Top or bottom?

I struggle with how gay culture uses sexual positions to define gender roles between men in a gay relationship. Sure, facets of promiscuous gay culture -- aka one night hook-ups and casual sex -- use sexual positions to distinguish the gay couple. And yet, whether someone chooses to be on "top" (penetrating) or "bottom" (receiving), nether one of these can earnestly define the personality type of a gay male -- aside from what will get them to climax in bed on that particular day.

It's as if sex, rather than the relationship, is the single most defining role. It's hard enough finding an attractive, single and intelligent gay male. Having to further subdivide the gay dating pool based on preference of sexual position, are we really going there?

Considering my age and where I come from, I'm relatively inexperienced to what it means to be in a homosexual relationship. However, I do represent the voice of gay men my age -- regardless of sexual experience within the demographic -- that share in the confusion brought on by living in San Francisco void of guidelines for gay dating. As I attempt to explore the meager options available in the Bay Area (there's a lot of gays in SF, this doesn't mean they're all up to par) I'm forced to adhere to some ridiculous rubric for defining gay couples set forth by whom?

Today's generation of gay culture is not like the one that came before us. We're living in an age where the concept of marriage, previously exclusively reserved for heterosexual culture, is now an idea that at the very least is being entertained by society at large. The promiscuous gay culture conditioned by the generation before us was plagued by the AIDS epidemic. Now, in 2009, even though humans can live with AIDS, the gay culture created by the generation before us is hardly one worth continuing. To start with, let's take ourselves seriously and abstain from identifying our gender roles on the basis of where we stick our penis.