Popular Jewish dating website adds support for gays and lesbians

For Jewish boys having trouble finding another Jewish boy to bring home, JDate.com now offers a solution.

The popular Jewish online dating website expanded its search capabilities this month to allow gay men and lesbians to seek matches. The site now asks people for their gender and the gender of the person they'd like to meet, allowing men to search for men and women to search for women.

The updated site sports other requested features, including an option that allows non-Jews to express a willingness to convert as part of their online profiles, but the expansion to gay searches has had the most significant impact. In less than a month, 700 members have registered for same-sex searches, according to Gail Laguna, vice president for communications at Spark Networks, JDate's parent company.

JDate officials say the original website did not intentionally exclude same-sex searches, but there was not a demand for it when the site was unveiled in 1997. Since that time, though, they've heard from gay Jews seeking a portal for online Jewish dating.

"In the gay scene, especially in New York, there's a lot of people who need to be filtered," Lon Steinberg, 23, told the New York Times. "It's just so much better than going to a gay club, getting wasted and having a bunch of random sex."