Why Straight Men Have Sex With Each Other
If you can get a straight man to talk to you about why he is having sex with men, it’s very likely that he’s going to draw from a small set of acceptable narratives about why straight men do things like that, and I think that’s a really common one, you know, the narrative of constraint —Well, I’d rather be having sex with a woman, but there are no women available, or, Women are too complicated — this kind of thing. But I don’t buy that.
That’s not to say that I think those straight men know the real reason — I think often they don’t know. I guess we don’t have language that circulates in mainstream culture that would help straight men make sense of or explain their sexual encounters with other men, whereas straight women, when they have sexual encounters with other women, have an array of socially acceptable narratives that they can draw on.
.. I think straight people who engage in homosexual sex, what makes them straight is precisely that they have no interest whatsoever in being part of queer subculture, and so in the last chapter I’m making the point that they could if they wanted to, but they don’t, and that’s part of how we know that this is homosexual sex being enacted in the service of heteronormativity.
.. And similarly, many straight men, especially younger men, have a very ambivalent relationship to women’s bodies and many feminists have written about this at length. The sort of natural state of women’s bodies, the smell of their vagina, their armpit hair, their leg hair — straight men are only attracted to women’s bodies to the extent that they have been very carefully modified.
.. Yeah, well what I would like to see first is acknowledgement, more mainstream acknowledgement that everybody has homosexual sex. And when I say that I don’t mean that truly everybody does — there are some people who have no sex and of course there are some people who never have homosexual sex, but if we’re going to talk about who has homosexual sex, we often just think, well, only gay, lesbian, and bisexual-identified people have homosexual sex, but it turns out straight women have a lot of homosexual contact with other women, and so do straight men, and so that means that kind of everybody does, and so I think it would be helpful to just start with greater awareness that homosexual desire is just part of the human condition.
.. To me that’s a more interesting question than Are you born gay or straight? and so I think that the solution, honestly, is to stop being so obsessed with sociobiological arguments about sexual orientation, which I think are a trap, frankly, and instead ask the question, Given that so many humans have homosexual encounters, what is it that makes some people understand their homosexual encounters as culturally significant, and other people understand it as meaningless or circumstantial? I don’t think we have the answer to that question yet.
.. I’d probably even say homophobic argument, because the logic is, Well, of course I was born gay — who would ever choose a life like this? No one would ever choose to be queer, so of course it must be something that I have no choice about, that I have no control over.