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

Thanks, Kate: a useful observation on the masking. People-reading is usually one of my stronger skills, so this all came right out of leftfield on the Sunday. He was super-chill until I arrived at his front door, but really stressed and agitated after that. He also told a lot of lies that I was able to disprove when I got home (internet sleuthing being another strong area), but I'm not sure that he had a sound grasp on his own reality, either. My "gonna block you" message was carefully worded so as not to send him into a bigger spiral.

as i'm aging, my libido waxes and wanes every week and a half or so. i like it, it feels healthy. it's a relief not to feel horny all the time tbh. sometimes it's nice just to be more in my head or my heart for a while. sometimes i feel like my sexual desire is lower priority than it is for some people my age or older. i don't mind it though. i've had fun, i'll still have fun. there's no rush. maybe it's an introvert thing too.

all that is prompted by a chat with farm banker, who i've managed to stay friendly with for a few months now. he's a sweet guy, very salt of the earth, not a dummy or anything, kind of intense, still very straight-laced with lots of hangups. it's funny that i was jealous of him at first. he's 40, only been out for 3 years, is really getting into the dating game looking for an ltr. anyway he likes to text and likes it to turn into sexting when he's horny, which is often. and oh my god, my desire to sext is at zero point zero zero zero. i'm 41, halfway through this life, the last thing on earth i want to do is try to feel sexual through my old-ass iphone i can barely read without glasses lmao. typing made up shit back and forth with someone i can't see. dude i was on irc doing that shit from 16 to 22 when meeting someone irl was out of the question. i'd literally rather watch paint dry at this moment in my life. my partner seems to enjoy it though, which is great - i'll let him do it with our mutual sex buds to keep the wheels turning, just as long as i don't have to sext. anyway, i like this guy and check in on him every once in a while, but he's just beginning his gay journey. i'm, like, being a little bit of a "gentle parent" with him. he'll probably disappoint me lol.

i hope my farm banker friend learns to love himself and makes good choices 🥹

do we have opinions about teeth whitening?

personally i find the appearance of blindingly white teeth in photographs to be distracting and kinda ugly tbqf

here's my deal - i was never much of a joiner in any kind of "gay scene". after i finally came out i had mainly straight friends then spent 7 years with a more reclusive guy than myself. i finally convinced myself i needed to make an effort and have gay friends around 36-37 and now at 41 after having made many, many attempts at it and landing maybe two really good friends, it feels like most gay guys are alien lifeforms i don't have any desire to be within 10 feet of. just throwing that out there because it's a chain posting scatterbrained monologue kind of saturday night for this madam, and i'm even 100 percent sober.

as i'm aging, my libido waxes and wanes every week and a half or so. i like it, it feels healthy. it's a relief not to feel horny all the time tbh.

this is happening to me too and **i fucking hate it!!!** these are the dog days of summer, every guy on the planet is walking around wearing next to nothing, it is *killing* me that i can't get it up 20x a day. i mean if not now when?? fuck!

i'm in my head *all the goddamn time*

omg, can you even imagine what it's like to be 40 and just starting to live as a gay man. i was a late bloomer too and so deeply ashamed of my inexperience when i started, it was crippling. made dating and hook ups sooo tough. and i was like 20!! i'm really glad he found you because you seem like you would be an amazing "gentle parent"! not to add to your burden of responsibility, as i'm sure you've given him so much already.

the gay boys i used to chill with, it was a giggle fest every time. i used to think, how come all my other friendships aren't just like this? this is what every hangout should be.

this is supposed to be my day to catch up on sleep, but my cousins came into the city to see me, i couldn't talk them out of it, was running around all day. i'm dead this week. never gonna make it.

i haven't done it in a while but i remember going on tinder dates or ok cupid or whatever with boys several years younger than me, they used to wanna call and talk for hours, like, every night for a week before meeting me in person.

fuckin' brats ♥️, with guys my age and older we'd just exchange like a 2 sentence email, "hey, how's tuesday?", end of.

i haven't done it in a while but i remember going on tinder dates or ok cupid or whatever with boys several years younger than me, they used to wanna call and talk for hours, like, every night for a week before meeting me in person.

lol otm

<3 deflatormouse

tell us about your cousins!

i'm really proud of my older cousin! she overcame severe, debilitating anxiety to put herself through school while raising 2 boys on her own, now she's launching a career as a social worker at 50. she's been writing a book too, about girls with Aspergers.

my younger cousin is sweet, shy and awkward, except when he gets to talking about his interests (he likes EDM and has Skrillex hair). He apologizes way too much.

How's your partner been lately??

What's on everyone's summer bucket list?

holy shit re your older cousin! and your younger cousin too. they sound awesome.

my j3r-bear is doing well. he's having fun hanging out with our new friend / fuck buddy, let's call him luka. i'm wfh today and he went over to luka's to swim. i asked him if he would mind coming home after 5 so we could have some together time tonight, instead of me driving over there to join them for dinner, and he said yes. so i'm really happy about that. he's a lot better at doing the open relationship thing than i would have guessed, he surprises me with his social game tbh, mine is a lot rougher in general. the only thing he's not really happy with at the moment is is shitty job doing optical tech, but he's naturally pretty cheerful so it runs off his back for the most part.

right now my bucket list is just "keep the ship moving forward" basically. i'm trying to think of our fairly large space with good ac as a "vacation landing pad" while we wait out a few months of no traveling because expensive, and it's actually kind of working. there's just enough fun in my routine right now that i don't feel that restlessness to escape. luka and new open relaysh chats / flirting is helping with that.

luka has a swimmy pool??? i dare say you're sorted for a vacation landing pad :D

that's all great to hear about j3r-bear. cheerful people can be such a buzz to be around and i'm always impressed by couples who thrive in open relationships, it seems to require so much maturity and emotional intelligence.

i seem to be in a similar position of riding out the summer, which is a first. usually i have grand ambitions to make every day an adventure, and bottle it up at the end of the season, hang on as long as possible. i'm just not feeling it, but hopefully that'll change, there's still time.

I've had a relentless teaching schedule this summer (I'm a 12-month professor), but I hope to compensate with a trip to Chicago in a few days and a week at the beach the following weekend.

oh sweet, which beach?

we're heading to chicago on saturday! staying with very sweet gay pals of ours. have not spent very much time there at all, so i'm super looking forward to it.

j3r-bear has a cheerful disposition, can confirm :)

i've been taking a break from The Apps(TM) since my man got home from his trip and i can't really say i've felt compelled to get back on them. this is subject to change ofc but i'm really enjoying having one less distraction in my life.

oh also re: teeth whitening - i'm anti! teeth are not meant to be bright white, some yellowing/discoloration is fine/normal

I wanna whiten mine, I drink so much coffee and they’re getting streaky. Honestly, too, I’ve never met anybody and thought “wow, your teeth are too white”

I had a non-relaxing semi-vacation (a work trip with a day off in Naples and a day off in Alicante), my first such endeavour in many months, now I’m working at home literally every day until September, no beach no cottage no nothing.

We were supposed to go to Lake Como to see my brother, but my bf could only get a flight to Rome so I also flew to Rome. We got there and were like “wait, Lake Como is eight hours away? Fuck that” and we drove to Naples instead. Sorry brother! see you at Christmas

In Naples we went to a perfume store and there was a heavy older gay dude working the place, and he immediately started tempting us with perfumes that are, like, not what you usually sell to strangers (he wanted to show us Amouage Gold, not whatever Tom Ford/Parfums De Marly) and I thought “ok this guy is something special. I bought a bottle of Fracas from him and we chatted for an hour and he ruled, I’d go back just to see him again.

Afterward I was texting a friend of mine who’d spent some time in Naples and I mentioned the dude, and he said “oh? what did he look like” and I sent him a picture of the cover of Old Goriot because that was exactly what the guy looked like and my friend said “holy shit I know that guy! he sold me a fragrance and I love it”

Place is called Pepino, it’s very cute and the dude is great and so were the rest of the staff, the whole thing felt more like a slumber party than a shop

omg, can you even imagine what it's like to be 40 and just starting to live as a gay man.

― Deflatormouse

as a _gay man_? i guess not. i'm _definitely_ a late bloomer though... it's difficult!

i haven't done it in a while but i remember going on tinder dates or ok cupid or whatever with boys several years younger than me, they used to wanna call and talk for hours, like, every night for a week before meeting me in person.

― Deflatormouse

yeah i did that with my ex, it turns out that's kind of a thing lesbians do a lot? like nobody wants to make the first move, which is probably why there's also the stereotype of the u-haul lesbian, when you've literally done everything together and developed a long-term relationship before getting up the nerve to ask somebody on a date it kind of makes sense almost.

here's my deal - i was never much of a joiner in any kind of "gay scene". after i finally came out i had mainly straight friends then spent 7 years with a more reclusive guy than myself. i finally convinced myself i needed to make an effort and have gay friends around 36-37 and now at 41 after having made many, many attempts at it and landing maybe two really good friends, it feels like most gay guys are alien lifeforms i don't have any desire to be within 10 feet of. just throwing that out there because it's a chain posting scatterbrained monologue kind of saturday night for this madam, and i'm even 100 percent sober.

― ꙮ (map)

it's the fucking _drama_ that gets me. like i get it, allostatic load and shit, but i really, i just want friends i can hang out with and watch anime with and maybe cuddle.

and my primary tried that with 24, and 24 then decided she was going to break up with her wife and move in with my primary and they would have a perfect life and my primary told me this as if i was supposed to think it was a good idea, and i was like "so uh you want to think about that for a little bit" and as it turns out my 24 after a week decided that she was going to stay with her wife and that she hadn't consented to cuddling my primary and my primary had manipulated her and blah blah blah and i don't want to judge but i was did tell 24 "so, uh, you think you might have some bpd or something going on? because i got bpd and my primary sure as hell has bpd", and nope, 24 only thought she had it because she was around my primary, because bpd is contagious like german measles or some shit.

so today 24 announces that she had fallen in love with the very next person she met after deciding my primary was an awful person and that she was never going to talk to my primary again and that she's divorcing her wife and moving in with this _new_ person. but she totally doesn't have bpd.

and my primary, who by the way is moving off my couch and into her new apartment in two days and is a little bit stressed about that, has for months now been super fucking traumatized over the way 24 was shitty to her and then acted like it was all her fault.

anyway 24 is good friends with 13, who i like a lot, i don't know how the fuck she puts up with 24, 13 has a lot of problems and hates herself even more than most of us do but she deals with it well, my primary just went out to hang out with her other girlfriend, 40, because 40 is moving (which is also pretty stressful for my primary, btw) because her ex took the kids to california and said "well if you ever want to see the kids again sell the house and move down here", anyway 40 quit the friend group server i'm still futilely trying to maintain because she got into it with 13, probably over 24. and also i want to stay on good terms with 13 because she's a mod on the server i founded and got banned from because of the BPD.

for a while there i was enjoying being the stereotype of a queen but to be honest it's getting fucking old, i haven't watched "birdie wing" in over a week now.

best thing about pride was that i got to catch up with this cis girl i've been talking to off and on for probably a year. we're both pretty clearly into each other and have a lot of shared interests, by which i mean kink and that we both really fuckin' hate cops, but we both have been really cautious because each of us has a really long history of fucked up trauma shit and neither of us are really into the whole "trauma bonding" thing. no i'm sorry i got way more shit to work through before i start doing kink with new partners again. also the kink scene here has been, if anything, even more fucked up than the trans scene here, so i think each of us has been leaning heavily on the "risk-aware" part of RACK. every time i talk to her she talks about how boring her life is, and holy shit i envy her for that so much. she's someone i feel good about hanging out with and who i trust to have healthy boundaries, which NOBODY ELSE IN MY FUCKING LIFE seems to have, except for my primary partner, weirdly enough, she's BPD as hell but she's actually really easy for me to deal with.

that said i do kinda want to hook up with 14, i was supposed to have a kink threesome with her and my primary but i flaked at the last minute. if things ever calm down a bit that would be a lot of fun. the great thing about her is that she's pretty good at avoiding the drama and just showing up for the sex. god, i wish that was a life skill more of us had.

i am starting to realize the value of separating one's personal messy stuff from sex. i used to be a "you should bring all of yourself into sex" kind of person, at least in my head, but i realized that's not actually how it works best for me. it's more like "the sexual side of yourself is a fun hobby you get to put your own personal twist on, and definitely keep the boundary-crossing theatrics you learned from your mother out of the picture so everyone can feel groovy."

anyway 24 is good friends with 13

fuck i just realized that 24 is _really good friends_ with 13

i am _so fucking mad_ at 24 right now.

like how the fuck am i the responsible one here. how. when i started the portland server i _agonized_ over not wanting to use my position of authority as a way to build a personal polycule and _apparently_ that was just a _me_ thing because EVERYBODY ELSE IN A POSITION OF POWER SEEMS TO DO THAT. like as soon as i got with my primary, who absolutely got with me because she was a starfucker, i quit the server, and me getting with another server member was a small part of that but it _was_ a part of that. but no, nobody else sees a PROBLEM with... ok I'm not gonna go into detail but it's just EGREGIOUSLY AWFUL behavior. i'm so tired of it. i know we're all fucked up and traumatized and lonely and i know suddenly discovering how great dick is can be a transformative experience but come the fuck _on_ here.

my problem with sex, i've decided, is that i _really_ want someone to make me cum, but when i say that people take it like i'm dinah-moe humm and they're frank zappa and eww, no, gross. no you cannot brute-force my o password, three wrong attempts and my body involuntarily goes into lockout mode. i'm pretty sure i have it written down somewhere, i just want somebody to help me look for it, and yeah it's probably one of those things where in order to find it we're going to have to literally clean my whole apartment, sorry.

good insights, Kate. the boys i'm thinking of seemed very committed or invested from the moment of initial contact on the app. someone made a move, a date was set... and then the epic intimate phone calls would start. but i think you're mostly on point wrt the motivations.

i suppose, if it were a concern (and i don't think it was) that my availability to talk on the phone so many nights consecutively would have demonstrated that i wasn't out on dates with other boys while also tying me up.

it annoyed me a little after the first couple of times because i don't like talking on the phone for hours, and more importantly because spending time together in person is so essential to understanding who you're dealing with, so getting heavy before that's happened doesn't make a ton of sense. how reassuring can it possibly be? (and in one case, that backfired and it was the worst date of our lives)

anyway, i hope the drama settles down and that you have amazing sex in the near future

I have never used a dating app for more than a few months, and never met anyone from a hook-up app. They kind of terrify me.

does anyone know anyone in a throuple? i've had passing brushes with two throuples before. i don't think i could ever do it, it looks exhausting to me, like juggling all the time. i'm curious about them though.

also a friend informed me he attended an orgy last weekend where there were some 'pups'. i have yet to see pups in action but i think i need to cross that one off soon, i'm intrigued. he said they had their masks on and tails "in" and they were on all fours wagging their butts. ok, i can see it, dog as man's best friend, i think i could get into it, not as the dog but as the man, it's a little spicy but not like a thai-food-4 or anything. i realize my updates to this thread are often kinda tmi - i hope no one minds too much.

i was at gunnison (gay — mostly — nude beach in NJ) on sunday & there were some pups there with their masks on — tanning in the 90 degree sun, swimming in the ocean etc. there was also a bear pride flag flying high in the air elsewhere

I know a throuple! They are very happy, but less socially available and seem exhausted all the time. I don’t think the situation is like sexually exhausting but more like psychologically exhausting, working to keep the happiness of three people on the front burner at all times

It's enough work to keep one's own happiness.

i'm sorry, i cannot see the word "throuple" without thinking of this

https://d2j6dbq0eux0bg.cloudfront.net/images/12912354/3568938396.jpg

is a throuple just like a polycule with three people in it?

I had to google it too lol. I use "triad."

I've known a couple of MFF thruples, both of which devolved to MF after a couple of years or so.
Sex-wise, I've always preferred MMMM to MMM: there's always something to do! No one gets left out!

"triad" works except it keeps making me think of that creepy david crosby song. anyway i feel like the difficulty of maintaining a relationship increases exponentially the more people are in that relationship. christ, i have enough fucking trouble with metas. (i guess i need to clarify that i mean metamours, not metoidoplasties, which are awesome and underrated.)

i have known of some throuples, pretty sure none of them are together anymore. i would never, personally - seems way too delicate a balance to strike

we’re in chicago right now visiting friends, we’re about to drive out to saugatuck, MI (small gay-friendly village on the lake) in a bit once this thunderstorm lets up. went to a bar in north halsted on monday where a room full of gays were singing along to video clips from musicals. at one point they were doing rocky horror-style interjections to a clip of madonna singing “don’t cry for me, argentina” in evita (“have i said too much?” “YES!!!”). it was kinda great tbh.

triad" works except it keeps making me think of that creepy david crosby song.

yeah :(

definitely not enough emotional energy for a throuple here. we had a thing with a non-binary pal for a few years but it ended because they consistently crossed boundaries that had nothing to do with sex— doing hard drugs in our house, kicking our dog off the bed when we asked them to sleep on the futon for the night, etc. they were excellent in bed but turned into a horrible toxic narcissist outside of it!

god, there are so many incredibly fucked-up people who are amazing in bed

i'm not one of them, for the record, one result my last long-term relationship is that physical touch currently activates extreme anxiety in me

god, there are so many incredibly fucked-up people who are amazing in bed

haha, so otm

donna, that experience sounds like exactly the kind of queer group culture / energy i need more of. very wholesome. happy to hear you guys are on vacation!

i never eat pizza but i ate 4 slices with some friends last night and it ended up making me really horny?? i guess that's a thing. sorry for tmi i just had to share.

gonna try that approach before my next assignation

also it was a dilf parade in that place (ny style pizzeria in a strip mall). lots of hot divorced looking dads picking up dinner.

i won't lie, i thought of the infamous pizzeria sex ilx post.

that’s amore!

hahaha

i never eat pizza but i ate 4 slices with some friends last night and it ended up making me really horny??

rofl

Anyone see Close?

Wrecked me. Been thinking a lot about what it was like growing up and being a young teenager in the mid-to-late 90s. The film captures a period of adolescence and friendship between boys that I haven’t seen depicted so accurately and wrenchingly. I have a lot to say about it, but don’t want to talk about it if people haven’t seen it.

I haven’t seen it.

Yesterday I was eating a fish sandwich with a couple friends and one of them was talking about how she ruins every group chat she’s ever been invited into and I hummed “🎶group chat, group chat destroyer🎶”

ugh, drugs yesterday with straight guys

close sounds interesting.

i've been feeling a lot of boy energy lately, my own and others'.