Jerkay Video Chat

It’s usually the light that gives it away. His window is doing something yours isn’t — going amber while yours has been dark for hours, or flat and grey at an hour you’d have called late — so you know he is nowhere near you well before anyone speaks. That is the whole proposition of Jerkay Video Chat, and it carries further than it looks: how many men you could be talking to tonight has stopped depending on where you happen to live.

Everywhere else that number is handed to you and it isn’t open to negotiation. A large city gives you bars, a couple of clubs, an app with four hundred faces inside two miles, friends who know other men. A town of six thousand gives you almost none of that, and wanting it differently does not shift it by one. Same country, same language, same Tuesday evening — completely different odds, and the only thing that changed was which street you ended up on.

A gay random cam room is the one arrangement in which that stops being true.

The one fact this room never learns is which town you are sitting in — and normally that fact settles everything.

What a slow night actually looks like

Most of it is nothing much, and it would be dishonest to dress that up. You’ll get a run of men who look at you for two seconds and are gone, one or two plainly giving the call half their attention, someone who would rather talk about his work. Somewhere after eleven the room fills out properly and holds for a few hours. By the time it is getting light on somebody’s side of the world there might be a dozen of you awake at once, and you can feel the difference.

That quieter stretch isn’t a fault in the site; it is the busy stretch seen from the other end, because nothing here is booked in advance. It is worth being plain about how Jerkay Video Chat differs from a general random cam site, though, because on paper the two look identical.

This room

Who turns up: Men, every time. It is men to men here and nothing else, cam to cam.
Getting in: An age check and a camera permission.
What you install: Nothing at all.
Between matches: Nobody selling you anything.

A general random cam site

Who turns up: Whoever the shuffle has spare, and most of it isn’t for you.
Getting in: Often an account before the useful half.
What you install: Usually nothing either, to be fair.
Between matches: This is where the adverts live.

What holds the room together

Everyone here has said he is an adult and switched a camera on deliberately, and that is where the agreement ends. Say what you’re after early, in whatever words suit you; let him say whether he’s up for it; if the answer is no, take it, because the next man is one skip away and nothing has been lost that you can’t get back in a minute. Pushing past a no is the one thing that gets accounts removed here, and the reports do get read. Whatever is behind you is in the call as much as you are, so it is worth a look before you start.

I could be wrong about this, but the evenings that go well seem to have less to do with who is online than with how quickly you give up. Ten strangers in a row can be a dull ten minutes; the eleventh is a different country and an entirely different mood.

There is no telling in advance whether tonight is one of the busy ones. The two minutes it takes to switch a webcam on cost exactly the same in a capital city as they do in a village, so — see what turns up.