Melissa Gira Grant gets deep about the San Francisco sex scene every Thursday on SEX SF.
Interesting sex lives are all alike; but every boring San Francisco sex life is boring in its own way.
“Justin” moved to the Bay Area from Modesto – not seeking some sexual refuge, but heeding that other great siren call, a software engineering job in the Valley. He’s still in his early 20s, and cute in that slight and skinny way. You would never know that he’s got a secondary encrypted operating system running inside his computer just for his transwoman-on-man porn.
Hip San Francisco sex has little room for someone like Justin. That has nothing to do with “internalized” anything on his part, some lack of sophistication it’s all too easy to dismiss. “I know about Diva’s,” Justin tells me, referring to the club for transwomen and the genetic males who admire them. The reason he doesn’t go isn’t because he’s ashamed – it’s because he doesn’t want to come off as some chaser creep. “I’ve spent way too much time objectifying them,” he says. “Which is fake, but at some point, you think that real life might be that way. You know it’s not, but it’s what you see.”
Instead, Justin relies on Craigslist. He probably spends too much time on Casual Encounters, he says, “which is where most of the t4m [transgender-for-male] ads are.”
That is, there aren’t as many ads from transgender women in the regular dating section of Craigslist, and they don’t have a dedicated “seeking” listing except under “miscellaneous romance” – and he’s not just looking to fool around.