In the new issue of Out, Michael Joseph Gross takes on the thing that gay guys sort of refuse to but also can't stop talking about: the hookup site Manhunt. The website, founded in 2001, claims a million members, with 400,000 uniques a month—and a stupendously long time-per-visitor, on average, 40 minutes. (The New York Times would kill for that.) They get 30,000 new members a week, and that is a lot of horny gays. How do those numbers stack up in gayland?

Matt Foreman, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, notes with some awe that Manhunt's membership is "larger than the membership of every major gay political organization combined."

Manhunt's annual income from memberships alone is roughly the same as the total amount of individual contributions to this country's two biggest gay political groups, the Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF. Foreman says, "If we could leverage their membership for activism, there's no limit to what we could do."

The problem is, no one wants to give money to those groups because they're (at least perceived as) wasteful and their politics and priorities are, in some ways, not shared. Or also—maybe gay guys are actually more interested in ass-fucking than marriage rights. And maybe they should be!

So, but, and, as this article progresses—and it's a very interesting read—this weird, not-so-well-thought-out take on the whole thing comes through.

When you came out, you did it because you wanted something. Part of what you wanted was sex, but part of what you hoped for was the possibility of being loved as your true self. And when, as often happens while cruising online, we diminish the hopes that drew us out of the closet, we reduce sexy to a purely physical act.

When we do these things we lie to ourselves -- and worse, we tell the same lies that our enemies tell about us. The fundamentalist canard about loving the sinner but hating the sin draws a nonsensical distinction between person and act. Cruising online, by encouraging us to separate sex from the rest of our lives, does exactly the same thing. These are falsehoods about human nature and about the place of love in our lives, and they undermine the belief that sex can be anything more than a pastime.

Okay hold the phone, pal. Yeah, there is such a thing as terrible junk food sex—and even worse crystal meth sex. And sure, spending all day in front of your computer, shopping for available guys is mindless, dehumanizing and a waste of time.

But Gross is, how you say, not 20-something exactly, and this stuff isn't all necessarily true for people younger than him. (Or for some his age and older as well.) The kids today (damn kids!) don't see much difference between the community they run into on Manhunt and the community they run into in the local bars of Brooklyn, for instance, or on the street. Those are the same people, going the same places. And some of them are cheap sex partners, and some of them become boyfriends, and some of them are a community of friends.

Hookup sex isn't a lie. It's not some betrayal of the self. This incredibly conservative view—he gets affirmation in the piece from Larry Kramer even, the original anti-hookup jeremiadist—is just silly. And he goes way over the top:

We still don't know how to have enduring relationships. We still don't have examples. We still don't have mentors. We still don't have courtship rituals. We are still getting HIV.

Uh, speak for yourself? And seriously, talk about needy! Who feels this desperate drive for someone to tell you how to live?

The other thing about Manhunt is it brings together people who aren't part of this mythical community "we" that Gross thinks is so desperate for courtship ritual examples. Not every guy, on the Manhunt or off, is a West Hollywood and Chelsea gay looking for "role models," is not desperately looking for someone with better abs or a better credit rating. Not everyone even wants to even be a gay. Plenty of them just want to get fucked. And really, no matter how many times you do that, it still doesn't make you part of this little cultural club.