Don’t be surprised if San Diego seniors start flocking to New York City.

That’s because, according to the New York Times, tasty twinks are paying old gay guys for sex in the Big Apple.

But before you plan on supplementing your Social Security check with a booty call atop the Empire State building, consider the experience of Robert Pinter, 53, a New York masseur whom police arrested last October for “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.”

Pinter was in an adult theatre in the East Village when a “young, handsome stranger” approached him for sex.

Well, what would you do? Pinter agreed to leave the store to have consensual sex in private ? nothing illegal about that.

But then the buff beauty offered Pinter $50 for the privilege. Pinter, who says he declined, notes he found this odd, but before he had time to wonder if he was having a senior moment, he found himself handcuffed to a chain-link fence – and not in a good way. Apparently, the youth’s clean-cut charisma was straight out of “NYPD Blue.”

Now Pinter has started a group called Coalition to Stop the Arrests, claiming that New York police are targeting gay men and have arrested at least 34 of them in the last 14 months on trumped up sex charges.

Police officials, of course, claim that they are merely responding to complaints of misconduct occurring at business venues. However, of the 900 nuisance claims the city investigated last year, only three involved adult video stores.

And anyone familiar with what I call “gay CSI” knows how unlikely it is that younger gay men would go to adult book stores to meet men in their 50s, much less offer to pay for sex! Given also that the 34 men arrested have no criminal records, the only likely aspect of this scenario is that police are harassing gay men.

Never mind that courts frown on the practice of using decoys to generate arrests because it’s both discriminatory and a form of entrapment. Never mind that judges and juries are wise to that fact.

The point is that most poor dupes who fall for such a ruse never make it to trial. Most are too embarrassed to do anything except plead no contest and pay a fine, which is exactly what N.Y police are counting on. Sting operations like the one that trapped Pinter turn gay men into cash cows for the city.

Could this happen in San Diego?

In California, sexual activity in the confines of adult venues isn’t generally considered to be public sex, because the assumption is that patrons aren’t necessarily offended by nudity. (After all, they’re on the premises to see it!)

And, thankfully, it’s been some time since San Diego police engaged in similar shenanigans. Former City Attorney Mike Aguirre didn’t want to prosecute such cases, and William Landsdowne, our local police chief, can’t justify the use of scarce staff to build them. Most importantly, prostitution has never been an issue at such places.

So if you see grandpa on a bus headed to N.Y., you might want to remind him that his odds are better at home.