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.
