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

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???

HI
wtf is up

hello gays

hiiii!

we spent nearly four hours trying to put up two bookshelves yesterday. stupid drywall!!

Got laid in New Orleans last week with a Napoleon House waiter.

i'm gay. not much else up tbh. hi kate!

Gay meter low thank christ for this thread

There is one (1) gay bar in town and it is a municipal landmark for being the first local gay watering hole

See? They don't need anymore!

wait hoos i thought you were in dc?

I love Hello Bored Biz Man

US city ILX gay fap!

What do you want...

...me to do today?

(xp)

On some healing news-- things remain "feeling slow" but are "progressing quickly". I'll be driving again, soon. Just today I received some docs in the mail I'd signed just a couple weeks ago. Seeing the difference in "my penmanship", like how much my right hand has recovered in the past two weeks, was shocking, shocking!! And yet the days pass by with such tedium and I'm still sleeping 10-11 hours out of 24, sheesh

great news

And yeah Alfo I guess it’s been twelve years since I hung with you in Miami— far too fucking long if you ask me

― brb (flamboyant goon tie included), Thursday, August 13, 2026

what a time!

I am glad we all agree that Boston sucks. Honestly it sucks so much that when people I know say they love it there, I think less of them!!

i feel that way when people say it about slc. "oh we aren't gonna vibe." "oh cool you are one of those people." there are the dyed in the wool mormon whites. but among gay or more liberal people they're either very embedded in family (who are often dyed in the wool mormon whites). which, i just don't relate to at all. or they moved here to get ahead. from california / texas / indiana or wherever. usually another conservative state or the conservative part of cali. often in some kind of health-related field. the health scam *ahem* industry is the biggest game in town here, behind mining oil and gas, with outdoor rec far down the list somewhere. houses are (or were) cheaper here. so it's a market move. these people tend to only care about making more money. there are a lot of them in this city. for a place with such a weird religious rep it's very materialist. the taste though is not for "expensive and finely made", it's for "expensive trash." slc wins when it comes to the amount of money you have to pay for access to abysmal culture and aesthetics.

what i love about.. nearly any other city i've been to is that there is a fair amount of people you see on the street who are obviously marching to the beat of their own drum, who never "grew up and bought a house in the suburbs". maybe they're poor, maybe they're doing well for themselves, but for whatever reason they are living a colorful life and being somewhat more true to their authentic selves. in slc the people you see walking downtown are either commuters working their finance job at jp morgan chase or houseless. often it's the houseless people who are actually displaying authenticity. a fair amount are obviously in pain but not all.

I'm on the eve of a birthday-- 47-- and I was lying in bed this morning contemplating how comparatively un-productive, artistically, this decade, my 40s, has been for me. I was adding up all the factors that have been eroding that productivity. "Owning dogs" is a big one, "COVID" also. "The men I've dated" for sure, no shade at the two men I've chosen to split my time with but they were a time suck. "PTSD" was a big one, as was "playing bridge on my phone"-- I really got into bridge but I've probably spent 60-90 minutes daily, on average, in playing it, all in tribute to my late grandma. I've decided to give up bridge, and men, moving forward.

Owning dogs is the best reason for un-productivity.

it's hard for me to do stuff because there is just too much to do and less and less energy to do it. i got health problems, i got less and less stamina...

anyway, reflections

Friend of mine has been encouraging me to get on Grindr for ages and finally convinced me. The main thing is that I'm not into hookups, and Grindr is very much oriented around hookups.

IDK. Things probably will change, but right now I'm seeing the appeal. The main thing is that you gotta go where the people are. I'm 50 years old. Most of the apps are ghost towns. Whatever the intent of Grindr, if it's the only one that has a userbase, people are going to gravitate there.

The other one I've used a lot is Lex, and it's just very discourse/shitpost oriented. Nothing that happens there seems _actionable_. It doesn't seem like anything on Lex _goes anywhere_. I go on Grindr and I mostly see trans people and sissies. I filter out the sissies. Trans people are interesting, but mostly I wait for people to reach out for me. God, I've been waiting a lifetime for people to hit on me, and here, they do it. It's fine even if they're not into it. If they send me a dick pic, whatever, I block them. Everybody gets dick pics. Some guys are dumb. Not all of them.

A guy DMs me and asks if he can suck me off. I tell him "lol I have a pussy" and he messages back "even better". I mean, you know, when people guys are down bad they can be very flexible. So I say the honest thing which is that I'm not looking for someone to go down on me, and he gives me a thumbs up, not a ironic gen z thumbs up. God, it's liberating to just be able to talk about this shit openly.

It's the context, I think. If someone's on Grindr the cultural assumption is that it's fine to just message someone "Hey, I wanna suck you off, you down for it?" I don't like having to run my head in circles trying to figure out what the other person is actually looking for. Traditionally gay male spaces are, I find, a lot more relaxed about that kind of thing.

Cuz even if I don't want someone to go down on me, the idea that there's someone out there who looks at my picture wants to go down on me helps me feel more attractive.

Someone texts me and asks me if I bottom, and I say, honestly, yeah but not for anal. Then he asks if I have a nice butt, and I say, truthfully, that I do. Again, it's great to be able to just SAY that to someone, to say yeah, I got a nice ass actually. He wants to see a picture, and I say sure. I say hell with it and take a picture. I'm clothed, and it's a good one. Being hyperflexible does mean I can get some pretty nice camera angles of myself. He is happy with it, confirms that I have a nice butt, and asks if I'm into cis guys. I say, again, honestly, sure, as long he's not a sissy or an egg. My only problem with dating cis guys is that a lot of the "cis guys" who date trans women aren't. It's just being able to talk honestly about the insecurities. Cis people are like "Gee, I don't know if a trans woman will date me", and a lot of us won't, and a lot of us are VERY HAPPY to date cis people, just like a lot of cis people are VERY HAPPY to date us. It's hard to get past the bullshit, though, unless I'm in an environment where I can just say, you know, yeah I date cis guys, I date trans guys, I date trans women, cis women, I just don't date sissies and eggs. Not a personal judgement on them. I know plenty of people who used to be sissies and they're fine, I'm find with them. Sissies just got shit they gotta work through before I'm gonna get with them.

Even if nothing comes of it, it helps me feel normal. Dating is complex. Like, if I'm a lesbian who dates guys, a guy can be a gay dude and date me. If I tell him a guy "Just so you know, I have a pussy" and he says "even better", yeah I feel good about that. I don't give a shit if he's feeding me a line. Sometimes I just need that casual intimacy, and talking about this stuff in a place that actually feels safe... I feel good about it. Just being able to say "Yeah, I got a really nice ass, actually". Straight guys are afraid I'll report them to HR or some shit like that. God, it (assless) chaps my hide.