[Standard disclaimer: Nothing wrong with being gay. Who cares if it was gay. etc…]
Having lunch with some friends of mine today. Somehow the subject came up: Have you ever had a gay experience?
I went on to tell the story about how, in 97, I got my first computer. I was new to the Internets. I was also more than a little curious about “Cyber Sexting” (or whatever it’s called)
So I log on to AOL and enter into on of those chat rooms. From there, I met and started chatting privately with this girl. At first I thought it was slightly amusing. But much to my surprise I quickly started to get into it.
I’ll spare you all the details but let’s just say we do the deed and I log off. It wasn’t until later it dawned on me that this “girl” could have very easily been a guy pretending to be a girl.
Now, being wiser and smarter towards all things Internets, I’m almost sure that it was. At least that’s what the statistics would seem to sugest.
Anyway, it’s an amusing story but it was also very polorizing with the group of friends I was having lunch with.
The two basic arguements were:
1.) You and another man masturbated together. It’s gay.
2.) It doesn’t matter if it was a guy. I was masturbating to the image of a woman. Not gay.
Not gay, and the contention that it was is sufficiently bizarre that I suspect your friends were just fucking with you. Which, by the bar they set, makes them gay.
Gay is sexual desire, not necessarily action or activity. Two cell mates in their bunks masturbating furiously in lights out time to fantasies of women are not being gay together.
You thought you were masturbating with a woman, so your desires were heterosexual no matter who was behind the mask of the internet.
Not gay. You were attracted to this person because of their perceived female qualities. Whether or not they actually possessed those qualities is immaterial.
On the other hand, what the dude on the other end of your modem was doing? Totally gay.
Not gay. In fact, in the future, there will be for-pay cyber-sex chat rooms staffed exclusively by gay, Indian men with only one woman on staff to check quailty control (“tell him to slow down”). Or maybe this is already going on. The staff is gay, the callers are not.
If a male-run corporation hires a male-owned advertising team and the advertising team chooses to market the corporation’s wares by photographing scantily clad sexy girlish peoples with girlparts flirtatiously posing with the corporation’s product, and you (male person) get turned on by the ad, is that “gay” because it’s a bunch of dudes deliberately making you horny?
Also:
I don’t think the word “gay” should have any meaning except “pertaining to, or of, gay people”. Asking if some THING is gay is ridiculous.
Other. It’s a Schrödingerian nexus of indeterminacy with a Turing twist, vis-à-vis gender. It’s in a state of indeterminacy. That seems to come with its own set of rules.
Not gay. So much so, that half-way through the OP I assumed you were a girl because there would be no other way to even possibly confuse what you did with being gay.
But this does bring up the harder question: If a guy makes out with a dude who is convincingly dressed as a woman… gay or not? I still want to say no, but I think that is a harder sell.
Brilliant! You should’ve had lunch with me today.