Straight Gay Sex
Why Do So Many ‘Straight’ Men Have Sex with Gay Men?
Sex is Sex
I often yearn for the simpler times before I came out of the ominous closet. Being gay came to me easily when I was 15, because I wasn’t aware of the labels associated with what I felt back then. It was easy for my adolescent brain to go through life with a sexual intent that was hardly met until I was allowed to travel in a packed local train with men of all shapes and sizes. The early years of exploring your sexuality are ideally the most thrilling because you never know who in your vicinity is going to end up becoming a random sexual experience.
One of my earliest experiences was chilling with my childhood buddy, playing video games, banging hot wheels into each other, and borrowing 10 rupees from our parents to go surfing at a cyber cafe. There, at the age of 14, we would freefall into the murky back alleys of early 2000s internet pornography – the sorts that even after you shut the browser, a pop-up of a woman moaning kept returning on the desktop.
Before we got shunned from the local cyber cafes, we would take our half-hour surfing period to look at images of pink penises and vaginas and excitedly head to my friend’s place after to masturbate together. His mom would be out for work, and his younger siblings would still be at school. So that’s what we did for almost two years. We obviously didn’t think too much about it. A year later, the jerk-off sessions turned into hand jobs, making out, and blowjobs. While it was mostly me on the giving end of it, I thought of it as early target practice, since today I am as gay as Easter Sunday.
However, today, my childhood friend is married and has a wife and kid of his own, and he even had a great pre-Covid wedding party. I know for a fact that he’s straight now because when we interact, we don’t delve upon those days of mutual gratification. Also, because he very much claims he’s straight to this day. So, what were those encounters?
Straight Men
On the other hand, psychologist and queer rights advocate Deepak Kashyap suggests that this experience of men having sex with men irrespective of their orientation or gender expression is also very Indian – or South Asian – in its nature. “Out here, just like most things, identities are fluid and not rigidly defined, especially personal identities,” he said. “Hence straight men don’t think that a little bit of sexual mastic (fun) with other men makes them gay. That’s beautiful and must be protected against stringent identity boxes that the West has formed their entire civilisation on.”
Men Like Men
Joe Kort, a renowned sex therapist, recently created a buzz on TikTok when he chose to dive into this phenomenon. He said there are several reasons why men who call themselves straight do this. “Some do it because they’ve been sexually abused as children and are reenacting childhood abuse, some do it because they’re bi-curious, some do it because they’re kinky and have a fetish. Some men do it for money (called gay for pay). Some men do it for financial domination, which is like BDSM without the rope. Some men suffer from homosexual obsessive compulsive disorder which is really just OCD attached to the worry that you might be homosexual.”
Kort also claims that gay men are more willing to engage in fantasy play, verbal play, and various sexual acts and fantasies that many women are uncomfortable with or disgusted by. “The straight men who tell me that they are having sex with men tell me they appreciate and enjoy the transactional nature of the sex that they can’t necessarily get with women,” he said.
Ramit*, a straight friend who has indulged in male-to-male sexual experiences in the past said, “I like it because there are things like blowjobs or fingering that I really enjoy but my girlfriend either doesn’t do it well or is too disgusted to do it.” Ramit plans to settle down with a woman eventually, and he doesn’t see himself getting romantically involved with a guy ever. “I don’t wish to hold hands, read books and go on dates [with men]. I like the in-the-moment nature of it, that’s all,” he said.
It’s also interesting to note here that these straight men don’t really count sleeping with gay men as cheating on their female partners—an observation made by both, my gay friends and Kort too, who also added how what one is aroused by isn’t necessarily correlated to or attached to their sexual orientation. That’s because, in essence, being gay means more than just performing oral and anal sexual acts. It’s mainly arguments over who will do the dishes once you start dating.
But obviously, such situations can be unnerving for some gay men. My friend Farhad once hooked up with an internet celebrity who was known to be extremely straight in his carefully crafted online world. “It befuddles me because there he is online being the biggest jock I know but then we’re hooking up and he wants me to belittle him and piss in his mouth,” Farhad said.
Gaurav Deka, a trauma informed psychotherapist and coach, told VICE that sexual expression and sexual orientation are at two extreme ends of the spectrum. Everything in between is often ever evolving. “In my observation and practice, I have realised that the internal homophobia that people have is a result of family conditioning and trauma, and sociocultural norms,” he said. “The phobia is real because it is literally a fear.” His understanding is that as per evolutionary psychology, the idea of belonging is central to the idea of survival. So while we may argue that these people who call themselves straight and still find themselves on Grindr at midnight are spineless and lack courage, they are probably doing so in clear conscience as a way of survival.
