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

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!

So, I’m in one of the only two gay bars in Marbella (southern coast of Spain) right now, and the thing here is that high heeled shoes are passed around, everyone tries them on, and then they take their turn swishing down what passes for a catwalk. Pleased to report that my boy got the loudest applause of the night. We make our own entertainment.

The bar is filling up because at 4am they close the doors, bring out the ashtrays, and everyone can smoke indoors.

We will be back tomorrow for drag queen bingo.

omgggggg jealous

Oh I forgot to mention the seventy something naked woman who did her catwalk turn clutching a large stuffed teddy bear.

stop

jealz to the max

Just ended a fabulous evening with j0rdan.

yesss. what did y'all do?

we went to a sports bar so i could watch basketball while we talked about madonna

...and Mariah Carey. And my terrible non-date last week.

ok well that sounds ideal (sorry for the delay how the hell do three days go by?!)

you know i saw Madonna's Mme X tour
she could still put on a show, i just wonder if it isn't time for her to maybe think about doing something else

we had dinner with Stevie last night!! and then he came back to our place and we plied him with amaro and we talked about sheryl crow and natalie merchant and celine dion and it was just a total delight <3

Amaro! Sheryl Crow! Sounds like my kind of night.

sounds like a blast

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

uhhhhhh i had no idea wallace shawn was in a chaka khan video lol

he's in everything!
also I'm pretty sure I've had that night before lol so fun xp ❤️

wassup docs
it's eighty goddamn degrees here today
too soon yo

lovely haiku

it's only about 70 here. we've had some random bursts of heat over the past few weeks though.

next week i will be in seattle, where it's gonna be 50 and rainy no doubt. i forget, are any of y'all based there? would love recs on things and places to do/see/eat/drink there!

Wish I had more Recs than go to PONY and the gay Karaoke bar on Cap Hill, and also you simply must visit the main public library, it is everything a public library should be imho

85 degrees already

omg I've always wanted to go to Seattle

i used to love working in the library in college. I would sit in the stacks in the basement, or the art stacks which were the super cool ones. but I had no place there TBH

I miss my college library all the time.

The cops caught the arsonist of the queer bar in Bushwick. Scary story of what happened.

Not gonna lie, my queer friends, but I really am getting a lot more worried about some things, like whether my marriage will be recognized in a few years.

wait i didn't hear about the bar. deets? how did i miss that. was reading an article about a gay couple last night just filed a precedent setting suit RE being denied infertility coverage for IVF. glad for the action.

so just now i'm served an ad on facebook for customized wrestling singlets that's just an image of hairy pecs bulging out of spandex (the co is t4ked0wn sp0rtswe4r, in case you want to google it and have the ads follow you around everywhere). and i notice that it has likes and loves. so i click on the loves because i have a premonition. about ten gentlemen come up, and i open each in a new tab, and am beguiled by ten miniature portraits of gay american men.

wrestling fetishists have surprisingly good taste in memes

sorry busy week! how creepy! honestly the sanitary side of wrestling alone counteracts how hot it can be don't you think? u know how many skin infections those guys get? gross.

so I'm going to fire island in Aug and i have to figure out my look. last year was health goth. I'm kind of feeling club kid this year???

thanks fgti :). we'll be here for at least a few more years, probably.

i would love to visit the big canadian cities some day, and the rockies in alberta. a little hello to fgti in vancouver and a visit to his woods would be worth the trip!

i loved l.a. when i lived there, but when jared and i visited a few years ago (and hung out with donna rouge!) it felt like a really hard place to come back to.

city vs rural is a tug of war i still have. i mean let's be honest it needs to be city but i sure have persistent farmhouse fantasies. the reality is my poor financial track record makes city and better-paying job the logical next step. i'm easily overwhelmed by both those things, moving and getting a new job. many days i just don't even want to think about it haha. but then another winter hits, another inversion, another dismal local political headline, another rent raise, and my little trailer cove feels like a trap.

We relocated from a city to a smaller market town (c.16k population) in 2014; a calculated risk, but one that has paid off massively. It's super-friendly, which was quite a culture shock after the city, with a strong sense of community, and we're fully accepted as a couple. We've made other queer friends and acquaintances here, across the full LGBTQ+ spectrum, but a queer community per se doesn't exist, and in any case the pubs are all queer-friendly to greater or lesser degrees, particularly our local. Essentially, it's a small town that doesn't have a "small town" mentality, so my initial Madame Bovary phase was mercifully short-lived.

If the city urge arises, we're 30 seconds walk from the railway station, which is 25 minutes from York, 45 minutes from Leeds, 2 hours from Manchester and 2.5 hours from London, so that takes care of gigs, big gay nights out etc.

If forced to relocate to a city again, I'd choose Amsterdam. We could have a nice life there.

i love LA, though it feels impossible some days, maybe increasingly so with every year, but it’s also where all my various communities (work, artistic, cultural, etc) are and the thought of leaving it anytime soon would make me sad. having said that i doubt we’ll retire here, among other reasons being the absolute unaffordability of housing

the thought of getting the fuck out of dodge (ie the US) is also appealing tho. i have EU citizenship and we have discussed (though not taken any serious steps towards) relocating to eg spain or italy

i feel corny when this subject comes up bcuz i am one of those people who lives in new york and looks out at the rest of the country and is like, ok so where else would i live... uhhhhh...... ????? we really like nyc presently, we have a really strong community of friends and gay people here and my bf is very active in doing nyc specific stuff, seeing films that are only playing here, going to plays etc... we get a lot of tickets to things thru work stuff & knowing people which definitely helps. nightlife is still very important to me, maybe even more so than when i was younger and it just felt like something everyone does. now that i'm older and it no longer feels compulsory my emotional connection to being out late, clubbing etc has deepened. my connection to new york and the lifestyle here feels more meaningful to me, my participation feels more active and what i'm seeking from & getting out of those experiences is more fulfilling than when i was in my 20s and it was just like, well i am here on this earth to go out at night. i was at the big overnight queer rave (zero chill) here a few weekends ago and dancing all night w/ a bunch of people, being up as the sun rose, intrinsically bonding w/ strangers by existing in that kind of liminal space, leaving the party to a warm sunday afternoon... i was in a really great mood that day. i go back and forth on whether i'm in some sort of arrested development phase, like in a sense my life isn't necessarily all that different from when i was 25, versus feeling like the experiences are more or less the same on their face but different for me because i'm older and wiser, i understand myself more, am more appreciative of what i'm experiencing and more prone to taking stock of it in the grand scheme of my life and seeing myself as participating in something bigger than just myself, which is not how i really viewed things in my 20s. not that it's prescriptive but i feel like i'm at that point in my life where my straight friends are having babies and settling down and i get to be a gay man who doesn't have to (slash chooses not to) worry about that entire notion, it's an exercising of some sort of privilege and that weighs on me in a sense like, wait am i doing my life wrong? should i have "moved on" to something different? no, it feels great to not have to -- but am i wrong for feeling like that? this stuff bounces around in my head a lot now. also a big thing for me was having my identity as a person decoupled from my work in my 30s, i think that helped me feel like someone who really lives in new york city vs someone who is here because everyone who does what i do for work is here and i'm doing the same things as them because that's just what people do. i feel more agency over my own life, even tho i've always had agency

if i was going to live anywhere else in the USA i think it would be chicago -- i have friends there and the lifestyle from a public transportation & nightlife scenario is probably as close to nyc as exists in this country. not driving is really important to me, i think i have a very high tolerance for urban living. riding public transportation & biking around the city makes me happy almost every day, idk if i could move somewhere at the moment where that wasn't a reality for me. also from a cost perspective i feel like the disparity between public transportation and having a car has to be about as big as it's ever been, i was just reading this nyt article about how entry level $20k cars have basically been eradicated in america... anyway, i just love urbanity. i like that nyc offers me the ability to get out into the woods a few times per year but i don't feel a pull towards rural living, i think back to being a kid and it's just not something that was ever in my head. i've always liked cities

i think if we end up anywhere else down the line it will probably be in the UK. now, there is something about the british countryside... perhaps it allows me to fetishize the experience in a way that i cannot w/ the hudson valley. my bf has several close friends who have moved to hastings on the british coast, very cute quaint old little town, almost always gray and rainy but a very geological & architecturally beautiful place. i really love it there and have been planting seeds in my bf's head for us to move there when we're like 50. his estranged dad recently revealed that he purchased a home on the isle of man that he is bequeathing to my bf & his brother so i guess there's that. i don't know if we are new york city lifers but the idea of settling down somewhere else in the USA just seems foreign to me so... why not actually go and be foreign

i think that if living the nightlife in new york makes you happy and that your appreciation for it has only deepened you have every green light in the world to keep going with it. with anything that continues to offer us what we really want, i think we should build our lives around that and to cherish it.

donna rouge, j has friends who are talking about retiring in italy (she's from verona). seems like a tempting proposition!

This is the second time in a few days I've had a variant of this question. On my friends Signal chat a buddy wondered where we'd want to retire. Spain and Northern Italy came up. The thing for me is, I like my job and see myself doing it past retirement age. It's not spiritually enervating enough for me to long for doing more of what I do a lot of already. I've wanted this sinecure for two decades. I live alone and make good money. There's nothing in the world I'd do instead of this job, with the exception perhaps of working at a bookstore, for which I'd need a partner with money. I like where my life is. To read as many books as I want, to hang out a bar without an instinct to get wasted, to still have writing gigs and an urge to write every day that's like a kind of violence, to do whatever the fuck I want on my days off -- it can settle into complacency, I suppose. I wrote a book a year and a half ago -- I'm shopping it around. I wanna write another.

I did remark in the friends chat that despite this country being a shit hole I really don't wanna give up on it; I won't let rapacious GOP presidents ruin the good things about this country, so I've thought about northern California or even, despite the weather, the northeast (I don't mind snowbirding). There's so much gross in Miami, but I'm reaching an age at which I'm attached to the friends I've got here, who because they're straight or gay-coupled ain't going anywhere. I could live someplace else but I like the sense of authority coterminous with living in a city with such a deracinated sense of culture and a not much better queer scene.

i am probably a new york city lifer unless i move out of the country. once upon a time i longed to end up in sf….. no more. though i guess i also dreamed of returning to reno at some point, maybe as my dad gets older, but…. the places i’d move if money were not a factor are tokyo or berlin. probably tokyo. just feels like a dream city

Essentially, it's a small town that doesn't have a "small town" mentality

this sounds really nice mike. i.. don't think such a place exists in the u.s. haha. at least not in the red states.

our strong desire / need to leave slc has meant that we've considered places like reno. i think it would be a marginal improvement. good trail access! relatively liberal. nevada is kind of shockingly beautiful tbh.

I did remark in the friends chat that despite this country being a shit hole I really don't wanna give up on it

speaking of corny i do increasingly feel more cultural patriotism as i get older. i really like certain strains of american culture and my identity springs from those for better or worse. i increasingly can't see myself moving to another country, but a big part of that is i haven't even traveled to any yet lol.

my life has become pretty solitary. the things i really love are solitary activities. physical culture stuff. finding and spending time in wilderness. i could see that including country living stuff. home and land improvement projects. gardening. even little art projects. music. photography.

the thing about city life that still appeals to me i think is the chance to interact with intelligent, creative, cultured people. but... increasingly other people matter less and less to me! my happiness is about the dream worlds i cultivate, the expression of myself within them, including rituals.

however. i have a huge anvil of student loan debt hanging over my head that's just gotten worse. jobs are more available in cities.

thinking about this today, i feel like i should just move toward the nature stuff that's increasingly making me happy, and the money will work out somehow.

nevada is kind of shockingly beautiful tbh.

it's true as hell. the five years i spent going to college in reno were wonderful

I didn't know you were "from Reno" in some capacity, ivy... Nevada is one of only three states I've never visited. The other two are Alaska and Arkansas. I might actually not have ever been to South Dakota, either. I have been to Delaware, even if it was only to buy my first laptop computer, tax free, in 2005.

i’m from vegas (horrible place). northern nevada good except there’s the usual “the more rural the more fascist” town dynamic. the mountains throughout the state are staggering

ruby mountains near elko are crazy beautiful. great basin national park is a must-see. jarbidge mountains / wilderness area are on my bucket list. there are hot springs and ghost towns all over. fascist vibes though, yep. the rest of the state hates vegas afaict. not as familiar with the western half of the state. the area around walker lake looks beautiful.

_Essentially, it's a small town that doesn't have a "small town" mentality_

this sounds really nice mike. i.. don't think such a place exists in the u.s. haha. at least not in the red states.

Fwiw these places exist but mostly in coastal states, per your point. sad reality! and most of them have been overrun by transplants (see skot’s valid complaints about the Northampton area from a few years ago)

j0rd which nyc clubs/club nights do you like? planning to pop into the city briefly when i visit my family in September and am v out of the loop re: what’s going on there now. (on the non-club front, planning to make my customary Julius’ stop as well)

imo the best club in the city is basement, it’s the closest thing we have to a great european club. it’s a bit affected in that way however the space is my favorite in the city (not knockdown but basement specifically). public records, nowadays, elsewhere, good room are other usual suspects — those have crowds that more run the gamut of taste but if the DJs are good can still be fun. bossa is still good, i think. in manhattan parkside lounge can have some good stuff, night club 101 is another. for more explicitly gay parties/crowds that sorta split the difference between club and bar c’mon everybody & 3 dollar bill have stuff every weekend — bear parties, tea dances, pop parties etc

i don’t have access to the email attached to my ILX account but if you can find a way to connect w/ me off here closer to when you’re coming i can let you know what is going on during the specific dates that might be fun