Many young men intify as mostly straight — a sexual orientatn that is not que straight but also, they say, ls gay than bisexualy
Contents:
- THE FACT NO ONE LIK TO ADM: MANY GAY MEN ULD JT HAVE EASILY BEEN STRAIGHT
- CAN SCTN MAKE STRAIGHT MEN GAY?
- IS IT POSSIBLE TO SYSTEMATILLY TURN GAY PEOPLE STRAIGHT?
THE FACT NO ONE LIK TO ADM: MANY GAY MEN ULD JT HAVE EASILY BEEN STRAIGHT
I was a young gay man hopg universy athletics would help me f . Then the oil wrtlg began * straight boys turned gay *
When I was young, I was told the whole world was divid to heterosexual men and heterosexual women, bar a small number of unfortunate ‘homosexuals’ of both genrs and possibly an even smaller number a third tegory, ‘bisexuals’, who ‘swung both ways’; pl, fally, a ty band of wretched creatur who were physilly not que one thg or the other.
How many ‘homosexuals’ were there? Ksey diststed btal tegorisatn but, wishg to unt, nstcted what me close to a slidg sle ntag seven gradatns between exclive heterosexualy and exclive homosexualy. He found that almost half his male terviewe had reacted sexually to both genrs; more than a third had had a homosexual enunter; and more than one ten reported roughly equally strong sexual rpons to both men and women.
Surveys for the Observer of ten and four years ago suggt that around 4 per cent of Brish men would ll themselv ‘homosexual’.
CAN SCTN MAKE STRAIGHT MEN GAY?
Some of the men I slept wh have gone straight spe a strong cultural barrier to a gay man dog this. Some iends I thought — knew — to be straight have gone gay, or ‘bisexual’.
All all, I’ve probably slept wh as many straight men as self–intifyg gay or bisexual on: I doubt most were lyg, and some s have reason to know they weren’t. For every ‘bisexual’ man who’s actually gay but reluctant to say so, there’s a straight man who’s actually bisexual. And there are plenty of ‘gay’ men who know that, a different life, they uld reasonably ntentedly be straight.
In what pass for the gay ‘muny’, there’s somethg of a taboo about admtg, even to ourselv, that que a few of (not me) uld, wh a ltle axg and self-disciple, be ‘straight’.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO SYSTEMATILLY TURN GAY PEOPLE STRAIGHT?
There exist strong reasons for this taboo among gays: first, ‘we n’t help ’ was absolutely central to our early pch for equaly, and we need to believe . For example, when a “closeted” gay or bisexual man has sex wh another man, he views that sex as reflectg his secret gay/bisexual inty. How do the men view homosexualy and LGBTQ2+ rights?