PHOTO BY GIOVANI TARIFENO It can be difficult to meet date-worthy people in these modern times    Metro Bad Man on Campus, Part 2 Legal experts say Eduardo Padrón's real estate deal to buy the Freedom Tower looks more like a criminal conspiracy Kulchur He's Back From Iraq Miami may be a great news town, but it's a bore compared with Baghdad Letters Letters from the Issue of July 3-9, 2003

"Good point. Probably not. What do you do?"

"I run a summer camp for kids."

I think about Kerry from 8minuteDating and wonder what kind of woman this man prefers. When the bell rings I'm sad to see him go.

Toward the end of the event a tall, thin man with a slight Southern accent sits across from me with a drink in his hand. "What the fuck, man? How are you?" he asks. He's very, very loud but friendly. Seeing that I'm a reporter, he confides that women have been asking him if he finds them attractive, then gives me his opinion of his fellow male daters. "Some of these guys are fuckin' nerds, you know. I don't need to take fuckin' notes, man. Do you need to take notes? Here, I'll tell you all you need to know about me. I like to play pool. I like a good steak. I like good red wine. That's all you need. Pool, steak, red wine. Simple. There you go. All right? Take care, sweetheart."

I'm unable to concentrate because the girl next to me is leaning all the way over the table so the young man sitting across from her can smell the perfume on her neck. She has a curtain of long, curly black hair that makes it difficult for me to spy whether or not he's begun to kiss her. It's a small spectacle that I'm having a hard time dismissing. People clearly make matches at these events.

With HurryDate there's really no time for notes or for differentiating whether or not you'd like to know someone for business, friendship, or romance. People are encouraged to circle "yes" or "no" quickly, which I fail to do and am therefore a failure as a HurryDater. At the end of the night the group has blended into a single memory of attractive, professional young adulthood. The dates who stick out are the four I just mentioned -- one of whom wasn't even mine. Still I feel good about the people I met and the way I spent the last two hours, even though I don't enter any matches.

I do, however, hear from "Jason," a 38-year-old software salesman. New to the area, he signed up for HurryDate and told a friend, who laughed at him. Of the experience, he says: "Overall it was a fairly relaxed process, even though the pace was a bit frenetic." He received a few matches but the women never returned his subsequent e-mails. Jason says it's unlikely he'll go to this type of event again but would encourage others to try it. "It's relatively fun, easy, and something to try," he offers. "But I wouldn't expect to meet my soul mate there."

"Even if you don't meet your soul mate, you're gonna have a great night out and just have a fun experience," says Testani, a cheerful young professional who is not above using smiley faces in her e-mails. She met her partner Deckinger when the two were high school students in Boca Raton. (Testani graduated from Spanish River High School in 1993. Deckinger, former "Mr. Boca High," graduated in 1992.)

Testani has participated in her own events. "I was amazed at how exhausted I was at the end of it," she marvels. "The adrenaline was kind of pumping, and I was like, 'Wow, 25 dates go so quickly.'"

Warburton says these short dates rely heavily on something he calls "magical thinking," which he explains this way: "'If I just go and just interact for a few minutes with fifteen to twenty people, I may find my heart's desire.' Not that we don't all do that anyway. The people who put the ['don't expect true love'] disclaimer out do so in order to cut off at the path possible legal actions or hurt feelings.

"But the three-minute date is putting all its money into the magical thinking pot: 'I'm just going to look at her or him and react and think: Ohh, isn't that nice or I don't like him.' This is all based on internal stuff, not the other person."

Younger daters seem to appreciate the more-and-shorter-dates format, which may be why MTV featured HurryDate in one of its Sex2K documentaries. Planetout.com also links to HurryDate's Website to keep its readers informed of same-sex events across the country. Even with all the attention, Testani admits, "There's still a little bit of stigma attached."

- Relay Dating -

Blond, muscular, and very handsome, 39-year-old Edison Farrow bears a striking resemblance to American Idol's Ryan Seacrest. The outfit he dons to host relay dating also bears a striking resemblance to Dan Benjamin's from HurryDate. In a ref's jersey and with a whistle around his neck, Farrow encourages his 37 gay male relay daters at Miami Beach's Lime Bar to take their seats, which are lined up in two long rows of 18. Their dates will last two minutes; then they take the next chair to their right. Because there is an odd number of participants, each man has a break when he reaches the single seat at the head of the two rows. I'm sitting next to this chair, on a stool at the bar. The only woman in the room, I'm like the free space on a Bingo card. When the men reach this seat, they look down the row, which earns the nickname "the gauntlet," and sigh: "Wow, that's a lot of people."

These guys are all pretty handsome, yet not uniform. White, Hispanic, and African American. Some are dressed conservatively, some in club clothes. Some are muscular, others look more bookish. They start each date with a smile and a handshake and everyone seems unguarded and open to conversation -- not something one often sees at, say, a circuit party or a big gay venue. Their two-minute interactions seem very much the same as those at HurryDate -- people ask the same questions, make the same faces.

As I chat with the men in the Free Space, I notice two things. They almost all would have preferred fewer dates and more time. Also they aren't that surprised at themselves for trying speed dating. Quite a number of the men had tried meeting other men online (and echoed the Tom Jaffee sentiment that people online tend not to look the way they describe themselves). For many of these gay men, who have often already used inventive ways to meet potential partners, this was just a new option.

In fact gays, along with Jews, are the pioneers on the speed-dating frontier. The simple explanation for this is that, barring visual cues like a yarmulke or an "Out and Proud" T-shirt, singles from these specific groups are far less likely to rely on sight to identify members of their desired demographic group. (On the other hand, straight singles looking to date someone of the opposite sex need only see people to know whether they're male or female and wearing a wedding ring.) As such, members of these minority groups have traditionally relied on intermediaries -- clubs, temples, bookstores, college groups -- as a way to meet potential partners.

Aish HaTorah describes itself as "an apolitical, international network of Jewish educational centers, providing opportunities for Jews of all backgrounds to discover the wisdom and beauty of their heritage in an atmosphere of open inquiry and mutual respect." In 1998 the Los Angeles branch offered its members something called SpeedDating -- one-on-one dates that lasted seven minutes. With the intention of getting Jewish singles to date within their religion, it was the first one-on-one event of its kind; soon it spread to Aish HaTorah's other North American branches. (In SpeedDating: The Movie, Charlton Heston stars as L.A.'s "Rabbi Yaacov Deyo" -- "Let my people date!")

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