Charlie

If you feel up to it, rent a bike and ride all around the island. My spouse and I did it years ago and loved it.

#381 looks like a fairly poor little western town, yet I see a clean new Buick and Chrysler in the photo.

Good friends of ours became a couple in the 1970s, but each had his own home. They didn't decide to live together until they retired and moved to Florida 20 years later. Even though they bought a house with two master suites and were together mostly in the kitchen-dining area, they ended up bickering constantly. Visiting them could be pretty uncomfortable. Another couple met in the early 1960s when each was married with children. They divorced their wives, but had partial custody of the children, so they got two apartments in the same building (they would have certainly lost custody if they tried to live together). When the kids were grown and they both retired, they finally moved in together, but found it hard to adjust after so many years of each being a head of household.

Both of us have written memoirs. His has been shared with a number of friends and family, but mine is a little too candid to be shared until after I am long gone. (An institution has agreed to archive it with my journals.)

No. To our close gay friends, of course, our relationship was known, but to most other people we were simply roommates....who happened to share a bed in a one bedroom apartment. When we bought our first house together in 1971, it had to be in his name, because only one of us could get a mortgage, as a "single man." Our first cars were all owned by me. By the time we bought the second house in 1983, there was no problem purchasing and getting a mortgage in both names. However, we didn't purchase and register a car together until 2004. By the mid-1970s, our relationship was open knowledge to all our friends and neighbors, as well as to our work colleagues and our employers. (At his retirement reception twenty years ago, I was formally included as his partner.) His siblings--one of them also gay--recognized the relationship early on; other family members undoubtedly understood, but didn't openly acknowledge it. All our parents were deceased before we could legally marry, which probably saved them and us from a lot of angst, because they were fairly conservative. My father had a favorite cousin who had a male "friend" for many years, but in the 1930s and 40s, living together as a couple would have been unthinkable.

We tend to like the same styles of clothes, but we never dress as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We are also very different physically (e.g., I am five inches taller than he, but usually weigh less), so what looks good on one of us doesn't necessarily suit the other.

I have never had haggis or laverbread; otherwise, I have had everything on the list at least once, and a few are staples of my diet. Unfortunately, much as I love a scotch egg, it is almost impossible to find in this country.

My spouse and I decided to move in together the day we met--which just happened to be 50 years ago from the date of your posted question. (I didn't see the post because we were celebrating.)

I have had a medical POA for years, and I have held one for others. It is important to have a back-up person named in case the primary POA is unavailable for any reason at a critical moment. It is also important to update the document if your situation changes (the POA holder becomes unable to act effectively, your relationships change, etc.). You should also carry it with you when you are traveling. At one time I held the primary POA for a friend, but when he unexpectedly became critically ill while on a European vacation, it was his family who were contacted, not me, and I didn't even learn that he was ill until after they had brought him home and he had died.

I beg your pardon? Center City is where most people want to live, which is why it has become so expensive.

No, it is posts.

If it's a sex vacation, three days is enough. If it is a first time tourist visit, it is worth more than three days.

I hate all the days of prep beforehand, during which there are restrictions on what you can eat, medications you can take, etc. The operation itself doesn't bother me, since I am completely unconscious. I just had what I hope is my last, since supposedly they don't do routine colonoscopies after one turns 80.

Please do not blow that petard (which is a small bomb made of metal or wood filled with blasting powder)!!! The phrase "hoist by his own petard" is Shakespearean, and it means to be blown up by your own bomb.

An old friend of our had a stroke at 70 that put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He moved to a new home and hired a younger gay man, who had been a tenant of his in San Francisco, to live with him and take care of all his needs (non-sexual). I don't know how much he paid him in addition to his free room and board and a car. After several years, however, the personal relationship soured, and then the trouble began, because it was difficult to get rid of him, since it was not a formal contractual relationship, and lawyers were engaged on both sides. It was only resolved by the unexpected death of the younger man. Then our friend hired a young gay aide through an agency, who came in for several hours a day, and although it meant that he was alone much more of the time, he was happier with the set-up. I don't know how much it cost, or how well the situation would have worked out in the long run, because our friend died in his sleep several months later.

If you repressed your sexual desires for a long time, it is natural to think that if you have a lot of great sex, you will feel much better. You won't. It isn't the sex itself that you need, but something else that the sex represents for you. It sounds like you have already figured out that much. I would second the advice of those who recommend finding someone to help you understand what that something is and how to satisfy that need.

I can sometimes ignore everything above the waist for a pair of muscular, hairy legs.

Young males nowadays are much more aware that they are sex objects to other men than they were in the days when homosexuality was the lust that dare not speak its name. When I was a young man, if another man stared at my naked body, I could yell "Faggot!" and punch him in the eye without being accused of a hate crime. Now young men are probably reacting the same way that most young women do when they are in the company of men whom they do not want to attract sexually, by trying to avoid evoking any prurient interest.

The California DMV does not take credit cards, only debit cards. If you do not want to use a debit card (I don't), they ask for cash or a check.

And may there be many more!

My Citizen Eco-Drive, which I bought several years ago, is powered NOT by motion but by light. Therefore, as long as I leave it out to absorb light, it continues to be energized. It has never lost time. I don't remember what I paid for it, but it certainly was no more than $250. However, the majority of the time I wear a $20 Casio, which also remains accurate, and has a battery that lasts a couple of years.

I'm not sure what you saw in my post that convinced you that Jefferson was right. I think it showed that Jefferson was pretty foolish to believe that the rest of the world would respect the American declaration that after we had won our independence, our country just wanted to be left alone to do our own thing, and they would just go and fight among themselves. BTW, it was Jefferson who made the Louisiana Purchase that extended the USA across the plains and over the Rockies.

Thomas Jefferson was opposed to a standing army, because he thought that a republic could always count on its citizens to rise up and join voluntary militias to defend themselves against foreign enemies. He tried to cut off support for the army academy at West Point and any support for a navy. (He also insisted that any money appropriated by Congress for naval vessels should be spent on ones he designed himself, which turned out to be worthless in combat, as the naval professionals had predicted.) When the British declared war in 1812, the country was caught unprepared, and Madison found himself a Commander in Chief with almost no organized military to command. It was mainly luck and the British distraction by Napoleon in Europe that enabled the US to avoid being defeated by the British and potentially absorbed back into British North America. Believing in the possibility of non-involvement with the rest of the world was unrealistic then, and it is no more reasonable now.

No one has mentioned the Triangle (Durham/ Raleigh/ Chapel Hill) in North Carolina, which is probably one of the most liberal areas in the South. One of the most active early members of this site retired there around 2005 and declared himself so happy there that he stopped posting. There also seem to be a number of active escorts there. If hiring escorts regularly is important to you, you should probably check out sites like rent.men to see what the market is like in the places that you are considering. Places like Iowa City usually can't support a variety of escorts, so you will have to either travel to where the escorts are, or import them (at your expense) to you.

My first recommendation would be Philadelphia; of really big cities, it is probably the cheapest to live in (that doesn't mean that someone coming from the South would consider it cheap, however). Twenty years ago I would have said Portland, but housing cost there is rising fast. A favorite of mine is Salt Lake City, but the air pollution there is becoming a problem. Someplace inexpensive and very gay friendly, in a low key way, is Albuquerque.