GayGeek

Does New York Straight Men deliver what it promises on the outside?

Take the tour of NewYorkStraightMen and you will quickly catch on to the theme here - its NYC's "down low" blow job site. A kind of fun and unique site theme. You can watch preview vids for the Recent Updates row on the main menu only. Its a little contrived, clicking the thumbnail gets the Portfolio page - click the thumbnail again to get to the Pix page - then select the Video tab for the video page. It should give you a pretty good idea of what's inside. Other thumbnails not in the Recent Updates row will still reveal an abbreviated photo gallery, but no preview vids. The total collection of movie thumbnails shown on the tour represents the actual collection as a member.

What's good about New York Straight Men? What needs improvement?

I've been an intermittant fan of the site since it started in 2005. On the positive side, it does manage to add content at a reliable pace and has kept up with resolution upgrades to keep it competitive. I love all the hairy numbers - something thats gotten very out of vogue with the shaved craze. And the talented "suckers" are quite good at what they do - hehe.

My biggest beef with the site is that the videos don't play conveniently, which is a huge flaw for a movie site. There are two choices for videos, QT and WMP. Pick QT and you must wait until the ENTIRE video downloads invisibly into your computer's hard drive before it starts to play, basically just hanging there lifeless until the video plays a few to a lot of minutes later - but at least the QT video once "streamed" or downloaded had a status bar which allows you move around in the video. Pick WMP and the video streams instantly (maybe a little overdone on all of the sign-ons), but once the entire video is "streamed" or downloaded - the status bar on WMP does not allow for you to forward, back up, or select a certain sequence. You have to just watch the ENTIRE vid from front to back - something wrong with the way the vids are "indexed". This was true even on vids downloaded to your hard drive and even the preview vids - try it for yourself!

The other complaint is the tedious navigation. Select Thumbnail-of-the-Movie, then a Portfolio page appears, then select the Thumbnail-of-the-Movie again (why?), takes you to the Photo Set, then you must select the Video tab to select the Video (which required two additional sign-ons). I think the original concept was for the Portfolio page to cross index certain "stars", but I never found a Portfolio page with anything other than a single link, even for repeat performers.

A simple search bar would also be a great help.

How is New York Straight Men unique?

NYSM has a unique concept and unique content. A winning concept if it would fix some annoying mechanical issues.