Just when you thought it was safe to reopen your Manhunt.net account, the hook up site is back in the news. When it was revealed last month that the site’s co-founder Jonathan Crutchley made the maximum donation to John McCain’s campaign, the blogosphere  hit code red.

The fallout was crazy. Crutchley was asked to resign from Manhunt’s board, his business partner issued an apology and talked some noise about how Crutchley had  seen the errors of his ways (with nothing from Crutchley of course), and team McCain said it would give the money back.

Well it looks like the McCain campaign really has no issue with gay lubed cash because it has not returned a dime back to Crutchley. Politico.com’s Ben Smith argues this should not be a surprise considering how McCain’s strength has never been the social issues warrior.

True statement, but by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate the Arizona senator was paying homage to those social conservatives in the GOP. They and Palin might draw the line at stumping for a guy who quietly spends money from a site that celebrates gay male sex.

Mike Diamond is journalist and a flirt who likes puppies.

Oh, the Manhunt saga is so juicy. Sex, politics, and money. What’s not to love? Unless you get your news from  CBN, the Manhunt tale has been tearing it up on the gay political sites. Here is the Cliff Notes version: co-founder Jonathan Crutchley gives maximum donation to John McCain’s campaign. People lose their minds. Crutchley is asked to resign from the Manhunt board and co-founder Larry Basile issues a statement apologizing for the whole mess.

Over the week-end, team McCain decided it was time to return Crutchley’s cash (we all saw that coming). Now according to Basile, Crutchley loves him some Obama and plans on giving the Democratic nominee a donation (hey Crutchley: when team Obama sends your check back, give it to me; I’ll proudly cash it).

Okay but here is the problem. Basile is doing all of the talking. Not a word from Crutchley. It is strange for a Republican, as Crutchley proudly described himself, to have a week-end conversion and now be all about the Democrats.

So Mr. Crutchley if you are out there (and we know you are), give us a call here at 365. Let’s sit down for an interview.

Sorry about posting this so late, but the chairman and co-founder of Manhunt.com, Jonathan Crutchley,  has been forced to resign from the site’s board. Seems  Crutchley’s maximum donation to John McCain’s campaign didn’t go down well with the company’s other founder Larry Basile.

“It should be known that Jonathan Crutchley’s donation to McCain left the entire Board in disbelief,” Basile said in an statement. “I am disappointed that we have lost some customers, and I understand the anger. It is too bad for the web site if we lose customers, but PLEASE never refer to me as a Republican. I consider it an offense.”

Is this enough for people who have been asking for a boycott of Manhunt?

Manhunt.net is getting a lot of ink recently. First there is the Out magazine article looking at the site’s impact on gay male culture. Now one of the site’s co-founders is a proud John McCain donor. According to Opensecrets Jonathan Crutchley has given the maximum individual donation to the presumptive Republican nominee.

Be prepared to be cut if you describe Crutchley as a liberal Republican. He admits his brand of Republicanism isn’t the same when compared to a Republican from Alabama, but for him the word liberal is an insult of the highest order.

If I were a betting man, I would wager camp McCain will return the cash when the story gets a wider audience. McCain can’t seek the support of the GOP base and take money from a gay guy who makes tons of money off of gay sex. Sure McCain could make a big tent argument but that takes political courage, a rather rare commodity in a close election.

Hopefully more gays and lesbians who think like Crutchley will come out of the closet. I’m not going to shed too many tears for gays who happen to be Republican, but the stories are out there of prejudice against those whose politics are a deeper shade of red. A community only stays vibrant when all ideas are presented at the table and it’s time to give up the deceit that sexuality leads to a liberal agenda.

This is the question Out magazine writer Joseph Gross posed in one of the most provocative articles of the year.

The Out commentary points to the benefits of the site, but posits that it also has, “a tendency to isolate us, encourage objectification, and diminish our sense of life’s nonsexual possibilities.”

“For a long time it has been considered normal to be on the net,” Hollywood physician Gary Cohan said in the article. “We need to start thinking, that’s not normal.”

In his most powerful passage, Goss laments that cruising on ManHunt has come with a steep social cost. “I don’t like to think about the number of books I could have read, languages I could have learned, and friends I could have stayed in better touch with if I had not wasted so much time cruising online these past 12 years.”

Why are gay men spending so much time online? Why are the profiles so explicit?  Do sites like ManHunt, as the author claims, “exaggerate our propensity to objectify each other?”

I don’t necessarily think so and believe that gay online culture is a result of the law of supply and demand. There are simply too few potential partners suitable for relationships. To make up for this husband deficit, we are thrust into fierce competition – which is reflected by the level of skin shown in many of our online ads.

Here is the hard truth – if you are looking for a life partner the numbers are not in your favor. If you take the total number of gay men in your city, subtract the number you are not sexually compatible with, minus the ones who have deal breaking habits, minus the guys who you have nothing in common with, minus the pathological closet cases who play straight while playing around online, minus the ones who just plain annoy you – the universe of potential mates is remarkably limited.

This harsh reality is true for gay men in large cities and especially for rural gay men who can’t find a hunk in Podunk.

What we are talking about is sexual Darwinism and it affects straight people too. Heterosexuals also trudge through the snow for a night of speed dating, have online profiles and spend lonely evenings in bars looking for Mr. or Ms. Right. Like us, when they have uninspiring one night stands they remind themselves that there are more fish in the sea. When they cast their nets, however, they do so in the ocean, while we are fishing in a pond. The exponentially higher number of potential mates, combined with the fact that straight people can flirt anywhere without fear of getting bashed, creates an entirely different dating experience.

ManHunt – much like the earlier gay bar cruising scene – reflects the understanding that we must show off what we’ve got because there are limited opportunities. We don’t want someone we are interested in to never get to experience our great personality because someone distracted him with a naughty picture – so we show a little more than we might like in order to compete in this cutthroat marketplace.

Until we learn to clone gay people or magically convert heterosexuals – as the religious right imagines we can – we will have a sexualized culture as we try to get the upper hand, so we won’t have to settle for our hand.

Such hyper-competition can best be seen at large Pride celebrations, where normally staid gay men bear all because for a few hours the dating pool increases by several hundred thousand. This behavior mirrors the way many small town women act (think skimpy clothes and perfume wafting through the air) when a Navy ship docks, increasing their odds of finding a husband.

Goss concludes in Out that online hookups can be harmful because “decoupling sex from emotion is a fool’s errand.” But, I’m not sure that such decoupling is going on most of the time.

Online meeting is a utilitarian audition where the actor usually doesn’t get a callback. It isn’t because he didn’t read his lines well – he just might not be right for the part. What sites like ManHunt do, is give busy gay professionals the opportunity to kiss enough frogs before they hopefully find a prince – which is no guarantee.

As the article points out, this process can be tiresome, frustrating, even addictive, as gay men feel as if they are one click away from love.

And, the truth is, they are – or it could be one million taps on the mouse to find a spouse. There is no sugar coating that in a small community of limited partners, if you want a man you have to hunt – hence the success of ManHunt. All one can do is keep his head up and never forget that the next online fling might lead to a diamond ring.