No the Belvedere is not in the city limits even though it is awful damn close!
That gets Vernon Jones credit.

Way to go Danny, you pretty well summed it up.

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40 something, 6' 175 brn/brn hairy looking for other married wm or younger guys to play.

Well, since everyone is throwing their two drops of cum in on this subject, I might as well too. I have long felt that you could put all of the true sex that happened as a result of CFS into a tea cup, so we might as well have political agruments. It is generally much more entertaining reading than: "Hot bottom in Acworth seeks 12 inch hung top, under 20 years please!"

The Atlanta sex scene has changed (For the worse, meaning less of it.) because we have changed and the city has changed. You might argue that this is either good or bad, either way it is a fact. You really can't blame Shirley Franklin, she hasn't done anything. The various sex clubs: SEMCO; Steam and Eros all closed for different reasons and many rumored ones. If a place isn't up to fire code it should be closed down. I don't want to fry getting my cock sucked because the electrical work is shoddy or the fire doors are bolted shut. Many of the old cruise spots are long gone. Remember Dutch Valley off Monroe? Posh condo's there now. Remember when you could drive through Piedmont Park and get out and do it in the bushes with 60 other guys? You can't find a parking space ten blocks from the park now.

Politically we are becoming a one party city, state and nation just as surely as the old Soviet Union was. Atlanta is a black island in a sea of white. Think you will ever live to see a Republican mayor or city council in Atlanta or most of Fulton and Dekalb Counties? Not if you were born yesterday. You will however see various black politicans trashing gays and raiding movie theaters inorder to court the black religious vote.

Think you will see a Democratic governor or General Assembly in Georgia anytime soon? Oh, maybe in thirty or forty years. You will however see white and black politicans kicking the dead dog of gay marriage and ending funding for state subsidized HIV drugs for the poor inorder to court the rural and church vote.

Think you will see a true two party system in Washington anytime soon? Probably not. The Republicans seem to have the Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court sewn up and in their control for many decades to come. We need a big, daddy sheriff
to protect us from the twin scourges of Christian civilization: Muslims and homosexuals. They will play this card as long as they possibly can until the house of cards the whole fallacy is built on comes tumbling down.

The Democrats are only slightly less worse than the Republicans only because the latter have all the power. What I can't quite understand is all of the Republicans, gay and straight, who can do nothing but whine, complain and victimize themselves. You won baby! It's your ball game now, lock, stock and WMD! We have had Republican Presidents for 18 of the last 25 years. (Clinton won despite himself, it was Bush I's to loose.) You have had control of the Congress for the last 11 years. The majority of the Supreme Court Judges were appointed by Republican Presidents. What are you belly aching about? Still you must have a boogey man and if you can't think of anything else to call it, call it "liberal."

The people in control now, be it the local courthouse, statehouse or the White House have no political philosophy right or left. It is all about POWER! And they will say anything, do anything and kill anybody in order to keep and maintain it.

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"Pass me the poppers boys, this one's got landing lights."

well said!!
p

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xviewer

Always laying the blame is victim mentality. It will keep you being a victim. Grow up. Take responsibility. All I ever hear are whiners complaining about and blaming Bush, Cops, GOP, Religious Right, etc. They never take the blame for having sex in public places and getting busted - no way, it couldn’t be our own fault. Look around - new housing going up everywhere, like the gentleman said, more taxpayers = more infrastructure, including police, politicians, and public do-gooders. But I also see grown men having sex in public places. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the excitement as much as you do, but if I get busted it’s my own damn fault. I won’t blame administrations, organizations or the Gestapo. So take it somewhere in private. Be safe.

This is a myth. Clinton appointed more minorities. Look it up.

The majority of Americans polled now disapprove of Bush's job performance and it has never been more than a few points that have approved. He has had the lowest popularity ratings of a re-elected president in history.

They overwhelmingly disapprove of his Social Security proposal. They disapprove of his handling of Iraq. They believe he lied to get us into the war. They disapprove of his environmental policies. They disapprove of his stand against abortion (except late-term). They disapprove of his stand against stem cell research. Even the idiotic Frist -- who diagnosed Teri Schiavo by video -- today opposed Bush on stem cell research.

We're likely to see more of the latter kind of distancing for one simple reason: midterm elections.

Untrue. For one thing, it's obviously more politically expedient to oppose gay rights than to support them. Duh.

But you need only compare the platforms of the two parties during the last election. It is absurd to accuse the Democratic Party of the same excesses of homophobia as the Republican Party. You will recall that Clinton actually pressured Kerry to move further to the right on the issue of gay marriage and he refused.

Gee, you sound just like Karl Rove. Liberals wanna give terrorist therapy and conservatives want to blow 'em off the map. Problem with your hallucination is that the Dems almost unanimously supported the Afghanistan invasion and the Iraq one too -- the one that turned out to be launched for completely bogus reasons. You really should try adhering to fact, instead of fantasy.

The "flypaper argument" you make died last week, anyway. Two of our allies -- Spain and Great Britain -- have both been attacked by al qaeda. Obviously, fighting in Iraq doesn't keep the terrorists from extending their fight to other countries.

The State Dept's own survey revealed that terrorist attacks since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq have doubled around the world. Of course, they immediately tried to block publication of the survey.

Comparing the religious right -- the people who want to re-criminalize sodomy and re-authorize the police to enter your bedroom to arrest you -- to the Democrats is absolutely absurd, though it seems to provide plenty of catharsis to do so.

It is certainly true that there are plenty of homophobic Dems, just as southern dems led the fight against racial integration, but I don't know a single Dem of importance who has campaigned against gay people the way Republicans have made gay rights their "wedge" issue in their self-proclaimed culture war. The fact is that if they DID, they'd have a much better chance of being elected. We do see covert complicity, like Shirley Franklin's, but nothing on the scale of what Republicans are advocating and have won in their state-by-state campaign to "protect marriage."

It is bizarre to read these harangues about politics that expect ideological purity of Democrats. It's politics, not religion. Or it should be!

Im sure the number of attacks have increased since those numbers they keep include terrorist attacks IN IRAQ!

The attacks in Spain influenced the election, so they are no longer in Iraq with us.

Lets all hide our heads in the sand and those bad guys will just go away and leave us alone.

There is a seat for you too ride the" Vegetable Oil" bus with Jane Fonda. I guess we will have to stop calling her Bagdad Jane instead of Hanoi Jane.

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40 something, 6' 175 brn/brn hairy looking for other married wm or younger guys to play.

Oh please. Flex stays open under an exemption. Give me a damn break. If you're a lawyer, you know quite well that bath houses are illegal.

As usual you avoid the facts, but thanks for sharing. And putting me on the bus with Jane. I'm hurt.

Oh, and remember: It was the State Dept. that wanted to put our heads in the sand by not publishing the report. As for the attacks in Iraq...uh....DUH. Who are they attacking? Their invaders. Double DUH.

Now that I've got politics out of my system....

I think there is a simpler explanation for the sex panic that's gripped Atlanta and many other cities. You might want to check out this site of a 1997 conference:
http://www.managingdesire.org/sexpan...ssrelease.html

I believe I met the webmaster, Keith, at that conference.

A hint: Are you aware that a few years ago the city that reported the greatest number of arrests for sex in public bathrooms was West Hollywood, the only gay-run city in America? Much larger cities didn't even come close. (That's from Michael Warner's "The Trouble with Normal," which also addresses this issue brilliantly.)

The point is that the shift to a conservative ideology, as was observed at this conf. in 1997, isn't just in the dominant culture. It's also true among gay men, arguably to an even greater extent among us. (And god knows you can see it in a broad way in this very thread, even if it isn't uniformly extended to sexual behavior.)

As gay men try to become assimilated, they adopt more of the dominant culture's views about sex, marriage, love, etc. I'm willing to bet that most of the complaints police hear about public sex, sex clubs, bookstores, etc, come from other gay men, not from heterosexuals. (In fact, police reports corroborate this.)Some of you may remember that it was gay men who blocked the opening of a bath house on Amsterdam Ave. some years ago. This was also the case when the Eagle had a very, um, vibrant sex night a few years --much more active than the current Thurs night one.

I'm not saying the religious right, Shirley's constituency, isn't part of this, but I think many mainstream-minded gay men are playing right along because it doesn't look good for us to be sexual beasts when marriage has become our main agenda.

And I do think it's also about a change of values. I'm betting the average age of the person who feels like his sexual liberties have been severely limited here is over 40 or close thereto. People of that age -- my age -- typically depended on public sex venues like the parks and semi-public ones like bath houses not only to have regular sex when they first came out but to actually learn how to have gay sex. That's not the case much any more, especially not with park and bathroom sex.

Also, I think an effect of this agenda of mainstreaming ourselves has created a new kind of closet. Gay men who go to sex clubs aren't as open about it even among themselves as we were 20 years ago. Because we're all supposed to get married and live behind picket fences, it's considered skanky to defend recreational sex because it presents an unflattering PR picture to the culture that controls our civil rights.

! There are plenty of new places to cruise and meet other guys in Atlanta but they are no longer being listed on crushingthegaysex.com anymore. I know because I get plenty of cock at them often. They are out there. We have evolved once again back to a old reliable method that has always worked. To find out where new cruise areas are it will take turning off the computer and getting out asking other gay people. Even read the grout between the tiles!! They will tell you. Finding gay cruise areas has gone back to a old reliable safe method \"WORD OF MOUTH\". Most of us real fags do not feel comfortable cruising places that have been heavily advertised online anyway and never go to them. Every gay person I talk to at a cruise area hates what the (Internet FRONT PAGE WORLD WIDE NEWSPAPER) and (GWB church & company) has done to gay cruise places anyway. The ones they know about. Hee\' You will not find any of the new cruise places online for now and hopefully never because once they are listed its the same old - same old thing every single time, they quickly are crashed and busted by the usual SICK cops-antigay-religious..etc. or whatever and not only that - they are overloaded just before the burn every single time! One of the stupidest things in the world is to try to stop people from having sex because its not ever gonna happen and one of the best things that can happen is a cure for HIV disease and others but that is NOT ever gonna happen either because they makin by \"FAR\" too much \"money\" off maintenance HIV drugs to cure it and cut off the MONEY highway. I think heterosexual people around where I live need to come out of denial and face the truth about just who in the human population carries the majority of HIV infections and it is not gay people here where I am. Say if they were to board up and stop all gay cruising everywhere, what and who will they blame for the continuing rise in AIDS after that? One thing for sure is that nature will always find a way no matter what and gay cruising is not about to evaporate no time soon.

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midget

Well said, Gaywillow. You are sooooo right!!