I gotta tell you, I’ve had six or more beers in me and wouldn’t fuck another guy if you liquored me up AND denied me women for a year. I couldn’t even begin to try “Experimenting.” My dick would contract back into my body.
The problem with these threads is observation bias. A gay guy who picks up “straight guys” at bars is (a) of course only going to have experience with the guys who ARE open to experimentation, and (b) is probably, a lot of the time, picking up guys who aren’t as straight as they initially claim to be. Conversely, guys like me don’t just find it personally icky, but are baffled by the idea that any man would ever NOT find it icky. I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that you’d want to touch another man’s penis; it’s vile. But consequently I am probably bullshitting myself into assuming that all other men who claim to be straight would never experiment; in all likelihood some of them would, and have, but I don’t see it, or don’t want to.
So there’s observation bias in both directions.
And of course we combine that with REPORTING bias. Many straight men with an experiment or two won’t admit to it, just as I don’t admit to killing the hooker. Conversely, gay men who claim to have seduced a remarkable number of straight men are - just like straight men - likely bullshitting their sexual conquests by a magnitude of anywhere from 2 to 100. (We don’t have any in this thread but a number of years back we had a psoter who claimed to have seduced every male in his neighborhood, scores upon scores of them, without exception. Suuuure, buddy, and I nailed every girl on the cheerleading squad.)
I saw a really interesting article about a British study of straight-identifying men and their homoerotic/homo-emotional experiences with other men – often in a sports (football) context but also in other situations. Interestingly, among the results was that they didn’t feel troubled about their experiences, and far from identifying as straight due to homophobia, they specifically identified increasing acceptance of homosexuality as a reason they felt more comfortable to express emotion and intimacy with their male friends.
Sure they do. I have several groups of friends that include straight males and females as well as gay males and females. Everyone hugs, leans on, snuggles, lays heads on laps etc with no regard to the gender or orientation of the people involved. Since it’s not sexual and is just an expression of the closeness of those friendships, it just doesn’t matter.
Not to say that all straight guys would do so, but there are plenty that do.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. If being accused of being gay is no longer a problem for you (or others) then it takes a lot of the pressure off of behaviour. If you’re genuinely straight and don’t consider homosexuality as a crime unto god/nature then why would it bother you if you were doing things (hugging, being emotional, crying, whatever) that someone else might charge you as being gay for?
This is one of the things that I try to highlight to straight guys as one of the unintended consequences of the LGBT rights movement - it gives THEM more freedom to be who they are in their heterosexual identity too. It’s not just about the queers, it’s about all of us.
It offends my sensibilities that people would try to pressure people to be or insinuate they something they are not just as gay people I talk to find it offensive for their friends to drag them to a conventional strip club and buy them lap dances from women. It just seems contrived to either make the person feel uncomfortible or to act all offended when they become defensive.
I don’t really get the whole concept of “homosexual experimentation”. I mean don’t you generally have a sense that you are or are not attracted to guys? I suspect that people who use many beers or other excuses to engage in gayness (or bi-curiousness) already have those feelings but may have been afraid to express them because of social pressures.
Then again, the only gay guys I know are pretty unambiguously super-gay.
I’m completely gay - I have no desire to have sex with a woman. Does it offend me when people ask the question “have you ever thought about it? Would you ever do it? Under what circumstances would you consider it?”? No, it doesn’t, because I don’t consider the idea of having heterosexual sex a bad thing and so why would I be offended that someone would ask if I’d ever do it? I’d be offended if someone repeatedly wouldn’t accept what I was saying as true, as if I was deluding myself or trying to conceal someone from them.
Do you have any actual instances where people here or in your own experience have insisted that all or even most straight men want to have gay experiences? Or vice versa?
Again, why is just asking the question at all tantamount to “trying to pressure people to be or insinuate they are something they are not?” And again - why are you being so defensive about it? I’m not offended that you’re defensive, I just don’t get why you are.
Yea, that’s cool and all. I do that kind of stuff with my mom and I don’t consider it sexual at all. But I do also draw a fine line between platonic touching and sexual touching. The difference is just there. And it may not be what you and your friends are doing, but that’s what I was referring to.
I have to wonder… suppose I (a straight male with no history of homosexual experimentation) went around proclaiming, “ALL women want me- they just won’t admit it. But even those lesbians who CLAIM they wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole are obviously in denial. They all WANT to have sex with me. And if I just got them drunk enough, they’d ALL be tearing off their clothes and throwing themselves at me.”
Would anyone buy that? Or would everyone shake their heads and scoff that Astorian is an insane egomaniac with a grossly inflated sense of his own desirability? If I were to suggest that Ellen DeGeneres would jump me after a few beers, people would laugh hysterically.
But nobody seems to be laughing so hard at gays who insist that I REALLY want to suck them off, and am just too insecure to admit it.
I’m not offended by the question. I’m annoyed by the hostility and skepticism when I say no. Just because I say I’ve never had any same sex attractions or curiosity doesn’t mean I’m homophobic or protesting too much.
Firstly I haven’t met any gay guys who make the claim you describe.
Secondly, you may have touched on a difference between the genders and their sexuality, and society’s expectations.
For example: I’ve slept with women that I felt no attraction to. There’s often a peer pressure component to this, and an alcohol component, but I usually enjoyed the sex (even if I was not 100% aroused), and didn’t have any regrets the following day.
This attitude to sex is not considered atypical for guys.
But given this background, for me anyway, it was no big deal experimenting with a guy: it felt a lot like getting with a girl that I wasn’t attracted to. Except that my level of arousal was so low, I quickly realized that nothing was going to happen.
What hostility and skepticism?
The closest I’ve seen is slight annoyance at you crowding out the thread with repeated declarations of your 100% straightness.
We get it. You’re straight. No-one has questioned or challenged that.
Who, me? You realise this is the first thing I’ve said to you, Dio? That I completely accept your sexuality and have no further comment.
This is apparently proof that I’m bothered by your sexuality
Illuminatiprimus was not the one who suggested the “six beer rule.” Like me and panache, he acknowledges some straight identifying men have experimented with other men. Whether those men are actually straight or not and whether or not it’s common is up for debate.
The only people in the thread who have suggested the “six beer rule” might actually be true and/or that all people are bisexual are Indygrrl (in 2003) and Mississippienne. That is it. Others have said that in some cases it might be possible to act outside your orientation and that for some people orientation is partially choice. Nobody, other than those two people, have insinuated what you are so vociferously defending against.
Let’s imagine I start a thread: Are there any girls that play Magic: The Gathering?
And the OP body simply asks this question, and says, if you have played, was it a one-off or do you play regularly, etc.
I’d be quite surprised to get a torrent of replies of “Nope. Never. Never even thought about it” because these are the people who normally wouldn’t bother to read or post in such threads (which is why you wouldn’t normally get a representative sample). Let alone repeated postings of such statements.
And apparently this has all been caused by one post (#32) that suggested guys might not be completely forthcoming about their experiences.
(Post #70 simply observed how weird it was to have a thread almost completely made up of denials).
What seems to be happening here is that certain people have read between the lines, and believe that the thread is making insinuations. I don’t think this inference is justified. And one post, not directed at anyone in particular, is not sufficient cause for the tangent.
Calling negative answers “denials” is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Why should yo be surprised that most heterosexuals would not have homosexual attractions?
Look at this post from Illuminatiprimus replying to my statement that I had never felt any same-sex attractions:
I never said I thought guys couldn’t feel attracted to guys or that I thought anyone was trying to recruit me. I just said I had never been attracted to guys. It seems to me that any male who claims to be 100% heterosexual is automatically regarded with derision and skepticism. If I had any such attractions or curiosities, I would say so. I don’t think there’s anything shameful about it.
One of the meanings of denial is a negative answer, and from the context it’s pretty clear that’s what I meant. I said that most responses were denials, not that anyone is in denial.
