BootmanLA

It's not that you "can't". Obviously, it's possible to use both at the same time. But "can" is not the same as "advisable". While it's not a guaranteed issue (like many drug interactions), there's a known risk of cardiovascular issues that can be fatal. The same is true of mixing poppers and alcohol. Again, some people mix these every day with no issues. But that's not saying there is no risk.

I'm not sure whether you're asking about other STI's from the standpoint of "How do I prevent them?" or "How do you deal with them?" or "How can I get more of them?" Be forewarned, if you weren't aware, that the last of those three is not an acceptable topic on this site. You may with to clarify your question as to what it is you're looking to learn.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like you're suggesting the current "Backroom" be split - one section for Bugchasing (discussion forum, fiction/story forum) and one section for Druggies (discussion forum, fiction/story forum) - so that members can opt to block one or the other without blocking both. If so: I heartily endorse this. It's not my reasoning, but: I could easily see where someone in recovery would want to completely avoid the ChemSex sections but be open to the Bugchasing portion. While I recognize that a certain percentage of people interested in poz play are drug (ab)users, I think there's enough of a separation between the two to support dividing the section into two.

5 to 1 is rather generous. I'd estimate it's more like, in 100 gay men, 80 are bottoms or "versatile bottoms" that never actually top, 10% are versatile, 5% are versatile tops who actually prefer topping, and maybe 5% are tops who don't bottom. If that many.

New users can participate, extensively. They just can't private message other members until they've proven by *public* participation that they can be trusted. From the beginning a new member can make several posts a day (I'm not sure if it's 5, or what, but it's not limited to a single posting). That post can be a new topic entirely or a reply to an existing topic. A new member who makes two or three posts a day for a couple of weeks very quickly advances to a higher level. Your profile (look to the left of your post, above) says this is your 29th post. Since February, 2016, or more than 7 years. That's an average of fewer than four posts per year. If you only just now "have few enough restrictions" that you can engage enough to satisfy yourself, blame your lack of effort to engage for seven years, not "extremely aggressive limitations".

The CDC considers 100,000 or above a "high viral load". Presumably, then, anything below that (or at least, significantly below that; not counting the 99,950 copy loads) is a "non-HVL" partner.

Isn't a "married bachelor" a contradiction in terms?

I hate to be a wet blanket, but it's probably worth a reminder: while same-sex sex has been legalized in a big chunk of the world, that's not the case everywhere, and even where it's perfectly legal, it's not always (in fact, rarely is) legal in a public setting. Not to suggest that watching for signals from potential sex partners inevitably means public sex, but it sometimes does; and in places where it does, that also puts you at risk for undercover vice cops baiting gay men into propositioning them, steering the conversation towards playing somewhere like in the bushes of a park, and then arresting them for attempted public nudity. Or claiming that the person offered them money for sex. Or asked for money for sex. (The police are notoriously non-eager to charge actual customers of actual prostitutes, but they're frequently happy to make an exception to lock up a gay man by pretending he was offering to pay. Even if the charges won't stick, the point for the cops is the humiliation of the person arrested.) So be forewarned: public cruising, to be safe, really needs to be explicitly directed towards taking it somewhere private. I get the appeal of public play as much as anyone, and I'm not saying never ever do it; I'm saying be careful about what you agree to do, with whom.

That's the problem. People look at odds and cannot correctly figure what they mean. Of course, this is also in a country where millions of people play the lottery daily or weekly despite odds of winning that are astronomically against them. Why people can think "the odds are 500 million to one against me winning, but that means I've got a chance!" and at the same time read "the odds of infection from a single act of bareback sex with a poz person are 800 to one" and think "nah, nothing to worry about, that'll never happen to me!"

It's only "russian roulette" if you refuse to take reasonable precautions like PrEP. Rather than "enjoy the risk" (what a stupid thought), reasonable people mitigate the risk of bareback sex with preventative care.

I think there are about 750,000 dead people in the US alone who would show you the risk is real, but they can't, because they're dead. I'm sure most of them would happily let you take their place if it meant they had a choice not to contract HIV in the first place.

There's not a huge amount of data about this because it's not the kind of thing scientists are likely to want to study; the assumption is that any normal, sane, HIV+ person is going to want to get his viral load undetectable and keep it there while at the same time imposing the least "toll" on the rest of his body's systems (because HIV medications can and do take a toll on things like your kidneys, your liver, and more). Science isn't particularly interested (for good reason) in investigating "Hey, what happens when a bunch of undetectable poz guys deliberately expose themselves repeatedly to high viral loads?" What we DO know, however, is that there are variants (or subtypes) of HIV. We also know that it's possible for HIV to become med-resistant in a person who (deliberately or not) stays "on meds" but only sporadically. We know that modern HIV treatment works very well at keeping a controlled HIV infection under control. We know that within reason, that same treatment can help ward off reinfection by other strains of HIV as long as those are not med-resistant. It sounds to me like the "event" your friend is talking about is either guys hoping to get a superinfection (ie additional strains of HIV for their body/meds to fight off) or even to get a med-resistant strain. Regardless of the actual risk involved, to me this sounds very much like insanity; you've already got to live the rest of your life with a virus that requires daily attention to keep from killing you, and they want you to risk making that even more complex (or worse, impossible to manage)? For what? The temporary "thrill" of some risky sex? Honestly, I don't see why such people don't just take up Russian Roulette and keep adding bullets until the chamber of the pistol is full. If someone's life is so empty that they need a thrill from the risk of making complex disease management even more so, or possibly putting management out of reach, there are a lot more efficient ways to honor that suicidal impulse.

You may wish to re-word this, although I'm not sure you can do so within the rules without changing your meaning. Since you're poz, "bug chasing" for you presumably means chasing other STI's, and promoting that is expressly forbidden on this site. You may want to reacquaint yourself with the rules of the site.

FWIW, as I understand it, past infractions remain visible to you (and to the moderators) but unless they're particularly severe, their "effect" wears off (ie the impact on your reputation score, your level of advancement, and so forth). I suspect that the original designers of the software (which, remember, isn't RawTop or anyone associated with this site; this is software available for people to create a site like this one) planned it that way, so that site operators could always look at a user's history and see if he's other problems in the past - and importantly, what kind of problem, which can indicate a specific issue to address.

Let me add this: Many of you have commented that there are some members who appear to be "favorites" and who escape punishment for what you think are serious infractions while others get penalized for minor offenses. I can't speak to how the decision to penalize / not penalize a member goes, nor how severe a penalty is levied and what factors go into that decision. What I *can* tell you with absolute certainty is that unless a member tells you he's been penalized, there's pretty much no way to know whether he has. I know this because I've been penalized before (and in each case, I'll say the penalty was defensible even if I might have decided otherwise if it were my call and regarding another member). No one but me was notified (I assume other moderators can somehow tell), and because the penalty only meant I couldn't post or message other members for the duration, all that would appear to others is that I was temporarily not active. A 3-day suspension, even for a prolific poster, can go unnoticed because we ALL have times in our lives when we can't get online to interact with others as we might want. So don't assume that a member "escapes punishment" for infractions. It's very possible they do not.

So moderators are "tools" despite the fact they're enforcing the rules that YOU agreed to when you signed up for this site (and which you continue to agree to, each time you sign on). One reason new posts are getting "fewer and far between" (if in fact they are) is that some people think they're entitled to post anything they want, anywhere on the site. And that's simply not the case. And if the problem is that this is "one of the only options", might I suggest you invest your time and money into creating a site more to your liking? Deal with the legal ramifications of laws around the world governing data privacy, permissible and unpermissible postings, and liability for user conduct, and then maybe you'll grasp just how much work goes into walking the line between offering a resource like this and getting shut down by a massively expensive lawsuit.

Bear in mind that anyone bragging about how he started having sex as a willing 9 year old is probably living in a fantasy world. But also bear in mind, for the situations where it's true that someone started very young: it's highly unlikely they have any notion about STI's, so while they might experience symptoms for a bit, those symptoms often fade even if the infection is untreated. Such a person might well be in his late teens before he learns enough about STI's to protect himself, and even then, he might not associate "that thing" he had years earlier with the infections he's learning about now. Your post raises a big question, though, for the interaction between health care autonomy, parental rights, age of consent laws, and the like. The existence of judicial bypass laws for abortion permission (while it's still legal) presumes that there are health care providers who will see an unaccompanied minor teenager who suspects she's pregnant. Abortion as a very public issue does have the side effect of making those resources more visible. The same, alas, cannot be said for (for example) urologists treating underaged boys for STI's. And the problem for health care providers is that they're mandatory reporters of suspected child abuse. If a nine or ten year old boy presents with a case of syphilis or gonorrhea, it's a statistical certainty that he contracted it through what is legally sexual abuse; the person who infected him is almost certainly much older and that age is far below any age of consent (another concept that would be foreign to that child). I suppose within pedophile circles, there are health care workers who are known to look the other way when quietly treating an underaged victim of sexual abuse. But that's not of much use to a hypothetical, perhaps even imaginary, boy who is so sexually active that he contracts an STI at a very young age.

I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that at the time your profiles on such sites mentioned that you traveled, perhaps even worldwide). I think contacting such a person from a distance is reasonable, even if it turns out the traveler has no plans to head in that direction for the foreseeable future. But that's a case rendered valid because of particular circumstances. A random message from some [allegedly] 18-year old in Singapore or Bangkok or Amman or Buenos Aires, whose profile says he's looking for "love", messaging someone in the U.S. (or Europe)? Almost certainly a wanker at best, a lead-in to a scam at worst.

For you, that may be true (I'm not you, so I can't say). You don't have the standing to make that declaration for anyone else in the world. THAT is the correct answer - turn down condoms all you want. Just don't presume to speak for others when you do.

In most (maybe all) technologies involving transmission of information (of whatever kind) there's a number called the Signal to Noise Ratio, or SNR. Depending on the technology, a high SNR can result in anything from excessive static for broadcast radios to fuzzy broadcast television pictures to pixellated digital TV pictures to dropped packets in an computer network scenario. The same is true in written (and even spoken) language. Unfortunately, despite the hard work of the system moderators, the "noise" ratio on what I would call the actual "discussion" forums here keeps creeping upward, threatening to outweigh the signal. The valid points made - as you note - get subsumed in the noise generated by the "fap fap fap" part of the post. And when one part of a posting - not just this one, but a post in general, made with the ostensible purpose of discussing a topic - is essentially impossible to credit on its face, any signal in the post can get lost among that noise.

Also meant to mention: for essentially the entirety of that time, the females in question weren't consenting to anything. They were essentially property that transferred in possession from her father to her husband, and "wifely duties" were part of the bargain. As recently as the late 20th century, in many states in the U.S. it was legally impossible for a man to rape his wife as consent to sex was impliedly recognized as part of the marriage, period. Our modern concept of consent is really less than about 50-60 years old.

The first sentence is only "half plus" true. Once humans settled down into urban settings (no longer hunter-gathering, but practicing agriculture and animal husbandry), an age gap quickly developed between typical couples. For females, 14-15 was considered a marriagable age because wives were expected to keep house (a much more labor-intensive, but not mentally tasking, experience in those days) and to bear and rear children. It was very UNcommon for a male that age as he would not have had time to develop a means of supporting his family. Men were usually well into their twenties - or later - before marrying a (frequently much) younger woman. In an era with essentially no functioning birth control, the ability to provide - pretty much immediately - for a family was essential. This system also accommodated a fact with which egalitarians are sometimes uncomfortable: adolescent boys and girls mature, both physically and mentally, at different times and different rates. Whatever the reason, we know that a 15-year old girl is frequently more mentally and psychologically mature than a boy two or three years older. We can't realistically make different rules for boys and girls at this point in history, but that's the context of how things "used to be."

Most of what you say I don't find fault with, except the "business mentality" he brought to the White House was strictly "How can my business make money off this gig?". From the bribes-disguised-as-hotel-stays to selling overpriced tschotskes bearing presidential insignia (in violation of federal law) at his golf courses and clubs, Trump's presidency was one long grift streak. And it's still paying off. Witness the billions his son-in-law, a failed real estate developer with no experience in venture capital, managed to raise from the Saudi royal family after finessing covering up their responsibility for the murder of a U.S. resident journalist in Turkey. But Trump's grift wasn't the biggest problem. It's that when it was all coming to an end, he cheerfully fomented a riot whose purpose was to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his successor. It only failed because enough "adults in the room" finally had enough and made it clear they weren't going to stand idly by, including the entire leadership team at the Department of Justice. Trump seems pretty clear about wanting another shot at it. If he gets it, we may never have another transfer of power by election again. That's enough to keep any sane person from sleeping well.

THIS. I know a hefty number of gay guys in Atlanta, and a not insignificant number in several of the other cities he mentioned. Not all of them, certainly, but some of the largest. My acquaintances and friends run the gamut from top to bottom and all the in-betweens. Not one of them could think of anyone in the region - anywhere - who was "known" for regularly being gang-banged. And again, sure, my friends don't represent a complete and representative cross-section of the gay community, but I find it especially odd when I can say "that 40ish bottom boy who lives about 20 miles south of Atlanta, the one who likes to take pictures on his John Deere tractor all summer" and ten people know who I mean immediately, that no one knows of a bottom "known" for being regularly gang-banged. Like Eros, I'm solidly in the "skeptical" category.

That's certainly one way to approach porn actors. I personally can't enjoy watching sex, no matter how hot it might otherwise appear, if I know the actor to be a shit human being. But it's certainly not the way everyone approaches it.