selfpics and nudity and friends, oh my

According to an online source, South Australia has a population of around 1,550,000.

Which means that there's roughly 775000 males.

Factor in the "10% gay" statistic and you have 77500 gay males.

Another statistic I found said that 6% of SA is online (which looks really lame next to NSW's 34%), which leaves 4650 gay males online.

And if, say, 40% of those have joined Gaydar at one time or another, that's roughly 1860 gay males online with Gaydar profiles...

Which probably explains why I keep tripping over the same few faces everywhere I go online...

To be honest, I kind of scared myself with that whole statistic thing... I've known that Adelaide was a "Two Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (as opposed to the usual six degrees) kind of town for a long time... but I've never sat down and actually crunched the numbers like that before... I'm sure that my numbers are probably somewhat offbase though... I would imagine that the percentage of gay men online is a lot higher than 6%... and the 40% with Gaydar profiles was completely picked out of thin air.

It does tie in to something that I've been thinking about for a while now, and something that very much got brought home to me a few days ago.

I was randomly surfing Gaydar profiles, as one does, and just happened to open a particular profile that, while I was sure I'd looked at before, had either changed photos or else the first time I saw it I hadn't been paying attention.

Turns out that this profile belongs to a guy that I had a total and major crush on when I first came out... which ended in random disaster and wrongness, and linked this person and I, at least in my brain, for a very long time.

This guy, we'll call him Crow, made me nuts every time I saw him out and about for YEARS, particularly when he danced... because damn, the boy could dance... and because he was out on the scene all the time, whenever I happened to venture out, there he would be. Whether I had any effect on Crow or not, I don't know, but I do know that we became masters at ignoring each other... there was even one particular occasion where his group of friends and my group of friends were basically sitting "back to back" at a set of tables in the beer garden of the gay pub, and Crow and I still managed to ignore each other completely. And that was even with one of his friends also being one of my friends for a while there... Weird.

Anyway, like I said, Crow made me crazy (actually it's more accurate to say that I let myself be crazy where Crow was concerned) until finally, one New Years Eve, I was sitting with Sheba and Raury and various others on the pool table in Adelaide's single gay nightclub (yeah, lame I know, one pub, one club, one sauna) and he was standing with his cronies not two feet away, and I just looked at him in his godawful cowboy hat and had this total moment of calm and clarity (so much so that it was almost like the music fell away completely and it was very quiet around me, even though I know it actually wasn't), and just thought to myself "I'm so over this... over you... over feeling like this about you... I'm done!"... imagined walking through a doorway and closing it behind me, and that was that... no more crazy. I still saw him around the place from time to time, but it was like seeing anybody else I saw around but didn't talk to... I just didn't care.

It sounds weird, I know... but here was this person that I'd obsessed over for years, and who had never given a shit about me, but who still, somehow, had the ability to make me go to the crazy place... and I was just able to remove myself from the whole drama.

So, where was I... oh yeah... Crow's profile... now neither of us are the spring chickens were once were... and it's been a large number of years since I first met him... but I looked at the shots in his profile and just wondered what the hell I ever saw in him in the first place... although I was seeing more of him in a couple of those pictures (at least within the often odd confines of whatever the hell Gaydar's censorship policy covers) than I had done previously... which just seemed weird somehow...

Then a couple of days later I happened to be taking a look at another site and discovered that Crow had a profile there too... with much more explicit images on it. So what I had never been able to see in person, I was suddenly able to see in the privacy of my own home and without Crow's knowledge (well, he put them there, so he knew people would see them, but you know what I mean)... and, again, it seemed even more weird.

But he wasn't the only person who happened to have a profile on this particular site (obviously)... there were other people I've known one way or another... but then, with only those alleged 1860 people, there's bound to be some overlap...

Basically, I saw the doodles of people I know...

And that was what really got me thinking...

I'm always very particular about putting shots of myself online... for a number of reasons, but partly because I had a bad experience when I first joined Gaydar... I didn't realise when I joined that it had become THE place for the SA gay online crowd to hang out... and I'd been, lets say, a "known entity" back when IRC was the place to hang... and I put a couple of photos on there that were a little more explicit... and a couple of days later it got back to me through a friend (via a mutual friend, via someone else) that allegedly "everyone" had seen them (thanks to one particular individual, who has since displayed the same kind of images on his Gaydar profile, which I have to say did annoy me somewhat)... and given the identity of the friend that mentioned the whole scenario to me, it was highly embarrassing...

I learned the hard way... but I wonder if it crosses the mind of people like Crow and the others that I know one way or the other... that people that they know, and more than that, people who they would never show those particular body parts to in the real world, are able to view those images. Not that any of them had anything to be embarrassed about... although occasionally I'd like to explain the actual definition of "large" to some people... but I just wonder if it crosses their minds.

Not that I have a problem with it... hey, you want to show the whole world your John Thomas, that's fine with me... although depending on the John Thomas in question and the relative attractiveness of it's owner, I may or may not want to take a look at you...

I do wonder if there is a particular kind of etiquette for those situations though, seeing the naked photos of someone you know online... particularly if it isn't someone you've ever been involved in a physical or sexual relationship with... are you supposed to look, or are you just meant to pretend you didn't see whatever it was and move onto the next profile. I mean 99 times out of 100, I'm going to look... in fact the only person who I would probably hesitate about, and would most likely not look at, would be J... and I think that's more out of a sense of preserving my own ongoing mental function than it is about my lack of curiosity... I mean, I'm curious, but I don't think it's something I need to see at this point in my relationship with him.

I also wonder if it's something about us as gay men that we feel compelled to "show off" like that... but sometimes within very odd sets of personal boundaries... like a guy who will show a full body shot of himself in underwear and will tell you his penis is "large", but won't say if it's cut or uncut... or, possibly even more strange, those who will tell you that it's uncut, but not what size range it falls into... I understand the guys who will show everything from the neck down, but not their face, that does make some sense, but there are about a million other variations where I just think to myself "huh?"...

But I know I'm something of a voyeur, so I'm always going to look...

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