Gay-dar

I fear that there’s something wrong with my gaydar. It’s not working properly, especially with younger people and / or metrosexuals. Maybe the times have changed and the youngsters behave differently nowadays. I’ve even more confused with certain cultures like the Italians, Spanish, or even the Greeks, after living in the UK for the last years. There are lots of straight Greek guys out there that look gay to me.

I was watching the other day, a very silly TV program called ‘Playing it Straight’. The show’s very similar to the ‘Bachelorette’ but with a twist. There’s a girl and around 10 boys. Boys try to win the girl’s heart. However not all of them are telling the truth. Some of them are gay. At the end if the girl picks the straight boy, they both get £25k. If the girl picks the gay boy, he gets £50k on his own. The quality of the show is very low to say the least. The boys need to prove their manhood (in comparison to their gayness) by wining challenges. Some of the challenges are ridiculous like working on a fish boat cleaning fresh fish or knowing how to use a compass and a map. The stereotypes used could be plain insulting but the show wasn’t taking itself too seriously and the narration done by the very camp comedian Alan Carr gave it a funny twist at times.

At the end the girl chose a straight guy (or that is what he said) and it ended happily ever after. However, the whole process made me think. Firstly, there was a set of twin boys in the show. It proved at the end that they were both gay. That is the second occurrence I know where twins share the same sexual orientation. The other is from two sisters I know in Greece. I was wondering, is that common? When one of the twin’s gay, is the other one as well?

Secondly, the guy who won didn’t really look straight. He was as camp as a Christmas Tree at times and I’ve always put him in gay group. He also had a tribal tattoo on his lower back that I think is more easily fashioned by gay guys. OK, I know that someone’s campness is not always an indicator, but… I also have to admit that being gay, makes me find more gay traits in people. Maybe it’s wishful thinking

PS. I love the date today! Happy leap year to everybody!

Q2 - February 2012

Welcome to 'The Question'. That's Stephen's from 'The State of the Nation UK' new project where he poses a question to all bloggers each month. The second question is:


What is the best piece of advice you have ever been given? 

Unfortunately I have the memory of a goldfish and I do forget (quite a lot). Sometimes you need to repeat certain things many times to me before they actually sink in. There are however some things in life that stayed. For example I do remember what my father told me I should do regarding my career, what a friend of mine mentioned when I was a teenager on how to be a good sex partner and what my first grade teacher often commented so many years ago.


From these pieces of advice I'll share with you the one that my first grade teacher shared to us. She told us always to aim higher than the mark in everything we do in life. It's normal that some times you can't accomplish what you aimed for but at least that way the minimum mark is reached.


This is a very simple advice but I believe very good. I've used it throughout my academic progress and now at work. Even in my personal life when I set targets in my path, I always try to reach higher than what's minimum expected or needed... 

Dating a porn star

The fact that George Michael is actually dating a porn star didn’t come as a shock to me, but I have to admit that I was surprised. I have no experience in the matter at all, but it made me think. Would I be OK dating a porn star or an escort for that matter? To be perfectly honest I’m not that sure about it. I don’t think that it’s a matter of morals. I do believe however that I’d have a problem with my boyfriend having ‘intimate’ moments with other people. I don’t know exactly how to explain but I would like to know that I share something special with my partner that no other people knew or watched.

Being paid for sex is considered a profession like all the rest, right? It is different being ‘easy’ (aka a slut) and sleep with lots of people not really having any standards and sleep with people in front or behind cameras to get the money you need to pay rent. As an argument I’ve heard from someone that everybody everywhere, in a sense, is using their sex or love partners. From helping to fight loneliness or fill a gap in someone’s life to sleeping with your boss to get a promotion, don’t you use the person next to you? My personal answer would be negative. Personal financial gain is different to psychological gain from both parts in a relationship where each member gives and receives more or less equally.

Also, I fear that in most cases, being paid as a sex object leaves or shows psychological scars. I have two very real examples to show you. I have a friend of mine that dated in the past both a porn actor and an escort. Both guys were of course fine. I spent some time with them in various outings and we had fun. However, both of them had issues when it came to relationships. One of them was extremely possessive and jealous! I couldn’t even grasp that a guy doing porn movies on the weekends could act like that. The second was sentimentally unattainable. I don’t know if that’s expected of an escort. I assume that in order to survive in their profession, they need to create mental walls to protect themselves that it’s not easy to take down, even if they wanted to. Sure the money's good and the looks matter but the price is too high.

These of course are speculations. Not everybody is the same and I can’t generalise. There are all kinds of people in all professions and definitely there is no such thing as being normal.