A few nights ago I decide to stop in my favorite ‘all lifestyles circus’ bar on the way home from work. I pause outside and rustle through my rucksack … and all I find is EST (50mcg/spray) and TAF(50mcg/spray) and -Androsterone 15mcg. I skip the -Androsterone and apply EST 8x50=400 and TAF 2x50=100 and I decide as I enter to be fairly self-contained in the bar:
- some quiet conversation with my barkeep buddy Chad
- browse a newspaper/magazine
- make some notes on a project
Nothing particularly goal-oriented; I’m passing time, waiting constructively. I’m not wandering around saying hello to people I know or introducing myself to strangers; the bar is a bit on the quiet side (pop<30) anyway. I’m observing people in the bar and make no secret of enjoying them as they do their thing; I’m not being reclusive or sending off ‘hermit signals’.
Except for trips to the bathroom or to get popcorn, I’m sitting in my own pherocloud next to the front service counter rather than leaving a trail. I’m quiet, sipping on a large stein of Bass Ale for an hour.
Then a four-set rocks in, two gay boys (Shaun, Brian) and two girls (Lisa, Jenya). Lisa is visiting from New York, and she decides I embody the best of Chicago. If you use a stopwatch, you can measure that over the next two hours the total time Lisa is ~not~ touching me is under one minute.
Ummm … no one that I know, not even the Kinsey scale 5.999 gay boys, would throw Lisa out of bed.
The kino is great; at one point she manages to brush both of her mamms across my cheek on the way to leaning over my lap to hug another boy, Dana, who joins late.
The housecleaning we do is mental; one after another critical topic is raised, inspected, sorted, dismissed: politics to religion to economy to social mores and anthropology.
She makes it a point to tell me twice about how a policeman stopped their group while she was skinny-dipping at the beach (after the park was closed) … and how she emerged, topless, and announced to the cop that if he was going to arrest her, he better know how to show her a good time with the handcuffs on. 
The posse that arrived with her finally returns from the back bar (and pool tables) after about 90 minutes. They are in two modes – one is to rescue me (or Lisa) because Lisa is becoming progressively drunk, and the other, it seems, is to figure out why the hell she’s so engaged with me in the first place.
So Lisa tutors her friends on what they’ve been missing while they left her alone and too bad for them, it’s their loss. I observe that the front door to the place is only 35" wide, so please go easy on the ego inflating comments.
Now we evolve from Lisa-MarkL kino to a very fluid group hug. Brian gives me a shoulder rub that I’d have paid hard cash for, my toes curl; Shaun opens up and we’re all trading warm “open hand” touches – back, arms, chests/breasts, though Jenya is a bit more reserved. (I’ve not witnessed such a scene in this venue in three - odd years, let alone participated. Perhaps I’ve been visiting on the wrong days! 
This lasts for about two minutes, then spins away.)
The IOIs are thick .. it’s like a group flirting convention, and casual bystanders are now being sucked into the vortex.
In any case, I did not foresee that the EST/TAF combo would generate such a strong hit. And one that I did virtually no work for. EST, I thought, was a “comfortable for guys” vibe, but apparently there’s more to it.