An Ode To Straight Men
It is no secret that I have had a thing for straight guys all my life.
It dates back to high school, having had my first love and semi-relationship be a threesome between a straight guy and girl at 16 years old. It carried on into working in the adult entertainment industry, getting up close and personal with many a straight male porn star who, after banging several hundred vaginas a year, were interested in trying something different -- or going out on the town with female porn stars finding hot straight guys to approach with the proposition, "You can get with my hot porn star friend, but you've got to get with me too."
More often than not though I don't even have to seek it out. After putting it out into the universe for so long, it seems straight men often gravitate towards me. They always have I guess, looking back.
I don't find myself falling in love with them. I have developed great friendships with some straight guys who liked to experiment over the years and I do feel love for them, but not in a romantic "in love" sort of way. That only happened with the first one. I'm not quite that self-destructive.
There is a bond that I have with the many straight men in my life though that is completely unique from that I've ever felt with gay men or women. It is similar to the bond they have with their straight male friends, a sort of "bros before hoes" attitude that is born of an unspoken understanding of what it's like to be a boy that no one else can understand. No matter how straight a guy may profess to be, there is something undeniably sensual about the bonds so close as those.
Women have always had the complaint that while boys are raised to grab their crotches and spit on the ground and say lewd things and lust after girls, the female race is brought up to be proper, not speak of certain things or have lustful feelings. This is true and it is certainly most women's cross to bare as they get older and it instills a structure that eventually they have to break down.
But there is an equally destructive structure that boys are raised with that many of them, particularly straight men, never do find their way out of.
Though boys are welcome to be the lewd pranksters, they're not free to show their emotions. There is only one universally acceptable emotion for boys in every household across the world and that is Anger. Therefore, all other emotions -- hurt, sadness, fear -- those feelings that are deemed everything from "feminine" to "weak" are transposed over time into anger. Only then can those other emotions be expressed.
I mentioned this briefly in a past entry when I was visiting my hometown in Indiana: How do you tell straight men from gay men walking down the straight? The gay men are smiling. ... Funny, but true. In small towns especially across America, you don't see random straight men strolling down the street with an ear to ear smile greeting each person who passes by. They walk stoically, blank of expression, with a cautious wall surrounding them or often with their head down altogether.
When you think of a group of straight men laughing and having a good time what do you think of? You think of them drunk. Or you think of them doing something they're not supposed to be doing.
Being a gay man, I'm very open with my feelings. I wear my heart on my sleeve and my life is an open book.
I express everything I am feeling when I feel it.
I can't imagine a life where I couldn't feel that freedom.
There is a great empathy that I have for straight men and that is actually the thing that attracts me to them.
For the straight guys that find gay friends, sexual or otherwise, they finally have another man in their lives that they can come to and express certain emotions to that other friends might deem "gay" or just too heavy.
I believe there is a man and a woman inside every human being and I don't believe that we are complete individuals until we are fully comfortable embracing the whole of who we are. Straight men have had pieces of their heart castrated from them at a very early age and it's something many of them never get over.
As a gay man, I know repression. I remember it well.
It just makes me want to embrace them.
posted by Jason Sechrest at 2:36 PM
4 Comments:
Do you think we're partially at fault for causing these emotional depression? Do you also think us defined tightly like a gridlock of what has to be feminine and what has to be masculine?
We are human, we have bloods, we have emotions, we have souls, we're not robots. We created repression, we created catastrophic emotional ending of a story. We just can't help but kept creating them.
If women complaints and frustrated, why not embrace the problem and destruct this psychological shield of str8 men?
Correct me if I'm not 100% right on this.
cheers
jimy
It's a childhood issue so it falls on the parents.
In the day to day grind of picking up and dropping off and homework and dinners, I think it's easy to parents to forget that children are becoming conditioned to society every day.
It's incredibly important to instill in them at home a feeling of security to exposing all sides of themselves -- and that anyone who tells them otherwise outside the home is not correct.
I like how conscious and aware you are of people around you and how men in america are brought up. I am straight and luckily I was raised by my mom and for some reason have about 4 female friends to every 1 guy friend. They actually wished I was gay just because plutonic relationships between 2 sexes are hard to keep plutonic when the 2 people are heterosexual. Anyways, this is good writing. I enjoyed reading it.
I can relate to all of this. The emotional repression thing turned me away from other men at an early age. I became afraid of them, and I trained in Karate for years until I finally felt that it was safe enough to approach other men again, even for the sake of friendship. It actually took a straight man who fell in love with me some effort to break me out of deep repression.
We don't have sex, but Steve has still become my best friend. I treasure him. We share an incredible, unique bond that borders on ecstasy. And basically, my findings are that people continue to limit their emotions, or they don't. Given the right amount of permission to FEEL one's emotions, any person, gay or straight, can override the issues from older generations!
Social pressures on all the levels (from family to society) keep people in check, and I believe that habits like to continue themselves. Repression and suffering are horrible burdens to bear alone, but the only person who has any power to change that kind of thing is the individual.
While I did not create gender roles, I played right into them, even as a gay person. It took a lot of work for me to break that cycle. I was terrified of being considered inferior, and I know the pain of being locked in delusions. But the pain of repression is good motivation for people to break through the barriers of current society, for their own sakes. It just requires honesty and some personal willpower. There is no honor in isolation or denial. There is only suffering.
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