Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

first date? how did you meet? brown hair, big heart, bat eyelashes?

you know Stevie it's just at first it was pandemia, and then health stuff that's going to take another 6 months to settle. just didn't realize I'd be singing the same tune for the goddamn 3-year dark ages. but whatever i'm going to get so many beauty treatments when this is all through I plan on looking like Princess Jasmine meets Bella Hadid. mark my words.

also i quit smoking forever and it's truly something else. going on 6 months.

my new issue of BUTT just arrived!!!!!!!!!

omg i already read some of the poems
how is it at large?

is it large?

C'mon Simone, let's talk about your big "but."

I haven't read it yet bcz I got it at work and then *brag alert* went straight to my fuck buddy's house for a cute date and only just got home a few hours ago!!!

butts all around

butts rule everything around me

OK SO
I'm not a butt man and i keep feeling more and more alone
like American men are just obsessed with them
i feel like there's something wrong with me

Stevo you're killin it these days

don't care about the outside, it's what's inside that counts imo

like the way it feels?

yeah! i mean not to get too tmi or too cliche i guess but i just think anuses are this incredible part of us lol and i really like experiencing them.

So! My Saturday night date sold me out. I suspected trouble when I had to text him 15 mins before meeting: he was running late thanks to a "minor emergency" at his parents', whatever that means (what's a "minor" emergency?). Luckily a friend kept me company at the bar.

An hour later, date texts: "On my way, send location address plz?" That's the last I heard of him. For a while I thought he died -- until I saw a an Instagram post Sunday morning.

He's 24, a former student who emailed me four years after class to ask about getting a beer or coffee. On determining he was queer he gushed: he praised my self-assurance, brains, looks, etc. We might've met that night had I not plans already. It's worth noting I barely remember this kid in summer 2018.

I wonder if simply not showing up is a phenomenon of the young?

Anusii are a cliche?

that sucks. definitely hit next. it's been a phenomenon of the young and old as long as i've been dating tbh. xp

Yeah, I wanted to avoid generational generalization, but a few viejos noted The Vanishing has been more prevalent in the last four years.

I've ghosted more than my share, I should note.

I have never done this, to my knowledge?

me eiths it's dumb
I'm too polite though

wassup homieslice

good morning!

Mornin' sunshine!
What's on the platter?

I'm vegetarian tonight.

sexually or culinarily?

Lady Bracknell : Well, both, if necessary, I presume!

So, I’m in one of the only two gay bars in Marbella (southern coast of Spain) right now, and the thing here is that high heeled shoes are passed around, everyone tries them on, and then they take their turn swishing down what passes for a catwalk. Pleased to report that my boy got the loudest applause of the night. We make our own entertainment.

The bar is filling up because at 4am they close the doors, bring out the ashtrays, and everyone can smoke indoors.

We will be back tomorrow for drag queen bingo.

omgggggg jealous

Oh I forgot to mention the seventy something naked woman who did her catwalk turn clutching a large stuffed teddy bear.

stop

jealz to the max

Just ended a fabulous evening with j0rdan.

yesss. what did y'all do?

we went to a sports bar so i could watch basketball while we talked about madonna

...and Mariah Carey. And my terrible non-date last week.

ok well that sounds ideal (sorry for the delay how the hell do three days go by?!)

you know i saw Madonna's Mme X tour
she could still put on a show, i just wonder if it isn't time for her to maybe think about doing something else

we had dinner with Stevie last night!! and then he came back to our place and we plied him with amaro and we talked about sheryl crow and natalie merchant and celine dion and it was just a total delight <3

Amaro! Sheryl Crow! Sounds like my kind of night.

sounds like a blast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHxbxAQSQMM

uhhhhhh i had no idea wallace shawn was in a chaka khan video lol

he's in everything!
also I'm pretty sure I've had that night before lol so fun xp ❤️

wassup docs
it's eighty goddamn degrees here today
too soon yo

lovely haiku

it's only about 70 here. we've had some random bursts of heat over the past few weeks though.

next week i will be in seattle, where it's gonna be 50 and rainy no doubt. i forget, are any of y'all based there? would love recs on things and places to do/see/eat/drink there!

Wish I had more Recs than go to PONY and the gay Karaoke bar on Cap Hill, and also you simply must visit the main public library, it is everything a public library should be imho

85 degrees already

omg I've always wanted to go to Seattle

i used to love working in the library in college. I would sit in the stacks in the basement, or the art stacks which were the super cool ones. but I had no place there TBH

I miss my college library all the time.

The cops caught the arsonist of the queer bar in Bushwick. Scary story of what happened.

Not gonna lie, my queer friends, but I really am getting a lot more worried about some things, like whether my marriage will be recognized in a few years.

how is everyone doing? love to all yous

bumped into an estranged former bestie recently and it was devastating and challenging but i really enjoyed the part where we got to hang out for a couple of hours

it made me wanna meet new people! i even installed a couple of apps on my phone ('looking for pals not dates') and set my gender to nonbinary and 'show me everyone'... no matches came up until i switched it to male. i live in manhattan around the corner from a major university, unreal... of course i am mostly getting messages from guys who wanna hook up

but i don't think i can use these kind of apps it is just a terribly unpleasant and unhelpful way to connect with people, will probably delete before the week is out. approaching and talking to complete strangers in central park would be a million times better than this.

how can those of you who use apps for dates and such even stand it? tell me tell me

i have met one cool person and several duds through dating websites. i have never used an app, don’t plan on it tbh

I came out at the same time I discovered AOL chats in 1999. My first few hookups happened thanks to AOL.

Since then I've had several boyfriends I've met online, many of whom remain friends. Websites and apps gave me the confidence to eventually pick up dudes in bars, most recently in February.

Online vs live ain't a binary.

but i don't think i can use these kind of apps it is just a terribly unpleasant and unhelpful way to connect with people,

It really isn't. In 25 years of using them we've come back to my or his place...maybe four times? I insist on meeting at a bar or coffee shop. We usually have a puddle of interests from which we can draw conversation. If it doesn't work out one of us will call it a night; if it does, we'll make out and grope and maybe the next step but no more.

I don't know how old you are, but creating a version of yourself with which you can chat with guys is an essential part of the dating/hookup scene. Should things deepen, it's up to you whether you shelve that version.

I am with Deflatormouse, I think the apps have ruined dating and based on my own experience, they rarely deliver.

how were you hooking up in your early years? Picking up guys in person?

approaching and talking to complete strangers in central park would be a million times better than this.

yes, do it!

Since then I've had several boyfriends I've met online, many of whom remain friends

same! i've met a bunch of cool people on dating sites and very few duds, mostly ok cupid i think. that was a very different kind of environment with people crafting very thoughtful responses to the essay questions. there was a lot to sink my teeth into.

now i've installed tinder and a couple of similar apps, including one specifically aimed at meeting platonic friends. but it basically shows you tinder profiles, with everyone posting the standard issue dating app photos and revealing very little else about themselves.

it'a not an online/real life binary, no. i don't see myself picking up dudes in bars. there is too little ambiguity about what everyone is after there; i am bad at saying no.

i guess it's apparent that i want to slow things down. in fact i think that ultimately, what i want is to avoid having sex :)

but you seem to have intuited that i can't quite figure out how to create the version of myself with which i can chat. and want to bypass that part of interacting with others, i won't usually take to anyone online who doesn't cut straight to the deeper stuff. and you're right; it doesn't usually work that way.

by the way, i'm 40 and spent a year or two in my early 30's talking to strangers in new york through various outlets. it was pretty cool!

Listen, it took too many years for me to learn that no one holds a stopwatch, no one sets your rhythm to a metronome, and no one shakes his head. You set your own pace. The thought that I could've said when I was 25, "Well, no, I don't wanna have sex" would've blown my mind. In ways we are better than we were.

omg amen

i still suck with boundaries tho.
i've had some beautiful relationships with people who also suck with boundaries, it's amazing what can happen in those cases. but obviously it doesn't end well.

All my relationships began as irl meetings and were borne out of friendships (and returned to friendships afterward, save one). Except my current boyfriend! We met on Grindr in the middle of the pandemic, went on several no-contact dates getting to know each other, and eventually started dating properly once our respective pods approved of the union

The date where we first held hands under the patio table was thrilling in a Victorian sort of way

I thought of Kay Ryan's "Hide and Seek":

It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.

i still suck with boundaries tho.
i've had some beautiful relationships with people who also suck with boundaries, it's amazing what can happen in those cases. but obviously it doesn't end well.

― Deflatormouse

not necessarily! i mean, it's not a _good idea_ in general, but i really do feel positively about my relationship with my now-QPP. we kind of modeled healthy boundaries for each other. that experience was what eventually led me to break up with her, because we weren't in a place where we could have that kind of relationship, but it hasn't been a disaster or anything. we're closer in a lot of ways for having broken up. she came over today to take me to urgent care this morning (i fell in the shower and gave myself an accidental lip piercing). saturday, on my five-year tranniversary, we went to a craft fair - she loves craft fairs, i love being able to support people in their personal interests, particularly if they're not interests i share. then we went to see "hundreds of beavers", and we had just such a great time. if we were still together it would _not_ have gone that well. tomorrow morning she's coming over and we're going out to breakfast, and she'll probably make me another pot of cold brew. it's really sweet and healthy and wholesome. overall she's not necessarily doing super great, she's got some challenges going on in her life, but we can still have a good time together, have a relationship that isn't centered around anyone's trauma.

i tried dating apps and got nowhere with them. i'm pretty rejection-sensitive. dating apps for me feels like filling out job applications. here's 100 people and maybe something good might come out of one of them, and i'm just swiping, swiping, swiping, and i'm thinking wow, here's 99 people i'm not ever going to get with. because i have to look at each one of them individually, right? if i'm at a party and i'm not interested in someone i don't think about it, i'll naturally gravitate towards the people i _am_ interested in, but a dating app, it'll be like "how about her, are you interested in her?" and i'm supposed to make that decision based on, what, three pictures and a joke about the last book they read? ick.

as far as bars go, i don't drink and i have auditory processing disorder, which means that i have a hard time differentiating between different sounds in social settings. it's dark, i'm disoriented, and since i have a hard time with eye contact i'm not really looking at the other person anyway.

-

deflatormouse, i'm with you on avoiding sex. at the same time, it's easy for me to slow things down so much that it becomes kind of a "why bother?" situation. like, the major reason i broke up with my QPP was because we _weren't_ doing anything together, because she wasn't up for it, and even though it was nothing to do with me, it made me feel really inadequate. socially i feel like i'm doing really good. i got a good number of friends who i'm not interested in getting with at this particular time for various reasons, and that's nice. i love having friends who i can socialize with without that kind of "will-we-or-won't-we" tension.

it's also hard for me to talk about the stuff i'm actually _interested_ in, because there's so much shame, and i'm so afraid of rejection. particularly the stuff on the right side of the slash. stuff on the left side, i'm fairly confident about that, as long as i can trust the other person to respect my boundaries (because doms get to have boundaries too, doms get to say "no"), but on the right side? like, it's not the entirety of who i am, but it's important to me to _sometimes_ have interactions with other people where i'm submissive and femme, and my brain is telling that, you know, "every trans woman wants to be a submissive femme, nobody's going to want you that way". neither part of which is true - having put it down in writing it's really easy for me to recognize that.

i guess this is important because when it comes to building intimate relationships with people, there is something that i'm interested in, that can be done casually, where there's a potential to build something more out of it. it's just hard to talk about it though because there's so much baggage attached to it. it's the way i feel about rope, the baggage around that. for me it's like, you know how some people will just go out there and do nude modeling for painters? it's not a sex thing, people who do nude modeling for painters aren't doing it as some fetish. you know, to get good at something, it involves building one's skills. and that's one of the ways i'm interested in being a rope bottom, as a casual, non-sexual thing. that doesn't mean that there aren't other contexts in which rope interests me, just like someone who does nude modeling isn't only ever nude in a, like, artistic way.

the group i'm interested in around here, though, the assumption is that you're doing it to learn to tie and i feel really awkward about that, just like going up to some stranger and asking if they want to tie me up. i don't feel unsafe or anything, it's just really embarrassing and awkward and i'm kinda terrified of people just saying "no", like i'm reading the social cues wrong, which i do sometimes. i went to a new year's eve party that was kinda like that this year, people are all making out with each other and i don't know what the protocol is to start making out with people, like, do they know each other? are they all in a polycule together? and these people are pretty much all, for the record, just as fucking autistic as i am, which doesn't make it any easier. an allistic person might, like, see that i'm feeling awkward and left out and help me feel more comfortable lol.

like the thing is if someone's vanilla and cishet there's this kind of assumed mutual goal and you don't have to talk about "it", you just have to let "it" happen. which i'm not a big fan of, i think that's bad overall, but jesus christ i don't want to go up to somebody and talk about my fetishes on the first date. except if i don't, well, the relationship doesn't kind of work out.

like i got into the first relationship of my life when i was 33, i was in that relationship for the next 12 years, and eventually i broke up with her because _i had not ever actually been sexually attracted to her_. which apparently is not normal for a 12-year-long relationship? i don't know. like alfred said, the thought that i could have directly said "no" never occurred to me. nor did the idea that my never having said "yes", never having expressed any desire for coitus at all, might have some implications regarding the consensuality of the sexual activity in question. that shit isn't the kind of thing i want to talk about on a first date either. i don't know how to _deal_ with that within the context of a prospective relationship.

-

anyway the good thing is that i asked this group if they could do some, like, social stuff so i could get to know them in person before asking anyone to tie me up, and they're giving it a shot. god knows if it'll help. i'm absolutely terrified. i'm going to give it a shot, at least!

we met our current third on scruff. i've met a handful of keepers through it over the years, though i'm not in touch with any of them. i only ever met guys on that app if sex was the priority tbh. i had grindr for a minute but never liked it much. i agree that apps are generally a bad way to make good connections.

it's nice to hear from everyone. deflatormouse, i wish you luck.

i hope you guys don't mind if i share a little travelogue of our weekend in southeast utah.

we spent two days in comb ridge, a monocline or tilted slab of sandstone jutting up from the earth at about 15 to 30 degrees that runs north to south for 28 miles and is 2 to 3 miles wide. narrow canyons carve through the rock every mile or so down the length of it. here's an aerial image of it: https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/145000/145913/iss060e038053_lrg.jpghttps://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/145000/145913/iss060e038053_lrg.jpg

in almost every one of the canyons, there are pictographs, petroglyphs and/or ruins, left behind by ancestral puebloans and later groups. we went into two of them, fishmouth and monarch, and hiked to the rim and saw the procession panel, one of the most breathtaking pieces of art i've ever seen. we also saw the wolfman panel, a very foreboding "who goes there" kind of collection on the rim of butler wash right where it joins the san juan river. we saw maybe 10-15 other people the whole time, a huge contrast to moab, which was completely overrun and which we passed through to get there. exploring the ruins and looking at potsherds in shady canyon alcoves and then just sitting on a rock enjoying an enveloping and friendly silence, watching leaves shake and listening to flows of wind was completely sublime. at the end of the second day we decided to try going for a swim in the san juan river. we stopped at a popular boat ramp and decided there were too many people, then i used google maps satellite view to scout out a little dirt access road a few miles upstream. we got there and saw three cars parked next to the canyon wall and an awning was propped up, taking up the entire width of a small path carved out of the very dense tamarisk leading to the river. a woman was at one of the cars. she asked us if we were from there, we said no not really, we were just hoping to go for a swim. a navajo extended family were celebrating a daughter's birthday. they offered to let us walk through their spot into the ankle-deep river, but we opted to walk further along the canyon wall and see if any other paths broke through the tamarisk. it just grew denser and denser, so we came back and they told us they were heading out anyway. so eventually we had the spot to ourselves and we all swam and played in the river naked in the golden light until the weakening sun and the breeze chilled us too much. afterward we were grateful to find good if overpriced food in a gravel courtyard restaurant in bluff. the end.

not the aerial image i wanted to post, but maybe this one will work https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Bluff_UT_-_aerial_with_San_Juan_River_and_Comb_Ridge.jpg

lol that's big. the san juan river is running horizontally at the bottom of the image. butler wash runs down the front of comb ridge diagonally from top right. bluff is the little town on the san juan where the canyon at the right meets it.

no matches came up until i switched it to male. i live in manhattan around the corner from a major university, unreal... of course i am mostly getting messages from guys who wanna hook up

but i don't think i can use these kind of apps it is just a terribly unpleasant and unhelpful way to connect with people, will probably delete before the week is out. approaching and talking to complete strangers in central park would be a million times better than this.

how can those of you who use apps for dates and such even stand it? tell me tell me

― Deflatormouse

sorry i'm a little scatter-brained today... anyway uh. yeah idk, maybe it's being talked about on another thread, but there's that whole viral thing... where they asked women "would you rather be alone in the woods with a man, or would you rather be alone in the woods with a bear?", and we all picked "bear" (and yes there are plenty of jokes about bear-the-animal versus bear-the-whatever-gay-thing-bear-is). and yeah i like men and i'd pick the bear. i guess cuz like if the bear does something to me nobody's gonna say it was my fault. i mean i like men! i'm very attracted to men. i don't think men are inherently more dangerous than women, i mean, i've been hurt way worse by women than i ever have by men. it's just, like, if i'm into a guy i gotta be very, very careful, and if i make a mistake there can be some pretty serious consequences, and i mean, i make mistakes sometimes. i'm not perfect. so even more "reasons i don't date much" haha.

Alfred— I lived in Sam Francisco, which has the best cruising, gay bar, and public sex culture of any city in the US. I didn’t need a phone.

The ethos in SF for a lot of my formative years was “wait you met on an app? weird.”

Every single person I have dated longterm I met in person first.

I lived in Sam Francisco, which has the best cruising, gay bar, and public sex culture of any city in the US. I didn’t need a phone.

Heh -- Miami's no slouch in those departments.

Makes sense. I needed to meet dudes online to build the courage to cruise like I do now. I was a little older when I came out (25 y/o).

I was too! (23)! I just dove into dick-hunting, making up for lost time.

honestly I think the apps vs IRL thing is a false binary, but also think that one can be more amenable personality-wise to one or the other. i am definitely more amenable to meeting people in-person, mostly because “chemistry” is something I cannot get from the apps. I also started resenting being ghosted and manipulated on dating sites, not to mention tired of going on dates with total fucking bores when I could have been doing something else.

Deflatormouse, do you do any like sports or physical activities? I have met a lot of nice homos while climbing, and I know a ton of queer and non-binary cyclists and runners here in Philly

i will say that i don't see there being a strict divide between "online" and "in person", particularly as someone who came out just before covid. for me that's not the "apps". the main way i connect with other people online is through discord, but even ilx, lately i've been connecting and meeting up with people online through there. that was how it used to be with usenet in the '90s. most of my friends were through newsgroups, and i'd meet up with them in person, even had a couple of... i wouldn't call them "relationships", but i got with a couple people that way and had a miserable time for reasons i didn't understand back then. i got bullied and rejected a lot, i wasn't like most people, and online was a way for me to connect with other people in ways that weren't socially acceptable in "mainstream" interactions. part of that was me being kind of an edgelord, part of that was me not having appropriate emotional boundaries with other people, but it was, like. just being able to express myself authentically. and then when usenet died i kinda lost that, got lost for a while, got with my ex-wife and tried to be "normal", got a facebook account.

when i came out i wanted, like a lot of the people around me, to have a "slut era". i was surrounded by people who were really hot and really thirsty and many of them were attracted to me. but it's all within this one small community. i've never been the kind of person who could do anonymous sex, and when you're getting with people you see socially on a regular basis... shit gets real complicated, real quick. a lot of the reason i broke up with my ex-wife was to slut around, but i was worried that it wasn't something i really wanted. it wasn't something i really wanted, turns out. my "slut era" didn't involve any actual slutting. like i was "poly" but had one partner during that time. at the same time i don't regret breaking up with my ex-wife, because going through that experience helped me understand what was really important to me. which was, like, not being dependent on other people for my sense of self-worth. that process involved a lot more trauma than it did hot sex, but i don't, like, feel like i missed out on hot sex. because if it's not gonna make me happy, you know, it's not worth it for me. i've had enough sex that was hot but made me miserable.

-

i'm pretty insecure about how sedentary i am. out here, you know, there are a lot of "hiking lesbians". my body can't do that, hasn't ever been able to do that sort of intense physical activity. i want to be fit, i want to have, like, a strong core, mostly because it allows me to do thing i couldn't do otherwise. part of the reason i wasn't able to do things with my QPP is because she just wasn't physically healthy enough for any sort of intimacy. i figure the more stuff i can do, the longer i can do it for, the more fun i have. but i'm in my late 40s, i'm dyspraxic, i can't bike or do long hiking. well, i do my best, at least! :)