Another Non Gay Day In The Gay Mecca

Saturday March, 12, 2011.

There was nothing specifically gay again today.  I went shopping in Union Square and bought fabric at Britex.  Most straight men don’t do that, but I don’t know many other gay men who would either.  I had dinner on Castro Street at a restaurant that definitely had predominately gay men as customers, but I am sure straight men and women would be welcome if they could pay their bills.  I did go to a gay bar after dinner so I guess that was a specifically gay thing.  I only had one beer though, partly because of my compromised cardio pulmonary function, but also because it was too noisy.  Now I am going to bed at Beck’s Motor Inn, and there seems to be a party going on next door.  That has nothing to do with being gay.

A Day In San Francisco

It was not all gay in San Francisco today. In fact not much of it would be considered gay.  Most of my day was spent at SFMOMA. I did some shopping on Castro Street,  and went back for the first movie of a triple feature at the Castro Theater.  The theme of the triple feature was girl empowerment.  It seemed to be a primarily gay and lesbian audience, but I am sure there were many there who were just film buffs.  After watching The Craft, which had no gay content, I went to the Midnight Sun for a beer and back to my hotel.

It was not a particularly “gay” day in a city which is definitely gay, but Gay Life’s Like That.

Goodbye Palm Springs Hello San Francisco

According to Riff Markowitz 56% of the population of Palm Springs is gay. I would not be surprised if he made that up.  After ten days in Palm Springs I did not get a gay vibe while I was there, other than at CCBC and a few bars that I visited.

I have been in San Francisco for about three hours and one walk from Beck’s Motor Inn to Castro Street and back and I feel more at home as gay man in San Francisco than all the time in Palm Springs.

More to come.

The Palm Springs Follies

Wednesday March 9, 2010

This will first be a comment on The Palm Springs Follies and then a rant about the host Riff Markowitz.

The Follies were just as I suspected they would be, a troupe of former entertainers who still have it in them to entertain but like all of the rest of us have met some limitations.

There are eleven women and five men in the company.  They are all entertaining but their days as high kickers are over, except for a couple of the men who could still get the feet over their heads and one who could do a flying splits move.  Of the five men three are gay.  The costumes are quite spectacular and the music although obviously digitized is good and did not overwhelm the singing voices of the all seniors cast.  The youngest cast member  is a woman who, if  I remember correctly is sixty two.  The oldest is also a woman and I think she is seventy eight.

The Four Preps were the guest stars last night and although only two were original to the group they sounded very much like they did in the 50’s and 60’s when they were popular.

I am glad I got my ticket at the discount price of $52.00. I think if had paid the full price of $72.00 I would have been disappointed with what I saw.

Now Riff Markowitz.  He is the host of the show, and I believe the owner of the company. He insulted everyone in the room.  He made jokes that were slurs against, Jews, young people, gays and seniors.  I did not laugh at his jokes, nor did I applaud anything he did.  As a senior gay man I was doubly insulted and his slurs against young people and Jews just embarrassed me. He is a comedian in the same vein as Don Rickles and I always found him offensive too.  Joan Rivers is cut from the same cloth and thank goodness they are all fading out.  Unfortunately, just like cheap polyester, they won’t go away.

The seniors and the gays in Palm Springs, and without those two groups Palm Springs would be a ghost town, should take action and boycott The Palm Springs Follies until they replace Markowitz with someone who is more aware of the changes in sensibility to all identifiable groups and who understands that entertainment doesn’t have to be offensive to be entertaining.

The Outdoor Bath House

I am staying at Cathedral City Boys Club – CCBC – in Palm Springs California.  Alfy, who I met the first night I was here, refers to it as an outdoor bath house and he is pretty much right. There is cruising everywhere on what has been told to me is a 3.5 acre establishment.  It doesn’t seem that large to me, but hey what do I know about how big an acre looks.

I have been here seven days and I have been cruising with varying degrees of success every day and night. It is beginning to get a little boring, but I will no doubt go for a little look around again before retiring tonight.

Many gay men would deny knowing anything about this kind of cruising for sex thing but most of us do.  Most men would have given up on it by my age though.  Perhaps it is because I came out late and still feel like I am making up ground.  I have never had a full time lover, and quite frankly I enjoy the chase in places like this. Most of the guys I have met here at least want to exchange names and where we are from.  I don’t really care all that much.  I am not here to find a lover that is for sure, and really not even a friend.  I am just looking for a warm body with whom I can  share some intimacy.

A friend once told me that I seemed to go for exotic men.  I can now add, Egyptian, Cuban and Mexican to my list of exotic breeds.

Is Halloween A Gay Holiday?

Is Halloween a gay holiday?

Some of my best times and some of my gayest times have been spent with friends on Halloween night. I don’t think that is enough to make it a “gay high holy day” as one of my friends referred to it. I was at four gay clubs in Calgary on Saturday night. There were costumes at all except The Bunker. There were also people in costumes outside the straight club right beside the Backlot, so it is not exclusive to the gay community and pre teen children. Mark, my favorite bartender at The Backlot, was dressed as the devil with great makeup and no shirt. That was enough to keep me there for longer than I might have if he had not been shirtless. That was because I am gay, but that is  not enough reason to call it a gay high holy day.

Four guys in my group were in drag, and taking it very seriously. The best among us was Al who was an aged Playboy Bunny and very funny complete with a gray five o’clock shadow.  At the Eagle there was a lesbian dressed as a mammogram machine. I have no idea how accurate it was but the concept was very good.

Although I had discussed not wearing a costume with two of my closest friends and they had agreed that they were just going to wear civvies, they showed up in kilts. One of them was a piper and the other a leprichon. There was also a nurse prepared to give prostate exams, and another drag queen who sort of resembled Dorothy Lamour, or at least how I imagine Dorothy Lamour would have looked.

I didn’t wear  a costume.

In the past when we had such good times a big part of the fun was getting ready to go out. This year everyone just showed up at Moneypennies. We didn’t seem to have anything to bring us together, as a group. The best year was when seven of us went as nuns dressed in habits in the colors of the Gay Pride Rainbow, a priest, and a geisha. I made all the costumes, and the geisha’s kimono was authentic. There is a photograph of Al (this year’s aged Playboy Bunny) who was a trucker in his real life putting my fake fingernails on for me.  Among our group there were three teachers, a banker, a trucker, a city building inspector, an IT manager for a major oil company and a retired United Church minister. We all met at the IT manager’s apartment and ordered pizza and drank.  Fortunately the guy who was the priest is diabetic so he doesn’t drink and he and his partner, the trucker, have a big van we could all fit into.  We had a great time.

I don’t expect to be able to recreate that night, but it would be fun following the same scenario.

My friend who was the leprichon and his partner the piper are looking for that kind of entertainment again. They have volunteered their apartment for the get together party, so maybe we just have to come up with something cohesive to bring us all together. I am thinking maybe a wedding party.  There are some who don’t want to do drag. The guy who was the priest on the good year still has the priest’s outfit. The geisha has decided he just doesn’t look good as a woman so he could be the groom and I could spend the next year making gowns for the rest of us.

I am thinking ahead one year to next Halloween.

Maybe it is a Gay High Holy Day.

Just Another Day

Did I have any gay moments today?

When I logged on tonight I was thinking I didn’t have any gay moments today, but hell they are all gay moments. I had coffee this morning with about fifteen other gay men. I went to the Fairytales Presentation Society film library and I pre screened two movies for the gay film festival in May and I watched another gay film just because it looked like it might be good. It was The New Twenty and was not all that great.

My on going battle with staying off the chat sites was not that good. I did chat with a very nice guy who I actually hooked up with in the spring.  He came over to my house we got along just fine and had a good conversation which led to the bedroom. He didn’t tell me but he doesn’t like tattoos and piercings. He saw the ear rings and thought he could tolerate those, but when we got into the bedroom and he saw my tattoos and nipple piercings and PA, he just couldn’t move past them.  He is a very nice guy. We share many interests.  There was definitely some sexual interest and attraction but it just could not happen for him.  I have since taken out the nipple rings and the PA.  I went to his choir concert in June, with a ticket that he gave me. We have chatted on line a few times but the tattoos just are not going anywhere and in fact I am considering some more.

I am sure this kind of thing has happened to straight men with tattoos and piercings too, but I feel like it is a gay moment for me.

A New STD

Who would have thought that head lice would be the new Sexually Transmitted Disease?

The itchy scalp that my doctor told me was sebarreah(sp?) was actually head lice.  He gave me a prescription and it didn’t work so I went back to see him this morning and guess what. It was head lice.

Besides the fact that the prescription didn’t work, even after a refill, I had an e mail and a Yahoo chat with a guy with whom I had oral sex which, as you may know, involves putting your head into your partners pubic area.  This guy is one hairy dude, by the way. He was on a conference call, working from home and he was itchy so he saw something on one of his pubic hairs and pulled it out and layed it on the desk. I know! What the hell was he doing having a conference call wearing just his underpants?  It started to move.  There was a very tiny crab like creature attached to the hair. He pulled out some more and they were all moving.  Sounds like a good scene in a bad horror movie to me.  I heard this story the day before he went to the clinic, when he contacted me to find out if I had lice because I was the only one he had been “intimate” with in the last six months, including his wife, although they do still sleep together.  That is another concern I have, and will no doubt go on about another time.

The next day I didn’t hear from him, and became concerned, because I didn’t think I had head lice.  A pharmacist and my doctor had both told me my symptons were not those of head lice. I did, however, pull some hairs out of my head on Sunday and guess what was attached. You got it. There were small crab like creatures on them. My hairy sex partner had been to a masseur in Vancouver, and I thought he may have picked his up there, but I must have been the donor.

Where the hell did I get them? The information sheet in the medication I got in the form of a cream rinse from the pharmacy says that the lice can only be transmitted by head to head contact, but my guess is that head to crotch contact works too. Now my head was in a few crotches while I was away on holiday and since I do love to kiss I also had head to head contact with several men as well. Who gets names, or in some cases even sees the faces and bodies they come into contact with when enjoying adventurous sex?  I am always very careful to have protected sex, and was quite happy when three weeks ago I had the HIV and STD tests and they all came back negative.  In the mean time I should have been paying attention to the itchy scalp that just would not go away.

The cream rinse seems to have done its job. The itch is still there but I think it is just sensitive skin now because before there was always this brown, dried blood looking stuff, which I now know was the eggs for the nits, are not there.  I did not use the complete bottle of the anti lice formula just in case there is a stubborn little egg in there waiting to hatch and attack my scalp.

I have, for the most part, stayed out of the Squirt and Silver Daddies chat rooms today. I am feeling self conscious about being with another guy until I am sure these pesky little critters are clearly out of my life.  I have been out for coffee with a friend. I have completed quite a bit of sewing, and tried only to watch entertaining television. I am now going to bed to read.

It feels like it has been a good Gay Life’s Like That day today.

Another Night Alone

Do all gay men get lonely at night?

I seem to be able to keep myself busy during the day and the early evening. I do some sewing, read, watch television and sometimes talk on the phone to my friends or family. As the evening goes on I start to feel lonely.  That has probably contributed to me being on Squirt entirely too much.  Hell sometimes there were two hundred men just waiting to talk to me about sex. Ya  sure. I did manage to stay off line most of this evening.  OK so I did chat with a guy in Cold Lake Alberta who likes to wear thongs and be naked but doesn’t get the opportunity to do it very much, because he is married. There was also a brief chat with a guy in Toronto, but it was two hours later there and he was tired. I also chatted with a guy who is from Calgary, and I have met him here a couple of times, but he is in Vancouver with his wife.  Now it is 00:16 and I am going to bed by myself.

Going to bed by myself is what I do pretty much every night. You would think I would have some kind of strategy by now.  I do.  It is  7.5 mg tablet of Zopiclone. One pill used to work. Now I take one and a half pills.  So I guess my strategy is now 9.75 mg of Zopiclone.  I tried to stop cold it didn’t work.  I just stayed awake all night and couldn’t function the next day.  I tried replacing it with Melatonin and B12 at my doctor’s suggestion.  That didn’t work either. So I will continue to put myself to sleep with chemicals I guess.  That has nothing to do with being gay, and is probably symptomatic of many single men and women, gay and straight.

I have some kind of rash, itchy scalp thing going on.  My doctor called it sebarreah (sp?) and prescribed some drops to clear it up. I have almost finished the second bottle of the of the drops and it is getting worse, and seems to have migrated to my eyebrows and eyelashes.  Tomorrow I will try to make an appointment to see him again.  What are the chances that he will be able to see me?  Slim to none. So I will go to the clinic and spend the day there waiting to see some overworked doctor who is either taking extra shifts to make money or can’t afford to set up a practice of his own or is a married woman who takes shifts for the money while the kids are in school.

I have no idea how I got this condition. It started when I was on holiday in Ontario in August. I could have picked it in the bed of a guy I slept with a couple of times, at the tubs in Toronto or Montreal, in the hotel in Montreal or Renfrew or any other of the dodgey kinds of places I visited. Or being a gay man looking for love in all the wrong places might have nothing to do with it at all.

Television was in my life tonight, but there were no sit coms, a little news, and mostly television drama.  I don’t know if that is better than reading, but I did do a little of that today too. I also did some sewing and should have done some house cleaniong.  My apartment is starting to look like a straight man lives here, except, of course, for the sewing machine set up on my dining room table.

On a positive note I did go to church, teach a Sunday School class and go to coffee with a friend today.

Back At It

I have decided that I want more than I can get from hook ups on sites like Squirt and Silver Daddies.  They are also a giant time wasters.

In my resolution to stay out of the gay chat rooms I have managed to read one and a half books in the last five days.  I think I want to be a writer, and I believe that a writer has to be a reader.  The time I spent chatting up guys on sites or just looking for —  who knows what? — could have been spent reading.  Now that is what I am doing. Reading, Reading, Reading.

I have also left the junk TV behind. Who needs to watch re runs of Sex and the City so often they can identify the episode in the first minute.  I can do it.  What a waste of time. Reba at 11:00PM? Please honey, if you can’t go to sleep read a book, even watch a good movie but sit coms are definitely for those who can’t think for any longer than the eight to ten minutes between commercials on those shows.

Back to the chat rooms. Who was I kidding thinking I was going to find Mr. Right there?  For starters there are too many married men in those chat rooms. Many of them have no real intention to meet up with anyone.  They might like to, but very few of them actually do, and they will be the “no shows” they all claim to never be. When I have made connections with guys on these sites, and there have been quite a few over the last three years, there have been various degrees of  satisfaction in the actual sexual acts.  There may be great foreplay, and then a variety of sexual deeds, but invariably when someone cums, the other guy is out of here.  I almost wished smoking would come back in favor just because the stereotypical cigarette after sex would mean some time laying together and enjoying the afterglow. With guys from these sites, as soon as it is over they have their pants on and are out the door as quickly as possible.

And “bi sexual”. What the hell is that? By definition I am bi sexual. I have had sex with two women and married both of them, although not at the same time. I knew all the time I was homosexual and frequently fantasized about men while having sex with them. I wasn’t bi sexual. I was homosexual in denial.

Although I have not scrolled through all the pages, several times, or tried to initiate a conversation with someone whose only attraction was his “hot ass” or “studly cock”, I have been to the Squirt and Silver Daddies sites several times in the last two days.  All I did though was check who had taken a peek at me and check if any of my “buddies” were on line. I will wean myself off that bad habit too.  There have been times, in the past, when I would spend time jumping between the two sites, and maybe checking some of the secondary sites like Pond Full of Fish, or Nudist Friends, and get up from the computer to find three hours had passed before I even realized what I was doing.  There will surely be a twelve step program for men addicted to gay chat rooms.

Perhaps straight men have the same issue but they will have to deal with their own problems.  I am just concerned about myself as a gay man who wants to get out of the trap of thinking I will find love on a site that advertises itself as a place for gay men looking for sex.