So the boyfriend ended and Wein adopted Billy, a rescue terrier. Wein eventually tired of his two-month-long first date and realized, with his diminished sex drive, that all he really craved was cuddling. I didn’t realize that these relationships had formed over time.” I didn’t expect with these people I had met on Grindr or Scruff or Jack’d that I’d have these conversations about the situation. “With my husband, I have a relationship that’s much more involved than just sex. I have a big, burly daddy and he was checking in with me all the time-more than half of the people checking in on me were fuckbuddies,” Ari said. The surprises continued as the pandemic lengthened. Wein, who had a date with a Tinder match-and three-year crush-on the first day of lockdown, turned it into a two-month staycation in a self-ascribed “marriage of convenience.” And writhing in the longest sexual drought of his life, Ari, 43, a New York-area doctor who began sleeping in a room separate from his husband to avoid contagion, started masturbating in the shower at least twice a day, bought three vibrators (a first for him), began a hentai fetish, and learned hands-free orgasms. Chasing what he called " optimal hedonism," Harvier began mixing ecstasy into his orgasms. For the first time in seven years, Barrett began masturbating (“I hadn’t needed to before”). Radical shifts began in the lives of the men I spoke with, as well-worn habits gave way to novelties. "I felt like I was dipping my pen in a poisoned well-physically, emotionally, spiritually poisoned. Perhaps there was another, more primal culprit too, as 68 percent of those gay men also reported decreased opportunity to have sex. Duh, look around: historic unemployment, lockdowns and travel restrictions, industries shuttered or limping along, bailout apathy from Congress and the White House, a Supreme Court that may nix healthcare for millions, and a nationwide nightmare of new COVID-19 infections. I miss jerking off in the steam room, just as something to do to break up my day.”Ī National Institutes of Health study of 1,051 gay men, published in April, found 69 percent reported decreased quality of life in the pandemic, with 73 percent reporting increased anxiety. and sharing physical space with the community-the catharsis of that, the political project of gayborhoods. The gym, the bars, everything.” Sean, 39, who requested anonymity because his parents aren’t privy to his setup, enjoyed a gilded coterie of paramours in his open relationship with his fiancé in Boston not so in lockdown: “So much of gay coming of age is moving to New York or San Francisco or L.A. "There was a really immediate, visceral resistance to not being sexual.” Danny Wein, 28, a communications strategist in San Francisco, felt disoriented: “My sex drive, which was very high, fell off a cliff, and it was a very unsettling feeling in a city where cruising is par for the course in my daily routine-or was. How We're Redefining Our Dating Deal BreakersĬourtney Harvier, 33, a photographer in Brooklyn, rebelled hard against the isolation: “I had this super-averse reaction to not having sex: If I can’t do this, I’m just going to be a camboy and start taking all these videos and sending them to people-ass pics and dick pics, sending them out to all the people I’ve ever found attractive on Instagram," he told me. Sexually sequestered with empty beds, the men I spoke with have been forced to reckon with who they are without active sex lives-some for the first time since coming out. Gay life has always been rooted in active sex, but the pandemic upended that, compelling a kind of self-consciousness for untold swaths of gay men, especially single gay men. Broadly, nearly half of gay Americans are single, compared to 29 percent of straight American adults. In their lifetime, gay men aged 35 to 39 on average reported 67 sexual partners, according to one study, far more than the 12 lifetime partners of their straight counterparts. “I felt like I was dipping my pen in a poisoned well-physically, emotionally, spiritually poisoned. In 20 minutes, I’d have whatever topping I want,” he said of his pre-pandemic life. This year, since the start of pandemic protocols in March, he’s done nothing more than a mutual masturbation session in June. Last year, Barrett, a fortysomething architect in North Carolina who traded candor here for anonymity, had sex with a little more than 200 men.