(Re)Introduction
When going through archives of gay pornography, the fetishization of straight men by gay men is unmistakable. There are countless forms of gay porn that involve tricking straight men into gay sex, getting them to do gay things for money, etc. This fetishization in male bondage media often involves depictions of straight men being kidnapped and preyed on by queer men at its most extreme, or less extreme scenarios like behind-the-scenes commentary about a kinky content creator getting the guy that installed his cable to agree to being tied up and photographed for a little extra cash. Either type of story has it's merit in that they involve queer kinksters winning in some way, whether it involves asserting masculine dominance over an attractive straight man who's resisting his restraints and your queer desires for him in a fantastical context or a real straight man consenting to be vulnerable and sexualized for gay men if it means that he can go home with a nice chunk of change in his pocket. For some reason, these scenarios just wouldn't seem as sexually compelling if they involved gay men overpowering and sexualizing other gay men.
On Capturedguys, creator Paul Rosner infamously teases his subs by asking "like that, straight boy?" as they struggle and moan in response to his foot worshipping, stripping, nipple play, etc. Bound Gods videos include interviews with models not only proving their consent to what is happening to them in the feature, but also proving that they are in fact heterosexual. There are numerous websites that have 'straight' in their title like Breeder Fuckers, Straight Hell, Straight Men in Trouble, etc. There was a book in kink circles that was problematically titled How to Rape a Straight Man.
So, a big question that comes to mind is why? Why do gay men sexualize straight men so much? Even though gay men are the most sexually accessible and available to other gay men, why are we more compelled by stories that involve asserting sexual dominance over straight men? What is it about straight men that make us want to see them do gay things, have gay things done to them against their will, etc?
To attempt answering these questions, this blog gets into different aspects of why straight men are often the objects of our sexual desires and fantasies. Each installment will address one of the following topics:
Straight men are "ideal"
Straight men are "normal" and normative
Straight men are exotic to queers
We want what we can't have
Straight men deserve our wrath
Straight men need to understand our world
Straight Men are "Ideal"
I think that most gay men would say that "straight men are just hotter. More real, masculine, ideal, etc." when asked what the appeal of straight men is. On the surface, straight men just seem to be the best performers of masculinity and maleness because we've seen them be breadwinners, leaders, protectors, athletes, law enforcers, business executives, you name it, moreso than women or queer men. However, part of this is because most of us exist in patriarchal cultures, where heterosexual, masculine men are at the top of the hierarchy.
They manage family units, they make and enforce the laws, and they have the power to influence the progression or regression of culture. So, of course anyone who was brought up in such a society will essentially be programed to believe that the heterosexual male is not only the ideal version of man, but the ideal type of human. This could even explain how those who aren't attracted to men, other straight men, also seem to put heterosexual men over anyone else.
As queer men, we're typically raised to be heterosexual by our families and patriarchal society. Regardless of how traditional individual families are, most of us are brought up in heteronormative environments with heterosexual families, in towns and countries with homophobic laws and customs, with very limited queer influences. So, to be raised as boys in these environments, we're not only taught to grow up to be men, we're taught to grow up to be straight men who ought to pursue potential wives who will mother our children that we'd take care of and support. As queers, we might fulfill some version of this expectation by remaining closeted; doing the traditional thing, but with someone of the same sex; or even become internally homophobic from being taught to be ashamed of our own queerness and encouraged to demean the effeminacy in other men. But I think what we really take from this is "this man that my family and society wants me to be sounds like an ideal husband, boyfriend, lover, sexual fantasy, etc. for me."
Instead of doing what our parents and society tells us to do by becoming the type of man that they want us to be, we apply their logic to the men we pursue. Therefore, if our upbringing tells us that we need to look like x, y, or z to be attractive, we wind up attracted to men who look like x, y, or z. If we're taught that we need to be breadwinners that provide for our prospective families to be ideal husbands, we seek men who are capable of providing for us. If we're punished for being effeminate and praised for being butch because "women want men who are masculine protectors," we might pursue men with traditionally masculine qualities, that particularly indicate strength and the ability to protect, over men who are more effeminate or seemingly weak. So, what all this amounts to is, we're taught to idealize straight men whether or not we're being granted permission to sexualize them. Since there's often very limited queer influence in our upbringings, and most queer influences are often painted in a negative light, straight men have usually been the only option for us to look up to.
Straight Men are "Normal" and Normative
Going off of the discussion of patriarchy and heteronormativity, straight men of any variety (as far as race, profession, masculine, feminine, body type, etc) are extremely normalized in our culture. They're as visible and natural to us, and patriarchal culture at large, as water is to a fish. We're not only taught that straight men are ideal, but with things like queer erasure and other forms of queer othering, we're essentially taught that straight men are the only kinds of men that exist. Or, at least, straight men are the only kind of men who are worthy of notable existence.
Obviously, this kind of socializing is bound to make queer men feel shame and alienation because at some point, we learn that we aren't adding up to this rigid, idealized concept of what men ought to be. And to make matters worse, it's nearly impossible to find other queer people to connect and identify with because this shame influences secrecy and attempts to pass as straight.
So, there either weren't forms of queer representation or if there is, we're taught to not like or identify with it. Maybe, with this idealizing of heterosexuality, we might be drawn to men who pass as straight, but are in the closet. Or maybe we like men who aren't closeted, but can still convincingly pass as straight with the only conceivably queer thing about them is what they do with other men behind closed doors.
I think normalcy factors into queer male lust for straight men because it's easy. It's easy because it doesn't take any kind of deconstructing or a revolution for us to just like the men we've been told to like by mainstream society. Men who are conventionally attractive, and masculine, and who star in all the movies and TV shows we watch.
As queer people, we often exist in the shadow of the ordinary and normal. Not only are we taught that queerness is abnormal and shameful, we are often deprived of living normal lifestyles because we get denied rights to marry or have children, our sexualities are sensationalized as perversion, "religious freedoms" make it okay for us to be discriminated against, some of us are denied a legitimate upbringing because our families abandon us when they learn about our queerness, etc, which means that we have to constantly put up a fight just to have what straight people have, the ability and freedom to live a regular life without persecution. So, I feel like we idealize ordinary things that straight people often take for granted because they don't have to fight for them.
What all of this amounts to as far as why we idealize straight men is that we kind of want a world where we don't have to fight for these things. We want the power, privilege, and comfort that straight men have, so we fetishize the ordinary lifestyles that we've been denied as queer people. This, however, can take many forms. Maybe we want to punish the straight man for all that they have and take for granted, as well as what they've taken from us as queer men. We might even want to take this privilege and sense of comfort away from everyone and anyone, "if we can't have it, nobody is allowed to have it." Or perhaps we symbolically want to take them out of commission and take their place. Or maybe, the thought of ordinary, heterosexual life has been made so foreign and out-of-reach to us that we just want a taste of the life of normativity or give the straight man a taste of our world as marginalized people.
Straight Men are Exotic to Queers
As the people that heteronormativity and patriarchy cater to, straight men exist in completely different worlds from queer men. Of course, straight men aren't a monolith and there's a lot of variance between them, but while we were brought up with an expectation to be men that we can't ever be, they were more likely to identify with the culture they were brought up in and usually didn't have to seek niche forms of representation and influence to feel like they are a part of the world. This is how straight people can reach their social peaks in high school, probably marry people they met in high school, and never have to leave their hometowns. These are things that might be more common for queer people today, but it's still a largely foreign concept to the majority of us.
It's this foreign, yet ordinary world that we typically like perverting with our kink and gayness, the office settings that serve "executive realness" or country farms where men get to be rugged "good ole boys," the suburban neighborhoods that lack cultural diversity or rough streets that aren't typically safe for queers. We as kinksters place upstanding authority figures into sexualized peril, frame average dads as sex objects, and make powerful athletes or threatening gang members vulnerable.
We might even embrace it when mainstream media allows a queer coded villain to get an upper hand over the hero, if even for a minute. I feel like we fetishize the normal, but add our twist that places stereotypically masculine figures that are typically there to alienate or defeat us into weaker and more complex roles. This is when the world of the normal starts speaking our language, showing that even masculine heroes are fallible, thus a little more relatable. And this usually tends to be when things are going wrong for normative people.
Straight men don't necessarily have to get married, have children, be religious, and do the whole traditional nuclear family thing, but the option is always on the table for them and society will reward them for it. Unlike queers, they don't have to fight to have a normal life because normativity is just in their nature. Rather, normativity was made for them while it has been used to alienate queer people, forcing us to either bend to their standards or be punished and cast out. This is why the world of straight men is foreign to us even though it's all around us.
I believe that we seem drawn to straight men being objects of our sexual fantasies because we can't usually identify with them. They just become sexy men in uniforms, suits, or gym attire, putting their bodies on display, seemingly oblivious of their sex appeal because they come from a different planet. Consider how easy it seems to be for men to see and treat women as sexual objects. There are many elements of patriarchal culture at play for this, but a main culprit could be the fact that a lot of straight men aren't able to identify with women or respect and see them as people instead of just madonnas or whores.
Granted, a lot of queer men might also not be able to identify with women as well either, but when you combine a lack of identification with sexual attraction to a type of person, you get sexual objectification. This cuts the same way as fetishizing people of other races, ethnicities, body types, etc, because attractive people you don't understand or identify with tend to be exotic. Exoticness adds mystery and mystique to people who are sexually desirable because there's something new and unfamiliar about people who are different, even if that involves the presumably simplistic and vanilla sexual skill and experience of a straight man compared to a queer’s.
When people dwell on superficial things about how different kinds of people look, talk, act, what genitalia they have, etc, they become objects that can be sexualized or even demonized. This is not to say that we can't or don't objectify other queer men, because we can and do, but we are at least more likely to identify with other queer people because their experiences are more like ours. So, when we're attracted to a type of person, but understand them as idealized masculine characters or caricatures that seem to only exist in a fantastical world and exert brute force, it's easier for our minds to justify making them helpless in our sexual fantasies. It's usually more challenging to do this to people we can identify with, which is why it’s difficult to completely sexualize our friends.
We Want What We Can't Have
Aside from wanting a sense of normalcy and belonging, we also seem to want power, whether it's sexual or systemic. For some reason with sexuality, we tend to desire forbidden fruit as a way of getting power. Maybe we find the taboo appeal of wanting something that's forbidden or hard to get, the proverbial "chase" or "hunt" itself, to be part of the fun since things that are readily available and easy for us to get can easily become boring. In some cases, we might just want to pursue potential romantic or sexual partners that don't throw themselves at us, or anyone who asks, and go for people who might challenge us a little for their attention and affection. In other cases, we might pursue potential partners who show no clear interest in us, because if we can get them to like or pursue us, our charm and skills in persuasion have been proven effective.
Consider how much straight men are the cultural standard. We've been raised and taught to be them, that they're the standard and most ideal people anyone could be, but our queerness prevented us from being that. They're sexually idealized in media, but we're told we don't have access to them, since they're "for women" and would never be interested in us, and it's even wrong for us to desire them. Since expressions of homosexuality in the mainstream, from innocent pecks on the lips and two men holding hands to actual gay sex, is all considered perverse, profane, exclusively adult, and sexually alternative, it’s automatically assumed that all queer people are kinky and therefore would accept and consent to kinky sex acts. By this logic, if any gay man is thought to like being submissive and sexually objectified, it’s assumed that he would be easy prey, therefore boring, to over power because he won’t object to his subserviently sexual status and position. So, how can we get and be with the kinds of men that are dangled in front of us as "the ideal," who have no interest in what we have to offer?
Bondage is a good exercise in fictitious and performative refusal of consent. In other words, bondage play allows us to pretend that sexual control is being taken or lost, allowing us to eat the forbidden fruit without worrying about consequences. Therefore, not only can we roleplay as sexy jocks or frat boys horsing around with a roll of duct tape, we can roleplay as straight coded men getting overpowered and sexually taken advantage of by other men. We can enjoy articulations of rape fantasies with queer and consenting subjects who share those fantasies with us, while striving for some form of "realness."
A struggling sub adds plausibility to the fantasy, illustrating the impression that there is an actual power imbalance between dom and sub. These fantasies also allow us to take pride in being able to still get what we want by physically overpowering somebody. Our pride comes from our physical strength to overpower another grown man, our skills in manipulation to lure a man of mature intellect, the general ability to physically restrain somebody, etc, all within a safe and fictional context. Further, having your futile protests ignored from being bound and gagged while experiencing homoerotic pleasure can be the ultimate “no homo” for liking and doing something gay.
In a Straight Hell video, a sub tells his tormentors "you'll never get away with this," to which Dave replies "I don't care. All I care about is what's happening right now and enjoying you." This response to a threat of legal consequence shows utter hedonism in the sense that these "captors" are committing complete felonies by holding a man against his will, but aren't worried about what could happen because they're too busy enjoying what's in front of them. The straight man holds onto hope that the legal system that has been built to serve him could hopefully scare these queer men into letting him go, but it doesn't work because there's an understanding that this system has sort of worked against queer people and these characters are accustomed to working around that system. It's possible that these characters would continue to get away with what they've done and what they will do in the future.
So, being able to overpower a straight man, the authority, patriarch, and socially constructed pinnacle of strength and masculinity who isn't attracted to us and doesn't want our desire, and getting away with it shows us queers that we are capable of winning in spite of the things that work against us and make us powerless. At least in fantasy, it is possible for us to win in the sense that we get what we want, not have to face repercussions for getting these things, and those with normative power and control just have to accept it.
Straight Men Deserve Our Wrath
Aside from the gratification we may get from "the thrill of the hunt," these fantasies also let us queers win at something for once. We've failed at being the straight boys that we were anticipated to be. We've had to hide who we are as sexual deviants out of shame and fear of discrimination and alienation, having to put on a "straight act," even reaching the point of fetishizing that performance and judging other queers for failing at that performance. We've hated ourselves and people like us with society making laws that keep us from living normal adult lives and families sending our youths to conversion therapy.
So, when we fantasize about overpowering the men who are in charge, who have bullied us, kept us from having rights, who were lauded over us just because of who they're sexually attracted to, and who we've been told is the most ideal, why not let ourselves take revenge and win in our depraved sexual fantasies?
With all the status, privilege, control, and oppression that straight men hold over queers, there seems to be a need for revenge. Male bondage often shows that straight men, just like us, are simply people who are fallible and capable of being made vulnerable, being reduced and humiliated, objectified, etc. They also have fears and weaknesses while we are also capable of having strength and power. Speaking of something that straight men seem to fear, at least in porn that objectifies them and any movie that makes dropping the soap in prison shower jokes, we have a particular power in this dynamic.
Even though there's an element of roughness and physical force in gay kinky media that sexualizes straight men, it ultimately uses gayness, not necessarily brutality, to "defeat" the straights. Beyond the straight man just not wanting sexual advances from other men, there seems to be an inherent disgust towards gay men and gay sex, as well as an inherent straight male fear of objectification in this media.
In the world of patriarchy, only women are to be considered sexual objects because men are in charge and gay men shouldn't exist. Patriarchal culture is way too familiar with male gazes and women being framed as sexaully desirable objects, but the thought of women taking over and objectifying men or, even worse, men objectifying men is downright sinful and unheard-of. Since queer men and straight men have many similarities from being male in a patriarchal world, both groups tend to be desensitized to the objectification of women, whether or not we participate in it. Therefore, straight men seem to have an ultimate fear of being seen or treated similarly to how they've seen women looked at and treated by other men, while queers are likely thrilled by the novelty of this dynamic.
It's way too unfamiliar for straight men and many probably can't even fathom the thought of being submissive in a sexual dynamic. And we as kinky queers can not only handle submissive status, a lot of us welcome it with loving arms, making many traditional forms of punishment somewhat useless against us. "You can't beat a hoe with a belt, they like that shit!" Not only that, we also have the power and desire to dominate other men for pleasure that can double as punishment, creating nightmare fuel for homophobia and patriarchy because we don't operate by their rules. The queer bondage world has a completely different game to play and rules that many straights and vanillas can't begin to comprehend. So, not only do we win in this media, but we set ourselves up to win at every turn. Finally, a game and system that's rigged for us.
Straight Men Need to Understand Our World
Beyond the straight male fear of male attention and sexual submissiveness, they also seem to be afraid of liking gay sex and submission because that would completely disrupt their rigid, heteronormative worlds and identities. Does this mean they're gay? Does this mean that they won't wear the pants in relationships with women? Will women reject them for not being man enough? Would their buddies reject them for not being man enough? Would they ever be able to go back to the way things were and forget this pleasure?
Since we rule this little world we've constructed with sexual hedonism instead of traditionally coercive means, the pleasurability of sex is the brush we tend to paint with and it's a fairly queer, genderless medium because pleasure is simply pleasure. If you deny stimuli you enjoy, you're really only hurting yourself. From the queer perspective, straight people do this to themselves all the time. A lot of them tend to not want to follow the trajectory of tradition by getting married, having children, ending up with a Leave it to Beaver lifestyle, yet they eventually wind up in that pitfall because it's natural to them. In spite of whatever radical lives they may plan for themselves in their teens and 20s, single women become wedding-obsessed bridezillas, perpetual bachelors wind up in monogamous marriages, straights who refuse to get tied down by kids wind up having them, etc.
Even when all these things go awry and the straights are miserable, they stick to it because it's all they know and think is possible for adults. When they don't meet up to these standards by a certain age, they take it as a personal flaw and not a system or set of rules that deserve to be broken. The pressure of normativity and being the same as the communities they've grown up in prevail. Not only that, but they force those standards onto other people, queer or straight alike, as if they want to share their misery.
Normativity hurts everyone. While it kicks out queers and acts like we don't exist, it traps straight people. Although putting straight men into gay kink places them in a submissive and objectified position, we're kind of introducing straight men to a world that they don't have access to as men in the rigid confines of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. We challenge masculinity by bringing straight men down to our level, deconstructing that hetero-patriarchical hierarchy by showing them that they can be just as vulnerable and sexualized as women and queer men. On the surface, this can seem like punishment and revenge, but it could also be liberating and mind-opening in a sense.
Even though the privilege of heterosexuality, masculinity, and patriarchy are obviously appealing and straight men might not want to lose that and be at the level of queers, women, or sexual submissives, being at the higher end has its costs. Toxic masculinity gives traditional straight manhood very rigid and hypocritical guidelines to follow because it doesn't let men be fallible humans with vulnerabilities, weaknesses, emotions, effeminate traits, diverse sexual interests, etc. As gay kinksters, we all know that the power and control of dominance is appealing, but it can get daunting, be full of pressure to uphold, and become tiring, especially when subs are dying for attention and for their power to be taken from them. And that's exactly it: having your power taken from you for a moment of time is relieving and liberating while having power is work and takes responsibility.
Since straight men are often tasked with the role of being the breadwinner, head of household, and emotionally and physically strong, they have little room to be anything else. Once they show gayness, effeminacy, or vulnerability, their bros turn on them and some women might question their ability to head a household. As queers, we can essentially be what we want whether it's masculine or feminine, single or partnered, monogamous or open, sexual or asexual, trans or cis, homemakers or breadwinners, etc. Not only that, but as kinksters we understand the value of vulnerability, the escape from control and burden, of having another person take control and care of us as we safely experience helplessness.
Beyond taking breaks from pressure and normativity, doesn't the roughness of kink play seem a bit more inviting to a straight man who's probably afraid of intimacy? Like, they're being "forced" into that role, so that lack of agency provides plausible deniability. Then, the roughness is masculine in the sense that they're being teased and physically abused, instead of being tenderly cuddled and treated like a girlfriend. So, "they have no control" over the pain and pleasure they may experience while tied up, and they can even place themselves into a scene from an action movie where someone is kidnapped, tied up, and tortured by the bad guy. They can experience something gay without feeling gay or guilty about it.
Conclusion/Final Thoughts
On the surface, queer idealization of straight men seems simple like merely being attracted to masculinity, straight men just being more interesting, authentic, attractive, etc, but this appears to have more to do with power, normativity, patriarchy, homophobia, passing, and shortages of queer representation. I, frankly, see the targeting of straight men as out of touch these days now that we have more queer figures to look up to and desire.
I know that attraction to straight men isn't overt internalized homophobia, but when straight men are preferred by gay men over other gay men, you start to wonder. Queer people need to be able to identify with each other and find each other attractive. If we don't, it could be a sign of not identifying with ourselves or not seeing ourselves as desirable.
I myself have experienced internalized homophobia. I used to get uncomfortable with seeing male intimacy and effeminacy, only had crushes on straight boys at school or gay men who'd make me forget they're gay because of how "straight acting" they were, and hated most gay characters in movies and TV. However, I eventually grew out of most of those things, realizing that a lot of this was essentially heteronormative programming that tried to teach me to be straight and not identify with queerness, as well as just poor attempts at representation.
In fact, I believe that I understand heteronormativity on such a critical level because I feel that I, probably like many other queers, was essentially forced to identify with it because it seemed like there were no alternatives. There were obvious differences between me and the other boys and men that surrounded me, but I was told that I was just like them even though I wasn't treated the same as any of them and couldn't identify with them.
It was like being forced into a pair of shoes that are too small, that hurt and made doing basic tasks a chore, but everyone told me that I need to wear them, that I looked great in them, and when my cries for how miserable they made me weren't ignored, I was basically told that I should feel proud of how much discomfort I'm willing to endure for wearing the shoes even though I wasn't given a choice. So, I've essentially worn the shoes, studied them and the world that surrounded them, wondering why this is the way that things are, and here I am today.
Doing this project really opened my eyes about how important things like representation are. It's easy to get swept up into media versions of queer, or really any group of people and assume that is reality, which makes you disassociate with certain types of people even if they're part of the community you belong to. It keeps marginalized people from feeling like they belong in the world or have a community that they could genuinely connect with, so they can feel obligated to just conform.
When your sexuality is part of what makes you alienated in society, it can make you think that your sexual interests and the people who share those interests are bad and undesirable, which, in turn, makes you think that you're bad and undesirable for not meeting up to conformist standards. I feel like a hidden agenda, a "straight agenda" if you will, within this is to keep queer people from forming a sense of community, as well as just preventing gay sex from happening, because if queers can't be attracted to other queers, and only desire the men that they can't have, maybe they won't have sex with each other. Of course, we have found ways around this.
With the evolution of queer acceptance, as well as just being a queer adult who sexually pursues and dates other queer men, I am now attracted to queer traits that other men exhibit, as well as embrace my own queerness. I'm also able to appreciate masculinity and straight coded things without longing for the attention of a straight man or trying to pass as straight myself. Male bondage seems to be a good outlet for embracing male queerness because it normalizes and celebrates, instead of demonizes, male submissiveness.
In the straight world, any man with "beta" status, who becomes a simp for his wife, who gets fucked or dominated by anyone, who has been seen in vulnerable states, etc is worthy of ridicule and social subordinance. However, in the bondage world, it's acceptable for a man to be submissive, show his vulnerable side, and be embraced and dominated by other men because that's just part of the play and also a part of life. No men have absolutely no vulnerabilities or complete and ultimate power, yet people act like some do because of toxic masculine performativity.
We don't have to serve as doormats to straight people who might not respect us anymore, so we no longer have to put them on pedestals. However, this is just my personal take and I know that it will take awhile and several generations of progress to wipe this slate clean because the lauding of straight men is still very much around and will probably stick around for awhile.
I'm actually not even interested in getting rid of the sexualizing of straight men. I just think that we should be aware of the underlying issues with it and let it evolve in a direction that boosts us up as queers instead of knocks us down in certain respects. We can appropriate straight coded things, dismantle the symbolic power of heteronormative patriarchy, overpower the men in charge in our media, and tease them for the submissive status that they likely hate, but not laud or target them because of their heteronormativity. Hell, we can even make more media that targets queer men with power.
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