Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?
8.4.2008
By Michael Joseph Gross
If you are a single gay man in search of a mate, and if you are at times prone to discouragement, you probably have friends who reassure you that someday you will find a man who'll cherish every part of you -- even your weaknesses, even your flaws.
If you have been wondering whether to believe this, wonder no more. There are in fact at least a few dozen guys out there who cherish your flaws. They work in Cambridge, Mass., in a historic building topped by a golden statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, in an oak-paneled office suite where a grandfather clock marks the passing of the hours. Here the guys who delight in your weaknesses oversee Manhunt.net, the world's fastest-growing gay website, which is quietly abetting a revolution in social and sexual mores, under the slogan 'get on, get off.'
The phrase evokes the product Manhunt sells: a fix of quick sex -- easy in, easy out. To partake, men market themselves in a style shaped by the site's profile template. Profile names, which tend to be histrionically masculine or graphically sexual, appear next to pictures, usually of a beefcake or X-rated variety, often with heads cropped out, accompanied by brief, blunt descriptions of sexual tastes ('I need oral and anal sex all the time'). Beneath these entries lie a series of boxes that can be checked to signal 'What I'm Into' (27 options, including 'JO', 'Exhibition,' 'Pig Play,' 'LTR' -- long-term relationship -- 'Feet/Socks'), 'When I Want It' (the box most frequently checked is 'Right Now!'), 'How I Like It' (top, bottom, etc.), 'Where It Happens' ('Your Place,' 'My Place,' and the popular 'Anywhere'), and 'What I Got' (age, build, ethnicity, eye color, hair color, HIV status, and height). To that last category will soon be added penis length and girth -- 'a controversial issue within the company,' says Manhunt's recently resigned director of marketing Phil Henricks, 'because men lie.'
This wealth of information makes Manhunt seem the most efficient place for its target customers to find sex, because the site's comprehensive search function can produce in seconds a list of, say, brown-eyed bottoms within one mile of your zip code wanting to get it on 'Right Now!'
Manhunt's apparent efficiency owes even more to its staggering number of members. The site's other advertising tag line, 'If he's out there, he is on here,' is only a slight exaggeration. In the United States, Manhunt now has nearly 1 million members, and the site receives more than 400,000 unique visitors per month. If you are among its target customers -- younger, hotter, and richer than average gay men in big cities -- Manhunt is the club that the proverbial everyone (meaning, the guys you've always fantasized about) belongs to.
Who knows? You might even find a boyfriend there. If it's true -- and everybody says it's true -- that sex is the gay handshake, then one of these days maybe you'll hit the jackpot. Thus, even many of the most overbearingly erotic profiles also haltingly express a dream of emotional connection. The headline of one man's ad, next to a big close-up of his butt, asks, 'Are you The One?'
Manhunt was founded in Boston in 2001 by Larry Basile and Jonathan Crutchley, who came into the business via phone chat rooms (they still have that business, but it's dwindling). Separately, both men, now in their 60s, had also made fortunes in real estate. (Among many other properties, Basile owned a hotel and gay bar in the former gay enclave of Boston's South End; today, he lives outside the city in a Frank Lloyd Wright house on a 17-acre farm.)
Crutchley, a liberal Republican with a tight white beard, admits that he felt anxious during Manhunt's first years, before his and Basile's initial investment of $800,000 bore fruit. Now, seated at his desk and surrounded by giant photographs of body builders' glutes, Crutchley says the company brings in at least $2.4 million per month -- almost $30 million a year -- not counting ad revenues, and prospects for growth are strong. Manhunt's success measures the extent to which online cruising has changed gay urban social life. Is it changing gay politics too?
I began wondering about this connection at a dinner party on Martha's Vineyard when the host asked why, during the past decade, so many national political victories and legal reforms -- an employment nondiscrimination act, a hate-crimes bill, repeal of the military ban, marriage or civil unions -- have remained beyond our grasp. A fashion photographer from Texas drawled, 'I think it's because so many of us spend so many hours of so many days online, doing things that make us feel ashamed of ourselves.'
We all laughed, and the conversation rolled on, but the comment stuck with me. Though not an exhaustive answer to the question, it is (for the kind of men who were at that dinner party, for the kind of men who read this magazine) an important part of the answer, and -- when followed to its logical conclusion -- more than a little unsettling.
During the 15 years since America Online men-4-men chat rooms introduced mass-market online cruising (earlier Internet cruising technologies, like IRC chat rooms, were mostly for techies), some aspects of our lives have become more visible than ever. We are ubiquitous in mainstream culture; we are out to our families, friends, and employers; we're able to hold hands in public, in some places, without having to worry that we might get beaten up; and some states and cities now permit gay marriage or civil unions (more will inevitably follow now that California has joined Massachusetts). As this wave of enculturation advanced, AIDS treatments made the ravages of that disease less visible and dispelled the sense of crisis that strengthened our connection to each other in the 1980s. These factors, along with straight gentrification of gay neighborhoods and the growth of the long-tail economy, hastened the decline of many urban gay enclaves, and the demise of many bars, businesses, and social groups that gave structure to gay life.
'Post-gay' social life grew mixed, and the physical drive that defines us as gay -- the drive to have sex with each other -- increasingly found vent online. This aspect of our lives became more private, and even secret, than ever. In 1993, 2.3% of gay men found their first male sexual partner online. In 2003 the number was 61.2%. (These figures come from the United Kingdom, and there's been no parallel study in the United States, but sociologists believe the findings here would be similar.)
'The implications of that trend are enormous,' says Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. 'It means that gay men who were once socialized in brick-and-mortar establishments, surrounded by other people, are now being socialized online.' Gay men still go out as well, but our nightlife habits are very different than they were 12 years ago. Jeffrey Parsons, professor of psychology at New York's Hunter College, says his unpublished research confirms the common sense that 'when guys go to bars, they're going to be with their friends, not to meet new people.'
The same thing is happening all over the world, and Manhunt is going global. Already catering to members in over 100 countries, Manhunt has recently expanded into such unexpected realms as China and India. In March of this year foreign memberships numbered 600,000, and worldwide, Manhunt adds 30,000 new members per week. Matt Foreman, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, notes with some awe that Manhunt's membership is 'larger than the membership of every major gay political organization combined.'
Manhunt's annual income from memberships alone is roughly the same as the total amount of individual contributions to this country's two biggest gay political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF. Foreman says, 'If we could leverage their membership for activism, there's no limit to what we could do.'
When the Department of Justice considered requiring proof of age for all Americans who post naked pictures of themselves online (ostensibly as part of an effort to crack down on child pornography), a link on Manhunt directed members to NGLTF's website for instructions on how to stop the regulation from taking effect. 'We got 130,000 hits in a two-day period and it crashed the site,' Foreman marvels. It was the heaviest site traffic in NGLTF's history, a fact that Foreman optimistically interprets as a reaction to the 'Bush administration's infringements on rights to privacy.' But there's another plausible reading of this activist surge: Perhaps the right that gay men are most willing to fight for is the right to cruise online.
I am not scolding. I have done practically every stupid thing a guy can do on Manhunt. I don't like to think about the number of books I could have read, languages I could have learned, and friends I could have stayed in better touch with if I had not wasted so much time cruising online these past 12 years. I hesitated to write this essay, because I am not proud of having acted like a moron, and because contemplating the just deserts of my online adventures is unpleasant.
I decided to write this piece anyway, because after I reflected on my own experience, talked to friends about theirs, and interviewed shrinks and doctors and academics, political activists, historians, journalists, novelists, and, via e-mail, heard from many dozens of random guys about how online cruising in general, and Manhunt in particular, has changed our lives, I found that their answers, taken together, told a surprisingly common story about the way gay men keep secrets and the destructive power those secrets hold.
Manhunt is the elite gay world's big secret. An acquaintance and his boyfriend, both successful executives, first met on a Manhunt hookup; months later they were married in a castle, surrounded by friends and family, few of whom have any idea how the couple met. We don't tell straight people about Manhunt. We don't even tell them it exists. And even when we do, we usually don't tell them what it's really like.
Manhunt is rarely mentioned in newspapers or magazines. Occasionally it shows up in stories about public-health crises (of which more later). A little more often, reporters discover the Manhunt profiles of public figures, who are subsequently embarrassed, or worse. The mayor of Spokane, Wash., and the chairman of the school board in Richmond, Va., for instance, both lost their office after their Manhunt profiles were made public. Last year, a 24-year veteran of the Norwalk, Conn., police department was arrested for having sex with two 15-year-old boys and trying to arrange to meet a third -- all of whom he found on Manhunt. Nude pictures from profiles reputed to belong to Thomas Roberts, the former CNN anchor, and American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, were circulated on blogs and mentioned in gossip columns. And yet Manhunt members still seem to think they can get away with anything there: The profile of one of the world's most powerful entertainment executives includes full-length naked photos of him, clearly showing his face, having sex with another man. Another famous master of industry advertises on Manhunt as a hung top, with a headless version of a widely published portrait of himself. God only knows how many more ticking time bombs lie among the profiles.
But the most powerful secrets that live on Manhunt aren't the ones we keep from the outside world. The most powerful secrets on Manhunt are the ones we keep from ourselves. Practically every gay man has his own version of this secret, which we learned to keep while growing up in the closet: the secret fear that, if we were truly known, we would never be loved.
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Homo: For a moment we hoped that Manhunt actually could destroy “gay culture”. No such luck, neither Manhunt nor Adam4Adam, nor Grindr nor nor all the other hook-up sites could do that. They are, of course, a symptom, but so is the rickety version of self-help Utopia presented by Michael Joseph Gross as an alternative. First, Gross’s view is rife with a thinly veiled puritanism: that sex is somehow inherently dangerous or evil. Second, the fiction that “we” (“gay” men) are a culture, that “we” have rules or a notion that “we” share anything in common. Which culture? Which rules? Which heritage? Gross’s assertion that it takes courage, patience, discipline, and imagination to go on dates and that if we all engage in this magical practice we’ll become “better men”, is as risible an idea as that of “Manhunt as Zion” held by some poor sucker clicking away toward Sex Addicts Anonymous in Indianapolis. Is the Amusement Park of Cruising or Death by Slow acting Suburban Anesthesia the only choice today?
A truth of gay life for us is that we are born into it alone, and this affords us a unique opportunity to develop. If we can take this up deliberately, choose and demand a great deal more from our lives and of our peers than the average sheepish hetero, then we’re getting somewhere. For this to happen we need to be aware of the possibilities. Friendship, excellence, art and Eros have always been important watchwords. To many ignorant straight-gays these might be seen as frivolous things (as opposed to SUVs and children), but to our kind they are articles of faith; the home in which we dwell. Nor are we empire building. We represent a choice, we were NOT born this way: we become this way. This path is a demanding one, you need to trail blaze, and this is more than can be asked of many. Homosexual life, flooded with immigrants from unprocessed Straightland, has declined into to lazy suburban living. This Sex and the City crowd have plopped themselves in the middle of the exceptional party and ruined everything with their bad taste in Everything. They have much to answer for, but thankfully they are not in our keep.
We represent an elective tribe, lost at the time of the AIDS catastrophe (yes, HIV was a disaster for us, not a redemptive moment or team building exercise). We advocate pluralism but with a stress on difference. Whatever the lying stripes on the rainbow banner represent baffles and repels us, as do all such confected nationalisms. We sail under cover of darkness through the Scylla of consumerized sex and the Charybdis of Suburban Prison with our little band of sailors.
More like this here: http://homo-online.com/post/34691109832
Thank you for a fantastic article. I don't believe though that it is just the development of the internet that has led to this. We live in a society where its possible for everyone to have their 15 minutes of fame. It is a culture where the individual is king, being famous isn't limited to a select few. This is progress when compared to previous authoritarian cultures and is what underpins the Arab Spring. Yes things have probably gone too far but it will be this dysfunction which will lead to the next level of seeking inner peace within a caring community. The question is what can we do now to support the development of a caring community? My thoughts have led me to ideas such as developing grass roots groups of men who come together, agree to a code of behaviour based on mutual respect and honesty and focus their energies on positive contributions to society. Their are many subgroups in gay culture who view each other with suspicion or contempt. This probably arises from our won internalised homophobia. As Bears, muscle marys, gay professionals, fairies, transgender we need to come together honour each others past, create spaces we can express our sexuality, feel good about themselves, learn to care for each other and move beyond using sex as a purely a means of validation. Having myself moved between some of these subcultures they all have much to offer the whole. The Radical Fairy Movement inspired by Harry Hay has much to offer in developing different ways of coming together. We mustn't forget though that the commercial gay scene had an enormous role in pushing gay visibility and rights and this needs to be honoured. As Marquismarq suggests the answer to all of this probably lies by thinking out of the box!
This article is very enlightening. As I have felt this way so many times. Even at my age (23) I have felt this way about sites like adam4adam, black gay chat, and countless other sites and even phone apps. These sites have reduced us to nothing. They are physiologically debilitating. I began using online dating when I was 17. ( I came out when I was 14) and for me it did provide a way to socialize with others like myself. but since then I have deleted and recreated these profile too many times to even count. In the span of five years.... five years of my life. I feel like I went from innocent to destructive, to mournful to now.... simply... done... done with this online thing, but at times craving for people like myself who are only a click away. You cannot tell me that you can divorce emotions while having one hook hookup after another.... Je suis desolee, but your brain does not simply shut off... the physiological impact that this has on your brain... secondly on your self worth. How much can you give before there is nothing left to give and you just become someone's fantasy as they lie on top of you or you lie on top of them and simply move up and down... I felt guilty after every hook up i have ever had, every one of them. I've only been on maybe two real dates where no sex was involved.... I'M DONE!!!!!!.....From these sites I've had some good sex and tons of bad sex. and again like the article I honestly feel that these sites have destroyed me, brought me down, made me less than anything of substance, less than anything that matters... reduced to a mere picture of my penis/ass to turn around and head to the grand Hyatt for a hookup with a guy who's first name I forgot, as he lays on top of me, and all I can think is how I really deep down I was lonely and wanted to cuddle with someone. It has at one time made me give up on the notion that there are monogamous, sensitive, loving, men in this life.... The number of times I run across men in open relationships; is this what I have to hope for in the years to come? I have been so disheartened to the point of depression. But like the poster above me, I've chosen to get rid of those profiles, to delete them. And there are those days when I feel alone, or I feel the need for just the company of another person, but like all feelings those to pass, and I simply wait them out. There are times I feel like I'm the only gay man trying to " make it" without having sex, without doing drugs, or partying it up.... sometimes I think I should be out there with all the other 20somethings like myself....but like the poster above me.... I seek fulfillment across spiritual lines.... this journey has pushed me to buddhism... to quell my anxieties, to quell my fears, to bind up my loneliness..etc.. but still I live in hope that someone like myself will come along.... I wish I had mentors, gay mentors, I wish that I could have known the camaraderie you all speak of during the AIDS crisis. I really wish I knew that.... because there was no one there to help me along the way.... maybe I can help younger gay men like myself along this path. I thank the author for posting this.
Regarding this quote:
'I think it's because so many of us spend so many hours of so many days online, doing things that make us feel ashamed
of ourselves.'
I've looked for and found gay sex (even extra-marital)in person and online for 40 yrs and have NEVER felt ashamed of myself...even a tad chagrined right after but never ashamed....
I think that Mr. Gross is Larry Kramer's love child and I am encouraged that he is here and hope to read his work for as long as I am still alive.
However, the most disturbing, distressing, sad and pathetic feature of his essay is that the OUT editors placed it in the category of "Entertainment."
This trivializes the subject matter. Although there doesn't appear to be category for "profound insight and analysis re socio-sexual behavior," entertainment this is not.
I'm all for anything to debunk the marriage monogamy myth. There is some truth to the men rolling over and going back to sleep after sex cliche. It's true most men just want too "get off," not recreate "Ozzie and Harriet." In all honesty, even if they try that, it won't last very long. The unspoken desire of gay marriage is the feeling that you own someone else - on paper of course. Masterbation will always out live any ridiculous ceremony on a beach at sunset.
I could write reams and reams about this and lose a day I need to devote to graduate school, so I'll try to keep it short. From the perspective of a man sober for 7 years, 20 years spent in the bars and 10 years spent on line were two sides of the same coin. One experience was drenched in liquor, one in crystal meth. Both yielded uncountable sexual encounters. Both led to incomprehensible demoralization, notwithstanding an enormous amount of "fun." Both were underpinned by the diehard commitment to the idea that my value was measured by my desirability, that my sense of self-worth required constant outside validation. It shocks me now how willing I was to give away all that power to others for so long.
When I let go of such notions by making a commitment to live along spiritual lines my first priority, it's rather remarkable how my love/sex life settled into a lovely amalgam of domesticity with a roommate, hot, regular encounters with a fuck-buddy, and Skype-love with an Austrian I see once a year but with whom I have a stunning intellectual connection. It is entirely possibly to find "right-sizedness" where before there was compulsion, and a hunger for intimacy that only led to my high having a relationship with their high.
Mostly, I get most of my emotional sustenance from a circle of incredibly close friends to whom I consider myself in a defacto marriage. It doesn't feel like compromise in the slightest--I can't think of any traditional couple I envy. I urge all gay men to think "outside the box" in ways to find intimacy if you redefine it as an experience that does necessarily require a sexual component. We as a tribe have a gift for friendship that we need to see as equally sacred to romance.
You are totally on point about our gift for friendship. It is wonderful to read about your personal and spiritual growth. I too find intimacy through nonsexual relationships with some very close friends. Thinking out of the box is definitely key in fulfilling our sexual and emotional needs. I currently get my emotional support and intimacy needs met through friends while having a sex buddy from time to time. Unfortunately, I am with you on the fact that there are currently no couples in my life that I envy. I find that a lot of times those who are in long term relationships are in them for the wrong reasons. We should be proud of our independence. All while being able to meet our needs in non traditional ways.
This article has been a turning point for me. And indeed The Wolf's response. I came out of a 20 year relationship last year, and turned to Manhunt as an escape, a relief, an adventure and, yes, in the belief that there might be another person out there (not to replace the one I had lost, but to start a new journey with, probably just as confusing, unpredictable and fulfilling as the last one).
Now I won't be a hypocrite and say that part of it hasn't been fun. On-line cruising didn't exist when I came out - we met in bars, or at dinner parties or at work, and did all that complex, odd and oddly satisfying/disappointing dance of discovery of the other. And it took time. And you sort of got to know people along the way. But the new world I found was profoundly different and for six months or so profoundly exciting; I'm fit, OK looking for my age and reasonably confident (god, this sounds like a Manhunt profile...) and for the first time I found myself hooking up, fucking and saying goodbye with a sense of light, ludic freedom. This was FUN, and playful and immediate and it made me feel like I was a porn star (in my own little middle-aged-porn-star at home with slippers kind of way). I took some drugs, I did a few trios, I had some laughs and then…. Well then it morphed. Quite quickly. Into something else; something that has changed me more than a little and something that I have not yet got a word for. And don’t like.
First of all I need it; I am on line a lot, and always on line for sex; Secondly it has made me dismissive of people who don’t meet my sexual fantasies (and more worryingly for my sense of self, equally depressed and insecure when I don’t meet the sexual fantasies of the other) and finally it has reduced my sense of the other to a set of numbers/mages/statements that do not equate with a real, flesh and blood person but with the internalised perfected images we all have of what successful male-ness is in the 21st century. The writer said it – an image separate from myself. Muscular, confident, self-contained, 30. And I think it is making me sad.
The 30 reference is not a throw away reference. I have met some sweet guys on line, but the 30-generation is a law unto itself; the younger guys, still searching for some way to be who they might become, are full of questions, a certain innocence, and a certain sense of the impossible task they have set themselves. The 45+ are cynical, aware of the task that was set and how little it satisfied them, and often (when not totally leached free of all human emotion by the process) and still with a capacity to listen. The 30-generation is fully submerged in the gay consumer dream – young, financially independent, party and sex obsessed and driven by a sense of entitlement; I have never met so many rude, careless or cruel individuals in my life before. You don’t fit? You don’t match my immediate need? You don’t fit into the hegemony of what being gay is (tits, man, and a close cropped beard?). Then get out of the pool! I feel this. And I sort of do match… what the outliers feel like God only knows.
And I am drifting in that direction! A phrase keeps coming back to me – “sorry, man, but our profiles don’t match”. I have got it back more than a few times and then a week or so ago I used it myself. Now, I spent 20 years with a man who in Manhunt terms would have been a disaster; to say our profiles didn’t match would be like saying Cher has had some hair extensions. Nothing matched. And we got 20 years, friends, family, god kids, houses, holidays, books, travel and long Sunday mornings in bed to of it. And now I am trying to match my profile with a set of ticked boxes. I don’t think I lie on my profile; but isn’t really me; Not deep down; not in the sense that I am not those photos, I am not that jocular, relaxed, NSA successful guy who gives the impression that life is a bowl of fruit he dips into when he feels like snacking. What I am, what you are, and what I believe most of us are is softer, more fragmented, less contained - searching for some map towards the fulfilment of self – even better if in the company of a courageous friend. And the boxes don’t tell that story.
To understand the real impact of this change you need to connect with a more dangerous phenomenon, which is that of the impact that Internet use is having on our brains. I recommend anyone interested in this area to read ‘In the shallows’ by Nichols Carr. If you connect it to the light of your own experience on sites like Manhunt, Gay Romeo or Gaydar, you will quickly realise that what is being altered if our very cognitive structure – how we perceive other people, how we connect to them, read them, understand them, how we build up our pictures of the outside world and how we project ourselves into the future; It is not just that the gay dating site encourages a sense of ever-renewed need, desire and satisfaction (brief satisfaction), it is that the very tool we are using – the computer screen, the mobile app, the touch pad – reinforces this endless unsatisfied quest for novelty, for perfection and for completion. Bring together three elements – the gay man’s insecurity, the computer screen’s neurological stickiness and the gay dating site’s exquisite designed consumer compulsion and you have a perfect storm of addictive behaviour. In a way it makes me feel better that I cannot get off line. Who could? Its all been designed to make me come back, click again and move on. And what it has done (and thank you to Michael Joseph Gross for having the balls to use this word) is that it is destroying Hope.
I used to pity gamblers and winos; I used to think I was emotionally and psychologically superior to them; I used to think that having a car, an apartment, a Prada suit, a book collection and a dinner party circuit made me immune; now I see that I am living the slot machine version of my emotional life. SO the article was an important warning sign. The question now is –how do I get out of the gambling arcade? Is it enough to know? Is it enough to be aware and yet not yet be cynical? And how, in Elliot Spitzer’s name do I reconnect to my emotional needs, find a man I want to sit on the sofa with and read the New Yorker and age with (there’s the word Manhunt seems to have banned from its vocabulary), when my entire identity seems to be now just about my penis and my pecs? And I am one of the successful, intelligent and (or so I like to vaunt) sensitive ones?
What, now I have ticked my boxes, to I do to unpick them, Can I just switch off? And when I do, when everyone else in the entire world is connected (I have not yet downloaded Grinder – the urge to do so is like a sugar craving. Pray for me that I resist, as you would pray for a diabetic to ignore the Krispy Kreme in the fridge) where does hope lie then?
In many parts and in so many words, I feel your article truly hits home about what I have been saying and preaching about for so many years now. Ever since I was sixteen, I saw the blight which entangled and choked the masses into believing that identity and homosexuality were mutually inclusive terms, that "being gay" meant acting, dressing, or behaving in a certain way. I think the gay community has been propelled into a spiraling cycle of labels, stereotypes, and archetypes that it fights with such vehemence with yet fails to realize the nature of these sociological boxes carved out by the world. In effect, it leads to us becoming the very things which we hate. We hate to be stereotyped and labeled yet we become so consumed by that mutilates our sense ourselves, our sense of being.
Introspection, critical thinking, and reflection are not common within gay men. They are immersed in their sexualism, their high-end urban life, their possessions, and trying to echo the reverberations of the American dream: rich, independent, masculine, self-sufficient, muscular, confident, and intelligent. While these traits may be good and worthy, they do nothing to allow us to view the world realistically, to teach us to love ourselves, to embrace our weaknesses, to banish the darkness and toxicity that society has instilled in us for ourselves and for gays. Instead, what I see is division after division of gays trying to find their own safety hubs from each other, trying to compete and vie for supremacy of lost souls, broken hearts, and empty souls. How can this be a good thing?
While I am not condemning sex and I can see its need on a biological level, I think it should not be the center-piece of any one's life. Unfortunately, people of this thinking are usually equipped to believe they can do anything, they are invincible, and will never have to deal with consequences. They value the immediate in exchange for the future because. They may think "the future is unpredictable and I have little hope that there will be much for them in the future anyway so may as well party it up today while I'm still alive and young because when I'm 40, it won't matter anyway. I'll be too old, decrepit, and senile."
I hardly knew 40 was the age of senility but these are this is just an example of what I mean by people not understanding themselves, reality, or how the real world functions in which they live in. As you so eloquently put, Michael, "We still don't know how to have enduring relationships. We still don't have examples. We still don't have mentors. We still don't have courtship rituals." All we have is ourselves and we don't even know what the heck we're supposed to do half the time when we are alone. We desperately seek out others to define us, to build us, to create in us purpose and give our existence purpose. Who could blame us for we are human too. We are no different than anyone else in this fundamental regard. We just don't recognize these kinds of these yet though, the majority of us anyway. With each new generation, I fear the legacy and message we are sending to the younger ones that "this is what being gay is: being a urban middle-classed socionymph (word I coined describing non-purposeful hypersexualism within gay men) with a constant urge to live on the edge of life."