No Craig’s List Personals? What will Linda Do?

This Ad Won’t Be Running

At first the significance of his words did not register with me. Andrew and I had ‘met’ through an ad I had placed on Craig’s List. We had then been exchanging e-mail messages about the possibility of us getting together at a local club that night. His last message read, “Great! See you at 8 ish. Do you want to exchange numbers? I’m surprised that I was able to contact you. You heard about CL getting shut down right?”

‘CL getting shut down’? No, I hadn’t heard so I thought he meant they were shut down for a few hours to solve some technical issues. That happens all the time on the Internet.

Andrew and I met up at the club and we talked about this and that. We were joined by another gentleman who had also responded to my Craig’s List ad. That ad must have been a good one. In total four men showed up for the chance to get cozy with me. That is pretty good odds. But that is another story. Let’s just say that not all four ‘got lucky.’

Eventually Andrew got around to talking about Craig’s List again. He explained to me that Craig’s List had just posted a notice saying they were closing down the personal section of their ads because of the risk of liability created by the passing of a new federal regulation. Apparently the US Congress had overwhelmingly passed a regulation that would subject websites to ‘criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully’.

What an interesting concept, I thought. What if the same lawmakers passed a regulation to make gun makers and sellers criminally and civilly liable for unlawful activity by their users? Same principle, isn’t it? I thought it but I didn’t say it. We Canadians know not to discuss religion, politics and guns with Americans we do not know too well.

Anyway that Craig’s List news hit me hard. It was not hard like news of the death of a friend or relative but hard nonetheless. It was more like the way you would feel when you learn the city is closing down a street or cancelling a bus route that you normally take to and from work or to some recreation. In this case Craig’s List had just without prior notice closed down an important road to my social life.

I went in to a bit of a funk thinking of how much I had come to rely on Craig’s List when I travel. I travel a lot. There was a time, stretching mostly back in to the last century when my go-to way to enhance my social life when I visited a new place was to find the local gay bar with a drag show and go there. Inevitably one would find other t-girls and with them you found the admirers. I admire admirers. Clubs such as the Queen Mary (LA), Backstreet (Atlanta) Cartwheel (near Philly), Edelweiss (NYC),the old Ziegfeld’s (DC), Cleopatra’s (Montreal) and the Dufferin (Vancouver) come to mind as great meeting clubs. Each operated somewhat differently from the others but had in common that the t-girl could count on finding a ‘social life’ there waiting when you visited that city. Now those clubs have something else in common -– they are now closed!

Those clubs all had different reasons for closing but I think one of the contributing reasons might have been the rise of online dating sites making it easier for people to make contacts without spending the time and money to go to a nightclub and put oneself out there.

What was so good about Craig’s List Personals? Why did they work for me? Gosh it sounds strange to be writing about that service in the past tense. I tried with some success making contacts through other services such as Plenty of Fish and URNotAlone but none had the number of contacts and filters/sorts that Craig’s List did. Also Craig’s List ads were current, rarely over a day or two, maybe a week, old so you knew the person placing the ad was currently looking.

Craig’s List permitted a quick focus in on the geographic area of interest, still does for its other categories, just not the personals. So typically, if I were to be visiting Orlando FL for instance, I would click on United States >Florida >Orlando >Personals >Casual Encounters — where I would be greeted with a richness of choices for the T-girls including T4T, M4T, MW4T, W4T, etc. More standard were the M4W, M4M etc. They sorted by pretty well every category imaginable. When I wanted to place an ad it went to the T4M category, sometimes T4MW. If Casual Encounters were not one’s thing there was also Miscellaneous Romance and Strictly Platonic categories to choose.

I chose ‘Strictly Platonic’ from time to time when I was going on holiday and looking for a tennis or golf partner for Linda. Needless to say there were few replies in that category but when they worked out for a golf game, for instance, the after golf social rarely stayed platonic. Funny how even in a ‘platonic’ setting some people stereotyped t-girls as loose or easy. Be it not for me to disappoint!

A lot of people knocked Craig’s List personals saying everyone there were populated by fakes and phonies. There were certainly some funny things about Craig’s List ads. For example:

• Not many people wanted to post face pictures, I guess thinking their penis was their better side.
• A lot of guys who just wanted a buddy to masturbate while they wore some lingerie – I would call them fetish transvestites – called themselves crossdressers. I did not like that they were usurping my term of choice.
• In placing ads too many would not write out fully what they were seeking thus leaving the potential responder to guess at getting it right.
• In responding to ads many, very many guys would not care what the ad said. They just wanted to send a picture of their dick. I call them e-flashers. I guess that is safer than standing in a park and having to run when the girl screams.
• When receiving responses I inevitably had to sort through a lot of dirt to find the gem, like panning for gold.
• Then there were the game players. I sometimes suspected that somewhere there was an online contest on the go where guys would see how far along they could lead a girl before pulling the plug on her. For some that would be off-putting. I saw it as just another challenge to the ‘game’.

Despite those drawbacks, I liked my success rate with Craig’s List. I would put out detailed ads about what I was seeking. It was usually something like you take me to dinner and I’ll take you to bed, type of thing. If for some reason the guy did not want to take me to dinner the fallback position was ‘okay but then you chip in to help pay for the room’.

Some balked at that suggestion. No problem flushing them. If they did not want to make any contribution to our get-together they were not for me. You see my sexual adventures, through Craig’s List or a night club, were and are not so much about sexual satisfaction but about the feeling that a man is getting turned on by the feminine image I project. That is gratifying enough. I loved playing the role.

So what happens now? How can I meet people without Craig’s List? I don’t know for sure. There are more dating sites, tons of them but none have sort and filter capability that Craig’s List had. I’ll look around, maybe go back to Plenty of Fish or URNA.

I do know from my science student days that nature abhors a vacuum so something will probably rise up to fill the space left by Craig’s List. Perhaps it’s already around. Or perhaps the legal and technical minds at Craig’s List will find a way to keep the predators off their site and the legal hounds away from their door.

I have had girls recommend FetLife to me and my ace in the hole is that I have stored all the emails I have received from Craig’s List. Surely a number of those email addresses will still be good. Any other suggestions, ladies and admirers, would be greatly appreciated.

Things will sort themselves out. They always do. Perhaps some entrepreneur will challenge the regulation in Court and perhaps the Court will rule it unconstitutional as it unfairly targets Internet service providers but doesn’t hold gun or vehicle or house or any other seller responsible for the subsequent illegal activities of their customers.

But in the meantime what do I do? I’m going to be spending a week at a resort in Western Massachusetts at the end of April. I was about to place this ad in the Craig’s List M4T and T4T sections.

Why let it go to waste? Does anyone want to respond?

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Tags: crossdressing, featured, opinion

Category: Transgender Opinion