When the New Yorker writes an article about crystal and gay world with actual specific stories, someone is paying attention. I am just worried that it doesn't matter.
I walked over to the Starbucks on Eighteenth Street with my laptop one afternoon and went online. There are dozens of sites devoted specifically to uniting men for the purposes of immediate, anonymous, and, often, drug-induced sex. The Web site Craig’s List has unintentionally become a sexual superstore for men and women, straight or gay; there is m4m4sex.com and also manhunt.org, the current favorite in San Francisco. (There is hunkhunter.com and bigmuscle.com, among many, many others.) The sites were numbingly similar, and the advertisements on them couldn’t be more explicit. Statistics are usually invoked, and pictures of body parts provided (or sought) as proof. It almost makes the seventies, when throngs of men congregated in bathhouses and on the piers of the Village, seem innocent. Despite laws and regulations instituted at the height of the aids epidemic, sex clubs continue to exist in many cities; there is, for instance, the West Side Club, housed in an unexceptional-looking building in Chelsea, where men—both H.I.V.-negative and H.I.V.-positive—can have anonymous and, if they want, unprotected sex. Another club in New York admits only men with certain physical attributes; others demand that all clothing be checked at the entrance (except, apparently, boots). In San Francisco, clubs are legal, but most sexual encounters are not supposed to be permitted. They are, of course; why else go to a sex club? At least there you can put a box of condoms on the counter and some posters on the walls. Education and interventions are not easily transferred to cyberspace. “The Internet sucks you in,” Tom Orr told me in San Francisco. Orr, a thirty-four-year-old native of Seattle, rewrites show tunes in a salacious, funny way (much like “Forbidden Broadway”), from a gay perspective. “On the Internet, you can be whoever you want to be. Smoke some crystal, get online, and there is nothing you won’t or cannot do.” He is trying to quit the drug. For the most part, he has been successful, he said, but there have been occasional lapses. At Tina’s Caf�, for example, where he performed some of his songs, he mentioned a serious “Christmas binge.” He said, “It’s a constant temptation. It’s everywhere in this town. Anyplace you swing your purse.”
I went to the personals section of Craig’s List and clicked on the link for “men seeking men.” Then I typed the letters “PNP” into the search bar at the top of the page. (“PNP” stands for “party and play.” It’s the not very secret code that means you want sex and drugs.) “We call it ordering in,” Orr had told me earlier. In less than a second, there were seven hundred and seventy-one entries on my list. (This was just for that day in the San Francisco Bay Area. For comparison’s sake, I carried out the same search on the New York City version of the Web site and saw two hundred and twenty-one postings.) The first San Francisco listing said, “Preppy white bottom guy, coming to Castro wants to get fucked.” There followed an extremely detailed list of the man’s various attributes (“38, 5'8", 150, medium complexion, well built, 8 x 6 cut”) and his desires (needs PNP). Another post said, “U.L.L.4 O. P.P.,” which stands for “Up Late Looking for Other Partying People.” Another said, “I’m a hot, down-to-earth, versatile black male and I’m looking for an erotic adventure. Not interested in predictable ‘orifice by numbers’ encounter, and tired of scripted narratives/verbal roles.” He went on to say that he was “PNP friendly” and “poz” (H.I.V.-positive), and that he was hoping for something hot and unexpected. Immediately.
First things first. I bought the new Gillette Fusion razor and have moved
my other Turbo Mach or whatever (the vibrating one) to my shower for when I...well, trim the other parts. Which is much more exciting since it now vibrates, lol. The Fusion however is fantastic. It is like cutting butter. I don't even feel hairs being removed. It's absolutely a fantastic device. However, I am not sure yet of the back trimmer thing since I already have an electric trimmer, lol. And just look at it, its absolutely a stunning piece of commercial/industrial equipment.
