Here's an interesting article from one of our favorite bloggers, Hardy Haberman, for the Dallas Voice, where he proposes that ‘Electro-tricks’ may be quicker and easier, but half the fun of the hook-up was working at it.
In his article Hardy relates some of the allure of cruising as it used to be; If two people read the signals, and actually respond, it might proceed to sending over a drink — or a more direct approach. Often before actually making contact, you would ask a few friends if they knew the man in question, and for the leather scene that would also entail asking if anyone knew more intimate details: Was he a safe player? What was he into?
He goes on to write; Sadly, I don’t see much of that going on anymore. What I do see is guys checking their smart phones. Looking a little closer, I see them using Grindr, checking Recon and texting.
Check out the entire article after the jump.
I love cruising the "way it used to be", the mystery of the dark corners, the butterflies in my stomach (and other places) when the guy I was cruising responded.
Believe me, we're still cruising and we're using all of the tools of the modern digitally connected kinkster. In the old days I'd carefully pick some going out clothes (an emsemble okay!) that reflected my mood and what I was looking for. Today, I might pick one of my profiles for the same reason, my persona for the evening. Pre-Internet, I'd head to the bar that was most likely to deliver the goods for my mood just the same way as I might pick one or two cruising/hookup sites today.
Cruising multiple sites on my iPhone today, even while I'm IN a bar, is exactly the same approach I used on my hunting nights at the SF Eagle. I was never cruising just one guy. It was never just a serial activity. Nope, I had multiple lines out to see which guy took which bait.
I honestly can't think of downsides to either approach. I get rejected online just like I did in person. I took more than a few "falsely advertised" duds home from the bar just like I have online. I chatted in person in the bars with one or two people standing next to me and today I chat with dozens from around the world.
Our online sites are our bars of yesteryear and the bars still around today have adapted to survive and moved on from dark cruising bars that kept women out with "open toe shoe" policies to social spaces that function more as a community center and less a hook up spot.
I definitely agree with Hardy that the art of cruising, at least as he and I remember it, is either gone or an endangered species. But my Grandma had a party line phone back in the day and there was a certain etiquette to using that too which is long gone. Today I've got a smart phone all to myself and I kind of like that better.
Hardy's great, but he does sound here a little like he's bemoaning the passing of the horse and buggy.
And I think he misidentifies what's missing from online cruising. It was missing from flagging too.
Flagging as a cruising strategy was predicated on two highly questionable propositions: first, that you knew with great precision what you wanted, and second, that what you wanted was to perform a specific act or acts, as top or bottom.
The lesson of real-time in-person cruising for me was that there was plenty about what would turn my crank that was unknown to me. I wasn't really in search of an activity but of a connection: a man. This guy making eye contact might not be what I had in mind, might be flagging colors I'm not into -- but the sense of some buzz, some mystery between us that I wanted to explore would turn out to be a surer guide than what I thought I was up for when I walked in the bar.
That's the thing I don't know how we can replicate online. Mystery will still happen, of course. But it's harder to chase down if you can't actually see it and smell it in front of you.
Posted by: Patrick Mulcahey | 08/05/2011 at 05:52 PM