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.