Email from a bi-curious guy in his 20's

About a week and a half ago the following email popped into my inbox:

Dear GB,

Long-time reader of your excellent blog, and long-time dreamer about having gay sex. I'm 26, I'm white, I'm straight (probably bi curious) but I cannot help wondering what it would be like to be with a man. I play with, and adore, dildos, and cannot wait to have my first time with a man.

I don't want this email to turn into a plead for advice, though that is exactly what I need! I've looked at Gaydar's chat sections, but although there are an absolute tonne of people there, they all seem to just be "advertising" their needs, and none of them responds. What is the best way to go about it on Gaydar? Perhaps it might be a useful post for sex-seeking people like me, new to the whole thing? Though, judging by your last post, cruising for a hot guy is exactly what you *don't* need to be doing at the moment!

Anyway, GB, I find your blog a revelation. You're clearly educated and write very well, and long may it continue. My only wish? That you'd go into a little more detail about your encounters. We want to read whether you were top, bottom, how it went and so on! And I think you'd doubtlessly be turned on writing it...

All the best, XXX

Honestly, I don't know, isn't a guy allowed to have a few secrets, especially when it comes to the bedroom? Why do people always want to know all the intimate details about exactly who did what to whom? I can actually remember writing my first ever post, and in the original draft there were the kind of details that this reader is interested in. However when I read it prior to posting, I thought that it all sounded very cheap, so sitting in the BA lounge at Singapore's Changi airport back in Feb-05 I made the decision to try and elevate my blog-to-be above such smuttiness! I edited out all the unnecessary details, and before boarding my flight back to the UK I pressed the button to publish my first post. I've never looked back :-).

But the question about how best to use online cruising web sites like gaydar is a good one :-). Both gaydar and gay.com (recently revamped) have chat rooms in which there's two ways of communicating. There's the Open Channel, where everyone in the room can see what everyone else says, but there's also private conversations between two guys where only the guys involved can see what's being said. So people advertise what they're looking for on the Open Channel, hoping to attract a private conversation from a guy who's interested.

So what's the best way of finding a guy for a few activities? The first thing to do is to create your profile. Most of important of all, try and include some kind of photo. These days there seems to be more openness than there used to be, with more guys showing pics which include their face, however I myself still don't have a face pic on my gaydar profile. But any pic is better than no pic. Some guys will show pics of their equipment, although I always think that that makes them look very crude and one-dimensional. I think leaving some things to the other guy's imagination works better, but putting up a pic in swimming trunks for example is a nice compromise :-). Note that guys who want maximum privacy can make their profile 'private' which means that it gets excluded from all searches. That means it's highly unlikely that anyone would find the profile by accident if the profile owner isn't logged in.

Having got one's pic, the next thing is to fill out the rest of the profile. On gaydar there are two main sections to write, one where you say something about yourself, and another where you say what kind of guy you'd like to find. Some guys just write things like "Ask me" in these sections which doesn't give a good impression, after all, do you want to go to bed with a lazy guy? However, although you should write something I would suggest keeping it short, because guys who write long essays here always give me the impression of being high maintenance and self-centered. There are other sections to fill out too, again put something there, but I don't see the point of saying too much. Looking at other guy's profiles on gaydar is a good way of getting an idea of what works.

Before entering the chat system, I would suggest using the GPS (Gaydar Positioning Service!!). With GPS, you enter your full postcode or zip code of where you are, and then when you're looking at profiles of other guys who've done the same you can both see how far away you are from each other. Guys who are new to online gay cruising may be suspicions of this, because they'll probably be keen to avoid been identified on the system, but no other users will ever see your postcode and it's hugely useful. I'm certainly more likely to start chatting to someone if I can see that they're not too many miles from where I am.

Although I think the chat system is best, gaydar also has the online message system which operates outside the chat system. These messages can be sent to users who're not even logged in, and they'll pick them up the next time they log in. Some users will use the search facilities and then send these online messages to guys that they like the look of, instead of using the chat system. One advantage of these messages is that one can tell whether the guy at the other end has read them, because one can ask to be notified when the other guy receives the message. A problem with the chat system is that one can't tell whether the guy is there or not, because he may have left himself logged in and gone out.

In the chat system itself, before actually entering a chat room one can enter a short bio line, which one does from the main chat window. Although this is optional, I think it's a good idea to say something, even if it's only "feeling horny"! One useful thing to do is to say where you are, e.g. "Chelsea", although guys will often give an impression of what they're after, e.g. "Chelsea top 4 bttm". Saying something useful here helps to save time and cuts down on wasted conversations. You'll still sometimes see things like "pvt ok" at the end of this bio line, meaning that the guy doesn't mind being sent private messages. Before gaydar existed, I recall that that was a very common thing to say on your bio line in the original gay.com chat rooms, but these days I think everyone assumes that private messages are OK unless the bio line says otherwise. Some guys will say "please read profile before pvt" which seems fair enough.

If you've got a reasonable profile with a pic, if you've entered your postcode into GPS, and if you've got a sensible bio line, then if you go into a busy chat room other guys will probably contact you. There's also nothing to stop you contacting other guys yourself, if you like the look of their profile. You can also put a brief advert onto the Open Channel, but doing that works best if you've only just entered the chat room. The reason for that is that one of the long standing problems with the system is that if you see a message from a guy on the Open Channel and you're interested in it, it can be hard to find the guy in the list of chat room users to start a private conversation with him. But because lots of guys are monitoring the new guys that are entering the room whose names are all listed at the bottom of the list, the thing to do is to exit the chat room, then re-enter and immediately put your advert onto the Open Channel so that you'll be easy to find.

Lastly, a warning and a request. Many guys are incredibly rude when cruising online. They'll ignore you, just stop talking to you for no apparent reason even if things seemed to be going well, they'll be self-centered so they'll just ask loads of questions without any thought that you may need similar questions answered, and so on. So the request is for a bit of politeness, because it doesn't cost anything. If you're focusing on a conversation with one guy, it doesn't take long to reply "soz m8 busy at mom" if you get sent a message from a different guy. And if you don't like the look of a guy for whatever reason, "soz m8 but ur not my type" or even "soz m8 but ur not what I'm looking for at mom" is sufficiently polite and will be appreciated at the other end, because the guy won't then waste his time waiting for you to reply.

Do any other readers have any thoughts on the best way to use online cruising web sites?