I thought gay men were supposed to be good communicators?

Recent taglines on gaymatchmaker.com.au, annotated for ease of comprehension:

DISCREET GAY GUY LOOKING FOR HOT RAUNCHY SEX
IF YOU’RE SO DISCREET WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING?

Im new Need to be tort what to do....
Okay. Step one, activate your spellcheck…

can i spoil u
Yes, you can. By using the shift key. Apparently that’s a lot to ask, but it seems I'm high maintenance.

bi couris 28 yr old perth guy
This goes beyond bad spelling. It’s closer to good anti-spelling. I’d go so far as to say excellent anti-spelling. Somebody buy that man a drink!

And now a different example of my sense of humour getting me into trouble

Witness the following true conversation I had with a rather prim, spectacularly annoying and very stupid girl...

Her: GTR, do you like quiche?

Me: I guess. Everyone likes quiche, don’t they?

Her: I thought only gay men liked quiche.

Me: One, the saying is that real men don’t like quiche, not that gay men do like it, and two, I think most men like the same sorts of things, whether they’re gay or straight.

Her: Oh.

Me: Well, other than butt sex, of course.

Her: (chokes on her chardonnay)

That shut her up for a good two minutes, which is something of a record.

Finally, proof that there is more to me than just gay fretting

Over the last few weeks I’ve been forced to deal with a somewhat unusual houseguest. Many people get a kitten or a puppy for Christmas, but I got a squirrel. An inflatable squirrel. A psychedelic, psychopathic inflatable squirrel.

I call him Psycho Squirrel for short.

I loved Psycho Squirrel right from the start, what with those huge adorable anime eyes and that acid colour scheme. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that he had a few, well, antisocial tendencies.

First I caught him on the couch with one of the kitchen knives:

Then I found him outside with a packet of matches, on the bale of hay I was planning to use for garden mulch. He claimed he was “just playing”:

But my patience was really stretched when I found him trying to garrote my stuffed walrus with my iPod headphones. His explanation was that he was “just taking out the competition”:

So as you can see he’s a bit of a handful. Fortunately, I have a pack of specially trained wild monkeys to take him down as needed:

We’ll eventually learn to sort out our differences in a civilized and enlightened manner. Until then, I’ll just make sure I keep the hedge trimmer locked up.

A lesson to be learned

I logged in under my old GMM profile yesterday afternoon to check some information held there, and almost immediately I was contacted by two random guys. I haven't even looked at it in weeks, and suddenly as soon as I open it two guys pounce. Go figure.

The first was a little on the old side and "bi-curious", which I generally take as GMM shorthand for "more trouble than he's worth". But I was bored so I sent him a return message.

Meanwhile I'd been winked by another, younger guy. His profile was somewhat listless and there was no photo, but I gave a mental shrug and sent him a positive message anyway.

Over a few exchanges the older guy sent me sentences unmarred by punctuation, seemingly thrown together at random in an idiosyncratic patois of English and SMS. He mentioned that he was drinking scotch and coke, and I had a mental image of him swaying in his chair, taking slugs from the bottle and banging it occasionally against the keyboard then hitting 'Send'. The conversation ended when I made I mild joke and he logged off.

Note to self: Don't make jokes to hammered older men who are scanning GMM for a root.

The younger guy and I sent a few short messages back and forth, then he gave me access to his photo file. Mild interest became more intense interest; he was really cute, in a Japanese tourist kind of way. We traded a few more messages and I sent him a slightly jokey photo of myself. And he logged off without a further word.

Note to self: Don't send jokey photos to cute Asian boys that might put them off.

So the lesson to be learned here, presumably, is that my sense of humour needs to be weighed down with a big rock and thrown off a bridge if I'm ever going to successfully chat up a guy.

The Line of Presentableness

I watched the first episode of the BBC miniseries version of 'The Line of Beauty' last night. It's based on a Booker Prize-winning novel, which I must confess I have not read, and frankly I'm not in a hurry to. While I enjoyed the program, it did make me feel as if someone was trying to make a point rather than tell a story, especially as the story (young middle class man falls under spell of decadent upper class family and thus into trials and tribulations) has been done so many, many times before, from Brideshead Revisited to The Go-Between to The Talented Mr Ripley.

I'm always suspicious of gay-themed productions that are set in the past. Making a story a period piece tends to mean that the makers can make all sorts of clumsy, didactic statements about homophobia, making the characters say and do things that we can all smugly condemn with the benefit of hindsight.

This using-the-past-to-make-a-loaded-point-about-the-present was exacerbated in this instance by the design practice of dressing a period piece to look as little like the period as possible. The designers used every trick in the book to make the supposedly 1983 setting look, at best, temporally ambivalent. You occasionally see a Sloane Ranger scuttling across the background of a scene, but in the foreground it's all low, sleek, modern hair, subdued modern makeup and timeless little black dresses.

Excuse me, it's 1983 and no one has New Romatic hair? None of the girls are wearing jackets with shoulder pads? Even the cars are as unspecific as possible - the main characters have a Range Rover and a VW Golf, two cars which barely looked different in their 1973, 1983 or 1993 iterations.

That said, the program did capture a couple of strong aspects of gay sexuality. The first is the depth to which AIDS has affected gay sex: the characters hook up and get it on without a shadow of a thought about infection or disease. You see it and you want to shout, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? ARE YOU PEOPLE INSANE!?" Now that disease (of various kinds) stalks all sexual relationships (gay and straight), this sort of thoughtlessness looks suicidal.

The second is more positive (no pun intended): the program captured the electric thrill of gay sexual possibility. Two people pursuing a secretive, illicit coupling, both walking on the razor's edge, both aware that a hint too much interest, a brush against the back of the hand that comes too early, a divulgence of too much need or a simple issue of time or location will make the opportunity evaporate like morning dew. I'm sure you've all felt it. I know I have - it feels like your blood is sizzling.

So apparently I'm one step away from being turned on by the Chesty Bonds logo.

Over the last few days I've been playing a computer game which allows you to create your own avatar, and in so doing I've been forced to ask myself an important question: is it pathetic to design a really hot avatar and then spend the entire game lusting after his sweet ass?

Okay, let me rephrase that... is it the most pathetic thing ever? Especially considering that he looks like this:

Actually most of the time he's running around in armour wielding a sword - but you can take away all of his gear, leaving him with nothing but his little green trunks and that twinkle in his eye. I sent him into battle like this and nearly got him killed, since I kept getting distracted by the way his butt undulated under his shorts as he ran.

Hey, stop judging me! I mean, look at it!

If you had that to watch, you'd forget you were supposed to be fighting the legions of the undead too.

Sometimes it seems I just can't get a break.

I went to a largely gay party just before Christmas, and was pleasantly surprised by a couple of the guys I met. Sure, there was a sizeable contingent of bitchy queens who formed a tight little cluster to compare hair products and tanning secrets, but there were also some nice, normal, masculine guys who seemed happy to talk and mingle, and didn't even ping my (admittedly weak) gaydar until they mentioned "my ex-boyfriend" or something similar.

How refreshing! I was begining to believe that gay guys who don't act like total fairies were confined to preachy progressive sitcoms and 'Brokeback Mountain'.

One of them was tall, lean and laconic; dressed in a worn T-shirt, old jeans, thongs and stubble, swigging cheap beer and telling bad dirty jokes all night. Attractive? Hell yeah; not in a male model way but certainly in attitude.

The other one was shorter and skinnier, quiet and perhaps lacking in confidence. But underneath the mousiness he was good-looking and intelligent, without that meanness of heart one often finds in gay guys. While the other guy was more fun to talk to and be around, this guy had a certain something. I liked him, and he seemed to like me.

So a few days later I got his email address from a mutual friend and sent him some photos I'd taken relating to the party. No pressure, and the photos were relevant to a little joke that we'd shared.

That was ten days ago... and he hasn't replied. Not even a brief note of thanks. For the first few days I thought that maybe he was just away from his email for a while, but in the modern age no one is away from email for ten days. Maybe he's just pissed at me for dividing my attention between him and the other, more charismatic guy.

It's sort of depressing, especially since I've realised that if I ever want to meet any decent men, it's most likely going to be through friends, not through the internet.

The many moods of one man's ass

After pretty much ignoring it for several months, I recently decided to give GMM another shot. I took a flattering new picture of myself (looking very bedroom eyes-y, if I do say so myself), wrote a snappy new profile (not too long, peppered with intriguing details, not asking for too much or too little), and posted it all up on the site.

Within a few hours it'd been opened by dozens of people, mainly falling into two catagories - dirty old men and Asian students. I guess they're the ones who have their computers on all day, although possibly for different reasons.

Within a few days I'd been winked by half a dozen guys, mainly falling into two catagories - weirdos and sluts. In both cases, I got the impression that they wanted me not because I was witty or charming or attractive, but because I had a pulse. The weirdos were all very off-putting because of the painful stink of desperation hanging over them like the haze of grease over a KFC deep fryer. The sluts were more presentable - even kinda hot, in one case - but all of them bluntly stated that they were solely interested in anonymous, meaningless screwing... and I just don't operate on that level. Most of them got the "thanks but no thanks" reply, and the rest just got ignored.

Only one of the guys who winked me is worth noting in more detail, but sadly not for a good reason. He has ten, repeat ten pictures of his ass on his profile. It's certainly a nice enough ass, as asses go, but ten pictures? Does it really have that many moods that it takes ten pictures to capture them all?

"Here's my ass being happy, and here's it looking sultry, and here it is being just a little bit coy. And here's one of it ruminating on the state of the stock market as the aftershocks of the sub-prime mortgage collapse in the US work their way through the global economy..."