The question was asked on Qujora: How do straight men feel when gay men hit on them? The answers that followed were typical Cultural Left Quora types. They were all along the lines of, “Oh no, I would be perfectly ok with it. It would be flattering. But I would tell him thanks but no thanks.” One thing I found shocking was how many straight men have been hit on by gay men. A number of the straight men commenting said they had been hit on by gay men many times. I guess this goes to show a couple of things that I have always suspected:
- Gay men don’t have the faintest idea who is gay and who isn’t.
- Gaydar may work sometimes, but the false positive rate seems incredibly high.
- Gay men probably just go after any goodlooking man. I had some friends who were (straight) male models, and they told me that they had gay men after them constantly such that it was almost like swatting mosquitoes.
Here is my answer:
It makes me extremely uncomfortable.
Do I get angry at the gay man for hitting on me? No, I would not get angry at the man because that’s rude and mean, and I am not a mean person. Would I get angry afterwards? Quite possibly. Or disgusted. Or frightened and worried.
First of all, this has happened to me so many times I cannot even count them. For a long time, it just made me feel extremely uncomfortable.
Once as a teenage boy, I was hitchhiking, and a very nervous man gave me a ride and then asked if I would give him a blowjob. I got very offended and angry, said no, and demanded to be let out of the car right then. He got very upset and started crying and said he wanted to take me home. All the way home he was crying and saying, “I’m not a bad person.” This was 1973 before things got so liberal. I must say that this is a very sad story and I did feel rather sorry for this tragic man.
It is generally not true that gay men who get angry when gay men hit on them have “issues.” Issues implies that these straight men are secretly gay themselves or some other idiocy.
This goes back to the stupid but very popular notion that homophobes are all gay themselves. They’re not. Yes, there are some men who are engaging in some reaction formation. Instead of being gay, these men are basically straight with a small amount of homosexual interest. I suppose they can’t handle having that bit of interest, so they assault gay men or men perceived to be gay.
I have found instead that the more masculine and aggressively heterosexual a man is, the more he reacts negatively towards gay men. So most homophobes are not gay at all. Instead they are extremely macho and aggressively heterosexual men who simply hate and despise gay men.
Gay men need to get over this crap that all homophobes are gay. Maybe a few are a bit gay, but most of them just hate your guts. Yes, gay men, there are a lot of men who just out and out hate you for whatever reason. This is a bitter pill to swallow, so maybe that is where the homophobes are gay nonsense came from.
People want to know why straight men hit gay men who hit on them. Well, here is the reason, and I have quite a bit of experience with this.
As I said, I have gotten hit on by gay men more times than I can count, mostly when I was a young man in my 20’s. I was often told that I was very handsome back then, so maybe that was it. Also a fair number of people used to think I was gay myself, so maybe that was part of it too.
Now, when I told people that gay men hit on me, I got this aggressive, violent reaction that typically boiled down to the person calling me a faggot. The reasoning goes like this: to a lot of homophobic men, a man should be so aggressively macho or hypermasculine such that it would be dead obvious to anyone, including a gay man, that he was not gay. So a real man would never get hit on by a gay because all gay men would figure out he was straight and leave him alone.
You follow?
Ok, now following on from that, these same homophobes say that if a gay man hits on you, that means you’re gay. Yes they actually believe this and quite a few times, when I related how gay men wouldn’t leave me alone, that was the response I got: “That’s because you’re gay, Bob.”
Get it?
Along the same lines, a lot of homophobes think that if a gay man hits on you, then that is because you give off a gay vibe. In other words, if they hit on you, it’s because they think you’re gay. And why do they think you’re gay? Because you act gay obviously. So when you admit that a gay man hit on you, you are admitting that you act gay.
I admit that I often worried this. When a gay man hit on me, I used to get quite worried. “Why did he hit on me? Does he think I’m gay? Why does he think I’m gay? Do I act gay? Do I look gay? What am I doing wrong here?”
Now most straight men find it very insulting if you tell them that they act gay. It’s such an insult that if you say it, you might just get hit.
One more thing: masculinity. Masculinity is a huge deal to most men, though none of them will ever admit it. It’s also a vast deal to most women, and none of them will ever admit it either. Masculinity is sort of the elephant in the room that no one talks about.
Now when a gay man hits on a straight man, he has just given the straight man the message: I think you’re gay. Other possible messages are: You’re gay. You act gay. You seem like you are gay, etc. etc.
Now many men perceive messages like that to be attacks on their masculinity. And in a way it is. So a gay man who hits on a straight man is committing a serious assault on that man’s masculinity. You’re telling him he’s not a man. You’re calling him a faggot.
One thing I never do is attack a man’s masculinity. I also never call any man gay ever for any reason, even if he is flaming. I know my gender very well and I know that many straight men will defend their masculinity aggressively. If you seriously attack a man’s masculinity in any way, you are likely to get an angry response. You might even get hit. You might even get killed. So what it boils down to is that I consider all men to be potential killers (sadly that’s what they are), and I am so frightened of men that I would never insult a man’s masculinity for fear he might kill me.
So there you have some of the reasons why straight men react angrily or violently if a gay man hits on them. It’s not a bafflingly irrational act. There’s a logic behind it. You may not agree with the logic, but it’s there all right.
