New York trip 2004: Saturday before the flight

Last year I spent a week working in New York. Ever since I started working in investment banking I’ve been a regular visitor to New York, making trips once or sometimes twice a year, so I’ve got to know the city quite well.

In New York gay.com is (unfortunately) much more widely used that gaydar (gaydar.com is better than gay.com). I hadn’t used gay.com for many months so on Saturday, the day before I’m due to fly out to New York, I log on to gay.com to set up my profile for New York.

After updating my profile, including things like altering my location city from London to New York, I can’t resist having a peek at the chat rooms for London to see how dead the gay.com ones are compared to gaydar.

To my surprise, there are almost 100 guys in the gay.com London citywide chat room, although the other gay.com London chat rooms were empty. On gaydar of course, there are several London chat rooms for different areas and they’re all much much busier than that, but I’m still surprised to see so many guys on gay.com.

I’m about to log-off and head for the gym when I get a surprise – someone on gay.com likes my profile and wants to talk to me. With much fewer guys in the chat room, and without any idea of whether we’re likely to be close to each other in London or not, the probability of getting some fun is low. But I start chatting to him anyway.

Coincidentally it turns out that he’s in the adjacent London borough, he’s up for a meet immediately, and he can accommodate. And of course, since I was about to go out to the gym anyway, the timing works for me too.

So it’s all agreed, I’m to go round there immediately! I tell boyfriend number 1 that I’m off to the gym as usual, and set off. I walk round the corner to the usual mini-cab firm that I use in these situations, and within 15 minutes I’ve arrived. It’ll be a bit awkward to get a cab for the return journey from this area, but never mind.

The guy lives in a small Victorian terraced house. “Nice house”, I say as I walk through the door, “is it yours?” It turns out that he shares the whole house with his boyfriend, but his boyfriend has an IT job for a bank that means he sometimes has to work weekends on site, which is exactly the situation today. So after the boyfriend left early for work, the poor guy left behind felt horny, so he went looking for action on the Internet.

The guy directs me into the front room, where the curtains are still closed. Because I’m on my way to the gym I’m dressed in gym kit, which the guy finds a bit of a turn on. “I like sporty guys”, he says. I slip off my T-shirt, and take off my trainers and socks, so I’m almost naked apart from one item of clothing, my gym shorts. The guy puts one hand on my bare shoulder, and reaches down with his other hand and feels me through my shorts. “Hmmm, nice”, he murmurs. I look him in the eye and touch him in a similar way. We have an enjoyable, if somewhat functional, session.

“But why gay.com when there are so many more guys on gaydar?” I ask when we’ve finished.

“Well”, he says, looking embarrassed as though I’ve discovered his dirty little secret, “I really like American guys, and you tend to get quite a few Americans who are visiting London on gay.com because they don’t know about gaydar”. Good answer, although nothing to be embarrassed about surely? Perhaps he wishes he had an American boyfriend?

As anticipated it’s a bit hard to find a cab afterwards, but it’s been an enjoyable little trip. Maybe I should use gay.com more frequently in London after all. In any case, I’ll be using it over the next few days while I’m in New York.