Gay Men and Straight Men as Friends | Psychology Today

Contents:

• HOW TO TELL IF YOUR GUY FRIEND IS GAY
• ‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’
• GAY MEN AND STRAIGHT MEN AS FRIENDS
• HOW TO MAKE GAY FRIENDS
• HOW TO MAKE GAY FRIENDS: AN LBGT FRIENDSHIP GUI
• AM I GAY?
• HOW TO DEAL WHEN YOUR BT FRIEND IS GAY
• CAN GAY AND STRAIGHT MEN REALLY BE FRIENDS?
• HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY
• HOW TO COME OUT AS GAY OR LBIAN
• FRIENDS BEE GAY LOVERS EROTI BUNDLE COLLECTN
• HOW TO HAVE A GAY FRIEND

HOW TO TELL IF YOUR GUY FRIEND IS GAY

If you're tryg to figure out if your iend is gay bee you want to date him (as a woman), 's important to remember that jt bee he might be terted men don't mean he's not terted women. Although some people the gay culture may put on a certa voice or a way of speakg, your iend talkg a siar or "effemate" way is still not a very good way to judge. Say somethg like, "You know you're stuck wh me as a iend no matter what, but I jt have to ask bee I don't want to make assumptns and e to the wrong nclns: are you gay?

‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’

You so obvly nnot be gay, was her implitn, bee this is good was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop s unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular unrstandg of orientatn was that was somethg you were born wh, somethg you uldn’t change. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this people may fd their sir changg directn - and n't jt be explaed as experimentatn (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In 1977, jt over 10% of Amerins thought gayns was somethg you were born wh, acrdg to Gallup.

Throughout the same perd, the number of Amerins who believe homosexualy is “due to someone’s upbrgg/environment” fell om jt unr 60% to ias reached cril mass pop culture, first wh Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later wh Macklemore’s Same Love, the chos of which has a gay person sgg “I n’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to. ” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign clared unequivolly that “Beg gay is not a choice, ” and to claim that is “giv unwarranted crence to roundly disproven practic such as nversn or reparative therapy.

GAY MEN AND STRAIGHT MEN AS FRIENDS

”People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backwardAs Jane Ward not Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Whe Men, what’s tertg about many of the claims is how transparent their speakers are wh their polil motivatns.

HOW TO MAKE GAY FRIENDS

“Such statements, ” she wr, “fe blogil acunts wh an obligatory and nearly ercive force, suggtg that anyone who scrib homosexual sire as a choice or social nstctn is playg to the hands of the enemy.

” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backward – even if they are themselv, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The Cy fame.

”Gay rights do not have to hge on a geic explanatn for sexualy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they thk they were born gay. Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Profsor of Psychology at Universy of Tennsee, for stance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexualy is nate still hold negative views of gays.

HOW TO MAKE GAY FRIENDS: AN LBGT FRIENDSHIP GUI

In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic rponnts he studied shared siar levels of belief a Born This Way Samantha Allen not at The Daily Beast, the growg public support for gays and lbians has grown out of proportn wh the rise the number of people who believe homosexualy is fixed at birth; would be unlikely that this small change opn uld expla the spike support for gay marriage, for stance. “It don’t seem to matter as much whether or not people believe that gay people are born that way as do that they simply know someone who is currently gay, ” Allen spe of the studi, those who ph agast Born This Way narrativ have been heavily cricised by gay activists. Siarly, Ward has received her own hatemail for phg agast the lg LGB narrativ, wh some gays tellg her she’s “worse than Ann Coulter, ” the ntroversial US thor of books like If Democrats Had Any Bras, They’d Be Republins.

AM I GAY?

And when I published my say on choosg to be gay, an irate Amerin lbian activist wrote me that had “jt been nfirmed” to her that my wrg was “directly rponsible for four gay aths Rsia. There is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejectedLet’s first be clear that whatever the origs of our sexual orientatn, there is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejected. The efforts are potentially harmful, acrdg to the APA, “bee they prent the view that the sexual orientatn of lbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illns of disorr, and they often ame the abily to change one’s sexual orientatn as a personal and moral failure.

HOW TO DEAL WHEN YOUR BT FRIEND IS GAY

The APA, for example, while notg that most people experience ltle to no choice over their orientatns, says this of homosexualy’s origs:“Although much rearch has examed the possible geic, hormonal, velopmental, social and cultural fluenc on sexual orientatn, no fdgs have emerged that perm scientists to nclu that sexual orientatn is termed by any particular factor or factors.

”Siarly, the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn wr a 2013 statement that while the of heterosexualy and homosexualy are currently unknown, they are likely “multifactorial cludg blogil and behavral roots which may vary between different dividuals and may even vary over time. ” Acrdg to LeVay’s rearch, a specific part of the bra, the third terstial nucls of the anterr hypothalam (INAH-3), is smaller homosexual men than is heterosexual as they might, scientists have stggled to inty any particular gen that nsistently predict the directns of our love and sire (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Read moreYou n spot the problem wh this study a e away: were the gay bras LeVay studied born that way, or did they bee that way? Begng om his observatn that there are more gay relativ on a mother’s si than a father’s, Hamer turned his attentn to the X chromosome (which is passed on by the mother).

Bis the dividual criqu leveled agast each new study announcg some gay gene disvery, there are major methodologil cricisms to make about the entire enterprise general, as Grzanka pots out: “If we look at the raveno pursu, particularly among Amerin scientists, to fd a gay gene, what we see is that the ncln has already been arrived at.

CAN GAY AND STRAIGHT MEN REALLY BE FRIENDS?

”The other problem wh Born This Way science is summed up nicely by Simon Copland: “Scientists are askg whether homosexualy is natural when we n’t even agree exactly what homosexualy is. ” Our sir may exprs themselv many different ways that do not all nform to existg notns of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bisexual’ is one of the bt takeaways of Ward’s Not Gay, a peratg analysis of sex between straight whe men.

”Gay or not, our sir are oriented and re-oriented throughout our liv (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In fact, the straight-intified men Ward studied for her book sometim found themselv suatns that sparked the sire for homosexual sex: aterni, ployments, public rtrooms, etc. I’m claimg that at some pot durg llege, my sexual and romantic sir beme reoriented toward menThkg back to my llege romanc wh women and men, I n beg to unrstand how my own experienc might have helped me to ‘cultivate’ my sire for homosexualy. I want to be very clear: I’m not claimg I simply began to ‘grow to’ my homosexualy, or that as I beme more fortable wh beg gay, I allowed myself the eedom to exprs what had always been latent wh me.

“Limg our unrstandg of any plex human experience is always gog to be worse than allowg to be plited, ” he gay rights activists pared sexualy to relign - a ccial part of our life that we should be ee to practise however we like (Cred: Ignac Lehamann)So what are we to do wh the Born This Way rhetoric? “That’s a very narrow unrstandg of what jtice looks like, ” says about the ncern that homophob will want to ‘enurage’ gay people to be straight if there’s no blogil basis for sexualy? It don’t take too much creativy to image a scenar which homophobic parents, upon beg rmed their fet has ‘the gay gene’, choose what to them may seem the lser of two evils: abortn.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY

”Acrdg to surveys, ls than half of Generatn Z intify as "100% heterosexual", suggtg more and more people have embraced their sexual fluidy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Perhaps is time to look to the begng of the gay rights movement.

“Then there was a shift, and the lears of the movement chose to jump on board wh a ls nuanced argument that people already unrstood: jt like race, people are born wh their homosexualy.

HOW TO COME OUT AS GAY OR LBIAN

More than a third chose a number between one and rponse to the poll, one of my Facebook iends quipped about how natural selectn mt be workg overtime, what wh makg all of gay! I’m thankful for a new generatn that is pable of imagg sexualy a way that transcends the gay/straight bary, that uldn’t re ls about what happened to their bodi and mds to make them who they are today.

We currently have a survey vtigatn unrway that explor some of the posive out of “bromosexual” iendships, cludg our theory that gay men and straight men n be optimal wg men for one another. At the same time, many straight men still doubt that they’ll be able to relate to gay men any meangful way and, for this reason, may not try to iate a iendship.

Send, recent rearch has argued that genr and sexual orientatn might not be as black and whe as prevly thought, which opens up new avenu for explorg how gay and straight men n relate to one another. If a straight guy and his gay male iend are ls rigid about their masculy and sexualy, they’ll probably be more likely to discs tails about their sexual and romantic liv openly wh one another.

FRIENDS BEE GAY LOVERS EROTI BUNDLE COLLECTN

In short, women are able to tst the datg advice om gay male iends bee they know their gay iends don’t have any ulterr motiv: They’re not tryg to hook up wh them or pete wh them for guys. Jt as a gay man might be able to pass on advice about women to his straight iend, a straight man uld nnect his gay male iend wh another sirable gay man, sce neher the gay man nor his straight iend are petg for the same person. We believe that havg a tstworthy nfidant to help wh romantic pursus is one of the major reasons straight and gay men are leavg the fort of their same-sex, same-orientatn iend groups to form “bromosexual” iendships.

HOW TO HAVE A GAY FRIEND

Sex the Cy, Will and Grace), though a lot ls has been said about how gay and straight men regnize and negotiate the distct challeng, plitns, and rewards of their iendships.

S., before there was such a thg as a gay inty, some straight men would, wh ltle shame, engage sexual ntact wh other men (ually allowg themselv to be fellated) when female partners were otherwise unavailable (see Gee Chncey’s semal book, Gay New York: Genr, Urban Culture, and the Makg of the Gay Male World 1890-1940) and there is good reason to believe this still occurs other untri and cultur.

Gay men have suffered physil, social, and psychologil abe at the hands of heterosexually intified mal who, thanks to homophobia and heterosexism, felt fully jtified flictg the terrors. This legacy of vlence, both physil and psychologil, flicted by straight men toward those of who are gay naturally fuels our utn and distst at the thought of beiendg them.