The State of Online Cruising

A couple of days ago, my partner noticed that I'd been tricking a lot more over the summer than I had been earlier in the year. He asked where I was finding all these "bois" even though their ages could range from 18 to 60. Without missing a beat, I said, "gay.com" which kind of surprised me. In fact, I was so surprised, I decided I needed to verify that answer. I've been using iTrick fairly faithfully for years, so I had a lot of this data logged. Unfortunately, there's not a ready made report in iTrick to show that kind of information, although I have suggested it to the author. Basically, I just eyeballed my history for the last 2 years and I was usually able to remember how I met each of the 53 guys with whom I've enjoyed a 1-on-1 encounter. After seeing this, he suggested I do some sort of analysis of variance, but my statistics skills are really rusty and I'm not sure how much value there would be in digging into this.

Screen Name Service	hookups in last 2 years
bear411	15
gay.com	13
craigslist	8
other (face to face)	10
men4sexnow	3
yahoo	2
bearwww	2

I still use Bear411. It is not my favorite site to chat or cruise, but it has the most guys and almost certainly has face pictures. Bearciti is an improvement, but they still have to build their userbase and keep guys online in order to make any headway and as you can see, I've never hooked up with anyone using bearciti. Bearwww is too similar to bear411 and has a very annoying "hours of usage" policy for non-paid subscribers. One of the 2 guys I hooked up with at Bearwww wasn't comfortable having a face picture on a cruising site, but didn't have a problem emailing me one. Because of this, he could never get an account at bear411.

Gay.com has certainly seen better days. I remember back in the late 90's, it was the place to go and I certainly got a lot out of it. I really wish iTrick had been around or known to me much sooner as I'd love to have some of that information now. As for the way I use it today, I don't hang out in one of the big city rooms. I prefer to enter one of the smaller suburban rooms. It ends up being fairly quiet and often has people too far away to even think about pursuing. Because I actually live in the city the room is named after, I find it much more useful to "advertise" there and get more serious interest in private messages. By "advertise," in this case, I mean having a completed profile with both face and adult pictures, showing up as online and in a room. I don't often post what I'm looking for in the room and the times I have done that haven't resulted in a hookup. I am less likely to initiate a conversation on gay.com than I am at bear411 or a bear-focused site, but that seems to be working ok for me.

Craigslist is an interesting site. I've heard about it for years, but they hadn't really developed much presence in Texas until fairly recently. I just started using it in the last 6 months. I put myself out there with a very honest, moderately detailed ad and some adult pictures that don't hide my hair or weight. Most days, I will get 4-6 responses which will usually include someone I'm not interested in, someone who didn't really read my ad, a married or closeted guy and then maybe someone I was really interested in. The married and closeted guys all have varying levels of comfort with everything from exchanging pictures, to meeting places, to actually touching. In general, I've found Craigslist to be fast and effective, but there can be a lot more pitfalls, flakes, fakes and special handling required.

Now, the other (face to face), includes 2 or 3 smaller bear runs, but not really any bars, sex parties or sex clubs. It does include meeting a guy face-to-face at a party and then hooking up with him later through an screen name service like bear411 or Yahoo. Even though I tend to have trouble even breaking the ice at larger venues like a bar, I seem to do ok at smaller sexually charged events like Bearadise. My experience at sex clubs can go either way, depending on the clientele that night.

Men4SexNow is one of the sites I found after I started using iTrick as it is listed as one of the screen name services built into the application. I've used it as a free member as well as a premium member. I wish they would have a policy requiring pictures both a face picture and a body picture and better elimination of duplicates or abandoned accounts. It would make the site more usable, I think. I recently tried using the "Sex Parties" feature and found that to work ok. I may upgrade to premium status for a few months to try hosting my own parties just to see how that works.

That's a broad overview of my recent online cruising experience. I want to delve a little deeper into aspects of various sites and the services they offer. I'd like to develop a better method of cruising online that results in better matching, faster hookups, and weed out flaky tricks.