Baths, bookstores, and bars

Back to the early 90's, it was probably 1990 when I made the first of several trips to Dallas to check out what the big city had to offer for this small town gay boy. It's funny to remember places that are now something completely different. There used to be an adult book store called something like "Lobo After Dark" in Oak Lawn. It was at the back of the building that now includes Hunky's, but on the side nearest the Nelson-Tebedo Clinic. There was very limited parking and everybody always joked about having "enter through the rear." Just exploring the stock, both video and magazines, was quite eye-opening. I probably shopped there a half-dozen times in a 2-3 year period before it closed down. Across the street, in the building where Skivvies is now, there was a very cool dance club that I distinctly recall dancing in only one time with friends.

From these 2 places on Cedar Springs, I soon branched out and discovered some adult bookstores on Mockingbird. I don't really recall their names anymore, but one was in the building now marked "McKool Graphics" and that's where I had some furtive gropes and an unexpected hookup one time. He and I along with about 8-10 other guys were in a small theater showing porn projected onto a screen. I remember following him to a part of north Dallas that I'd never seen before. For some reason though, I remember how we met more than the actual encounter. I know this seems kind of random, but it was memorable for being the only time I was cruised at an adult theater.

Around this same time, I discovered there was still a bath house operating in Dallas. (Actually, there are 2, and they are still operating, but I didn't learn about the second one until much later.) I first visited Midtowne Spa in Dallas sometime around the summer of 1990. For those that have been there recently, this was before the maze was installed, otherwise, it hasn't changed much in the 15 years until they remodeled the basement. The routine at Midtowne Spa at this time was to cruise the corridors, the spa area, or the roof. You could also leave your door open and try to catch someone's eye to invite in. Typically, you'd lay on the bed in your preferred position, showing off the particular asset you wanted to use. Bottoms would either face the door with the ass up and away from the door, or contort into a position to show your ass and still see the door. Tops had to maintain enough of an erection to attract interest. Before Viagra, this was more of a challenge for some guys than others. My main memory from my first visit was kind of a mixed deal. I was cruised by this super hot red-bearded otter and somehow we ended up in someone's room for a very awkward 3-some. I was in the middle of what should have been a hot bear sandwich. The red otter was very hot, but the other guy really wasn't prepared to be the bottom and it really wrecked the scene. Luckily, I would encounter the red otter again on at least 2 other trips to the baths. One time about 10 years ago, I saw him looking even hotter in a tux at an event at the Meyerson Symphony Center, but I never saw him again after that.

Sometime later, I went back to Midtowne Spa with a gay coworker. He had a much older partner, but seemed to free to go play in the city. We coordinated days off to drive up and spend the night at the club. Back then, you could check in to a room for 10-12 hours, nowadays, rooms at Midtowne are 6 or 8 hours. I really wanted to play with him and thought this would be a good opportunity, but once we were there, I never got the vibe that he was interested in playing with me. I still had a good time, cruising the halls and the steam room and several anonymous quickies of various flavors. We compared notes on the drive home, but never really spoke of it again.

Another time, I took a straight, but curious, young redheaded co-worker to Dallas to show him the Crossroads. For some reason, we ended up at a dive bar called Big Daddy's that is now a strip center with a sandwich and sushi shop. We were watching some comedic drag show when he decided to go tip the performer. A bit later, I discovered he had arranged for her to come over and embarrass me. He got a good laugh out of it, but decided it was time to return home. I remember he stayed the night at my place and we were up very late experimenting. He was a good kisser and actually a good cocksucker. He said he'd never done that before and his earnestness was pretty believable. He had a comfortable-sized cut cock that I certainly enjoyed playing with. He really wasn't interested in fucking me, but I don't recall if he let me fuck him. I do know that we both had a good time and a satisfactory conclusion, but that ultimately, he decided he was more interested in girls. I ran into him a few years later in a similar job at another location. He had gotten 2 different women pregnant at the same time, so he was struggling to pay his share of everything for both babies. He seemed happy about the way things turned out and was genuinely glad to see me and tell me all these details.

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.

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.