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I think because sex practices are still so closely scrutinized and morally laden, I think people-including many LGBT people-are most comfortable with sex when it adheres to clearly defined categories and when it's relatively predictable. I imagine you get a lot of people saying "Oh, these men are just closeted."Ībsolutely. This was a totally straight guy-I can't imagine a more hetero-masculine man-who I had known for many years, and I just thought, How were you making sense of this when you were participating in that? And so I was interested 15, 20 years ago in this question, and then I just started to see more and more evidence that straight men have intimate contact with one another's bodies and don't necessarily perceive it as sexual.Īs homosexuality and homosexual sex become increasingly normalized, they'll stop triggering the gag reflex in your average American. This is basically a ritual in which men are holding the penis of the guy behind them and they have their thumb in the butt of the guy in front of them. Jane Ward: In my early 20s I was still dating men occasionally, and, as I explain in the book, one of these men started telling me about the elephant walk, which is a ritual that is notorious in the Greek system. VICE: So, what motivated you to write a book about straight guys having gay sex? VICE called up Ward to discuss sexuality, normative culture, bro-jobs, elephant walks, "crossing the line," and the dozen other bizarrely named and carefully orchestrated rituals that white straight guys use to get inside each other's cargo shorts. The very same behaviors and feelings these men exhibit might, in someone less invested in normality, have given rise to a gay, bi, or queer identity. Instead, her point is that what makes these men "not gay" isn't their actions, nor the complicated and contradictory emotions that are involved in those actions, but rather, their commitment to straight, normative life. Ward is not arguing that these men are "really" gay or bisexual (though some probably are).
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Yet she points out that many straight men openly express disgust about women's bodies, showing that disgust and desire can easily exist in the same moment. For example, sexual contact between men is often seen as a kind of heterosexual bonding if the participants loudly declare how disgusting the activity is (think frat boys "forced" to insert things into each others' assholes-a frequent occurrence in the pages of Not Gay). She neatly breaks down common defenses given to "explain" such actions.
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In particular, Ward pays close attention to the ways in which white straight men justify their own sexual behaviors with other men. But straight white men are generally held up as the paragons of our sexually normative culture, oriented in one rigid direction, unwavering and in fact disgusted by any other kind of sexuality. Women, Ward contends, are allowed (or, increasingly, expected) to be more sexually fluid and "open," while the concept of the "down low" has prompted many recent discussions on the supposed sexual fluidity (and duplicity) of men of color. Each chapter in the book explores a different framing device that our culture uses to understand sex between straight white men: frat house or military hazing rituals, boys-will-be-boys summer camp circle jerks, or the "situational homosexuality" of sailors at sea, for instance.