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Some think he needs to wake up and smell the very gay coffee, but others chalk it up to how poorly we understand sexuality.
By John Sundholm — Written on Mar 24, 2023
Can a guy still be "straight" if he sleeps with other men? That's the question at the heart of a man's post in the "r/TrueOffMyChest" subReddit, a forum for people to confess something weighing on their minds.
By now we've probably all heard that sexuality is a spectrum, especially as our ideas about sexuality and gender identity become ever more fluid—and science continues to back up the notion, as shown in the video below.
Accordingly, the man's post about his sex life sparked quite a debate about what it means to be straight, gay, bisexual or otherwise.
A man says he's straight even though he has sex with other men 'once or twice a week.'
It began as a way to break a "dry spell," but quickly escalated to more. The man says having sex with men felt like "losing my virginity all over again," and he really liked it.
Desperate to end his long spell without a girlfriend or any sexual partners, the guy writes that he decided to take things into his own hands and expand his search criteria on online dating apps.
"I just wanted to have sex," he writes. So he "went on Tinder and changed my preference to dudes." Before long, he had matched with several men and "found a dude that I felt comfortable meeting."
And while it was awkward at first, it quickly became something he was really into. "It felt like I was losing my virginity all over again because it was all new to me and I had no idea what I was doing," he writes, "but I enjoyed it a lot." The experience "started a trend of me having sex with dudes," and soon it became a regular occurrence.
The man says he's not attracted to the men he has sex with, he just likes having sex with them.
He now has sex with men on a weekly basis, but says he doesn't think he's actually into them—at least, not in the way that he's into women. And it's made his long "dry spell" in dating women less of a problem, too. "My dry spell with women is now [a] year," he writes, "but I don't really feel that bad anymore because I'm having sex weekly."
But despite his casual, circumspect attitude about the whole thing, he's kept it tightly under wraps. "No one knows about this," he wrote, adding that he never brings his male sexual partners back to his house and hasn't "spoken a word about this to anyone." But he felt like he "just needed to tell someone," so he posted about it on Reddit.
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Many online think the man is just in denial about being gay, but others say he's probably just bisexual—and that sexuality is a spectrum anyway.
"I don't think you're straight..." one Redditor wrote. "I hate to break it to you but I'm pretty sure banging dudes makes you gay." Another user cracked, "Nope... I've never gone through a dry spell and thought I'd love to fu-k a guy," but added, "as long as you are happy and safe... That's all that matters."
That sort of easy, black-and-white thinking might be the simplest approach for us to understand, but it doesn't hold up to what we know about how the sexuality spectrum.
As explored in the video below, according to a 2019 study, some 40% of heterosexual people asked said they could see themselves being attracted to the same sex if the right person came along.
Another 25% said same-sex attraction was "unlikely" but they wouldn't rule it out, while another 10% said "maybe." But of all the straight people surveyed, only 4%—just four in 100!—were unequivocal that same-sex attraction was an absolute impossibility for them.
Bisexuality is nothing new—and neither is the assumption that it just means that someone is in denial about their homosexuality.
That so many people seem open to the idea of bisexuality nowadays shouldn't come as any surprise.
As life coach Denise LaFrance told us in 2015, the Kinsey Scale, which ranks sexuality from an "exclusively heterosexual" 0 to an "exclusively homosexual" 6, was developed by biologist Alfred Kinsey all the way back in 1948, decades before so-called "alternative lifestyles" were even remotely acceptable in society.
Incidentally, Kinsey's scale also included a rating of 'X' for asexuality—a sexual identity only just beginning to be talked about in recent years.
But despite how long we've known about the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, accusations of denial like the Redditor's post elicited are also nothing new. As the TikToker below explains, people "[assuming] you're not actually bi" is part of the territory for bisexual people, especially for bisexual men.
Thankfully, most people on social media who read the Redditor's post seemed to understand that bisexuality was real—and that it really shouldn't be this big of a deal to own up to one's same-sex proclivities. Even gay icon Julie Brown, perhaps best known for her role as lesbian gym teacher Ms. Stoeger in "Clueless," got in on the conversation on Twitter.
Here's hoping Brown's "whatever, just enjoy yourself" ethos becomes the default response to people's sexuality in the future. As another Redditor plainly put it, "sexuality is a spectrum my dude. Sleep with whomever you want to, who cares!?"
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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.