Monday, June 15, 2009

Bring back the dignity! And the pool hunks!



The process of updating my gaydar profile has made me consider that particular website in a new way. If you've used it for more than a few months you'll know that they've recently overhauled their title screens. The hot yet G-rated hunks lounging around the swimming pool are gone. They've been replaced, as far as I can tell, by the contents of Jean Paul Gaultier's subconscious. Gym-honed clowns in fantasy sailor outfits and silly mirrored sunglasses. Three guys who look like rutting cavemen. An older man who seems to have dieted and exercised so much that his skin no longer fits properly. And a neatly dressed geek guy who appears to have accidentally wandered in from a generic clip art photoshoot next door.

The effect is one of bizarre randomness. The old design suggested snapshots taken at a hot pool party. The new one suggests that the web designers just threw up their hands and said, "Fine, gay stuff, whatever, just pull some images out of the file."

Gaydar is a funny old place. With the redesign it seems to be trying to reassert its identity as a gay swinger site; a resource for finding that particular variation of twink or bear you need to fulfill a very specific sexual fantasy. But I would have thought that, as society become more and more accepting of homosexuality and more willing to consider it as "normal", sites like gaydar would evolve into something based less on hardcore sex and more on love and relationships. After all, while there are heterosexual sex personals, they tend to be out on the fringe, while rsvp.com and match.com are in the centre.

But it seems that gay men aren't much interested in such things. Match.com and rsvp.com both have male-for-male sections, but they aren't worth the effort. I did some searches on them last night, looking for guys between the ages of 29 and 49 in my city... and the numbers speak for themselves:

match.com - 25 guys.
rsvp.com - 31 guys.
gaydar.net - 847 guys.

So it seems that when gay men write personal ads, they tend to be sex-based rather than love-based.

Forgive me if I'm out of touch, but aren't we supposed to be normal people? Haven't gay activists spent considerable time and effort telling straight society that we want the same things they want - solid relationships, marriage, families, and acceptance into mainstream culture? And yet in the places where straights don't go, where we can most be ourselves... we reveal ourselves to be the same sex-obsessed and shallow creatures that activists dismiss as hateful caricatures in the outside world.

Go figure.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Working to my strengths isn't working.



I always tend to feel lonlier in the cooler months. It's the long dark evenings, I guess. In addition while the spark of hope ignited by my colleague at work didn't come to anything, it does seem to have reawoken my need for love.

So I've renovated my gaydar profile. I took some photos with my new camera, chose the best one, and after a bit of careful cropping and colour balancing I got a result I liked. I looked good. The structure of the picture makes it stand out, and if I saw it online, amidst the photos of bare decapitated torsos with sucked in stomachs and skinny naked asses, I'd think to myself, "Hey, there's a good looking guy I'd like to get to know."

I tinkered with the text but only barely. It says all that I want it to say, and let's face it, the text is only an adjunct to the picture. The picture is what draws guys in, and it's generally all they need to decide if they're going to contact you or not. In my experience the text only reinforces impressions made by the picture.

I put the revised profile up late on Monday night, then checked in 24 hours later to see if it had generated any interest.

Cue crickets chirping, and the occasional tumbleweed rolling across the pages of gaydar.

Eventually, after spending a few hours online and leaving my virtual footprints everywhere, I got a few twinges of interest. Hey, nice picture, said one. Another gave me the old "I think you're nice" tag. A third engaged me in a brief conversation about our favourite authors, but it didn't particularly go anywhere.

Why was no one interested? The picture made me look attractive, masculine and confident, with a warm smile and a spark in my eye. What else could men want?

I got my answer while browsing some of the other profiles:




Well that explains a lot. How in the hell am I supposed to compete with this?

My attractive, interesting headshots are all very good, but when there's plain photographic evidence of a young man's gymnastic flexibility and spectacular ass available elsewhere, the headshots don't stand a chance. Given the choice between a date with this and a date with my headshot, even I'd go with Bubble Butt Boy. I'm only human.

My ass is never going to look that good. I'd better get used to crickets and tumbleweeds.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

What doesn't make a man gay?



Almost all of the traffic that this blog gets from Google searches comes via one specific search: "what makes a man gay?" The traffic comes to me because of this post, and because it's a question that few blogs bother to consider. This is odd, when you think about it, because it's a question that every gay man asks himself as part of his search for identity.

Of course my blog isn't the only place that this Google search identifies. While checking my stats the other day, I clicked on this link to a Times review from 2007 of Desmond Morris' book 'The Naked Man'.

Desmond Morris is best known as the author of the seminal 1967 anthropological work 'The Naked Ape'. His theory, as outlined in the review, is that homosexuals are men who do not break away from the all-male bonding that boys seem to prefer for a roughly ten year stretch between toddlerhood and puberty. For some reason - possibly a misfiring of hormones - they stay stuck in a preference for the company of men, even as their interests turn sexual.

This is, of course, utter bunk.

I've met several little boys who couldn't be more proto-gay if they minced around wearing pink feather boas singing Liza Minnelli medleys... which they occasionally do. We've all met such boys. Their homosexuality isn't an upcoming failure to make the leap into an interest in girls. It's already part of who they are, something they started expressing from the very first moment they could express anything. Puberty does nothing other than ramp up the testosterone and supercharge their orientation with horniness and lust.

Reading this review makes me suspect that research into the causes of homosexuality is a young person's game. When looking for reasons and influences, it seems that every generation of researchers latches onto the scientific discipline du jour and clings to it, like a barnacle on a ship's hull, for the rest of their days. It's kind of alarming to witness otherwise impeccably-credentialed scientists supporting theories that are about as scientifically rigorous as phrenology and perpetual motion. It seems that young researchers are the only ones who have any chance of coming to the issue with open minds.

Desmond Morris was 80 years old when 'The Naked Man' was published. Candidly, he may be too old to be able or willing to consider fresh ideas or advancements in other fields. He's viewing the world though the mindset of his 1967 heyday, when homosexuality was still considered a psychiatric disorder. Weighed down by the baggage of more than half a century of misinformation and misinterpretation, he fails to grasp truths that are self-evident to any gay man.

Apart from being set in his ways, why does Morris support such a ridiculous theory? Part of the answer, I think, comes from the comment thread following the review. "Why are you even asking this question", demand several commenters. "Stop trying to put me in a box. I am who I am and I'm fabulous!" To which I can only reply, "Well good for you, honey, but if scientists listened to you and stopped trying to find out how the world worked, we'd still think the earth was flat and cower in terror during every thunderstorm."

There's no use in pretending that people don't want to know why some men are gay. It's probably for the best if gay men themselves look into it, tell scientists when their theories are off-kilter, and try to get to the bottom of the puzzle. Knowledge is always a good thing.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Another mirage



Around three thirty on Friday afternoon I had a phone call from the guy mentioned in my last post. Friday was the last day of his project with my department, and he had some final pieces of paperwork to give me. He wanted to make sure I was still going to be there at five o'clock. I was, as I had some extra work to do, but everyone else was leaving at four so I'd be there by myself.

I hadn't expected to hear from him again. I'd thought that he'd already given me all the documents I needed. Was this just an excuse to see me at a time when the office wasn't crowded with people?

After the blushing episode I was filled with trepidation. I concentrated on my work and did a lot of deep breathing. Every time I heard someone walking up the hall outside my office my heart started beating faster.

And finally, just before five, he was there. Looking good in a snug blue sweater. He gave me his paperwork and we chatted about the project. I managed to keep my side of the conversation rolling along. I leaned against my desk. He hooked his hand over the top of the doorframe and leaned against it in a relaxed way. I kept the papers and a pen in my hands, because I found that if I put them down my hands started to shake. I smiled, I chuckled, I made jokes, and most importantly, I didn't blush. I gave every impression of being a normal person, which under the circumstances was something of an achievement.

And then the conversation finished, we wished each other well, and he left. I listlessly banged away at some work for ten more minutes, then I went home.

I'd done my best. I'd given him an opportunity, and he'd decided not to take it. If you're wondering, "Why the hell didn't you just ask him out?", well, there are two answers. One, it's not my style to be so forward. And two, technically I'm one of his supervisors (a kind of adjunct to his boss), and I'm pretty sure that asking an underling out on a date is frowned upon, perhaps even an outright offense. If he initiates, on the other hand, it's probably okay. Which is a moot point, since he didn't.

I'm satisfied that I did the best I could. As I drove home that evening I didn't have any of those "Damn, that's what I should have said!" moments. But it seems my subconscious wasn't as satisfied. All through the weekend it seemed that everywhere I looked there was a happy gay couple - in the checkout line at the deli, having breakfast at the coffee shop, browsing the shelves at Blockbuster. At several moments across Saturday and Sunday I realised that I was 90% of the way to bursting into tears. Who are these people? For what secret source did they find these significant others? Why haven't I been told about it?

I suppose my point is that it's easy to tolerate loneliness when you don't have your nose rubbed in the possibility of making a connection. But when everyone around you seems to have achieved what you want without all that much effort, it just hurts.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Thwarted by my own hormones and blood vessels.



There's a guy who has had reason to come into my department at work about four or five times in the last couple of months. Other than setting my gaydar off every time he came in, he didn't make much of an impression on me. About my age, average looks... I treated him with the same professional amiability that I treat everyone.

Then a couple of days ago he dropped by the office to give me some paperwork, and instead of a suit he was wearing casual clothes. The top three buttons of his light cotton shirt were undone, and as he handed me the documents I got a momentary glimpse of the curve of his pecs, the light dusting of hair on his chest... and it was if someone had flicked the sexual attraction switch in my brain and set off an alarm.

I was trying to answer his question on some point of bureaucracy but all I could hear was CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! I struggled to look him in the eye, much less give a smooth and professional answer to his question.

The next day he dropped by to give me another piece of paper I needed, and it was terrible. As soon as he walked into my office I felt myself starting to blush. I'm pretty sure that my ears were turning so red that they could have been used as traffic lights. As a result it was all I could do to say the right words like "good morning" and "thank you", rather than turning on the old GTR charm and delicately probing to see if my gaydar was reading true. Maybe it's my imagination, but he seemed quite happy to get out of there, no doubt wondering why this GTR guy was blushing furiously while discussing quarterly reviews.

If this were television he'd come back later, even after I'd made a fool of myself, and quietly ask me if I wanted to go out and get a drink sometime.

But unfortunately this isn't television. This is life, and it's a bitch.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Suddenly I'm feelin' it.



Number of days since I went on a date: 346

Number of days since I kissed a guy: 346

Number of days since I had sex: 392

All of these things were so long ago that I don't actually remember the exact times. It's a good thing I wrote them down in my blog.

You what would be an even better thing? If the numbers were a lot smaller.