Charlie

Thanks for reminding me of the historical reason why the friezes were not being properly maintained at the time that Elgin made his argument for removing them to London.. Of course, Elgin did not know what the Greeks would do after they won their war of independence from the Turks, so the British Museum felt that technically they had a right to keep artwork that they had gone to considerable trouble to obtain. As I said, attitudes have changed over the years toward art that many people now considered to have been "stolen" from the "rightful owners." Museums are now facing the same pressures to return anthropological holdings, such as corpses, to the descendants of the cultural groups from which they were taken.

Smorgasbord

Narcissus? (jerks off looking at an image of himself)

Right now (Fri., 1:10pm) the ad says he is still in California City, CA. Maybe he struck paydirt there.

When I was first introduced to the gay world and its terminology, I was told that "trade" basically meant any straight male who was willing to receive sexual attention (usually a blow job) from a gay male, without doing anything in return; "rough trade" usually meant someone who demanded payment for the interaction.

The Parthenon friezes were probably considered more culturally important to educated Britons of 19th century London than they were to most citizens of 19th century Athens, who were doing nothing to preserve them. For most Orthodox Greeks, they were remnants of a false religion which they had rejected. Two hundred years later, perspectives on relations between material art and the culture that created it have changed, particularly among educated persons everywhere, and questions of ownership are no longer considered simple judicial matters. Rational arguments can be made for returning the art to Greece or for keeping the work at the British Museum, and one side will certainly be dissatisfied with whatever the outcome is.

According to his RM ad, tomorrow he is going to be in California City, which is actually a small town (11K population) in the Mojave Desert. I don't think he is going to drum up a lot of new business there.

Years ago I introduced two of my closest gay friends to one another. Although they were born and lived on two different continents, they both had the same birthday (06/06). Both of them had a straight brother and sister; the sister was childless, the straight brother was married with three children, and the straight brothers were both called Greg!!! Surely that can't all be coincidence, can it?🤔

I'd like to take a tumble in his rumble seat.

I clicked on this thread mainly because I went to an actual pig-butchering once. It was an annual event in the small town in Czechoslovakia where I worked thirty years ago. Everyone got together at a farm on a Saturday to take part in butchering a fattened hog and taking home various pieces to cook.

My first hire took place in New York City in November 1978. It was provoked by the fact that my father had died a couple of weeks earlier in Virginia, and I had just returned from a long visit to family, during which I arranged the funeral, and afterwards drove my mother to New Jersey for the burial of his ashes. I left my mother with family in NJ and returned alone to my apartment in NYC, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I was also horny, and I didn't want to go out cruising--I wanted good sex with an attractive guy, efficient and guaranteed. I called an ad in a gay rag for a service called Chelsea Men, and made an arrangement to go to their place on West 16th St. It was in an old building, and at the office there was a guy sitting at a desk, whom I recognized as an old face from a Village bar, and lounging on a sofa there were three young men who were obviously available. However, I had called in advance and arranged to hire someone whose description fit exactly what I was looking for, for $55. But the man at the desk said the guy I had arranged for turned out not to be available after all. I smelled a bait-and-switch, in which I would be pressured to take one of the kids on the sofa, none of whom were what I wanted at all. So I persuaded the guy to go through his lists, and he found someone whose description sounded more acceptable. He called the guy, and I agreed to wait until he arrived. He told me to go into another room in the office, which contained a double bed; he told me to get undressed and wait in the bed. I had been waiting impatiently in the bed for about a half hour, when the door into the room opened, and in walked "Daniel," a 6'4" Australian of Italian/Lebanese background, with an advertised 10 " cock. He was in his late 20s and not conventionally handsome, but he was masculine and sexy, and I came twice in the next hour, although the whole process seemed rather mechanical. Then he quickly dressed and left . I cleaned up in the attached bathroom, dressed, and went out to the front desk, where I paid my $55 in cash, and left. And did I go home relaxed and ready for bed? No. The whole experience had stimulated but frustrated me to the point that I wanted much more. So I decided to go to the Ramrod, where I socialized with friends, and was hit on by a cute little Irish muscle builder. I decided not to go home with him, but on Christopher St, I was picked up by an attractive older man, who took me back to his place, where I had even better sex than I had with Daniel, for another couple of hours--for free! It was another year before I decided it was worthwhile to try paying for sexual satisfaction again.

I find it hard to believe that a 30 year old--or anyone really--has a speaking competence in sixteen different language from a variety of language families. Maybe he can say "hello, "goodbye," "suck it," and quote his fee, but not much else.

Ah, but what about orgies, a night at the baths, a night in the Meat Rack on Fire Island, etc.? Not that I have any personal knowledge of such experiences, of course🙄....

Yes, PS can be brutally hot in the summer, and it seems to be getting worse. The forecast high for tomorrow is 114F. It's only 112F at my house right now (1pm).

When I was in high school, I came out to my best friend, and discovered that my classmate was gay, too. He also amazed me with the claim that he had been having sex with an older teenage neighbor of his. He wanted me to meet the neighbor, Philip, who by that time was 24. The neighbor was a very tall, slim but muscular Slavic blond with a handsome but rough-looking face. So one night the three of us went out in a car, parked in a dark area, and my friend said, "I want to see if you can suck his cock." Philip then pulled out his hard cock, and I was stunned: I don't know how long it was, but the head was huge! I tried, but by the time I got it all in my mouth, I could hardly take any of the shaft. My friend laughed at my inept performance, and then showed me how expert he was at handling that monster cock. And he had learned how to do it when he was! I have sucked a few cocks (ahem!) since then, but I have never actually measured any of them--I just eyeball them--but that was the only one that completely exceeded my limits. A few years later, after Philip married, when his wife was out of town, I accompanied my friend to Philip's home and watched him get fucked by that monster cock. I declined to experiment with it.

PS actually does have a large natural aquifer underneath the valley, but it needs to be artificially replenished regularly, and ironically one of the sources that is used is the Colorado River, which is a crucial water source for Las Vegas.

I had this choice to make twenty years ago, so I went to stay in and check out both cities. I found myself feeling much more at home and relaxed in PS than in LV. Ultimately, I voted for PS, because LV seemed like an island in the desert, whereas PS was closer to other options for places to go and things to do whenever I wanted to get out of the neighborhood. I was also influenced, as searchers usually are, by the people I happened to meet during my search: I found many more people who I thought could turn into regular friends in PS than I did in LV, and I have found it easy to make friends here. It is also nice to live in a place where one never has to explain that the companion with you is your same-sex spouse (everyone assumes that anyway). My partner, on the other hand, often asks me why we ended up here, because he finds the physical ambience too boringly suburban--he likes city centers, hi-rises and public mass transportation, and would have chosen San Francisco if we could have afforded the real estate. Of course, places change over 20 years, and so do people, but I think I would make the same choice if I were doing it again today.

Under "near travel," most guys name another town; he only names "Cherry Hill Mall," which sounds strange--does he expect to meet you at the mall and then arrange for the two of you to go someplace else? I can't think of anyplace at the Cherry Hill Mall where he could give a "soft core erotic" (?) massage (unless the CHM has changed a lot since the last time I shopped there).

No head?!

Yesterday I phoned a friend in London to wish him a happy birthday, but he wasn't home, so I left a voicemail on his home phone. Then I sat down at my computer to write him an email, but as I was about to hit SEND, my cell phone rang, and it was my friend, who had accessed his voice mail in London and was face-timing me from somewhere in rural France. We had a nice face-to-face chat. (Then, of course, we both had a problem trying to figure out how to end the face-time function.)

My only regular in this century was Rex Brant in NYC. When I hired him as my birthday gift for myself one time, he arrived with a bottle of wine, and another time he arranged for Gino Mancuso to join us for a threesome, at no extra cost. I never saw him again after I moved from the east to the west coast 20 years ago, and I don't know what became of him. He was a close friend of the legendary Reece Rothmeier, and I stopped seeing ads for both of them about the same time.

La Vierge is French for The Virgin. Not an encouraging sign.

I was born and raised in the US and have lived here for the majority of my life, but I also studied, lived and worked in other countries when I was younger. Naturally, when I retired, I gave some thought to retiring abroad. However, retiring to one of the countries I had lived in previously didn't make financial sense, because the living conditions were not any cheaper than one could find in the US. The places that might make financial sense were places where I didn't speak the language (a major consideration), and where I was not sure of what kind of medical care I could expect. Being a healthy 65 year old foreigner with plenty of money can be very exciting in a new country; being an elderly (e.g., over 75) foreigner with no family in a country where one isn't fluent in the language, doesn't know the way around local bureaucracies even after living there for several years, and may no longer have dependable health, is no fun at all. When my partner, who loved European travel, said he wanted us to retire to London (where he worked as a young man) so we could be close to places on the continent which we could visit frequently, I nixed the idea, and I'm glad I did. Now he is physically unable to travel at all, and we would have been stuck far from family and old friends, in a place where we were simply a couple of old queens who didn't even qualify for the social assistance we could expect in the US. I think I have mentioned here before the case of an English friend of mine, a sophisticated schoolmaster, who retired to a small town in Portugal, because he thought he could live there more comfortably on his limited retirement income than he could at home in England. After ten years there, he would phone me, practically sobbing, about how miserably isolated he felt there. I have no regrets about retiring to California, which is quite exotic enough for me.

And he played through an entire match with it!

Learning new languages also fascinated me when I was younger. I studied Spanish in high school, German in college, French in graduate school, Dutch when I was having a hot affair with a guy in Amsterdam, Italian because I was an opera lover, and Czech when I lived and worked in Czechoslovakia. The only one in which I could genuinely claim to have become bi-lingual was German, because I kept working at it for years by participating in German conversation groups and taking summer courses in Austria until I was in my 40s, but the problem in learning languages as an adult is that you have to use it or you lose it. The only one which I still use at all is Spanish, because I am surrounded by it living in southern California.