Has a straight dude’s straightness
ever seemed, well, a little gay? Whether it’s the inherent homoeroticism of
fraternity life or the scantily-clad antics of the world’s Steve-Os and Johnny
Knoxvilles, straight bro culture comes off as less hetero than they’d have us
believe.
“We actually know very little
about the complexities of straight male sexuality and desires that sit outside
of the heterosexual-homosexual binary,” says Jane Ward, author of Not
Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men. “I’m drawing attention to the way that
straight men exceptionalize their homosexual behavior as a way of making it
invisible.”
While most would hardly bat an
eye at young straight women making out at a party or even fooling around in the
bedroom, there’s a complex series of patriarchal social ideologies that bar
straight men from doing the same. Ward isn’t set on outing anyone; instead,
she’s looking to alter popular discourse suggesting that straight-identifying
white men who masturbate with one another and post M4M Craigslist ads are
self-hating and closeted. They are “straight” in terms of the
mainstream gay-straight system, but she argues that that binary itself is
faulty. “I’m invested in us having a more nuanced understanding of straight
men’s sexuality,” she says. “They’re not invited to be bi-curious in the same
way that women are.” Just as college-age women experiment without identifying
as lesbian, many straight white men have fluid sexual desires. They’re simply
enacted in a way that adheres to society’s hetero norms.
This latent desire for
homosexual play in bro culture is usually seen in less explicit ways than with
circle jerks and glory holes. “You really can’t go out and ask straight men,
‘Have you had sex with men?’ and get the answer that you’re looking for,” Ward
says. “So many of these behaviors are not conceptualized as sexual by the
participants.” Instead, answers to questions like, “Have you ever touched a
penis?” or “Have you ever put a finger inside another man’s butt?” begin to
draw a more complex picture of a straight identified guy’s sexuality. Ward
cites fraternity hazing, the Jackass franchise, and men who
watch porn together as indicators of this more complicated sexuality. “The men
involved think of it as fucking around: ’We’re joking. We’re drunk. This is
hazing. It’s not sexual.’ And yet the actual body contact certainly would be
called sex if it was something two gay men engaged in.”
Look no further than the
elephant walk, a fraternity phenomenon Ward describes in Not Gay’s
opening pages. A relatively common hazing ritual, it has fraternity pledges
stand nude in a circle with one thumb in their mouth and their other up their
neighbor’s butt. They then parade around like a line of circus elephants, trunk
to tail, in step with their future brothers’ playful jeers and hollers. Rituals
like this are, of course, posed under the guise of humiliation, and they’re
certainly embarrassing for many young pledges. But Ward’s photographic and
anecdotal evidence from such events show participants laughing along, enjoying
the ride.
“Is there pressure involved?
Sure. But they’re manufacturing the ritual and participating in it themselves,”
Ward says. “Most men know that they could walk away from that situation.”
While it might seem like the
realm of gay porn fantasy—there’s a reason why there are so many military and
fraternity-themed “gay for pay” porn sites—Ward insists that in arenas of
hyper-masculinity like the frat house, homosexual experimentation has a home,
even if it manifests as a “too straight to care” pose.
“If you’re a straight man, and
you’re so balls-out and you’re so brave, this is something you might do just to
show that you can,” Ward explains. “You stand up unbroken, still heterosexual,
even after letting another dude suck your dick.”
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