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Despite the entertainment value of missing literal rainbow flags, I'll note outright that you did a lot better reading social signals than I did the first three or five times I went to one, and I had about the same level of interest in a casual hookup.
Fair. Not 100% accurately, mostly because some are paranoid enough to have separate phones or be really aggressive about separating files, but yeah, even people who aren't on the meat market'll often have some less-than-audience-friendly photos on their phones.
You might be surprised. I'm not the best person to ask about appearances, but there's a good part of gay society where that'd come across as pretty strong masc top signal.
Sounds about right. My impression's that they were a lot more popular in the 80s, and still had a decent number of strong advocates in the 90s, but even when I was a young bi they'd started to get the same sort reputation whippits did (if far less dangerous). Technically a high, but dumb and risky even by the standards of drugs.
I think there's also some mechanical explanations, in addition to the safety and reputational concerns, though. A lot of by-gay-for-gay literature even into the 90s emphasize them (or similar materials like 'vcr tape cleaner') not for improving climax, but as a muscle relaxant. Improved availability of tools and toys to get certain muscles more trained for certain things, and more expectations for tops to properly manage speed, may have made that aspect a lot less universally valuable.
But they've still got a following for that purpose, and that following has long a litany of first-hand bad experiences (bad headaches) and second-hand horror stories (oh boy, chemical burns).
Huh. Wonder how much of that's a genuine geographic or cultural difference, or something tied to the specifics of how UK bars work rather than US sphere stuff, rather than 'oh, that's just a bidet/enema/lotta shower time, not a douche'. It's always been something some people can't stand at all, and definitely not my idea of fun, but it's something I've been hard-pressed to be comfortable without even when pretty confident about diet control.
From the bi guy side, that's somewhat glossing over the less charitable reasons: there's a lot of gay stereotypes about bi guys as just wanting side pieces, or wanting some fucc in the short time before they settle down with a woman/beard later. But it's not wrong, and people fitting those stereotypes do exist.
You're starting to see that a bit more, but not surprised it's both uncommon and mostly not young gays in your sample. I'm not convinced it's a good decision at larger scales -- a lot of the fresh-out-of-high-school gay guys think it's like complete immunity, rather than 'just' an order of magnitude reduction -- but then again I probably put nowhere near FG's value on sex, so hard to make a serious analysis.
((In the US, they're starting to push it to the point of having advertisements on bus stops and park benches in my local area... and I'm not in an especially gay or even urban space.))
Yeah, they were incredibly rare ten or even twenty years ago, and probably reflected a bunch of conditions that aren't likely to show up again: the whole thing screams of sublimated fears over having to choose between certain infection and complete abstinence not just from sex but even casual exposure in gay spaces. You do still get some people taking incredibly stupid risks, but they're usually more just going 'max bodycount'.
Speaking of which: ugh, that's a sphere I'm glad I have no information about.
In the US, you'll sometimes see jokes about it as equivalent to keeping rent down by firing gunshots off at the street corner. Probably not a turn of phrase that'd be appreciated or understood in the UK, though. I think there's more motivation toward low-grade exhibitionism, since a lot of these habits were common back when (or where) straight guys wouldn't enter a gay bar for a sorority worth of women, but fear of gay spaces getting rolled over by a tidal wave of straights is definitely a thing and not an unreasonable fear.
Oh, boy, that's it's own separate ball of wax. Tbf, there's a lot of complex tradeoffs where the new demographic has some compatibility issues with the standard demos at the same time that it is partly your old clients. But there's also lot of older gay guys that are somewhere between weirded out by and grossed out by trans women as pretty much everything that gay men weren't supposed to do, or just don't like it, and that's a lot more controversial an issue in the field.
What is an honest straight man who is a zero on the Kinsey scale supposed to do? Go topless? I suspect that would make things worse, heh.
What else do I have in my wardrobe? Hawaiian shirt? I can see where that leads.. Barely worn suits? Probably means I'm closeted and looking for fun on a business trip I'm sure.
I mean, I can't blame them, I was an interloper in a gay bar. That is a strong signal of... something. Poor situational awareness, a liberal worldview, a love of cheap drinks? Pick your poison.
FG framed it in a manner I've heard before: Back in the day, you're all but guaranteed to get it, unless you give up on the gay lifestyle altogether. Why not just get it out of the way?
Hang on, another memory unlocked. He told me that he had met three potential partners who were HIV positive. I think he said two of them were on PrEP, and he might have slept with them. The other wasn't, and thus was rebuffed. I think this is what prompted the tirade about HIV and monkeypox. He said that man was being an idiot, and worsening general societal perception of the gays, as well as being a risk to their lifestyle.
Interesting. I'm not too surprised by the existence of conservative or reactionary gay men. These guys seemed to be very liberal in outlook, they were friends with the trans bartender, so I guess they took the concept of LGBT solidarity more seriously!
Fair. If I had to come up with the no-gay-guy-would-wear-this setup, it'd probably involve an emphasis on frumpy and especially too-large clothing, but that's neither actionable nor useful advice for anyone in the real world.
Yeah, something like that, but eroticized as someone permanently taking you and making it impossible to go back. Not just for lifestyle-as-in-baths-and-chemsex, but even lifestyle-as-in-meeting-up-with-gays-for-parchessi: remember that it took until the late 1980s for official medical advice to say you couldn't transmit HIV by casual contact, and longer for a lot of people including gay guys to actually believe it.
There's been a long-standing presence of these sorta pragmatists, and while HIV gave them a lot more political capital (even when they were guessing), they've probably had more impact than my respectability politics side. I'm not sure how well the math works out in the long run, though.
I'm also confused about either the specific policies or a communication issue. My impression was that US medical advice is to actively test people for HIV first and never give PrEP to HIV positive people, and that the UK was similar. Are these people using PrEP as a byword for any oral anti-HIV medication, and they're really on ART (but then they're unusually medtechnical group, so that'd be a weird conflation)? Is FG assuming anyone without known HIV status is positive, and these guys are 'just' unknown status, so PrEP is more reasonable? Am I behind the curve on the literature, here? Am I ahead of the curve, and people giving out PrEP doing so in conditions that probably aren't helping?
Some of them are generally-conservative or reactionary, at least by local standards, but I've also seen it from older lefties who just have that topic as their exception, too, in the same way that a lot of TERFs are bog-standard feminists otherwise. But the solidarity arguments are still pretty strong for anyone that's seen a cis crossdresser called a fag, too, even if the actual policy proposals don't necessarily follow.
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Okay, now you've piqued my curiosity.
This is kind of a straight person thing too. I recall seeing memes a few years ago joking about "not opening your gallery in front of strangers." And, really, the era we're living in often involves an exchange of nudes for people in an intimate relationship, so it wouldn't be especially surprising for a straight man to have dirty pics of his wife or his girlfriend on his phone -- though probably an order of magnitude fewer of them. Straight women are maybe? less likely, but I doubt it's unheard of. And both of them might just have dirty pics of themselves in their photos, you have to take them to send them!
The same stereotype works in the opposite direction -- straight women have concerns about bisexual men for the exact same reason. As self_made_human has realized, getting sexual attention from gay men is trivial, and so is both easy to obtain and less valuable per-interaction. So madonna/whoring your mindset and searching for disposable sexual attention from men (whores) while seeking out reliable partnership with women (madonnas) is something you can do, if you're so inclined.
The other thing is that gay men, particularly ones who are interested in companionship more than disposability, often feel trapped by the expectations of gay dating, and are jealous of straight men for whom long-term commitment, exclusivity, and broad social acceptance feel like table stakes. So bisexual men can be "traitors": taking from gay men whatever they can get from them and then fleeing to the arms of a woman when one arises.
This has been somewhat sexualized lately, with the "femboy bf"/"femboy hooters" meme culture which prompts great recrimination in the ongoing femininine-man/trans-woman civil war, but of course that also comes with the corollary memes of "breaking up with my femboy bf because I met a real woman." (I have no idea what the actual prevalence of this stuff is, I'm just way too extremely online.)
Intriguingly, this pattern seems to mirror many complaints about women's sexual behavior from men, and women's complaints about the sexual behavior of extremely attractive straight men: if sexual attention is abundant, using it for temporary affirmation while utterly disposing of your partners' interests and needs is a real possibility. Turns out, sex is not tennis.
I saw a bunch when I visited DC with my girlfriend. Interestingly, they were generally framed as "use PrEP to protect him" not yourself, like that Simpsons meme about Maggie.
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