I really hated the whole idea of using websites to meet people, but in my town it’s not so easy to meet Mr. Right without a little extra help. I’ve tried out other websites such as Craigslist (which I disdain) but I finally gave in and gave a few online dating sites a try. While these websites for sure won’t will solve all your relationship issues, I did find that you can meet some great people, friends and dates alike, on these services.
Chemistry.com
Chemistry.com has a large gay dating member population. The site is the most in-depth in terms of the profile you fill out and it seems they use a lot of techie stuff in the background to match you with a potential mate. It takes a while to fill out the profile, but its nice that you can see your potential matches (including photos - yay) before having to pay. You pay only if you’d like to contact someone. They have this weird 1-2-3 contact system which guides you through the initial contact with someone. Takes some getting used to, but it actually does save the time of emailing back and forth a bunch. Chemistry is a site run by the old-school site Match.com, so it’s a reputable company. I found their customer service to be responsive (my account was suspended for an unknown reason, and it turned out it was a system error, but they fixed it within one day). The biggest con about Chemistry is the price, which at $50 per month, is really overpriced. However, as I’ll detail down below, you get what you pay for.
Gay.com
If Chemistry feels like a professional, high-end site, Gay.com feels a bit more like the wild west. Maybe that’s partially because much of the site is available to free members, so it has a MySpace-like quality of being able to surf around and check guys out. You can create a profile and contact people for free, you pay to display additional photos and see who’s viewed your profile, as well as to see additional photos on profiles. You pay $4 per month to get access to enhanced features, but you can get a feel of the site on the free side to decide whether or not you want to pay. Overall, I found the site a fun and somewhat crazy place to see lots of guys and lots of pics. I met some great people on the site and actually went out on a few dates. I liked it overall, definitely worth checking out.
MetroDate
MetroDate is a smaller and lesser-known site. It’s also mostly-free so it’s easy to check out. You can create a profile and add photos quickly and get started. One nice feature is video profiles, many members have them so you can see what they look like in video before you contact them. It’s very easy to chat and use the forums. However, compared to Chemstry.com this is a very amateur-ish site, and I found that the types of guys you meet were all over the map. It might be better for those looking for hookups.
Yahoo! Personals Gay section
Finally, there’s Yahoo! Personals, which now has a Man Seeking Man option. I liked Yahoo for its easy interface and high quality design, it makes you feel like you’ll meet more qualified potentials here (whether or not that’s true I won’t say). Yahoo Personals has something like 10 million profiles overall, not sure how many of these are gay, but the site had plenty of selection. The photos are nice, and they have video profiles too. Unpaid Yahoo Personals members can sign up, create a profile, search for members and send generic Icebreaker messages. Paying users can do all of this as well as send instant messages and emails.
All Yahoo Personals members have access to "We Match" as well, which merely shows which members have answered basic demographic and tick box questions that are similar to your own. In my experience however, I found We Match not to be very accurate. I checked off that a smoker was a non-negotiable for me, and yet several Yahoo Personals members showed up in my We Match list as did numerous people well over my stated acceptable age range (some more than 30 years my senior). The main problem with Yahoo! Personals is they email you too much. Everytime someone visits your profile, you get an email. Kind of annoying. But the service does put you in touch with lots of great potential mates, so I can’t complain overall. I hope this was helpful to you and I hope you find fun and adventure using any of these sites!
