Charlie

Fin Fang Foom. His thread on trying to clean cum stains from his sofa was a classic.

Although I understand where you are coming from, this comment evokes a somewhat uncomfortable memory for me. When I was still a teenager, I met a guy who was very good-looking and had a beautifully developed upper body, but he had polio that affected him from the waist down as a child, and his legs were so spindly that he needed crutches to walk. Luckily, he had learned to ignore his disability and pursue a gay sex life with the assets he had. One Saturday night he took me on my first trip to Fire Island, and as we were walking around Cherry Grove in the dark, we passed a house where there was obviously a loud gay party going on. To my surprise, Dick knocked on the door and asked if we could join the festivity. I watched with nervous apprehension as the host looked us up and down, then smiled and invited us in. It was the first time I had ever been to a party full of suggestively dressed gay men dancing to loud music, and I was convinced we would be either ignored or made to feel out of place (I certainly felt out of place), but we were welcomed enthusiastically and treated no differently than the other guests. As the party was winding down and people were leaving, we prepared to leave, too. The host asked us where we were staying, and Dick said we would just sleep on the beach for a few hours before taking the first ferry back. The guy glanced uncertainly at Dick's legs, and said, "Why don't you take the bedroom down the hall instead?" I realized that Dick was uncomfortable at suddenly being reminded that his legs were perceived as a problem, so I quickly said,"Thank you, I really don't want to sleep on the beach," and I hurried him along to the bedroom, where we were left undisturbed until morning, when we quietly left the house and went down to the dock to catch the first ferry back to the mainland. I saw Dick a few more times after that, but the age difference between us (he was in his late 20s) was too much for a continuing relationship, and I lost track of him after that summer. I sometimes wonder what became of him, as I do about many gay men whom I knew only briefly when I was coming out.

BTW, for many years I did my own taxes, because I thought the process was simple enough that it was a waste of money to pay a professional to do them. I lived in a city that had its own wage tax, but I mistakenly believed that it was only on wages earned in the city. Since it was automatically deducted from my paychecks for my job in the city, I pretty much ignored it. After also having a second job for several years in another state, I received notice from the city that I was supposed to have reported that income, and I owed the city back taxes plus interest. Now I pay someone who knows what he is doing.

And whoever you use, try to determine that they are knowledgeable about the tax laws in individual states that are relevant as well as in federal tax laws. One year I had earned income from three different states, but my tax preparer was well versed in the laws of only two of them, and screwed up the filing for the third, which ended up being an expensive nuisance.

Because of some quirk in the program, all of us who were active in the very early days of the old Hooboy site are shown as having joined on December 31, 1969 (we were given an explanation once, which I have forgotten). No, the Internet did not exist in its present form then. The personal computer hadn't even been invented yet. And although I had already been sexually active for a decade by then, I still had never seen an ad for an escort, much less hired one.

I am a frequent watcher of "House Hunters," so there is no surprise in this article for me. Anyone who watches regularly can recognize the theme of two people with very different ideas about what they want, but amazingly can agree on a place that doesn't deliver something that one of them has insisted is essential. I saw the episode in question on Thursday, and could tell that Jeff's claim that certain things were non-negotiable would disappear when they made their final choice. Several of the things that Elizabeth mentions have been revealed by other participants in the past. I have fun looking for little giveaways of pasting things together, like snow on the ground when looking at one house, and none when looking at the next one.

He offers the "boyfriend experience" but "NO KISSING"? Does he understand the term?

Did you get both shots, several months apart, or only the first one? My doctor reminded me that I need to get both.

But will the rooms come with cute little Chihuahuas?

If I survive to November, I will have been on this site for 20 years. Most of the first escorts I reviewed are long since retired.

Thanks for the "report" clue.

When I click on "Information," it brings up a link to "Contact," but nothing at all happens when I click on it. I am trying to contact an administrator because I got an "Alert" that a poster had quoted my post in a response, but when I clicked on it, the quote was not from me--in fact, it was a thread that I never participated in, and the response was really nasty.

Many years ago, after a delightful afternoon appointment in NYC with a really hot escort, we cuddled up in bed with a copy of the Advocate "pink pages" (I told you this was many years ago!), and we compared notes on which escorts each of us knew. He said that he often had sex with other escorts, sometimes as a client and sometimes off the clock, depending on what the situation called for. Unfortunately, some time later he became emotionally involved with one of the escorts I knew, who was a gorgeous psycho--yes, escorts "fall in love with" escorts just as clients sometimes do--and it turned out badly for him.

If there was anything you did wrong, it was probably not meeting him in person beforehand to make sure that (a) he was who he represented himself to be, and (b) you were comfortable with one another in a social situation. If you had a dinner date or even a coffee date first, I think he might have been less likely to simply flake on the wedding day.

The fact that a building is 80 years old doesn't mean that it was mortgaged only once, at construction. It is probable that ownership changed hands multiple times, and the building has had multiple mortgages. Many older co-ops in Manhattan were not originally co-op, but were built as rental apartment buildings that turned out not to be profitable when rent controls were instituted, so the owners turned them into co-ops so that the individual apartment owners would assume responsibility for the underlying mortgages through HOA fees. I lived through one such conversion of a building in which I had been a tenant.

I live in a retirement community of individual homes, for which the owners are entirely responsible, including landscaping and utilities, but HOA fees are still needed for insurance and maintenance of the communal areas, the "lodge" (which contains offices, meeting rooms, game rooms, a gym, craft rooms, library, kitchen, etc.), four swimming pools with toilet and shower facilities, tennis courts, pickleball courts, shuffleboard, bocce, etc. In addition to all the maintenance expenses, management personnel to run the facilities aren't cheap. Lawyers are also needed to deal with problematic owners and residents as well as with local government. It is a gated community, but the gatehouses are not manned; however, some residents who are nervous about security want the HOA board to hire guards to man the gatehouses and patrol the grounds. An owner, who is a retired police chief, has estimated that the cost of doing so could almost double the current HOA fee (he thinks it would be a waste of money for little actual gain in security). We moved here from our own home on a quarter acre of land with a swimming pool, and a dozen lovely trees (the proper care of which cost us about $8000/yr). I have found that even with all the things that have to be covered by the HOA fee, our homeowning expenses have actually decreased along with the stress of individual responsibility for things that are now taken care of by someone else.

I think William meant to say you DON'T want to drive from Logan to P-Town on a holiday weekend. However, I don't know how hard it may be to rent a car in P-town.

I think one would have to know a lot more about the history of the building to decide how reasonable or unreasonable the HOA fee is. I lived in a rental building near Lincoln Center that was converted to a co-op in the 1980s, and we new owners were shocked to find out all the things that had to be included in the HOA fee once we had bought our units. I sold it as soon as I legally could. I used to think I would like to retire in Manhattan, but that no longer holds any appeal for me.

Sigh....I came oh, so close to being part of history. I lived within walking distance of the Stonewall, but on that fateful night we decided to go to bed early instead of going out to the bars, and we didn't learn about what happened until the next day.

Interesting: in one ad he claims to be 26, and in the other he claims "10 years experience." How many professional masseurs start at 16?

It sounds like he accidentally used the text he had written for an ad on Silverdaddies.

That's sort of funny: I lived half my life in Philly. But that background did remind me of old places I have been in there.

George Nader, BTW, was a hunky B-level movie actor in the 1950s, whose photos in the movie mags always turned me on at that time. I later learned that he was gay.

I thought, "Well, that's a book by Ralph Nader about corruption in the auto industry that I didn't know about," and then I saw the cover.

What a grim-looking setting, almost like a prison.