Although online dating gives an avenue for those looking for gay relationships, it is far from the only way. If you do some of the following things you can avoid paying the expensive monthly fees and the issues that come with online dating sites…
Check out the gay and lesbian community in your area. If you do a google search for “(name of your city here) gay lesbian” or just “(name of your city here) gay”, you are likely to stumble upon some sort of organization or community to join. In the gay community there is everything from sports clubs, barbecues, camps, volunteer groups, etc. If you go to a college or university there is likely to be some kind of gay organization or club. Once you start getting involved in the gay and lesbian scene and make some friends, there’ll likely be a snowball effect. Also, once you get into the scene, you’ll find out gay and lesbian events, which you’ve never heard of before. You’ll make some friends, those friends will make you even more friends, and so on.
You can also go about making friends in general (gay and straight). Not only may you stumble upon someone that is gay, you’ll better your social life in the process. It is estimated that about 1 of very 20 men are gay.
Gay Dating for Shys
If you are on the shy side (maybe you don’t go out that often), work on improving your people skills. The more practice you get, the better you’ll be. One site, which I highly recommend in terms of improving your social life is succeedsocially.com. Although this site comes from a heterosexual male who, at one point, struggled to get girls, it gets into the nitty gritty shyness issues that a lot of us have. If you’re someone that is awkward around people, the hardest thing is getting started. If you want to improve your social life you have to have a long term focus. If you don’t, the inevitable rejections and awkward social situations you’ll have in the beginning may make you give up. Being well liked is a learnable skill.
If you are outgoing, your options increase dramatically. Being more open to people in everyday life will increase the chance that you find someone who is gay. A lot of homosexual people go to standard night clubs to meet others gays.
Things will be a lot easier for you if other people know that you are gay. That way, your co-workers or friends may recommend somebody to you. Coming out is not easy for a lot of gays because they are afraid of the social repercussions. What will their friends think of them? How to break the news to your family? Here’s a site, which has some posts from real people who have come out of the closest.
The Internet can not only help connect gays by online dating sites, but by connecting gays to their community in the real world…
lgbtfriends.meetup.com: This site lists LGBT events around the world. Although one group may be over an hour away, it may be worth checking out because some of these meetups have a lot of gay members within them. A cool thing about this site is that you can read reviews about people who’ve been involved in the meetups. Obviously, the larger the city you live in, the better chance that the meetup group has a lot of people.
If you want to get in touch with the gay community online, here are some sites to check out…
www.gayteenforum.org: An active forum for gay teens.
www.chat-avenue.com: Check out their Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual forum.
www.bibble.org/gay/stories/comingout.html
There are national gay organizations, such as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLADD), which have events in some U.S. cities. At the time this article was written GLADD had events going on in New York City, Palm Springs, Dallas, and San Francisco. If you happen to live in a small town or live in one which doesn’t have much of a gay community, see if you can visit one, which does. San Francisco is one that immediately comes to mind.
New York City has a very active gay and lesbian center, which is known simply as “The Center”. Although you may not live in such a big city, it shows that the larger the city is, the more gay people there are, and the more of a gay/lesbian/transgender/bisexual community there is.
Tags: Bisexual, gay and lesbian, gay relationships, gay teens, GLADD, homosexual, lesbian, lgbtfriends.meetup.com, meetup, New York City, outgoing, people skills, rejections, social life, social situations, succeedsocially.com