Do you "have sex" or "make love"?

I was looking at a few gaydar profiles recently when I spotted a guy who'd written the following sentence about himself:

"Prefer making love to having sex, as such the terms top/bottom, active/passive/versatile do not apply"

Although I've never really liked the terms top, bottom etc, I'd never really given much thought as to why I don't like them. But suddenly, when I read that line, everything became crystal clear!

So much cruising relates to the mechanics of who does what to whom. There's no love, or interest in the person, apart from their ability to play the right role. Of course, this isn't new because before online cruising existed, the Hanky Codes were invented to help guys hook-up in the combinations that they wanted.

My experience suggests that a lot of gay men focus almost exclusively on the mechanical aspects of sex. If someone is able to play all the right roles well enough, the two guys may end up in a *relationship* which will last until they get bored, perhaps for a few months or maybe even a couple of years. I reckon guys who behave like this are having sex with each other, but never making love. In this context where there's no love, monogamy makes even less sense to me because we're just behaving like dumb animals, following our primordial sexual instincts. It's the world of pornography where one guy says to the other "Yeah bud, you like it like that don't you"!

The curiosity is that so many of the gay guys that contact me via this blog seem to be interested in love, especially the guys who are in the process of coming out, whereas many of the guys that have come out and that one meets online only seem to be interested in the mechanics. I can't help thinking that as guys come out, they often get gradually more involved in their local "gay scene", and that somehow encourages them to focus on their primordial sexual desires rather than gay love. Indeed, I've heard of several bisexual guys who've chosen a woman as their long term partner because they feel there's no love in gay male relationships.

When I'm cruising online however, I reckon that I always start by trying to find guys that it would be nice to make love to :-). But sometimes, I admit that I'll just end just focusing on the mechanics! I think the act of cruising gradually makes me feel more horny, so that if I 'm unable to find a nice guy to make love to, I'll end up just trying to find another horny guy to have sex with. But I do think that I try not to focus on the mechanics, and perhaps that explains why I have some success finding guys who want to be my boyfriend. Looking back only a couple of weeks, I can now see that my list of ten things which make me happy is incorrectly specified. It should definitely talk about 'making love' rather than 'sexual activities'!

Unfortunately the guy who wrote the sentence quoted above that inspired this posting lives on the outskirts of London, so meeting up with him would be inconvenient. But I did contact him to tell him that I'd be using his sentence in a posting, and to ask him whether he wanted me to attribute the sentence to his gaydar profile using a web link. He said he was flattered that I liked what he'd written, but didn't want a link.

Perhaps just "having sex" is something that we all have to get out of our system before we can focus properly on "making love" instead. Some guys probably get seduced by the gay scene and end up permanently focused on having sex, but I think many more tire of it and move on. My view is certainly that making love to another guy, and especially making love to a boyfriend, is infinitely superior to just having sex with him :-)!