a copy of a CD for a friend - it was illegal, technically, but people were limited in terms of time and cost as to how many CDs they would be willing to copy for people. But the internet changed the economics of that dramatically; you could make one MP3 file of a song, and send it to twenty or thirty people at once, and then do the same thing again and again - assuming you knew that many people online with whom to share the music. And then Napster came along, popularizing the notion of peer to peer network sharing, coupled with software that was constantly looking at what was being shared and updating a list of who had what available. The DMCA was the primary tool used by the music industry to take down Napster. (It was also used against Limewire. If I recall correctly, and I'm not sure I do, the difference was that Limewire, unlike Napster, didn't use a central server to track user files; rather, each user would know what, say, 15 or 20 other users had, and those would know 15 or 20 others, and so forth - so a search for a particular song would just bounce between PCs until there was a hit. Limewire argued that because they weren't cataloging the machines that held these infringing files, they weren't liable - they'd just released a piece of software that let users do for themselves what Napster had done for them. The courts disagreed, finding Limewire liable, and ending with it shut down.) All of which is to say that the DMCA wasn't designed specifically for porn or for adult sites - it's a copyright law designed specifically for how infringements work in the digital era. It's just that the tools available under it - like the takedown request - can have dramatic impacts in lots of ways not necessarily foreseen by anyone. Hosting companies, like the one that owns the servers that BZ is hosted on, are understandably cautious about what they host because if they don't handle things correctly under the law, they can incur liability. And while the company or person who owns a popular website might have few tangible assets (as opposed to the sweat equity and intellectual property involved) to attack if a lawsuit happens and there are violations found, the hosting company has significant tangible skin in the game (servers, racks, other equipment, leases on buildings, whatever). It's why hosting companies have lengthy contracts about what's permitted, what's required, and so forth, to help indemnify themselves.

DMCA stands for "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" and is intended to modernize some aspects of copyright law in the United States for the digital age. One key aspect is called the "DMCA takedown request", whereby a copyright holder can make a demand to an online site that it remove material covered by the copyright but posted by others on the online site. If the site owner promptly honors such requests immediately, it's protected by a "safe harbor" provision from being held liable for that copyright infringement. The idea is that, say, YouTube is protected from liability if John uploads a bootleg copy of Dave's recording of a song of his, as long as YouTube immediately removes that upload when notified by the copyright holder (Dave, in this case). But it also applies if, say, Dave records a song where Robbie owns the copyright to the music and/or lyrics, and Dave doesn't have permission to record it for release to the public; in such a case, Robbie could demand that YouTube take down John's upload of Dave's performance/recording. That's not the end of it, of course; anyone can "claim" to have a copyright on almost anything. But YouTube is protected from liability while it investigates whether Dave or Robbie actually do have a valid copyright claim - as long as the material isn't accessible during their investigation. There are other parts of the DMCA that aren't relevant here, but this is the one most relevant for sites like this. In this case it appears a user (let's call him John) uploaded some pictures of himself, and then thought about it and wanted them removed - and instead of working with the site owners to get them removed, he filed a DMCA takedown request with the company that hosts BZ. That puts BZ on the spot - and since the hosting company is the one protected by acting promptly, it leaves BZ and RawTop in the unenviable position of having to deal with a hosting company pissed off that they've got to now deal with this - which can mean lawyers, or at the least time in investigating the alleged violation. For that reason, RawTop's position is: If you post something, and then you try to get it removed by a DMCA takedown instead of working with the moderators, you're done here, forever. And I don't blame him.

I'm not sure there's been much research on that topic and any answer would be guesswork at best. It's documented that tops have been infected via that method, but I don't think there's any quantification as to the timelines involved. I would guess - and it's an educated guess but still a guess - that as long as anyone can detect the semen, it could be infectious. Of course, it's going to dribble out and/or be absorbed by the rectum eventually. Obviously, odds are much higher of infection if a second top enters immediately after the first ejaculates. Conversely, four days later it's highly unlikely.

You're entitled to your opinion.

Then it appears you have to make a choice, and it appears to me you have three from which to choose. 1. Do nothing, continue to not have sex, and remain perfectly safe. 2. Resume having sex, forego getting PrEP, and continue to roll the dice as to contracting an incurable sexually transmitted infection. (This is what you seem to be seeking other guys' permission for, for some bizarre reason; what other people say you "should" do is a big fat nothingburger and if you follow the suggestions of strangers that readily, I don't think you're ready for sex with anyone.) 3. Get PrEP, and engage in the kind of sex you want, with dramatically reduced risk (almost 0% for HIV, but of course that doesn't protect for other STIs). You don't HAVE to get PrEP from your primary care doctor, though in most cases your insurer, if you have one, will know (but they're not allowed to share that information with anyone). There are multiple other options besides your doctor. Public health clinics are one option. Another is one of the various telemedicine/online medical services like MISTR ([think before following links] https://www.heymistr.com). So you have choices. You may not like that these are, essentially, the only options, but there they are. And the choice is yours - not anyone else's.

One could, of course, say that "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are divisive, when "sexual" simply covers both. The point is that language is rich, and different words have (sometimes subtly) different meanings, and of course the point is to distinguish things. Linguists have learned, for instance, that in some languages, there aren't separate words for blue and green because they're seen as variants of the same color (just as we consider sky blue and navy blue variants of blue, they consider the various greens and blues as variants of "blue-green"). Eventually, language develops words to give us a means to convey subtle distinctions where cruder, less specific terms fail. I would also argue with your suggestion that the "vast majority" of bisexuals are in fact attracted in some way to transgender individuals in addition to cisgender individuals. That's not my experience, and it's not the experience of the (admittedly limited) sample of each in my circles. Most trans people I know tell me that they see just as much disinterest from bisexuals as from gay or straight people, and one (a trans man) specifically noted that he'd been told more than once by a bisexual that "when I want a man, I want a real man, and when I want a woman, I want a real woman". That's not to say some self-identified bisexuals aren't open to trans people; but then again, they may simply not be familiar with the term "pansexual" and not realize it may apply better to them. As for "obnoxious and narcissistic follow-up conversations", I don't think it's either one to simply explain "pansexual means I'm interested in the person, regardless of the gender, whatever it might be and however the person might identify."

I never said, one way or the other, whether Thomas has been "fair" to us or not. I believe that his legal views are warped - that they are out of the mainstream legal profession - but I don't really perceive animus on his part, or an effort to be unfair. As he noted in his dissent in the Lawrence v. Texas case (which struck down state sodomy laws), he found such laws "uncommonly silly" and he would not hesitate to vote to repeal them if he were a legislator. He simply didn't believe that they were unconstitutional (because, again, he doesn't believe in substantive due process, which underpins that rationale). His legal thoughts may well be skewed (as I note, they're far outside the mainstream). But he's consistent in his approach, and I honestly don't perceive any specific animus towards gay people in his opinions. I think he's just wrong on the law.

It's true that some undocumented immigrants work "under the table" and thus don't pay taxes (which is a separate issue). But official estimates are that 75% of undocumented workers use falsified social security numbers - either one that wasn't ever issued, or more often one issued to someone else. As a result, the wages of that 75% get hit for social security taxes (7.65%, including Medicare) and they'll never be able to claim those benefits. In fact, that's part of what's keeping social security afloat for citizens. Meanwhile, plenty of rich people pay little or no social security taxes because they structure their income such that it's not "earned" income. Remember that interest earnings, dividends, capital gains, and so forth aren't taxed for social security purposes at all, because they're not "earned". If we simply applied the social security tax rate to all income, regardless of source, the system would be solvent for decades longer, perhaps in perpetuity.

Bottoms tend to outnumber tops and versatile people everywhere. All I can say is, if you go, and nobody fucks you, that's not really a whole lot different than staying home with nobody fucking you, except you might get to watch some hot sex going on around you if nothing else. I get that it's depressing to be overlooked at events like this - lord do I ever - but it's like that saying: you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

If I read this correctly, you're saying that between 20 and 30 percent of all people have been infected with MRSA. What's your source for that? From what I can find, the 30% figure refers to ALL staph infections, not MRSA - which itself is only about 1% of staph infections. If only 1 of the 30 people with staph have MRSA, and they are less than 1/3 of the population, then the actual rate of MRSA among people is (1/30 * 30/100 = 30/3000, or about 1%. Not zero, certainly, but 1% of people is a lot smaller than 20-30%. Source: [think before following links] https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/uf-study-silent-mrsa-carriers-have-twice-mortality-rate-adults-without-bacteria

The first problem I see is that if any viewer can change the lighting and music, there would be a constant stream of choices and counter-choices, with customers getting pissed off as "their" setup keeps changing. If it's first-come, first-served (once someone takes control of the lights/music, they've got it until the scene is over), then it might work. But even so, I could see people making lighting/music choices that kill the mood for the performers, leading to poor performance, and then the customer is going to feel cheated. The second problem I see is the potential for entrapment by overzealous law enforcement. It's not out of the question for some prosecutors to consider paying performers for live sex acts (even if the payer is remote) to be a form of prostitution, and if Bob and John advertise they're willing to fuck on camera live for money, it's not a stretch for a prosecutor to get the police to pay for one episode, trace the signal's IP (with a subpoena if necessary, based on the evidence of the video stream recording, then order a second performance and have the police at that location ready to swoop in the moment they accept the payment.

Bear in mind this is not an official medical opinion, but reading reports about the study, they said "Participants in the intervention arm were told to take a single dose of doxycycline as soon as possible and no more than 72 hours after condomless sex." By "as soon as possible" I would imagine they mean within a few hours, if not right after. Bear in mind that if you're infected during a sex act, that infection begins to spread almost immediately - as soon as the bacteria can make a beachhead. When you take medication, unless it's a time-release form, it enters your system pretty quickly as well, and starts distributing itself through your body. One of the reasons Doxycycline was chosen as an STI-PEP medication is that it has a long half-life - that is, it takes longer for your body to eradicate it from your system, so it remains efficacious for longer than some other antibiotics. That means it'll keep knocking down the nascent STI for a longer period than an antibiotic with a short half-life. So I would say the sooner the better. Certainly there's no evident reason to wait a full day to start the treatment; the infection, if there is one, is going to be getting established before that (although the dose may, in fact, knock it out).

The poster to whom you're responding has a profile indicating he lives in Greece. I can't verify what he's saying, but it's quite possible that in some other countries, particularly ones in Europe, there is in fact not only taxpayer-funded health care but living stipends (aka "welfare") paid by the government. That is not to dispute your general point that HIV is still something people should be avoiding if possible. But we Americans tend to forget, at times, that not every place on this planet treats health care as a profit-based system designed to enrich insurance companies (and some providers), or that not every place on this planet treats assisting citizens financially as a sign of moral failure on the part of the recipient.

There is a difference between "giving someone the benefit of the doubt" and "being fair to". The former is something you do when you're not sure, exactly, how they feel or believe or would act in a given situation. The latter is for where the person's position is well established and well known, but may be mischaracterized by some. That's the case for Thomas. It's easy to point a finger at Thomas and yell "Hypocrite!" because of his opposition to the legal foundation for same-sex marriage, while he himself is in an interracial marriage, given that both were outlawed at one time. But the fact remains that the legal reasons for striking down one are unrelated to the legal reasons for striking down the other. Racial discrimination is expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. Sexual orientation discrimination, including in marriage, is not. I might wish, as you might, and many of us might, that it were protected expressly, but that isn't the case.

Still waiting, more than three weeks later, for a citation to these "provisions of this law" you claim exist. Oddly, I've read the entire thing seven times now and I can't find any such reference to this, almost as though it doesn't exist and you made it up out of thin air.

Worse: those people think that being of a different ethnicity than "caucasian" is what makes those "other" people inferior. That's the reason they want to abolish birthright citizenship; they believe (against all evidence) that hordes of pregnant women are pouring across our southern border to give birth to children on U.S. soil (which makes those children citizens). They don't seem nearly as upset about college-age European women coming here for higher education and getting pregnant and giving birth to new U.S. citizens, because those kids are white.

To be fair to Thomas, the decision that got rid of bans on interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia) rests on several legal underpinnings. The first is that by using race as a means of distinguishing what government permitted you to do, it was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which specifically prohibits race-based discrimination. This provision is explicit in the text of the Constitution, and Thomas does not quarrel with that decision because it is derived directly from the text of the 14th amendment. That stands independent of the issue of substantive due process that Thomas addressed in the abortion decision last year (Dobbs v. Jackson), which also underpin the decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage. (Loving also cited substantive due process, but as a separate reason to strike down the interracial marriage ban; so as noted, even if substantive due process were rejected as a no-longer-valid interpretation of the Constitution, bans on interracial marriage wouldn't be affected.) I've mentioned this before, but there are two types of due process currently recognized under Supreme Court precedent. The first - procedural due process - is the guarantee that when the government denies a person his life, liberty, or property, it can only do so with due process - there must be hearings, there must be a public decision, there must be means to appeal the decision to higher authorities, and so forth. That's the original, and primary, form of due process. It's why if the government wants to take your property to expand the road on which it sits, it has to go through a process to take the property and pay you fair compensation for it. It's why fines levied by administrative agencies of government can be appealed to higher levels and, depending on the circumstances, challenged in court. And so forth. This doesn't affect marriage rights, generally speaking. But the Supreme Court also recognizes (at least for now) substantive due process, by which it means that certain types of laws are unconstitutional because they violate a (typically) unenumerated right under the constitution, meaning attempts to regulate such conduct are outside the legitimate functions of government. Substantive due process is what protects (among other things) the right of parents to control the education of their children, the right to marry (in general, as well as the right to marry someone of the opposite sex, but not necessarily the right to marry someone of any age), the right to engage in private, consensual, noncommercial sex acts, the right to use contraception, and so forth. It's these rights, and the general doctrine of substantive due process,

Curious about your source for the poz guy living to be 100 years old. I'm not saying it's impossible, but...

In practical terms, there probably isn't much difference in more than 95% of cases. But speaking for how things actually work out, bisexual typically means "cisgendered" people - you are a man who likes men who have identified as male since birth, and women who have identified as female since birth. Pansexual would include transgendered individuals - accepting partners who are male but who were born with a vagina, or female but born with a penis and testicles. Pansexual people also tend to be more open and accepting of individuals like demisexuals, who need emotional attachment in order to feel physical/sexual interest (many people, both straight and LGBT, don't have the patience for demisexuals). Pansexual people, in my experience, are more open to ideas about gender and sexuality that are less mainstream. That's not a definitional difference; just a practical one that I've observed.

This right here renders most of your opinion moot and pointless, not because non-Americans can't have opinions about our government, but because you're unlikely actually reading any significant amount of real, factual news about our elections. Where to start with this ignorance? First, it's not just "a vote" in both houses of Congress. It requires a majority vote in the House to begin the proceeding and a 2/3 vote in the Senate to actually remove the official. Second, neither party has held 2/3 of the seats in the Senate since 1966, so anything likely to be decided on a party-line vote (as most impeachments now would be) is doomed to failure no matter which party has a (slim) majority in the Senate. Third, no Supreme Court justice has ever been removed for "political bias"" at all. Never happened. In fact, the only justice ever impeached by the House was Samuel Chase in 1805, and the Senate voted NOT to remove him. So your education is apparently as faulty as your logic and reasoning, such as they are. "People" didn't elect Trump, because he didn't get even a plurality of the people's vote. The Electoral College of the U.S. - a body of 538 individuals - selected Trump as President because we have a stupid, antiquated, ignorant system for choosing a President that is used virtually nowhere else in the world, and it's politically impossible to change it. As for your phobia about a religion, well, maybe that's what's scary to you. It's not scary to most people. And if anything, it was Trump's attacks on Hispanics, south of our border, and not his nutty idea to shut down Muslim immigration, that got him the bigot vote, of which you seem to be so proud. What's going on is the corruption of our political system, where states that are sometimes just barely Republican majority in terms of voters rig their voting districts so that their congressional delegations are 3/4 Republican or more. What's going on is the afore-mentioned insane Electoral College system we have, which keeps selecting Republican presidents despite the Republican candidate getting hundreds of thousands or millions fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. What we have, in other words, is a political system that does not actually recognize the will of the people in choosing its representatives - and that's without considering the antiquated, malapportioned, disgracefully un-democratic Senate.

Rape isn't about sex. It's a crime of violence. Calling rape a "sex crime" is like calling someone who assaults you with a shovel a "yard tool crime" - the point is the violence, not the means chosen. Now, the sex part is relevant, in that it's designed to humiliate, and to control a very intimate aspect of the victim's life. But again, it's not about "sex" or "sexual orientation" (gay vs straight). Straight people can be raped; gay people can be raped; bi people can be raped; asexual people can be raped; pansexual people can be raped. It's completely off-track to wonder about the orientation of the victim or the perpetrators (with the sole exception of when and if the victim was chosen specifically because of his/her orientation). And idiots wondering whether he was gay or not doesn't do anything to help him.

To clarify: I don't think there's anything wrong with messaging people who send a wink/oink/nod/woof/growl. The problem comes when one expects a response to the message and when one gets outraged when no reply is received.

I repeat my comment from earlier in the thread: sometimes a wink/oink/nod/growl/woof is just a general compliment, nothing more, and expecting/demanding it to mean more is a fool's errand.