GiB#2 | All Day Sobhiyye with Matinée

It happened. Last Sunday gorgeous Riviera Beach opened up its doors for the long awaited pool party by Matinée. A perfect day in the sun for hundreds of ‘beautiful people’ to wander around the pools showing off those abs (and implants) and dancing all day long to housy tunes by international and local DJs. My hat goes down for the local DJs especially the closing set by Madjam, to the Matinée beach balloons floating in the pool and used as GiB carrier pigeons, and the Matinée logos made of foam passing above our heads. My hat stays on however for the stage ‘performances’, sorry but a well crafted costume alone doesn’t make up for a good show.

The venue was a bit too spread out, and in my mind GiBs and friends don’t need that much 'sectionization' (what’s with the VVVVVVIP thing?!), although it didn’t prevent the party from getting wild at times. With twice as many guys per square meter in the pool and half as many girls at the party, this could have seemed like a Matinée party in Europe... but it doesn’t make it any less amazing for Lebanon! It was great fun indeed.

Kudos to the Ghazal brothers for putting all this together, it was a definite success guys. Hope this is a first of many more to come!

GiB#2 | "Gaylebanon on MIRC sent you a message on Facebook”!

It was hard to believe when I read this email subject line last week – way for a single line to take me a decade back in time…

As much as I miss my teens, I can’t say I miss the early days of online GiB dating.

As some of you may remember, to meet fellow GiBs online in the 90’s, we had to log in through the crappy mIRC application to the shady #GayLebanon channel on creepy 192.168.0.1-type Undernet servers – or was it Dalnet?

The nicknames were freaky, people remained religiously anonymous, and dishonesty prevailed. Could have been my young age, or how gay Lebanon was back then, add to it the whole ‘hacker’ culture of the time: in either case it sure felt like we were doing something illegal, something wrong at best.

GiBs had to go a long way to take a breath through this narrow window – it was the times of the shady Internet cafés and the stuttering dial-up Internet connections – but mIRC’s #GayLebanon was all there was. It’s where it started.

As such, #GayLebanon’s dictators clique of “admins” and “operators” can tout themselves today of being the pioneers of online gay cruising in Lebanon!

But is it really much different nowadays? Granted, GiBs can now pick and choose between Manjam, Gaydar, GayRomeo, Helem’s chat, the newcomer gaylebanon.info, Facebook or even the BBM service on Blackberry… then cherry-pick from thousands of GiB faces and asses on display…

As far as I'm concerned it still feels like the same hit-or-miss shooting in the dark, the same fear of fakes, the same hate of flakes, in that everlasting gloomy atmosphere… So come to think of it, it wasn’t that bad in the 90’s!

(Visual concocted by GiB#1)

GiB#2 | Oh Jimmy Come On

Lebanon’s “first male stripper” got himself some quality airtime last winter.

In this funny article from the Jerusalem Post (!), this hot Lebanese hunk who goes by the name of Jimmy, self-proclaimed himself the first professional male stripper in Lebanon. Perhaps rightly so, as Jimmy seems to emphasize what he means by ‘professional’: a fully-booked schedule, an outfit for every occasion, a pair of handcuffs, and a kick-ass rate that dwarfs his day job’s as a personal trainer.
As far as us GiBs, here’s what PT Jimmy had to say: "Lots of gay men ask me to strip for them but I only strip for women." "I don't dance alone and I only dance with girls.” "I don't want to be people’s bitch." "I do this for fun and extra money, so I have my rules and I want to be seen as respectable."

So Jimmy doesn’t do boys? Not that it matters so much – you can probably score a male-for-male stripper on Manjam in no time. But I doubt that Jimmy is telling the truth, because it’s his number that my GiB friend was given out once when he was shopping around for a male stripper for his (male) friend’s bachelor party.

Jimmy says he charges $500 for 20 to 30 minutes and that he plans to raise the rate to $750 this summer.

Any GiBs out there willing to outbid Jimmy with that killer-offer-he-can’t-refuse? Oh come on now Jimmy. I know you can do it.

[For Jimmy’s contact, contact the GiBs!]

(Photo from linked article)

GiB#2 | Two Summers This Year

It should come as no surprise that the summer cadence of the DJ events started as early as May this year.

If two big-name DJs, Carl Cox and Tiesto, are playing in Beirut on the same night (tomorrow, Saturday July 3rd), it’s not just because the producing companies Crystal and Mix FM are in one hell of a dog fight. Everyone knows the times of the massive events that draw 15,000 people are gone, but although they’ve been much smaller lately, their cadence has gone way up.

The reality is, this year the producers have been trying to get as much done as possible before the month of Ramadan kicks in. Ramadan this year is from August 11 to September 9, and from what I can recall from previous years, nightlife tends to slow down a lot during that month. This will leave time, however, for another mini-summer in September to catch up on August… if we’re not completely broke and exhausted by then, that is.

(Photo taken on the Corniche)