Is 10% of the population gay?

Alfred Kinsey

David Spiegelhalter in a Guardian article analyses new statistics which suggest that that's not a bad guess.  But it's a question of definition.  Which is pretty much what I've been saying for a few years now.


For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a radical political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and lesbian groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.

So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To find out, we have to delve back into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual on a scale of 0 to 6.

Kinsey’s headline finding was that “at least 37% of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age”, meaning physical contact to the point of orgasm. He claimed that 13% of males were predominately homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55 (scoring at least 4) and that 4% of males were exclusively homosexual all their lives (scoring 6). For 30-year-old US men, he estimated that 83% would score 0 (totally heterosexual), 8% would be 1 or 2 on the scale, and 9% would be at least a 3. He acknowledged that people could move on the scale during their lifetime, and indeed Kinsey himself is said to have moved from a 1 or 2 when younger to a 3 or 4 in middle age.

When he published his study on women in 1953, Kinsey estimated that 20% of women had had some same-sex experience and 13% to orgasm. In unmarried females between the ages of 20 and 35, he claimed there was at least some homosexual experience in 11%-20%, and 1%-3% were exclusively homosexual.
So, in 1973, when Voeller was putting together the NGTF campaign, he went back to Kinsey’s estimates for those with predominantly homosexual experience (4 to 6 on his scale) for at least three years. As this was around 7% for women and 13% for men he took an average to get the headline figure: 10% of the population was gay.

This 10% claim was controversial, to say the least, and reignited old arguments about Kinsey’s poor survey methods. But even cleaned-up data gave similar answers, and Voeller stuck to the 10%, stating in 1990 that “the concept that 10% of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact’… As with so many pieces of knowledge (and myths), repeated telling made it so.”

However, later surveys gave much lower results, and of course the ChrisTaliban seized on them as proof that gays don't need rights (as if Jews, for example, who are much less numerous, shouldn't have rights either because there are so few of them)

The explanation lay in the terminology.  If you ask ppl whether they're "gay" or "lesbian" or "bi"  most say no.  Even if they have had same-sex experiences to orgasm.  

Same-sex sexual behaviour can come in all degrees of intensity. So Natsal carefully distinguishes a “same-sex experience”, which could be just a smooch in the dark, from a “same-sex partner”, who is someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm. Respondents are asked about activity at any age, so adolescent fumblings counted.

For women in the age range 16 to 44, the proportion who report having had some same-sex experience has shown a dramatic rise over the past 20 years: from 4% in 1990 to 10% in 2000, and to 16% in 2010 – a massive change in behaviour over such a short period. But this is not all just girls kissing girls in imitation of Madonna and Britney Spears; around half report genital contact, and around half of these in the past five years, so that overall nearly one in 20 women report a same-sex partner in the past five years.

But has there really been a change, or are women simply more willing to report what they get up to? Using some neat cross-checking, Natsal reckons that the change between 1990 and 2000 was partly due to more honest reporting, but the rise in 2000 and 2010 was all real.

And it is clear that there is a lot of experimental activity – roughly, for each woman who has had a recent same-sex partner there are two more of the same age who have had some same-sex contact in their lives, but no partner in the past five years.

Men show a different pattern. In 2010, about 8% of 16- to 44-year-old men reported having had a same-sex experience: this is higher than in 1990, possibly associated with both better reporting and the decline in fear of HIV, but there have been no substantial recent changes.

Overall the proportion of people with same-sex experience is far higher than the proportion who identify themselves as gay and bisexual. This must mean that many same-sex contacts are by people who do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. That’s just what we find in reputable surveys: in the last big US survey, 10% of women and 3% of men who identified themselves as “heterosexual” also reported a same‑sex contact.

Read more here.

Other pieces about this:

How many of us are there?

How many American Men are Gay?

What makes us gay?

The Cum-and-Go Culture

I kiss them because I love them

Labels

Boxes

For so long I've thought of myself as a gay man who happens to love a woman.  I thought, when I fell in love with my guy all those years ago, that, ergo, I was gay.  That's how it was: there were gays and there were straights and since I'd fallen in love with a man, and had sex with men, I had to go in the gay box.  But over the last few years I've realised that I am attracted to women as well as to men.  I'm not even sure any more whether I'm primarily attracted to men or to women.  I'm attracted to individuals.  To people.  And their gender isn't really relevant any more.

Of course society is still stuck with boxes: the gay box; the straight box; and even, dare we say it; the bisexual box.  But it's stupid.  These labels don't matter.

Night and day

People often say, well, it's obvious--gay and straight are as different as night and day!  You're either one or the other!  Choose!

Yep, night is different from day.  But note--where it is something we know well, like 'night' and 'day'--how we are well aware of the subtle differences within 'night' and 'day'.  A summer's day, when it is 40 degrees outside and the sunlight is white hot.  A late afternoon, when the air is still warm and the sunlight slants through the trees and the air is golden.  A sunny winter's day, where the light is crisp and silver and so is the air.  An early morning, dewy grass, a pink tinge to the eastern sky.  Those are all 'days'.  A night sky of indigo silk, the stars  brilliant sparkles scattered across it.   A harvest moon, yellow and prehistoric, rising over the eastern horizon.  A sky of black velvet, rich and lush, with a silver scimitar of a moon at the west.  The wee hours, when all is silent and the moon's shadows lie sharp and clear in the garden.  These are all 'nights'.

The words 'night' and 'day' are convenient portmanteau terms for real things.  But we also all know that it's more complicated than that.  We try and create words to convey these realities because we know that the words we have aren't enough.  Just as Eskimos are supposed to have 17 (or is it 12?) different words for snow.

'Gay' and 'straight' are nice convenient clichés/labels for the unthinking, the-not-very-perceptive.  But the truth is that  it's more complicated than that.  Even if you add 'bisexual' to the mix, what does that mean.  Some men like serial sex with male strangers even if they're married, happily married.  Others have just one male partner with or without their wives' knowledge and acquiescence.  Some (like me) remain faithful to their wives yet feel the emotional attraction of men.  Some call themselves straight but love a single man. A very queeny man I know is with a guy but says that his next partner, if there is one, will be a woman.  I feel closer to women, he says.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the vast diversity of human sexuality.  Once I too thought it was nice and simple and just a matter of correctly labelling and all would be clear.  Now I am more humble, more aware of just how complex and rich all our sexualities are, of how many different ways there are of seeing and experiencing 'night and day'.


 

Tom Daley

In a Youtube video a week ago, Tom Daley announced that he was in a relationship with a guy.

I note that he didn't say he was gay.   He said: “In spring this year my life changed massively when I met someone, and they make me feel so happy, so safe and everything just feels great. That someone is a guy.”  He added: “Of course I still fancy girls but right now I’m dating a guy and I couldn’t be happier.”

And that's exactly how it should be.  It might seem a meaningless quibble.  And perhaps it is.  But he is saying something very liberated: I love another man.  That's the key, not how he labels himself.  Or how we label him.  It's so simple, and the troglodytes find it so hard to understand.  Forget the labels, the categorisation, the this box or that.  It's something old as mankind, maybe older.  Something profound and vital.  Love.  What matters is not the gender of your partner or how you make love or any of those things.  What matters is that it is love.

Good on you mate.  And thank you for telling us, because it will make it easier for others also to be open and free.

You know you're bisexual when ...

This morning I woke from a powerful erotic dream of ... my wife.  We were making love, doggie position, and it was, well, very satisfying.  It would not have been a good idea to wake her too, at 5 am, to finish off what my subconscious clearly wanted.  Not a good idea at all.  So I lay there staring at the ceiling and thinking about our life together, nursing a massive hard-on.

The day before, I was woken from another erotic dream, this time with a bloke.  We were in a hotel room, high up, with a view over some city.  He was very handsome, with dark curly hair, pretty much like the bloke in the pic.  Perhaps that was where the dream came from.   Anyway, I was impaled on him in an entirely pleasing, sexy and fulfilling way.  In this case, I also woke up before the climax.  (Is there some hidden pattern here?) Perhaps the nicest part of the whole dream was that I could feel his desire for me.  I could see it in his smile, in his face.  Definitely wish fulfillment, that!

Your subconscious doesn't lie.  When you dream of a man or a woman sexually, or of both, it's reflecting a profound reality, a truth, from deep inside.  There was a time when I thought bisexuality was a con: a transition phase to gayness.  And for some people it is.  Many straights I've mentioned this topic to are inclined to believe that if you desire or love another man, you are by definition gay, even if you also love and desire a woman.  If you have one drop of gayness in you then you are ipso facto gay, just as it used to be considered in regard to black blood.  Which is rubbish.

Our culture likes nice convenient labels and divisions.  Somehow, if we can just say 'it is thus', we can come to grips with complex phenomena, we can make the world less scary because we have labelled it.   We confuse the label with reality.  But reality is much more diverse and complex than these simple categories.  I am what I am.  I respond emotionally and sometimes sexually to men.  But I also respond emotionally and sexually to woman.  Some people would call me 'gay', others 'self-deluding', or 'in a phase'.  Some 'hypocritical' or 'dishonest'.  Actually I have news for all of you.  I am me.   Put me in a box at your peril.

Meanwhile, later today, after my lady gets home from work ....

I have written about this a lot.  Here are some more blog posts:

Labels

Queer but not gay

Saturday Night Thoughts

Special

Thought Experiment

Gay Sex by Any Name

Letter from Thomas

What Makes Us Gay

Saturday night thoughts

For thirty years after I married my lady, I considered myself a gay married bloke who loved just one woman, his wife.  It never seemed plausible to me that I might be bisexual.  I believed (foolishly) that bisexuals were dishonest, pretending to be half-straight when they were really gay.  And after all, I wasn't attracted to other women.  My emotional and sexual attraction was exclusively to men.  I was faithful to my wife (as I still am!) and didn't pick up men.  To most people I would have appeared completely straight.

Seven years ago I started writing gay-shaded fiction. My motives were several.  I had been through hell when I realised I was gay, and I wanted to write about gay and bisexual characters in a way that celebrated their gayness, not denigrated it.  I hoped that that would help young blokes who were struggling to accept their sexuality to be happier, and to believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay.  To be honest, I also hoped to make some money.  At the time my children were at pricey private schools and uni, and I wasn't earning much.  Untold wealth hasn't happened, sadly!  So far, I've made a princely $80, for my story Redhead. 

I had lived a life quite outside the gay networks which exist.  I knew no gay or bi men -- that I knew of; as with me, perhaps there were many that I didn't know of because they were closeted or "straight-acting".  But the essence of a network is that it is known, if not necessarily obviously visible.  What gay fiction I read didn't resonate with me.   I travelled along, occasionally attracted to a man, always, so far as I could tell straight, never talking about what I thought I was or what I felt, and never acting on my attractions.

And then I started writing, and started posting my stories in online groups.  And I started talking via email with other blokes out there, many of whom were bisexual, had been or were still married, who thought it quite ordinary that a man might be attracted to both genders even if he preferred one or the other.  And I found that my own definitions shifted as I learned more.  Remember, I'd been very ignorant.  I'd had sex with a few men, fallen in love with one, and then met my wife and married her.  But it became perfectly clear to me that I too was bisexual.  Oh, I was for the most part emotionally and sexually attracted to men, but once I allowed myself to feel it, I was often attracted to women too.  The labels and the boxes were too rigid and confining.

These days I have come to believe that whether you are gay or straight is absolutely unimportant.  Of course, I'm not saying gay rights don't have to be fought for.  Gays in many countries are still persecuted and murdered, and vile laws which discriminate still exist.  And that should stop.  But in most Western countries, gays if not yet equal, are certainly accepted in ways I never thought of 30 years ago.  I'm not talking about the law and custom, though, I'm talking about my perceptions.  I have gone through a transformation, where my intellectual acceptance of gayness has translated into a spiritual and emotional acceptance of my straight-shadedness, if I can call it that.  A bizarre journey,  but when you come to think about it, perfectly logical.  Acceptance does that.  It's liberating.

I feel tremendously free, free to think and feel what I want, untrammelled by convention or custom.  I hope one day the whole world will regard it as irrelevant and insignificant as I now do, and accept that people will run the gamut from gay through all different bisexualities to straight and it won't matter to anybody.  We shall overcome.  And it will be wonderful.

Special

One of the things about being eccentric (which is Greek and means simply, outside the centre) is that we know that all the stuff other ppl take for granted doesn't apply to us.

I'm right outside every "centre".  I'm in the blank space outside the Venn diagram.  I'm a gay man, or at least, mostly gay.  But I'm married, and happily, too.  I'm a vegetarian in a society which is 95% meat eaters.  I'm an intellectual, which sounds very grand and snobbish, but the way I think about the term is that it's the best there is for ppl who are interested in ideas.  Most ppl aren't.  I'm male, but unlike most males, I'm not obsessed with my small head -- I value friendship and love more highly than sex (how bizarre, you will exclaim).  Many readers think, from the emotional insights and feelings in my writing, that I am a woman.   I'm not,  but I know that my feelings are much more "feminine" than most blokes.

I don't belong anywhere.  And it's kinda lonely, to be honest.

OK, I will at once concede that every generalisation* I've made above is just that.    And generalisations inevitably mean that you don't notice when someone doesn't fit the convenient label you've invented or accepted.  Or had foisted upon you.  So much easier to sit back into the warm fug of preconceptions and generalisations and easy-to-digest familiar clichés.  So easy to hate.  And I have to fight that.  Because the labels are wrong.  And mislead.

Take my dear friend S.  He was married to a guy, who except for the love he felt for S, was straight.  Or A, who is in love with his best friend, who is also a straight bloke whose only male love and desire is A.  How to categorise this?  Because we want nice easy categories, we insist that they're really bisexual.  And I suppose if you stretch the meaning of the word enough it's true.  But if you stretch the meaning of all words enough they'll get like old undies:  always falling down on the job.

So I know, in my heart, that I shouldn't be angry at straights, or more particularly, straight men.  (Straight women have been amazingly supportive of me and my sexuality.)  Because, if I were 100% honest, I would accept that "straights" make up a huge group, full of individuals, just as "gays" are each unique, and "bi's" are all over the shop, with many, many bisexualities.

And yet.  And yet.

Straights -- straight men -- have all my life been cruel to me.  They have judged me and found me not good enough.  They have despised me.  They have bullied me.  They blinded me in one eye.  And they're still doing it, to other gay-shaded blokes.  Hardly a week goes by without some poor gay kid (or even just a straight but effeminate or nerdy kid) being bullied to death by his straight classmates for not being manly enough.

And I am angry with them for it.  Very angry.

And yet.  And yet.

My friend Damo is straight.  100 % straight.  A real pussy hound.  Yet he is entirely accepting of me and my gayness.  Completely, totally, utterly unjudgemental.   He's a lovely man.  And I value him even more for his eccentricity, his outside-the-centreness, his near-unique comfortableness with my sexuality.  Because all the other straight men I know are at the very least embarrassed by me and my sexuality.  And many are plainly hostile.  For them it defines me.  None of the other things about me matters.  Only my gayness is relevant.

But Damo doesn't give a flying foo-foo valve.

And that's special.



*All generalisations are false, including this one.

Thought Experiment

Let's suppose you're a straight man (just for argument's sake, since I'm assuming I have no straight male readers, though I know I have many straight female readers.)

Now, you haven't had sex (even the kind you bestow upon yourself) for a while.  A close male friend is with you.  He's good-looking, easy-going and fond of you, and you like him a lot too.  You've had a few beers together.  He also hasn't had sex for weeks.  Assume also (for the sake of the argument) that there are no Christian-Fascists, no constant churchly drip of homophobic poison, and society really, really doesn't give a toss whether you're straight or gay.  You and he pull each other's wires, have a bit of a cuddle and a kiss.  It's fun; the release of oxytocin binds you a little closer together; as you lie next to him afterwards, you admire the line of his jaw, the swell of his pecs, the muscles of his thighs thickening into gold; you congratulate yourself on having him as a friend.

Right, so far, so good -- a story which is a staple of Nifty wish-fulfillment.  But, does this encounter make you or him gay?  Even if you repeat it?  Or does it just make you friends with benefits, enjoying what the French delightfully call an amitié amoureuse? Both of you are essentially straight.  Does the fact that you have, and enjoy, sex with with each other make you gay?  Are you bisexual?  What kind of bisexual?

OK, what about those famed circle jerks?  I haven't experienced one myself, but then I missed out on all that adolescent male bonding stuff.  Are the guys who strip off their kit and wank themselves in front of each other gay?  Bi?  Straight with a gay edge?

Let's invert the scenario.  You're a 100% gay bloke, so you thought.  You see what you assume is a beaut bloke (as I did on the train once).  His hair is longish but cut boyishly.  He's wearing a checked man's shirt with the sleeves rolled up, loose worn blue jeans, and rather cool hiking boots.  You enjoy a fantasy with him and you and then suddenly realise he is in fact a she.  Does (s)he suddenly become less desirable, now you know there's no cock between her legs?  Why?

Or take Dil in The Crying Game, a transvestite with whom a straight man falls in love thinking he is a woman, who vomits when he discovers that Dil is not a woman, yet remains in love with him, and has sex with him.  Or the bloke described by the Nick Archer in The End of Gay who goes to bars in drag, picks up straight men and when it's clear they're attracted, tells them he's a transvestite and invites them home with him. Most accept; some even bottom for him.

Or two straight best friends, who love each other and have sex together yet remain primarily attracted to women?  Or the attraction so many men feel for other androgynous men?  The "straight" blokes who have sex with men, and admit they enjoy it, and are happy to continue as long as you don't tell their friends.

I could go on.  What all this suggests is that in the right circumstances with the right person, straights are capable of enjoying sex with (and loving) a man, and gays are as capable of enjoying sex with (and loving) a woman.  It doesn't mean that the straights aren't straight, or the gays gay.  It certainly doesn't mean that the Christian-Fascists are right and that there is no such thing as "gay".  That would be like saying that just because you can have different shades of grey, black doesn't exist.  But look at it another way.  Perhaps it really means that almost everybody is potentially bisexual: in the right place, at the right time, with the right person.  The popular perception of a bisexual is someone who is attracted to both genders equally.  This is plainly wrong.  There are many bisexualities, in all the flavours I've talked about above, and in others too.

When I was wrestling with my sexuality, I conducted a similar thought experiment.  I said to myself, what if I found this really sexy man, and took him home and when we got down to naked skin discovered that he wasn't a man?  Would I stop making love to him (her) or would I go right ahead?  I concluded that if I were randy enough I would go ahead.  I then asked myself what the difference would be if I found a really beautiful woman, and took her home, only to find a cock neatly concealed under her dress.  What was I really?  Gay or straight?  Or bi?  What?  I realised then that it was silly to turn away from someone just because they weren't a man.  And I stopped automatically assuming that women weren't sexy.

Don't get me wrong.  I myself am mostly attracted to men, and mostly for emotional rather than sexual reasons.  But I also love my wife and find her intensely erotic.  Am I a closeted gay married man?  A bisexual?  A straight in denial?  Is it just, as the ex-gay movement persists in maintaining, that I don't have enough straight, manly hugs from straight manly men?  (I'm open to offers, all you straight, manly men out there.)  Am I in fact looking, in a relationship with a man, for friendship? No, as it happens, you ex-gay fanatics out there: just because my primary connection to other men is emotional doesn't also mean I don't find some of them sexy and fuckable.  There's something very erotic about a chin with stubble; the narrow hips of a man; even his smell.  In the end what is it we're attracted to?  How much of attraction is mystery and layers and inner and outer perceptions?  Labels -- so misleading, so useful.

What is, I think, unarguable, something we can all agree on:  we are programmed to love.  Even our own gender.  And it doesn't necessarily make us gay or bi or even confused.  It just makes us human.

[There have been some insightful and illuminating comments, so have a look at them too]

Queer but not Gay

An interesting distinction.  Ugly Betty actor,  Michael Urie, says he's queer but not gay:

“I’ve been in a relationship for a while now, and if you just met the two of us together we’d be ‘gay,’ ” he explains. “But that somehow means anything that happened before didn’t count—and I don’t feel that way. I know that some people feel that way. They were with women, but it always felt wrong. But it didn’t for me. It felt right at the time. It didn’t work out, but it also didn’t work out with other men—many times. That’s why ‘gay’ never seemed right.”

“Certainly there was a point where I was like, I don’t know how long Ugly Betty is going to last and how well it’s going to do, and I might want some real anonymity if it ends quickly. I was also never one to seek out publicity or attention, and I basically didn’t want to be labeled. That kind of attention could turn ugly. I guess if I wasn’t in a relationship with a man and I tried to tell people I was queer, it would appear to be a lie or a cop-out—à la college 10 years ago, when people believed in that notion of ‘bi now, gay later.’ But things are different now. I’m much more comfortable, and I’m in a relationship now. I’m not as worried about a future for myself.”  

An interesting perspective, one I've often commented on: 

Gay sex by any name

Labels

Letter from Thomas

What Makes us Gay?

and of course, all my novels -- Footy, for example.

One day it really, really won't matter whether you're with a man or a woman, and the labels will cease to mean anything, because tastes will no longer be forced into cast-iron boxes.

Meantime, do you think it would be too gay of me to say he's gorgeous, and cute as?

The Power of Slash

More than half my readership is female.  And when I tell this to gay men, they are confounded.  Why, they ask, would straight women be interested in romantic and erotic stories about two men?  

To answer, I must mention 'slash'.  Slash began in the seventies.  Women who thought two men from a TV show sexy would write fanfic about them, making them fall in love with each other.  (But why? you wail impatiently.  Patience!)

Starsky & Hutch, best friends

The term itself comes from the slash between two names to indicate a pairing: Spock/Kirk for example, or Starsky/Hutch.  The essence of slash is that two previously heterosexual blokes (who remain resolutely het in the canonical versions of their stories in TV and film) become so close to each other that they fall in love.  They overcome their upbringing and the taboo against same-sex love, because they love each other so much that they wish to express this love physically and sexually.  They are prepared to ignore the opprobrium of society and to move past their own internal homophobia because of love.  Potent stuff.  And slash is written by women for women.  We men who love this style of writing are the interlopers here.

Starsky & Hutch.  Kinda intimate.

It's no accident that this emotional tension, this journey, is also a standard trope of gay fiction:  the hunky straight (he's never a hideous, pock-marked, halitotic fatso) who somehow falls in love with or has sex with our hero, and so turns gay.  For gay-shaded blokes, I suspect this reflects a kind of internalised homophobia:  we are so insecure in our sexuality that having the handsome alpha jock or sexy cop turn gay validates our own gayness.  Or, alternatively, we are only attracted to straight guys (all those personals ads for "straight-acting" men), though come to think of it, this is also perhaps partly about our own negative self image.  Whatever the reason, the stories about straight men turning gay are a staple of gay fiction.  I've written stories like that myself:  just look at Footy.  I find the emotional dynamic very satisfying to think and write about.  In my own case I would never have known I was gay if I hadn't fallen in love with another bloke, who was (surprise!) a very straight-acting surfer and rugby player.

And make no mistake:  it does happen in "real life".  I know of a couple of relationships where one straight guy has so loved (as friend, but the love deepens) another gay or bisexual man that he has set aside his straightness (if only for his friend) and entered into a profound sexual relationship.  Just thinking about it chokes me up.  But then I'm an old softie.

But why should women like male pairings?  There are a couple of answers.  One is that the women who like men find the emotional journey that straight men make when they start to love another man compelling.  It is conventional that straight men don't show their feelings and of course, like all generalisations, it's flawed.  Yet it is true that our culture, broadly speaking, doesn't encourage men to express their tenderer emotions.  In a heterosexual pairing, this is expected, this is what women have to put up with.  It's the way it is.  Asking a straight man touchy-feely questions is likely to provoke embarrassed shifting and silences.  But in a friendship which deepens to love, the two men involved are forced to come to terms with what's happening to their hearts, and this process means that they open up.  Some women like to read about this -- the kind of women who read and write slash.  It's romantic; it's not what regular guys do; it answers a need within themselves for men who are tough guys on the outside and tender and loving on the inside.  The doyen of gay writers, Victor J Banis, credits female writers and readers with rejuvenating the genre of gay writing:

[Women] came to a genre that was all but dead, and kicked some life into it. Are some of them bad writers? Of course, but they don’t have an exclusive franchise on that either, being a gay male does not automatically make anyone a great writer either. In the end, for me, it’s all about the quality of the writing. And as I’ve said, I am devoted to this genre, and I think the fact that it is now thriving in a way that it hasn’t for 30 or 40 years is largely due to the influx of women writers and readers.

The second reason why women like men who grow to love each other and then get down to the hot and sweaty is simply that women can enjoy two guys together just as some straight men find two women together sexy.  Read this piece about women being turned on by two men having sex.  And think of the relationships in Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series where a straight woman has many lovers, most of whom are bisexual.

Anita Blake with two blokes. Image from Bishonen Works

Slash was created by straight women for other straight women.  The dynamic of love conquering all, of a forbidden love nevertheless flowering between two men, is a powerful and emotive one.  Add hot sex and ...  It certainly pushes my buttons, and I won't hesitate to say that some of the most erotic and moving m2m scenes I have ever read have been written by women.  Wet eyes and wet undies.  A signal achievement.

From Strictly Male, my review of Karin Lowachee's trilogy, I say this:

I remember a western, its name and author lost in the dim shadows of childhood, where two heroes – but they were nevertheless outlaws, for reasons I have forgotten – are escaping from a posse of good and upright citizens.  One is wounded, and dying, his blood soaking into his clothes and onto the saddle.  The other, his loyal and true friend, is riding with him, risking his freedom and his life, for he could make much faster progress by himself.  At eleven or twelve years old, this was the very essence of romance to me—two strong, manly, tough men staying together out of loyalty and friendship.  To me, a lonely, bullied outsider, a friendship like that was worth dying for.

The essence of slash:  tough and gritty exteriors covering warm, romantic, loving interiors.  And utterly male, even if they have sex with other men.

Very powerful.  


[The artwork is from P.L. Nunn's Bishonen Works, with classic examples of P.L. Nunn's slash art and writings.  Read more about her and other gay-shaded artists here]

[There are a whole heap of interesting, insightful and revealing comments from female (and one male) readers and writers of m/m  below.  Be sure to read them too]

[Update:  This article discusses the issue.  M/m is becoming mainstream.]

The Uterine Replicator

Stuart & Lucy Gent

The terminology 'uterine replicator'  for a synthetic womb (I love it!)  is  Lois McMaster Bujold's.  She used the uterine replicator in Shards of Honor and expanded on the idea in Ethan of Athos.  But SF has come up with the idea of a synthetic womb many times. It's just that Bujold used it to consider how it would allow an all-male society.

Ethan of Athos is about a planet where a vaguely-Christian religious cult has set up an all-male polity and culture, because women are considered as the source of all evil.  It's a charming book, with a romantic and pleasing love story in it, and I wish to all heck I had written it.  Read my review to see why.  Since there are no women on Athos, they have to create children using uterine replicators, from eggs produced by donated ovaries, fertilised using artificial insemination. Like all technological innovations, the changes such an invention would be likely to bring in its wake will likely all be unexpected. 

I was led to think about the whole concept again by this fascinating story reported in Melbourne's Age newspaper. Stuart Gent, who is gay, wanted to have a child of his own.  So he found an egg donor and a surrogate mother, and had a daughter Lucy. Simple?  No.  Time consuming and very expensive, and not without human costs.  What if you could do it more easily and more cheaply?

Let us suppose for a moment that even the troglodytes eventually accept that the Bible doesn't really say that homosexuality  is immoral or evil.  This kind of volte-face is not without precedent.  The churches supported slavery and opposed women's rights.  Until they changed their minds.  The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa solemnly declared after apartheid* ended that apartheid was "unscriptural" though they had enthusiastically supported it, with appropriate Biblical quotes, while apartheid was the orthodoxy.

Let us suppose that as a result of this, societal attitudes to gayness move to indifference, in the same way that once women who wore trousers instead of skirts were considered immoral hussies but now no one could give a flying rat's clacker.  As I noted in a recent post, this seems already to be happening in certain circles.  I think that process is unstoppable, which is why the Christian-Fascists are so unattractively shrill and devious.

Without homophobia and religious hysteria, young men and women would happily try making love to others of their gender.  They might have a boyfriend followed by a girlfriend.  They might have a sequence from one gender followed by a similar number from the other.  When they went to parties, they wouldn't necessarily be on the lookout for someone of the "opposite" gender. 

It's sounds like a wonderful state of affairs, and, don't get me wrong, it is.   But there's a fly in the ointment.  What about children?  Let's assume for the moment that fairly long-lasting relationships (monogamy) between two people are what our species prefers (it might not be, see my piece, Our Cheatin' hearts, and think about the convenience of having threesomes to look after and bring up children) but let's assume that for now.  

With the uterine replicator, gay couples will be able to marry and have children. Of course, they can do that now, by adoption or using surrogate mothers.  But there are all sorts of difficulties inherent in the fact that biology requires a human womb to gestate a baby.  Interestingly, Bujold doesn't consider the fact that because her "invention" would make gay marriage no different in its essentials to heterosexual marriage, since both would use replicators to carry the foetus to term, it would also do away with hostility to gayness.  What is "natural" about a uterine replicator?  There would be no remaining "need" for heterosexual marriage as a parenting device (and she has some interesting enjoyably feminist comments on that aspect of marriage)  even though marriage for love would continue.

But until the uterine replicator has been invented, if you want children, and don't have oodles of money, you'll have to have some kind of relationship with the "opposite" sex.  In our ideal, troglodyte-free world, assuming (as we have above) that monogamy remains the norm, you would probably end up in a heterosexual marriage.  You might have sex with men and women until you decided you wanted a family and then you'd get married and "settle down".   And that would end your bisexual days.  Fidelity may have been set up as a desirable value by the patriarchy, eager to make sure that their wife's (or wives') babies were theirs, but it may also be hardwired into us (though I suspect it isn't.)  And my experience of the matter is that most wives do not take kindly even to the idea of their husbands having sex with their male friends, no matter how liberated they are.

So, absent a uterine replicator, even in our troglodyte-free society, most marriages would look pretty much as they do now, and most people who got married would marry someone of the "opposite" gender.  Most people would in practice be heterosexual, even as they are now.  And because values are often set just by the way things are now,  bisexuality would be seen as OK and normal between the onset of puberty and, say, your thirties, when you "settled down".  Practising bisexuality among older men and women would be considered risqué and even "off".  I know there are even now marriages where the wife allows the husband to have a male lover outside the marriage and indeed I consider such a marriage in my novel Footy.  But they are far from the norm.

Yet marriage has changed dramatically and may change more.  Everybody thinks that marriage now is the way it's always been, but that isn't so.  Read this fascinating essay by Stephanie Coontz in the Washington Post (my thanks to Hunter for alerting me to it)

Some quotes:

For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than love. Parents arranged their children's unions to expand the family labor force, gain well-connected in-laws and seal business deals. Sometimes, to consolidate inheritances, parents prevented their younger children from marrying at all. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty. For others, it was a privilege, not a right. Often, servants, slaves and paupers were forbidden to wed.

 and;

But a little more than two centuries ago, people began to believe that they had a right to choose their partners on the basis of love rather than having their marriages arranged to suit the interests of parents or the state.

Adopting love as the basis for marriage meant other changes, too, especially greater acceptance of the idea that men and women had a fundamental right to marry, even to people of whom their parents - and society - disapproved. By the 1940s and 1950s, many state courts were repealing laws that prevented particular classes of people from marrying. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit interracial marriage. In 1978, that court struck down a Wisconsin law prohibiting marriage by parents who had not met prior child-support obligations. In 1987, it upheld the right of prison inmates to marry. 

 and;

huge as the repercussions of the love revolution were, they did not make same-sex marriage inevitable, because marriage continued to be based on differing roles and rights for husbands and wives: Wives were legally dependent on their husbands and performed specific wifely duties. This was part of what marriage cemented in society, and the reason marriage was between men and women. Only when distinct gender roles ceased to be the organizing principle of marriage - in just the past 40 years - did we start down the road to legalizing unions between two men or two women. 

[My emphases]

As usual, my thoughts have wandered in an undisciplined and, well, wander-y way. But it does seem to me that as we as a society become easy with same-sex relationships, either marriage will continue its seismic shift of the last 200 years, or we'll have to invent the uterine replicator, or both. One thing is certain: the rabid religious right will continue to fight rearguard actions to take us back to some imaginary paradise from the past even as ordinary people rethink and reconstruct all the social relationships we all take and have all taken for granted.

A fascinating time to live in, don't you think?



*apartheid is pronounced apart+hate, easy to remember.  And it means separate (apart) + -ness (-heid, cognate with our -hood.)

Gay Sex by any name . . .

 . . . "but I'm straight"

This is an old report, but I remember commenting on it then, in a group which has now vanished.  The article reported a major study comparing men's sexual identity compared with their actual sexual activity.  About 10 per cent of men who say they are straight have had sex with other men, yet claim they are not gay.  Seventy per cent of them are married.

Point one:  this was ten per cent who admitted to having gay sex.  Yes, the interviewer may have promised anonymity, but  . . .  The report indicated a class divide with working class or members of a minority group or the foreign-born having a higher percentage of men who do this.   I don't know what this means.  Are middle-class whites more in tune with their inner selves, and therefore more likely to be open about their sexuality (which would imply a higher proportion of middle-class than working-class or minority men identify as gay) or are they just better at not telling the truth to unknown interviewers?  It's very hard to believe that the same-sex class divide reflects real divisions in same-sex desires.  But it surely reflects differing perceptions of "truth".  And given unwillingness to admit to a shameful/sinful social predilection, the real number is probably the higher one.

Two:  in the article, a local (Ozzie) spokesman said "many of the 10 per cent would be unwilling to be identified as gay because of the fact that same-sex relationships are still stigmatised, even in a relatively liberal place."  Well, yeah, some.  Except they would prolly not have told the interviewer about the fact they were having sex with men, would they?  Actually, they may simply not think of themselves as gay, either because they like sex with women as well as men so are bisexual (or, better, identify with one of the many bisexualities), or because they regard "gay" as queeny men who dress up in feather boas and wear thong undies.  They're not like that, they believe, even if they do like to fuck men or be fucked by them.  Labels.

"Male" men may enjoy and seek out sex with men but still think they're "all man". If we start talking clichés here, these are men who will bond by talking about how the cement they're standing on has been laid (a recently overheard conversation between two ostensibly straight guys) , or what their car is, or which footy team they barrack for.  They think of themselves as belonging to the whole male tribe (in a way I don't.)    And the cultural majority has defined "male" as identical to "not gay".  Therefore, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of all the blokes they know, including possibly some of those they're fucking, they're straight.  No matter how many times you and I might say "straight? yeah, right," they regard themselves as essentially male except that they fancy a root with a bloke.  Who'm I to piss in their Wheaties?

Three:  these are big numbers.  The UK income tax authorities (not known for their heart) did an analysis about the percentage of the population who would use the new civil marriage provisions, because this would cut tax paid by gay and lesbian couples.  They decided that 7% of the population was gay or lesbian.  This suggests that something just under 20% of the male population either identifies as gay or identifies as straight but is having sex with other men.   Kinsey said:

25 per cent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions (i.e. rates 2-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. In terms of averages, one male out of approximately every four has had or will have such a distinct and continued homosexual experience.

(from my article The End of Gay: the reference "2-6" is from the Kinsey scale, and means all except exclusive heterosexuals)

Think about this:  in a randomly selected group of men, say the blokes in the train or on the tram or in a supermarket, one in four (according to Kinsey) or one in five (according to this analysis) has had more than incidental sex with another man.

 

Four: because these blokes don't think of themselves as "gay" they probably won't support gay rights causes.  It doesn't mean they won't favour gay rights, but we tend (on the whole) to fight harder for causes closer to home than those which (appear) not to really impact us. Similarly, the Christian-Fascists and rocko rightists can say that there are few gays.  The man in the tram will go on thinking that gays are flamers, not "real men" like him, because the at least one in ten of the men around him who have periodic sex with men remain invisible. This is of course why gay rights advocates get so pissed off at these men: the more gay-shaded men are hidden, the more stereotypes are accepted, the harder it is to fight for the right to be accepted as normal.  Hence the continued need for gay pride parades, stereotypes and all.  But do the stereotypes make it more likely that straight-acting gay men or the men discussed in this article will be less willing to support us?

I used to feel that I was the only man I knew who was attracted to other men.  But I have become convinced that there are many, many men who might have sex with other men in the right circumstances. Those "right circumstances" will vary: two sportsmen who are attracted but convinced they're not gay because they're both so "manly": the man on the path in New Zealand who flirted with me (he's not gay, perhaps he thinks, because he hasn't fallen in love with a man, and doesn't want to share a house with one, even though he likes sex with them); the man who loves his wife and his kids but likes to bottom sometimes; the man who simply feels that his affection for his mate needs to be expressed sexually; the man who doesn't even notice the cultural mores, so doesn't really "know" that having sex with your friends is "wrong".  Male (and surely also female) sexuality is much more fluid than we are led to think.

Letter from Thomas

I got this letter from a reader, and (with his permission) I'd like to share it with you:

I just wanted to write to let you know that I have found your blog to be very insightful. And, indeed, helpful.

I am a happily married bi guy as well, though I have in the last year or so struggled to work out exactly what I am. I was so impressed to read your postings about distaste of labels. It brought it home for me that I was really just struggling to define "what" I am, and that in fact it is pretty much irrelevant. I love my wife. I like guys. And that is that.

It also gave me some comfort to know that there are other bi married guys out there who have a lasting and strong relationship with their wife and their kids, and still can appreciate what is good and beautiful in life - be it male or female.  Though I am out to my wife, I am not yet to the broader community.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. There is some fine perceptive writing on your blog and I greatly appreciate your point of view.

Thomas

Firstly, thanks for writing.  I'm never sure whether my own eccentric view of the world resonates out there.  I know that I am odd, very odd.  So to hear from someone who likes my writing, or my rants, or just my style, is great.

Second, I think there are so many guys like you, Thomas.  Maybe as many as one in five guys is bisexual and remain so most of their lives.  It's hard, because the Cartesian dualism in our culture inclines all of us to the view that you're either one, or the other.  But it's more complicated and more subtle than that.  For humans, sex was never just about reproduction.  It was always about bonding, too, because when our ancestors moved around the Serengeti plains, they needed social glue to bind the tribe together.  I suspect we formed extended and overlapping "families" of males and females who had sex with each other, as I discuss in Our Cheatin' Hearts.  

One of the reasons I write my fiction and this blog is that I think it vital that we fight for the right to be gay or bisexual: 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.  That's clear enough, isn't it?  Shakespeare was bisexual, without much doubt.  He loved women: look at the characters he created, full of life and vigor, sexy, feisty, thrilling.  And he loved at least one man:

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
     But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
     Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

 As usual, I digress.

Thanks for writing, and remember, in the end, it's love which matters: omnia vincit amor.  Love conquers all.  And if you and your wife love each other, you will make it work.  The world is full of sorrow and grief and loss and loneliness.  To reject someone for such a paltry reason as their sexual inclination is plain stupid.  My lady loves me for me, for what I am, and a key part of that is my gayness.  I'm sure your lady loves you too, and when you truly love someone, you know that they come as a package, good and bad combined.

Go well.

I Kiss Them Because I love Them

When this paper was reported in our local newspaper it caused a firestorm of criticism, best summed up by the phrase "real men don't kiss other men."   Irate commenters said that they never kissed other men on the lips, because they weren't homos.  And so on and so on.  As if (a) being a real man was some kind of moral imperative* and (b) kissing another man defines you as not a real man.

So first a brief summary of the authors' findings after interviewing 145 varsity and final-year high school men :

• 89% have, at some point, kissed another male on the lips which they reported as being non-sexual: a means of expressing platonic affection among heterosexual friends.
• 37% also reported engaging in sustained same-sex kissing, something they construed as non-sexual and non-homosexual.
• the students understood that this type of kissing remains a taboo sexual behavior, but nonetheless reconstructed it, making it compatible with heteromasculinity by recoding it as homosocial.
• Male-to-male kissing is increasingly permissible due to rapidly decreasing levels of cultural homophobia.

I quote the introduction extensively because it sums up what I have come to see as some archetypal facts about maleness and heterosexuality.

 Heterosexual masculinity has long maintained hegemonic dominance in Western-European and North American cultures (Kimmel, 1994;Rich,1980). Here, it is traditionally constructed against a backdrop of homophobic social stigma. But the stigma associated with men’s homosexuality (as an identity or behavior) reflects more than just the dislike of men having sex with other men: male homosexuality is also disparaged by others because it has been conflated with a perceived lack of maleness and the adoption of feminine traits**. Because of this conflation, both boys and men wishing to be perceived as masculine by their peers must necessarily disengage from those behaviors that have been socially coded as gay. Consequently, homophobia has become a benchmark for masculinity.

Among British youth, Epstein, Kehily, Mac an Ghaill, and Redman(2001) have argued that,‘‘Even little boys are required to prove that they are ‘‘real boys’’ in ways that mark them as masculine, even macho, and therefore (by definition) heterosexual’’ (p. 135). Accordingly, homophobia does more than marginalize gay boys and men; it also limits their gendered
behaviors. Schwartz and Rutter (2000) described this conflation of gender and sexual identities as the gender of sexuality; however, in the context of this article, we refer to it as heteromasculinity. The desire to be perceived as heteromasculine is understandable in a culture that distributes sexuality and gender privilege unequally.

Sedgwick (1990) explored the relationship between the homosocial and homoerotic, arguing that the suppression of emotional behaviors among men facilitated the maintenance of heterosexual power. Furthermore, Bourdieu (2001) posited that suppression of such emotional behaviors maintains the status quo, the subjugation of women. This hegemonic dominance is further accomplished through the codification of same-sex sexual behaviors as being consistent with a homosexual identity (Anderson, 2008; Lancaster, 1988). Almaguer (1991) has suggested that (in an Anglo-American context) same-sex sex historically carries with it, ‘‘a blanket condemnation of all same sex behavior…because it is at odds with a rigid, compulsory heterosexual norm’’ (p. 77). Furthermore, according to Butler (1990), the only cultural model of heterosexuality we have is predicated upon the avoidance of any sexual desire, thought, or action associated with homosexuality***. This is something Messner (2002) described as being‘‘100% straight’’ (p. 422).

Borrowing from Harris’ (1964) one-drop theory of race, in which a dominant white culture once viewed anyone with even a portion of black genetic ancestry as wholly black, Anderson (2008) has argued that a single same-sex sexual experience traditionally renders the public perception of an individual’s sexual orientation as gay. Calling this the one-time rule of homosexuality, Anderson described how, in most Western cultures, this imperative serves as a cultural mechanism to conflate the complex issues of gender, sexual orientations, sexual desires, sexual identities (and the social construction of sexual acts themselves) into the singular polarized identities of gay and straight—simultaneously re-inscribing heterosexual power and privilege through heteromasculinity while erasing bisexuality.

Furthermore, Schwartz (1995) has suggested that the inverse of this rule does not apply to homosexual men: ‘‘We have demonized the power of homosexuality so that we assume it to be the greater truth of our sexual self–as if one drop of homosexuality tells the truth of self,while one drop of heterosexuality in a homosexual life means nothing’’ (p. 12). This one-way application of the one-time rule traditionally creates a double jeopardy for heterosexual men who reveal an experience with any form of sexual behavior socially coded as gay: it both excludes them from achieving the requisites of heterosexuality and diminishes their masculine capital. With few exceptions (cf. Klein, 1993; Reis, 1961), this rule implies that in Anglo-American cultures, men’s socially constructed heteromasculine identities are framed upon exclusively opposite-sex sexual behaviors. Thus, a kiss on the lips has not been part of the historical repertoire of greetings or demonstrations of affection among men for centuries in Britain (Dinshaw, 1994). As Fox (2004) wrote, ‘‘With the possible exception of a father and a young son, Englishmen do not embrace or kiss one another’’(p. 191). In this research, however,we show that this social construction of heterosexuality is currently being contested.

 [The references are to works cited in the article, the emphases are mine]

I find it wonderful to see that the insights I have blindly striven towards are not in fact unique, and that there is a whole academic discourse about maleness and heterosexual self-identity.  I have come to the same place these analysts have reached under my own steam, with my own understandings.  In fact the very first post in this blog was about heterosexism:

It's something I've always known instinctively: straight men aren't afraid of gay or bi men for the reasons we think they are. Straight men, like gay men, care much more about how other men see them than about how women do. They act macho not to impress women, but to impress men.

I also did a couple of articles in Wilde Oats relating to this very topic:  The End of Gay discusses how increasing acceptance of gayness will lead to the strict barriers between heterosexual and homosexual being broken down; while Gay Then and Now discusses how gayness is perceived over the twenty years of Ethan Mordden's Buddy cycle of novels, and how greater tolerance has seen the edges of gayness become less sharp.



The authors of this study make it quite clear that they are talking about a special group here:  university and high school students, not the general population:

Sam suggested that much of the reason there was so much more kissing at the university was because of the liberal environment:‘‘I never kiss any of my friends back home,’’ he said. ‘‘And I can’t imagine it going down too well.’’ When asked about how his friends showed him affection back home, he said, ‘‘Punching and rubbing their knuckles into my head.’’ Comparing the two cultures, he said,‘‘I much prefer a kiss and a cuddle!’’

It's also clear that the kisses are not seen as sexual:

For the young men in our study, this type of kiss has been socially stripped of sexual significance. Whereas kissing a male friend on the lips would once be coded as a sexual act, the symbolic meaning of kissing has been differently interpreted by our informants. Here, kissing was consistent with a normal operation of heteromasculine intimacy. Highlighting this, when Pete was asked about which friends he kisses and which he does not, he answered, ‘‘I wouldn’t kiss just anyone. I kiss my good mates.’’He continued,‘‘You kiss a friend because there is no fear of being rejected; no fear of being knocked back.’’ And when Pete was asked about how he measured who was worthy of being kissed, he said,‘‘It’s not that there is a system to who gets it
or not. Instead, it’s a feeling, an expression of endearment, an act that happens to show they are important to you.’’

A number of other informants spoke of loving their friends (‘‘mates’’), too: kissing became a symbol of that platonic love. Mark said,‘‘They [the kisses] happen because you are the guy’s mate. It’s an, ‘I love you mate’ type of kiss.’’Tim agreed,‘‘Kissing others guys is a perfectly legitimate way of showing affection toward a friend.’’ Ollie, a third year engineering student, added,‘‘You do it sometimes when out having a laugh with your mates, yeah. But I suppose it’s also a way to show how much we love each other, so we do it at home, too.’’

There is an element of deliberate boundary-pushing too.  These men are well aware of the taboos they are breaking, and they do it on purpose:  "having a laugh with your mates".  They could as easily beat up homos to "have a laugh".  They do not.  They kiss each other.  They know exactly what they are doing.  They are being, in the best sense of the word, subversive:

Many of the students said that they also engaged in sustained kissing with other men. Of the 145 heterosexual men we interviewed, 48 said that they have (and sometimes regularly) engaged in provocative [my emphasis] displays of same-sex kissing, which they described as being part of the repertory of jocular banter among friends. This extended kissing may be enacted for shock value, even though our data suggest that this type of intimacy between heterosexual young men is now so common that it does not seem to elicit the desired effect.

I liked this aside:

Of the 25 men who have not socially kissed in our research, none were opposed to it. Ricky joked, ‘‘When I tell my mates what this interview was about, and they find out that I’ve not kissed a guy, you know what’s going to happen? [referring to his belief that one of his friends would kiss him]…I’m not bothered by it,’’he said.‘‘I’ll let you know if it does, so that you can change your statistics.’’ The primary author received a text message from him later that night, reading,‘‘I’m in the majority now.’’

I found this little anecdote rather touching:

Another student, Matt, highlighted how important emotional intimacy was to him, telling a story about breaking up with his girlfriend. ‘‘I was really lonely,’’he said. ‘‘Really depressed. So one night I asked my housemate who is one of my best friends if I could sleep in the bed with him. He looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Come on,’ opening the covers to invite me in.’’ Matt continued,‘‘He kissed me, and then held me. It was nice…. I sent him a text the next day saying, ‘I’ve got the best friend in the world.’’’Matt’s story highlighted not only the intimacy he shared with his friend but that a kiss can also transcend the spatial context of partying.

And, consistent with the view that those who have substantial heteromasculine capital can more easily push the boundaries, more sportsmen (55% or more) have kissed other blokes than non sportsmen (14-22%) 

Finally, despite nearly 90% kissing other men on the lips, only 40% have had a sexual experience with other men.  The 40% is more or less consistent with Kinsey's research:

37 per cent of the total male population has at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age.

 (Quoted in The End of Gay)

None of this implies that lip-kissing is a custom which will inevitably spread to the rest of the population from this group of elite, self-confident young men.  But definitions of maleness are changing, and have changed in the past.  From the Restoration until Victoria ascended the throne, men wore high heels (to show off their calves), make up and wigs.  When I was a teenager, it was considered effeminate and unmanly to wear deodorant.  "The manly tang of honest sweat."  Even homophobes wear deodorant now.  And they probably also use aftershave and conditioner.  How unmanly!  Earrings or earstuds on men were considered a clear proof of effeminacy as well as evidence of "communist" or "radical" tendencies.  So was long hair.

No doubt men kissing other men, on the cheek or on the lips, will in time become as unexceptional and unexceptionable as male deodorant, earrings and long hair.

Altogether a fascinating study.



Footnotes

* I certainly felt that my effeminacy was worse than if I'd been a rapist or thief or murderer.  This is of course the very definition of a taboo:  how could one rationally consider same-sex love or sex as worse, much worse, than rape, theft or murder?

** My own perceptions are that gender dysphoria -- men not acting like 'real men' -- is a much greater taboo than men having sex with other men.   Even within the broad church of gay-shaded men, effeminate behaviour is despised.  "I don't mind gays as long as they act straight".  Et cetera, et cetera.

*** Indeed.  So in reaction (during the decades of maximum homophobia in the first 70 years of the twentieth century) gays in reaction created their (our) own culture:

When Mordden started writing in the mid 1980s, it was the height of the AIDS epidemic.  Gays had won few rights.  Anita Bryant, the orange-juice queen, had in 1977 run a vicious scare campaign about gays “recruiting” our children.  It was only a little over a decade since the American Psychological Association had declared (in 1973) that being gay wasn’t a “mental disorder” (some straight individual psychiatrists and psychologists have yet to come to terms with that).  The noisy and occasionally violent revolution which started after Stonewall, just over 40 years ago now, hadn’t yet delivered the huge advances we’ve gained.  If you were gay or gay-shaded there was a battle on.  Lines were clear.  Either you were with us or you were against us.  Any deviation from the party line was treason.  But this implied that there was a “gay lifestyle”, a “gay culture”.   Gay men weren’t just different from the broad mass of humanity because they preferred sex with other men.  They (we) thought differently.  We dressed differently.  We had good taste.  We were good at interior design and the arts. We had “the Knowledge”.  Once it was enough to call a man ‘musical’ to label him as gay.

(From Gay Then and Now ).