BootmanLA

and First, nobody just lives in "EU". You may be in a country within the European Union, but that doesn't mean you're not in a member state within that. Knowing that location would color any advice given. Second, nanny-state as it may be at times, the European Union is so far removed from North Korea that you come across as paranoid delusional, especially considering that you want medication but consider the "medical apparatus" evil. In case you were unaware - and really, based on your posts, it's hard to tell - pharmaceutical manufacturers are part of the "medical apparatus". Sure, with the name of the medication and the dosage, you *might* - and I stress *MIGHT* - be able to line up a source for the prescription medication without actually seeing a health care professional - sorry, I mean "medical traitor of humanity". But I wouldn't count on it; those same "traitors of humanity" pretty tightly control prescription medications, even antibiotics, and for good reason. You might be able to import some illegally from another country, but then there's no actual way to trust you're getting the medication you're paying for, is there? Funny how that works; you want the right medication but you're unwilling to trust the only people you can actually count on to get you the right treatment. As they say, *sad trombone sound*.

One difference might be that in the bookstores, there's also a substantial amount of retail activity going on - people buying porn, poppers, sex toys, whatever. In the adult theaters, you're providing a specific film or films that are advertised so a reasonable argument can be made that the sex is incidental (wink wink) to the artistic endeavor presented. That's a bit of a stretch for a bathhouse, some of which have essentially no amenities. A place that charges, say, a $15 "membership" fee to join, plus $20 for a locker for x hours, or $25-30 for a room (or whatever), can't really sustain the facade of being a non-sex-trade business under any sort of "quacks like a duck" test. Sure, there might be a pool where five people might have room to actually swim at one time, or perhaps ten if they're just bobbing around; and maybe there's a "gym" with enough space for those same ten guys, at most, to work out at one time. But that wouldn't explain letting 80 or 100 people into the place at one time. To be sure: everyone knows all these places exist to provide sexual venues for people. But there's a difference when you can provide a certain amount of plausible deniability.

But neither gonorrhea nor chlamydia is a viral infection, so there is no DNA exchange and there is no "shedding virus". Both are *bacterial* infections, which operate completely differently from viruses. Bacteria are treated with antibiotics (and different bacteria are susceptible to different antibiotics - and some become resistant to some antibiotics as well). Monkeypox, however, *is* a virus (as is HIV). That isn't to say your other points about altruism and education aren't valid, of course. They are.

*some* of the bugs are changing - much of the "population" of gonorrhea bacteria are more or less unchanged and respond to treatment. But you are so, so close to "getting it". Yes, there are antibiotic-resistant strains developing out there. But they have nothing to do with whether you - personally - are a slut or chaste as a nun. While those strains mutate and develop, there's no guarantee the slut will ever encounter one, and there's no guarantee his sluthood contributed one iota to the mutations. Meanwhile, the chaste person might encounter one on his first sexual encounter in a decade. You make it sound like the slut person is incubating increasingly resistant strains and one day, one of them is not going to be treatable any more and he's hosed. That's not how it works, and to the extent you're giving that impression with your statements, you're wrong. "My doctor...knew of no other patient..." is not the same thing as "I hold the record for...". You'd think this would be obvious, given that so many members here have documented that their doctors are unaware of this development or that treatment or this other concern - doctors are human, and fallible, and none of them know everything.

I think this is an OK place to post this. However, your situation is so specialized (and involves multiple issues) and you are probably better off (MUCH better off) discussing this with your doctor. This is a time for being completely up front with him (or her) about what you're experiencing.

Seconding what others have said: it's not so much that you're calling him a liar (or even suggesting he might be) but you're asking for proof of something he can't really prove. Can he prove he's got a prescription for PrEP? Sure. Can he prove he's been sticking with it daily for an extended period of time? No. I notice, by the way, your own profile here says "Don't ask, don't tell". While that's fine as a concept if it works for you, it seems awfully hypocritical to not only ask others, but to demand proof, for something you're asking others to not discuss about you.

As I posted, I think @ellentonboy has misunderstood what his doctor is telling him.

Either you are misunderstanding your ID specialist or he's giving you bad info. For bacterial infections, the host does not become resistant to treatment; as Eros noted, it's the bacteria that infects you which can become resistant. As long as you continue to contract strains that are treatable, AND you complete treatment every time, your infections should clear up. BUT: if you continue to have sex while in treatment that isn't complete, you run the risk of infecting someone else with partially treated bacteria (and if they don't get treated, they have an infection which has already survived incomplete antibiotics). That infection could become resistant to common antibiotics and is then circulating in the same sexual pool you are. And given the way things work, odds are you will eventually contract one of these STIs that is resistant to common drugs. It's not you that's become resistant; it's the infection. And simple odds dictate that having a great deal of unprotected sex increases your chances of hitting that jackpot eventually.

That is not what the study says, and I think the OP cited it incorrectly. What it said was that for mothers with multiple male children, the odds of having a gay son rise by about 1/3 with every male child born. The rest of this post will assume (without demonstrating it) that this figure is accurate. That does not mean 33%, 66%, 99%. What it means is that if the odds of a child being male are roughly 50/50 (it's closer to 51/59 or 52/48, but male children die more often in childhood so the numbers even out eventually), and about 5% of people are gay, then there's a roughly 2.5% chance for a first pregnancy that the child will be a gay boy (because you can eliminate 50% off the bat for being girls). For the second child, it's one-third higher than that, or about 3.3% chance it'll be a gay boy. For the third child, it's 4.4% (because the odds increase by a third over what the previous odds say. But when you look at boys only, it's more dramatic. A first boy has a 5% chance of being born gay. A second boy has a third-higher chance, or 6.7% chance. A third son has an 8.9% chance, and a fourth one has nearly a 12% chance of being gay. That's a dramatic increase in odds. True. But a few points: 1) a huge portion of people cluster at one end of that spectrum (straight), at least as far as we can tell - ie there is no classic bell curve distribution or anything like that; 2) there's a much smaller, but still substantial cluster at the 'gay' end of that spectrum, with apparently fewer people along the "bi" spectrum than at either extreme (although that number may be undercounted), and 3) while it's true that individual positions fluctuate, it's largely in one direction (ie straight to bi to gay), with very few people at the gay end of the spectrum shifting back to bi and even fewer shifting to the straight region. This isn't to say you were arguing otherwise; just to clarify that things are not evenly distributed or even classically distributed along that spectrum and it's not something where people move all up and down the spectrum equally.

If I had to pick between them, Newsom obviously well before DeSantis. But I'd demand doctor's proof that there is *nothing* left behind by Newsom's ex-wife anywhere near his body.

Indeed, insult not intended. As I said, it's what your post suggests to me, not that I made a determination (aka decided that's what it is), and I take your word for it that it's not the case. And while I agree that you can't go on s search for specifically platonic friends, what one CAN do is avoid having sex with people until you get to know them better. Because he's the thing: having sex with someone is a bell you can't un-ring. If you're quick to hop into bed with anyone who has an appealing personality and for whom there's any physical attraction, you're unlikely to have anyone "just happen" to become a good friend who you haven't had sex with. Because the sex happened first. And again, not to criticize that if it works for you. But if you want friends that you haven't slept with, the key would seem to be not sleeping with everyone you like, to see if anything more serious on the friendship front can develop.

My gut feeling is that there's a separation in most people between "the kind of people I'm physically attracted to/want to have sex with" and "the kind of people I like to be friends/have fun with." Either, or both, could be focused on one sex or both sexes; and I think the things that motivate each could be different. In fact, I would guess that your dislike of women who use feminine wiles may well be tied to your being gay. Most of us probably don't relish being hit on by people we don't find attractive in the slightest, and for a purely gay man, I'd think women all fall squarely into that group. But that doesn't mean the dislike of women is as innate as the attraction to men; rather, it could be that it's more "How the fuck does she not know I don't give a damn about her tits and snatch?" that produces that reaction. As evidenced by the fact that you do get along with women who don't try that sort of manipulation.

Of course, it may not be an "either-or" situation. Perhaps there's a set of genes in our chromosomes, somewhere, that if activated (or deactivated, if active is the default) "flip" one's sexual orientation. And even then, it might be there's a spectrum of flipping; if there are, say, 10 genes that govern sexual orientation, one flipping might result in some vague bi-curiosity, while 8 or 9 or 10 flipping might result in an overtly gay person. It's also possible that, for instance, the default is a gene (or set of genes) that makes one attracted to men. Female fetuses, developing normally don't have any change to those genes, but most male fetuses undergo something that turns them all off. (We know that male genitalia develop in response to a gene in the Y chromosome, and it's possible that the orientation gene also normally responds to something like that.) So the answer could be that something (maternal hormones?) in utero either blocks that gene in male fetuses (creating a gay boy) or activates the gene in a female fetus, which producers a lesbian girl. But in any event: that's an environmental cause - the release of a hormone that alters development - which nonetheless wouldn't necessarily affect every fetus a woman carries. One of the studies previously cited found that if a woman carried three male fetuses, the odds were far higher that a fourth male would turn out gay. One scientist hypothesizes that the mother's body keeps a tally of what it's produced, in some form, and producing a male offspring who's unlikely to father his own children (who'd need to be cared for) might help the familial unit because he'd be able to contribute to the raising of his siblings' children. We aren't so removed from a time when that would have provided a distinct evolutionary advantage, and it may have persisted simply because there's no corresponding evolutionary pressure to change that.

This is not to suggest that the data pointing to a gestational determination of sexual orientation are wrong - far from it. However, I would caution anyone against drawing the conclusion "I was born gay" based on "I have always known it" or "As long as I can remember". I daresay none of us remembers the first year of our lives at all, and for most people, the earliest memory that "sticks" is somewhere between two and three, sometimes later. So a post-birth environmental cause is not incongruent with "as long as I can remember". Moreover, the plural of anecdote, as I've pointed out many times here, is not "data". That said, there does seem to be good data suggesting that many aspects of one's sexual development occur in utero and are not strictly genetic in nature. Under ideal circumstances, of course, any human with the XX chromosomal pair should develop as a female, and any human with the XY chromosomal pair should develop as a male. But aside from chromosomal discrepancies - individuals with something other than an XX or XY chromosomes for the 23rd pair - there are also issues where hormonal changes in the mother while carrying the fetus can cause changes to its development. Flipping a few genes somewhere - probably, but not guaranteed, on the Y chromosome - may be one of the things that causes homosexuality. If that is in fact the case, then "born this way" would seem to apply.

You observe, apparently, what goes on in one small section of the site (the Backroom's "Chemsex" section) and consider that "what goes on here and what is promoted". Navel gazing is never the path to enlightenment.

Several of them should already be impeached for giving misleading testimony (if not actual perjury) during their confirmation hearings. We see how far that's going. My point is that what we "need" and what we're likely to get, at any given point, are likely to diverge widely. I am now nearing 60, and I do not expect to see a non-conservative-dominated Supreme Court in my remaining lifetime, given the incredibly young ages at which the GOP has been putting their obedient lackeys on the Court.

I agree that's what such a provision *should* mean. I'm just saying I cannot confidently predict what the current conservative majority of the Supreme Court would rule, especially given their willingness to toss precedent. If five of them really, really wanted DeSantis to be able to run, and he made it clear he wanted to keep serving as governor "just in case he lost", I could easily see them re-casting what the Florida law says as "effectively" a requirement to be a candidate (by effectively penalizing him unless he meets that requirement they imposed). I don't think it's a valid argument but then I don't have a vote on the Supreme Court. That said, unless elections are "aligned" - that is, one's re-election for current office is scheduled at the same time as the election for the office you're seeking - people run for office all the time while continuing to hold another office. And in fact, as I recall, when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, Joe Lieberman simultaneously (and successfully) ran for re-election to the US Senate at the same time he ran for vice-president on Gore's ticket.

Perhaps (I'm not sure if that state law would be held constitutional or not; it depends on whether the courts construe it as an additional qualification to run for president, which isn't allowed). But even so, that won't make Crist governor; the Lt. Governor, who is certainly no progressive, will take his place. And Lying Marco, who claimed his parents fled Cuba to escape Castro, when in reality they came to the US many years before and were already US citizens by 1956, will still be in the US Senate regardless of what DeathSantis does.

As many have noted, FTM persons are welcome as members by this site (not all members will be eager to engage with you, but that's just life). That said: Your profile name hints at more than one topic that is forbidden here. Discussion of FTM issues (in the appropriate areas) is fine, obviously discussion of barebacking is fine, even chasing HIV (in the Bugchasing area) is fine, but read the rules about certain other things. Would be sad for you to earn an infraction because you thought "anything goes".

And unfortunately the decent people of Florida (which apparently are less than a majority in the state now) will suffer another four years of a shitty asshole as governor and another six years of a lying con artist as US senator. Floriduh is fast living up to its "Florida Man" reputation. Unfortunately, the shithead-type voters tend to live well away from the coast so we can't look forward to their homes washing away with the rising sea levels.

On a more serious note: those who are casually dismissing Twitter and its impending implosion as just the collapse of a site for posting nude shots may be missing the bigger picture (although that bigger picture isn't so relevant for porn). It's that Twitter has become a valuable method of communication because of the niche it fills. Lots of corporations, for instance, monitor their social media accounts for troubleshooting problems among their customers. Journalists can use it to promote works, especially breaking news. Politicians can use it to rally their supporters. And it does this kind of thing well because of its design. There isn't another widely used social media application with the same basic concepts: -primarily text based, not image/video, although that's an option; -sent by the user to the cosmos, where almost anyone can opt into following it*; -a community where I can see who my followers are, who they follow in turn, and what they (and other users) are all posting/following*. This last makes it possible to discover new veins of information and posters to follow. (The * is because users can choose to require approval for someone to follow them (and without approval, you don't see what they've posted), and because Twitter can control, via its software, how much of the potential flow of posts based on your follow requests actually gets shown to you. By and large, though, the point holds.) Instagram is similar, but it requires a picture or video in every posting - Comments are secondary and often overlooked. There are a lot of "twitter replacement" sites out there, but the reality is that few have the number of members needed to be relevant.

1. It's not a non-issue. You don't get to declare what is and is not an issue for everyone else. Nobody died and made you Queen. 2. Sites are not equal. What you can and cannot do on various sites are not equal. There are things about Twitter that are not readily replicated on other social media sites. (For instance: try posting on Instagram without including an image. You can't. It's primarily a photo/video sharing site where you can comment along with your images/videos. So if you don't have a relevant image to post, it doesn't matter what you want to say: you can't say it there. Every site out there has differences like that, and to ask "who cares" betrays a shocking lack of understanding about social media. 3. Many of us do not view this site as a place strictly for "sex and drugs" the way you apparently do. Your limited use of BZ doesn't negate the fact that it has many other uses that are just as, or more, important for other users here. 4. Lots of things and places that existed 30 years ago no longer do, in part because social media and "the apps" (among other factors) destroyed their business models. We've made accommodations in our lives to allow social media fill in gaps that formerly were met by brick-and-mortar places; if the social media landscape then upends those bonds in our communities, there's no longer any brick-and-mortar places to go back to. I get it - you're a druggie and a slut and proud of it and you don't give a shit about anything else, apparently - which seems to be a pretty accurate paraphrase of what your world is like and how you use this site. That's fine - knock yourself out. But please stop telling other users that they should shut up and be happy with whatever we're given because YOU are content with whatever crap you're served up. Some of us like more than that.

Of course she would benefit from that. But realistically, unless she understands the extent to which her own health is being placed in jeopardy by her husband - and she may not, given that he's withholding some information from her - she's unlikely to see the value of doing so.

For starters, bear in mind that media depictions aren't documentaries (usually) - they're fictional stories, which may or may not bear any resemblance to reality as we know it, and that's not limited to depictions of LGBT persons. Think the bright, cheerful, enormous apartments of the "Friends" characters - in Manhattan, where one or more of the cast is always job seeking and where some of them hold jobs that wouldn't allow them to share a studio in farthest Queens. More specifically: if the characters had normal lives, would anyone watch? People tune in to see drama and hijinks, not the everyday reality of most people's lives. And it's not infrequent that the areas that are most drama-filled in our own lives, the things that cause us the most angst, are the things that TV and film characters have figured out. Why? Because when we watch characters, we want to relate to them, but see both someone (a) who's overcome the problems we face - it gives us hope that we might, someday, too - and (b) nonetheless has other issues, things we don't necessarily worry about, because that teaches us that even those people who have it figured out have problems. And remember, too, that most TV/film depictions of LGBT life focus on living in big cities, where the dating AND sexual opportunities are ample. Close friendships of the sort depicted in such shows are rarer than we might think and harder to maintain, because they require just the right balance of "sameness" (where you agree on enough things to be thoroughly compatible as friends, through thick and thin) and "difference" (where different experiences can give you something to talk about, to learn from, and so forth). In a city that only has 50,000 people, say (roughly Albany, Oregon's population), even if a full 5% of the population is LGBT, that's only 2,500 people. Start overlaying filters on that for the kind of person who you'd be very comfortable in a deep friendship with, or a romantic relationship with - and recognizing that the other party/parties are doing the same kind of filtering - and you hit the outer limits pretty quickly. About 30 years ago, I was part of a small social circle of six guys who, without planning it, formed a little social group of our own - biweekly dinner parties, meeting up at the bar or club together, occasionally going to a cultural event together, etc. We were all in the 25-30 bracket, representing two couples and two single individuals. I was one of the latter. We were a tight group for a couple of years, even throwing a joint Christmas party as the home of one of the couples (they had the most space). But it proved hard to maintain for several reasons (one of the couples separated, the other single person was regularly morose about being single) and it just fell apart. None of us ever found a group of friends like that again - and that's in an urban area five or six times where you are.

Just recall the saying: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Or the other saying: Fuck Around and Find Out.