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At about this time I moved from DC to Atlanta and then over here to San Diego.  Initially, in neither Atlanta nor here did I find any women who I was interested in.  I did however, find a number of men who fit that bill.  I soon fell in among a truly wonderful group of men that was a circle of very strong friends.  Many of these men I still count as being among my closer friends and we share a bond that lasts to this day.  It is a connection deep enough that it's still there even if we are no longer in so close contact as we once were.  During those first two years of the 90's I had some awesome times with these men and was very comfortable being amongst them, being with them, loving them and being loved by them.  I had no desire or need to go outside the gay men's leather community at that time. 

Then I met Kim.  Kim was about everything I was looking for in a life partner.  Kim was also a woman.  I weighed that and decided I wanted and needed a partner more than I was concerned about the differences in plumbing.  For the next four years Kim and I made a solid go of it.  This was the longest I'd ever been with anyone and it was a major adjustment for me.  Not only was it an adjustment to be in a relationship for that long but it was also an adjustment to be in a relationship that also involved a child for Kim had a daughter from a previous marriage.  Prior to being with Kim I would have bet money that I'd never have gotten involved with anyone who already had a kid.  Adjusting to that and taking on the role of a father was no small thing for me and I count it as one of my greatest personal accomplishments that I was able to do both.  Not easily, not simply, and not painlessly but I did do it.  I also like to think I had some deep affect on her daughter as I was fulfilling the father role in her life during some of her most formative years.

All that ended when Kim and my relationship ended back in '97.  It did not end well but its ending was due to no dishonor nor lies on my part.  I thought I had had enough of women at the time and would reenter the men's community.  Such was not the case.  I did find more men to be with and enjoy but I wound up "going steady" with women more then men after that.  This got to be such the case that many gay men - men who I was very much interested in - completely discounted any possibility of that interest as they knew I was straight.  As one such man told me, I had been so long in the het world that I had become invisible to gaydar.  Luckily he was telling me this as we were relaxing together in his bed.  A mutual friend had done us the favor of cluing him in to his error.  Still though, most gay men no longer do see me as being part of their community and I feel that loss.

Over the past few years I have tried doing something about this.  This website, and its precursors, are one example of this.  I wanted back in to the men's community and was willing to do a lot get there.  I no longer enjoy hanging out in the bars though so I tried the online thing.  Initially it started when I found the online Longhair community.  I have long liked how Longhair can look on a man yet have almost as equally as long not been in a situation where I could grow a mane of my own.  With the job security I now enjoy, I now also have that Longhair freedom so I took advantage of it.  As part of this I found that there are websites and groups aplenty devoted to Longhair on men.  God bless the Internet!  Among these are some sites and groups specifically about gay & bi Longhairs.  I started hanging out there more often and then I set up my first site on GeoCities as a means of "hanging" what few pictures I then had of myself with my growing mane.  That site also began to serve as something of an extended personal ad site for me.

In short order I found that it was wiser not to make any mention of my being bi on that site.  Initially I was put off by this and then I discovered why when I started getting hit on by online bi men.  About the only credit I'll give such guys is that they at least had the honesty to identify as being bi.  I had assumed that the majority of bi men online would be like the bi men I know in real life.  That is, open, out, up-front, balanced, and not lying cheating scum.  My mistake.  It turns out that the majority of bi men online seem to all be cheating on someone.  That could be their wife, their girlfriend or what have you.  At the least they are not out and are not open about who they are.  So, in their contacting me they always sought encounters at my place, or in motel rooms, or if it was at their place it was only during the weekdays and never when "she" was home.  I can't stomach that.  That is lying.  Lying to your partner.  Lying to the person who has opened their life to you and given their heart to you.  Cheating on someone like that is to bring injury to them.  Being part of such cheating is helping in that hurt and that's something I just won't do.  I can empathize with individuals who only discovered their bisexuality after they got married or moved in with their girlfriend or when it was otherwise "impossible" for them to reveal themselves.  That empathy only goes so far however.  I have paid my own price for being this honest with myself and with others.  One of the benefits of that price is that my being me doesn't require lying to others or hurting them.  So, I won't be party to it with anyone else.  I got hit on so frequently by such men that I even had to put up a page on my site specifically about it.

Yet, at the same time I also realize that such an explanation is a bit much when cruising online.  Most guys doing such cruising would bail the moment they saw any mention of being bi.  So, I decided to save that explanation for a face to face time as that is time when abstract stereotypes fade away when presented with in the flesh reality.  I never lied about myself and was clear about it if asked but if there was no need to know then I made no mention of it.  When I'm with a person - be that person male or female - it matters not what I do with other people for when I'm with a person I am with that person fully.  That, and the fact that my bisexuality is but a part of me and by no means the whole of me.

In any event, I tried - diligently - to work my way back into the men's community.  I changed gyms to one in Hillcrest as opposed to the one out in Pacific Beach that was flamingly straight - even though I saw a lot of other gay men there among the gym rats.  I made that change in the hopes it would place me more in currency among the men's community here in San Diego.  I also began attending more gay male leather events.  IML was among the most obvious of these.  You'd be hard pressed to find a more gay male leather event than IML.  In 2002 I even went back to Inferno.  Inferno is an exclusively male event and almost entirely a gay male event.  I thought that by doing all this and by bringing back the memories of what I once did and who I once was that I would somehow find my way back in to the men's community and perhaps find a new circle of friends to call my own.  It has been over three years of this now and I now recognize there's nothing for me to go back to.

The main reason for this is AIDS.  I have lived with AIDS from almost the first time I had sex with a man.  It has been a part of my sexuality since I first formed my sexuality.  I was there when the Plague got its start in DC and I watched it as it spread through DC's gay community just like it spread through all the other communities throughout the nation and throughout the world.  I watched as the Plague took away one friend after another.  I've buried too many of my friends who've died from AIDS.  Safe Sex has been burned into me as I'm too aware of what happens without it.  Today though, I see that this has changed and that is why I now feel so alienated from the gay community. 

The changes I've seen in the gay community over the past few years are ones which have left me cold.  They've left me depressed, and they've left me with a feeling that I'm watching a close friend slowly kill himself and kill everything about himself that he once could take pride in.  All this, my essay about my being bi and about the changes I've seen in the gay community, was part of  one longer essay.  I found that the bisexuality references were distracting the main points I was trying to make about the gay community.  So, I split that off onto its own page and you can read about those Changes by going over to it.

What I see in the gay community is a community which no longer cares for itself and no longer cares for the individuals within it.  What had been the best way we had to exercise this care, Safe Sex, is now something which is all to often discarded by today's gay community.  Now it is all about barebacking, fucking without a condom, as AIDS, if not cured, is now considered to just be a chronic disease that the Cocktail (protease inhibitors) can handle.  That sort of pathological attitude sickens me.  It repulses me and to say the least, I do not find it erotic.  As such, I also don't find that there is any place for me left in the gay community.

Madoc

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This page was last updated on: 17 August 2007