I wanted to reprint this yet again since this topic remains current and valid…
I was trying to put my thoughts together on a review I was doing of Amber Green’s Bareback. Then it occurred to me that I had spent the entire review simply relating a general issue I have with some Gay Romance stories when it comes to using the old Straight To Gay Male Character Story Arc.
So first let’s put some of my own personal opinions about male sexuality in regards to Bisexuality and Homosexuality out on the table here…
The Northwestern University in Illinois and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto created probably one of the most controversial reports recently in a little study they did with self-identified “Bisexual men”. Taking a group of these “Bisexual men” they proceeded to wire their dicks up and showed them both male-male and girl-girl and then male-girl porn. Well Gee Whiz! Guess what? They found that 75% of these guys responses mostly mirrored the Gay male control group.
Oh My God! Does that mean that the other 25% were closeted Straight guys?
Well not in my opinion, I think those guys were most likely quite happy with the ease that Gay guys have in getting laid on a regular basis, that’s all. Why buy the bull when you can get the horns for free?
See, I don’t find this study all that radical to my, most likely pessimistic, view of the world as long as it is taken with some common sense and the knowledge that it in no way fully explains the human side of the equation.
There is a strong dichotomy in men (Gay-Bi-Straight) between physical sex and emotional love.
Repeat after me… MEN ARE PIGS!
For the price of a couple of shots and a six-pack of beer and the promise of a discreet blow job or a quick fuck with no potential ramifications they will pretty much do anything sexually you might want to do, man on man sex, the affair with the secretary, the wild weekend orgy.
BUT… When it comes to who they want to meet dear old mom and dad… WELL That’s a whole different can-o-worms.
Right guys?
The Northwestern study simply misses that one key thing in how men think about sex. From my point of view Bisexual experiences are just about access and opportunity, helped out if there are no possible social consequences, which means ultimately nothing emotionally to the typical guy, and are as common as dirt for the young adventurous randy male.
Bisexual emotions on the other hand are probably, in adult males at least, the most rare of occurrences. I’m not gonna say it can’t happen, I am gonna say don’t go holding your breath when trying to find this special male animal. There would most likely have to be a lot more complexities to the situation for that to happen.
I forgot to mention that women were also tested and that they are more likely to be truly Bisexual. No DUH!
So as the article states Women are from Venus AND Mars, Men are from Venus OR Mars.
So add all we know the commonly known and institutionally enforced Bisexuality like in the military or prison and the sexual experimentation of teenagers and what you get with this line of thinking is that 75% of the guys in that study were from a homophobic background and are simply in the normal process of coming to terms with being great big, man loving, queens. They are claiming to be Bisexual because of self denial.
This my friends has a whole bunch of people upset and very bitter. Now in my nasty little piggy mind that indicates someone’s getting close to some truth there.
Just don’t talk about this too much because it’s yet another sensitive issue for those more conservative insecure macho men. If sex is transitional but preference is permanent or genetic then no matter how over the top you perform in bed with a woman if you are not emotionally available to them but are always there for your buddies, um well… Which leads us to that wonderful cliché “It’s all just a phase they are going through.”
So what am I getting at in regards to the old Straight To Gay Male Character Story Arc?
Simply smacking any old Straight male character with the whole “Surprise you are a Gay Romance Hero!” story line is fucking bull even if he is secretly Bisexual. The Hero should always have been more intimate emotionally with men besides whatever sexual experiences he has had. So in other words making someone Gay because of sex alone does not do it for me. (Contemporary Romance wise, Paranormal Romance you can carefully use several magical ways to get out of this quandary.)
If you honestly want to write this type of story you should make it clear the “Straight” Hero has an awareness that this has always been the way he “felt” despite whatever takes place sexually.
It’s like what the Oracle said to Neo in The Matrix…
Being the one is just like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love. You just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones.
The Hero who is supposedly always been or acted straight should have a clue that he has never had emotional fulfillment with a woman because he has always been closer with his male buddies. There has to be some form of self awareness in order to make the leap into falling in love.
He should not just wake up after getting a really incredible blow job and decide he wants to be Gay.
Much like that 25% in the study guys who like great sex are just guys who like great sex and they are not HEA material in my book.
Sex is transitional but preference is permanent or genetic gives you a rich emotional patchwork to explore with your character. So why shorthand this aspect with a couple of quicky Gay sex scenes? That does not convince anyone who has thought this whole transitional process through or in my case experienced it.
Being Gay is a form of self awareness of who you really want emotionally, it happened with me very young but I have met guys where it took time to sink in. There are tons of Gay fathers out there. It’s not a condition that suddenly happens without short circuiting a huge amount of socially and religiously encouraged denial. Talk to any Gay guy who was married and had kids, so he had Straight sex right, but now swears he is 100% Gay and he most likely will tell you he always was Gay. Nothing about confronting that condition could possibly happen over night.
I am only pointing out a particular problem and I am in no way trying to single out Amber Green here and I am not making any accusation of any type of homophobia at all.
I also find the whole “Straight Women writing books about Gay Men for other Straight Women” explanation given typically for when a story fails in this way suspect. Would anyone have the nerve to say they are White Women writing books about African Americans for other White Women?
I do not think so, I could be wrong though.
Tags: eBook Commentary, Gay Romance
JL Langley wrote,
*applause* take a bow! That was very well said. I actually had a similar conversation (aka an argument) today over the phone about this very issue.
Link | October 15th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Anne Douglas wrote,
TP, I’m glad to see you back!
Link | October 15th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
K. Z. Snow wrote,
TP, none of this surprises me. Just hop on over to Literotica (or “Litrotica,” as some of us fondly call it) and check out their forums.
There are hundreds of posts from guys who swear up and down they’re straight yet are dying to hook up anonymously with other men. They’re salivating to experience dicks that aren’t their own. I mean, they fully and freely admit their desire, post pictures, talk dirty to each other (often quite explicitly), are eager to set up “dates,” and even boast about jerking off while reading other posts.
So I think your conclusions are probably accurate. The build-up to realization of emotional need takes WAY longer and can be a much more wrenching process than the build-up to realization of simple desire . . . which likely takes place in seconds. It’s interesting too, by the way, that most of these “I wanna suck dick” straight guys claim to have an aversion to kissing, fondling, and hugging. They just want to cut to the slurp-and-burp action.
Ain’t human nature fascinating?
Link | October 17th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
rocket_writer wrote,
I concur. Completely. one does not wake up gay one day, there’s always been a feeling of something’s missing or the like. I can over look it but the writing has to be fan-fucking-tastic in every other respect, which isn’t usually the case.
cheers, rocket
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 9:26 am
Erastes wrote,
Wonderful post Mr P, applauds madly. I agree that I don’t like the BING! I’m gay routine, and there are ways – as you rightly say – and it doesn’t take much – to infer that your character has been gloming men before in his life. (I insist that Harry Dresden, for this very reason HAS to be at the very least bisexual, no matter how his creator insists he isn’t)
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 11:26 am
kirsten saell wrote,
I also find the whole “Straight Women writing books about Gay Men for other Straight Women” explanation given typically for when a story fails in this way suspect. Would anyone have the nerve to say they are White Women writing books about African Americans for other White Women?
I do not think so, I could be wrong though.
I don’t think you’re wrong. When an author, straight or gay, does the emotional journey justice, it can be a wonderful thing. But when a straight author belittles it or deems it unimportant, he/she’s as guilty of cultural appropriation as Cassie Edwards. (And I actually said almost exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same words as you just did, in an email to a friend not a week ago, lol.)
I also likened the “it’s straight women writing for other straight women” argument to a straight guy writing about (or filming) ostensibly straight women “going lesbo” and dildo-fucking each other for the titillation of other straight men–there seems to be an general perception of one as okay, and the other as sexism and exploitation, as if men can never be objects of sexual exploitation by women, because of their male privilege.
As for “sex is transitional but preference is genetic”, not being a man (let alone a gay man), I can’t really say. Does that mean a gay man can never be aroused by a woman? Or does it simply mean that deep emotional and sexual compatability is impossible with a woman, and the man will always feel something is missing?
From the few studies I’ve looked at, I do believe that women are more capable of true bisexuality than men are. But in the end, behavior-wise, most of us are probably only as straight or as gay as our options.
This was a really interesting post! :)
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 1:38 pm
TeddyPig wrote,
As for “sex is transitional but preference is genetic”, not being a man (let alone a gay man), I can’t really say. Does that mean a gay man can never be aroused by a woman? Or does it simply mean that deep emotional and sexual compatability is impossible with a woman, and the man will always feel something is missing?
“Sex is transitional” means just that, I think sex is fluid so bisexual experiences are not as rare as people make them out to be. On the other hand just because I might find a woman attractive and sexy though does not make me any less Gay.
Men can have sex all we want with whomever for whatever reasons (denial, survival, pleasure, entertainment) but from everything I have read and experienced it seems to be your “genetic or predominant preference” for emotional attachments to either men or women that sets your course. Not how many kids you had while denying whatever was going on emotionally.
I do not find the studies findings surprising that women are more likely to be truly bisexual because women seem to have their sexuality closely wired to their emotions. So it seems to me women are more likely to do what they say and say what they mean. So if you think I am calling men big fat cheating liars. Why yes, yes I am.
Science is still exploring all this but it sure seems to be unearthing a lot of common sense things me and my other gossipy gay friends already knew but we mostly whispered about so not to hurt peoples feelings.
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
AM Riley wrote,
Thanks for setting this down point by point. I’ve had so many weird arguments with people who really want to believe that a man can be straight and madly in love with a woman and have NEVER EVER EVER been attracted to men and then WHAMMO he falls in love with this one special guy…
Right, baby.
Bisexuality makes everybody so nervous, one just knows it touches a lot of phobias.
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Amber wrote,
Where we run into some of these problems is not so much in moving from the fairly well-charted waters of m/f relationships to the less-charted territory of m/m relationships, but in translating the fiction-writer’s staple of a female protagonist who becomes sexualized with respect to one man (and one man only). In current m/f fiction, it’s not that difficult to expand the sexual awareness from the initial awakener to another person, or any number of other persons, but basically the sexual awareness begins with awareness of one person. The instinct is to say that a man can also be sexualized by one person only, male or female, and that his awareness can change dramatically from that point. But if I’m getting what you’re saying, pig, men DO NOT get sexualized by their reaction to one person. They’re moving in a sea of targets, constantly, and need only a focus.
If I’ve got that right, I’ve come a long way.
But then I start wondering about the D/s stories that do appear to show a man being sexualized in a new and different way by his reactions to a particular person, and (at least at first) only that person. How does that follow, if it does? Or is this another area in which fiction doesn’t reflect how men’s psyches actually work?
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 6:38 pm
TeddyPig wrote,
The instinct is to say that a man can also be sexualized by one person only, male or female, and that his awareness can change dramatically from that point. But if I’m getting what you’re saying, pig, men DO NOT get sexualized by their reaction to one person. They’re moving in a sea of targets, constantly, and need only a focus.
No I said there is a strong dichotomy in men (Gay-Bi-Straight) between physical sex and emotional love.
Men may participate in something physically but feel something completely different and learn to accept that as a duty.
I think society, our own family etc play a strong role in sexualization. We see accepted heterosexual norms constantly right? Yet there are still gay people and we still get the high profile Ted Haggards these days so obviously that cannot be the full picture of how people function.
I think from what I have read and experienced the predominate preference of emotional attachments is probably set from birth but the triggering sexual events are complex and obviously the heterosexual influence from social norms can be suppressive and act as a mask. So for some it takes time and others figure it out right when they start having sex.
A lot of men I have talked to (I have met a shit load of them here in North Carolina I tell you) say in retrospect even if they were married and had kids and went to church every Sunday that the homosexual attraction was always there but their situation required time for them to come to terms with it so who am I to say different. They themselves say it was not that much of a surprise to them and I have to agree.
It was not a revelation to them it simply was relief in finally accepting it.
Link | March 31st, 2009 at 7:42 pm
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