The first time I saw a gay man on TV was when my mom was watching reruns of "Desperate Housewives." I remember watching in horror at a particular plotline where the gay teenage son of one of these “desperate” housewives seduced his mother’s boyfriend.
I witnessed then, something I have come to see constantly — the hyper-sexualization of gay men. I have seen countless shows or movies where gay men are nothing but an accessory side character whose sole purpose is to uncomfortably hit on nearby straight men or make lewd comments. It’s not surprising that the promiscuous gay male trope does not exist solely within the confines of a screen. It permeates out into numerous aspects of our own society.
Slut-shaming assumptions within queer men aren't uncommon. I myself have experienced them. Our media portrayals don’t serve us justice and, quite honestly, we don’t do ourselves any favors either.
I know gay men who, at young ages, engaged in sex with men decades older than themselves through apps like Grindr. This past weekend, I was speaking to a friend regarding his recent sexual flings, and he revealed he had been using a new website, “Sniffies,” to hook up with other gay men. He explained that this was a new site designed specifically for “cruising,” and allowed for quick, anonymous hookups. It was, essentially, Grindr on steroids.
Cruising is the act of searching for a sexual encounter in a public space, typically in a quick and casual way. It was designed as a system for historically queer people to have sex with each other in secret during a period where homosexuality was illegal, and thus necessitated anonymity. Gay men would “cruise” in public restrooms, at YMCAs, in bathhouses, through subtle codes in search of other participants.
For centuries, gay men have been labeled as sexual deviants. When I think of the depictions of gay men in the media, I feel that we have fallen into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have no intention of shaming anyone’s sexual practices, but many of the queer men around me have embraced this promiscuous label as a medium of reclamation. Reclamation may serve as a method for reasserting our agency, but it might also preclude us from breaking free from these stereotypes in the first place.
If these practices were born out of the criminalization of our sexualities, I can't help but wonder, why we, as a community, are so intent on preserving them. There are times when being open about our sexuality can be unsafe, but it is often regressive for us to reduce our sexuality to anonymous, meaningless hookups. The dynamics of these gay encounters were born out of a desire to stay hidden from society, so why maintain them?
I’m not hating on casual sex by any means. If you enjoy hookups, that’s well within your right to participate in them. But, there’s a huge difference between a casual hookup and continued unsafe and unprotected encounters with people you briefly exchanged pictures with online.
As queer people, we deserve healthy and safe sexual relationships. Cruising and anonymous hookups might be a part of our history, but that doesn’t mean they need to be a part of our future.
