Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Inspired by a note from a friend about Jane Ward’s Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, which I’ve written about on this blog before.)

There are sexual encounters often described as “straight men having gay sex”, but the men themselves deny that there is anything gay about it (and they might be to some degree homo-haters, strongly condemnatory of gay men and their cultures): it’s just sex with other men — not involving desire for another man, but having psychological values of its own.

The acts in question are ones that are characteristic of sex between gay men: man fellating man, men taking part in anal intercourse – in street talk, cocksucking and ass-fucking between men. But here the acts are disengaged from same-sex desire, gay identity, and involvement in gay culture. (Note: not every man who experiences strong same-sex desire identifies as gay, and not every man who identifies as gay is involved in some gay subculture — but men who identify as straight but engage in man-man sex deny all of these things, starting with the desire.)

I used to refer to these acts as gay sex or gaysex (coming at these things from the viewpoint of a frankly gay man), but increasingly I’ve shifted to talking about the acts more neutrally, as man-man sex — or, in convenient shorthand, mansex.

This entry was posted on March 2, 2016 at 7:54 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language and sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.