This post was submitted by corey

Start your week with sex… or lack thereof. Delve into the jungle of the newly out and single every Monday morning in Sexual Disorientation.

Part One: The Realization

A few weeks ago on a Thursday night, I found myself poring over one of my guiltiest pleasures: the Craigslist Missed Connections. Apparently either people weren’t feeling connections that week, or they had finally learned to be direct with each other, because there weren’t a lot of could-have-beens for me to read. Bored and curious, I navigated over to a different part of the site: the regular men-seeking-men ads, where the pretext of prior chemistry is aborted and people’s desires and fantasies are put on the table.

I had long been thinking about the relationship between new age communication and the tendency of people to market themselves. On Facebook and Twitter, blogs and away messages – everywhere we go, we are forced to be public relations executives, getting our image and message just right. If you don’t believe me, check out the Facebook Grader, which uses a formula to judge the publicity power of your profile. Or think about the time and energy many put into selecting profile pictures and detagging less-than-flattering photos.

But I realized that nothing compares to the raw salespersonship that is employed on Craigslist, where you classify what you’re looking for and then make a classified out of yourself. I had been living under the impression that all of the self-promoting associated with modern life is unhealthy, tiring, and at times even maddening. But could the direct approach work? Could the right salespitch lead to the quick and profitable exchange of goods? Or would it only yield false advertising?

Part Two: The Experiment

Knowing that I may soon be leaving the District of Columbia, and having had little luck going out, I decided to do something out of character for the sake of this column: I would put up an ad on Craigslist and see what happens.

My first rule for advertising myself was to keep it simple. I was frequently turned off by ads that listed ten thousand confusing, contradictory, or repetitive statistics. If the descriptor “GL” (meaning good looking) was useless, than “VGL” – very good looking – was beyond excessive. There was no need to say “HWP,” meaning height-weight proportionate, and then spell out all of your measurements anyway. Don’t say race doesn’t matter and then state your preferred races. Don’t even bother listing cock size, because even the Pope would lie about that.

My second rule for advertising was to keep it open-minded. For the sake of the experiment, I thought that it would be best to have only basic requirements listed for my suitor, and to therefore generate more responses. So I said only that I was looking for a college student who was in pretty good shape and who lived in Northwest.

Within minutes I had received a half-dozen emails, but not one of them matched my requirements. Most of the guys’ ages put them clearly outside the college bracket; if a man is 24 to 30 and still an undergraduate, I probably would have no interest hooking up with him, anyway. The only collegiate respondent did not meet even a very loose standard for being “in pretty good shape,” so that didn’t work, either.

Discouraged but not defeated, I thought that I would try responding to a few ads that others had posted. A few got back to me and would exchange a few messages before they stopped replying. Interestingly, this never happened after I sent face pictures – they were all still interested upon seeing me, which gave my low self confidence at least a bit of a boost. One stopped after I stated, in all honesty, that I had no “body shots” of myself naked. My advertising mission aside, that was something I was not willing to release to an anonymous person through conspicuous channels.

But the others stopped communicating when they learned that I was gay. One might assume that these men were, too, but many identified as bi, or as “straight but having problems with my girlfriend,” or as “totally in the closet and looking for other closeted bros.” Apparently, there are many ways for men-seeking-men to market themselves. “Gay” is not a particularly successful one.

However, eventually I had a lead. Like me, he was a Georgetown student, and something about the warm weather and the approach of finals had encouraged him to look online. We chatted a bit on AIM before agreeing to meet up.

I met him in front of his building. He was cuter than his picture indicated. He led me upstairs and made small-talk along the way. Soon we were in his room, our lips locked and our bodies moving towards the bed. But just after his head hit the pillow, things started to go south – and I don’t mean below the waistline.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I feel like you’re holding back. Are you into this?” I answered that I was, and that this just wasn’t something I did often (or ever).

I realized that the problem was he hadn’t wanted to make a specific plan when we chatted online, even though most Craigslisters do just that. However, having come together, he was unable to take charge as he had suggested, and I felt uncomfortable leading things myself.

We kept kissing for a few more minutes, but it was clearly not working. I couldn’t help but wonder why, if he wasn’t able to take charge, he would have led me to his room without direction. And if he wasn’t into what I was offering, why had he accepted to begin with?

Our hook-up having failed, I left alone. I decided that while some “advertising” may be necessary in this day and age, it’s hard to directly market ourselves when our sexual desires are so complicated and ambivalent. Some people don’t know what they want, and don’t realize it until they’re in bed with another person. Some people seek out encounters with members of the own sex, but can’t come to label themselves as gay. Some people will lie to your face, and some will lie to themselves.

The most important rule of marketing is to know the product you’re selling. A lot of us searching for someone don’t seem to know ourselves. So while sex may sell, it’s not easy to sell sex.

Part Three: The Final Find

There is a place I call the Facebook for gay men. DList is the Vogue to Craiglist’s Us Weekly: glossier, sexier, and with a lot more ad space. It was on DList where I met my “first time,” and after having been off for months, I decided to make my return.

One April night a boy messaged me and we got to talking. Before long we met up, and I was relieved to find that he was exactly who he said he was – no lies, no hidden motives, no false representation. The more time we spent with each other, the more I realized that we had in common, and the more of myself I saw in him.

We were “just friends,” a label I didn’t mind in my post-Craigslist existence. I realized through that experience that sex wasn’t all that important to me. It means very little without a connection, without emotion, without chemistry. I would take a friendship with a smart, interesting man over a cold hook-up with a stranger.

But as our story continued, I realized that this could be a true rarity in the world of marketing: something even better than advertised.

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