Charlie

If you "had been looking at Rentboy and Hooboy's sites for years," what motivated you to finally take the plunge?

It won't be published until after I am safely under the ground.

It is true that in a place like NYC there are lots of other options for cruising nowadays, like gay bars, but some of us grew up when the social options were very different, so we still remember when public toilets were the only place where we could handle our cocks in public, much less make sexual overtures to another male. Old habits die hard. Then there are also the closeted gays who don't want to be seen in openly gay surroundings, and want to be able to plausibly claim, "I just came here because I needed to use the bathroom." I went to college in a small city in farm country. One evening in the college library, I went to use the men's room, and when I sat down in a stall, the foot in the next stall started a tapping routine that I immediately recognized from my experience in Manhattan public men's rooms. When I returned the message, we both left and met outside in the hall. The guy turned out to be a former student who now lived in town, and I went home with him. After we had concluded our business at his place, I asked him why he was cruising in the college library. He said that all the actively gay men in the town knew that the library men's room was the standard place in town to pick up tricks, and if the guy in the adjoining stall didn't respond to the tapping foot, he probably didn't know what it meant and wasn't available. It was easy enough to just leave and start looking for something on the library book shelves, as if that were the only reason he was there. Unfortunately, one evening the tapping foot turned out to belong to one of my professors. When he emerged from the stall and I saw who it was, I was dumbfounded, because he was the last person I would have wanted to have sex with, but I couldn't very well refuse after having signaled with my foot that I was available. Luckily, the semester was almost over, and I took no more courses with him.

Victim was the first film about gays that I ever saw. I took my best friend's sister with me to an art theater to see it. My best friend was gay, which she knew, and I'm sure it affected her attitude toward the fact.

I also get those icloud messages in one of my imail spam folders. I have ignored them for weeks because I don't know if they are real. New photos that I take with the phone continue to show up on the phone's photo storage.

Alas! My very first sexual experience began in a men's room of a public transit terminal in midtown Manhattan. I might still be a virgin if it weren't for that! 🙄

I'm wondering how one finds reliable statistics on such a subject. I would think most of these generalizations are based on anecdotal information, because many gay couples are not legally married, so they don't file tax returns with that status, and single gays don't file as "gay." Most gays probably don't even reveal their actual incomes to their friends; I can only guess at the incomes of even my closest friends.

His photos look like they were taken over a fairly long period of time: the farther you click to the right, the younger he gets.

Tylenol hadn't yet been invented when my mother was pregnant with me, so I can't use that as an excuse.

One thing an executor needs to be told is that the unraveling of all the details in a will can sometimes take a long time. As an example, a deposit from Social Security showed up in my bank account this month that left me baffled at first. The sum was the same amount that my late spouse--who died last year--had received as his monthly benefit. I thought I would have to make an appointment with SS to get an explanation. By checking his bank records, however, I discovered that he never received his last monthly benefit check. I suspected that SS was very slow in finally sending that check after they were notified of his death, but when it arrived at the bank, his old account had already been closed, so the bank simply transferred it to me as the executor, but didn't inform me of that. Today I finally got a letter from SS explaining that my suspicions were correct.

I suspect they may be looking for a "Daddy Warbycks." (If they are old enough to remember "Little Orphan Annie)

The only people with whom I share my history of hiring is the people I have met from this site. I can't remember anyone else ever having asked if I have hired. It's not a subject that usually comes up in social conversation.

40 didn't really bother me. However, at 62, I decided it was time to take up some kind of serious regular exercise, and I played tennis for the first time. I am still playing a couple of times a week at 82, and am still fairly spry. But not as spry as the doubles tennis partner I had the other day: he was 79, and his wife had given birth to their first child the day before.

I am currently reading Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York by Richard M. Ketchum. I think it is probably the best history I have ever read about the origins of the American Revolutionary War. (And believe me, as a former resident of New York, Philadelphia and London, I have read a lot of histories of that period.)

As I think about that story, it occurs to me that younger readers here may not realize that sixty years ago "gay" was basically a secret code word that active male homosexuals used to describe themselves. There was no "gay community" in the current sense. Nowadays every American teenager of whatever orientation knows what it means.