Charlie

It probably means that the photos are not of him. The tats on the left bicep and forearm in the one photo are hard not to notice. That arm is not revealed in any of the other photos.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or feel insulted.

"Wait! Tell me again: what are we supposed to do now?"

I wonder if the road was closed to traffic while that photo was taken. It doesn't look like there was any way for him to hide.

OK, you still qualify as a "dirty old man." Alas!, At 82, I feel only a slightly nostalgic interest in similar triggers nowadays. I don't know whether I need testosterone shots, or counseling.

I have to admit that I'm not the imaginative hot stud that I once was. I can't even remember the last time I had a spontaneous hard-on.

OK, I know this is off-topic, but his ad reminded me that I had baby back ribs with barbecue sauce for dinner last night. The offer sounded good, but the meat was too tough.

Well, the fact that I look at the gallery on this site every day means that I haven't completely lost interest, but I don't really lust anymore--I am more interested in the aesthetic qualities of the photos 😬. I appreciate a beautiful young man, but I wouldn't know what to do with him if he reciprocated my interest.

The Rainbow Bridge was the one the Norse gods used to enter Valhalla. (See what you learn when you're a fan of Wagnerian opera.)

A niece by marriage gave me a Book of the Month membership as a Christmas gift. Every month they send me a list of the books available that month, and I have yet to order a single one of them. They are all fiction, which I hardly ever read any longer, a fact which would probably confound her, since she knows that two of my degrees are in English literature. I have simply lost interest in most fiction, and would much rather read history or social science subjects.

I think this is actually a reference to the ending of a Wagnerian opera. One of the euphemisms that I have never understood is "bought the farm."

Buying rental properties is probably a good way of investing income that is unrecorded and untaxed.

Grandaddy issues!

The match was so long I actually ate my breakfast and my lunch during the course of watching it. Every time I thought the end was finally near, the player who seemed to be losing at that point made an unexpected comeback. The most amazing point was that neither player took a bathroom break at any time. (I took a couple, and even my dog took one.).

Damn! Has my dog been cheating on me?

When I checked the record on my own phone, I discovered that I received a call from someone in that same residential complex a couple of days ago (I hadn't answered it and it went to voice mail, but they didn't leave any message). I made my original comment in this thread, because I wondered if one of the new developments would be providers calling potential customers in their neighborhood.

Interesting. I just googled my phone number, and almost everything in the report was correct, including my name, address, age, former addresses and phone numbers, partner, associates, relations, etc., etc. I wonder why your experience was so different.

The caller actually lived in a complex in which many of the other residents had ads offering sexual services.

Yesterday I got a spam/scam phone call which had nothing to do with sex or escorting (the caller claimed it was about new benefits offered by my medical insurer). He had my name and birthdate, and wanted medical information about me. I quickly hung up on him, but googled the phone number to see what I could find about the caller, and was amazed to come up with related names and numbers of men and women who were advertising sexual services!

As a youth, I was often the youngest male in my class or at work. As a young gay man, my cohort of friends and tricks were mostly older than I was. When I settled down with a partner in my 20s, he was eight years older than I was, and we were together for 56 years. Over the years, more and more of my friends and colleagues were about my own age, or a little younger. Now, as an old gay man, I have few longtime friends left (and most of them are really old: 80 to 95), but I haven't made a lot of new younger friends. Part of that is because I don't relate to today's young people and their interests, and part of it is because I live in a retirement community, and I don't venture out of it very much any more. I go to more funerals than weddings. I do still play tennis at a club regularly, and I am almost always the oldest player on the court, but the "youngsters" are men and women in the 35-70 age range, and I don't know if they are just being kind when they express surprise and remark that I don't seem as old as I am.

OMG! I knew him when that photo was new!

There is really not a lot to see and do in Newport unless you are interested in driving around to see the many mansions built by the wealthy from cities like New York and Boston in the 19th century, as homes to escape from the summer heat. However, if you are interested in tennis--as I am--there is the International Tennis Hall of Fame that is worth a visit.

Perhaps the key to acceptance was the fact that there always seemed to be some integral family members who were gay. I mentioned that I knew others in my extended family. I knew my father's Cousin Fred and his "special friend" when I was young. I had my own Cousin Fred on my mother's side of the family: he was a very discreet high school principal, and his family knew that his marriage of convenience to a female teacher was strictly platonic for both of them, because he was really attracted to young men. His younger sister, my Cousin Phyllis, was not discreet: she and her lesbian partner were active in the gay rights movement. Fred's and Phyllis's only sibling who was straight was their younger brother. On my mother's side there was also my Cousin Pete, a retired Navy officer, who was happily married to his wife, and his only daughter is also happily married to her wife. To be strongly anti-gay, the family would have had to reject too many beloved members.

No wonder he's smiling!

My parents were active Christian Republicans whose highest academic degree was a high school diploma. In retrospect, it does seem unusual they were able to fairly easily adapt to having a son and a son-in-law rather than a daughter-in-law. My father's family fit the same definition, yet in the early 20th century they also seemed able to accept Cousin Fred and his "special friend." I don't know what it was about their backgrounds that made them so rational about homosexuality, because to me they always seemed quite conservative on other subjects. I personally knew at least one family member in each generation who was homosexual.