Open Forum Wednesday: The Pic Thing

In my question-and-answer series yesterday was an inquiry from a reader about how to hook up with guys online without having to provide a photograph. I spent a good deal of this weekend clearing out my pending-replies folder of my email box, and I was a little surprised to find no less than four emails—all from different people—asking pretty much the same question.

Here’s one, which I’ve gotten permission to reproduce here:

Mr. Steed, 

I am a married guy who really envies the way you go for and get sex. I have been straight for the last twenty years after some ‘experimentation’ in high school, and I think it’s time to start integrating my gay side more, or I think I’ll go completely nuts. All I think about is gay sex. It drives me kind of crazy that I can’t get any. 

I’m not a bad-looking guy, I work out three times a week and have a fit build and a good chest. My position in the community is too important to risk putting pics out there, though, and it bugs me that guys want to see pics before meeting. I’m not into pic-swapping. I want to meet. It seems like no pics is a deal-breaker for most men, though, and I can’t take that risk. 

How can I meet guys online without showing any pics? I’ve tried Craigslist, etc. 

Thanks.

Before I get to my tough love, I’d like to express sympathy to all you guys who wrote in with similar letters (and they were all very, very similar). I understand you’re in a tough place, trying to negotiate that tightrope between your current life and your own sexual desires. It’s obvious, though, that none of you are content with the way things are; if you were, you wouldn’t be hunting for sex on the side, nor would you be writing me to ask for advice.

The simple reality, however, is that there are vanishingly few people who will want to meet you without knowing what you look like. That is the immovable object against which you have to labor. I wouldn’t meet you without a photo. Nor would I meet you with an obviously out-of-date photo, a murky photo that looks like it’s been shot with a crappy cell phone cam in the dark, or a shot only of the tip of your cock. I’ve been burned too many times by guys who’ve represented themselves falsely.

If you want to meet men online, you need to have a clear shot of yourself and your face. It can be that vacation photo from earlier in the spring, or a shot you’ve taken especially for your profile or ad sitting on the stairs. But I need to see a photo so that I can make sure you don’t look like an axe murderer, a creepy playground guy, or one of those men who claims to be 46 when it looks as if you’re 70. (I’ve got nothing against 70-year-olds, mind you, but I do dislike liars.) That’s just the way it is.

Guys who talk about how they’re simply too important and high-profile to have pics absolutely baffle me. Unless your name is John Travolta or Tom Cruise, you’re simply not that special a snowflake that you can’t share your face. (And if your name is John Travolta, you’re not really doing that great a job at hiding your needs, frankly.) There are a lot of married men who share photos of their faces with other men. I’m one. There are a lot of teachers, politicians, policemen, and other high-profile career men who have photographs of themselves. If we were in the nineteen-fifties or sixties and homosexual blackmail plots were still a current literary device, I might understand. But we are well past those days.

Perhaps you might not want to share your face photo on Craigslist, where anyone can stumble across it and link to it. That’s understandable. But you can choose another online site that requires membership, like Manhunt or Adam4Adam—your wife, your minister, your parishioners are not going accidentally to stumble across them on a site like those that requires a membership or account. (If they do, they’re looking for the same thing as you, you know.) You can even place your photos under lock so that you can pick and choose who sees them, if you’re really that worried. But guys are going to want to see your photos, and you are going to have to share them at some point.

The essential crux of the dilemma with these gentlemen is that—and I don’t mean to be cruel, just honest—they want to have all the benefits of scoring online tricks, without taking any of the risks. To someone who’s never posted a photo on an online profile before, I understand that it’s a daunting prospect. In reality, though, it’s a risk so minimal that once you’ve done it, you will be totally baffled at why you thought it was at all scary. Without risk, you’re unlikely to get rewards. No guts, no glory. That’s simply the way it works.

So no, I’m afraid that I can’t offer any of these gentlemen the reassurance that there is a foolproof way to get sex online without taking the slightest risk. If these guys want to get some, they’re all going to have to give.

What do you guys think? We’ve discussed the pic thing before the past, but would you have any different advice to give? Am I being too harsh? Or is my advice pretty much on-target? Let’s hear your experiences in today’s open-forum comments.