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I would never open with "Pic?", but I wouldn't start a chat with someone whose profile had no pic, and if they started a chat, I'd block or not respond. I perceive it as an information imbalance, because I have public face and body pics in my profile. Whether to post a public pic is very much a personal choice, but not engaging without a pic also seems reasonable (and safe).

Agreed on all points, @BergenGuy. To quote the songwriter Janis Ian, "Why the line? / Where's the race?" The Scruff ambiguity stems from an ambiguity in the profile prompt: Are we talking about what the user does to protect themselves, or about the protection strategies they look for in partners? The "Tribes" prompt in Grindr suffers from the same ambiguity: is it about the user or about the user's preferred partners? It would be so easy for Grindr and Scruff to write clear and useful profile prompts. Like the social media giants that claim to root out misinformation but in fact turn a blind eye, any click is a good click — the more clicks, the more advertising revenue! As you say, the average Scruff user who selects both PrEP and TasP doesn't understand, let alone use, either one.

I get turned off when I see several of these factors at once: • "Clean" (This usually means the person considers Poz people "dirty", which may signal a sex-negative attitude, misconceptions about sexual risk, or plain bias.) • "Safe only" (I take Truvada for PrEP daily, get HIV and STI tests monthly, and have had all available STI vaccines, so I'm safer than someone who relies solely on condoms.) • No public face picture (Sending it privately usually signals that something's being hidden.) • No age • No distance (In a large urban area, it's also really helpful to write one's city or neighborhood in profile text.) • No HIV status (Poz undetectable people are my favorite partners, then fellow PrEP users. Neg people not on PrEP come last, and whereas "don't know" is hot on BBRTS, it's suspicious on Grindr.) • No last test date, or one that's not recent (People who pretend, or imagine, they're on PrEP are the worst offenders. In the US, if you haven't received HIV and STI tests within 3 months, you are decidedly not following a CDC-recommended PrEP regimen.) • Unrealistic descriptions (For example, I love playing with big and very big people, but be forthright! "Stocky" ends somewhere below 250 pounds.) • Redundant descriptions or bragging (For example, why write "muscular" in profile text? The pictures should suffice.) • Looking for "hung" (This usually means that, no matter the size of your penis, it is not big enough. I hope, for the sake of this type of Grindr user, that there are lots of tops with 14-inch, beercan-thick dicks, 100 feet away, eager to meet.) • "Ass-up, face-down" (When I want mechanical sex, I go to a sex club or an adult arcade, where there's lots of choice for both parties, if things don't click between me and a particular bottom.) • "Don't waste my time" (My time is just as valuable. We are both investing time to find out about each other.)

This is beautiful, and beautifully written, @hntnhole ! You mention restroom glory holes as well as bar or bookstore glory holes. Both kinds are important but the restroom ones, to me, are the ultimate...the serendipity, the spontaneity, the random men, the adrenaline rush, and the way that a blowjob or a quick fuck can be interleaved with one's regular day (you can rejoin your BF/GF/husband/wife outside, go back to the office, etc.). It's also fascinating to sample restroom glory holes in different cities. Having to use two different kinds of modern-day "pissoirs" (essentially, outdoor, minimally-sheltered urinals) on my last trip to Paris prompted me to do some research. I was able to find and visit the last remaining "Vespassienne" (historic Parisian urinal enclosure and men's meeting place). Of course there was no one else there, but I could just imagine what it was like for two gay men to meet and have a furtive encounter in a place like that in the late 1800s.

Last time I checked, misdemeanors are not legal, permitted, penalty-free behavior. And why does San Francisco get the blame for a statewide proposition? San Francisco has always had high rates of shoplifting, car break-ins, bike thefts, etc. These crimes are regrettable, but they occur in all high-profile world cities (except perhaps in Singapore, where socioeconomic status is homogeneous, especially compared to US cities, and even chewing gum is a crime — or in the Islamic world, where a person might be stoned, arbitrarily incarcerated, etc.). I'm not convinced that running into homeless people and drug users on Market Street, or having Target close at 7 PM, completely negates the joys of visiting the Castro, sampling the numerous gay or gay-friendly restaurants, cafés, bars and clubs that remain in the City, and finding literally hundreds of other gay people within a 1-mile radius on Grindr (or 20 instant hookup ads at a time on BBRTS).

It's important to discuss this with your doctor if you haven't already, or if you didn't get thorough answers. My boyfriend switched (voluntarily) from an old-line regimen they'd been using for more than a decade to Biktarvy. The Pharm.D. in the medical office, who helps them with HIV care and me with PrEP care, is cautious and conscientious, so she reviewed potential side effects and arranged an early round of testing after the switch. Purely out of curiosity, did you and your doctor consider Cabenuva, the recently-approved monthly injectable — since you'll be switching regimens anyway? Most of all, I hope you have a problem-free transition!

@skinster, thanks for posting the article (which I'd seen in the Times and and was hoping to discuss on BZ) and then finding the legal text! @R86, thanks for the practical analysis. The heterosexual bias of the news coverage is fascinating. If we watched the legislative debate, we'd probably find similar sexism. Although the text refers to the person stealthing and to the person being stealthed using neutral words, I doubt that the legislators gave much more thought than the journalists, to the possibility that men might stealth other men. Side note: Last week the Times published an editorial — the paper's latest flip-flop on whether OnlyFans porn is good or bad — in which some puritanical nut explained that all porn is sexual abuse, that women who post on OnlyFans go on to become street prostitutes, and that all porn harms women. The first two claims are exaggerated but the last one really exposes the editorial board's heterosexual bias. It just doesn't occur to these "nice" people that some porn might feature only men, with not a woman in sight. The text of the anti-stealthing law mentions removed condoms, but a judge's job is to interpret laws, so it's likely that holes or tears, short of removal, would amount to the same thing. This law is dangerous for two reasons, which have nothing at all to do with the ethics of stealthing: First, when the sponsor's initial effort to designate stealthing as a crime failed, she found a golden opportunity: by switching from criminal to civil law, she secured easier passage of her legislation and lowered the standard of proof. Claims of non-consent should require the highest standard of proof because most sex takes place behind closed doors, with no witnesses and no recordings, and the consent is usually oral, not written. (It would be strange indeed for partners to consent in writing before fucking. If the puritans win, maybe someday we'll have to fill out 3-part carbon forms with checkboxes for the sex acts we're willing to do, before we take off our clothes.) Why is the sponsor now afraid of the higher standard of proof in criminal law? Second, this law creates an imbalance for heterosexuals, entrenching bias against men. There is no companion law against a woman's lying about or sabotaging her own contraception. If a man removes a condom, he will be subject to civil penalties, but a woman remains perfectly free to do the equivalent. My purpose here isn't to say anything about the ethics of stealthing, but to point out the unintended (or, for the puritans, totally intentional) consequences of this kind of legislation.

I'm a top and pretty aggressive when fucking, but I love it when a bottom has the skill, desire and dedication to do the work. Your tops are lucky guys! I've only fucked two guys with the talent to make me nut entirely by moving their asses.

Tell that to a heterosexual woman in South Africa, where 17% of adults have HIV, not everyone has access to testing and treatment, and her husband beats her (or has threatened to abandon her) if she insists that he use a condom. Even in the US, there is no "micro, individual level" to speak of when we are talking about health. Blaming individuals is not useful for health policy (which necessarily deals with entire populations) and it's not effective at changing individual behavior! If it were that simple, problems like drug and alcohol addiction; lung cancer from smoking; sexual transmission of HIV; frequent COVID-19 transmission among unmasked, unvaccinated people; and so on would all have been solved long ago. I don't think you read what I wrote, or understood what I was trying to say. I hope you'll spend a day shadowing an HIV prevention counselor or a family planning counselor to understand that there's no easy way to control individual behavior, and then spend an hour with a researcher at an HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) site to understand why it's important to continue working on PrEP methods, adherence and access.

I never said low-price generic drug manufacturers should fund patient assistance. I explained that the shift from high-priced, brand-name Truvada to a low-priced generic changed the landscape for low-income US PrEP patients. Where they might have been able to get by with a patient assistance program before, they now need to pay something out of pocket, or obtain insurance (@BootmanLA notes the difficulty of qualifying, in states that have not expanded Medicaid eligibility) and rely on the new preventive care designation for PrEP (which, as pointed out by @BergenGuy in a different thread, is being litigated by the same religious conservatives who oppose birth control). You should be able to tell from my explanation of how patient assistance programs are paid for that I don't view patient assistance ( = hidden revenue transfer) as a solution. Emprical data don't support this position. Large randomized controlled trials (the gold standard in medical research) have established that daily Truvada, 2-1-1 intermittent Truvada, daily Descovy, and also 2-month injectable Cabotegravir (already approved in the US for HIV treatment, with approval for prevention pending) are nearly 100% effective in preventing HIV infection when used as directed. Even in actual use (a subset of the patient population fails to take some Truvada or Descovy doses), efficacy is quite high: a substantial percentage of infections are avoided. The lone exception in PrEP efficacy research is in heterosexual women in Africa. You claim that "going bare is a choice", but this is not true for straight women in patriarchal societies where, to make matters worse, the rate of existing HIV infections ("prevalence") is very high, treatment is limited, and HIV remains a major cause of disability and early death. African women's male partners generally refuse to allow condoms. African women also reported having to keep their use of Truvada secret from their male partners. Some women signed up for PrEP studies because they were so poor that they needed the compensation or the general health care offered to study participants, but had no intention of taking Truvada. Not surprisingly, the efficacy of Truvada for PrEP among heterosexual women in Africa was low, because adherence was very low. Adherence might be better with injectables or implants, which are currently being studied. These alternatives are more discreet than a daily pill, and they last a long time. Returning to our comparatively simple, American universe, we know from birth control studies that there's a difference in the effectiveness of condoms in perfect versus actual use. Just as PrEP users miss doses sometimes, couples who rely on condoms sometimes don't use them. No matter our intentions as individuals, we are not perfect! So, another source of evidence of PrEP's value is epidemiological data. Even in San Francisco, a city with a large, long-term, sustained investment in HIV prevention and HIV treatment, and relatively low rates of new HIV infections ("incidence") to show for it, existing interventions had peaked. Condoms — and a big intervention that you left out, Treatment as Prevention (the fact that HIV-positive people with an undetectable viral load do not transmit HIV) — were not enough. For the first half of the 2010s, there was still more than one new HIV infection in San Francisco per day, on average. The infection rate was no longer going down. It started dropping again only after Truvada was approved for PrEP, access barriers were reduced, and PrEP usage became widespread locally. PrEP makes a difference, at the whole-population level, even in places like San Francisco that already did a good job with HIV prevention. Think of the difference it could make in less advanced locales! As for economics, PrEP was never intended for everyone. CDC guidelines indicate that it is for people who are at high risk of HIV infection. When it is made available to high-risk people, with minimal access barriers, the rate of new HIV infections goes down. Health economists could well weigh the cost of PrEP (which continues to drop) against the cost of HIV treatment (or lost economic output due to disability and early death, in places where treatment is not readily available) for the extra people who would become infected if PrEP were not accessible. In the US, PrEP isn't yet reaching the people at highest risk of getting HIV. As far as sexual transmission goes, new HIV infections in the US are overwhelmingly among low-income people, people of color, young people, and trans people. These groups have trouble accessing PrEP, believe that they would have trouble, or simply don't know it's an option. There is a big demographic (and also geographic) mismatch between Americans who readily access PrEP and Americans who are newly infected with HIV. When we expand our perspective to Africa, the mismatch is even worse. You want more, not less, PrEP access for people who are otherwise likely to get HIV!

Nothing wrong about that at all. You were promoting international and interracial understanding and friendship. 😏 I hope you will continue to enjoy getting bred by strangers (of all races). If I were the guy in a relationship with you, I'd be even more turned on when you came home with your hole wet and slick and ready for me to fuck you, using some random guy's cum as my lube. I'd want to do this often, and see whether my sperm were stronger.

A correction, relevant to PrEP and other pharmaceutical interventions: Many Americans don't know the details of Canada's single-payer health system. The provincial health insurance plans that comprise the system do not cover prescription drugs. There is no government-funded prescription drug coverage in Canada unless you are a senior citizen or a low income earner (if you are curious, you can look up ODB/Ontario Drug Benefit, the largest such program in Canada) or you have one of a small number of high-cost conditions for which exceptional government help has been legislated. Canadians rely on employer-provided supplemental health plans for prescription coverage. There is no individual health insurance market to speak of in Canada, and supplemental plans are generally offered to employees high up on the economic totem pole (full-time, white-collar professionals who work for large employers). The lack of government-funded prescription drug coverage has significantly held back PrEP adoption Canada. For a similar example, even though medical (pill-based) abortion has been routinely available in Europe and the US for years, and was finally approved in Canada, it didn't become routinely available there until a year or two ago, and there are still access gaps. The provincial health plans cover services, so they will pay for surgical abortion, but because they do not cover outpatient prescriptions, they initially refused to cover the medication needed for medical abortion. This was the height of economic irrationality: surgical abortion was much more expensive for the provincial health plans! One small consolation is that Canada, at the federal level, regulates prescription drug prices. (Note that health is largely a provincial responsibility in Canada. The federal government retains regulatory authority and, because it reimburses the provinces for a [declining] share of the cost of their health plans, it can use this financial lever to set rudimentary standards for the provincial health plans.) But even with federal price caps, the out-of-pocket cost of brand-name Truvada remains out of reach for ordinary people in Canada. In the US, generic Truvada, particularly from Aurobindo (Teva's first-to-market generic was nearly full-price) is at once helping and harming PrEP access. Uninsured Americans could potentially afford to pay out-of-pocket for the Aurobindo product (just over $1 per daily pill), but the company does not sponsor a patient assistance program. Gilead covered thousands of dollars a year in out-of-pocket costs for Truvada for any privately-insured or uninsured American who asked and, given proof of income, the entire cost for low income earners. (This wasn't a matter of generosity; it was simply redistribution of a fraction of the revenues that Gilead received from private and public insurers, which paid full-price. For Americans, this kind of redistribution is more palatable than actually correcting inequities in healthcare access.) Now that the preventive health care designation is in place, and that most PrEP patients receive generic Truvada, getting health insurance (whether through basic Medicaid eligibility in red states, expanded Medicaid eligibility in blue states, or subsidized ACA plans in all states — note that federal subsidies have been increased for a few years) is the way for low-income Americans to get access to PrEP. In Canada, low-priced generic Truvada will only improve PrEP access. Gilead did not offer patient assistance in Canada. For the large number of Canadians without supplemental health insurance to cover prescriptions, the prospect of paying just over $1 per daily tablet brings the drug cost within reach. A more substantial consolation is that the provincial health plans in Canada — unlike Gilead's patient assistance programs in the US — do cover office visits and lab tests.

I agree with @negbtm ... get on BBRTS! Enjoy yourself with lots of men. Set goals for the number of partners you'd like to meet every week or every month, and for the kinds of experiences you'd like to try. If you're not already doing it, it's a good idea to set up regular STI testing. (Making testing frequent and routine is one of the extra benefits of PrEP.) Discuss with your doctor whether a quarterly or perhaps even monthly schedule makes sense. If you have frequent sex, you will get STIs now and then. Many infections are asymptomatic. Quick detection and treatment could put yours and your sexual partners' minds at ease. It's also a good idea to review vaccinations with your doctor. There are vaccines against Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, HPV, and meningitis. Some are routine, depending on your location and your generation, but some are not. Last but not least, consider discussing your protection against HIV with your doctor, especially if your genetic tests were done by a direct-to-consumer service. Consumer genetic tests are not validated for, let alone approved for, use in disease prevention, diagnosis, or treatment. PrEP, on the other hand, is well studied, and is a safe and effective way to protect against HIV. It doesn't hurt to find sex-positive friends or even a licensed counselor. It's good to be able to discuss whatever might be holding you back from accepting and enjoying your sexual desires. Last but not least, I sometimes see "deleting soon" in people's Grindr profiles. These are usually blank profiles, or ones without many details, and without face pictures. Apparently, there is a psychological pattern at work in liquidation sales, motivating shoppers to buy while they can. But it doesn't translate to Grindr, where there are literally hundreds of other guys available! If you're not filling out your profile each time you re-download Grindr, try that. And instead of deleting and re-downloading, consider maintaining a presence. It will make you more approachable and increase your chances of meeting sexual partners and like-minded friends in your area.

In PrEP research studies that include adherence monitoring, participants who have taken at least 4 of 7 daily Truvada pills in a given week are generally considered protected. It's important to note that this covers receptive anal sex. Drug concentrations vary in different body tissues. For receptive vaginal sex, daily dosing means daily dosing; there's much less margin for error. Some PrEP users report that taking Truvada at the same time each day (even though the time of day doesn't matter) helps them sustain the routine. Most of all, be sure to discuss missed doses with your PrEP provider. Part of providing good PrEP care means supporting patients with adherence. It may also be informative to learn about intermittent or "2-1-1" dosing — not necessarily because you want to switch, but because the research will put your mind at ease about missing occasional daily doses. If you are in the US, intermittent or "2-1-1" dosing is discussed in some depth in the forthcoming 2021 revision to the CDC PrEP guidelines. The guidelines are a great resource for medical professionals and for informed patients, because they reference actual research.

The right question to ask is, "What would VC Andrews say?" 😂 The success of the VC Andrews novels ("the novels" rather than "her novels" because someone else was hired to write in her name after she died) proves that there can never be too much incest.

This is so hot! It gets at the psychology of a dom/sub relationship (and also, I would say, of ordinary romantic or sexual relationships in which a person has a particularly strong desire for another person). Have you seen the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service? There's an over-the-top scene in which a group of attractive young women from around the world, who believe they are undergoing treatment for food allergies, gobble up the foods that they believe they are allergic to. (They are, in fact, not receiving any medical treatment at all, but are instead being hypnotized to respond to the orders of a megalomaniac bent on world domination.) Your account of eagerly drinking your ex-master's piss reminded me of that scene. 🙂

Somewhere here on Breeding Zone, someone posted a link to a "Butt Baby" toy, which might be a way for people to explore this fantasy. (I found the product video unrealistic and unstimulating, because the "baby" seemed to just shoot out across the room. 😂 Roleplay participants, as I've seen in some just-before-birth MPreg videos, would probably be more convincing, acting out the anticipation, the pain, and the love that a couple might experience during a real birth.) As a top I get turned on by the risk of, and the thought of, knocking someone up. I hadn't given much thought to the eventual birth process, but if a bottom guy carried my baby to term I'd definitely want to be there to comfort the guy after he had given birth. Reassurance at that moment would start getting him in the mindset of preparing for my next baby.

Or begging not to be knocked up, when he knows I'm seconds away from breeding him and I won't pull out. 😈

Can't a sex date be romantic, if the host lights candles, puts on classical music (or maybe sounds of nature, like thunderstorms or waves) during the fuck, and still remembers the guy's name at the end? 😂

I've never used OnlyFans, but apparently, they have reversed their planned ban on sexual content. Content creators interviewed for one article I read said that they were still spooked. They're afraid that arbitrary restrictions will be imposed in the future. I am disgusted with the New York Times, which had the gall to publish (between the announcement and the reversal) an article lamenting that OnlyFans was the latest casualty of censorship. The newspaper has a very short memory. It was a sloppy and sensationalistic New York Times exposé that led payment processors to cut off PornHub, which in turn forced the deletion of most amateur content from the site. The Times can't have it both ways!

Please feel free to post a screenshot! Again from experience — in this case with many different Web sites, not specifically with Breeding Zone — DNS-based ad blockers (system-wide or network-wide) and in-browser tracking protections interfere with "recaptcha" ("Are you a human?") checks, completely breaking login forms, payment forms, etc.

For those referencing the US CDC PrEP guidelines, once again, the 2021 revision is pending (comments were received in May) and intermittent or 2-1-1 PrEP is in the document. Some people have mentioned fear and trauma from the early days of the HIV epidemic, and while it's important to acknowledge fear, because it does affect health-related decisions for some people, it's also important not to stoke further fear (or to sow doubt). The research is unequivocal: daily Truvada (and now Descovy) for PrEP is extremely effective in preventing HIV infections in real-world use (and so is Truvada used intermittently according to 2-1-1 rules).

It's possible that tracking protection software (such as a DNS-based ad-blocker) is operating systemwide. It's also possible that browser-based tracking protection (which is a feature of each of the Web browsers you mention and, in the latest versions of some of them, isn't automatically disabled in private browsing mode, though it can be disabled completely in the browser's settings) is interfering. Firefox and Chrome both have developer modes that would let you see exactly what requests are being sent, to what destinations, and whether responses are being received. The browsers' developer modes are not for the faint of heart: the text and controls are tiny, the screens are cluttered, and there's very little explanatory documentation. Still, if it's worth it to you to be able to access Breeding Zone from your PC, braving the developer mode of one your browsers might be worth the effort. Please share any discoveries, for the benefit of other users! I've noticed that I sometimes can't follow users or edit posts when I'm accessing Breeding Zone through my VPN, using my DNS-based ad blocker, or leaving the tracking protections in Apple's Safari Web browser turned on. The problem is intermittent and I sometimes have to switch off multiple levels of protection. This is to say that there must be JavaScript code, tracking pixels, font download tracking, or other mechanisms at work on Breeding Zone, and that some of the mechanisms might be stateful, too. (I don't mean to single out Breeding Zone, as the vast majority of Web sites now use one or more of these mechanisms.)

It's years too soon to speculate on behavioral and social changes from an HIV vaccine. Moderna is launching a Phase 1 clinical trial to find out whether its two candidates are safe, and to determine what immune responses they provoke (which is not the same as checking whether they prevent HIV infections in entire population groups). Though these are the first candidates based on mRNA technology, they are not the first HIV vaccines. Vaccines using older technologies have advanced even further through the clinical trial stages, some with disappointing results and others with encouraging results. (Even vaccines with low efficacy rates can save large numbers of lives, when we are talking about a disease like HIV, in places where it is widespread and where prevention, testing, and treatment are limited — as in some parts of the world beyond the US and Western Europe.) People who are interested in participating in HIV prevention clinical trials should look up the HVTN and HPTN, two international research networks funded by the US federal government. Those interested in participating in HIV treatment-related trials can look up the ACTG. Many US cities, and some foreign countries, have network sites. (European countries have their own national research agencies, such as the ANRS in France.) There is a range of HIV vaccine-related clinical trials going on at any time. Most are Phase 1 studies, meant to answer narrow scientific questions with the help of small numbers of volunteers who are at low-risk of getting HIV. In other words, this line of research is slow, deliberate, and unsexy — but very important. @LoveAndBeLoved is right to credit queer communities, but perhaps not for their role in HIV vaccine research. At the height of the AIDS crisis in the US, queer activists dramatically changed the clinical trial process, forcing researchers to consult with community members. Each HVTN, HPTN and ACTG site has a community advisory board in addition to an institutional ethics committee. Ordinary people drawn from the communities that will participate in the clinical trials are at the table when studies are planned, and as they are being implemented. The main participants in later-stage HIV vaccine trials are not likely to be queer people — nor Americans or Europeans, for that matter. They are likely to be heterosexual Africans, due to the much higher prevalence of HIV in African countries. And we can credit South Africa for being the continental leader in building local, non-US-operated HIV research competence.