This is an extension to an essay I published, Men, We Are the Problem - and the Solution. That piece was about the heteronormative narrative and the survival template men are made to live inside. This one adds the sexual nuance. Most men, whether they admit this or not, lead every connection they make with sex. And if sex is already running on a script, the question underneath everything becomes simple and uncomfortable.
Are you actually attracted? Or has the inherited narrative been so normalized that the attraction just feels natural? And has what you're dismissing as "not attracted" been properly contextualized?
Since Men’s Mental Health Awareness, Pride, and Juneteenth Month have ended, I wanted to dedicate this essay not just to same-gender-loving men, but to ALL men and the people who love and care for them.
Let me be clear about the register I’m writing this in before I go further, because this conversation makes people flinch. I'm not writing this to be obscene, and I'm not writing it to convert anyone or turn anyone into anything. I'm writing it to name a pattern precisely enough to be examined. Naming the mechanics directly exposes the script hiding inside them. Softening it would be me protecting the script.
Most of us were never trained in self-knowledge. Almost no one was taught to know their own sexual energy from the inside. What we were handed instead was a menu of porn, literature, movies, music, gossip, and the culture's narrow set of available roles. Most people learned their desire from that menu rather than from their own bodies. So when men connect with other men, or with anyone, a lot of them are running scripts of sex through people, rather than meeting the actual person in front of them.
You can see it most clearly, especially in gay/queer spaces, in how quickly the conversation goes to a position. Top, bottom, and verse get set as compatibility before two people have felt a single honest thing in the body. I've noticed that, of all the positions, a side is perhaps the most neutral. Every other position is organized around penetration, which means every other position arrives pre-loaded with a story of dominance, submission, who's "masculine," who's "feminine," and the whole cultural hierarchy imported straight into the bed, even if the goal isn’t the bed. Side sits outside of that. It's the register least cluttered by the popular narrative.
When the script drops away in spontaneous, anonymous encounters between men, the default is usually mutual and non-penetrative. Circle jerks and oral sex. That’s actually side behavior. That may sound crude, but it’s actually just an honest observation. When nobody is performing a positional identity, the body reaches for the thing that isn't organized by the hierarchy. Which makes me wonder how much of the positional identity was ever located in the body to begin with, and how much of it was a role adopted from the inherited menu.
That's not a claim that penetrative desire is fake. Some of it is genuinely located, genuinely owned, genuinely known. The point isn't the position. It’s how you arrived at it. Was it through your own body, or through the script?
There's a version of this that gets left out of every conversation, so I'll name it plainly. There are men who identify as straight and carry a real charge toward feminine men, or toward trans women. It’s an attraction that fits neither the straight story nor the gay story cleanly, so it gets excluded from both.
The culture only offers two bad readings of it. Either "he's secretly gay and in denial," or "that's not real, he's straight." Both force a resolution that isn't honest, because the actual thing lives in a space the available categories don't hold. The charge is real, but it doesn't fit the boxes. And the man carrying it usually has no language for it, which means he can't publicly express or privately examine what he can't name. And this makes it difficult for those who share that charge to feel free in the sharing.
I'm not here to tell any of these men what they are. That's theirs to find. I'm here to say that the category exists, the charge is real, and it can be looked at without being forced into a box it doesn't fit.
When your attraction runs on the inherited narrative, it feels completely natural. There is nothing wrong with that. Everyone starts there. But the moment the question presents itself as is this mine, or is this the script? It invites you to zoom out from what feels natural and look at the parameters.
When you look, some of what you find will be sincerely aligned, genuinely yours, located, and true. And some of it may not be. Some of it may be the normalized narrative wearing the costume of your own desire. You won't know which is which until you look, honestly, without needing the answer to come out a particular way.
This is not about turning anyone gay or straight or anything else. It's about the fluidity of the actual experience, which is wider than the script admits. Masculine and feminine are not opposites parked in different bodies. They are states of being that move with your emotions, and they exist in everyone. The trap is never the attraction itself. The trap is the performance of a fixed identity laid over a body that was never that fixed to begin with.
Examining your fluidity honestly sometimes requires space from intimate contact. I'm a huge advocate for celibacy and abstinence. Giving yourself a period of isolation from the very thing you're trying to understand.
It's important to know that the field is saturated. It's crowded with positional scripts and normalized narratives, and that saturation doesn't just fail to train self-knowledge; it actively crowds it out. Every time you re-enter the field, it re-scripts you before the self-knowing can form. So sometimes the only way to feel what's actually yours is to step out of the contact for a while, let the script go quiet, and see what your body reaches for when nothing is telling it what to want.
In that space, you get to see whether your orientation is re-orienting toward something else, or deepening within its current orientation. Both are valid and constitute self-knowledge. And only you can know which one is happening in you. No one can hand you that answer, and no one should try.
None of this is a prescription for what to conclude. It's an invitation to the inquiry.
The point is self-actualization from a place of honest, transparent, and vulnerable resolve. Then, you get to adjust yourself accordingly, whatever "accordingly" turns out to mean for you. Maybe you examine the parameters and find that what felt natural was genuinely yours all along. Good. Now you know it, instead of assuming it. Maybe you find something the script had been covering. Also good. Now you can meet it.
Either way, you come out the other side holding your own desire rather than the menu's version. That's the whole thing. Not who you end up wanting. But whether the wanting is finally, honestly, yours.
In the meantime and in between time, please be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same.
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