He feels totally at home in straight culture.
"He knows there are gay and bisexual identities, but he has no interest in either of those. "He could be a straight guy," Ward told Mic last year. Specifically, she argued that participating in gay sex doesn't automatically mean that a man is gay or bisexual. But the question of whether straight men can have same-sex desire was particularly buzzy last year, popping up everywhere from Reddit threads to the MTV episode True Life: I'm a Gay-For-Pay Porn Star.Ī driving force behind the discussion was the 2015 release of Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, in which author Jane Ward explored the complicated relationship between male same-sex experimentation and sexual identity. The numbers tell us that male sexual fluidity isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Even though it's still more common for women to dabble in same-sex contact than men (almost three times more common, according to the CDC report), it seems that men's desires are just as complex as women's, regardless of whether they identify as straight or gay. Yet these numbers still indicate that the stereotypical belief that women are sexually fluid and men aren't is flat-out wrong. This percentage is actually down from the last time the CDC came out with this report back in 2011, when 3.2% of straight men said they'd had a same-sex encounter. In looking specifically at the heterosexual men of the study (who made up 95.1% of the men surveyed), 2.8% of them reported having engaged in anal or oral sex with another dude. But we do know that a number of the guys who have had sex with other men identify as exclusively straight. It's worth keeping in mind that 1% of men in the study refused to share their sexual orientations altogether, which could account for some of the gay sex in question. So openly gay dudes actually made up the smallest group of men who've had gay sex among the respondents? Ooh, that's interesting. And yet: 6.2% of men reported having had same-sex sexual encounters. Just 1.9% of men in the report identified as gay, while 2% said they were bisexual. The contrast between reported sexual orientation and actual, IRL sexual experience is where things get interesting.
Participants were asked about their sexual experiences, as well as which sexual orientations they identified with. The report is based on survey answers from more than 9,000 respondents, collected between 20.