Sex Dead Cities/internet Regional Issue Or Worldwide?

[nekofox]

It honestly is so random for this area I'm in.  With this being the "bible belt" area, I'll have some fun, but not as much since I keep getting either ignored, or hit by those that are too pushy for their own good. Had I been travelling solo during Gay Days in Orlando, I would've had a lot of action in some form.  It just comes down to certain times in this area.    

[Hungrycumpig]

Dead here in California's Central Valley as well. 

[Ddawg]

I think the reality is there is a social shift. People under 40 grew up with overexposure to TV, Internet, etc, that they have lost sociability. Millennials are the least promiscuous generation in history. Gay relationships are more and more accepted so the counterculture of "can't get married, so let's screw around!" isn't the norm. I'm 35, and I find I have a hard time even talking to people... Online chats go something like:

"How's your weekend going?"

"Ok."

"I went to the park and got a lot of sun, how about you?"

"U 2?"

I dunno. I just think people are broken.

[BiAggieGuy]

I think the reality is there is a social shift. People under 40 grew up with overexposure to TV, Internet, etc, that they have lost sociability. Millennials are the least promiscuous generation in history. Gay relationships are more and more accepted so the counterculture of "can't get married, so let's screw around!" isn't the norm. I'm 35, and I find I have a hard time even talking to people... Online chats go something like:

"How's your weekend going?"

"Ok."

"I went to the park and got a lot of sun, how about you?"

"U 2?"

I dunno. I just think people are broken.

 

Gotta agree with you on that.  Sure a little chit-chat is okay, but one should get to the point.  And starting every e-mail with "Hey" or "wassup" is just lame.

 

Truly, I 99% of the "18-30 crowd" are just fucking nuts.  They live in some kind of warped sense of reality where nothing that matters in the long run is important.  All they care about is the next pop culture fad, the next social media outrage, and whatever else they can find to focus their brains on for their 5 minute attention span.  Most cannot carry on an even partly intellegent conversation.

 

Okay, rant mode off.

[Scottyrim]

I think there are two things here.

The Internet has provided all of us with unprecedented access to millions and millions of men and we are able to find like minded individuals. This site being just one example. Would barebacking have flourished without the internet? Possibly not as much.

On the other hand it has provided people with endless menus of people they want or desire or mainly what they don't want.

Essentially to sum up the majority, if you are a hot football straight acting 10 inch cock wielding ,intelligent, witty, charming , not vain , great body, romantic , tall,cut ,and just a jock at heart you have it made it in the gay world. If you are not this then they will wait for this.

The next problem are gay sex venues themselves. There seems to be two types of venues essentially. In each city I have travelled too. There is one that is like a Paris catwalk at fashion week, be that Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam London or Melbourne and one venue that is just pure sex.

What you have to do is find the pure sex one and take a notepad, camera and sunglasses to the Catwalk ones.

[muscmtl]

Essentially to sum up, if you are a hot football straight acting 10 inch cock wielding ,intelligent, witty, charming , not vain , great body, romantic , tall,cut ,and just a jock at heart you have it made it in the gay world. If you are not this then they will wait for this.

 

 

LOVE IT, I`ll start printing T-Shirt and force ActUp to distribute them instead of their "the-nineties-are-over" condoms.

 

[cumlatrine]

Death here. Too much AIDS around

[AJM271]

Philadelphia is pretty much like everyone else has described dead or 3s waiting for a 10...or 11....or 15. I've also noticed that no matter what site you go to or app you use it is the same guys. They may use a different name but the pics are always the same batch - they will even be on several hookup places at the same time.

 

Philly still manages to support two bath houses and several book stores but I haven't been to any in two years. The last time I went it was the Paris catwalk as mentioned above.

 

I do hit up a bar once in a while and usually can find someone to chat with but that is it. An older guy can usually carry a conversation but the under 30 crowd is a lost cause. 

[meetme]

Well, jj10, visit NYC and you can fill me up all you want with your young spunk.  I go to the only two baths left in NYC trying to find a time when they are busy enough for me to have a good time with some new "friends."  And I'm checking BBRT all the time but connections don't happen often enough, people are so reluctant to jump into having a good time, I keep telling myself it's NYC not Nebraska but it really has gone dead in this town.  If you check BBRT listings in London or Montreal it's still looks like they are active cities.  Chicago is great but the Big Apple is a big snore.

[berlinboi]

Have to say that I think that the gay scene is diverging. I was in Edinburgh in August and there are two saunas. The first one I went to guys were walking round the maze in circles. It was nice and clean etc but so prissy. After two hours I gave up and wandered down to the independent one that is older and more `well established`. Boy what a difference! Even though it was an hour or so before closing time I was getting it on with an older guy within five minutes. I was fucked by a hot Chinese guy and a guy my age.

 

Same in London. Go to some of these squeaky clean saunas and if you're over 40 you can clear the room (unless you act like some `daddy`). All the guys are looking for someone like themselves rather than being open-minded like some sort of pseudo marriage parade except that they can flit from man to man. Travel to another one and the mentality is completely the opposite. In the one near Marble Arch I've been to although it's mostly suck and wank you can see some totally hot tall guy in his 20s taking it in turns to snog and wank suck with all the other older guys as if there is no cultural difference. It's a question of mindset. The other thing I notice is that you can also have a bit of friendly banter with people in the lounge areas.

 

If you go to the more niche sex clubs there is one very special one that has spanking nights, piss nights etc - the bar area is full of cruising and chatting and even if you don't fancy a guy the vibe is to acknowledge him and if you can have a friendly chat - it's the done thing.

 

Berlin is the same - go to Tom's Bar and you might as well forget it if you're over 35. They do the `sixpack test` in the dark lol. Wander a few minutes to the Bull bar or Woof bar it's completely different. Bull bar lots of younger getting off with older - woof bar full of ordinary hot guys bottoms and tops looking for a good time or if they're not they are drinking and chatting in the pub area.

 

I think guys find life a bit too easy - when i was younger we had to be open minded and take our fun wherever we could find it. There was a stigma to being Gay let alone anything else like Poz. Everyone is looking for the ideal catch without realising it's never gonna happen and that we're all men out to have a good time or find a nice guy to settle down with. The ticklist is all wrong - it's about physical detail and not personality combined with what's available.

 

Frankfurt - there's one place where I had some sort of good time though was pushed away a lot (too old). Go to the Amsterdam Sauna in the same town and you are essentially in older man's heaven. Full of guys 30s to 60s really up for it no attitude. I got fucked (covered) by one horny guy about 60 and had fun with other guys similar age and younger. The key thing is that there's also a really nice cafe area where you can go and rest or take a guy to chat and drink.

 

 

 

Anot

[PhoenixGeoff]

Have to say that I think that the gay scene is diverging. I was in Edinburgh in August and there are two saunas. The first one I went to guys were walking round the maze in circles. It was nice and clean etc but so prissy. After two hours I gave up and wandered down to the independent one that is older and more `well established`. Boy what a difference! Even though it was an hour or so before closing time I was getting it on with an older guy within five minutes. I was fucked by a hot Chinese guy and a guy my age.

 

This is nothing new.  For as long as I've been out of the closet, any city that has had two or more bathhouses has had this same divide.  One (usually the cleaner, nicer one) will cater more to the younger, twinkie crowd and the older guys who chase them.  As you say, many of these guys are prissy.  Often, they want to be sluts, but don't want anyone to know about it. Like many youngsters, they can be ruthless about who they find attractive.

 

The other will usually cater to older guys, more masculine types, bears, maybe leathermen (though it's rare to see any leather in a bath, unless there's a special event).  Guys there have generally been around the scene for a while and are a lot more comfortable having their business be known.  And they tend not to be quite as hung up on appearances (after all, as we age, we all acquire our flaws!)

 

I've found this to be true in pretty much every city I've lived in where I've frequented the baths, from Toronto in the early '90s and Washington DC in the late '90s to Denver and Phoenix these days.

 

And, of course, everyone knows there's a similar breakdown between bars (bear, leather, dance, country, stand & model, etc.) and websites (Bear Underground, Recon, Grindr, Growlr, Scruff).

Edited October 26, 2015 by PhoenixGeoff

[PhoenixGeoff]

So here's my theory on this.  There are two parts.

 

Part the First:  The Internet Sucks

and not in a good way

 

So, while I appreciate sites like this which help connect virtually with like-minded individuals, it has been my observation that the Internet has absolutely killed cruising. 

 

First, porn.  Everybody loves porn, right?  Well yeah, that's kind of the problem.  We love it too much.  You're horny.  What do you do?  Get dressed up and head out to a bar?  Maybe drop by the bath for a few hours?  No.  Chances are you're going to jump on the internet with some vague notion of maybe hooking up, but things get frustrationg quickly, so you pull out your cock and start looking at pictures.  Or, having flipped through all the guys on BBRT, you hop on over to your favorite porn site and stroke your meat.  And before you know it, you've shot a load and now you're ready to get back to work or head to bed or whatever.

 

Back in the day, porn was expensive.  You might have a few grainy, well worn VHS tapes.  And you would have seen them so many times that they'd have lost their potency.  And before that, if you wanted porn, you had to go to a XXX theater (where you might very likely end up hooking up with a like-minded individual).  Or get off to photos in magazines or erotic stories.  And it turned up in an embarrassing brown paper package that the postman handed to you with a smirk.

 

In other words, as porn has gotten better and cheaper and easier to get into the privacy of your bedroom.  But that has made it a much more viable replacement for other kinds of, you know, actual sex.

 

So why don't the hookup sites work? 

1. Low barrier to entry.  This seems wrong...more guys online means more chances to fuck, right?  Except before, when you went out to a bar or a bath, you made a real investment in your cruising, in the form of getting ready, travel, possibly a cover or entry fee, drinks, time.  You sank that investment into your night out with some expectation that it would pay off in the form of a hook up.  Which meant that you damn well better find someone before they got close to last call or the investment would be lost.
   
   Online, the investment you make into hooking up is very, very small.  There's a one-time investment in the time it takes to set up a profile.  You might pay a fee, but it's not required.  And you can even do other stuff (work, watch TV, talk on the phone) while you cruise.  If you don't hook up, you've lost practically nothing.  So nothing pushes you to pull the trigger on a hookup.
    
2. The Grass is Always Greener.  Cruising online practically demands that you have to juggle several potential hookups at once.  It only makes sense...if you message five different guys, maybe two might respond.  If you did that sequentially, cruising would almost never work.  But now you've got two guys interested.  So you have to make a choice.  Which can be hard to do.  So you message back and forth while trying to close the deal.  And they're doing the same thing.  Meanwhile, you still hold out hope that your perfect man will show up if you just stay online for a few minutes more.  And in the meantime, you lose the bird in the hand while going after the two in the bush.  Fuck.
   
   Cruising in real life starts out with very publicly visible cues.  Eye contact generally starts things off.  And from there, it might go to conversation, or straight to making out.  But see what you've done there?  You've both made a choice that you're pretty locked into.  Once you start getting each others' hands in your pants, it's pretty clear where things are going and the other options go away.
    
3. The Amazon Factor.  I'm convinced that shopping online has conditioned us to approach sex in commercial terms.  We want a guy with a particular kind of body, demeanor, dick size, age, race, sexual preference, etc.  And if a potential fuck doesn't measure up, then we either defer or reject him outright. 
   
   Which isn't to say that some level of selectivity didn't exist in bars (they used to call 'em meat markets for a reason).  But the key difference was that a bar had a more-or-less fixed population.  If your perfect man wasn't there, you either compromised or didn't get laid.
   
   Online sites, on the other hand, give the illusion of a more or less unlimited supply of men to choose from, especially now that we can "cruise" guys who are half a world away. Inevitably, the men who are actually locally available won't measure up to your fantasy man who (curse the bad luck!) lives in Bujumbura.  And there's always the chance that Mr. Perfect will sign on in the next few minutes....

The problem is, between the high quallity and quantity of porn out there and the promise of easy online hookups (a promise that is never delivered), we've mostly killed off cruising in bars and elsewhere.  Which sucks, because cruising in person was, IMO, a hell of a lot more effective.  And fun, for that matter.

 

Part the Second:  Life is (Too) Good

so lets stay home and raise a family

 

The last twenty years have seen a hell of a lot of social change regarding homosexuality.  Every year, it gets a bit easier to come out of the closet at an earlier and earlier age.  Every year, fewer and fewer gay teens or adults have to struggle with discrimination from their own families when they do come out. 

 

Our institutions: schools, churches, hospitals, governments, businesses, employers, all have become much more welcoming and supportive.

 

This is unquestionably a good thing.

 

But it has a bad side effect.  Fifty years ago, if you were a gay guy, your options were severely limited.  Most ended up living deep in the closet, either in sham marriages, or in lives of more-or-less enforced chastity (many Catholic gay men, for example, ended up in the priesthood, which caused problems for both the individuals concerned and the Church as a whole).  If you wanted to be "out of the closet" to any degree, you had to live in a major city, preferably New York or San Francisco.  And being out of the closet meant you went to gay bars that paid the cops off to not be raided.  You certainly won't open at work and probably weren't with your family.

 

So we turned to each other.  And, finding that living in the city core was affordable (since all the families were moving out to the suburbs), it was easy for us to take over a neighborhood and make it our own.  And, unrestrained by conventional morality (churches would have nothing to do with us and oftentimes, neither would our families), we embraced our own sexual ethics.

 

Those influences are all running in reverse now.  We're no longer cast out.  We can be gay anywhere. Hell, we've got businesses supporting us in Mississippi, of all places.  Even the city centers, which used to be affordable places young men could move to and reasonably expect to find work and an affordable place to live, are increasingly out of reach for a lot of gay guys (I personally couldn't possibly live in Manhatten or SF the way things are now). 

 

So the community is a lot more diffused.  And a lot more assimilated.  Which means that we end up acting a lot more like our straight counterparts do.  Not completely—we've still got a lot of gay cultural messages that push us to be a bit more promiscuous, and we are still men too—but a lot more than we used to be.

 

There is a generational disconnect here.  Guys my age and older may have lived through the AIDS crisis (which you would think would make us more inclined to chastity rather than less) seem to still have something of that same fairly blithe and carefree attitude towards sex that is a holdover from the '70s and early '80s.  Younger guys, who grew up with same-sex marriage in the wind (if not yet a reality) seem to, in general, aspire to something more conventional, something I never thought I could have.

 

As I said, this is a good thing.  But not if you're interested in a highly sexually liberated and promiscuous gay community.

[hungry_hole]

Here, most of the comments are from guys 45 and over. I'm sure that most guys under 30 have little problem hooking up among themselves with Apps like Grindr. Many young guys prefer to fool around with other guys their age and anyone over 30 or 35 is too old for them. But this does not mean that online cruising is no good.

 

In the pre-Internet days horny guys, old and young, had to congregate in the same places, whether it was a park or sauna. But now guys can filter fuck buddies without having to meet. Honestly, as a young man it was frustrating for me to always find so many "old" guys when I was only interested in guys my age. I would have welcome something like Grindr where I could select only young guys as fuck-buddies. For young guys looking for only guys their age, Internet hook-ups are probably the perfect system. They can block guys that doesn't interest them.

 

However, young guys who like older are usually frustrated by Grindr and other similar Apps. In Grindr a 20-yr old guy once said "Finally a mature guy!" and chatted with m,e. But most Grindr users are looking for younger.

[PhoenixGeoff]

Here, most of the comments are from guys 45 and over. I'm sure that most guys under 30 have little problem hooking up among themselves with Apps like Grindr. Many young guys prefer to fool around with other guys their age and anyone over 30 or 35 is too old for them. But this does not mean that online cruising is no good.

 

In the pre-Internet days horny guys, old and young, had to congregate in the same places, whether it was a park or sauna. But now guys can filter fuck buddies without having to meet. Honestly, as a young man it was frustrating for me to always find so many "old" guys when I was only interested in guys my age. I would have welcome something like Grindr where I could select only young guys as fuck-buddies. For young guys looking for only guys their age, Internet hook-ups are probably the perfect system. They can block guys that doesn't interest them.

 

However, young guys who like older are usually frustrated by Grindr and other similar Apps. In Grindr a 20-yr old guy once said "Finally a mature guy!" and chatted with m,e. But most Grindr users are looking for younger.

 

I dunno...I think the same cruising dynamics apply to both young and old.  I've had young guys approach me online (so obviosuly they saw something they liked in spite of/because of the age difference) and had the discussion peter out just as often as with the guys my age.  Maybe it's different if both guys are young, but I doubt it.

 

If anything, younger guys these days are even more wedded to the virtual aspects of sex and cruising than we geezers are.  I wouldn't be surprised if the typical guy in his 20s wasn't having less actual sex than I did at the same age.

 

And we did sort ourselves out by age back when I was in my 20s too.  We just did it in different physical spaces rather than virtual ones.  Certain bars catered to a younger crowd.  Others drew in more mature guys.

[tallslenderguy]

Great discussion! I would agree with the many who believe the internet has had a major effect on how cruising is done. I was living in VA (Hampton Roads- Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Pop. 1.8m) before the internet and cruising sites were the rage.  There were popular cruise spots, one beach/park in particular would almost always have about 20 guys cruising. That was great for me because I don't drink and have never been much for bars. I was also pretty closeted then (was married) and spent a lot of time cruising restrooms (there were many hot spots and I'd get fucked under stalls often). I moved away from the east coast in 2014, but those cruise places had all dried up for at least 10 to 15 years. 

 

I still hook up plenty, but it's usually the results of a visit to the local ABS, an ad on CL or one of the many hook up sites, or a FB. The biggest difference I experience is the flake factor. Cruising in person always resulted in sex for me, with online you get the guys who are getting of virtually (I guess) and essentially lie about hooking. I cannot count the number of times I've had all the details worked out with a guy, often to the point of giving my address, and the guy never shows and never says why. It's really weird, it seems like there is a whole new type of person who's sole goal is to just get your address and that's their climax. My guess is that is mostly newbies/married/closet guys who are just to afraid to act on their desires, but I never encountered it with in person cruising.