A call for tasteful cruising

I have lived long enough to know the ins and outs of cruising. Not the kind that traverses countries and oceans, although it brings you the same heavy breathing and tensed muscles. I’m talking about gay cruising to be exact. Sometimes I can’t help by laugh quietly when I realize I have probably breathed cruising air for so long I can smell it from miles away. I can very well sense it in my surroundings even if I close my eyes in sleep or plug my ears to rest.

That’s how I have grown to be so unknowingly skillful in this field. By that, I don’t mean I top the cruising field. I’m quite more of the reverse. I’m dreadfully shy. You would have to fill me up full tank with vodka or tequila or anything extremely intoxicating to make me lose myself and forget about my inhibitions. That’s probably the only time I can manage to smile seductively or even walk up to somebody for a small talk. I needed to be prodded in a special kind of way just to initiate what otherwise would have been something unimaginable.

When I say cruising pervades my space it can drown me in no time, all I wanted to declare is something that’s so plain and true. One doesn’t need to pray for mammoth eyes or ears that grow like wild giant mushrooms to be familiar with the finer points of cruising. What’s all needed is just a heightened sense of intuition, one that leads to being perceptive and insightful of people’s feelings, behaviors, or the slightest move of a body part. For instance, there is a way to read a person’s seemingly innocent glance or second stares and find out they really meant something else. There’s also a way to know that a harmless brush of elbows in a music store or a moviehouse or even inside a church during an ongoing mass really was meant to communicate one’s desire to pursue a tryst.

For gayguys, this is not something foreign. We have all grown accustomed to the step-count-look back habit or that celebrated three-second eye contact. We have likewise polished our face muscles so well we can whip out a craving look anytime or, worse, that one that depicts a yearning to devour certain body parts no end.

I don’t have anything against cruising and people who cruise. I won’t even lift a finger and talk people out of their decision to walk around the entire city to pursue a partner even for a momentary bliss. I will not stand in the way of people who might opt to spend the rest of their lives doing this. There’s only a small request I’d like to make: That when you do it, can it please be done in a way it doesn’t lead other people – gay or straight – to think lowly of the gaykind. It doesn’t help that, while other people silently work hard to break long-standing myths about gay people, some recklessly flush down hardly-fought constructive imagery of gays down the drain with their unflattering conduct.

I’m no manners police or anything. I just beg, please be at least tasteful.