Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

🙃🙃🙃 wassup y'all? i'm so happy we're all here. lots of years between the lot of you. friends, lovers, cuties welcome. 🐙🐙🐙

Bump.

feeling mighty real tbh

great title swen, can i call you swenny henny?

y'all I just spent 4 days in Boston w my new "friend" and it was soooo nice, we seem to really enjoy each other's company and he was v cuddly and affectionate and it just felt v lovely to have like easy uncomplicated intimacy, also while I was there I bought a golden fork to keep in my office for work lunches and I am irrationally excited abt it, it is truly so cunt

this weekend I am performing in a Kate Bush revue thing called N1ght of 1000 K4tes, it is going to be v fun (it's in its 8th year and I have attended all but the v first one and this will be my 2nd time performing!!!), it is one of my v favorite things abt Philly, every year is like going to summer camp and seeing all your friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jK7dW8Jf74

lmao at having a golden fork, it's completely perfect and now i want one. kate bush community theater sounds lovely.

it's got like a sanded matte finish instead of a high-gloss sheen, I really love it

it's actually my friend's performance/idea and I'm just one of the performers, but it's like, about covid??? (which I'm not thrilled abt but I love my friend and am happy to contrib), it's like a sound collage based on "Aerial" (which I tbh am thrilled abt) and there's like, dancers in the audience, and mirrory things on the stage reflecting back on the audience, and there's like, contemplation and one-ness and survival and stuff I think

that's sooo cool and I'm jelly. I just listened to Aerial the other day. my introduction to ILX!

so I have had my own idea for YEARS that I have told several ppl abt and have gotten a good response to and I think I am going to finally finally try to pull it off next year, I think I have maybe even talked abt it on here somewhere, but the song is this v inexplicable house remix of "Rubberband Girl" and the performance is a complete ripoff of UNZIPPED (1995) where it will be a fashion show and there will be all sorts of zany chaos and hijinks backstage but w like perfect immaculate runway walks the second they come out from behind the curtain, the performance has nothing to do w the music but maybe I'll get some LIVESTRONG bracelets made and throw them into the crowd idk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KII-OXV86c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFBc4rXKkTU

AERIAL is honestly the best Kate Bush album

also it is a bit $$$ (20 of them to be exact) but they are selling tickets for the livestream tomorrow night at 8:30! https://wl.seetickets.us/event/Night-of1000Kates/470113?afflky=UndergroundArts

stevie i still have that KB shirt you sent me! it's a lil snug on me atm but whenever i wear it ppl always ask about it

omg mine too is a lil snug, I forget which one I sent you but the one I have has her face on it and my belly makes it fold in half so that it makes her look like that one picture of Aphex Twin

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Aphex_Twin_-_Syro_main_press_photo.jpg

you sent me the glow in the dark one (which amazingly still works after probably dozens of laundry cycles)

I just watched unzipped recently and it was so good. also did you know there's a sister documentary called catwalk that basically follows Christy Turlington all over the world?
pretty awful what's going on with Linda Evangelista. she just released the first body pics of her condition due to coolsculpting. unimaginable.

I was sad to miss Kates. Heard my friend Anna blew it outta the park, and saw the wacky inflatable Cathy and Heathcliff blow-up piece on film. Looked like a really fun time, but we had planned a dinner months ago with our gay friends, one of whom is going through a health scare...so it seemed more important to hang out with them.

I finished "Detransition, Baby," yesterday, and while I thought it ended much too quickly, I thought it had some really lovely moments.

hope your friend is hanging in there <3

xp y0ung?? she fuckin KILLED it (as per usual). I hope they post a recording of the livestream.

I've been listening to a lot of RuTH lately 🌄🌄🌄

yes Stevie, that Ann4

o boy what a life we lead really

so I'm not sure when the next time I'll "meet" someone is, let's call it, due to extenuating circumstances

do i care?

will i ever go out to a bar and pick someone up again? i had occasional game. all of a sudden I'd love to meet someone younger than me. i usually don't gravitate to that realm. i wonder what that's about

you will absolutely go out to a bar and pick someone up again, it is so inevitable

Date tonight. At a (rooftop) bar. I shoulda asked if he's jabbed.

first date? how did you meet? brown hair, big heart, bat eyelashes?

you know Stevie it's just at first it was pandemia, and then health stuff that's going to take another 6 months to settle. just didn't realize I'd be singing the same tune for the goddamn 3-year dark ages. but whatever i'm going to get so many beauty treatments when this is all through I plan on looking like Princess Jasmine meets Bella Hadid. mark my words.

also i quit smoking forever and it's truly something else. going on 6 months.

my new issue of BUTT just arrived!!!!!!!!!

omg i already read some of the poems
how is it at large?

is it large?

C'mon Simone, let's talk about your big "but."

I haven't read it yet bcz I got it at work and then *brag alert* went straight to my fuck buddy's house for a cute date and only just got home a few hours ago!!!

butts all around

butts rule everything around me

OK SO
I'm not a butt man and i keep feeling more and more alone
like American men are just obsessed with them
i feel like there's something wrong with me

Stevo you're killin it these days

don't care about the outside, it's what's inside that counts imo

like the way it feels?

yeah! i mean not to get too tmi or too cliche i guess but i just think anuses are this incredible part of us lol and i really like experiencing them.

So! My Saturday night date sold me out. I suspected trouble when I had to text him 15 mins before meeting: he was running late thanks to a "minor emergency" at his parents', whatever that means (what's a "minor" emergency?). Luckily a friend kept me company at the bar.

An hour later, date texts: "On my way, send location address plz?" That's the last I heard of him. For a while I thought he died -- until I saw a an Instagram post Sunday morning.

He's 24, a former student who emailed me four years after class to ask about getting a beer or coffee. On determining he was queer he gushed: he praised my self-assurance, brains, looks, etc. We might've met that night had I not plans already. It's worth noting I barely remember this kid in summer 2018.

I wonder if simply not showing up is a phenomenon of the young?

Anusii are a cliche?

that sucks. definitely hit next. it's been a phenomenon of the young and old as long as i've been dating tbh. xp

Yeah, I wanted to avoid generational generalization, but a few viejos noted The Vanishing has been more prevalent in the last four years.

I've ghosted more than my share, I should note.

I have never done this, to my knowledge?

me eiths it's dumb
I'm too polite though

wassup homieslice

good morning!

Mornin' sunshine!
What's on the platter?

I'm vegetarian tonight.

sexually or culinarily?

Lady Bracknell : Well, both, if necessary, I presume!

We'll be a clothing-optional resort!

that's the way

Every person, gay and straight, has told me Palm Springs can be (a) expensive (b) a place where people, gay and straight and young and old, line up for happy hour at 4:30.

seconding the art museum! even if the exhibits aren't that interesting, the building is very cool.

there's a two- or three-block radius in PS where most of the gay bars are concentrated, you can kinda just bop around from place to place until you find one you like. toolshed's a little further south off the main drag, it's more eagle-esque if you're into that. i had some decent food there but don't really remember where i ate, but can do some hunting

some places do have ridiculous lines for entry esp. on the weekends, i just steered clear of those places tbh

What (if anything) do we think of the gay hockey romance series Heated Rivalry? I'm only one episode in, but I was surprised/impressed how much time it spent on the sex scenes.

I watched it and I like it. My ex-bf is obsessed, he has a Heated Rivalry group chat going on.

Jordan Firstman is annoyed about it. I think this show and yaoi in general is more for a female audience tho.

I Googled his comments and I dunno, it kinda seems like he's reaching for something to complain about. If it's more realistic sex he wants, why not watch porn?

The sex scenes are probably more explicit than anything I've seen in mainstream gay fare before, but they're staged and shot much like those in the stylish erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s, all the way down to the swanky interiors. Oddly enough, it is this that I respond to as much as the bodies on screen, if only because it feels like it has been that long since I have seen a mainstream entertainment that devoted so much screen time to simulated sex.

Palm Springs is fun.

you still there? what did you end up doing?

yes do tell

Other than the unexpected acquisition of drugs from my buddy's boyfriend, a PG weekend. Everyone who's visited Palm Springs has told -- warned -- me about God's waiting room; I had no idea that the paucity of young gays and young people, period, was so uhh pronounced. I found most of the restaurants exist as labs for tasteful interior design, midcentury or otherwise, rather than as the purveyors of excellent meals.

Still, the Joshua Tree trails, the tramway, the cute downtown, the unaffected courtesy of every couple I talked to -- they more than justified the trip. We also drove down to Coachella, where we had a fabulous Mexican meal at Jalisco. I tried my first michelada.

The only time I was there, I was there as an older gentleman’s boy, and now that I am in my early 40s, I would probably be in his position. Honestly don’t find many people my age very attractive!

ha, I barely saw any fortysomethings either!

glad it was a nice trip Alfred! and also that you left before the “atmospheric river” touches down

many moons ago i introduced the lex to the michelada when he was visiting LA!

alfred i'm glad to hear that you made it to joshua tree trails! i still haven't and i'm itching to. your feelings about the generational aspect and the restaurants mirror mine. thanks for giving us your report :)

i have a palm springs sex shop owner to thank for letting me know that the way to tell "real poppers" from the ones that leave you with a headache is to look at the ingredients list - if there's water, they're the headache kind. i'm finding that no one in slc knows this and the few stores here who sell poppers sell the ones with water. trying to educate one hookup at a time.

the more you know :)

I tried my first michelada.

This is insanity, but I met somebody last week who claims to have never eaten an egg in her 31 years on this planet

Honestly don’t find many people my age very attractive!

My problem is that I crush on men-my-age who are nevertheless entirely out-of-my-league, this bemused "oh that's so sweet" kind of patronising response when they detect my eyes getting googly.

I blurted out to a 51-year old exemplar of hotness that he was the most attractive individual I'd laid eyes on in recent memory and he didn't even blush, just smiled knowingly, and I said "look we don't even need to fuck I just kinda want you to maybe try bench-pressing my body one time, for research"

I feel these two posts.

can i ask fgti for more info about what his type is? or what does this 51 year old look like. was he saying that you're jacked and we didn't know?

Oh I am extremely not-jacked, normal skinnyfat mid-40s. 51 year old looked like "Jonathan Banks' hot brother who is into rock climbing"

*nods* sounds appealing

ohhh you said "bench press me," not him. xmas scatterbrain.

i met a sweet young thing, a big boy, last week and now it looks like i have a standing lunch-time hookup on mondays or tuesdays. he's like 6'2 and built like a dairy farmer. the chemistry isn't like smoking hot or anything but i like him. personality goes a long way. he's already sending me heart emojis lol. he's hinted that some have found him too clingy. i hope i haven't bitten off more than i can chew lol.

oh uhh happy new year everyone. literally don't think i'll ever celebrate this dumb holiday again in my life haha. the solstice on the other hand is lit, i have plans for turning it into a holiday gleefully celebrated by everyone in the mindfulness prayer group / masculine sex cult i hope to one day be a part of.

also we both hate texting! and he likes phone calls. i'm actually really looking forward to flirty phone calls with someone lol.

hooked up w/ a man matching that description at pleasuredrome in london over the weekend... there is just something about that body type isn't there... he cradled my head in his chest but then also told me to top him, that's a good combo. i went to pleasuredrome on back to back sundays, holiday treat to myself i guess. the ability to have sex as much as you want while also using saunas and steamrooms really is a fantastic idea, real full body rejuvenation there

oh uhh happy new year everyone. literally don't think i'll ever celebrate this dumb holiday again in my life

sure gregorian new year is one of the lamest new years
but lunar new year is lit and so is nowruz

nowruz - now that's a seasonal holiday that makes sense. christmas and new years couldn't be more obviously "centuries of random-ass european bickering got us here - huzzah!"

another hookup with farm boy, much better than the first since we know and trust each other a bit more. this whole experience has been very natural and light. i asked him out on a date :). buzzing a bit tbh.

A married straight male friend of mine told me his wife got addicted to Heated Rivalry, watched the series twice. “We haven’t fucked like we’ve been fucking since before we were married,” he reported. It occurred to me that yaoi and yaoi-adjacent gay smut might not be LGBTQ coded at all? Creating a kind of “men being intimate with each other” fantasy that is entirely the realm of straight women? I wanna ask my lesbians about their thoughts on this

Brokeback Mountain kicked off this wave imo. Its American audience consisted mostly of women going to see it in theaters several times.

em1ly g0uld's tweets on heated rivalry have been, ummmm, eye opening, on this subject

Its American audience consisted mostly of women going to see it in theaters several times.

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 7, 2026 3:12 PM (fifty-six seconds ago)

i'm getting into touchy territory here but my screening of pillion was a rather mixed gender crowd and it was hard not to notice the tenor of the laughter that happened in the theater during sex scenes that were fundamentally based on fetish

We're still so damaged by machismo that guys crying, bottoming, etc. code as sensitive

did you like it?

maybe it's just bc of how deep an anime fan i was in high school but straight women have always loved yaoi

did you like it?

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 7, 2026 3:16 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

pillion? i didn't dislike it but i thought that it was essentially a pat rom com grafted onto a story of a fetish based relationship. i liked the performances and most of the sex scenes are pretty hot but i ultimately didn't think the movie had much if anything to say about the nature of those relationships, why people enter into them, what they get out of them, etc. i think it has something to say about its dorky main character but it's a thesis that easily could exist outside the framework of fetish. the film is "dirty" but isn't actually dirty, there is no grime on the lens. i can't imagine that it provides any sort of shock value to a standard gay man. i understand that for various reasons they are different films, but it's hard to watch i.e. "o fantasma" and then watch "pilion" and think that there is anything, like, particularly profound, surprising, interesting etc about "pillion." it's a cute film w/ a few hot sex scenes! but that's the extent of it, if anything, to me

I mean, it showed not told the relationship (and it's different from the novel on which it's based) and I was more interested in the non-sex power dynamics from which the film didn't recoil or sentimentalize.

i ultimately didn't think the movie had much if anything to say about the nature of those relationships, why people enter into them, what they get out of them

this was my take from reading a plot synopsis. people don't just snap into a fetish relationship without knowing each other and themselves fairly well first. a realistic film about fetish would probably be pretty boring.

that’s because fetish scenes are mostly pretty boring, which is fine. fetish stuff often requires a ton of logistical work, from my experience in the, uh, fetish industry

maybe it's just bc of how deep an anime fan i was in high school but straight women have always loved yaoi

― ivy., Wednesday, January 7, 2026 12:35 PM (one hour ago)

and lesbians! i'm over in the maleness and masculinity thread shipping cody zervas and jake kozloski. tired of being stuck with toxic yuri, time for some toxic yaoi. so to answer your question, no, "men being intimate with each other" is not an exclusively heterosexual fantasy :) idk, gender and sex are complicated.

that’s because fetish scenes are mostly pretty boring, which is fine. fetish stuff often requires a ton of logistical work, from my experience in the, uh, fetish industry

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Wednesday, January 7, 2026 12:59 PM (one hour ago)

i'd differentiate _about_ fetish and and fetish stuff itself. like, de sade is a witty, funny writer, but that doesn't keep the 120 days of sodom from being incredibly boring and repetitive. for me, at least, fetish is very much about the _lack_ of resolution, a liminal space where time as we know it doesn't exist. a film about fetish, i think would be much more interesting, given that a lot of fetish has a lot to do with trauma and healing and all that other stuff. a work _about_ fetish would involve flawed, traumatized people trying to support each other as best they could. i'd love to watch a movie about a relationship, for instance, between cannibal fetishists.

one of the things that interests me most about fetish is the ways that "top/bottom" or "dom/sub" dynamics can be highly contingent and fluid, to the point where i have more or less stopped thinking about things in top/bottom terms.

i just happened to be reading, actually, the yaoi hole wikipedia article (i swear i don't spend as much time thinking about yaoi holes as my ilx post history makes it look like):

Junko Kaneda divides expressions of the yaoi hole in fiction into three distinct periods from the 1970s to the 1990s:

The 1970s were the "age without holes". Kaneda notes that fellatio appears as the most common sexual act in yaoi doujinshi in the 1970s, and that her study of doujinshi from this period held by the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library found no depictions of anal sex.
The 1980s were the "age of hole-discovery". Though the first depiction of a yaoi hole is unknown, she notes that yaoi works during this period began to make clear references to non-oral penetrative sex, such as in Kaoru Kurimoto's novel Mayonaka no Tenshi (真夜中の天使; lit. 'Angel at Midnight').
The 1990s were the "age of prostate-discovery", with an increase in depictions of prostate stimulation via fingering.

it interests me because sexually, i do live more or less a life "without holes". a lot of "top/bottom" or "dom/sub" relationships boil down o the relationship between penetrator and penetrated. i don't want to devalue that experience - it's really important to a lot of people. i think the denigration of bottoms, the treating of bottoms as being inherently "inferior" or "submissive", is fucked up, not just for the bottoms but for the top. tops, in the world i know, aren't so much expected to experience pleasure themselves as they are to _provide_ for others.

d/s, for me, is more about the distinction between subject and object, which i do find to be somewhat of a false dichotomy. one of the things i love most about male homosexuality is the way in which it permits men to be _sexually objectified_. i think that's cool! seeing guys who are into for instance, gym socks, that allows me to be more accepting of my own fetishes.

i think anybody of any gender should be able to _choose_, selectively, to be sexually objectified. there's a paradox, which is that although a lot of patriarchal ideas are promoted by men, promote a masculinist aesthetic which is _particularly desirable_ to some gay men, homosexuality in practice allows for a much richer experience of sexuality than patriarchal masculine ideals permit.

anyway yeah i would write a lot more fetish fiction if we didn't live in times as judgemental and repressive as these. i think looking at things through the realm of fetish can be both liberating and healing. it can also be really fucked up, tho, which is what makes it narratively interesting. there's a lot of fetish fiction where it's like, yeah, you _could_ do it, but it would be a really, really fucking bad idea.

a couple months ago i went to see the film knife + heart with a friend, and i think it kind of demonstrates the ways in which fetish can be interesting. it's a 2018 film, and it's one of those films that's not just a time capsule of the 1970s, but a time capsule of 2018. the portrayals of the ways gender and sexuality interact in the adult film world of late 1970s france are great! the narrative interpretations the film places on those behaviors is... well, i don't think it'd be made the same way today.

cuz fetish is, on some level, about _emotion_... it's kind of a commonplace among the people i know that lewd stuff and horror are very very similar, that in a lot of cases it's really just a matter of framing, and knife + heart makes that very very explicit. kink for me also enables the expression of emotions that are, honestly, too extreme for me to feel safe expressing. rage, terror, despair - all of these are understandable reactions within a certain fictional framework.

I love that film.

i think it's an _interesting_ film. i have some very specific and niche objections to it, mostly regarding the symbolic importance it places on the phallus. there's this weird disconnect because one of the characters in the film _is_ a trans woman and the way the characters behave is fantastic, the reveal just, well, it came off as being a lot like a genderswapped "sleepaway camp". i do personally love sleepaway camp but it, uh, has Problems.

Pillion went entirely under my radar but I will watch it for the Ollie Coates score alone

I hadn't heard of it until this funny father-and-son Skarsgårds conversation.

btw I recommend Box Hill, the lovely short novel. Quite different from the film. The last third focuses as much on Colin's relationship with is parents as it does on Ray.