How could I have convinced this gay acquaintance that being gay doesn't mean you think like a woman?

Tell him that the fact that he thinks like that proves to you that he isn’t REALLY gay. That should set him thinking on just how ridiculous his own notions sound.

Wait. I’m confused!

I’d probably say something like, “I’m not kidding you. My experience is that different people often have really different attraction patterns. I’ve talked to many gay and straight people, and while there might be some things more likely or typical for some groups, different people are often really different about their sexual attraction, who they’re attracted to, in what ways, and what they’d actually do about it.”

You’re telling him he thinks like a VERY straight man. He’s tied up in stereotypes. There ARE women of course who would “like to hit that”, but throw another stereotype back at him such as usually it’s men who want to screw anything pretty regardless of consequences.

I have a classmate who figured out he was gay when he was, like, 35 years old! I love him to death, everyone does, but he makes absolutely no secret of the fact that when he flies in for class get togethers, he makes a point of searching the internet for some guy to have sex with while he’s here, even if it’s just for the night. That just blows my mind!

Making up for lost time. Gay men & pretty boys. You should have seen this town in the late 70s—early 80s prior to the aids epidemic.

I think a lot of people who come out of the closet go crazy at first. It’s just like anything else. My first time at Costco, I spent a fortune.

Well he’s not newly out. He’s 60 so 25 years now…he can find sex partners with ease so he does. I can NOT fathom putting myself in a situation like that, alone with a stranger! But he isn’t a girl and he works out regularly so he doesn’t necessarily have the same concerns a woman would have.

I have this so-called friend that must think that every woman there is wants to have sex with him. He thinks if a woman agrees to a date, she is agreeing to sex. If he ever fell down and busted his head wide open, millions of naked women would fall out! If I ever mention anything about women, be they young or old, short or tall, skinny or fat, he has to hang some sexual connotation on it, as if I think just like him.
Some guys (and probably some gals) are like that.

Yeah we know that guy @kritiper. When I was 16 I had a flat tire on a busy 2 lane. I knew how to change a tire. Dad saw to that! So I got to work.
Well some dirty old man, probably in his 40s, stops and insists on taking over, in spite.of my protest that I knew what to do.
Well, after all was said and done I was a rude bitch for rejecting his sexual advances after he had just saved my life.
Eye roll.

I always thought that if a girl agreed to have sex with me, that it was pretty special! But some guys think sex is like a handshake: Everybody does it and it’s no big deal!

In your experience is there a particular kind of guy who thinks that @kritiper?

People are going to believe whatever they want to believe.

At one point in my life (in San Francisco) I was in school and working 2 jobs with no woman friend or social life (I was far too busy for that). Pretty much everyone was convinced that I was gay even when I explained to them that I was not. A typical response was, “Oh you’re gay!”. One woman tried to set me up with a gay man. I was very polite and kind to them. They were nice to me also. But they hard a hard time accepting what I was telling them. It was so weird.

There was a time in San Francisco when it seemed any half way desirable man was assumed to be gay. And this in a town where single young women outnumbered their single straight male counterparts by better than 2 to 1. The sailors still talk about those days when this place was paradise.

Well, San Fran was kind of where it all started @stanleybmanly.

You had to see it to believe it. I mean gay & lesbian young people from all over the country flooded the city. And the Castro was like a commune of recent escapees from concentration camps. Gay liberation here was an astonishing thing to live through. There was this indescribable frenetic intensity to it that no description will do justice— And then came the plague.

I bet it was. And AIDs must have been crippling to the whole city.

It was bizarre, because the mad rush of young gay folk here along with galloping sexual freedom were still ramping up as the pestilence erupted. It was a fkn nightmare, because no one understood what was going on. There were an awful lot of people in the gay community suspicious for too long of the developing alarm as sabotage of the gay celebration. There were fights over whether or not to close down the exploding proliferation of bath houses and gyms as the party tempo rolled on beside the rocketing climb of diagnoses with only one outcome.

I remember, though I wasn’t in the middle of it.

I remember wondering why the bath houses were so important to gay men. They didn’t have bathhouses for Lesbian women. They didn’t have bath houses for hetero sexual people either. Just gay men.

Somehow there’s something rather sweet in that sort of innocence.

There were steam rooms and hot tub places. Until now, I’d forgotten about their existence. I wonder if there are any left?

Obviously it was for sexual reasons, but why are gay men the only ones who use a bath house for that?

I’ve never been in one. I wonder if they were equivalent to steam rooms or saunas. I know for a fact that the hot tub houses were put to sexual purposes as a matter of routine.

Just…ew!

@Dutchess_lll There are lots of guys who must think like that!

I envision wanton random sex with strangers going on. So yucky.

Well it cannot be any worse than a whore house for example. It makes sense that people compelled to hide their sexuality as a matter of survival would overindulge with the lifting of restraints.
There is just too much variety between individuals in the degree of objectification of desires.

I would think the humid conditions of a bathhouse would spawn all kinds of bacteria. That’s what grosses me out.

I think the epidemic did them all in locally. But I believe that prior to the outbreak such places were heavily regulated by the health department. The plague had all sorts of unforeseen effects. For example, I’m pretty sure a man can no longer get a shave in a barber shop.

How would they regulate them @stanleybmanly?

Regulate the barbers?

Regulate the steam rooms and hot tubs in the gay bars! Daym. Hanging out with you boys at 4 A.M. is funky!

What were you doing up so late/early? That’s a fascinating study— the city’s bureaucracy and its reaction to the epidemic. It took a lot longer than you would think for people to understand what was going on. This was because people were getting ill and dying from secondary diseases resulting from compromised immune systems. So the question of how the bath houses were regulated depends on what stage of the epidemic you want to discuss.

I have no f*****g idea. In the last month I got to bed at 11 or 12, like I always do, then hubs comes to bed and I manage to wake up and can’t go back to sleep. So I just…get up and stay up until about 4.

So the bath houses weren’t regulated prior to the AIDs out break? I guess if those places are full of willing, eyes wide open males, who know the dangers, why should any government entity police them?

No. They were regulated and inspected. But the regimen was on the order of attention you give to public swimming pools. Actually as the cases skyrocketed and rumors still exceeded the facts, the only thing apparent was that the disease appeared confined to gay men. A fierce controversy boiled up over whether or not to shut the bath houses down. But the controversy and climbing casualty list brought an abrupt steep decline in business. You know, looking back, that was a very strange era to live through.

It was. And I remember it clearly. I remember seeing the National Enquirer featuring Rock Hudson on the cover at the grocery store. That was my first introduction to AIDs. I think it was 1982 or so…..