Such services generally allow people to provide personal information, then search for other individuals using criteria such as age range, gender and location. Most sites allow members to upload photos of themselves and browse the photos of others. Sites may offer additional services, such as webcasts, online chat, and message boards. Sites sometimes allow people to register for free but may offer services which require a monthly fee.

Many sites are broad-based, with members from a variety of backgrounds looking for different types of relationships. Other sites are more specific, based on the type of members, interests, location, or relationship desired.

In many cultural traditions, dates are arranged by a third party.

Traditional dating activities include sharing entertainment or a meal. When the activity costs money, it has traditionally been the man's role to pay, although in recent times the practice of "going Dutch" (splitting the expenses) has emerged.

A pleasurable BDSM experience is thought to depend greatly upon a competent top and the bottom attaining the correct state of mind. Trust and sexual arousal help a person prepare for the intense sensation. Some have even gone so far as to compare adept BDSM play to musical composition and performance, each sensation like a musical note. Likewise, different sensations are combined in different ways to produce the total experience.

Some sensations may be equated to different levels of bodywork and may have the same end result of causing emotional releases and other physical and psychological experiences. This experience is the motivation for many in the BDSM community but is not the only motivating factor. Indeed, a strong minority of BDSM participants (especially "submissives") may well participate in a scene that they do not derive any physical pleasure from. This is done in order to provide their dominant master or mistress with an opportunity to indulge their desires or fetishes.

It is worth noting that bondage has sexual appeal to persons of both sexes and all sexual orientations. However, a subculture of gay men, sometimes called leathermen, were arguably among the first group to make obvious hints of their tastes in bondage in public.

The growth of the gay leather subculture parallels the biker culture that arose after World War II -- a number of early leathermen were WWII veterans, and the military traditions of discipline and structure were an important influence in Old Guard leather. While the bikers were not identified as homosexual, the leathermen admired their toughness, tenacity, and willingness to ignore mainstream social mores. Consequently, they adopted the biker style of dress, particularly the use of black leather. While this served a utilitarian purpose for the bikers, in providing warmth and protection from "road rash", it was primarily of fashion and fetishistic value to the leathermen, who for the most part did not ride motorcycles extensively (although there have been and are numerous gay leather motorcycle clubs).

Beginning in the late 1960s, heterosexual groups began to come together to explore bondage and power exchange. With time, these groups have grown and have raised their profile somewhat, to the point where most U.S. cities of any size have one or more such groups. A major goal of most of these groups is to provide semi-public opportunities for BDSM, in an effort to provide a safe environment for relative strangers to engage in such activities. As such, these groups attach high importance to objective safety rules, such as the use of safewords.

Just as the word "gay" is sometimes used as shorthand for LGBT, so "gay community" is sometimes a synonym for "LGBT community." In other cases, the speaker may be referring only to gay men. Some people (including many mainstream American journalists) interpret the phrase "gay community" to mean "the population of LGBT people".

Some LGBT people are relatively isolated, geographically or socially, from other LGBT people, or don't feel their social connections to their LGBT friends are different from those they have with straight friends. As a result, some analysts question the notion of sharing a "community" with people one has never actually met (whether in person or remotely). But other advocates insist that all LGBT people (and perhaps their allies) share political and social interests that make them part of a global community, in one way or another.

Cybersex, computer sex, internet sex or net sex is a virtual sex encounter in which two or more persons connected remotely via a computer network send one another sexually explicit messages describing a sexual experience. It is a form of role-playing in which the participants pretend they are having actual sexual relations. In one iteration, this fantasy sex is accomplished by the participants describing their actions and responding to their chat partners in a mostly written form designed to stimulate their own sexual feelings and fantasies. Cybersex may also be accomplished through the use of avatars in a multiuser software environment.

Cybersex sometimes includes real life masturbation. The quality of a cybersex encounter typically depends upon the participants' abilities to evoke a vivid, visceral mental picture in the minds of their partners. Imagination and suspension of disbelief are also critically important. Cybersex can occur either within the context of existing or intimate relationships, e.g. among lovers who are geographically separated, or among individuals who have no prior knowledge of one another and meet in virtual spaces or cyberspaces and may even remain anonymous to one another. In some contexts cybersex is enhanced by the use of webcams to transmit real-time video of the partners.

Cybersex is sometimes colloquially called "cybering". Channels used to initiate cybersex are not necessarily exclusively devoted to that subject, and participants in any Internet chat may suddenly receive a message with any possible variation of the text "Wanna cyber?"

If a person has had same-sex sexual encounters but does not self-identify as gay, terms such as 'closeted', 'discreet', or 'bi-curious' may be applied. Conversely, a person may identify as gay without engaging in homosexual sex. Possible choices include identifying as gay socially while choosing to be celibate or while anticipating a first homosexual experience. Further, a bisexual person can also identify as "gay" but others might consider gay and bisexual to be mutually exclusive. There are some who are drawn to the same-sex and may not have sex and also not identify as gay, these could have the term 'asexual' applied even though an 'asexual' generally can mean no attraction and includes heterosexual attraction that is not sufficient to engage in sex or where the sex act is not desirable even though titillation may occur. Finally, there are some who may want to identify as gay that are not technically gay but have some event in their life or gender transformation or who otherwise feel they fit in no other identity.