Charlie

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.

Well, I actually did come out to my parents more than 60 years ago. My point is that you should not feel like you are confessing to a sin when you come out, but are simply explaining to them a situation about which they are confused. If you or they feel that it is a sin that you have revealed, that is a separate problem to be dealt with.

I think that most parents would rather that their child have a stable relationship with one person they like, of whichever gender, than promiscuous sex with multiple persons they don't know, of whichever gender. I think of "coming out" to family as simply explaining which gender one is sexually attracted to, rather than explaining all about whatever kind of sexual activity one actually engages in. I certainly would never have told my parents about gay bath-houses or sex parties, or the kinds of experiences that are usually discussed on this site, any more than I would have told them if I patronized female prostitutes. Remember: "coming out" is explanation, not confession.

I just had my annual physical, and my doctor performed the regular old prostate exam two days ago. There hasn't been anything up that chute since my last physical, and I had almost forgotten what it feels like. Luckily, my doctor is gay, so he knows how to do it professionally. (He said everything felt fine to his experienced fingers.)

I still have rolls of toilet paper and paper towels that I bought at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.🙄

I mentioned in an earlier post here that when I told my parents that I was gay, they were "bemused." I actually expected that kind of calm reaction from my father. One of his closest friends as he was growing up was his cousin Fred, who turned out to be quietly gay. Fred continued to live with his widowed mother as an adult, but he had a "special friend" who lived elsewhere. As a child, I noticed that this "special friend" was always invited to family get-togethers, and was usually the only non-family-member present, but none of the adults ever seemed to notice or comment on this anomaly. It wasn't until I was an adult myself that I put two and two together and I realized that the "special friend" was actually Cousin Fred's partner, even though they didn't live together. I don't know if Fred actually "came out" or discussed his sexuality with other family members, but obviously they were aware and accepted the situation. Whether they thought about the sexual aspect of the relationship or only the emotional aspect I can't tell. When I came out, my mother only asked, "How do you know?" and I couldn't help laughing.

I just got home from my annual physical, during which my doctor recommended getting the COVID shot again.

Like anything else about someone's physical appearance, sometimes they are attractive and sometimes they are not--it depends on whether they are done by a pro or are self-inflicted, all the same color or multi-colored, small or huge, placed in an appropriate location on the body (any kind of facial tat is a turn-off for me, for example). However, observers often read other kinds of messages about a person from his tattoos. Lots of them make me think: what is he trying to hide or distract the observer from? Is he ashamed of his arms, or his legs? Some tattoos seem to be intended as visual messages about the person (why did he get THAT tat?). Tattoos per se neither turn me on nor turn me off, but they do make me think twice about why the person has them.

I realized that I was sexually attracted to other males when I was an adolescent, but I was aware that I wasn't supposed to be, so I wasn't open about it, since it was assumed that boys who were attracted to other boys were rather obviously effeminate, and I wasn't. Yet the male friend whom I was most closely drawn to in high school turned out to be not only gay but already sexually active, though he didn't announce it either. It wasn't until after I had my first sexual experience at 17 with an older male, and told him about it, that he revealed to me that he had been having sex with older males for years, but also was not open about it. We were not sexually attracted to one another, so coming out to one another didn't affect our relationship, although I think some of our classmates suspected that we might both be gay, since we spent so much time together. I think I have told the story on this site before about my having a nervous breakdown at 19 because I was involved in a non-sexual romantic relationship with a girl, and the psychotherapist my parents sent me to told me that I would get relief by being honest about my sexuality with my family and my girlfriend. So I came out to my parents, who were bemused, and to the girlfriend, who was confused. I didn't announce my orientation to the world, but if anyone was interested enough to ask me, I didn't deny that I was gay. By my mid-20s, however, I was starting to become radicalized by gay friends who were active in the gay rights movement (this was the 1960s), and from then on I was openly out. Amazingly, I don't think I ever suffered in any way from my openness, because I didn't flaunt my sexual orientation--I just didn't hide it. I lived with a male partner for 56 years (legally married for the last dozen years), and family, neighbors and employers all seemed to accept the situation without comment. Maybe I was just lucky (that's with a small L).

But what model? "Explorer"? "Edge"? "Maverick"? "Bronco"? "Ranger"?

I have had the opportunity to see an enormous range of cock sizes up close in my lifetime, and I have concluded that mine is basically average size for someone my height. No one has ever complained to me that it is too small or too big.

The only pope in history who went to one of the same schools that I went to (but we were not classmates).

When I scanned the title of this thread quickly, I thought it read "A cash cow" 😬

I wonder if there could be some photo-shopping here: the head looks almost too small for the rest of the body.

As I mentioned in another thread, as soon as Trump started talking about tariffs before he was inaugurated, I decided to buy a new car immediately, even though I didn't really need one yet. I understood what the tariffs would do to the prices of all cars, because even cars assembled in America by American manufacturers usually contain parts from some other country. I even bought a leftover unsold 2024 model on a dealer's lot, so there would be no question about whether or not it was pre-tariff-imposition. A friend's elderly mother wrecked her old car a couple of weeks ago. She is trying to buy a cheap used car to replace it, but guess what?--now there is a shortage of available used cars, because owners are hesitating about trading them in for new cars that are suddenly more expensive than they expected, so of course the used cars are also more expensive than they normally would be.