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.

HOW I LEARNED I WAS GAY. I was 17 years old, and had stopped to use the men's room in the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan. Suddenly a note was thrust under the divider from the next stall: "Meet me outside." Curious, I left and was approached outside the men's room by a young man who emerged from the door. He looked to be in his early to mid 20s, and he introduced himself with a name that sounded vaguely foreign, possibly French. He was cute, slender and a little taller than I was, with dark hair and a tiny mustache. He asked, "Are you gay?" but I didn't know the word except in its normal usage as a term for being happy, so I said yes. When he asked if I would like to go back to his place, I thought,"Why not?" I had never done anything sexual with anyone, but even though I had a steady girlfriend, I already knew I was attracted to other males. So I went with him to a room he was renting in the East Village. When he locked the door behind us, he asked, "What are you into?" I told him I didn't know, so he told me to take off my clothes and get into bed, and he did the same. For the next couple of hours he introduced me to the basic sex acts: sucking and fucking, as both top and bottom. When we were finished and I was getting ready to leave, I said, "Wow! I didn't know these things were possible!" He gave me a puzzled look and said, "But you said you were gay?" I looked confused, as he realized that I didn't understand the term, and he had just initiated a neophyte.

My tastes were more aligned with you than with your father. Perhaps that had something to do with where we both went to school (Wolf von Wernsdorff used to use Wagnerian operas as texts in his courses).

It's encouraging to know that there is still someone here who is older than I am.

My best friend worked at a Wall Street firm. He was getting ready to leave for work when he got a call telling him to stay home, because they were afraid that the Stock Exchange might also be a target for some kind of attack.

I was concerned about the son of friends of mine, who worked at Windows on the World, but luckily he was still on his way to work when the plane hit, and he, too, learned about it when he got out of the subway. A couple of friends of mine who lived in a hi-rise nearby saw the whole sequence of events, and were traumatized by it for months afterwards. A current neighbor of mine was working in the Pentagon when it was hit by another plane that day, but luckily he was in a different part of the building and wasn't hurt.

On the morning of 9/11, I was in my home in Philadelphia, where my spouse was waiting for the van to take him to JFK for his flight to South Africa later in the day, to begin a scheduled "Cape to Cairo" tour. The phone rang, and a somewhat upset-sounding young woman said, "We can't pick you up. The van has been cancelled." Surprised, I asked, "But how is he supposed to get to the airport?" "The airport has been shut down," she said, and hung up. Baffled, I looked at my spouse, and said, "I think we should turn on the news." We turned on the TV, just in time to see the first tower fall. (Ironically, my architect spouse and I were living in Manhattan when the towers were built, and had watched every day from our south-facing window in Chelsea as they rose against the horizon; we couldn't imagine them disappearing in our lifetime.)

Not really. I was exposed to opera from the time I was a child, because my mother was a trained classical singer. We listened to the Met performances on the radio every Saturday, so it was a familiar form of music for me from an early age, although I didn't actually see a performance till I was in my teens.

I had to click on this thread, because I have several cousins whose real name is Mister Powers, but I don't recognize him.

Unless you have a massage table where you are staying, you are probably better off being the mobile one and going to him--that is, unless "massage" means something different to you 🤔.

My mother lived to 102. No way I want to last that long.