I ALMOST GOT MUGGED INSIDE A NYC BUDDY BOOTH!!!

[Guest regulation]

If by "judgementalism" you're referring to my views, then I'm afraid you'll have to believe it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main purpose of the gay rights movement was to insure that in the future gay kids WON'T have to express their sexuality furtively in the back rows of porn theaters or in bus station men's rooms or in the bushes in some public park. I thought the idea was that gay kids should be able go on dates and sit together at football games and attend their high school proms just like straight kids. If that's NOT what the movement is all about, then what the hell is it about? It seems to me the stealthy practices you're reminiscing about are all a product of the oppression of gays. You may have fond memories of them, but do you really want the conditions that created them to continue? I sure don't.

[Guest albinorat]

RE: albo dog food??

 

>albo, my man - isn't the

>dog food "alpo"?

>

>only a humble canajun question....

>

>A. :-)

 

Yes, my man, it is. I was making, how you say in dialect you speak, PUN? You know where one letter is supstituted for another but there is a sound alike with something else?

 

I've been singing things Albo, hope no one mistakes that for the dog food.

[Guest LOVEHANDLE]

Forgive me for being so naive, regulation, but I have lived all my life in NYC, and have yet to see GAY kids dating in the way you feel they should have been. I wonder about the planet where you came from. Much to the chagrin of all our gay friends, but having GAY PRIDE does not exactly qualify for liberation, either!!! I hate to be a prude but I don't think we are NOT as MAINSTREAM as you thought we are right now, you can only wish that we are. And besides, these heterosexuals have their own kinky way of getting and having sex: in the same video booths located in the same x-rated shops across the same Burger King I am talking about! Theirs is located at the street level and ours at the basement. I don't quite see the difference with that: and they get mugged as much as we do in the same location by the supposed "GIRLS" that give you two- second pleasures!!! Do you hear any outcries of shame!!! Maybe in other venues such as this one ( I'm just not that interested)!

Got the point my friend? My only interest for the posting to warn those who needed to be warned. For those who couldn't care less: que sera sera.

[Traveller]

RE: albo dog food??

 

Canine Crunchies can't be beat, they make each meal a special treat. Or was it Michael Rainey was ill the day the earth stood still, but he taught us where we stand? I can't remember which one I was singing while getting porked as a twelve year old by the school teacher in the Greyhound Bus Station. But I'm sure it was Bananarama's "She got it, and then she sat on it" the next year with the priest in the back row of the porn theatre.

 

Later.

[Guest Jake]

RE: albo dog food??

 

I had my priest in the confessional booth. To each his own I guess.

[Guest allansmith63]

RE: albo dog food??

 

...I guess this canajun isn't always the crunchiest kernel in the dog food bag...

 

A.

 

another dumb question, though, why are you singing things Albo??

 

...ah, typing error - figured that one out myself. :-)

[Guest albinorat]

RE: albo dog food??

 

>another dumb question, though, why are

>you singing things Albo?? >

 

I guess I'm dumb. But you know the confessional is much like a buddy booth. My first experience in one was when I was 11. We had a priest, Monsignor Farrell, who always heard the kids' confession. He was Irish. We were dagos. He would tell us he had his dog, Mary Margaret, a jack russel terrier in the confessional with him and when you told a sin (usually one you made up, none of us were about to tell an Irish priest the truth) the dog would bark. My vicious brother was sure there was no dog in there. So he dared me to open the door to the priest's side of the confessional and give him a heart attack. I did. I got bitten severely on the hands and arm but did break the dog's leg. Monsigner Farrell had a heart attack and had to be rushed to the hospital. Both he and the dog lived. However there was much cogitation about whether we should sue the church for having a dog that attacked me or the church should sue us for having a kid who attacked a dog in church. I was sent to public school.

 

But when I was 14, my second cousin Vinny, who was a Franciscan, became the first dago prelate at that church. I used to give him blow jobs and once we did it in the confessional (not much room) and once we did it under the high alter where he was reciprocal then threw up. He had a very nice cock. But I have to say these experiences turned me off priests.

 

However, when I was a teenager roaming around the tea rooms in New York, I met several and one was the kinkiest human being I have ever run into. He had a thing for cops. And once he invited me to the rectory where he had a regular date with a young beat cop named Stan (he was Polish). FatherXXX suggested I smoke a joint before I got there, then offered me some blotter acid when I arrived. He then handcuffed Stan and proceeded to shit on him while Stan said the Act of Contrition over and and over. Believe me on acid that was quite something to see.

 

I guess I shouldn't sign things Albo

 

I've been singing things Albo, hope no one mistakes that for the dog food.

[Guest Jake]

RE: albo dog food??

 

none of us

>were about to tell an

>Irish priest the truth

 

Ah, Albo, that was my big mistake - I always told them the truth. They knew I was ripe for the plucking.

[Guest Midnight Cowboy]

Where to begin...? I guess at the beginning...

 

Re-read the opening post. "I go there during lunch hour and scores (sic) for a couple of bucks ... for a j/o and a rimming session...", "...watchers couldn't care less what happens inside the booth...", "...Latino asshole, who had a two inch (sic) dick,...", "...leaving the bastard half-naked and screaming! And mind you, he has accomplices,...". Now, perhaps we could get a spare Democrat, Republican, and arbitrator from Miami-Dade (once they've finished with the dimples) to give this a look, but my bet is most people would find this kind of activity sleazy, particularly in Lovehandle's rendering of it. Maybe I'm more twisted than I'd realized, but I thought a certain sleazy element was part of the attraction of places like these, and many other sex establishments long gone. What surprises me in all this is not the degree of what people keep referring to as judgmental attitudes, but the degree of defensiveness.

 

I appreciate the compliment, Curtain. I don't fall into the group opposed to public sex. I guess if I were a good Republican or Libertarian, I'd say, "To each his own, let each be responsible for himself." But I'm a good Democrat, and instead find the issues at hand very difficult to balance. As a civil libertarian, I know you can't and shouldn't legislate morality; as a pragmatist, I know the unchecked spread of arenas for public sex means more rapid spread of STDs. And the particular establishment Lovehandles described isn't a place most of us would like for a next-door neighbor.

 

Unlike Curtain, I'm not tired of the "fringe types" defining gays in the public mind; I'm tired of caring how the public mind defines us. Unlike Lovehandles, I don't pity anyone who chooses not to frequent buddy booths (nor anyone who chooses to). Regulation's vision may be too mainstream for some, yet it is a goal of gay rights that we be allowed to live and love as conventionally as anyone else. But forcing us to is not a goal. The right to marry, or serve in the military, or raise 2.3 kids in a nice middle-class suburb of Topeka doesn't require all of us to do those things. Nor does the freedom to take your boyfriend to the ball game mean giving up tearooms.

 

Still, it's disturbing how steadfastly everyone here who's accusing others of being judgmental has avoided the spectre of responsibility. Instead, Trilingual compares a 42nd St. tearoom to making out on the Great Lawn, thus equating an afternoon of heavy petting with one's significant other with an afternoon of giving multiple blow-jobs to a series of strangers. Before I'm accused of being judgmental, let me just say that there are days when I'd prefer one, and days when I'd prefer the other. I'm not saying one is better, more moral, more ennobling than the other; but I am saying they are different, and that the man on the street AND the man in the park would be very likely to regard the first as relatively tame and the second as relatively sleazy. If you all insist on pretending otherwise, I'd say it's you who have hang-ups about sleazy sex and some pretty hefty denial issues.

 

There is one other very important difference between these two activities: one is markedly less risky, health-and-safety-wise, than the other. Again, though, no one seems to want to pony up to that issue. As Albinorat says in his wistful memoirs, "who knew, really?" Once when I was in my early 20s, talking with a guy in his early 40s, he lit into me fiercely when I pulled out a cigarette in front of him. Eventually he admitted that he'd smoked all the way through his 20s, but that was different because they didn't know how bad it was for you. I'm sorry, but if you smoke for more than four or five years, you can start to feel for yourself what it's doing to you. How many STDs did a gay man contract before he'd ask himself whether curling up with a good book might be preferable to the fourth trip this week to the bathhouse? Obviously, I'm exaggerating a bit for effect. The point, though, is that even without AIDS we as a community and as individuals would have seen the wisdom in the old warhorse, "You play, you pay." That doesn't mean no more playing, at least not in my book, but it does mean I'm not going to walk into a sleazy buddy booth XXX porn shop in a dodgy neighborhood and pretend that it's the equivalent of an afternoon in the park. Many of the comments on this thread remind me of the immortal words of Cpt. Louis Renault in "Casablanca": "I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!"

[Guest NYCMuscBoy]

Great post.

 

I read this thread with interest. I wonder: why has there been almost no comment on the issue that this discussion is taking place on a bulletin board dedicated to MALE PROSTITUTION? Presumably, everyone on this board is interested in some way on this topic -- a topic that also contributes to a distinct "gay stereotype" and which I suspect most of America would find morally questionable.

 

(I am not most of America, needless to say.)

 

Why is it okay for someone to judge another by where he chooses to have sex, yet conversely not expect to be judged by the fact that one pays/is paid for sex? Is there a stop on this moral slippery slope?

[Guest CZ]

Well, that was precisely the point I was trying to make in my post from two weeks ago. And look at the lame & irrelevant 'responses' it got.

[adriano46]

NYCMuscBoy,

 

I had the same feeling reading through many of the posts here.

 

The whole arena of morality among gays is complicated enough by one's background, culture, nationality, religion and whatever.

 

How each many grapples with his identity and self-esteem varies. For some there are fewer (or no) issues; for others there are many obstacles from a profoundly formed religious conscience to deeply impedded social taboos.

 

Sadly, while we can fight and bitch with the best of people outside our "world", there is a sad tendency to become absolutely cruel with each other, ignoring some of the vulnerabilities we can mask. I would not want to strike up yet another set of finger-pointings, but do think we could all re-read what Jason here has written and think about it before we lash out at anyone else's ideas (remember too... no one HAS to respond to these posts. If you completely disagree with a topic, or find it distasteful or "sleazy" just move to another one).

[Guest Midnight Cowboy]

NYCMuscBoy - I wish you wouldn't focus on the "morality" of any of this, which is what so many here seem to be hung up on; that, and the suspicion that they are being somehow judged. You brought up this site, the primary purpose of which I see as to share information about our experiences with escorts, to help us all become more educated consumers. The fact that in most states "escorting" (or prostitution, as it is called under the law) is illegal should give us all a pretty good indication of its position on the moral compass for the silent majority. But there's an awfully large minority who think prostitution ought not to be entirely illegal. In a good many states, sodomy is illegal; in the majority of states, marijuana is illegal, though some have taken the step of legalizing its use for medical purposes. What is or isn't viewed as "moral" by any particular segment of society, any particular society at large, any particular nation or culture changes over time. It always has been and always will be a slippery slope, a changing landscape; there are no "absolutes" when it comes to morality.

 

Prostitution has almost always been censured, to varying degrees, in most societies, by most cultures. Yet it's referred to as "the oldest profession." Someday people will cotton to the fact that it's not going to die. Someday, perhaps when monotheism relaxes its deathgrip on the majority of the populace (I give it another 500 years or so, but I won't be around to enjoy the decline of Judeo/Christian/Moslem moral sanctioning, alas), people will grasp that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to human sexuality or expressions thereof.

 

But what won't change -- unless we get to the point where all disease is wiped out, all drug-addiction can be easily cured, all psychological idiosyncracies can be "normalized" with certain combinations of injections or pills (a point I'm glad I won't live to see us get to) -- is that different behavior carries with it different risks, and different degrees of those risks. The first time I hooked up with a guy I'd met on a phone line, he said to me (after very satisfying sex), "I'm amazed you'd just come over to a stranger's apartment." He had a point -- what if he'd been a serial killer, or just some garden-variety asshole who liked to beat the shit out of fags? (Yeah, sure, I could've prosecuted in the latter case, but is that satisfaction worth getting beaten-up over?) These days, any sexual contact involving the exchange of bodily fluids carries with it some degree of risk, and we all assess for ourselves what degree we are comfortable with. In general, the greater the risk, the sleazier the sex. What's judgmental or moralizing about acknowledging that? Fuck morality, but open your eyes, guys. Don't pretend sucking off a dozen men in a tearoom or rimming hustlers in a buddy-booth is no riskier than getting fucked by your lover. Both activities are illegal in many states, both activities are viewed as immoral by a sizeable portion of the population -- screw 'em. But don't screw yourself. Take some responsibility for your own actions and your own behavior, instead of blaming others constantly (in this thread, the strawmen seem to be Indians, Pakistanis, and the ever-popular Guliani; on others, it's Denise at the Gaiety, or Pat Robertson, or any one of the past several Presidents, Prime Ministers, ruling political parties, etc., etc.).

 

Suppose Lovehandle had not been so lucky. What if the worst had happened, and he'd been led out of the buddy-booth by this guy, met up with some of his accomplices, and dragged to the piers to be beaten and left for dead? Do any of you think there'd be 1/100th of the national outcry that the fate of Matthew Shepard (spelling?) provoked? I find it extremely unlikely, and that's sad, but not surprising. It's sad because no man -- be he a "straight-acting" (don't get me started), clean-cut white boy from Wyoming or a black transvestite from the Bronx -- should be so victimized. But it's not surprising because most people, whether gay or not, understand that sleazy urban sex is riskier than conventional suburban monogamy, the same way most people understand that being a fireman is riskier than being an accountant -- most people except, it seems, many of the contributors here, who prefer to pretend otherwise.

 

Take morality out of the picture -- add in a dose of reality. Tex said, "...this thread could literally save someone's life," as if being forewarned about one potentially dangerous hustler who frequents a sex emporium (which is much too grand a word to describe the place in question -- I've been there) makes buddy-booths everywhere safe again. I think not.

 

To Adriano and Lovehandle and others who say "don't read this thread if you think it's sleazy," I'd request you please refrain from telling me and others what we ought not to read, and how we ought to define sleazy when none of you have offered your own definitions (which I'd love to hear, really), never mind how I ought to feel about sleazy sex (which, often, is: pretty damned good). Lovehandle, I've lived in NYC for 20 years (going on half my life, if not all my life) and I have met plenty of gay men, here and elsewhere, who want nothing more than to settle down with one person and raise kids, and have met some who are doing so, even here. Please don't think that because you don't know them personally, they don't exist. And please stop with the rude and insulting comments -- they really don't advance your point of view.

 

Michael

[Guest NYCMuscBoy]

Michael,

 

I am intrigued as to why you wish I wouldn't "focus on the 'morality' of this" and then you yourself spend six paragraphs doing so.

 

I was merely bringing up the question, "Are there any stops on this slippery slope?" and you stated, cogently and clearly, that for you there ARE stops. For me as well, there are stops -- I've never been in a buddy-booth. It doesn't interest me. For everyone there are points where they draw the line.

 

What makes me question your post is the assumption that what "most people" believe is the crucial dividing line -- I don't need to explore why this is a controversial view, a simple look at history will do nicely. You then claim "It's not about morality, it's about reality --" namely, the 'reality' of what 'most people' believe -- which sounds a lot like, well, morality.

 

On the other hand, I guess on some level it'd be nice if everyone had pleasant suburban sex. But that's just my ignorant view of what I THINK happens in the suburbs!

[Guest N]

and how we

>ought to define sleazy when

>none of you have offered

>your own definitions (which I'd

>love to hear, really),

 

 

Don't you realize that "Sleaze" is what the other guy does?

 

Good thread. Thanks for the warning!

 

N

[Guest LOVEHANDLE]

Ladies,

 

Could we let this thread die a natural death now so we can all move on? I never intended this to be humorous or preach a certain gay lifestyle or much less advocate one: the only intent was to warn those that needed to be warned or should I say, that wanted to be warned. This venue has provided me more than what I needed to know: that the world is made of different people with differing opinions and that no matter how clean your intentions are, there will still be some people who would think otherwise.

 

As I have said, and will stand by with what I had posted: THIS IS MY LIFE AND THIS IS THE WAY I HAD CHOSEN TO LIVE IT. I couldn't care less what the other people think. If you don't like it: tough shit! And if you do: then so be it!

[Guest Midnight Cowboy]

NYCMuscBoy -- Well, I re-read my last post twice and still can't figure out how I spent six paragraphs focussing on morality, except in the attempt to get rid of it as a consideration. I was using what "most people" think as a reference to what one might call "common sense." For instance, do you agree that it's common sense to presume a fireman's job is riskier than an accountant's, or most any other office worker? Isn't it common sense to regard mountain-climbing as a riskier activity than, say, ping-pong? Are any of these choices more or less moral than the other? If George-the-accountant was killed by a psycho co-worker who came in one day with a shotgun, wouldn't you be more surprised by that than if Henry-the-fireman was killed by a collapsed beam in a burning building? Does that make George more or less moral than Henry?

 

Common sense, as I see it, would hold that hanging around in inner-city tearooms or buddy-booths is more dangerous, riskier to your personal health and safety than going home to your lover every night. Does that imply one is more or less moral than the other? Virtually everyone on this thread has gotten hung-up on being "judged," and thus reacted defensively (and offensively), instead of having a real discussion about the risks involved. Read Lovehandle's latest retort: "I couldn't care less what the other people think...tough shit!" Real community-building there, real constructive attitude. (Despite Lovehandle's claim to care about gay people, he seems actually to care only about gay people who think and act exactly like him; otherwise, "tough shit!") I had hoped to get people away from feeling judged, but it seems impossible. It seems that people like to feel persecuted, like to point fingers at mayors or presidents or ethnic minorities, instead of discussing what kind of risks are associated with what kinds of behavior, for us as individuals and for us as a community, and why we take them. Given how the gay community pulled together over 15 years ago in the face of a dire crisis, I had hoped we'd not fracture quite as dramatically, not to mention rudely and dismissively. (Not to imply that you've been either, NYCM; far from it.)

 

Michael

[adriano46]

Midnight... x(

 

Just out of curiosity, given all you've written here, is there a reason for your name "Midnight Cowboy"? I only ask, as the title implies a position blatently the opposite everything you are saying here... or did I not see the right movie back then?

 

Much of what you write is provocative, and calls for much more thought, but to be honest, for this reader, you do not persuade because you actually write too much. You begin to sound like the lawyers we are watching on T.V.

 

As many have said here, and not wishing to belabour a point, most gay men would like nothing more than to have a single lover, happy home, job security and looking forweard to a nice happy retirement with their lover... They would love not having to be tempted to visit tea rooms, bath houses, saunas, buddy booths, video parlours, boys houses and frequenting escorts and hustlers.

 

And if all that were possible, HooBoy's site would be out of business too (and we would not even be having this dialogue... of sorts...

 

I agree to keep our aim high, work towards those goals, and try to make this all happen. I also agree that many of the places mentioned above are down right dangerous for one's health and well-being, and we are all (those of us over 40...) sadly seeing a reversion to the carefree days of the '60's and 70's, as if all that we have gone through means nothing.

 

At the same time, one cannot deny that there are also many gay men out here who cannot live openly their identity. Their sexualty must be suppressed, closeted, and hidden, and they can only express their true feelings - albeit almost in an exaggerated way - when having anonymous sex. For them, my own message is "Keep it safe, guys no matter what!" But I cannot condemn them being in their shoes myself. With that, I thank NYMuscle for his own perspective and empathy.