art of cruising

i think with advances in technology (specifically, in the areas of communications/ connections), we, as a gay community are starting to lose touch in the art of cruising. yes, as in totally totally losing it! i still remember the times when internet has not penetrated the society, where the order of the day was face-to-face communications, and little nuances in body gestures were important, where we take time to cruise, to romance and to court. and we gaymen were so so well-trained and acute in our senses when it came to the whole art of cruising, romancing, and courting each other.

during those times, we were so conscious of eye contacts, we were so conscious of using the right words (yes, you'll be amazed at how little words can mean different things!), of how we dressed (and little signals we gave each other from the different types of hankerchiefs used, where we wore our ear ring, etc), of how we projected ourselves, how we carried ourselves, and so on... we had to use our whole-being and all our senses to communicate. and as a result, our senses were so much more acute. we were so sensitive to little feelings of touch and we could feel each other when skin nears skin, we were so sensitive to changes in temperatures, where we felt the slightest change in temperatures as flesh nears flesh, we were so sensitive to sounds, we could even heart each other's heart go tump tump tump! and so on... and we took things slow, we pleasured ourselves in the whole experience of cruising, we indulged ourselves in the anxieties that arose from little gestures, smells, eye movements, lips movements. we took pleasures in feeling the anxieties of the touch of the other person's finger, hands etc, and how the fingers feel, and then crawl and inch its ways up our thighs...

and technology came along. it expanded our horizons, it brought the acts of sex from the privacy of the personal spaces into wherever we wished it to be - the bedroom, the car, the office... you name it. it provided us the convenience of peeping into people's private lives anytime and anywhere, and at the same time, allowed us to let people into our private spaces. it fulfil our secret voyeuristic as well as our exhibitionistic fetishes. cybersex, cam-to-cam, msn, you name it. i felt all these advances came at the expense of the physical communications that i spoke of earlier. it totally killed all the human dimension of cruising... of communications to be exact. people want things at an instant. when they want titillating moments, they have porn, when they want anonymous sex, they do web-cam (faceless), etc... no different from how a delicious bak chor mee is conveniently replaced with maggi instant noodle. and for many, a direct result of this instantaneous gratifications and blurring of cyber vs real life is that they totally lost the art of living in the real world.

let me share this experience. a real life experience. i shared it with my bee and he laughed out really loud. it is about cruising... ok here goes, i live in the east and within 5min away from my place is an industrial estate. this estate has a large piece of undeveloped land and developments are ongoing to change this piece of ground into a university within the next 2-3 years. this is also a place where i would do my brisk walks/ runs. it so happened that some years back (and still is), gay men started frequenting this area and it became quite a cruising ground. and on one evening as i was jogging, i saw a young person (i later found out he was 18/ 19 years old). from his behaviour, it was obvious that he was gay and was there for a quickie. he was strolling along my jogging path. as i jogged pass him, i noted he was on his phone surfing the net (i assumed it was grindr), he looked at me and gave me a dazed look. and before i could even say "the", he asked out loud "ah... you gay a-not?"... hmmm, such a direct question... "yes" i answered. a direct question should be responded with a direct answer i reckoned, and i jogged on. he continued surfing the net as he walked about mindlessly. "he was totally totally not my type lor" i thought to myself. thin like a teck-kho aka gala-pole, hair with fringe that is so long and unkempt it covered half his face (macam those in japanese anime), behaviour like a typical ah-beng (derogatory sense)... i turned back and could see him strolling up and down the same path. i returned after my exercise and as i did my warming down, he approached me again and asked another question "ah... you want to have sex a-not?" oh-my-f-ing-god! wah ranzzzz... what a question to ask! was i experiencing a generation gap? i gave a quick negative answer... yet, he persisted, "you want to suck my cock a-not?"... tsk tsk tsk... (of cos, the other way to look at it and ask myself was - i so pecha meh?)

i felt a little disturbed after that incident. i believe you would too if you were in my shoes... and i could only blame his crude and blunt questions to the fact that he has lost all abilities to communicate like a normal hot-blooded human being. and frankly, increasingly, i am seeing such kind of questions being asked. questions that i have never experienced before years ago.

picture from http://gay-singapore-bars.qguide.com/towel-club-sauna.php