How to talk to people

OK, you'd think this wouldn't be difficult, but every time I go into anything but the largest chat rooms, there's total silence. This doesn't bother me, but it seems to bother other people, because they try to start conversation, and they fail, and they get mad and blame everyone else.

I covered the basicsa while back, but I see guys make the same few mistakes every time, so let's get them out in the open.

Things not to say if you want to start conversation

1. Hello.
   
   OK, you can say "hello," but don't stop there. My response to "hello" is, to no one's surprise, "Hello." This is followed by "how are you," but no one really cares how I am, so unless I deliberately respond with "oh, everything sucks," the topic dies right there. But chances are if I wanted to talk about my problems, I'd already be doing it.
   
   I mean, be friendly and everything, but "hello" is not some magic key that unlocks conversation in other people that they were dying to start.


2. Why isn't anyone talking?
   
   Because no one's said anything that they can respond to. I have nothing to say about why other people aren't talking, and neither does anyone else. Talk about something real and you'll have better luck.


3. Does/is anyone …
   
   I'm not everyone, so unless you ask a question I can answer affirmatively, I'm staying silent. "Does anyone know a good place to eat?" Well, my tastes are probably different from yours (and I have dietary restrictions), so no. "Does anyone know where all the fun is?" If I did, I probably wouldn't be chatting.
   
   Now, if you ask me where I would choose to eat, and why, I'll probably answer that because I can. This isn't to say I know everything, it's to say that if you want a question answered, ask someone, not anyone. Find someone who's talking, or who's just entered the room, and ask him. If others chime in, all the better.

It's basically all the same stuff as I said 18 months ago—talk about something and people will usually respond, if they're paying attention at all. Talk about nothing and you'll get nothing in return.

I have no boys collared

As his needs continue to change through his transition to womanhood, my puppy today decided to remove the collar I placed on him more than 27 months ago.

This was not unexpected given the journey he is taking. I didn't write that post until months after he'd told me, and I genuinely hoped he would never remove the collar. But I suspected he would. A relationship between two gay BDSM men can survive a lot, but I'm not sure that changing gender is among those, at least if both of them aren't bisexual.

In the words of a different Mary Chapin Carpenter song, we have grown "closer and closer apart" over the past year, and I could never, in good conscience, expect him to remain in a relationship that is not fulfilling to him. We remain extremely close friends, and as I said before, he will always be my puppy, even when he becomes a magnificent bitch.

I placed the collar on him in late July 2008; he had worn it himself for a couple of months before that, and wore a chain for a few months before that. In the 27-plus months since that day, the collar had never been off his neck, not for one moment, until today. His love for me could not have been more perfect, and I could not have asked for anything more.

I only wish that our paths had not diverged. Having him on my path has been the most emotionally fulfilling time of my life.

The next post has been cancelled

For a few weeks, I've been mentally working up to the next post, "So, there's another boy." (In addition to Puppy, whose transition was discussed last time, except I got something wrong: surgery is most definitely an option.)

However, it seems the new boy has decided not to stay.

I make him happy, and he has requested that I stop doing this because other people would not understand why he is happy. Or, conversely, that I be a different person so that other people would understand why he was with me.

As the second option is not up for discussion, I'm leaning very heavily in favor of granting the first part of his request.

Update: It's official, he's gone.

Update 2: Well, now he wants back. Long-time readers will understand exactly how reluctant I am to allow this, but I am considering it.

A long, strange journey

In addition to being busy with real-world stuff, I've left this blog kind of idle because I haven't been searching much of late. My wonderful boy who lives 800 miles away has now been collared for over two solid years—in all that time, the collar has not come off his neck even once. He is handsome, smart, witty, passionate, sexy, and so completely devoted to me that I normally call him "puppy" even though we do nothing like traditional "puppy play." I've been very blessed to own him and to continue to own him.

And he is transgendered.

This came as a surprise to both of us. He had talked about it some in 2009, but on his last visit here (in the winter), he said that he was sure he was going to go through hormone replacement therapy (HRT). It's not clear to me (and maybe not to him, but maybe I'm just blocking some of this out) whether he will be living as a woman or how strong the female secondary sex characteristics will be. He does not anticipate any kind of sexual reassignment surgery (ever), though.

It was a traumatic thing for me to hear, and that was a surprise to him. He is (and always has been) bisexual, but I am just gay. The more female he becomes, the less attracted I will be. I remember thinking at times that this must be what it's like for straight married couples when one of them comes out of the closet. One person in the relationship did not come out, and he or she is still sexually attracted to his or her spouse, but the spouse starts moving further and further away.

And it's even harder, because he still finds a fulfilling relationship with me (and was never that sexually attracted to me anyway, but loves me to the point where that doesn't matter). Naturally, I feel like a heel when he can see the relationship staying the same when he's a girl, but I (being gay) cannot. He is so wonderful that he wants to visit again even though he knows that despite his burgeoning feminine side, I'm reasonably likely to shave his head as my slave. How could one ask for more than that?

If his transition doesn't develop a huge number of the secondary sex characteristics that tell the lizard sexuality part of my brain "that's a woman" instead of "that's your puppy," I think the relationship can be largely unchanged. But if they do—like most gay people, I have the same revulsion towards the "wrong" gender that straight people do to gay activity. And it kills me a little inside just to use the word "revulsion" in a paragraph about my slave puppy. I hate the uncertainty, and he does too.

Some things, however, are pretty easy. There is a bond between us that gender lines cannot break. He is my puppy, and regardless of sexual characteristics or gender, he will always be my puppy. As long as he obeys me and recognizes me as his owner, I am proud for him to wear my collar and hope he never, ever removes it.

There's a Mary Chapin Carpenter song whose refrain says "Whatever the calling / the stumbling and falling / we follow it knowing there's no other way." This is his path, and he must follow it even if it leads away from me. It makes us both sad at times, but we both know without any doubt that to ignore the path would be far, far greater a sin. How many submissives never become slaves because they refuse to follow their path? It's also wrong to ignore the path when it points in a direction we'd rather not travel. Your path is yours, wherever it leads, and I love him for following it wherever it goes.

Protip: Don't try to take control

I was talking to a really local boy (more local than most local boys) that I had found on grindr today. Grindr is a meat-market app for gay guys with iPhones. It's nice to see local boys who aren't in the normal chat rooms, but most them seem to be really looking for almost totally anonymous hook-ups right now, and that doesn't work for me or for most BDSM dominant men I've known. (Subs have it easier, at times, because they often don't mind vanilla encounters. Dominant men are less likely to feel the same way, IMHO.)

Anyway, I had enjoyed making him realize whose choice it was if we played (mine), agreed to his desire to wait a couple of weeks (he says he's a virgin), and had even more fun making him realize it was still my choice if we played tonight or not. But then I let him off the hook.

Unwisely, he then said that he wanted to keep talking about sexual stuff so he could get hard again and then resist temptation. Having done this for a few hours, I was kind of done with it, as I had decided to accept his proposal to wait a couple of weeks. I told him I wasn't going to continue that way, and he said:

What if I threaten to cut off contact unless you continue?

I replied:

Then I'll cut it off right now. Good night, boy.

I didn't log off, but I didn't see anything else from him, and now can't find him on grindr. Perhaps he logged off there, or perhaps he was just faking all along and didn't care how he pushed it.

But for those who mean to find a dominant man: do not threaten to take any part of control away from a Dominant man who's already established it. I don't know a single dominant man who would accept that, even in the slightest. When a sub spends part of the "get to know you" process threatening to do or not do something unless you do what he says, every Dominant man I know would just walk away without hesitating.

I'm not saying I wouldn't give the boy a second chance, as it was early in the process. But not a third. I've learned that lesson, at least.

A brief status update

My slaveboy is starting a process of transition, to a place where he will apparently be much happier. This makes me thrilled for him, because having owned him for two years, I think that things other than me should make him happy, and that hasn't happened too much. However, if he does get to this new place, he will be unable to continue as my slaveboy. This causes us both grief, because we don't want it to end.

There are zero local candidates for play. Of two local boys I can count who might want to play here again, one has a boyfriend and won't, and the other always finds a reason not to play here. The other local sub candidates of the appropriate age range who express interest are too flaky to get anywhere close to actually playing. Just tonight, one local guy who has expressed a BDSM interest in his gay.com profile, but has always shrugged off when I tried to talk to him, did the same thing after I pointed out his Recon profile with extensive BDSM interest—and denied that we had ever spoken in the first place. I lose interest really fast when I'm accused at the beginning of a chat of being either a liar or incompetent.

I've looked at Grindr and a couple of similar location-based services lately, but if there's more than quick anonymous vanilla hook-ups on them, I haven't found it yet. All they want are pics. Face pics, body pics, dick pics, ass pics, any pictures, it's all they want. That couldn't interest me less.

So, yeah, things are reasonably dark with no sign of a tunnel's end. I don't know what happens from here. I may just give up the online chatting for a while again. Last time I did that, I stayed out of public chat rooms for about three years. I don't know if I'm going to do it again or how long it would last. I just see no rational reason to continue on the same paths.

Secret: I'm kind of a jerk.

Well, you know, big surprise. Most people are jerks in one way or another, and I don't think I'm any more jerky than anyone else.

I am, however, complicated, and that usually makes my life suck more.

I own a wonderful boy whom I love, and who loves me, but the right thing in his life is for him to be in school several hundred miles away. I only see him 2-3 times per year because of this, so he can play with others with my permission (which is not unreasonably withheld), and I can play with others at my discretion.

Nonetheless, for about the past year, my chat status on gay.com has been "not looking," because I'm not looking in the "traditional" sense. I only play with boys that I've talked to for a very long time. I don't like boys who come on too strong, and from my early days in domination, I still have bad memories of playing with very experienced boys because I get "that's not how the other doms did it," the quickest buzzkill I've yet found.

Beyond that, though, I'm kind of a low-key dominant. I've said before: I wear T-shirts and jeans, I'm somewhat mild-mannered, and anal sex is not my favorite thing in the world. That rules out the significant portion (65%?) of boys for whom getting fucked is the primary purpose of any BDSM. I also immediately tune out those into smoking/cigars—I've never been into that, and a bout with pneumonia a few years ago made it all but a deal-breaker now. I'm not a muscle guy, I'm over 40, and I don't wear a lot of leather or rubber (OK, I don't wear any of those).

I'm just…dominant.

That used to be enough, but for today's subs, increasingly it seems it is not. I recently treated myself to a Recon premium membership to see if I could find a greater number of submissive guys who might be looking for occasional play, and boy howdy, does Recon ever have that. But it seems there's a pretty sharp division between two kinds of younger subs:

• Those who have no profile info and no experience, and who live far away, and



• Those who have full profiles but extensive experience, even at young ages.

I'm seeing profiles of 18-19 year-old guys who have spent full weekends in bondage going from sleep sacks to cages to inverted suspension, all while kept hard with electro or forced smoke or full-body catsuits, and so on.

I haven't worked as much in the past few years as I did in the years before, so I haven't kept up with gear, especially when I don't play all that often. I don't have a cage, sleep sack, or vac-rac. I don't have the structural support for body-weight suspension, inverted or not. I have no electro gear and therefore no electro experience, and anymore, electros seems to be almost a baseline for "what subs expect." I've also never gotten into intricate rope bondage, despite how hot it looks. To my dominant side, bondage is about restraint, about keeping the sub in his place while things happen. I prefer to use stronger restraints that are quicker to get on and get off, and don't leave rope burn marks if I decide I want him in that position for several hours.

(Don't think I'm poorly equipped. I have a steel stockade, lots of leather restraints, nylon straps, padlocks, collars, gags, chastity devices, CBT implements, attachment points, and all the usual stuff. But honestly, all of it would fit in the bed of a pickup truck, preferably one that had a cover so passersby wouldn't see what all is in it. (Except for some wall attachment points that are suitable for bondage but not suspension. Can't take the wall with me.)

Nonetheless, I'm starting to feel like a man out of his time, like someone who feels the best way to start a business is to get a toll-free number and advertise in the newspaper. Combine that with some of the less standard things I do like doing, like the one mentioned here, and I feel like there just aren't very many opportunities for play in the future.

"But wait, Sir," you may say, "lots of subs still fit all your criteria!" This is true, but that gets back to the "I'm a jerk" part. Like most people, I'm not attracted to every guy on the planet, and that rules out most of the rest.

• I'm white, and I've never been attracted to black guys. Now, at one point, I had never been attracted to Asian or Latino guys either, and then one day I saw such guys and thought "wow!" and have been attracted to some of them ever since—but that's never happened for black guys. (It's never happened for women, either, much to some of my family's dismay.) I don't rule it out, but given that I'm in my 40s and have seen thousands and thousands of black guys I'm not holding out hope it's going to happen sometime soon.



• I also cannot effectively dominate guys older than me, or really within about 10 years of my age. It's not that I'm not attracted to some of them, but despite my best intentions, it really just doesn't work out very well for me.



• I don't even try with guys who are in cities with large BDSM groups (Chicago, Seattle) or states with similar groups (New York, California, Florida). In my experience over the decades with several boys in those areas, they simply do not travel to places like here. In the past 2-3 years, finding a boy from there who is not a fake seeking cyber-roleplay for masturbatory purposes is the rarity, not the norm.

That's not limited to those areas, of course. One local boy (and I will name him so others don't think I'm talking about them: "kadensdream" on gay.com) tried very hard in November to submit to me on a first conversation, despite having no picture and very limited profile information, saying he was headed overseas for a semester of study abroad in just two days. Well, it's now over two months later, and he's still in the OKC room, saying he's in Oklahoma, apparently hoping he can pressure others into quick sex (or perhaps set them up for bashing/robbing them, for all I know; I get really skeptical of anonymous guys around here who insist on meeting immediately).

There are two local boys I've played with regularly in the past four years. One has a partner who's less kinky than the boy is, and his partner has prohibited him from playing with me, but not playing with other doms, which really sucks hard. The other one has been distant for several months and leaves the country for several more months later this week.

A third boy, not as local but still just a couple of hours away, has been talking to me about submitting for eight months, blowing chance after chance but then always coming back and telling me this time he can do it, he can get through it—only to decide at the last possible moment that really, he can't, that's his final answer. Until a week or so later when he starts begging for another chance. Despite my convictions that he has a good heart, I should not have given him a third chance, much less the fourth chance that he blew in similarly spectacular fashion just this past week. I really can't take any more of that.

So…yeah, there I am. Not anally-focused enough for the lightweight subs, not enough gear for those seriously into it, not close enough for those who might find it interesting anyway. Although two of the best subs I've ever known (my boy and another one who now lives on the east coast) travel significant distances to play here, I've been burned often enough that I really dislike disclosing personal details to subs I've never met—and that, naturally, discourages subs from traveling long distances when they don't know what they're getting. Somehow, in the past, we seemed to find ways to make it work, but I'm not sure that happens anymore.

I don't play much, but I've enjoyed the idea that if I wanted to play, I could get someone I knew and trusted here within a few weeks to play. Now I don't even have the illusion of that happening, and it's a lot more depressing than I had anticipated.

I'm still out there, in chat, sending messages, seeing if there's anyone worth connecting to, but I'm not optimistic. I'm trying Recon's chat, too, but it's a piece of shit. All Flash-based, none of the controls work the way they should, no way to get any more info on anyone other than a full profile view, no tag line under your name, no way to see who just entered or exited the room, all stuck in one browser window except for every profile which opens in a new one. It would be a lot better if it worked like gay.com's chat, as disappointing as that often is. At least it's disappointing in predictable browser-based ways, not sucky Flash-based ways.

Anyway. When you see the "not looking" chat status, that's what it means. It's not that I'm completely "not looking," just that I'm not looking for what people who are "looking" are looking for. My penance is that I'm not sure I'll ever find what I do seek, so if you think I'm being an arrogant jerk, rest assured that I am paying for it.