ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 11/4/2010
Posts: 26,597
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Vice: "Straight men are having a lot of gay encounters"
Quote:
Jane Ward's new book, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, is an investigation into "no homo" culture, which charts the many ways in which straight white men explore, explain, and excuse their sexual behavior with other men. So readily visible are the pieces of evidence she amasses, and so surprising are her conclusions, that reading Not Gay is like doing a Magic Eye puzzle for the mind: All the dots you'd never before put together suddenly snap into place, allowing you to see just how hot for other men some straight men are.
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.
In particular, Ward pays close attention to the ways in which white straight men justify their own sexual behaviors with other men. She neatly breaks down common defenses given to "explain" such actions.
Ward is not arguing that these men are "really" gay or bisexual (though some probably are). 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.
I think that we're again in a time in which all of this is shifting, because there's such a push by the mainstream movement to normalize and assimilate all of us queers, through marriage, for instance. So I think what we'll see is as homosexuality and homosexual sex become increasingly normalized, they'll stop triggering the gag reflex in your average American. There'll be more and more room for people to engage in it and to make sense of it however they want.
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such an interesting article
http://www.vice.com/read/how-to-have...=vicetwitterus
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