One way that gay men interact with each other includes the action of cruising. While you’ve cruised for years, here’s news for you – we don’t all use the same method for cruising each other. I’ve discovered that we have four distinct approaches with cruising, or what I call in fancy clinical terms: sexual attention.
If you think this doesn’t include you because you’re not the cruising type, it does. Here’s one of the four: not cruising.
Why does this matter? Four different approaches mean that you have a one-in-four chance of success with a guy since your own approach may not match his. But even if your approaches are in sync, there’s still the possibility that he might not be attracted to you. Knowing this in advance allows us for the first time, even after decades of cruising men, to reframe indifference and overcome self-debilitating conclusions we can easily jump to when experiencing rejection: the belief that we are not “good enough.” Perhaps you really are “good enough,” even hot enough; that may not be the problem. Rather it could be simply that you have a 25% chance that your approach to sexual attention will be compatible with his.
Doesn’t looking at the situation in this light make dealing with rejection and indifference far easier than assuming that you are not good enough?
Possessing this awareness becomes even more important as we get older because everything changes. As I mention in this video, we often experience less attention. The need to feel sexy can often increase as we see it slipping away, leaving us at higher risk of both acting desperate and feeling depressed. When older men stop getting cruised we frequently begin feeling invisible and start making self-deprecating comments about our aging. Then in sadness, we actually do disappear because we stop engaging with other gay men and gay subculture.
Well, no longer! One of my clinical methods includes the updating of cruising for you. Identifying your approach is the first step. Come early 2012 in The Right Side of Forty, you’ll determine your style, and then learn how – and why – it needs changing.
Next year, I’m fifty. I’ve changed how I cruise. So have my clients. Now it’s your turn. Through the methods I’ve designed, as you refine your actions with sexual attention you increase your happiness, visibility and confidence when you interact with other gay men.
A new approach towards cruising is one of my numerous strategies to help you. But clearly with cruising: this is one of my clinical techniques packed with fun! Your identity as an aging gay man is desperate for fun, isn’t it? The fun I teach you invests in your future versus fun that potentially destroys it.
Are you ready to learn something new and start improving your gay life? Whether you’re in your twenties, your seventies or somewhere in between, the subject of cruising is just one of thirteen chapters in The Right Side of Forty training you on issues – unique to the lives of gay men – where we never received the teaching we needed before. Please check out the book section here on my blog to read an excerpt from my book’s introduction and here’s a direct link to order the book on amazon – The Right Side of Forty.
I am wondering if there is an alternative term that could be used instead of to cruise and “cruising”. That term seems a bit dated and hearkens back to a time when homosexuality was illegal and considered an illness–and the only option for gay men to meet was furtive sexual encounters in public places that often put gay men in physical and legal jeopardy. For me to cruise is being on the prowl for anonymous sexual encounters.
While I understand and appreciate the intent here, I feel like we as gay men need to change some of the language that often gives less legitimacy to how we socialize as gay men. Using that term today seems kind of heterosexist and homophobic, since the implication is that straight people flirt—which implies something innocent and “legitimate”-something that people do to show interest and that may to an actual relationship—while gay men “cruise” each other—which has a darker, much more predatory connotation.
I know I am splitting semantic hairs here but I think that the language we use is gay men has importance if we are to move towards legitimizing our relationships in a largely heterosexist world.
Thanks for your comment, I think it’s important to keep links with our gay heritage for embracing our gay identity, so the term cruising will likely not disappear, but if you’d like another option, how about the clinical term I use to describe it, like I mention in the first paragraph – sexual attention.