Confessions of a Str8 Gay Man

So why are we so wedded to our cells?

Same reasons as everybody else not using them purely for business, like male escorts setting up appointments between appointments, or those Lexus convertible boys cutting deals during South Florida’s real estate boom, you know, the same guys checking the dumpsters now because they pissed all their $$$ away while the sun shined. A busy cell phone is a symbol you’re loved, a security blanket that you’re not alone in this shitty world. I swear some guys fake calls just so people think they have friends.

But that’s where the problem is. Because in my mind, it’s cell phones and smart-phones and, yes, the web that are actually separating us, not bringing us closer together.Guys in the bars are texting  instead of talking and guys at their laps (or on their smart phones at work on their laps to hide their hard-on) are j-oing over some hottie’s pics and IM’s, not as foreplay to the real thing with the guy, but as the “real” thing itself.

Hell, there’s a new high tech toy out now you can hook up to your pc to stick over your dick or up your butt to simulate sex with the porn star of your wet dreams who’s on the screen making love just to you. Is that app on your smart-phone coming next?

Then, why will we need flesh at all?

Come to think of it, if Nokia were really enterprising and wanted to get back on top of the cell manufacturing game, they’d design a cell phone in the shape of a dildo that you could leave on vibrator. Easy to carry and definitely a good feel.

Think I got enough minutes left on my very ungay, Walmart Tracfone to call Nokia’s headquarters in Finland now?

Tomorrow: Cruising in Limbo

Sure, today cell phones are even used by homeless people (“Hey, Jimmy, there’s a shitload of aluminum cans in the dumpster next to Mickey Dee’s!”). But I think the guy who invented the cell phone had to be gay because if you’re gay and aren’t carrying one on your cock ring, the powers-that-be just might revoke your homo-license. In the bars, in the baths, in the supermarkets, on the beach, in the gym, in bed, between fucks, during fucks, we gays just can’t live without our cells. About the only place in local gaydom where they’re strictly forbidden is at the local sex club. Some nasty boys were using their C’s to take pics to send back to family and friends or, better yet, use them to jerk off over while they’re on their knees in church Sunday morning.

I think cells have almost totally replaced cruising and for some people even talking in a bar. One weekend bar night, I conducted my own rudimentary survey and found one out of every five guys dicking around with his little hi-tech playmate instead of staring at the hot guy giving him the eye across the way. A chance at the real deal squandered. Granted, maybe they’re on Grinder which can GPS the guy of your dreams right down to the wall he’s holding up in the bar, but all that satellite tracking is meaningless if there isn’t some, good old fashioned inter-action. In fact, some guys I’ve encountered would prefer texting in the bar to talking – huh?

A hot young guy recently came onto me on one of the hook-up sites big time. I asked for his cell number so I could call him (I always want to hear the voice) to which he replied he wanted me to text him instead. When I e-d him that my primeval Tracfone didn’t have the texting feature, he responded: “Guess that’s a deal breaker then.”

But my ultimate cell phone faux pas moment was the young hot guy I spotted chatting away on his cell while bobbing in the ocean at Sebastian Beach, Lauderdale’s gay hangout in the sun. I looked at him like he was nuts. He just smiled demurely back and went on chitchatting. I was praying for some big wave to knock it out of his hand or get it wet (can you get electrocuted by a wet cell??), but no luck.

A close second was the guy at the Ybor Resort and Spa in Tampa who was on his cell phone in the dry sauna at 2 a.m. as four guys were getting it on two feet away.

I hate cells and rarely use my humble, very ungay Tracfone. I have it in my car for emergencies, or for that occasional convenience call when I’m lost looking for a trick’s address because the fuck gave me a bogus one. You see, when I was back in NYC as a senior hospital PR exec handling media, I had to practically carry my cell phone into the shower. You become so jaded in this business that when someone gets shot and lingers on, you wish they just died so all those three o’clock in the morning calls from the media would end. That happened one night when a cop was shot by some lowlife and I had $150 theatre tickets to some hot show whose name has since been lost in my memory bank. When I got the beep from the hospital that he had died, I spent the break between acts out on West 44^th Street calling a dozen media outlets with the news. One pain in the ass.

Tomorrow – So why are we so wedded to our little tech toys?

“You Party?”

The first time a guy asked me that ( I think in a bathhouse), I figured he was ready to share a six pack of vodka coolers. I learned pretty quick that he was either looking for a fellow druggie to sniff or smoke with, or more likely, some free stuff.

Listen, if anybody should have been on drugs, c’est moi. Raised by a slightly psychotic mother who my sainted father wouldn’t rap, I was a lonely, highly introverted, nerdie adolescent, self conscious, not about being “different,” but about the fur sprouting all over a body that was made to play sports. Feeling unpopular and unloved, I thought of suicide more than once.

But at a point in my life where turning to addiction would have been oh so easy, I instead refocused my energies into building a career, and became a successful public relations executive in New York, and later an educator in Florida. Never once, in college. the workplace or even the scene, did I buy drugs or pursue them. Not even grass which never gave me a real high. (Give me a Long Island iced tea any day.) But, hey, if a trick offered me a line or handed me the pipe, why not experiment on his dime, right? Though I confess I’m an addictive personality in other ways, I was never concerned I’d get hooked. Nor did I.

No, the real problem I quickly discovered, even in my pre-Viagra days where a billboard of Markie Mark would give me a raging boner, was that while coke or crystal meth puts you in seemingly Perpetual Arousal, Horned Up Heaven, Mr. Peter is taking a nap. For me, if I and the guy can’t get it up – isn’t the penis the reason we like men? – well, what’s the point, pray tell? Apparently, not a problem for the drugheads I’ve encountered over the years, even the ones butch as hell with a nine inch dong between their legs, who love ending up being bottoms. High on shit, they can lie there for days getting fucked while Mr. Hard does all the work, that is, if there were an army of dicks at their beck and call. Safe sex? Huh?

Another sidebar to partying is the eventual paranoia, like the time one cokehead I was playing with suddenly got all uptight, stared at his pc, and stammered, “You think the cops are camming me?”

I had a fuck buddy years ago in Jersey whom I rendezvoused with at his place after work. We’d start in the living room with a beer, then we’d have a joint, then we’d move upstairs to the bedroom where we’d each sniff a line. By the time we were ready for more shit, our dicks weren’t.

Or take my 6 foot, 4 cowboy from Austin, Texas, who met me at my snowbird condo in Lauderdale. After getting high on his coke, we caroused on the outdoor terrace, rolling around in perpetual horniness but unable to even jerk off.

Then there was New York transplant Mitch, my meth-head clone, 5 foot, 8, humpy, hairy, and handsome, whom I knew I could fall in love with if I let myself but didn’t, and who despite a thick uncut cock wanted me to fuck him all night. But after a mutual feast of meth and G, all I could do was use my fist.

And yes, over the years I’ve even had my string of train wrecks who, once they unveiled their pipes, made us both feel like Sex Gods. At least for the first few drags.

So today, when I’m on the web and a guy, after making me think he’s really interested in having sex with me, drops the bombshell, “You party?”- now I know what he’s really fishing for is free drugs – my stock response is: “No, I don’t, you can if you like, but I ain’t got any stuff.”

You wanna know how fast he disappears into cyberspace?

Tomorrow: Gays and Their Cell phones, I-phones, Smart Phones, Blackberrys – You Get The Drift

Now before you start throwing rocks, send the Ebola virus to my laptop, or slash my tires the next time I’m in the Walmart parking lot, hear me out first.

We continually moan and groan how straights and hetero society are constantly shitting on us, denying us our civil rights, segregating us to second class citizenship, etc., etc., etc. It may all or partially be true. But, yes, here comes the but, do we ever stop and look at how we treat one another?

1. Do you give a genuine compliment without waiting to get one first?
2. If you’ve been blessed with the ideal gene pool – you’re 6’4, built like a brick shithouse and have the face the average woman in America would undergo a mastectomy to have between her legs – if you’ve been blessed with something you had absolutely nothing to do with, are you grateful for your luck? ‘Cause that’s all it is. Do you give us lesser folk a genuine welcoming smile, or do you look at us as if we had shit in our ears if we, God forbid, say hello? Or give that vacant “do I really need to talk to you?” stare. Just because he’s friendly doesn’t mean he wants your dick like the rest of the world. Remember, that 4’6” nerd who’s honest about himself and realistic about others may be happier with the memories of that one guy he slept with all last year than you are with your last ten tricks.
3. Also remember, the average height of an American male is 5’9” (I guess because of all that hot Italian and Slavic blood), so when one of these short, humpy guys is trying to get around your bubble butt in a dark bar, please look around and let him. Yes, Virginia, there is a world six inches beneath that beautiful mouth of yours.
4. Are you a 45 year old man who still prances around like you were 25?
5. If a guy who’s not drunk or high comes up to you to give you a compliment, do you at least politely in a non-committal way thank him even if he’s not your type, or do you give him your “you talkin’ to me” glare?
6. If you work in a gay business, are you truly interested in the needs of your customers, or are they instead an intrusion ( read pain in the ass) when all you really want to do is rattle away on your unlimited minutes cell?
7. If you’re a customer, do you treat the help like shit because, after all, only a “loser” faggot would be working at homo haunts for minimum wage?
8. Are you all botox and bullshit and gym reps and steroids and couldn’t carry on conversation without dropping Lady Gaga or Rihanna’s name at least a dozen times?
9. If you set a date up with someone and then can’t make it or simply change your mind (hey, nobody’s got a gun to your head to have sex with me), do you, at least, call that person back and let them down easy rather than not call them at all while they’re waiting for you in front of some bar? Or if you set up a webdate, do you just not bother showing, or give out a phony address or phone number? Is your life that small that this the only way you have domination over people?
10. Do you turn on your tres gay button and camp it up in very public mainstream places like airport lounges so straights have another stereotypical reason to piss on us?
11. Are you honest about your HIV status, or don’t care because all you want to do is bareback?
12. Do you vow to be loyal and true and then screw around anyway when you should have been honest from the beginning and let the chips fall as they may?
13. Do you only focus on, and make fun of strangers’ and friends’ shortcomings instead of helping them or showing some kind of support?

Yep, we’ve come a long way baby. But we still have a long way to go.

Tomorrow – What do you say when some prospective tricks asks: “You Party?”

I recently got around to reading an article I clipped on sex addiction than ran more than a year ago in Time magazine and wondered if I, like so many of us in The Life who are mesmerized by cock in this 24/7 web age, fit the definition.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe not.

The American Psychiatric Association, which is still grappling with whether sex addiction is a disease at all, defines hypersexual disorder as spending so much time pursuing intercourse or masturbation as to interfere with your job or other important activities. I guess what they mean by “other important activities” is social interaction, the responsibilities of daily living, etc.

OK, I can buy that if you’re constantly getting a hard-on by your desk at work fantasizing over the cutie in the next cubicle or the daddy on your pc screen instead of working on that report for the boss; or you call in sick because you were on an all night bender edging yourself up on X-Tube til four in the morning.  And your place looks like a contender for the next installment of that hoarders series.

But what if you live alone, don’t have a wifey or kids to contend with, or have a partner who’s on auto pilot, you work from home, are retired, or fulfill your 9 to 5 duties, do your food shopping or laundry, and than spend the rest of the evening thinking about dick?  Is that interfering with your job or other “important activities”? Is it worse than some jock beer-bellied wannabe watching football or baseball six nights a week or obsessed with violent video games on his X-Box? Or some meth head getting perpetually high?

Hey, I teach college level writing online (thankfully not in real time), and in between grading papers, reviewing assignments or responding to students’ e-mails, I’ll check the hook –up sites as a reward to see if anybody loves me. (He loves, he loves me not, he loves me …).

Now the APA definition of hyperactive sex doesn’t distinguish between intercourse ( i.e.,  actual in-the-flesh hookups) and masturbation, and while studies show regular sex with a committed partner once a day is healthy, only 3% of horny college age men reported they got off that many times with their dick in a hole. So does that mean guys who get it less than seven times a week are just as less healthy as guys who get it a lot more?

Me and fellow gay guys I know here in Lauderdale average 2 to 3 in the flesh web or sex club spurts a week minimally, and probably twice that amount playing with ourselves on  our laptops. After all, it’s not our fault the web has made access to homo porn as easy as taking a piss.  Or that sexy men are everywhere here in sunny SoFlo, including the supermarket. But does that make us sickos?

As I already surmised as an amateur sociologist, sexuality, according to the experts, including orientation and level of your horniness, involves your brain’s hormonal system which is regulated by our inherited genetic make-up but also molded by environment. (See my blog, “Shades of Gay,” 8/19/2011.)

Whether it is a form of diversion or recreation, or borne out of boredom, the desire to be wanted, or just plain lust, is wanting to get it on for real or virtually all that wrong if we have the rest of our life’s ducks in a row?

As for the reclusive isolationism a runaway sexual appetite padlocked to a pc may create, more and more, thanks to camming, smart phones and texting, haven’t all of our direct face-to-face social encounters taken a nosedive?

So as the Time article astutely concluded: “Should we regard out of the control sexual behavior as an extreme version of normal sexuality or an illness?”

What do YOU think?

Tomorrow: Gay Pride – Proud About What?

Underwear nite at Ramrod, Lauderdale’s leather bar and I make the stupid mistake of picking up Gilberto, a Brazilian transplant/loser who promptly falls asleep after 90 seconds of inglorious sex, if you could call it that.  Ah, but that wasn’t the end of my misery.

Complication #2: Gilberto snores. Not only does he snore; he snores loudly. And not only does he snore loudly, he begins humming tunes. In his sleep. By 5 a.m., I’ve had it with the snoring and the humming and my dogs’ whining. I get up, walk over to my other bedroom where my dogs follow me and proceed to jump on the bed. So here I am, with another man in my house, sleeping like I always do, alone, with my dogs.

Is there something wrong with this picture, folks?

About 7, I get up, determined to see Mr. Peter is satisfied and climb back into bed with my proper stranger who is sprawled out on his back. I begin to softly stroke Gilberto’s crotch. He stirs, then turns again on his side.

“You wanna play a little?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant.

He turns to me, and replies, “I -I tired,” with a faint smile, then returns to his snooze.

“Oh,” says I, ready to drag him out to the patio, tie one of my 60 pound dumbbells around his neck and throw him either into my pool or off my dock into the canal. But instead I play it cool. “I’ve got an appointment this morning so we’re leaving at 8. I’ll wake you when I’m ready.” The only reason I’ve decided to wait is my nosey-haven’t been-fucked-since-her-divorce-fifteen-years-ago neighbor doesn’t leave for work until about then and I don’t want her gawking from her kitchen window as I lead this loser out of my house.

Like a day trader checking the overnight Asian markets, I’m flipping through the websites frankly to kill time when “Morning Blower” pops up on my Manhunt mail screen. Not a bad looker, he wants to do me, RIGHT NOW.  I try to negotiate a later time, but no deal. I surmise he leaves for work by 9 and wants to have a smile on his face and a smudge of cum on his lips when he walks into the office that morning. Plus, he’s in a neighborhood just past where I plan to unload Gilberto.

So I wake the fuck up, tell him to get dressed, and one minute after my neighbor pulls out of her driveway, Gilberto and I hit the road. As I drive over to a nearby supermarket lot where he asks me to drop him off, he tells me his “roommate” is a teacher and, given Gilberto’s unemployed status, is probably keeping him. Are some people that afraid of being alone?

I look at my car clock. I have exactly seventeen minutes to find 910 NE 17th Terrace before Morning Blower leaves for work.

Complication #3: One bad thing about living in Lauderdale, the Venice of America, is that streets abruptly die in midstream, coming back to life on the other side of some friggin canal. I get lost, irretrievably lost, and when I finally manage to find my destined address, it’s ten after 9 and Morning Blower is already gone. And with him, Mr. Peter’s last shot at happiness.

An hour later, having my Wheaties and coffee, I call Bill to see how he made out with Green Polo. “You mean that fuckin’ weirdo,” Bill mutters. “He grabbed my cock for about ten seconds, then said he had to get up early for work and just strolled away.”

I hate to say it, but misery loves company and I took secret delight in knowing both of us had gotten the shaft. But, as God is my witness, as God is my witness, the next time I play Motel 6, I want to get paid – Florida room tax included.

And as if the Gay God was looking down and had mercy on my neglected dick, several underwear nights later, I hooked up with a tall, hot guy from L.A., and as luck would have it, a week later, with a shy, hot guy from Canada.

No room tax charged.

Tomorrow – When is Sex Addiction Not Sex Addiction?

You think you’ve done the very last, totally stupid thing in your life when – guess what? – you do it again.

It’s Tuesday night in Lauderdale, underwear night at the Ramrod, where if you’re a confirmed exhibitionist and amateur alcoholic like me, you can get free drinks from midnight till one a.m. by just prancing around in your undies. No problem for my bud Bill and me, seasoned veterans of Haulover, Miami’s nude beach.

It’s ten to one and I challenge anyone to find another bar, straight or gay, in these United States with more people in it – near naked or otherwise – on a Tuesday night. Even if some of the bozos roaming the bar in jeans and T’s are more interested in playing with their smart phones than staring at the bulges in front of them.

I’ve guzzled down my three-going-on-four rum and cokes when this tall, lanky, sorta handsome guy with tousled hair and a Fu Manchu goatee begins cruising me on the patio bar. With my usual inhibitions thrown to the wind, courtesy of all that free booze, I walk up to him. From the corner of my eye, I see Bill, with his bright yellow pouchy undies, make a play for a pleasant enough looking guy in a green polo and jeans. As Fu Manchu gropes my chest and I unbutton his loose flannel shirt and sneak a peek at his, also hairy, I can see Bill strolling away with Mr. Green Polo. Double score I think smugly to myself as my guy, Gilberto, a Brazilian transplant of German descent (that explains the European looks) living in Lauderdale for the past eighteen years, agrees to come home with me. I slip on my gym shorts.

Complication #1: Gilberto, who between the back bar and the front entrance tells me he has been thrown out of his apartment for the night after a knock-down fight with his roommate, has come on bike. Schwinn, not Harley. He offers to follow me over, but my Honda Element very neatly swallows up his bike and makes getting him in my bedroom a bit easier.

OK, now it’s 1 :30, my three doggies with their zap’em anti-barking collars are quietly milling around in the living room while in the back bedroom, Gilberto and I, down to our undies, (“Keep them on,” he says with a sly smile in his thick Portuguese accent, “I like.”) start getting it on. Just as I’m ready to dive down on his piece, still imprisoned in his Hanes, Gilberto taps me on the shoulder and asks, “You smoke?” Instinctively I remember the one ash tray in the house is out on the patio and I sneak out to retrieve it while my doggies begin whining ever so softly (remember, the barking collars) as I once again slam the bedroom door behind them.

For the next forty five minutes, we smoke, get high, and talk Latin American politics. While Gilberto may be an out-of-work house painter, he’s no dumb faggot and, in fact, rather articulate, even if his broken English somehow doesn’t fit someone who claims he’s been living here in the States, first Jersey, then Florida, for the last twenty of his forty-six years, almost half his life.

Finally, finally, we get down to doing the nasty which lasts as long as it takes Gilberto to light his pipe. Bing, bang, boom, he shoots over my belly after barely a lick while my Mr. Peter patiently remains at full attention, waiting for His turn which never comes. You see, Gilberto is “very tired” and wants to turn in. So, hoping for some action in the middle of the night or certainly by the dawn’s early light, I switch off the bed stand lamp and strip off my underwear. Gilberto stops me in mid unveiling and puts his own back on. “I like,” he reiterates. So I shove my pole back in snuggly and hope for better later.

Now, what I should have done at this point was tell him to get his fuckin’ German/Brazilian ass out of my bed and drop him and his bike off at the nearest Seven Eleven. But the eternal optimist in me says no.

It’s pretty rare I bring a guy home (even with G, my partner 1,340 miles away in PA’s Poconos), so I figure at least I’d take advantage of a warm man’s body next to me, certainly a change from my three furry companions who, just outside the door, have raised their whining to an Excedrin headache level. We clasp hands romantically for all of seven minutes. Then Gilberto turns away from me onto his side. I do the same, at this point content to just get some shut eye.

Ah, but there’s more …

So what separated the real Mc Coy Sleaze Factor bars of the New York City West Village of yesteryear from today’s S wannabes?

• Dress code: You didn’t see any polo shirt types with $100 designer jeans. Or flip flops or Bermuda shorts. The more ragged the better. At the Lure, it didn’t matter what you looked like; if you were wearing sneakers or, Jesus, after-shave or cologne, Mr. Bouncer would turn you away.
• Wall-to-wall men: There was no place, I mean NO PLACE, to move except against another sweaty body in bars the size of the men’s section at any Macy’s. Show me how many men’s bars that size are that crowded on a weekend night today.
• The smells: Sweaty arm pits and chests, beer-laden piss, even carcasses (The Lure, in the heart of the now chic Meat Market, was once a meat packing warehouse).
• Cruising – Big Time: You walk into a bear bar today shirtless and no one gives you a glance. Then, that was the ONLY reason you were there.
• A sense of history: Even if it was more illusion than reality, these holes had the dingy, dreggy look as if they had been there from the early days of NYC’s pre-gay liberation when being queer meant belonging to some truly secret society of men, not a sub-cultural demographic dissected by Congress and wooed by Corporate America.

And on Summer Sunday late afternoons from 4 until about 8, the Sleaze torch was handed over to the Dugout at West and Christopher. There, sweaty men, half naked men flooded the corner, searching for the one last fling or two of the weekend before Monday morning reality came crashing down on all our respective little shitty worlds.

If they hadn’t become victims of the real estate boom of the last decade that transformed this abandoned sector of New York into a new Soho, (though I understand it’s still called the Meat Packing District), NYC’s gay sleaze alley might still be with us. But alas, that was not to be. While City dwellers and tourists can still point to places like the Rawhide and Ty’s (sorry, guys, I don’t put the current Eagle in that league), it just ain’t the same without the West Village threesome, smelly corners of the world that every leather/levi bar today, whether it realizes it or not, is seeking to emulate, replicate, recreate.

Today, the Dugout is an abandoned rusting relic up for sale, where the Lure once ruled is now a sleek physical therapy center, and I understand an art gallery now occupies the space that the Spike called home.

I’m just hoping some gay historian had the smarts to save the“Don’t Flush for Piss” sign in the Spike’s john before they painted the wall over mauve.

Tomorrow: My Ramrod Underwear Nite from Hell

You know what’s disappearing big time in today’s scene? The Sleaze Factor. Today, too many bars are interior designer sparkling, like they were the “after” of some Bravo house make-over show. Christ, you can even smell the fresh coat of Sherman Williams. One famous leather bar in a minor league metropolis once oozed with the S Factor but lost it recently to a mutilating, emasculating redo, and now sports perfectly purple walls and nicely stained railings straight out of a Home Depot commercial.

No, no, no! I want the smell of piss to savor, cheap yellow lights to leer under, peeling black paint to smudge against my torn T-shirt, scraped, crumbling concrete under my boots, pool tables stained by Bud Lites, pre-cum and sweat.

And though only a few bars dared to sport them, backroom dark corners where shadows sucked and fucked in porn brazen brilliance.

I want the real raw deal, the kind of dark, dank atmosphere that made your dick quiver even before your first grope of the night.

There was a sign stenciled in white on the black wall of the tight, SRO-style john at one of NYC’s sleaziest West Village bars, the Spike. “Don’t Flush for Piss.” That sign said it all.

True, you can still find the S Factor at Lauderdale’s Ramrod leather bar and our town’s Slammers sex club (though the S at both is more a re-creation like the Wild Wild West in Disneyworld), and echoes of the glory days at Philly’s Bike Stop, D.C’s Eagle, Chelsea’s Rawhide, and Christopher Street’s Ty’s. But for real authentic sleaze you’d have to take a time machine back to New York City’s West Village Sleaze Alley threesome, the Spike, the Eagle and the Lure.

For anybody in the leather/levi scene of decades past and living in New York, visiting these bars on a Friday and Saturday night was a given. You wouldn’t just visit one of them even if essentially the same guys frequented all three. You’d have your early evening beer at the Rawhide in Chelsea (for those of us who came in from the ‘burbs parking in the West 20’s was saner). But by 11ish you were trotting your levied ass (or bare one if you were wearing chaps under your trench) down to West Street. The streets were dimly lit and kinda scary to be honest, but you didn’t care. You were butch (with no shirt under your leather jacket on a 10 degree NYC January night so your tits were all perky for your grand unveiling in the bar) and about to enter Manhattan’s Butch Zone. The S bars were all within reasonable walking distance of one another, so making the circuit was easy even with the wind blowing in your face.

And when you’re Saturday night horny, four or five blocks in sub-zero weather means nothing.

Tomorrow: So what separates the real Mc Coy Sleaze Factor bars of yesteryear from today’s S wannabes?

No, I’m not going to be talking here about gay nudist groups since, frankly, I don’t have much working knowledge of them. What I am going to talk about is the compulsion by gay guys to want to take some or all of their clothes off whenever they can and as fast as they can in a host of public or quasi-public places. From bars and bathhouses to beaches and campgrounds, showing some skin can be both an exhibitionist’s and voyeur’s delight. Since not everyone has a body by God, however, the eye candy results are definitely in the eyes of the beholder.

First, there’s the bars, at least the bars who let us go shirtless, what’s left of the men’s bar scene, that is. In NYC, where I spent my younger, formative gay years, it was just about every bar in the now long gone West Village scene. Hell, it could be 10 degrees out, and those were the days when I, living the burbs, had to walk blocks from where I parked my car to where the bars were. But that didn’t stop me from only wearing a T under my leather jacket, both of which were quickly disposed of once I got to my destination.

Here in Lauderdale, we’ve got Bill’s, the bear bar, though I’m usually in the minority when it comes to shirtless men; and of course, the Ramrod, our leather/levi hole, where you look a bit weird if you still have a shirt on. Even on a Saturday night, you’ll find a few exhibitionists only wearing a jockstrap, but on Tuesday nights, when you get free drinks from midnight to one a.m. if you have the balls to show up only in your underwear, the place is loaded.

On the beaches, pouches rule, and while more tradition swim trunks are making something of a comeback, bikinis still seem to be in vogue.

When it comes to stripping down completely, you’ve got just about every gay guesthouse with its “clothing optional” pool scene, a great way to examine the merchandise before buying. No wonder guys never call the men they lined up on the web before they left New York, Chicago or D.C. for their sub-tropical vacation; bare dick and ass is all right there for the picking and one friendly gesture and he’s in your room or you in his. How convenient.

The same rules apply at our two gay campgrounds, Mars, about two hours from Lauderdale, and Sawmill, just outside Tampa, both of which feature no-clothes pools. On theme weekends, like Leather Daddy, Sawmill allows you walk around in the all together almost anywhere on the camp grounds. Just hope the guy you meet has a cabin or a trailer; making it in a tent can be a bit too claustrophobic for me.

At the bathhouses or places like Lauderdale’s Leather Inn which not only sports a clothing optional pool but outdoor hideaways to fuck and suck in in broad daylight, going au naturale is more than just showing off what you got, it’s part of the foreplay.

In fact, about the only venue where gay nudity doesn’t have to have sex as a component is on the gay section of Haulover Beach, just outside Miami, So Flo’s only nude sandbox, where you can truly throw away the last vestiges of civilization and become one with nature.

That is until that hot motherfucker with the body by God and the dick the size of an Italian deli sausage decides to lay three feet from your blanket.

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