What's different about the gay experience?

First off, I should preface this that I am a very gay homosexual. Some of the topics here are universal, and some of them will be from different to very different for bisexuals and lesbians and especially trans. I decided to write this down as I've been experimenting writing stories that incorporate the gay experience and realized that I have never really thought about what makes our experience different from straight people, and thus what themes are different that can be mined. Second off, I'm opinionated. Sue me. Third, I use frank language. If you have pearls, prepare to clutch them.

Obviously we share a tremendous number of similarities with our straight counterparts, like needing to work, feeding ourselves, and how to trick our boyfriends into doing laundry for us. That sort of thing. But there are lots of things that are different too, sometimes very different.

I apologize in advance that this can be pretty choppy, shifting topics sort of abruptly. I'm not sure how to pull that off and keep the same content without blowing out its already too long length.

Wondering Why

When I was about in 6th grade I started noticing that other boys were starting to act weird about girls. Like they were starting to pay attention to them in ways they would either have been indifferent -- all the way to the He-Man-Women-Haters-Club indifference -- a year earlier. I just kept being indifferent to them. I think my age figuring it out was a pretty typical one of just hitting puberty, but some people know they are gay way before, and others it takes them a long time to figure it out. Sometimes like practically their entire life.

I have a hard time relating to people who have such a hard time figuring it out because it wasn't that hard for me. I wasn't particularly pleased, mind you, but I knew it was there. I was fortunately raised with no religion so I think that was a huge blessing. For others, religion is poison and sets up huge internal conflicts that can last for years or decades if they ever get fully resolved. Religion is obviously not the only thing that can mess gay people up, but it's probably the primary one.

So the experience here is "I'm different" starting with not knowing why and eventually coming to the realization that it might have something to do with finding boys sexually attractive. In my case when I was in 6th grade I actually had some Playboy like porno mag which I would jerk off to. Yes, with actual women. I really didn't get I was into guys yet but was horny just like almost every boy hitting puberty. The real life girls, on the other hand, I was completely indifferent to, unlike other guys my age.

Lots of gay guys when they were young were less concerned about gender roles and would do things associated with femininity like playing with dolls and that sort of thing. I wasn't really one of those, though I did like cooking and sewing (well, not when the bobbin fucked up) so I was at least a little unconcerned. Again, both are normal and may or may not say anything about the kid. By 6th grade, I was certainly well imbued with gender roles.

At some point, we start to figure out that we have attraction to the wrong sex. For me, it was sort of an epiphany because when I started 7th grade, I saw naked boys in the locker room and they turned me on -- unlike girls. As far as I can remember, that porn mag was the only time I actually jerked off to a woman's body. Later Hustler was very convenient because it often had issues that had guys in it too -- porn of any kind wasn't that easy to get so you couldn't be too choosy as a teen then. These days it's completely trivial and very normal for kids to find and use it.

I think the main thing is that it was very isolating. I didn't have anybody I could confide in and probably has something to do with how guarded I am with my feelings. I don't know how universal that is though. Guys in general are not supposed to talk about their feelings, but I guess it really reinforces it when you have a big secret that you don't want anybody to know.

I fortunately didn't have a lot of shame in comparison to a lot of gay people -- maybe the majority, especially then -- but the shame of being attracted to the "wrong" sex is extremely common. I don't think there is anything analogous for straight people.

Experimentation

Teens are full of hormones and are desperate to act on them in a lot of different ways. Everybody has their own comfort level with when they want to have sex and what kinds of sex they are willing to do, but it's not just sex. It's about crushes, and being awkward with the target of your crush and for straight kids to work up the courage to act on it. That presents a huge problem for gay people because 9 out of 10 guys we might have a crush on are definitely not going to be receptive to it, and who knows who the other 1 in 10 are. That's compounded by the fact that even that within that 1 in 10 lots might not know at that time or be willing to admit it, let alone act on it. So we're sort of stuck. I knew of some of the gay kids in junior high, but I wasn't really into them. Looking back, I'm positive that there was internalized homophobia on my part, but I also knew I wasn't very attracted to them so it was pretty easy to avoid. I'd have to wait to deal with that until after high school.

So in general the normal experimentation kids go through in school gets the short shrift. Even in the age of Heartstopper it's still obvious that it's aspirational for the most part. It's obviously better than when I was young, but I think Heartstopper is still an idealized world. If I had to guess, I'd say that still the majority of us have to wait until after high school to experiment with love, relationships and sex. That's it's own unique problem in that it's ok to be stupid about those things -- everybody does -- but when you are capable of doing that when you are legal, you open yourself up for making some really poor decisions with nobody to tell you "no".

As far as sexual experimentation the main problem is "who"? Randy boys will be boys so are often willing to experiment in different ways even if they ultimately become straight after figuring it out. I actually had a friend who turned out to be a friend with benefits starting when I was 14 going about till about not quite 16 when both of us moved away. At first I was pretty squicked about it but got more comfortable as time went on. I'm pretty sure that's a difference too. I mean, it's one thing to be uncomfortable about sex but quite another to be uncomfortable because it's gay sex we're talking about.

I was fortunately uninterested in relationships at the time (I have no idea why), but that's where it can get really complicated for gay kids experimenting because if I had caught feelings beyond just being good friends it would have been a mess. In straight relationships especially at that age, you're supposed to be boyfriend/girlfriend before any of that happens. I suspect that for gay kids it's exactly the reverse. Again, things are probably better today but the odds are still stacked against us is my suspicion.

Coming to Terms

When I was about 16 or so I wrote a really cringy letter to myself that I actually kept. I couldn't even write the word gay, and my letter pointed that out with lots of hand wringing. But that letter was my finally coming to terms with the fact that I was sexually attracted to guys and not to girls, and I was even willing to commit that to paper. That was something.

Straight people I assume don't have angst and write letters to themselves that they have come to terms with being straight. It would be kind of hilarious if some kid did though if it was sincere. But in some way or fashion, gay people have to come to terms that we are gay and once we do start to figure out what it means and what we want to do about it. I think that's a very big difference.

So now we're at least being honest with ourselves. For some people that is that and figuring it out beyond that is a project for later. I was always horny, so for me it was a project already in progress. Straight people don't have to figure out how to proceed because there is already a ready-made straight dating formula. Straight people can and do deviate from the formula, but it's not a priori obvious for gay people that we can figure it out, though these days the straight formula is easy to follow.

One of the perhaps unfortunate things about gay being more normalized is that the questioning the straight dating formula has become less common. I mean, if you like the formula that's great but I kind of think that not feeling any compunction to follow it was quite a blessing. My dad when I was about 20 or so once told me he was envious of my being gay because he really disliked heteronormativity. Beyond being thoroughly embarrassed because he was pretty much saying he envied me for being able to get laid on command, but it was about all of the other stuff that comes with the straight dating formula too.

So I think that not being forced into the formula is pretty different even if it's being eroded by acceptance nowadays. I grew up in the decade of sexual liberation (70's) so this wasn't unique to gay people but it was pretty prevalent in gay circles. It was part of coming to terms with yourself, but also figuring out what relationship you had with yourself being gay.

The Closet

If you ask anybody what the most defining experience gay people have to deal with, I think the closet would be the top or maybe a close second to homophobia, and the two are obviously really related. Once you've admitted to yourself that you're into other guys in my case, now what? For the vast majority of gay people, at least at first, is to hide. There are some gay people who can't hide, but even of those there are ones who are in the closet even though they aren't fooling anybody.

The closet can be and usually is soul crushing. It pretty much informs everything else in your life so as to keep up the charade. There are very valid reasons to be in the closet even in the more tolerant West. Not every place has San Francisco Values (tm). You can't be thought gay. You have to cover everything up. You need to have plausible deniability. Even better, to not be put in the situation in the first place. Being associated with other obvious gay people in public is a big fat nope. 

It's pretty telling that the closet has taken on a life of its own in popular culture to generally mean that you have to hide something about yourself that is embarrassing. I guess it's a good thing that straight people casually use "I'm a closeted Miracle Whip lover" (seriously, keep that shit to yourself, d00d). But the real closet is a serious thing.

Unlike race and other outward defining characteristics that can't be hidden, gay people generally can. I've heard people say that we're lucky since it's an invisible trait, but were it so simple. For one, it strains the already small dating pool if one is closeted and the other is out. It's bad enough to hide yourself, but if you've stopped hiding, you sure as shit don't want to deal with keeping somebody else's lies. But it's much, much worse than that. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that closeted people are associated with higher stress hormones (cortisol?) since it's constantly having to look over your shoulder. Take the testimonies of out athletes for example. Often they say they got better after they came out because they could focus better.

There are certainly different levels of closetedness. All situations aren't equal. Maybe you just need to be closeted at work which can be relatively manageable. Maybe you need to be closeted to some/all of your family. Depending on the situation, that can either be manageable like if you move to a gay friendly place, or absolutely soul crushing if you can't.

Even for me who is very comfortable being gay, I still have closety moments where I have to decide, for example, whether to correct pronouns for my other half or not. Often people are embarrassed for their assumption, but that's not always the case. But there are still things that are uncomfortable. Guys, for example, often like to talk about their sex lives and what's going on with them. I don't like doing that in a straight context -- that's what gay friends are for. Is that closety? Maybe?

The point is that I don't think we ever completely rid ourselves of the self-consciousness of being gay. Maybe some people can, but I ain't one of them. Even the word "husband" is something that I feel like I have to make a conscious effort to say it, both because it was unimaginable growing up, but it also outs me by saying it.

Finding the Gay World

It's the best of times, it's the worst of times. The internet has made finding the gay world utterly trivial. Google "gay" and 8 trillion hits come up. But the caveat is that that world is online and may have little or no real world analog where you live. The canonical answer at least in my lifetime was to go to a city with a gay population and either move there, or at least have the ability to visit as often as you need.

So it's still a problem even today. If you're rural or suburban or are in a small metro area, your ability to find other gay people can be really hard. A constant refrain is "I can't find anybody to date and I hate bars" especially before online dating. Even with the magic of GPS and Dialing for Dick(tm) it can be really hard to meet other gay people for friends, sex and relationships. It's not to say that straight people have it great either, but it's compounded greatly when you're gay.

"How do I meet people" when you're gay is a genuinely hard question. It's especially true when you can't/won't use the solutions at hand like going to gay bars above. I've always thought that one function of church is it provides a meeting place for the community with things like church socials and all of that. Our closest approximations are gay bars for better or worse. It's why I think that gay bars are still important as apps and the like online are just not the same, and even though there was sort of a golden age of online community for gay people, those days are long gone in my opinion.

I really don't know how this is going to get better. Online has pretty much failed. Maybe failed is too strong, but it has a lot of negative side effects like being reduced to your dick size and who does what in bed. Hoping for being gay to be so completely normalized to the point that you just ask seems naive and isn't helpful except in very small pockets. So that's the difference, I guess. Here's one piece of advice though: you first. If people know you're gay, that's a huge first step. Don't be invisible. You don't need blinking neon signs, but if you're effectively in the closet a good number of us are not going to figure it out unless you make it obvious. At least for us. That's for next chapter.

How Can You Tell if Somebody Is Gay? 

The short answer: you can't. At least with good accuracy. I take as a recent example this Youtube channel dude named Tim Miller on the Bulwark. Pearl necklace and all, my gaydar completely failed me. Gaydar -- the idea you can pick somebody out as gay -- isn't completely useless, but it's very imperfect. There are certainly a lot of gay mannerisms that either intentionally or unintentionally set it off. The Voice is one tip off. It's a gay lilt that is pretty distinctive. I've asked people if it exists in other languages and the answer is yes, but I don't know if it manifests the same as in English. Heck, I'm not sure if it's even the same in British English for that matter. I mean, I can tell British queens just as much as American queens, but I'm not sure whether it's just The Voice that tips me off. But it is a thing. But The Voice is not always reliable and most gay people don't really have it. Well, the more cocktails you have the better.

There's an old joke about Gay or Eurotrash. I think it mostly is about the  metrosexual kind of look and feel of styling and carriage, etc. The ones I have a hard time with are Mormons especially in Utah. They seem to be programmed to be permanently cheerful and engaging and it sets off my gaydar bad. That and the Catalonian lisp especially if they are young and kind of fay looking. But these are cultural things so my gaydar fails me.

Obviously the more somebody presents as gay, the easier it is. I mean, if you have rainbow Speedos, it screams "Girlfriend". It would probably take a long post to describe the things that would tip me off, but even then there will be times like the guy above that I get really surprised. I just didn't clock him as gay and not because he was super masculine or anything like that, he just sounded like a normal straight guy who liked to wear pearls for whatever reason. It happens these days.

Gay Spaces and Neighborhoods

The 70's after Stonewall saw a flood of gay people coming to cities to be gay. Lots were due to their oppressive lives from where they came from, but there is more to it than that. I grew up in the suburbs of LA in an ostensibly very conservative county (Orange) but never really had a problem. There were tons of gay bars there so that obviously helped, but even if there were only a few I think it would have been tolerable. Gay neighborhoods not only have large concentrations of gay people, but they have concentrations of gay businesses, restaurants, etc, too. 

I think the key difference is that living in a gayborhood/gay ghetto normalizes being gay in an analogous way that straight people are normalized everywhere else. You can walk down the street and if you think a guy is attractive you can more or less assume he is gay just the way that straight people do everywhere. They may not be available, but you're not likely to get your lights punched out if you hit on them.

That's a really liberating feeling and it's nice even if it's not about sex -- say you're partnered in a monogamous relationship. It's just nice to be free, to hold hands if you want, to find friends, to socialize with friends and just not have to worry about how we fit in the larger culture. I lived in the Castro for 25 years in San Francisco and it was really fun and I am very glad I did. I really think as a gay person that if you can live in a gay neighborhood, you should at least experience it for a little while even if you decide it's not your cup of tea. At least you'll have a point of reference.

Gay bars are sort of like gay neighborhoods, but in the small. They are far from perfect -- they can be loud, smokey, sexually focused, and cliquish but they serve a purpose beyond just looking to get laid. They are a place we can let down our guard regardless of why we are there. They also serve the purpose of getting the word out about whatever needs to get out. It was vital before the internet because there was no other way, but even today I think they are still useful.

Needless to say, straight people don't need "straight bars" because bars are straight by default. They have to go out of their way to be gay friendly -- something that big cities are much better at. But even gay-friendly isn't the same since you can't assume that the hot guy over in the corner sucking on a cocktail might be gay and the ensuing awkwardness if they aren't if you hit on them. It's never fun to be rejected for any reason, but hitting on a straight guy is mortifying -- even if they like it which straight guys comfortable in their skin sometimes do. It can be fun and flattering for them to be the prey rather than the predator. But awkward for us.

Then there is the whole subject of whether straight people should feel welcome at gay bars. Here's the acid test: if you think that you should be able to go to a gay bar just because and that we should suck it up, you're the problem. If you wonder why there aren't straight bars, you're the problem. If you think that there is some sort of equivalency, you're the problem. Don't go if you're the problem.

Gay bars and spaces are actually fragile. That is especially true these days as so many have shut down due to the internet and dialing for dick. A group of entitled straight people can completely ruin the vibe and if left unchecked can cause the gay bar to cease to be a gay bar. The canonical example are groups of entitled women having hen parties at gay bars because they perceive it as safe and that we should welcome them and entertain them.

Honestly, my take is that it's really the owner's call on what they want the vibe to be. If the vibe they want causes it to functionally cease to be a gay bar, that's their call. In a big city, it's not a big deal since there's lots to choose from, but in smaller cities it can be pretty devastating. If the owner thinks it's the only way to survive, however, it's hard to fault them. But for the love of all things sacred, let it be their decision and take your entitled disrespectful straight asses elsewhere if that's not the vibe they want.

The same thing can happen at a neighborhood level too. Gay neighborhoods often became gay in sketchy neighborhoods that we gentrified. The Castro is a classic example as it was a working class Irish neighborhood and all of its residents fled to the suburbs leaving it empty and sad. Now it's one of the most expensive and desirable neighborhoods in the city which makes it hard to move in for young people.

Gentrification has been a big problem in gay neighborhoods. In some cities, gay people just move to the next sketchy neighborhood. I think that Brooklyn has some examples of that. I don't think it's as true of San Francisco mainly because there really aren't that many sketch neighborhoods and some of them are historically gentrification resistant like the Tenderloin.

All in all though, we need our spaces even today. They are the closest we have to an actual community. The "gay community" is tossed around as if it were some one thing which is pretty ridiculous. Gay people don't fit into silos much better than straight people in general because we come from everywhere, but gay neighborhoods are actual communities in the normal sense. And actual communities are the grass roots of common cause and have been instrumental in getting our rights and calling out injustice. In the case of the AIDS crisis it was just get the word out to a willfully deaf world that we were dying.

Coming Out of the Closet

Coming out is really several stage process: 1) coming out to yourself 2) coming out to the first person 3) coming out to your family 4) coming out for the rest of your life. Over and over. The most important one is the first: being honest with yourself. The third is usually what a lot of people think about when you say "coming out", but is probably the most optional. By optional, I mean there are situations where absolutely nothing good will come of it. Yes people can surprise, but if you have super homophobic parents it can be years if ever that they will come around and it may not be worth the drama. A lot of gay people save the family part for when it's actually a problem like you found a boyfriend. Being closeted to family with a boyfriend can be the source of a lot of relationship strain though, like at holidays.

Coming out the first time to somebody can be terrifying. It can be terrifying even though you rationally know they won't care. But it's far worse when you don't. If you get rejected that first time, it can be devastating. I was lucky in that the first time I came out it was to my dad. He was relieved because he thought I was going to tell I got a girl pregnant. The second time I wasn't so fortunate when I came out to my best friend. Apparently his parents got wind of me somehow and forbade him from being my friend and that was that. It hurt like hell and in retrospect I didn't handle the whole situation well, but the net effect is that I lost a really good friend.

Suffice it to say, not many straight people get rejected because they come out as being straight. So this is a huge difference that we have to triangulate. With family it can be especially terrifying. Even with a family who is likely to be supportive it's really easy to get mixed messages. I had always assumed my mom would be homophobic and was never comfortable actually talking about it even though I was sleeping with my boyfriends over the holidays at her house. It took me 10 years to work up the courage to actually do the hand-wringing variety of coming out only for her to tell me a story that my uncle had somehow come out in the 40's who had recently died.

I was really lucky overall. Tons of gay people are not, ranging from being kicked out underage and disowned, to years of estrangement and everywhere in between. Regardless of how easy it is for ourselves, we all know the stories either personally or through word of mouth. The stories can be heartbreaking, but they can be heartening too. But is a key difference either way.

Something we need to keep in mind is that we often have had years to come to terms accepting ourselves and then dumping the news on others can come as a complete shock to your friends and family. I remember this exchange I had on Reddit once of an older brother whose brother came out to him and he didn't know what to say or how to handle it. I told him that he needed to march up to his brother's room and not say a damn word and just hug him if he wanted to be a good brother. He updated it and said he cried forever but all was good. We have to remember not everybody is going to know how to handle it in the moment either and that we have to give them time to process it, as hurtful as it may seem at the time.

The last is that we have to continually come out over our entire lives. Coming out is not a singular event. It gets easier as time goes by, but it's still something in the back of our heads -- at least for me, but I don't think I'm an outlier. 

One other thing is there are different styles of coming out. Not everything needs to be a hand-wringing confession. Some people are just obvious. There are the tres-gay guys that nobody needs to be clued in. But there are others like me who probably don't particularly read as gay but just don't give a fuck if others know for people who matter to us Aside: some people use the word "straight acting" to describe not being obviously gay. Don't use it as it's homophobic as hell. End aside.

To be gay is also to be political. Whether we like it or not. We don't have a choice that our lives are politicized. It's a choice we are not given. Coming out, however, is the singular most effective bit of political activism any of us can do because at scale it's  extremely powerful. We don't all need to be community organizers or attend chi-chi cocktail parties as part of the donor class. Just coming out to friends and family is also a political act. We are an invisible minority and visibility is the disinfectant to the hatred and lies. Harvey Milk even though a flawed messenger gave the most brilliant speech of his life in 1978:

Gay brothers and sisters, you must come out. Come out to your parents. I know that it is hard and will hurt them, but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives. Come out to your friends, if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors, to your fellow workers, to the people who work where you eat and shop. Come out only to the people you know, and who know you, not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths. Destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake.

Amen.

Discovering Relationships

There is an interesting movie from the early 70's called A Very Natural Thing. Supposedly it's patterned on Love Story of the same era. Gay relationships are really nothing new, of course, but back then people were starting to experiment on what they really meant. In A Very Natural Thing, the story turns on monogamy vs. non-monogamy. But the larger issue is that even if you want white picket fences and 2.5 children, you're still two guys so the traditional roles where the guy reads the paper and the wife does everything else doesn't apply.

Again, this is hardly unique and I hope for women's sake things have gotten a little better, but who does the laundry? Who cooks? Who cleans, etc? Generally how you go about living your life doesn't have a set answer. I've always liked to cook so for us that was no-brainer (though these days Aric does most of the cooking where I come with ideas). Even if I liked to clean, there was no point to it because Aric would come behind me and clean it again because I (or anybody else) couldn't do it right, but I digress. I suspect that the vast majority of gay relationships are far more egalitarian than ours, but it works for us and that's the only thing that's important. But that's sort of the point: we don't have a pat answer to those sorts of questions.

If a couple (or even somebody who's single I suppose) wants kids, part of the gay experience is jumping through the hoops to make that so. That can involve a thicket of regulation, homophobia and downright prohibition like I believe Italy recently enacted. Even when we're not treated differently we either have to adopt, use surrogates, or have kids from a previous relationship (often from one where the guy was closeted. I'll get to that). The net-net is that it's expensive, time consuming, or even impossible. A lot harder than rolling over on a cold winter's night and popping junior out nine months later. Women feel free to disagree, but the kid has to come from one of you.

Once the kid is there, their legal relationship with the parents needs to be established, often requiring adoption in the case of the partners in the case of surrogacy. Breaking up becomes more complicated too adding to the general hassle of differences that straight couples don't generally need to deal with. So there's another difference for the gay experience.

That's assuming that kids are part of the equation at all. Over the last 50 some years the fertility rate has dropped a lot for straight couplings, but the default assumption for gay couples is in my experience that children are the exception rather than the expectation as with straight couplings. So that's a difference even if it's getting more and more blurred. A lot of the blurring in this section is actually a good thing because straight couples don't have to pay attention to social expectations and would probably be a lot healthier if they questioned them.

As I alluded to above, children in a gay relationship can also come by way of one of the partners having a child from a previous relationship. This can be on the up and up, but too often it's because the guy was closeted and lying about being gay or was repressing it so he didn't even know, but eventually figuring it out. This, unfortunately, is part of the gay experience too and it's toxic. Toxic for the guy in the closet, and clearly toxic for the poor woman whose investment was built on a lie and the rightful betrayal she can feel. 

While some dads may get some form of custody and the above applies, women are still the ones who get full custody most of the time and often it can be to the exclusion of the father. With homophobic judges or laws it may be set at a legal level, but given the acrimonious divorces that often ensue after the father comes out, it may happen de facto as well. While acrimonious straight divorces certainly happen too, the gay angle is a pretty big difference. There are certainly cases where the wife has empathy for her husband which I wished happened more often so long as there wasn't cheating going on, but layering homophobia onto a bad situation is a difference.

Speaking of cheating, while some straight couplings allow for ethical non-monogamy, most of the cheating by Down Low (= closeted in a straight relationship) guys is an unfortunate difference. Some gay guys even get off on scoring "straight guys" (I mean, how straight can the DL guy be with your dick in his mouth?) often the gay partner is unaware or gets lied to. So cheating is hardly unique to the gay experience, but the way it plays out often is different when it involves a straight partner being lied to about the gay sex part.

As far as guys cheating on other guys, statistically guys are more likely to cheat so you get the product of cheating percentages which is going to be higher all things considered. But guys are more likely to be able to separate sex and love so it makes the whole situation worse.

Cheating also brings up the risk of STI's. Again, the same as straight couples except for on very big one: HIV. Receptive anal sex is 10-15 times riskier so getting some on the down low or just M-M cheating brings a lot more risk into a relationship which assumes they aren't using condoms or aren't on PrEP in the primary relationship. It's sort of unfortunate that using protection can be viewed through the lens of "don't you trust me?" and that sort of thing, but it happens. HIV infection rates are surprisingly high for "monogamous" gay partners (I think I read it was like a third, astonishingly).  People are monogamous... until they aren't.

Which brings up non-monogamy. Again, this can happen with straight couples and everything here applies, but it's just a lot more common in gay circles and certainly a lot more socially acceptable to talk about it. Not everybody is open about it, but it isn't uncommon to know who is and who is not monogamous. Non-monogamy can mean just about anything. From no rules, to a textbook of rules of when/where/how you have sex or even affection or even love. Not unique, but part of the gay experience is that it's more common.

And of course there is cognitive dissonance of "monogamous" couples who have threeways while on vacations and that sort of thing. Not that I care, and more power to them, but that ain't "monogamous". Actually I would say that part of the difference is what Dan Savage calls "monogamish". That is, primarily monogamous but sometimes they break the rules like the threeway guys above. I think this is very common in gay relationships.

Last is sexual incompatibilities. All relationships have issues with sexual incompatibilities like libido differences, etc, but let's face it anal sex isn't the easiest on a guy's body. Over time it can take a toll on the receiving end to the point that they have to give it up, or it has to be a very special occasion. Or perhaps the incompatibility was built in from the start because you fell in love with a guy who wasn't fundamentally sexually compatible with you. It happens and it can lead to a lot of conflict. Everybody has problems with this, but I think gay couples are more open to alternate solutions, where divorce or misery are often the traditional solutions.

So overall there are a lot of similarities, but the gay experience is different in that we have to think about it a lot more even in the most traditional relationship arrangements.

Dealing with Homophobia

Homophobia pretty much informs everything about being gay. First you find out that boys are attractive in a sexual way, and next you find out that's not ok. Or more often, gay is bad, but you don't know what gay is. Homophobia is everywhere. We all grew up with it to lesser or greater degrees. Gay this, gay that. Gay gay gay. That's so gay. Faggots and every possible denigrating derivative usually fixated on butt sex and sucking dick (yeah, I thought guys liked getting their dick sucked?). We're supposed to be sissies, lisp, mince around, do drag, and on it goes.

We're all going to hell, and many are happy to assist our journey there. Religion is certainly a big factor but hardly the only factor. Fragile masculinity plays its part too. There is a huge crossover of homophobia and misogyny -- women, bad. Man who takes dick equals woman. Therefore homo bad. QED. There are even cultural variations especially in macho like cultures where the insertive partner is ok, but the receptive partner is not.

Homophobia also manifests at a group level -- say like at your school or church social but is also possible at an institutional level like banning gay marriage, to throwing you in jail for sodomy and an endless list of things that homophobes can think of to harass us and make our lives a living hell, if we're alive at all.

So how do we deal with it? It is very situational. Sometimes it's as little as giving society the finger and just carrying on. That requires a pretty large degree of freedom which is a relatively recent turn of events. It's certainly got a lot better since I first figured myself out as homophobic dinosaurs roamed the earth, but it's still very uneven even in the US. A kid growing up in San Francisco today even if he has homophobic parents is still a lot better off because at least they know that there is a place a hill or two away where it's no big deal. Which isn't to say growing up in San Francisco can't be bad, which it can be.

Others are not nearly as lucky. Being thought gay (you don't actually have to be gay to experience homophobia, after all) can be one of the worst possible things for a guy. Pretty much the only thing to do is either hide or escape in those situations. In some countries, there is no escape, and even in the US lots of gay friendly areas and towns are not cheap and depending on your situation and skills, it can be impossible to escape. So we deal with it by suffering in the closet and hoping we don't get caught if we act on our attraction.

Some gay guys just can't hide though. Honestly, I've always thought of them as the bravest of all of us, but bravery implies some volition and if you can't hide you're sort of just making due as best you can. That said, a lot of guys who couldn't hide are the reason we've made progress because of the base problem of visibility. 

Isolation is a really powerful part of the gay experience for a lot of us. So many people who didn't know as a kid there were even other gay people out there. That they were the only one that felt that way. The internet has changed that a lot with its cliched "Am I gay?" quizzes and all the rest but there is just so much more gay visibility these days in media both explicitly catering to our gay lives. Just having a token gay guy in some movie or show is visibility. People denigrate the latter, but it serves a purpose, so I think it's being oversensitive about appropriation.

Homophobia is probably the key difference of the gay experience. Constantly wondering "Am I ok? Am I safe? How will somebody react?" I really don't know of another analog because gay isn't a physical outward trait that somebody can point to. They may pick up on social cues that we have that may or may not be voluntary like the Gay Voice, but there isn't an obvious gay marker like a Pink G sewn onto our shirts for all to see. Maybe some other sexual minorities experience something analogous, but homophobia is probably the biggest example.

If you're writing a story that involves gay characters, homophobia and how it affected the character is going to lurk somewhere in that character's psyche. It may not be relevant and It may not change outcomes, but it is always a consideration and informs a lot of the character's relationship with the world even if they are completely out and obvious.

Dealing with Internalized Homophobia

Homophobia doesn't stop at your body's doorstep. For years we have gotten the same message as everybody else that gay = bad, less, weak, etc. We internalize society's message and it can cause a very toxic brew of internal conflicts that can take a long time -- forever for many people -- to work though.

One of the classic forms of internalized homophobia is what I (and others) call the "unlike the other girls" syndrome. This usually plays out in the "masc/fem" false dichotomy where some guys are -- often loudly -- repulsed by anything that strikes them as feminine in other gay guys. 

I think a good deal of it is rooted in guilt by association. When you're in the closet or only tentatively out to a small set of people or just generally not comfortable being gay, there is the rest of the world who doesn't know you're gay and you may have very valid reasons for them not to know. There are lots of gay guys who are just obviously gay to anybody but then there are lots of gay guys who are more subtle but give off gay vibes. For somebody who has a lot of internalized homophobia, the obvious happens: they are homophobic to the -- usually couched in terms to make the appear to not be homophobic.

I really dislike the whole masc/fem dichotomy because it really doesn't capture the way gay guys look and behave. I'm much more enamored with what I call "faggy" because it has very little to do with the way that straight women look or act and much more with the norms within the loose thing we call gay culture. I think that quite a bit of successful gaydar (ie, being able to clock somebody as being gay) comes from cues like clothes and style, mannerisms, interests, the gay voice, and an endless supply of other characteristics I'm forgetting. I think a classic insight is the old saw about "gay or eurotrash" where gay American's gaydars are set off by European style, etc. I once went to Barcelona and my gaydar was off the scales with these waify twinks with their lispy Catalan accent, and my gaydar was totally and utterly wrong.

So what does this do with internalized homophobia? If you can pick somebody out as gay or potentially gay, and you were to befriend them you're being seen with them which might be incriminating. It's actually a valid concern. I mean guilt by association is a thing. So you avoid them. Nothing really wrong with that.

The next step is not: resenting them. Resenting them just existing because their very existence is incriminating. The drag queens, the leather queens, the guys in speedos at gay pride parades: resent. Resent because you're not like that and their very existence makes it either harder to maintain their closet (in their mind at least) and resenting that they exist because they are also gay. Those kind of guys are... unlike the other girls. They aren't like that and it ruins it for the "regular gays".

That formulation is very messed up. The problem isn't that some people are really faggy, it's people's homophobic reaction to that which they consider to be gay looking/acting. And unfortunately, gay people can be extremely homophobic in many/most of the same ways that non-gay people can. Basically they agree at a fundamental level that being gay is bad.

There was a book in the 90's called A Place at the Table by Bruce Bawer. I haven't actually read it so this is hearsay (I'm not interested in poorly reasoned tripe, sue me) but it caused quite a bit of controversy. Basically the premise is that if we got rid of all signs of fagginess, straight people would come around and open their arms because good gays are just normal people like everybody else.

Suffice it to say, that's preposterous on its face. The fire breathers citing Leviticus 18:22 could give exactly zero fucks whether we're good gays or bad gays because in their mind there is no such thing as a good gay in the first place. And people don't need religious justification to be homophobic either; there's plenty of other reasons like their own fragile masculinity that causes them to lash out.

The people who hold those kinds of delusions almost all suffer from a lot of the homophobia they internalized growing up. That it's the drag queens and other fembots that are the cause of them not getting their rights and social approval and if only we hid them, their lives would be better.

This is rubbish of course, but it is held by a not insignificant percentage of gay men in particular to varying degrees. You can usually tell by their vehemence and disgust. As an example, I've never particularly been into drag, but my reaction to RPDR and such things is indifference, not disgust. It's just not my thing any more than basket weaving is not my thing. Not for the unlike-the-other-girls set though. To them it's an affront.

The entire thing of masc4masc in dating apps screams of internalized homophobia too. It's not that people should be open to all kinds of attractions on an equal basis -- which nobody I know would ever say -- but that you need to let everybody know they are unlike the other girls. They need you to know it. They need everybody to know it, because their fragile grip on masculinity depends on it. Fragile because being gay is to be not masculine which society by and large teaches us.

I know I suffered from internalized homophobia when I was young because pretty much every gay person does. I had to confront it early on because a lot of those faggy guys that everybody could easily clock as gay, I was attracted to. In my case, my attraction won out over my internalized homophobia. It's ok to not be attracted to faggy twinks, but making a big deal out of it is not.

One of the more hilarious aspects of this form of masc4masc internalized homophobia is that they are so self-unaware that they totally clock as faggy to me, either with looks or mannerism or whatever, and it's like "who are you fooling, girlfriend?" 

Internalized homophobia isn't just about the masc/fem dichotomy, it informs all kinds of other things as well like the Great Monogamy Debate. I've always been non-monogamous because it suits me, but if people want to be monogamous that's fine by me and honestly none of my business. But there are plenty of people who are perfectly happy to tell me that Aric and I are just roommates and have been that way for 30 years and that we're disgusting and that, drumroll... we make the gays look bad. Often it comes from brainwashed young people who have never even been in a relationship of any kind, yet they are relationship experts as well as experts on what makes gay/straight relationships better.

I don't really want to try to make an exhaustive list of what constitutes internalized homophobia because it's both big as I outlined above, but it can also be small like after Aric and I got married, and was now my literal husband. I've been comfortable for decades using "boyfriend", but husband just seemed weird. I'm very comfortable being gay, but still felt a little uncomfortable because it's supposed to be husband and wife, and not because we were appropriating that from straight culture.

It's small, but that's rather the point. We all pick up cues from society about what society finds acceptable or not. It can take a long time to work through whether what we got taught is bullshit or not, big and small. There's a much larger truth to that than just homophobia, of course.

Making Gay Friends and Our Chosen Family

How do gay people make other gay friends? This is not nearly as easy as you'd think. First of all, the set of gay people is much smaller than other guys in general and second of all it's not all that easy in a non-gay setting to tell if somebody is gay or not. The classic problems described in other sections of this post. 

For a very long time, the way you found other gay people was going out to bars where other gay people hung out. Gay bars can be places that you literally just want to hang out with some of your friends and kick back a beer and shoot some pool like straight guys do, but gay bars also serve the purpose of hooking up. Again, not unlike straight bars (by straight, I mean not a gay bar). 

So you have a mix of guys in my case who are there just to socialize and guys who are aiming to get laid as either the goal, or a good outcome otherwise. That's part of finding ourselves that I wrote about above. 

The net effect is that guys being guys will often hookup which is a lot of the point of bars. What is different is that we often find that we're not looking to become lovers for any variety of reasons, like we're not interested in a relationship, the guy we hooked up with wasn't what we were looking for, or maybe we were ridiculously sexually incompatible (one of the curses of apps, in my opinion, is that it prioritizes sexual compatibility over pretty much everything. there are more things to do in bed that just butt fucking for gawdsakes).

So for whatever reason we're not interested in them for a long term relationship. That doesn't mean that we have to put them in the discard pile never to be seen again. Lots obviously do but it's often the case that you can have things in common or just get along either not for sex at all, or even with sex but as friends, not lovers. 

An example is my husband Aric's best friend David. Before we met, Aric had a huge boner for David but David quickly dissuaded Aric that that wasn't happening beyond the few times they hooked up. They loved going to concerts together and have very similar music tastes, and a whole range of other things in common, so they became friends.

This in my experience is pretty common: we sleep with each other and then decide we're better as friends if we don't want anything ongoing. I don't think this is very common in the straight dating world. In fact, dating probably hinders it because dating can be a very rigid heteronormative mating ritual and a failed date is not a good thing. But even with hookups for straight people, I don't think it leads to the phenomenon of becoming friends and being a very common way to make friends.

This brings up the second part which is essentially finding out tribe; our chosen family. Our chosen family is literally the family we choose rather than nature and blood chooses. Lots of straight people obviously have chosen families too, but gay people are at a big disadvantage because being gay is different and we share lots of different life experiences than straight people. Hence this post, obviously. It's useful and comforting to be around people who have been through the similar life experiences of being gay. It's not to say like there is any one set of universal experiences, but being gay gives us a window into others -- and hopefully some empathy, but as the previous section on internalized homophobia that is not a guarantee. 

I've always made gay friends much easier than straight friends, and especially straight guys. It's not like I don't like straight guys, but there are definitely times where we'd be talking about some pretty gay stuff -- ok let's be frank, sexual antics and the like -- that I would not feel comfortable talking about in front of straight guys. And good god not in front of blood family.

Lots of gay guys like to befriend women where there is some overlap because of course a lot of homophobia overlaps misogyny. Even though I was never really one of them, it's very much a thing for a lot of gay guys to have women in our lives and who are part of our chosen family as well. Where we can feel comfortable just being who we are though the good and bad, the virtuous and sleazy. All of it.

So it's not unique in and of itself, but it is very common especially when you consider how a lot of us make gay friends versus guys have friends who are girls especially if they met hooking up.

Dealing with Politics

As I said above, to be gay is to be political whether we like it or not.  We just have no choice in the matter because our lives have been politicized by homophobes. This takes many different forms, and can happen at every level of government: local, state and federal. They can be as big as calling for an amendment to the constitution to eliminate gay marriage, to as small as bigoted school boards banning anything vaguely gay adjacent to be taught, or allowing parents to ban books from school libraries. The current wave of homophobia -- and transphobia -- shows that getting gay marriage at a federal level didn't stop being gay as an issue to be cynically used to rile haters up.

I use 'cynical' because I think a lot of it is being done not so much out of conviction but out of desire for power and money. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida is certainly homophobic but his actions with Don't Say Gay and all of the rest of the hateful anti-gay stuff he's been doing is clearly performative first and foremost. He knows that it will play to his base causing them to turn out on election day and fill his coffers full of money.

In the global scope of things, however, it's pretty remarkable how far we've gotten. While Stonewall wasn't actually the beginning of modern gay rights -- that is probably best attributed to the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis -- it does set down a marker of when the biggest changes came and what the modern gay rights movement actually looked like. I wrote a post about the 70's and how the decade between Stonewall and the White Night Riots in San Francisco (protesting Dan White getting away with murdering Harvey Milk and George Moscone) was rather remarkable in that we went from having almost no power, to a little power.

A lot of people think that the 80's were a big setback to gay rights due to the AIDS crisis. I'm not as sure. With politics, passivity is probably the biggest impediment on all sides. The AIDS crisis made it hard for us to ignore, and if it didn't happen we probably would have merrily gone about our lives, leaving it to the political types to make slow and halting progress, if they made progress at all.

People dying in droves was sort of hard to ignore especially when they were your friends, lovers and neighbors. When the federal response to AIDS was that it was killing all of the right people, it wasn't just the political types who had a direct stake in things. ACT-UP was a direct response to the rage that a lot of people had at the indifference of the government. It made the news and was very in your face. Did it move the needle itself? Maybe, maybe not. Larry Kramer who started ACT-UP became friends with Anthony Fauci, head of the federal agency charged with dealing with infectious diseases (NIAID) and that certainly helped (Kramer hated him at first). But politics is a lot of good cop, bad cop so the good cops working the inside deserve credit too.

In any case, gay rights has been by and large a grass roots affair. Coming out is that one root of grass that we can all do, and in mass its effects are enormous. Just knowing somebody who is gay can make a profound difference. They may still be homophobic, but if they are willing to carve out an exception to Uncle Bob and his partner, that's a step in the right direction.

Coming out is just one form of visibility. Gay pride parades are another. Lots of the hide-the-drag-queens set clutch their pearls about them, but gay pride parades are not really so much for the world to see -- though they do -- but they are much more for us. The wonder in the eyes of some kid fresh off the boat from deep in the bible belt seeing a million people gathered at huge parades and festivals across the country tells that kid: I'm not alone. I'm very not alone. That is, in my opinion, why even today they are as important as ever. Yes, you can see there are lots of us via the internet, but seeing it in person is something else entirely.

That is a huge difference between gay people and our experience: we have to come out for both our sanity, but also to stand up and be seen and heard. We have parades and protests and all the rest to remind everybody that we're everywhere, there are lots of us, and that we aren't going back into the fucking closet no matter how much you try. We're here. We're Queer. Get used to it.

Not everybody needs to be an "activist" to play their part. Aric and I have done our small part just by getting married in the Winter of Love in 2004 where we made the national news. We did it just by showing up where Aric was the fairest maid of all and they chose us. We did it by putting up some choice words on our building after Prop H8 (making gay marriage illegal in California) passed, aimed at one of the major backers: the Mormon Church. It made the national news even running in the Washington Post. A lot of the pearl clutchers had heart palpitations over it, but I guarantee it was seen in Salt Lake City and while we don't claim credit for it, the Mormon Church has pretty much backed down since then. It was pretty purposeful on my part to go after them instead of, say, the Catholic Church since I knew how image conscious Mormons are vs the Catholic Church who doesn't give a fuck.

The larger point is that we all have to realize that our lives are not in a vacuum even if we live in a safe haven like a gay neighborhood. In fact, especially if we're in a gay neighborhood since size matters. Get your mind out of the gutter, I'm talking about crowds. 

Politics will keep being a part of the gay experience until homophobes run out power and money. It's just the way it is.

Dealing with Disease

It's impossible to talk about what makes the gay experience different without a discussion of the devastating impact that AIDS had on gay men in the West and especially in America. AIDS devastated an entire generation of gay men -- a lot of it mine. It has informed several generation even after HIV ceased to be an automatic death sentence.

The specter of AIDS hung over the gay community. It started as an article in the LA Times in 1981 describing something fucked happening in major cities like LA, San Francisco and New York causing us to die from really weird diseases and diseases that were very uncharacteristic for young men. It wasn't until 1985 that there was even a test, and it wouldn't be until 1987 that the first approved use of AZT happened, becoming the first drug to treat HIV. Six long years. And it didn't work. HIV mutates quickly and mutated around the AZT. It's also a retrovirus which means it integrates viral RNA into the host's DNA making it extremely hard to get rid of.

It wouldn't be until the advent of HAART in 1996 and its use of Saquanivir (a protease inhibitor) that a cocktail of drugs could suppress the virus. And for many people who had already been on drugs before that was not the end of the road because their HIV was resistant to some of the drugs. For my husband Aric who probably got it in 1986 or thereabouts it wouldn't be until 2003 until he finally got a cocktail that worked and the treatment was terrible requiring two shots a day.

So suffice it to say it was traumatizing. People in gayborhoods lost almost all of their friends. Aric lived in the Castro in 1986 and one by one all of his friends but a few died. His story is shared by countless other gay men living in cities. I on the other hand lived in the suburbs and it was insidious in a different way: people would just sort of disappear. Aric attended funerals. I am haunted wondering what happened to a lot of people I knew from that era, including two of my ex's. 

Even though I had it relatively easy on the friends dying front, one of the hardest things I've ever had to do was write and deliver a eulogy for a friend who died just before HAART became available in 1995. That's unfortunately part of our experience too at least from that period.

The thing that was so disheartening is that viruses don't give a shit about morality. If you were even a little sexually active as a gay man at the time, you were putting yourself at risk every time you had anal sex. Condoms greatly reduce the risk, but they are not perfect and people are not perfect either so screwups happen. 

So for many generations of gay men, sex was two things: joy and death. The two were interlocked and inseparable. Even now with the advent of PrEP (PrEP prevents HIV from infecting you) there is a tremendous amount of fear and irrationality surrounding the subject.

I've hung out on gay groups on Reddit and the amount of complete ignorance is astounding. Some of those come from some conservative and homophobic places in the world, but most of it is from here in the good ol' USofA. Thanks a lot fundy Christians. Your little darlings grow up to be gay too.

Stigma and shame is still a huge factor even in the West. A lot of the new cases are from more rural places and not necessarily gay men and more in line with the rest of the world. Stigma causes people to not get tested and untested positive people are by far the most infectious. The stigma in the West is because it's perceived to be a gay disease which opens the floodgates of homophobia.

Suffice it to say that HIV has affected in some way almost every gay man. Be it the fear of getting it, actually getting it, and the way we treat each other. Poz gay men are still routinely shamed by other gay men when they literally cannot give others HIV due to their treatment (see: U=U). 

I've even seen some little moralizing fuckers say that we deserved to die back in the 80's because we should have zipped it up. Putting aside that it was 4 years before we even knew what was causing it, the sheer audacity and hatefulness behind those words is one of the few things that can really make me go completely nonlinear.

But even if they aren't as completely hateful as that sorry excuse of gay genes, there are plenty of people willing to hate poz guys and blame them to this day and who fully support rounding them up and putting them in jail even though they can't possibly infect them.

I'm sorry for being on such a rant here, but this is part of my world and definitely part of the gay experience. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The deep sorrow of what we lost and what so many young men went through.

There really were three different generations of gay men with respect to HIV. My generation and previous ones who knew the sexual revolution of the 70's before HIV and knew the unencumbered joy of not having to worry about sexually transmitted diseases. Then there is GenX and the Millennials who came of age when gay sex was death. In some ways I think they were the most damaged mentally because sex was always associated with death for them. I at least got to experience sex without fear, and I saw that as someone whose generation was hit the hardest. 

Now with PrEP, GenZ is finally back to a world where sex doesn't have the sword of Damocles over our heads. We're smarter about STI's these days. GenZ gay boys/men are still affected by it, but if they just take the damn pill (PrEP) we can be rid of it in a decade. Ignorance is the problem now. It's so maddening that this is still such a thing.

One last thing: as I said, I decided to write this as sort of a thought experiment to tease out  what's different about us for ideas about stories. One of the unfortunate things that's happened is that in gay people's quest for "happy endings" (jeez, go to a fucking massage parlor if you always need one) is that that period is getting erased because of mostly gay people's squeamishness surround HIV. It's bad enough for gay history to be erased by society at large but it's tragic that we are an active part of erasing our history now too. The people who made it through the worst of it are getting old so there is going to be yet another gap in gay history and storytelling. People complain about how much gay movies revolve around that period, but that is complete bullshit. It's a tiny part of the many oeuvres of gay media. I wrote about that here

Ok, end of rant. This is a sore topic for me.

Being Gay in a Heteronormative World

When I was 18 and driving down the freeway with my dad, he told me he was jealous of me because I didn't have to put up with all of the bullshit of straight norms. Pretty much that he was envious of how easy it was for me to get laid. I was utterly mortified and didn't want to talk about it, but he was actually right. In the intervening 45 years, things have changed for straight people and probably for the better, but there is still a very wide gap of gay norms and straight norms.

Let's get something out of the way: there is a very large percentage of gay men who would like nothing more than to have their white picket fence and 2.5 children -- likely a majority -- but not all of us do.  And even if the picket fence people are the majority they almost certainly know that that is not the only option in the gay relationships. (see the section on internalized homophobia). They may well be the majority, but there are a lot of disaffected gay guys who are convinced that monogamy is a tiny slice of gay relationships and that gay culture oppresses them -- ah, martyrs and their love of nail holes.

But in the 70's lots of gay men were figuring out what two men being in a relationship actually meant. There is an interesting movie called A Very Natural Thing from that era which explored that. By the time I came around in the late 70's the sexual revolution was still in full swing. There was definitely a lot of preachiness back then about emulating heterosexual norms, blah blah blah, but honestly it was mostly about doing what felt right for ourselves without trying to overthink some grand unified theory. 

I have never been monogamous. That always felt right for me. I have explored many different aspects of what that actually means. Polyamory (too much work), fuck buds (nice but usually not very long term before then either became friends or drifted off), hookups, and hookups while I had a primary partner (nice when primary partner isn't interested in sex at the time). Hookups with affection attached (nice but they all almost end up being Aric's friends). Now I am by far the most monogamous I've ever been. I'm just not interested in anybody other than Aric now. Well, maybe the dog that sleeps with us too but not that way obviously. The one thing I will say about monogamy is that it has less complications, by the by.

But the larger point is that we all get to decide what is right for us. How we get to navigate our lives and our loves even if that's very traditional. With gay people you're not going to get a lot of shit for that from people you actually want in your life, and fuck the moralizing finger-waggers.

Straight people can do this too, of course, but I think they have to be far more circumspect about it. Not exactly the thing you talk about at the church social. Gay people are much more willing to talk about that and be tolerant about other people's choices.

One particular aspect of the gay experience is that there is no guarantee of sexual compatibility. With penis in vagina sex, it's pretty well established who wants what. With gay sex, it's not a given of who wants what. Nor is there any guarantee that it's a forever decision either -- people change. 

I've always had a fuck-first attitude with "dating" because there isn't much point to invest a lot of time and feelings only to find out that you're not sexually compatible. It's better to fuck around and find out in this case. The traditional heterosexual mating norms assume compatibility. We can't.

I like fucking around with people's assumptions on this front. With the show Heartstopper, everybody expects Nick to be the top and Charlie to be the bottom. I mean, it's palpable. But in my experience that is not at all a given. Charlie is by far the more assertive one and of course they could be both big old bottoms. It took them three seasons to get to sex, only to find they both want their legs in the air. That would be hilarious. 

I'll get to sexual compatibility in a later section. These are all huge generalizations, but it's part of the difference in the gay experience.

Body Image, Tribes and Dating

I realized late on that I haven't touched on an obvious thing that informs the gay experience. Gay guys come from all walks of life and all ages and body types. That said, I don't think that women look at men in the same way that gay men look at men. Maybe as important: the way that we think of how other gay men look at us. That's awkward, admittedly, but I mean our perception of their expectations is important to a lot of people. We may not have as many social norms to conform to with relationships, but we have them with the way we should look in droves.

The gay world has sort of devolved into a few loose categories: twinks, jocks, bears, dads, and please-don't-wear-spandex-anymore. I'm the latter these days, and I've heard your pleas.  The rest of us are supposed to get on board with one of those categories lest we just be an ordinary schlub, who's our own worst enemy for getting dates.

Twinks are really a place in time of being young and maybe a little callow. Basically they are teenagers or look like teenagers: thin, underdeveloped muscles, typically without much facial hair, maybe because they can't grow it. Very boyish. Often pretty/cute rather than being "handsome" or a "hunk". Being a twink is a transient thing. If you're ever a twink, after a while you will cease being a twink. Some guys can hold onto it for a long time, but usually by their early 20's most guys grow out of it, sooner if they make the effort to not look like a twink.

I was never really a twink. I had too much body hair to be the classic twink and wasn't really boyish enough. My husband was a twink when I met him and he was 29 -- a superannuated twink. He's a freak. In the gay pantheon, I should have just striven to be a jock as my next step in gay body enlightenment. 

All young gay guys are expected to be jocks. Or hunks, or whatever. Just look like a man with muscles. If you like getting fucked, you are expected to have a big butt. I don't understand this, but I didn't make the rules. Jocks get laid. Jocks are the gold standard of gay dating. If you're not a gym rat, you're not trying hard enough. You're probably not trying hard enough even if you are. Jocks are the culturally acceptable version of gay masculinity. Even if your voice overflows with chiffon, you can at least look like a fit jock.

Bears are a reaction to twink and jocks. The whole thing got its start online I'm pretty sure with the early internet. Canonically it's a hairy -- often really hairy -- out of shape guys who have given up on their quest to be a jock or never tried in the first place. Bears, unlike twinks and jocks, are their own subculture in the gay universe. They have get togethers and have bars that cater to them. They often bitch about jocks and twinks almost to be an organizing principle. What's hilarious is that they can often be just as exclusionary as those they purport to dislike. Often bears are really aged out twinks without the party drugs to keep the pounds off.

Dads and dad bods are just the natural evolution of a guy getting older. Dads can obviously be bears, but dads aren't really a subculture like bears are. I definitely had a dad bod and there were definitely guys -- often young -- who liked it. I was happy for that. Almost everybody finds it hard to keep the pounds off as we get older and you have to be really diligent because your body is programmed to want and cherish those extra pounds. But at least accepting that you're not going to have the diligence to be a jock until the day you die is a little healthier.

If it's not perfectly obvious, I think this categorization is a load of toxic crap. People don't fit into neat little boxes and tribes. But it really is part of the gay experience even if it is toxic. It informs a lot about how we date, the friends we keep, and our sense of self-worth. When I was young, I definitely wasn't a jock or twink, but I did like doing things like sailing and skiing so I was in reasonable shape. I didn't let my life be ruled by these kinds of expectations, but a lot of gay people are really affected by it and honestly it messes with their mental health in some cases. 

I kind of want to shake the twink who is trying to bulk up that there are tons of other guys who are your perfect type who like you the way you are. There are plenty of jocks who like other types too. You'll have plenty of time to become a jock. And there are plenty of guys that don't check any of those boxes who are perfectly attractive and don't have any problem getting hookups or dates. Or not be any of the above.

I think the internet has really exacerbated this problem in gay culture. For what it's worth, I'm not bagging on jocks at all. If it makes you happy to get the body you want for yourself, that's great. But if you're doing it primarily to impress other gay guys, yeah, that might be toxic and kind of contributes to our absurd fixation on body image.

I've actually heard people say that they don't want to date or anything unless they've achieved some fitness goals. That is just plain weird to me. Often I look at them and think if they achieve that goal, they'll be less attractive. To me at least. But the point is life should be enjoyed along the way. That goes for everybody, of course.

I'm pretty sure that there is nothing analogous to this treadmill in the straight world, at least for men. Women have their own treadmill but it's not the same. I think it's pretty unique to the gay world and informs a lot of the self-esteem issues gay guys have. Not all of our differences are good or based on straight people's views. We can bring things upon ourselves too.

Yes, Positions

Yes, we do stuff in bed. No, it's none of your business. First off, anal sex is not the sin qua non of gay sex. In fact I've read it's way less frequent than other kinds of sex like oral sex. It's not terribly surprising because anal sex is a lot more complicated than just sticking it in your hole of choice and going at it. Not all guys like to receive (bottom) and not all guys like to penetrate (top). If I had to guess, I'd say that most gay guys are versatile (both), but probably with a preference for one or the other.

In the gay world there is practically a fetishization of top and bottom roles as if they carry a larger significance than who prefers what in bed. Like your personality type determines your position, or position determines your personality. That you can have top-dar or bottom-dar to determine what people like to do in bed. It's probably true to some degree, but like gaydar it can spectacularly fail too. There's a lot of stereotyping in the gay world that femmy guys are bottoms and butcher guys are tops, but honestly there are plenty of very butch guys that love getting fucked. There is also a misconception that the guy with the bigger dick is the top. Maybe there is some correlation, but there are plenty of guys with big dicks that are total bottoms.

There is also a stereotype that tops are in short supply that animates a lot of banter. I've read that that isn't actually the case, but it is a common complaint by bottoms. I think it's mostly sort of a camp playfulness, but some people are undoubtedly serious about it. But who knows, maybe in certain areas it's actually true.

A more serious aspect is that bottoming is often considered lesser and perhaps shameful. That is just warmed over misogyny, but it certainly exists. The reality is that bottoming is often not easy. Taking dick is not easy. Some guys are naturals, but for others they need to understand their body's rhythms and often need to clean themselves out in order to have anal sex. There is definitely a lot of hysteria surrounding not being clean for bottoms. I mean, nobody likes an accident but it too often gets elevated to a moral failure for bottoms. That's pretty messed up. That's definitely a difference.

Next is if you're writing about gay sex, it's a real peeve of mine that you can't just throw a guy against the wall and start fucking him. It's only a tiny fraction of guys that are capable of doing things like that, and even for natural bottoms they have to get used to it before you can go to pound-town. Your butt doesn't have natural lubrication like a vagina does. If an anus is pre-lubed, that is definitely not a good thing. See: clean up.

I watched Red White and Royal Blue and there is a key scene were Alex fucked Henry. It was quite beautifully done and it was obvious that the director was gay by the way it was portrayed. So many depictions of gay sex are just awful. But the little gasp on Henry's face as Alex penetrated him was spot on. Apparently this caused some amount of shock that gay men can, in fact, fuck in the missionary position. It caused some amount of shock to me that people didn't know that. But yes, we do.

Another Red White and Royal Blue item from the book is that there was one scene that Alex almost certainly gave Henry a prostate orgasm by the way it was described. Only men have prostates and the prostate gland secretes a fluid which is mixed with semen when men orgasm. The prostate is only an inch or two inside next to the rectum and massaging it can cause intense feelings which are very pleasureful, and a reason that men like to receive anal sex more than women.

Back to Henry's prostate orgasm. Just with normal anal sex the prostate is going to get a work over. But sometimes just the stimulation of the prostate itself is enough to cause an orgasm. I've never had one, but it's supposed to be extremely intense -- far more intense than a normal orgasm. They are often referred to "hands-free orgasms" because you can orgasm without even stimulating your dick. I'm not sure whether hands-free is a requirement, but that's pretty much a sure sign. This is pretty TMI, but the larger takeaway is that our prostates are a big reason that gay men like anal sex in a way that your girlfriend might be pretty meh about.

None of this really exists in the straight world. It may be a little silly that sex positions get elevated to something beyond who likes what in bed, but it definitely exists and it's definitely a difference between the gay and straight experience.

The Gay Ethos

"Ethos: the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations. like 'a challenge to the ethos of the 1960s'"

I left this for last because it's the most ineffable. It touches on "The Gay Community" which is everything and nothing all at once. There are literal gay communities in gay neighborhoods, but there is also an ethereal culture that somehow binds us together. It's sort of like dark matter in that we know it's there but not quite what it is. Obviously there are things that are cultural phenoms like Ru Paul's Drag Race, and the diva of the day that has caught gay men's fancy, but there's more to it than that.

Popular culture that has a gay sensibility has been around for a very long time, but it sort of begs the question of what a gay sensibility is. Campiness? A lot of diva worship is because they are over the top and campy. Guys can be camp of course too. One of the early tropes in old Hollywood is that you could be a dandy or dead if you were a gay character. The dead part is in the past (yes, I know gay characters still get offed but it's not like the blatant morality statements from the bad old days). But actors like Paul Linde got away with it because he was camp and over the top.

There is definitely a canon of films that have very gay sensibilities. They are often very camp. A lot of old films were camp in that vein and often were just with straight people as stand-ins for what obviously should be gay men. See: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But there's tons of other movies in the canon like the Wizard of Oz, which while campy, also have the sensibility of being a fish out of water which a lot of gay people felt, especially in the day.

There are other parts of gay culture that aren't really tied to camp. Opera queens, and other parts of musical culture are part of the gay ethos. In general being cultured is definitely part of the gay experience for many gay men. Certainly not all and probably just a small percentage, but the notion that gay men are cultured is part of the perception. 

Another is how many people are convinced that you'll be able to help them with their home decorating dilemmas. I mean, I have decent enough taste but I'm not a damn interior designer. But that is part of perception and part of what's different. I am very sure that nobody goes up to some straight schlub expecting decorating advice where they'd do it to a gay schlub. So that's different. Amusing, a little annoying, and different.

A side part of these sorts of stereotypes is that they think we all know each other. I mean, there are probably 150,000 gay people in San Francisco, and you expect me to know your hairdresser in Fremont? But I digress. 

As I alluded above, music and especially popular music plays an outsized part of gay culture and the gay ethos. Acts get associated with gay or not gay based on whether gay men like them or not. Disco very early on after Stonewall was very much associated with gay men and our bars. Even to this day, what gets listened to at gay bars is an outgrowth of that era. Straight people obviously like to dance too, but dancing is also a pretty big part of the gay mating ritual and has been so for ages at bars and clubs.

There are even things called circuit parties which are basically drug fueled excuses to be high and have lots of sex. This lines up a lot with the previous section on body image and its pressures. Other than maybe Burning Man, I think that's pretty rare in the straight experience. It's worth noting that Burning Man -- since it was originally conceived in San Francisco -- has a large gay contingent and wouldn't surprise me that it was important in Burning Man's obvious camp aspects. 

That said, you can tell it's real and not real all at once because the disaffected unlike-the-other-girls gays recoil in horror to gay culture insisting a little too loudly that they aren't like that. Yeah, whatever. Don't do it girlfriend. If it pings their internalized homophobia, it's possible that it's real, but they overreact a lot too so it's not definite.

Another aspect is a different way to slice up the community with A-Gays and then pretty much the rest of us. An A-gay is very much a class thing. Being an A-Gay is sort of an actual thing, but also sort of a joke. I think it was Armistead Maupin that introduced me to the concept, but it's age old. In Hollywood terms, it was the gays that threw the fabulous parties with scantily clad twinks and jocks often on the arm of some studio exec or director or whatever. Certainly the class aspect is common with straight culture, but the gay version plays out a little different.

The gay ethos includes us being pretty slutty. Not all of us are, but it is common as dirt. Often it comes when we're young and finally legal. Gay people generally don't get the normal straight experience of crushes and dating and all of that that straight kids go through who use it as training wheels for when the real deal comes along. 

We get thrown in with much the same emotional state as a 14 year old, but now we can do all of the same things except we're adults with adult consequences. Being 18, on your own, and a little emotionally stunted because you are gay because you didn't get those training wheels can cause its own set of problems. Your parents, for one, don't get to tell you to go to your room or ground you.

I have nothing against sluttiness and honestly think it's kind of healthy if done for the right reasons, but often it's not. That is, quantity making up for quality and trying to find yourself through other peoples' opinions. That isn't healthy. But just wanting to have fun with a hot guy? Sounds like wholesome fun to me. Straight people can obviously do that too, but there is much more stigma for women. Where gay guys joke about being sluts, straight guys are serious and it has a very negative connotation for women. And then of course they whine about women not wanting to sleep around with them. Sometimes I thank the lord above that I'm gay, and that's one of them. That is a difference with the gay experience too.

I could try to come up with more examples, but it's sort of like gaydar in that you know it when you see it. It has a gay vibe going on. It aligns with gay sensibilities. I think a lot of it is born out of our mating rituals and status seeking. But it's also that gay guys on the whole are less likely to care about things that might seem gay. Sort of because we are... gay. Well adjusted gay guys don't care about what might make a straight guy seem less masculine. Well adjusted straight men do too, but I think they have more to overcome. I really pity straight guys who get caught up in that because a lot of it is fun and enriching. Homophobia hurts those kinds of straight guys too. Homophobia sucks.

Conclusion

Ok, this is entirely too long already. I have this bad habit of setting off to do something and then it turns into some 20-30 page tome. Sorry. As I said at the beginning, my writing this was because I was looking for angles for plots and that sort of thing for what makes us different for stories I might write. I realize now, it might be helpful for people who are writing gay guys who aren't gay themselves to understand us and not make the mistake of writing one-dimensional characters where you just substitute one set of naughty bits for the other and that's the only difference. I specifically wrote about gay guys because that's what I know. Obviously this isn't a study so it reflects all of my biases and experiences, but I lived 25 years in the Castro in San Francisco and grew up close enough to Hollywood which is also crawling with gay guys, so I do have a fair amount of experience to back up my observations.

Hopefully it's helpful though. 

Cheers, Mike.