Charlie

Like most males, I have my own preferences in physical surface features of a sex partner, which I won't elaborate on here. For me, however, the most important aspect in a provider (beside a reasonable fee agreed upon in advance), is that I have to feel that he is actually interested in having sex with me, not just with anyone who opens a wallet. I let the sex acts develop as spontaneously as I would with an unpaid partner (I don't have a pre-set scenario), but if I don't get the sense that he is enjoying whatever it is that we do, I probably won't enjoy it either. I stopped hiring when I could no longer convince myself that this gorgeous hunk was truly turned on by sex with this old man.

I am old enough to have lived through the early AIDS crisis and watched friends die before the disease even had a name. I was active in a gay rights organization in the 1980s, and took over running the AIDS Information Hotline in a major city when the woman who started it couldn't handle it any longer because she found it too upsetting. After the "crisis" was over, I had friends who had survived but were still dealing with the illness; my best friend since high school died in 1996, and the cause of death was listed as cancer, but those who knew him well were aware that he had been diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s, and when asked, his sister, a medical technician, still says, "He died of AIDS." A close friend's lover died of AIDS in 1987, and for the rest of his long life he was always questioning whenever he developed physical problems: "Is it really from AIDS that's dormant in me?" And, of course, for many of us there is always "survivor's guilt"--"I was as sexually slutty as he was; why didn't I get it?" AIDS has turned into another preventable or controllable disease, but one that unfortunately is still associated in everyone's mind with gay sex, so unlike most diseases, in the minds of many people it still carries overtones of punishment for something one shouldn't have done. I am glad that the focus nowadays is shifting more towards controlling the disease than blaming those who have contracted it.

I scored only 55 out of 90, which makes me wonder exactly how they define "kinky." I expected to be asked more specific questions (like, "Are you turned on by a hairy ass?")

I had the problem this morning, and all it said was there was a "technical error" each time I tried to log on. Lucky just texted me that it had been fixed, and I logged on normally just now.

One of my neighbors goes wild with Halloween decorations for her yard, starting in early October and adding something else every day. Now she has a severed head on the ground that starts talking when you approach it--it freaks out my dog.

If this is true, then shouldn't you also wash your asshole every day as well?

The last time I slept on the Queen Mary it was docked in Long Beach, CA. Oh, sorry, that was the old Queen Mary.

Well, he is a RETRIEVER, after all. (All the items seem to have been things that have been touched by his owners, and he may be able to smell their scent on the items, even if we couldn't.)

Do they live in a state that permits inter-species marriage?

I have known closeted gay men who married women, but the marriage usually ended after the man came out--e.g., my brother-in-law's step children are his husband's children by his former wife (and they are all open about the relationships). I also know men who married women before they came to terms with their own sexuality. But I have never known an openly gay man who married a straight woman, or an openly gay woman who married a straight man.

The photos I take with my iPhone also show up on my iPad, and vice versa, so they must be cached on a cloud somewhere.

If you "had been looking at Rentboy and Hooboy's sites for years," what motivated you to finally take the plunge?

It won't be published until after I am safely under the ground.

It is true that in a place like NYC there are lots of other options for cruising nowadays, like gay bars, but some of us grew up when the social options were very different, so we still remember when public toilets were the only place where we could handle our cocks in public, much less make sexual overtures to another male. Old habits die hard. Then there are also the closeted gays who don't want to be seen in openly gay surroundings, and want to be able to plausibly claim, "I just came here because I needed to use the bathroom." I went to college in a small city in farm country. One evening in the college library, I went to use the men's room, and when I sat down in a stall, the foot in the next stall started a tapping routine that I immediately recognized from my experience in Manhattan public men's rooms. When I returned the message, we both left and met outside in the hall. The guy turned out to be a former student who now lived in town, and I went home with him. After we had concluded our business at his place, I asked him why he was cruising in the college library. He said that all the actively gay men in the town knew that the library men's room was the standard place in town to pick up tricks, and if the guy in the adjoining stall didn't respond to the tapping foot, he probably didn't know what it meant and wasn't available. It was easy enough to just leave and start looking for something on the library book shelves, as if that were the only reason he was there. Unfortunately, one evening the tapping foot turned out to belong to one of my professors. When he emerged from the stall and I saw who it was, I was dumbfounded, because he was the last person I would have wanted to have sex with, but I couldn't very well refuse after having signaled with my foot that I was available. Luckily, the semester was almost over, and I took no more courses with him.

Victim was the first film about gays that I ever saw. I took my best friend's sister with me to an art theater to see it. My best friend was gay, which she knew, and I'm sure it affected her attitude toward the fact.

I also get those icloud messages in one of my imail spam folders. I have ignored them for weeks because I don't know if they are real. New photos that I take with the phone continue to show up on the phone's photo storage.

Alas! My very first sexual experience began in a men's room of a public transit terminal in midtown Manhattan. I might still be a virgin if it weren't for that! 🙄

I'm wondering how one finds reliable statistics on such a subject. I would think most of these generalizations are based on anecdotal information, because many gay couples are not legally married, so they don't file tax returns with that status, and single gays don't file as "gay." Most gays probably don't even reveal their actual incomes to their friends; I can only guess at the incomes of even my closest friends.

His photos look like they were taken over a fairly long period of time: the farther you click to the right, the younger he gets.

Tylenol hadn't yet been invented when my mother was pregnant with me, so I can't use that as an excuse.

One thing an executor needs to be told is that the unraveling of all the details in a will can sometimes take a long time. As an example, a deposit from Social Security showed up in my bank account this month that left me baffled at first. The sum was the same amount that my late spouse--who died last year--had received as his monthly benefit. I thought I would have to make an appointment with SS to get an explanation. By checking his bank records, however, I discovered that he never received his last monthly benefit check. I suspected that SS was very slow in finally sending that check after they were notified of his death, but when it arrived at the bank, his old account had already been closed, so the bank simply transferred it to me as the executor, but didn't inform me of that. Today I finally got a letter from SS explaining that my suspicions were correct.

I suspect they may be looking for a "Daddy Warbycks." (If they are old enough to remember "Little Orphan Annie)

The only people with whom I share my history of hiring is the people I have met from this site. I can't remember anyone else ever having asked if I have hired. It's not a subject that usually comes up in social conversation.

40 didn't really bother me. However, at 62, I decided it was time to take up some kind of serious regular exercise, and I played tennis for the first time. I am still playing a couple of times a week at 82, and am still fairly spry. But not as spry as the doubles tennis partner I had the other day: he was 79, and his wife had given birth to their first child the day before.

I am currently reading Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York by Richard M. Ketchum. I think it is probably the best history I have ever read about the origins of the American Revolutionary War. (And believe me, as a former resident of New York, Philadelphia and London, I have read a lot of histories of that period.)