Facebook discussion of my gay for pay posting on this blog led me to a Tyra Banks show on two men who identify as straight but got into acting in gay porn (for the money: dancing, stripping, and making porn for gay men pays hugely better than doing these things for women); the show is available in chunks on YouTube.
The discussion on the show (and in the comments on the videos, and in many other discussions of gay-for-pay elsewhere) focused on what is essentially a linguistic issue, over how labels like straight, bisexual, and gay should be used.
Like other gay-for-pay guys, the men on Banks’s show self-identify as straight, understanding straightness to be a matter of sexual desire; the men are attracted to women and not to men. (And they cope with this in a number of ways: focusing on putting on a performance that pleases their audience, thinking of the money, taking Viagra, using straight porn and videos of themselves having sex with their women to get themselves up, or preferring bottoming so as not to have to manage an erection in anal sex.) That is, these men don’t have what I’ve called “taste Y”.
But many commenters thought of sexual orientation not in terms of desire, but in terms of behavior, of acts, so that men who engage in gay sex (for whatever reasons) are therefore at least bi, if not simply gay.
Actual attitudes are more complex than this, as I suggested in my gay for pay posting, because many people view the different roles in male-male sexual encounters in different ways, parceling them out as straight (insertive) vs. gay (receptive).
There is no easy way to have a sensible discussion on these matters, since two (actually, more than two, but two is enough for the moment) different categorizations are being shoehorned into a single set of labels, and people are stuck having pointless arguments about what the labels “really mean”.
March 20, 2011 at 10:14 am |
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