1-900-THIS-SUX

Shortly after boyfriend #1, my old college friend that had introduced me to cruising the park introduced me to phone sex, but not the way you think. Of course, I had seen the ads for various phone services in First Hand, Honcho and other gay adult magazines of the time, but I had never really been tempted to call them. I was much more interested in the immediacy of real sex and that didn't usually involve keeping up my end of an erotic story, not to mention the per-minute charges. My friend had left college after the first year and joined the Army. He had gotten sent to the Gulf War at least once, but was stationed in Texas within reasonable driving distance when all this started. Since there were no gay bars near the base, he would come to see me, where he was reasonably assured a free place to crash plus there were 2 gay bars and the magnificent park where I lived now. When he first started visiting, he brought to my apartment his fold out foam coach like the one pictured below. We'd been friends for years, so I trusted him with a key to my place and he had a place to bring a trick if he needed it.



He'd been crashing at my place on weekends for several months and everything seemed to be going ok, but little did I know that he had started calling some of these phone sex lines from my apartment. The first inkling I had that something was going on was when I got a call from an obviously gay male looking for "Alex." My friend's name wasn't Alex and I didn't know anyone named Alex. When I tried to give a "wrong number" response, the caller tried to engage me in whatever fantasy that "Alex" had outlined in his voice post to the service. I should have hung up right then, but once the caller said a certain keyword, everything started falling into place. I knew who "Alex" was and I knew when he was expected back for a visit, so I told the caller when to try again.

In the meantime, I got a few more of these calls and one of the callers was very persistent that even if Alex wasn't available for the fetish chat, I would be sufficient. It's his dime, I don't have anything better to do and by now, I'm a little curious. It turns out this guy is in Fort Worth and claims that the bar scene in FW isn't very good. I had never been to FW, but I knew that Dallas is closer to FW than I was, so I naively suggested that he go to Dallas. He asserted that FW people do not go to Dallas and that it's just not done. I was kind of baffled that he wanted me to spend a few hours driving to FW when he can't drive a half-hour to get to Dallas. It was at this point that the conversation took a very bizarre turn. He's almost crying, "don't make me resort to the crisper drawer again." Huh? Crisper drawer? Ooo-kay, what have I gotten into here? Something about the way he said it made me ask what he meant, although the implication of vegetables seemed pretty clear. He started on this lecture about how you can't just take a vegetable out of the refrigerator and stick it in your ass, you have to warm it up first. Heating a cucumber or carrot wouldn't have occurred to me, but him saying it definitely made my asshole pucker at the thought of a cold cuke pressed up against it. I did my best to extract myself out of this very awkward conversation and made it clear I wasn't coming to Fort Worth to see him and that he really shouldn't call me back.

At some point, I had to call one of the lines myself and see if I could find someone for me. I was 23 or 24, 6 foot tall and about 235 pounds. Looking around, I seemed to be pretty chubby, so I mentioned that in my ad. Having seen plenty of the "no fats, no fems" type ads in print, I didn't want to misrepresent myself. I had played with a few husky guys from the park, so I thought I knew what I was getting into and could handle it. The one guy that answered my ad lived in the big city and knew I was a couple of hours away. He wanted some sort of assurance that I was interested in a bigger guy. I really couldn't imagine why that was a problem until he showed up at my apartment to take me out to dinner. He was a little shorter than me and only about 5 years older with a baby face, but he was at least a hundred pounds heavier than me. His body shape was rather different than what I'd seen on men before and trying to visualize sexual activity with him was really bothering me. We ended up having a couple of dates, but didn't really have much in common. He drove down to pick me up for the last date, drove us back to the city to go out for dinner and then drove me back home. He really had the expectation that we would have sex, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I know he left angry and frustrated while I was also a bit frustrated but mostly confused. Was there something about those other big guys I'd played with that appealed to me where this guy hadn't? Did I have a weight limit or were my "height/weight proportions" only so much more liberal than most? It would be several years before I started figuring out the answers to these questions and where I fit in.

Unfortunately, the next time Alex came to visit, it was to inform me that he was being shipped back to the Persian Gulf. Also, unfortunate for me, Alex did not delete his ads on the various services he had called nor did he let me know these would all be appearing on my phone bill after he'd left. A few weeks later, I got hit with a $200 phone bill and no easy way to contact Alex now. He did reimburse me eventually, but the whole experience left me with a very bad impression of the whole phone sex business.

Beardar

POPULATION:

I wasn't expecting to do one of the smallest bear profile sites as the first of the free sites I was reviewing. I remembered joining Beardar about a year and a half ago after hearing Vito on Bearpodcast during the IBR 2006 episodes. I had some expectation that it would have grown in over 18 months, but it looks like there is less than 1600 bears currently and they average 5-9 online users at the times I've checked, with 2 of those being Texan, including me. It appears there are less than 75 Texans on the site, but I can't verify that as the page 1 of the search gives the first 25 results I want, but selecting any other page, the results default to the entire database.

PROFILE:

The "My Profile" page gives options to select Modify Profile, My Photo, My Video Clip, Preview Profile, Suspend My Profile or Re-Activate your profile, or Cancel your membership. The profile lets you select a large number of details such as drinking habits, smoking habits, relationship status, plenty of appearance options, personal background options, what you're looking for, what you are, your interests. Several of these areas include a series of check boxes and pull-downs as well as a free-form text field to tell more about yourself. I remember being particularly intimidated that I had to write 3 paragraphs about particular aspects of myself.

Under "My Photos," you can upload, set or edit a description, mark some photos as public or private with a password. You don't have to have a photo set up a profile on Beardar. There is a size limit for photos, but it is not explicitly detailed while a limit of 20 photos is mentioned on the home page. Editing your photo's description may require administrator approval. You can also upload a video. The format must be MPEG or AVI, but no other formatting or size requirements are mentioned. While the video seems an innovative feature, there's not a mechanism to search for bears who have made a video clip available.

"Suspend" seems to be for those occasions when you make your profile unavailable without having to delete it. For example, you've just hooked up with a new boyfriend and you want to take yourself off the market for the time being to see how it all goes. You can cancel your profile later if it gets seriously monogamous. However, you don't have to go to those lengths, you can change your "Privacy Settings" to control how invisible you appear on the site.

SEARCHING:

The "Search" option here has plenty of features. In fact, it might have too many features, but I've generally found them pretty intuitive. If you were overwhelmed by the level of detail asked during the profile creation phase, the advanced search uses all those fields and choices. You can save and name your searches. You really have to save your search if you want to look past the first page of search results. You can delete or re-run your saved searches from the "Saved Searches" link naturally enough. Beardar offers or plans to offer an offline search feature that notifies you of new matches by e-mail called alternatively "Bear Locator" or "Matchfinder." Basically, you can select most of the search criteria as a sort of an ongoing matchmaker, although I'm not sure how useful it is with the current userbase and growth pattern.

You also have links to "Hot Lists" which includes Members Who Have "Messaged You," "IM'd You," "Viewed You," as well as those you performed the same actions toward. Looking at the list of people who have "viewed you" without contacting you is kind of interesting and bittersweet. Why didn't he contact me? Should I contact him? You might need to prepared for the answer if you decide to pursue it. You might also check the date he looked at your profile. The Address Book is just the list of guys you've contacted and Blocked Users are the ones you've deliberately ignored. When viewing another member's profile, you can add him to your Favorites list.

MESSAGING:

Messaging uses the e-mail model more than the instant message model. You get plenty of history to follow the thread of your conversations. It's a basic inbox with the ability to delete messages, send new messages, or check your sent messages. While you get the Favorites list in addition to the address book on your Mailbox page, you don't get the option to contact the user from the Favorites list, but you can go to his profile and do it from there.

You may send a "Virtual Kiss" for those situations where you want to let someone know you are interested without having to write any kind of message. The member is notified of who sent the virtual kiss by regular e-mail rather than the in-house mailbox.

There is also supposed to be a "Live Chat" feature, but I was unable to get it to work in 2 different browsers on various occasions.

PREMIUM:

There does not appear to be any premium services on Beardar currently. They are showing to be setup to use iBill whenever that gets implemented.

MOBILE:

Beardar does not appear to offer a mobile-compatible version of the site.

WARNINGS:

The only warnings I have about the site are related to its small userbase and relative newness. Some of the bugs I found on the site would probably have been addressed sooner if more people were using it regularly. I'll be happy to update this review if Beardar grows sufficiently or remodels significantly to warrant.

Cruising the park until boyfriend #1

After I graduated college, my first job moved me a few hundred miles to a little bit larger city. In fact, this was the first city I'd lived that was large enough to have suburbs. While mostly known for being home to a major university, few people realize there were 3 other colleges there. The cruisiest park basically connected the university to the community college. I ended up in an apartment by one of the other colleges. When I moved there, the city only had one gay bar and it was a private club where you had to give your name and some other personal details to the rather creepy owner to get in. The bar was out of the way, so I mostly cruised the park for the first year or so.

Of course, I started learning who a few of the regulars were in the park and how to tell if the park rangers were out. Because this park was more densely forested and had a really convoluted layout, I recall being more comfortable getting out of the car here, whether it was to get frisky or just to get comfortable. The park itself was another riverside affair and there was a second river that branched out from one place in the park. The local guys called that section "the mouth" as in the mouth of the new river. You might get a guy asking you to meet him "down at the mouth" which was a parking and picnic area a little ways off the main path through the park. There were at least 3 other cruisey sections of the park, all with colorful names, but one was usually more of a heterosexual "make out point" than the others.

I remember getting fucked in the woods by this guy who had more cock than personality.

I remember getting pick pocketed by a very well-hung black hustler who could get cash out of my wallet while sloppily sucking my dick.

I remember trying to 69 in the backseat of an Olds 98 and having to be a bit of a contortionist to make it work.

I remember this cute chubby Mexican pre-med student who drove a Ford Fiesta that I would take back to my apartment. He always wanted to shower first as foreplay. We played several times over a 2 year period, but we only ever met at the park. He was one of the first guys I remember as being a good kisser to the point of making kissing more important to me.

I remember this slightly flamboyant Texas gentleman who had decided he needed a memorable telephone number. Several of the suburbs had their own telephone prefix, so he didn't have much control over the first 3 digits, but he made the last four digits spell out "4FUN" so all you had to remember was his suburb's prefix 4FUN. He found me and chatted me up on Bear411 a couple of years ago. He still has that phone number, although the area code has changed at least once over the years.

I remember meeting another older gentleman outside the park and then later the same day inside the park who would become another mentor rather than a fuck buddy. He took me into his home and showed me Torch Song Trilogy for the first time and told tales of going to the leather bar in the big city. He set me straight on a few of the interesting regulars in the park. He always had a thing for the "beautiful people," but I don't think he was ever considered one of the "B.P." as he put it. His family was wealthy in a locally-owned business sort of way and he had inherited some of that. He traveled frequently and once offered to take me sometime, but that never happened. I heard from some mutual acquaintances that he died a few years ago, traveling alone outside the US.

You know the expression, "I wouldn't kick him out of bed"? It's very rare, for me at least, to terminate a sexual encounter once it has begun, but I remember taking one guy home and doing just that. He was terrible in bed from the beginning. I don't recall what completely set me off but I suspect he was rather toothy. I remember getting out of bed, getting dressed and telling him to get dressed before escorting him out the door. I probably headed right back to the park after he was gone.

After I was living there a year, someone decided to open a second gay bar in a more obvious location. I started going there a little more often, mainly with whatever gay friends I had made outside the bar and the park. One night, a short stocky bearish guy decided he was interested in me. I had only rarely gotten any attention at any bar, so I was quite flattered. I remember being somewhat embarrassed by our public displays of affection at the bar, but I didn't let that stop me. He was 17 years older than me and he became my first boyfriend. He had just gotten out of a 20+ year relationship where the other guy dumped him for a rough young thing. I always had the vaguest sense that I was caught in a "two can play at this game" situation. Evidently, he and his ex were strictly oral all those years while he and I moved directly to anal sex. After we'd been together for a few months, he took me to meet some of his friends at a Christmas party. He decided his friends needed to know the differences between me and the ex, other than the obvious, and started this silly hinting like "we're pregnant" or "we're knocked up" or something like that. It was lame and only got a chuckle or two out of the gang. I also learned several other things at this party. I had my first exposure to chubs and chasers hearing how one couple met that really embodied the "mirth and girth" concept. The hosts were also the first long-term live-in threesome I'd met. They also left me the impression that they didn't all 3 sleep together regularly, most often it was one-on-one in whatever combination worked that day. Unfortunately, my first relationship was very short-lived. When I went home for Christmas, I hooked up with an old buddy along the way. My boyfriend and I had been talking about monogamy as something we both desired, so I was kind of surprised that I jumped at the first opportunity to cheat on him. When I got back, the boyfriend just kind of disappeared. I don't remember if we talked about it, but it just kind of ended abruptly. I was not particularly heartbroken; I always knew it wasn't going anywhere. Even though I lived in this city for 4 or 5 more years, I never saw him out again and I didn't have any contact with him for about 10 or 12 years. He found me on one of the bear sites about 5 years ago and let me know just a few more details: he had made up with his ex and stayed with him until his passing.

Bear411 / BearWorld - the most bears

This is my first site review. I'm highlighting the broad areas I intend to cover regularly with the blue banners. I know some sitesPublish Post won't have some sections. If you have a better term for one of the headers, please let me know. I appreciate any constructive criticism you may have about these reviews. I have the next couple of sites picked out and should have another written in about a week.

POPULATION:

Bear411 has sort of become "where the bears are" in the last 5-7 years. It has reached a "critical mass" in population that sustains itself as well as attracts new members. At this writing, Bear411 has almost 120,000 members worldwide with over 200 new members daily and over 4500 members logged on at what would be off-peak hours in the US. The membership isn't just bears, but includes cubs and some types of chasers or admirers. Bear411 is also known as BearWorld with slightly different graphics. Gay411 appears to use the same base code, but is aimed at the larger gay male community rather than just bears. Another site, a misspelling of a competitor, bearww (only 2 w, not 3) redirects to bearworld. Bear411 has stayed largely the same in the 4+ years I've been a member. The site owner has added some minor new features and has given the site's look and feel a small facelift earlier this year.

PROFILE:

For your personal profile, Bear411 offers most of the standard fields as well as a couple of unusual ones. You can list your phone's area code for broader geographic searching than city name, but tighter than statewide. You can specify your travel plans whether it is just a visit to another city or you are attending an organized Bear event. You can have upto 11 pictures uploaded to your profile and you can make your profile visible only to other members. You can identify yourself as a bear, cub, daddybear, chubby or leatherbear, but not which of those types you are interested in. You can also choose to have a guest book where other members can leave one of a handful of canned compliments for you.

You can feature yourself by changing your profile or creating a new one (after deleting your old one). When you create a new profile, you get a "New" graphic overlay, which should generate plenty of welcome messages. If you have modified your profile in the last couple of days, you get an "Updated" overlay which serves to alert members that you may have new pictures. Previously, there was a paid option to get the "Hot!" overlay, but that appears to have been discontinued. Finally, there is a way to be featured over which you have no control. The site shows a featured member that changes every few minutes called the "Bear411 Star." It appears that the site owner can mark your profile as being eligible to be randomly selected as the Bear411 Star as some members do not seem to be featured this way. There does not appear to be a limit to how many times a member can be the Bear411 Star. I know I have been the Bear411 Star at least 3 or 4 times just because I was refreshing at the right time to spot it.

SEARCHING:

For basic searching, you can search on city, state, country, and area code if you know your geography. If you know the name of the member you are looking for, even a partial spelling, you can search "nickname" and combine it with the geographic criteria. Free members also get to search on the "Bear Events" field so you can see who else is coming to particular events. Finally, you can limit your searches to "who's online" to give you a more immediate connection. Premium members can search on more fields, such as the first name, email address or keywords in the free form text. They can also search some of the self-identifying descriptors such as top, bottom, versatile, or "looking for friends" vs "looking for sex." While you can combine the various criteria, you cannot select more than one in the same grouping. For example, you can't select to search for "bottom" and "versatile" at the same time, you'd have to search again. You also have to start your search from scratch every time as it doesn't remember any of your preferences or previous searches.

MESSAGING:

For messaging, Bear411 offers a simple pop-up message box where you can reply to your messages sequentially in the order they are received. The message pop up provides links to the member's full profile and offers the ability to add him to your buddy list. Until about a year ago, you could only reply or delete the message, ending the conversation. Now, you can select "reply later" so that you can go on to the next message or put off replying to someone for a few minutes. You can also refuse messages from a sender, putting him on your ignore list or you can report a profile or message to the site owner to be dealt with as a spammer. There is very limited message history. You can only see the last 2 responses in a conversation, usually your previous comment and his reply. If you do not have a new message from a member, you cannot see any message history. To the best of my knowledge, there is no external notification system. In other words, if you have a message and have not logged in recently, the site will not e-mail you to remind you to check messages. However, members can bypass the internal messaging system by clicking "e-mail me" on your profile and sending an e-mail directly to the e-mail address you have in your profile. The site uses a web form to keep from giving your e-mail address out. If you receive such a message, the sender will not get your e-mail address until you reply.

The basic usage of the site is to login and see if you have messages. From there, you can select "refresh chat list" and be presented a page of 12 members in your state or country in the order they logged in, with the most recent being first. At the bottom of the page, it'll say "Page #1 / ..." of however many dozen guys are registered as logged in at the moment. In the two mid-morning hours I've been writing this article, the number of pages has jumped from 385 (about 4620 members) to 480 (5760 members). The number of members in Texas who are online has jumped from 242 to 324 and I expect that to double during the peak evening hours.

PREMIUM:

I've mentioned premium member perks a little bit under searching, but for your $9.95 per month, you get several more features and a couple of fewer annoyances. You get 600 contacts on your buddy list instead of 120. The "refresh chat list" to see who is on in your area and the broader "search" are only available to regular members every other day (even numbered days) while paid members always get to use this vital function. Premium members get to see all photos in any member's profile without restriction. The "second location" can only be set by a premium member. Regular members may only update their profiles every 12 days, but premium members have unlimited updates.

MOBILE:

Bear411 has recently started offering a trimmed down mobile version of the site. It is definitely more friendly to mobile browsers that don't support frames like on the Palm and Blackberry. It offers a data-plan saving option of turning off auto-refresh. Once you receive a message, though, it is virtually the same as if you received it on the full-sized version of the site, but with a link back to the mobile home page. You do get your pal list and notes page, but no searching or the list of all members online. Responding to messages or initiating new messages from the pal list seems a bit iffy, but that may be my mobile browser's shortcomings as much as the site's.

WARNINGS:

There does seem to be some politics involved with the site. The site owner, Buddy Bear Greg, takes an aggressively biased role in policing the site, particularly with respect to approving new members and updating existing profiles. As the site owner, he certainly has the right to do all the things that people have been complaining about. Evidently, he hasn't angered enough of the most vocal and most heard people to effect a change. As a user, the only grievance I had was the hidden censorship. Certain words, like "ugly", in messages would cause messages to be deleted without being sent. The sender didn't know the message had failed and the recipient never saw anything. While I might have tolerated some list of forbidden words and terms, not knowing what they were made it infuriating when conversations cut off unexpectedly. Some of the censorship appears to have gone away, but a lot of potential members still cannot get their profiles approved because they're "not bear enough" for Greg. If you want to know more about what's wrong with Bear411, check out Bear411Sucks for the full scoop.

Expectations and Intentions

I have several expectations and intentions about what I want to do with this journal. One of them is the series of personal history of cruising that I've already started. Another one is to pose some uncomfortable real life sexual scenarios I've had and see how you would handle it. Finally, my primary objective is to do a series of comparative reviews of hookup sites with the intent of identifying the best features out there and how we might fit them together to make a better system for hooking up. I just need to find a starting place.

To really do proper reviews, I'll have to upgrade to premium membership at various places. That means I'll probably only be able to do one premium review per month, but I should be able to do an additional free site review. I'll also have to narrow the focus a bit. The first rule would have to be that the site offers a full page member profile view with at least one profile picture. This leaves off Craigslist as a possibility, but allows LiveJournal, MySpace and Facebook. I'd also like to eliminate sites that are primarily about video chat or cybersex. From my previous experience with ICUII, CUSeeMe and ISPQ, there was virtually no emphasis on trying to make a real life hookup. I'm also a serious proponent of safe sex, so I'm going to have to come up with a plan of action for dealing with bareback sites. I think I can be objective about the site's functionality.

I've been premium members of the following sites at one time or other, so will probably start with one of them:
Bear411
Men4SexNow
Gay.com

I was also a member of AOL for several years and found the M4M rooms to be very useful for hooking up, but haven't been a member for a couple of years.

Other sites, I'm considering, some of which are currently free:
BearWWW
Adam4Adam
M4M-World
Squirt
BearCiti
BearDar
BearProfiles


Feel free to make suggestions or ask me to prioritize. If, for some reason, you think a certain site is better in winter than summer, let me know that also. I hadn't really observed that kind of patterns.

Old School Cruising Cred

With this whole Senator Craig bathroom-cruising scandal, I thought I'd talk about my personal experience with pre-online cruising. I was never into bathroom cruising even though I loved to read trashy bathroom walls. I don't think I ever called any of the numbers posted there either. However, when I first went away to college, I got a lesson in "cruising the park" from one of the first gay friends I'd made on campus. He didn't have a car, so we would occasionally cruise together for some awkward moments.

The park was kind of a long rambling riverside affair in several sections. The parts closest to downtown were less active for cruising even though they were much closer to the town's one gay bar. The middle section was a good place to go if you met up with someone and need a little more privacy to talk or whatever. The transition between the middle and end section was a significant side street, a church and the odd fact that the street jogged over a bit, so you had to swerve a bit at the stop sign to continue gaily forward. The end section included a rest room that was supposed to be cruisy, but frankly, I never saw it, at least not at night. That end section had 3 smallish parking areas. The first two areas were suitable for 3 or 4 cars and the one closest to the rest room could have parked 10 cars. With this configuration, you could have 3 or 4 cars backed in so that potential hunters could just pull right in, roll down the windows and see what was what.

This park ended near the dam for the river, however, if you drove around to the lake side of the dam, there was another park that was less cruisy and more isolated. So if you were particularly bored, horny or desperate, you could leave the gay bar after striking out there, hit all the sections of the riverside park and then hit the lakeside park. If you don't find anything by the end of that route, you could turn around and backtrack. After all, you've wasted 30 minutes getting to the lakeside, the scene could have completely changed at the riverside or the bar by the time you get back. At least, that's what you told yourself on the slow nights.

From about age 19 to about 22, most of my sexual experience came from cruising this set of parks. While a lot of it has gotten blurry over the last 20 years, I have some distinct memories and milestones from my experiences there.
1. I remember fucking a guy about a my age at the lakeside park, probably without a condom and maybe even without lube. I remember him telling me he was a virgin, but he was quite into it when I bent him over his trunk.

2. I remember going somewhere with a guy from the base and fooling around. He was going to fuck me, but not having much luck. I distinctly remember him ordering me to "stand and deliver." I don't recall that being any more successful than his other attempts, but the spoken line was quite memorable for me.

3. I remember hooking up with an older chub who turned out to be my first gay mentor. He worked some government job involving psychological profiles. I remember him describing his own psych profile as "grossly normal." This was in the very early days of AIDS and the term "safe sex" was just entering the lexicon, but I remember he played safe every time we were together. Mostly, he was into mutual masturbation. He used lotion and I was entirely too sensitive for that. He had a lot of gay literature and I don't mean just porno magazines, although he had that too. We talked a lot and I learned a great deal of useful common sense stuff from him, but I never saw him outside the park or his mobile home.

4. I remember going home with this handsome blond gentleman who turned out to have a big dick and wanted to fuck me. Until this time, I really hadn't been fucked much or enjoyed the experiences I'd had. He was experienced enough to know how to deal with that. I remember he had some good lube and that was really my first exposure to that. He also recommended a position I had never tried before. I think that position is most commonly called the "cowboy" although "sit on it" seems to be the way to communicate that to your partner. His reasoning was that it allowed me, the bottom, to control how much and how fast I took. It worked! While I certainly recall a feeling of fullness from his big dick, there was also a significant amount of pleasure to be had. It wasn't at all like previous times, where I mostly endured what was being done to me. This didn't turn me into a big ol' bottom, but it did broaden my horizons a bit as well as ease my apprehensions about getting fucked.

My biggest scare happened at this park during this time. It's the closest I've ever come to being gay-bashed. I would say that I was assaulted, but battery is questionable. I remember being backed into one of the smaller parking lots at the end of the riverside park with another friend as we sometimes did. There was sort of an unwritten rule at the park about the number of people in a vehicle. If there was one person, it was considered safe to pull up and try to chat. If there were 2 people, it was considered a bit risky, but sometimes worth trying, especially if the vehicle was familiar. If there were more than 2 people though, it was safe to consider them gay bashers. I remember a car pulled up to chat with us and there were 2 people in the front and they both got out. One came to my side of the car and one came to my friend's side of the car. The conversation seemed normal for a minute or so and then suddenly one of them takes a swing at me and knocks off my glasses. Suddenly in "fight or flight" mode, I turned the key in the ignition and got the heck out of there. I know we were completely out of the park before either of us stopped shaking enough to think about looking for my glasses. This didn't really scare us off, but it did make us more careful or at least think we were being more careful.

Despite spending almost all my free time and late nights cruising, I graduated with better than a 3.0. I moved out of this town within a year of finishing college. I did move to a slightly bigger town, but that's a story for another day.

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.