For Those That It matters,A Reminder to Set your Clocks ahead one hour tonight

This guy knows how to set clocks forward.  Just follow him to set your clocks forward tonight.  Have a great day and enjoy the extra hour of daylight at the end of the day.

Mega hairy muscle hugs guys. Soon it will be shirtless weather again. WOOF

Being Green is HOT!!!

The following is a celebration of Earth Day, April 22, 2008. Be green by recycling your outgrown jocks, leathers, so that all hot men can enjoy them. After all, that's really what Craig's List is all about.

By Dave White
From The Advocate May 6, 2008

I read a lot of magazines. I know that’s not very green. But I have to know what’s going on. And I feel gross bringing my laptop into the bathroom. I especially read a lot of magazines about awesome (and usually expensive) furniture.

I used to love the design magazine Nest because the people in there would do stuff like wrap their staircases in electrical tape and then be all proud of it. It was a magazine less about being crazy-rich than being simply plain old crazy.

Anyway, Nest is long gone. So now I like Domino. It seems aimed at 23-year-old women, but I like it anyway. I especially like its feature about eco-people and their green lives, written as a daily timetable (“11 a.m.: Jet to Paris. To offset my carbon footprint I log on to a website that plants trees in your name and have Oregon personally reforested. Slide on Hermès sleep mask and slumber righteously.”). Here’s my own green day:

6 a.m.: Be kissed awake by the roar of garbage trucks. They say RECYCLING on the side, but I think they don’t mean it since it seems they dump all the recycling bin stuff right in with the other trash. Smell their exhaust through my open bedroom window. We have no air-conditioning. This already makes me way greener than almost all of you. How will you catch up to Eco-Me?

6:20 a.m.: Stand on my apartment balcony drinking green tea. I’d buy the fair-trade kind, but it doesn’t taste as good. And none of it tastes as good as grape soda. But that’s a sacrifice I make for the planet.

7 a.m.: Wash dishes from night before. Scrub the sink with environmentally friendly yet useless powder that is not as good as Comet. Feel despair over white enamel slowly turning brown.

8:30 a.m.: Morning walk with my husband/partner/whatever. My eco-suit = threadbare sweatpants, T-shirt my friend Lydia made for me that reads R. KELLY IS MAGIC, and most progressively, New Balance shoes that are not from Nike and therefore not glued together by child slaves. You’re welcome, child slaves.

10 a.m.: Commute to work—from the kitchen to my desk. Don’t hate me because I figured out a way to get paid for sitting around at home in my pajamas and never having to drive anywhere except to the grocery store that’s three blocks away.

11:30 a.m.: Drive to that grocery store. Bring own bags. While driving home think about how Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster is better than An Inconvenient Truth.
Noon: Eat lunch. Toss orange peel into the wrong trash can. Get berated by husband/partner/whatever. When he demands that I retrieve the peels, inform him I’ve already washed my hands and that to stick them into trash would mean rewashing them, and doesn’t he care about water, Mother Earth’s most precious resource? Watch as he sticks his own hands into the trash.

2:30 p.m.: Writer’s block. Need a snack. Organically harvested goji berries are gnarly, no matter how many antioxidants they have. Go to my local fancy bakery for some of those French macarons, like the kind Kirsten Dunst ate in Marie Antoinette. There’s nothing green about this except the color of the pistachio-flavored ones.

3:15 p.m.: Watch Oprah. She’s got a bunch of Dumpster-diving “freegans” on her show. Enjoy pausing TiVo each time she makes the “eww” face. Pay bills online while watching the show. Get tiny thrill at how superior and futuristic I am for not using paper or stamps.

5 p.m.: Go to a home store and spend a lot of money on one-of-a-kind shelves made from reclaimed wood. Bring them home and stack old issues of magazines on them.

Other than being dumpster freegans, there are some great ideas to live the "green" life in one's own way.

Gay men have been pioneers in recycling such items as used jock straps, leather, saliva and other stuff. So we don't have to buy the latest toy, trash stuff just because it isn't in style, follow the A gay crowd.

It is HOT to recycle. And I give my Mega Hairy Muscle Hug seal of approval to every guy who does so.

Fat Chance That You'll Ever Want To Meet Up With Mr. Phoney Baloney

The following sounds extreme, but it has happened and will happen in our cyberworld.

Sometimes a make-believe relationship is better than the real thing.
By Q. Allan Brocka

From The Advocate March 11, 2008

I knew my new boyfriend was fake right from the start. It was obvious: He had unbelievably sexy pictures, a modeling career, obscenely rich parents, an Ivy League education, and a brand-new record deal at a Big Label -- all at the age of 26. OK, maybe I could buy all that. But add the fact that he wanted to be with me and it was too good to be true.

Our romance began with an online message. He said something snarky. I said I liked his moxie. My jaw dropped at his too-hot-to-be-real JPEGs. Our one-liners continued as he sent a wide-enough range of pictures to convince me he was an actual person. Not that it mattered, with him in New York and me in Los Angeles.

HIM: This sucks, let’s talk on the phone.
ME: If you mean phone sex, not my thing.
HIM: Don’t be retarded.

He had me at retarded. He was charming, funny, and had a sexy voice and impressive vocabulary. I lay in bed and we talked for the next three hours. His name was Josh Alexander.* (*not his real name) (**not that he used his real name) (But it could have been Buzz or Bolt)

Josh spent seven years traveling the world as a fashion model. He’d invested his earnings well, and with his inheritance he was set for life. He had a knack for songwriting and sometimes performed at friends’ parties. (THE BULLSHIT IS PILING UP AT THIS POINT) (BUT WAIT,THERE'S MORE)

That’s where he was discovered by a music exec from Big Label, which was throwing tons of money behind him and his debut album. In fact, Big Label’s chairman was personally grooming him to be a rock star.

He enjoyed the fuss but ultimately didn’t give a shit about fame or the music business. His real dream was to open a Cuban-style catering company in Northern California. He wanted kids, a house, a giant kitchen, and me.

When we finally hung up, I was buzzing with that incredible high you can only get from a really good conversation. I smiled and thought, He’s totally fake.

The next day we chatted for two more hours. It became a nightly ritual. Over the next two months we shared every detail of our lives, the exciting to the mundane.

His stories ranged from his first runway job when he had no idea what the hell he was doing (as Giorgio Armani himself stitched him into a suit) to the time LL Cool J propositioned him in Paris. I knew how his parents met, about his father’s affair, his immigrant grandfather who built their fortune from nothing. I knew about his childhood, his brothers, and each of his ex-boyfriends. I knew more about Josh than most of my friends.

I decided, as long I didn’t spend money and wasn’t turning down actual dates, I had nothing to lose. When I’d tell him he was fake, he’d laugh and list attributes that made me seem too good to be true. I told you he was charming. Sometimes I’d ask random questions to test him. He always gave an impromptu but riveting answer. Then he’d bust me: “There, now do you think I’m real?”

One night he announced, “Guess who you’re having dinner with in three weeks?” Josh was finally coming to L.A.!

A week later he stopped calling and his online profile disappeared.

I called and e-mailed repeatedly. No response. I thought our finale would be more dramatic. Maybe I’d find proof he was fake or we’d have a disastrous first date.

But he simply vanished. When a friend randomly mentions he’s buddies with the founder of Big Label, I tell him my story and he offers to look into it. Turns out there is indeed a Josh Alexander, some guy in Florida who once submitted a demo to them. That’s it.

My friend suggests that Josh Alexander isn’t my fake boyfriend in New York. My fake boyfriend is likely someone who’s obsessed with Josh Alexander, because psychotic con artists tend to appropriate other people’s identities. And now that he knows all about my life, there’s a distinct possibility he’s pretending to be me with someone else.

It’s crazy, but despite the big fat lie part, my connection with my fake boyfriend still feels more substantial than most of my real relationships. Maybe it’s because I gave him chances that are hard to give when you’re looking someone in the eye. Maybe I finally heard the things I wanted someone to say. Or maybe I’m just into psychopaths, because, sad as it is, if my fake boyfriend called, I’d probably take him back.

NOT!!! Guys you are too smart to fall for such a set up. When a guy seems too good to be true, then maybe it's a sign to stand back. Hell, all of us have met this type of guy. Some of them are so transparent. Others are merely pathetic.

So just don't fall for the sweet talk and the pretty face. Like the commercial used to say, "Always Rely on Genuine GM Parts from Mr. GoodWrench". A guy that is handy with his toolbox is a guy to keep around. WOOF. Mega hairy muscle hugs and Happy March.

I Have Never Agreed With Andrew Sullivan, But I Guess There Is A First Time For Everything

And rarely do I continue a topic, but the Lord Browne of British Petroleum fame, deserves more coverage, because for loving another guy, though really young, and getting caught, and denying it, all of this brought a very powerful business executive to his knees.

Here are our Andy's thoughts on the whole mess.

Trapped in a glass closet of his own making
Andrew Sullivan

"The rule of thumb with all gay scandals is a very simple one. Would the same thing be a scandal if the central figure were heterosexual? In Lord Browne’s case the answer is clearly yes. It would still have been a scandal – a little one, to be sure, but a scandal nonetheless.

If a leading executive of a large company had met his girlfriend through an escort service and had subsequently attempted to lie about that in court, then he would have been forced to resign early as well. Browne has not been subject to a double standard or penalised because he is gay. Perjury is perjury. Ask Bill Clinton. Or Jonathan Aitken.

The more interesting question, it seems to me, is a prior one: why was Browne subject to blackmail in the first place?

It does not appear that he abused his position at BP to help Jeff Chevalier, his former boyfriend. BP doesn’t claim any financial impropriety. In fact, apart from the perjury and before the break-up, Browne seems to have been a gentleman throughout. So what was he afraid of? Yes, he’d met his lover through an escort service. An embarrassing detail, but not exactly the kind of thing to force a big executive to launch a legal jihad against a newspaper.

His real fear, it appears, was of being “outed” in the mass media, of having the fact of his sexual orientation a public matter. This is why, in an act of Wildean rashness, he brought The Mail on Sunday injunction. This is why he threw mounds of money and hired the best lawyers to keep a petty nonstory out of the papers.

But the principle for Browne was a clear one. He explained it thus: “In my 41 years with BP I have kept my private life separate from my business life. I have always regarded my sexuality as a personal matter, to be kept private.”

And yet the facts do not entirely bear this interpretation out. Browne openly socialised with his young lover, introduced him to colleagues and many members of the British Establishment. No one seems to have taken exception.

Tony and Gordon and Peter are not likely to take offence at an adult man in a gay relationship, however young and however attractive the lover. In fact the long list of honours and privileges and testimonials to Browne’s character bespeaks a British elite completely comfortable with a powerful and accomplished gay man in their midst.

Browne rose about as far as one can in the business world and is by any rational standard ridiculously wealthy. He lives in a country where gay couples have equal standing in the law (although still denied the word “marriage”), where gay culture is completely mainstream and where gay sex has been legal – for the most part at least – for 40 years and is now legal everywhere at the age of 16.

The pity one instinctively feels for Browne at this moment is therefore not because he was a man undone by homophobia. It is because he was a man undone by its opposite – by a culture so comfortable and at ease with homosexuality that it had surpassed his own comfort level and rendered his own strict view of “privacy” completely moot.

Browne was clearly struggling to cope with this social change and was experimenting in the new world. But in such experiments he was inexperienced. And the inexperience led to misjudgment. It often does.

Try to think of it from his perspective. Think of the world that the 59-year-old Browne has inhabited in one lifetime. When he was a teenager, homosexuality was literally unspeakable in polite society. British authorities were injecting the great Alan Turing with hormones to “cure” him of his orientation just as Browne was leaving primary school.

For the first 19 years of his life Browne could have been imprisoned for a relationship with another man. During his formative years of adolescence, Browne learnt what every gay boy or girl had to learn at the time: if you do not keep this a terrible secret you will perish.
Even after being largely decriminalised in 1967 the culture remained a strong force sustaining the stigma that Browne internalised. In the 1960s and 1970s it was far from easy for an ambitious scientist and businessman to have a life – that is, a mature relationship with another man – while having a serious career.

The secrecy and fear that were soldered onto a gay man’s psyche were not as easily detached from the world as a piece of Victorian legislation. And as the gay rights movement first blossomed as a countercultural force, it did not easily include Browne and his ilk – Establishment, mannered, private men and women.

For that generation their “discretion” was, and is, a matter of honour and pride. That this pride was inevitably entangled with the remnants of shame did not make it any the less treasured. “I have always regarded my sexuality as a personal matter, to be kept private” is almost a credo for a man of Browne’s generation. Younger generations scoff at this but they never had to acquire the psychological armour that a gay man needed in that era.

Societies, moreover, change more quickly than individuals do. This is especially the case with gay culture. Gays are a unique minority because we are almost all brought up as if we were heterosexuals in heterosexual families. We learn what it is to be gay from the general culture we imbibe as children and teens. As it changes, gay kids change. And quickly.

The difference between a culture that can safely mock “the only gay in the village” as comedy and a culture that would have beaten that gay to a pulp five decades ago is a vast one. And yet we have forgotten it so easily. A gay man who has lived through each of those decades is not in such an easy position.

I meet young gay men today who take it for granted that they can get married to someone they fall in love with.

When I was their age – only two decades ago – an argument for gay marriage was about as radical as it gets. If I feel somewhat left behind I can only imagine the perplexity Browne is grappling with this weekend.

Sympathy has its limits of course. Browne is a wealthy and privileged man. His remarkable achievements will soon outlast his temporary embarrassment. Besides, he foolishly tried to have it both ways: to live a life as an openly gay man, but to insist on controlling the disclosure of every aspect of that identity. In a culture where gayness is now unexceptional you cannot get away with this. You cannot simply segment your emotional and sexual life into a hermetically sealed “private zone”. No heterosexual can.

With acceptance come the same rules of public and private that heterosexuals have to live with. Browne could not be private about being gay in some contexts and public in other ones. Even a man as rich and powerful as he is cannot control the culture with that degree of precision.
He lived in what is best described as a glass closet. It’s when a gay man wants to have an openly gay life but not a publicly disclosed one. He tries to manage the contours of his identity on his own terms and in the way he was accustomed to in decades past. But those days are gone. With new freedom comes a transparency that also demands a new responsibility.

These are not easy adjustments, they merit compassion and understanding. But they are necessary if gay equality is to mean something tangible. Others didn’t see his glass closet but Browne did. That was the asymmetry that eventually righted itself. And so the glass shattered and the shards wounded. But the wounds heal. For so many others they already have. "

So the moral to the story maybe, be picky and careful who you chose, if you want to remain in a glass closet. But like glass houses, you'll soon be exposed, no matter how hard you try to cover up matters. An openly gay life and a publicly disclosed one do go hand-in-hand. One leads to the other, no matter how one tries to keep them separate. So you got to live with it and its consequences. In the long run, it will always be the better decision.

Check out my Slide Show!

Sorry to Keep Revisting This Story, But It's Definitely Worth Repeating

Why Can't Guys Learn that "Tina" is a BITCH, and get her out of their lives?

The following is from a news item posted on the Washington Blade web site.

The Atlanta Meth Task Force convened the forum at Outwrite after several recent deaths of local crystal meth users. The emotional forum included testimony from Josh Williams’ brother, one of guys who recently died of an overdose in the Atlanta area, as well as from Tommy Varnador, who wept as he talked about the November overdose death of his partner, Joseph Myska.

“This drug fills a void in people — a sense of guilt, a sense of shame,” said Brian Dew, a professor at Georgia State University who leads the Atlanta Meth Task Force. “It’s seen as a perfect short-term solution to the feelings that are there.”Drawing attention to the harmful effects of meth is particularly challenging among gay men, Dew said.“I think that the gay community has been reluctant to address our own pitfalls, and I think we’re seeing it with drug use,” Dew said. “But we can no longer sit back because of what it’s doing and the impact that it’s having.”

Russell Beasley talked about how he and Josh Williams had a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” attitude in many parts of their friendship, including drug use. But instead of being inspired by a desire not to appear judgmental, the informal policy was a manifestation of both men’s fears that if his friend knew the truth about him, he would no longer love him and would leave.

Gay men can no longer afford to mask their insecurities through drugs or indifference, Beasley said.“In the old days, when we were fighting HIV, we were going out and we were doing AIDS education and we were fighting to save lives — it’s kind of the same thing,” Beasley. “We all need to go out, spread the word, let everybody know that meth equals death, and that there is healing that can be achieved from everything.”

Also participating in the Outwrite forum was Mark White, who talked about how he had a staunchly conservative disdain for drug use most of his life before going through a difficult break-up.Crystal meth use, however, led to White landing in jail on Thanksgiving Day as well as Tina-fueled sex romps that led him to becoming HIV positive.“I became very lonely, I began to shy away from some of the things that I never really dealt with — for example, being comfortable being gay,” White said. “I’m a shy person by nature, but on crystal I became very sociable, I felt very powerful, very confident and very sexual.”

Guys have to have will power. Can't they realize that a guy can be sexual without the so called enhancement of fatal drugs? Is it too much to ask that guys interact more with their brains than with the lure of drugs? Can't guys get a woody by just taking in the "woofyness" of another guy's pleasure?

Drugs just fuck up the pleasures of the sexual experience. If guys invested some time for foreplay, they'd realize that great sex and staying power can come naturally. Drawing this from within, can make sex between two men real, and rememberable.

I know you guys have strong opinions on the subject. I can't accept the fact that guys can be so lonely that their only recourse is to use crystal. We've already seen these cries played out daily by Britney and look what happened to Anna Nicole. So why are guys who can have it all, killing themselves for instant, at the moment, pleasure? Self esteem seems to be at an all time low.

Is There Such A Thing As A Gay Male Mid-life Crisis?

Seems that our friend, Dan Savage, has devoted a lot of his column this week to just such a question.

The guy writes about his hottie partner who is turning 40 and wants to celebrate at a clothing optional gay resort and have sex under the sky.

Been there, done that. And for me, it was just fun, and had nothing to do with time or space, for that matter.

I don't think wanting to be sexy, playing safely, and just being a guy has anything to do with a guy being a horndog. Enjoying leather, boots, jockstraps, play toys, whatever, do it if it feels good.

The partner shouldn't have a hang-up about it. But there are limits. Three ways are always best when all three players are consenual. And when all three are enjoying the playtime. That's why for three ways, the key player is the top guy who gives both his playguys equal attention.

It's winter now, and sure, it is the perfect time to snuggle and get real nice and cozy physically with your man. The sexiest thing this time of year is a pair of long johns with a nice button fly. Sure gives new meaning to the phrase, "Are you glad to see me?"

A healthy appetite for sex is nothing that should never be turnoff or dismissed, no matter how old a guy is. Channeling that energy into safe, sexy fun is something that should be enjoyed to the fullest.

Our man Dan, I feel, was right on with his advice, as usual. Explore, be adventurous, and consensual. The same old, same old, isn't who we are, sexually or otherwise. If sex becomes so routine, so mechanical, then something is missing.

I truly believe that you get out of something only by investing in the time and trouble of making your best effort. That goes with life and with sex.

New Years Resolutions that We can all share together for the common good

Yes, it is that time of year to make and in some cases, already break, New Year's Resolutions.

I thought that maybe we could share together some New Year's Resolutions that we wouldn't break, and that we could easily commit to.

You guys know how much I love to hug. That aside, you might assume that I would also be a "tree hugger". You'd be right again.

So how about we try this spring to plant a tree. If each of us would commit to planting a single tree, a seedling would do, and help to nuture it, we would be doing our collective share in making the air a little cleaner and the environment a little better.

Likewise, we all set personal goals for ourselves, be it losing weight, gaining muscle, etc. Let's pledge to help each other with these personal goals. That way, it won't feel so lonely trying to do it alone.

An idea I saw on Ellen during the holidays, about loose change, could also be something we could do collectively and give to a favorite charity, gay or straight. A lot of our biker buds out there have favorite charities which we could devote some of our loose change in helping others.

Feel free to add your own ideas. You make this a place great to hang because you guys are the best. Never forget that.

Hoping you all are having a great start to the New Year. Together we can make it fun and sexy.