I’ve seen it asserted - on this board and possibly elsewhere as well - that some gay men do not engage in anal sex. I’m wondering how common this is. Like are we talking about something like 0.1% - it’s out there but very very rare - or would that be more like 10% - 20%, IOW a significant percentage of the gay people out there?
To be clear, I’m not talking about people who simply lack the opportunity, e.g. deeply closeted or lack partners etc.
Also, it’s not about people who are exclusively tops or bottoms.
Cites would be appreciated. But estimates from people who have broad enough personal experience would also be OK. Thanks.
Not searching for it here at work, but I’ve seen polls by the Advocate (gay and lesbian news magazine) showing about 30-35% reporting that they do not do anal.
Oscar Wilde was one. Just liked face-to-face frottage (source: Andre Gide via Gore Vidal). Thinking all gays are buggers, the prosecution brought his bed sheets in for evidence at his trial.
I don’t have a cite either, but I remember reading the same thing in Dan Savage’s column. The survey question was something like “When you have sex with another man, how often is it anal sex?” and the responses were about 1/3 rarely if ever, 1/3 occasionally, and 1/3 often.
Couldn’t find the Advocate poll I remember, but here is a Savage column (maybe the one you remember) where he has a quote that puts the average at 67.5% that do engage in anal.
The other question is, How often? Some probably have anal sex routinely, some occasionally, some only have it with certain partners (e.g. with long-term partners but not with casual partners), some have had it one or a few times, some never have. My supposition is, the number who have had anal sex is very high, and the number who have it routinely will be surprisingly low.
The other other question is, how does this compare to practices among heterosexuals (or, more accurately, how do men’s anal sex habits with other men compare to their habits with women – to account for men who have sex with both men and women – or for that matter to women’s anal sex habits with other women)?
Back in the day, when I was single and playing the field, I would say around half of guys I connected with would not do anal at all (that’s a great big wag, by the way). But the context was this was the late 80’s and there was a lot of fear, and that even condoms wouldn’t protect you from HIV (they might break, for example).
My other observation is that some gay men are a lot more flexible about what they are willing to do (or to settle for) than others. Sort of a high maintenance/low maintenance sort of thing.
Roddy
Before I read the other responses I was going to guess 30 percent. It’s never had any appeal to me, but I do have some gay friends who seem to enjoy the practice.
Never for me. Anal sex seems, well, gay even though I know not all gay men do it. Many heterosexual men do enjoy regular anal sex with women although I think they are in the extreme minority. Many others have tried it as an experiment that they didn’t take a sustained interest in.
I never understood it myself. You have perfectly marked entrance right next to one the one that is clearly an exit only door by design. I have no idea why you would choose the latter when a better alternative is available next to it for heterosexual sex. It seems like once you opened up that as preferred penetration route, there isn’t really any difference among the sexes because everyone has a butthole.
I am not homophobic at all but I always that that gay men were just improvising based on what they had available rather than what is by design. Many of them probably find the idea just as disgusting as many heterosexual men do so it isn’t worth it.
Like many here, I’ve also seen the one-third (proportion who abstain) stat bandied about. I also know of this weirdo “movement” called “g0ys”, who have a lot of internalized homophobia as well as less acquaintance with Yiddish than might be desired. But I’ll say it’s a fair cop of theirs to remonstrate that anal sex has been wrongfully essentialized in mainstream culture as some sort of sine qua non of being a homo.
What I think animates F-P’s bewilderment, and what might be the kernel of truth that these “g0ys” have unwittingly latched on to, is the idea that homosexuality is not just some mirror image of heterosexuality. Some straights, those confused by the not-universal adoption of anal sex as the preferred mode of sexual congress, seem to think: Well, we have penis-in-vagina sex, so to the extent that non-heterosexuals have sex, it must endeavor to simulate normative heterosexual practices. Thus, they believe, anal sex is the most important kind of gay sex, or the most frequent, or the only kind that counts. This is an error.
And it is a rather limited sample size.