Here is a study that seeks to show that porn stars are happier than you. It is quite heavy but Andrew Sullivan has a more chewable summary that I would highly recommend.
Money quote:
A couple of days ago, on another forum, three 30+ (including, ahem, yours truly) had this conversation about the frustrations of gay dating in Uganda. The excerpt is edited and the names have been changed to protect the privacy of the discussants. It does, however, give an interesting insight into how the dating world has morphed into a primarily monetary one almost from the moment older man meets younger man.
*********************
You are introduced to him for the first time, you like his large, firm, hands, his clean look, his dark mysteriousness, the tight body, the suggestive bulge …. and then he starts lamenting to you his tale of financial woe! Zzzzzzzzz …. That sinking feeling …
AA: It’s unusual if it does not take this turn……this is the normal turn of events in the Uganda I know or sub-Saharan Africa….
Me: t the first meeting? Eh! I don’t get it. How about finding out my other name before you pour out your sob story?
AA: It’s not about you, it’s about them……that’s classic feudal……
Me: Sad, very sad.
TLC: Your sob story! Lmao. A different world indeed from the one I grew in. ” Don’t take anything from a stranger however tantalized you might be” used to lesson numero uno!
Me: You know!! Whatever happened to personal pride, keeping your problems to yourself (and those close to you) and absolutely, utterly, completely never letting total strangers know your dire financial situation? It feels as though I was raised on a completely different planet.
AA: It’s a give me society…not what I can give back……give me, give me……give me………and what are you going to bring for me society? You owe me … for being blessed more than me … again I still will not try to understand … PAY AS U GO …
TLC: Decency/Dignity. Let me initiate the generosity. When demanding and pressure is the ammunition you use to get what you want from me, the fun and romance is gone, which in turn drives me to demand quality, not fun.
Me: I am telling you AA. I could write a sob story of my own about this kind of craven, slimy, selfish begging. In my book, if you don’t give me, and I can’t get it for myself, I move on. In our day, anyway, we got f****d for free because we loved being f****d. The idea that I was going to sleep with a man for money never once entered my head. I guess that is the difference between us and the young men of today.
AA: It’s a sad side of us……it takes a lot of civility..
Me: And you know why I avoid those kinds of boys? When they get to the bedroom, they can’t even get it up and keep it up. So, they weren’t interested in you in the first place – just the money. Aiyee! Unless I want you sexually (even for a mercy f**k) I am going nowhere with you!!!
TLC: Maybe it’s Society that changed so much! Bad Black syndrome, it’s like no free f***s , you pay for it and then maybe love comes! (Is it love for me or love for what you are getting out of me?)!
Are the best things in life free any more?
AA: Maybe we should accept that we are old cows … and pay for it…….why not……better attitude than trying to change anybody….
Me: Love is taking it too far TLC. I am talking about a simple f**k. Why do I have to hear how your mother’s sister can’t afford treatment for her gout in order to get a good dick in? What happened to a simple, uncomplicated, sob-story-free f**k, huh? Yes, love can come later … and then I can listen to your mother’s and grandmother’s ailments … but can’t we fuck without the attendant sob stories? Do these boys know that I could tell them sob stories that would make theirs look like Sunday school?
TLC: Well this Old cow is okay with sex deals and no pretense. Not that I am into commercial sex but I respect honesty, no sob stories. Lol!
Me: Exactly TLC. If it is a financial deal, I get that. I know I shall pay you the going rate at the end of the night. But don’t bore me with tales of your mother’s rickets, and how you need to bring your brother’s wife’s nephew’s dead body back from Tanzania for burial. Eiiish!
AA: A little pride would do the trick…..but since they don’t have the little pride…what do u do?
Me: You listen to the sob story, decide whether the f**k is still worth it and then get it in. Lock up everything in your house if you are taking him there – without pride, he will also not hesitate to lift your valuables. Better still, take him to a guest house, get your dick in and send him on his way with whatever you feel the going rate is.
TLC: A you are cracking me up ! It seems like you’re converted .
AA: You can negotiate on the rate…….
Me: Negotiate? That’s dangerous. What price do you put on his mother’s rickets? Or his grandmother’s lumbe (funeral rites) contribution?
AA: One chicken for the elders….or clan heads……
Me: Ha, Ha, Ha.
AA: It could be a goat, a chicken ……whatever you’re able to work with for the evening……
Me: am inclined to say … depends on how good the sex is. If it ain’t any good … you know … wilting willy, flaccid dick, too much work to get it up … you just pay for transport to the nearest boda boda [motocycle) stage.
AA: And also U R FREE TO SAY NO……..IT DOES NOT HURT…….
Me: True. But we went ahead of ourselves. My problem is not when we get home, it is the financial sob stories when you don’t even know my second name.
AA: By now you know how to say no……and you can easily say…..I don’t want to deal with that at this point ……What is hard there? If they insist……half chicken…….and say good-bye……
Me: I know, AA, I know. But that bulge, the big hands, the tight body, the dick I want … my raging hormones! Do I really have to hear that your mother’s rickets will play up if you don’t get 200K in order for me to get taken care of? LOL.
AA: Honey darling……..they know the trick……..it works with you……again you’re the big boss……You can put a a price tag to your hormones as well darlin …
Me: True. Well, then … listen up you hungry bitches out there. In my day we got f****d for free because we loved it. If your culture tells you to start on me with tales about your broke ass on the first date, move it on. I don’t want to be part of it. If I get to know you a bit better, then I will listen. On the first day we meet? No, No, No!
FOJ: Hehehehehe KIKA………I just love this…I hope they are reading this!!!! Small Kampala Boys!!!!!
TLC: Anyway I can give. I’ve given before. But don’t torment me with your miserable life’s tales! Its a total turn off. I don’t want to know that my catch is a riffraff , gutter resident! Let me delude myself at least in the beginning that am with someone worth the attention. Just like a lady friend of mine told how a guy was asking her for a phone , rent money, money to promote his music career before she even had an orgasm !
Me: Lolest!!! You have summarized it perfectly TLC. Hope they are reading it.
AA: Come to me all ye financially stricken…. I will quench your thirst…..
News has finally reached us that Paul Weatherly passed on August 23, 2012 following a prolonged illness. He apparently succumbed to kidney and heart failure. I didn’t know it myself but he apparently didn’t keep it much of a secret that he was living with HIV.
Paul Weatherly was a great friend of Uganda and was quite instrumental in steeling the backbone of what was then a nascent gay movement in Uganda 10-15 years ago.
No, he didn’t promote homosexuality as detractors like to argue; he encouraged the gay men and women in Uganda who were trying to form pressure groups to fight for gay rights to keep going. One of the Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) founders has intimated that Weatherly was “key in the foundation” of that organization.
Among the relatives that we know of, Paul is survived by an 87-year-old mother.
You have fought the good fight.
Think about what someone feels and, more pertinently, looks like after 30 years of living with another person as a couple. You are literally tied at the hip after 15 years so imagine what you are like after 30.
You expect me to get back into these LBTs in my 50s+!!!
You are practically the same person. Even if you met at 17, it would mean you are well into middle age thirty years later.
And then you ask for a divorce? What would you expect me to do? Don LBT heels again and start dating afresh? After 30 years of being Mr. and Mrs (or Mr. and Mr.) so and so? Seriously? Imagine the thought of learning to get used to someone else’s bad breath, their unsightly body this and that.
And I am telling you
I’m not going
Even though the rough times are showing
There’s just no way, there’s no way
We’re part of the same place
We’re part of the same time
We both share the same blood
We both have the same mind
No, no, no, no way Im living without you
Im not living without you (Jennifer Holiday)
You resemble each other, and all your pets resemble both of you. You lost track 20 years ago of when you resigned yourself to his terrible habit of gnashing his teeth in his sleep, his snoring like a steam engine, his unsightly nose hairs … and the gray hairs that keep coming relentlessly in all sorts of unexpected (and startling) places. You know each others habits better than your parents’ or siblings, you, you, you …
No.
So, let’s be clear about something:
After 30 years of marriage, with or without children, I am not going anywhere. You are stuck with me whether you like it or not. You can bring the newly minted bastard child home. You can ask the latest hussy you fell for to come home and we share the house. You can introduce the son you had with the house help 14 years ago. You can even reveal that you are sexually attracted to four-legged animals. I will send you to the dogs’ house to live out your fantasies but I shall not leave. Not after 30 years.
Sorry possums. After 30 years he is not divorcing me, and I am most certainly not going anywhere to start life afresh … whatever he wants to do or he has done.
Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman … please get back together immediately. This is just silly.
But the heart is not so smart /Can’t always trust it, no /The heart is not so smart Goes where it should not go / Always seems to find / Its way to trouble, no / The heart is not so smart / Oh, no, oh, no (El Debarge)
Here is a fact that feminists and the politically correct (PC) brigade would rather you don’t ever hear or see in print: some women (and men) actually love
Thug: modern day Heathcliff
being roughed up, beaten to a pulp and treated like “bitches” by their love partners!
Violence, violent sex, affinity for rough sex, being beaten blue-black to the extent where one has to mask the bruises with layers of foundation and sunglasses often are the basis of what many men and women would want their relationship to be about … if it weren’t for public opinion casting a disapproving, pontificating nose into their business.
Indeed, that is what makes the thuggish type of man very attractive to many a woman (and the odd man).
Thus far, nothing new. You only have to pick up Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to see the hot, passionate, relationship between the refined Catherine and the rough and ready Heathcliff which is frustrated by class-driven political correctness to understand that these kinds of relationships are as old as time itself.
Though Heathcliff was exactly her type – crude, rude, but simmering with sexual energy – Catherine had no way of making the relationship last because of her upper class upbringing. So she settled for the soft, safe, unexciting Edgar Linton whom she despised but was of her own pedigree.
Fast forward four centuries and you still see that sort of scenario being played out by young people of a different generation.
Heathcliff
Let’s be clear about this: if the press hadn’t picked up on Chris Brown beating Rihanna to a pulp, they would never have pretended to break up. Those two young people had found what they wanted in each other and it was clearly a relationship that survived on bouts of violent, physical, fights.
Indeed, since Rihanna was forced by PC to break up with Chris Brown, she has sung about how she likes to be physically manhandled no less than three times up to and including a sexually explicit song track with the real love of her life, Chris Brown.
And what else can one make of Rihanna’s Rude Boy (excerpts below)?
Come here, rude boy, boy; can you get it up? Come here rude boy, boy; is you big enough? … Give it to me, baby like boom, boom, boom What I want,
Rihanna/Brown
want, want is what you want, want, want Nah nah-ah … Tonight I’ma get a little crazy, get a little crazy, baby … I like the way you pull my hair Babe, if I don’t feel it I ain’t faking, no, no I like when you tell me ‘kiss you there’ I like when you tell me ‘move it there’ So giddy-up; time to get it up … (Rihanna’s Rude Boy)
Or the lyrics to the duet she recently agreed to sing with Chris Brown, the man who is supposed to be bad for her:
“Girl I wanna f*** you right now. Been a long time I been missing your body. Lemme, lemme turn the lights down. When I, when I go down it’s a private party.”
Rough & ready: something of the night about him
The modern version of Catherine’s Heathcliff is of course what is referred to with a mixture of secret admiration and mock distaste as a thug. Chris Brown is a clean cut, nice young man who has done all he can to turn himself into a ghetto thug, mostly by visiting the tattoo parlor more times than is really necessary. He already had the roughness Rihanna was looking for so all the work he has done to turn himself into a tastelessly tattooed ogre is overkill. But that is another discussion anyway.
Too nice? Nice can be a turn off for some.
To many a man or woman, being punched, having hair pulled, being slapped around like a rag doll … being treated like a whoring bitch is exactly what the doctor ordered. To such men and women, nice guys must indeed come last.
Nene Leakes
You know people have grown up when they start giving others good, sensible relationship advice.
Nene Leakes, she of Desperate Wives of Atlanta (is that the name of the show?) fame, is one such woman who recently showed that somewhere within her she knows the mature thing to do.
Money quote when Leakes was asked what Evelyn Lozada, who married Chad Johnson, had him arrested five weeks later for domestic abuse, and then filed for divorce immediately thereafter, should do:
Amen, Amen, Amen. Leakes is not terribly good at taking her own advice, given that she has discussed her love life in front of the cameras for a living over the last few years, but she actually knows the right thing to do in such situations.
There is simply no better advice when love goes sour. Keep your mouth shut and deal with things in private. Do not talk to your sorority friends, do not talk to your hairdresser, do not talk to your office girlfriends around the water cooler, do not post anything about it on Facebook (not even cryptically) and, most definitely, do not talk to the press.
Childish gestures: Chad Johnson/Chris Brown
On to that, one should add … don’t tattoo his or her face on your belonging to try to prove that you are still in love with that person. That sort of thing is juvenile and foolish and only a woman or man of low self-regard will fall for it.
Speaking of tattoos, I have advice for our young men and women out there. In our day (there he goes again) it was not classy to air one’s dirty love linen in public. That meant you did whatever you could to keep your private business at home. Come to think of it, that’s why it was almost unheard of for anyone to marry another and then divorce them within days. Even when you fought, it was behind closed doors. You simply invested in dark sunglasses and layers of makeup to hide the battle scars.
The reason for that was simple: love is a complicated phenomenon that few people have total control over. As Rihanna now knows, to her cost, you don’t stop loving someone because he has beaten you to a pulp. But we live in a world where public opinion can make or break your heart so you have to make sure that you keep it as far as you can from your relationship.
Yes, that means not tattooing your lover’s face on your leg or neck.
Goodness, why are such simple things so difficult for our young people to understand? How have they been raised? The better question perhaps should be: who is raising these kids?
Related article
1. What to do when you confirm that your partner is cheating
2. Rihanna 1 – Chris Brown 3
Here is a feel-good story coming out of Miami.
Juwan Howard and his wife’s 10th marriage anniversary is a timely reminder that we black people can actually be responsible fathers (and mothers), raising our children, paying our taxes and not falling foul of the law by beating up our wives, getting addicted to illegal drugs, pimping, abusing animals or failing to make our child support and/or mortgage payments.
I am not sure I am allowed to use it but here is one photo from the Howards’ 10th anniversary bash. I shall keep it up until I am asked to pull it down.
The Howards family at their 10th wedding anniversary
Aah!!
Check out The BTF.com for more of the fabulous pictures.
Happy anniversary.
If you get a chance, find a movie called De-Lovely, starring Kevin Kline as Cole Porter and Ashley Judd as his wife Linda.
Apart from the music which, by all accounts, blazed the trail on the stage and other mediums of performance, the movie is remarkable for the frank way it deals with the curious relationship between Porter and his wife.
You see, Cole Porter was a homosexual, a more or less openly gay man at a time when it was taboo to be gay because most of his friends and work colleagues knew he was homosexual. Linda, his wife, also knew he was gay when she married him.
Legend has it that Linda married Porter, 21 years her junior, to keep her place in society as well as move on from what had been an abusive first marriage.
So, I suspended my skepticism and decided to put myself in Linda’s place for a couple of minutes.
In order to continue being respected in the 1920s, when respectability was such a prized commodity, would I, had I been a middle-aged woman, have opted to knowingly marry a flamboyantly promiscuous gay man?
I would have asked myself questions that clearly can’t have featured much in Linda’s mind. The foremost one would have been about how I would reconcile trading in a bad relationship with a straight man with an emotionally abusive relationship with a gay man.
For, yes, Cole Porter didn’t stop for breath when he married Linda. Indeed he carried on with his flamboyant lifestyle in Europe, often leaving Linda to return to their home alone in the evenings while he remained behind to frolic with beautiful boys. She put up with all that up to and including notifying Porter that she would already be asleep by the time he returned from his gay exertions.
Finally, she lost a bit of her patience when the gay parties at their home in America became too brazen. But, as Porter, reminds her when she reprimands him about it, he had never been anything else and had never passed himself off as anything else.
“Discretion is dishonesty wrapped up in a little breeding,”(De Lovely)
Before she dies of cancer, Linda arranges for a man, a life partner of sorts, to enter into Porter’s life; the final act of a devoted woman who always knew that she stood no chance in winning Porter’s physical attention. Okay, she was devoted to him and he to her but I still don’t get it that she could put up with that arrangement. I don’t.
The lesson I draw from the movie, and what I now know about Cole Porter’s life is that one is best advised to live and let live. Cole Porter likely entered into the relationship and stayed in it because it allowed him to have his cake after he had eaten it. In Linda Lee Thomas‘ case, was it really de-lovely?
But I have lived in a slightly different age so perhaps I should just enjoy K.D Lang’s version of Cole Porter’s So in Love and forget about trying to make sense of his wife’s motivations.
Strange dear, but true dear/When I’m close to you, dear/The stars fill the sky/So in love with you am I/Even without you, My arms fold about you/You know, darling why/So in love with you am I./In love with the night mysterious/ The night when you first were there/In love with my joy delirious/The thought that you might care/So taunt me, and hurt me/Deceive me, desert me/I’m yours till I die/So in love with you am I
Rodman: convicted on four counts of failing to pay child support
I hate to be the one to ask but I will nonetheless.
What would posses anyone to have sex with, let alone have a baby with someone who looks the way Dennis Rodman does? More pertinently, why would anyone expect a man who looks like that to have the presence of mind to pay child support for his offspring?
Yes, methinks Dennis Rodman is being victimized unfairly here. If these women were so foolish as to allow themselves to get knocked up by someone who has been a bum for as long as anyone can remember, they should live with the results of his deadbeat ways.
Yes, there are at the short end of the stick but, for crying out loud, what sort of women are opening their legs and letting this man into their belonging? What kind of father were they thinking Dennis Rodman was ever going to be to their children? When you wallow in the mud, how can you complain when you get dirty?
The mind boggles.
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A mutual friend from another forum recently made this remark:
“Don’t show me Kenyan [gay] boys and then expect me to buy Uganda. You [are] simply asking for too much.”
What a coincidence, I said to myself. I have been thinking about the differences between Ugandan and Kenyan personas, specifically about the men in the two countries. Being gay I am of course terrible at figuring out the women if only because, with no vested interest in that direction, I haven’t bothered to.
Comparisons, especially of human beings, are usually unkind but we make them all the time. Correction, discerning people, well-traveled people, thoughtful people, make comparisons all the time. The notable point is that when perceptive people make the comparisons, they keep the unkind conclusions they reach to themselves.
So, I am going to do the polite thing; focus on the “positive” attributes I have observed about the Kenyan men, gay and straight. Of course this will not be a minute description of all Kenyan men – it is impossible to do that. But, generalizations are mother’s milk to mankind (even if namby-pamby do-gooders try to dissuade us from “stereotyping” as though there is any other way of commenting on a whole set of people) so they are going to flow thick and fast here.
Not all Kenyan men look this good obviously, but when it comes to going for what they want … they sizzle
Ugandans and Kenyans are what they are whether they are gay or not. So, there is little point in spending too much time trying to figure out why the two peoples are different. But there is, it seems to me, traction in dwelling on the differences in personality that make Kenyan gay men a more interesting set of people to hang around and, dare one say it, explore as sexual beings and lovers.
If a Kenyan man is interested in you, you will know it in about one and a half-minutes. In this day and age where we have so much going on, that sort of speed is a godsend. Once the niceties are out of the way, Kenyan men are making it clear they like you, want you, need you (though not necessarily in that order) before you take the second sip of your first drink.
I mean who wants to have a man act all coy, demure and well-brought-up when, all along, you’re eyeing him up and down and then some? Besides, in this day and age of Tyra-Banks-esque ”got for it” brazenness, who wants to spend time guessing whether that man eyeing you across hotel gardens wants to maul you to kingdom come or is simply staring at the mole on your nose in idiotic stupefaction? Kenyan men (I wonder whether it applies to straight men, too?) will simply walk over and let you know that you have a date if you want it. Oooh la, la.
Not necessarily gay but, being Kenyan, they likely know what they want and are wired to go for it
Of course most gay men [all men?] play silly games, what the Americans call bullshit. It is the order of the day even in the straight world, so you have to learn to sieve out the chaff from the diamonds. Growing up teaches you the hang of those ropes.
But there is nothing as irritating and confusing as dealing with the bullshit of people who think that they are straight men playing gay men pretending to be bisexual. One might have a little patience with confused people of that sort if they are 12 years old, but over 21? Oh, for Pete’s sake, grow up!
“Most Kenyan gay men I’ve met are comfortable with being gay. They don’t think its just a phase.” [Anon]
Homophobia, the African secrecy about matters sexual and general [pretend] disinclination to talk about sex and sexuality aside, Kenyan gay men are, to my mind, the most uninhibited gay men in the whole of East Africa, if you discount the money boys. And, oh, how refreshing that is.
Some might call that slutty or loose; I call it accepting that you have one life, embracing the odds stacked against you as a gay man and nonetheless living. Kenyan men seem rather good at this.
On a personal note, there is nothing that incenses me as much as all these down low (DL) men who tell you that they are bisexual and expect you to look at them as though they are somehow special because they get it up for men and women alike. “So what?” I always wonder to myself … “You expect me genuflect at your feet because you are a bar-fly?
Please.
Am I supposed to take your flitting from men to women as a badge of honor so that it would be a privilege to wait in line for when you will tire of your woman to give me a look-in? Please be a DL bisexual all you like but don’t flatter yourself into thinking that I am supposed to understand your clandestine juggling ways.
No! Whether they are Kenyan, exciting, direct, God’s gift or otherwise, bisexual men become a chore in two and a-half days. It’s tough enough wanting a relationship with a man – but one who also feels attraction to women and nonchalantly expects you to fall in line to accommodate that? No, thank you very much. Even if putting up with the DL bisexuality weren’t tedious enough, slugging it out with a woman over a man seems too indecorous to bear even if a man beating a woman wasn’t so embarrassing.
But this was supposed to be about Kenyan men. Give me a Kenyan gay man (Kenyan man?) any time. I so like the helium that seems to course through their very existence.
Now, I was about to embark on a description of what the Tanzanian, Ugandan, Rwandese, Malian, Togolese, Nigerian, South African, Somali, Ghanaian, Zambian, Zimbabwean, Moroccan, Cameroonian men are made of. But then I realized that this is too long already. Besides, who wants to admit in public that he has the intimate 4-1-1 on all those men?
Not me in whose mouth butter wouldn’t melt!!!
Best to leave it at the excitement-oozing, pot-boiling, action-seeking, party-livening, straining-at-the-leash Kenyans for now.
I just say things as I see them, Just know that this is "How Gerald Sees it"
to love. to be loved. to never forget your own insignificance. to never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. to seek joy in the saddest places. to pursue beauty to its lair...above all, to watch. to try and understand. to never look away. and never, never, to forget. [arundhati roy]
SEXUALITY, LOVE, LIFE...
Celebrating life as a gay nudist man! This is my nudecentric journal with a same gender loving perspective, the world through my eyes!
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In the wider scheme of things, I dont exist. The Kenyan gay man is a myth and you may never meet one in your life time. However,I and many others like me do exist; just not openly. This blog was created to allow access to the pysche of me who represents the thousands of us who are unrepresented. I know its anonymous and thus contradicts the essence of what Iam aiming to do. But if it does inform, educate and demystify the Kenyan gay man, then the purpose is served
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