I enjoy my kids, I enjoy my wife, and enjoy my life, and I certainly wouldn’t want to change it. Kevin (69): I’m a husband and a father, and a grandfather, and I consider that a part of a man’s life as bein’ straight.
It’s not gay because there’s a difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity. Regardless of how people identify, it would be ideal to live in a society where people could be open about their sexual encounters so long as they involved safe, healthy and pleasurable sex between consenting adults.” I found this to be the saddest element of my study: They felt the need to keep their same-sex sexual encounters secret, and often felt great anxiety at the thought of discovery.
There’s no leniency.Įxplains Silva: “Every participant described the need to be secretive, which was tied to rurality. It’s really a straight life, rurally, it just is. They’ve learned a lot of things, sex being just one of them. That’s what happens I think when people, particularly men, from rural areas end up going to college in urban areas, life really opens up for them, and sometimes they never go back, they won’t go back home. You would go with the status quo and say yeah, “I’m just like him, so…” You’d be afraid to admit it. I think gay people in rural areas are ostracized, teased a lot, looked down upon they’re not accepted at all, so regardless of what your personal feelings are, in rural areas you would hide them.
These interpretations of penetration as unrelated to straightness or masculinity reaffirmed their own straightness and masculinity, regardless of what specifically they did.” It’s not gay because everyone’s straight on the prairie.ĭavid (74): I think you’re more socially driven to be straight whether you want to be or not. I know that there are a lot of guys out there that are like me: Manly guys doing manly stuff and just happen to have oral sex with men every once in awhile. … It also seems that more masculine guys wouldn’t harass me, hound me all the time, send me 1,000 emails, “Hey, you want to get together today… Hey, what about now?” And there’s a thought in my head that a more feminine or gay guy would want me to come around more.Įxplains Silva: “Going into this study I thought participants might associate being penetrated with femininity or gayness, and penetration with masculinity or straightness, when in fact most did not. Marcus (38): a guy that I would consider more like me, that gets blowjobs from guys every once in a while, doesn’t do it every day. While most expressed frustration about the difficulty of finding sexual partners in rural areas, they nonetheless mostly chose men who are masculine, white and straight or secretly bisexual, underscoring the importance of these characteristics for their normative masculinity and bud-sex.” It’s not gay if you’re just like me. I go hunting every now and then, things that a quote-unquote manly man would do.Įxplains Silva: “Many participants explained that growing up in rural areas affected how they see themselves as masculine and straight. Reuben (28): I exercise, play sports, take part in what you’d call stereotypical masculine activities. So I asked Silva to share with me what his study’s participants told him and offer his explanation as to why they reckoned what they were doing wasn’t gay at all. What was different about Silva’s study is where this was taking placee- the American Heartland and the non-urban centers of Washington state and Oregon. It’s also something we’ve covered previously. At least two recent movies have dealt with straight-guy-on-straight-guy boning - The Overnight and The D Train.
This in and of itself wasn’t all that shocking. In other words, they were just “helpin’ a buddy out” or “acting on urges.” “ Bud-Sex: Constructing Normative Masculinity Among Rural Straight Men That Have Sex With Men” Silva’s participants were among the latter and reframed sex with men to fit rural, hyper-masculine identities. When it comes to straight men having sex, Silva says it’s important to differentiate between two groups: (1) Closeted guys who tell people they’re straight but secretly identify as gay or bisexual and (2) Those who identify as straight but perceive their sexual identity in ways that run counter to what many people think of as straightness.