Answered on Quora:
No. The campier the straight man is, the more likely that he is not even straight at all. He’s likely to be either a closeted gay, or he will come out later on. Most completely heterosexual men are not campy.
As far as straight men who are so blazingly effeminate that they are just about queens, over on Datalounge, a gay chat site, one man said that he had known several “flaming” straight men who had wives, families and two or more children. Most people shrugged their shoulders, looked at the wife and family and said whatever.
You see, back then, there were some effeminate straight men with wives and kids. People would shake their heads and say, “Boy, Joe sure likes to iron his shirts, doesn’t he? But God bless him! Every night he goes home and gives it to Mrs. Jones.” And the community of straight men and women would just except him. Nowadays, this man would be called gay continuously.
Back in those days, people were not obsessed with homosexuality. Everyone was straight until proven otherwise. Straight people were not commonly accused of being gay. The sad thing about gays coming out is that we no longer practice “straight until proven otherwise,” which in my opinion was much better, and straight men are much more likely to be called gay than they were back in the day.
So while gay liberation has been great for gay men, most good things have a downside, and this was the downside for straight men. Frankly, I can’t see how gay liberation helped straight men. It didn’t help us or improve our lives in any way, and in a few ways, it made our lives worse.
It was necessary for equal rights for gays, so we should have supported it (and I did from way back into the 1980’s when it was risky), but there sure wasn’t anything in it for us. As feminists are now talking about how feminism is good for men too, I wonder if any gay men would tell us how gay rights was good for straight men in any way whatsoever.
Anyway, this gay man said that he had followed these “flamer” purported straight married men over decades, and after 20–30 years, every single one of them had come out as gay and left their families.
A new study showed that 67% of gay men but only 3% of straight men are effeminate. Effeminate straight men are not common at all.
There are many “feminine” straight men who are quiet, soft-spoken, sensitive, like to read, write, and cook and are not macho in the traditional sense. But a lot of these men have a sort of soft masculinity about them.
I would wager that if a straight man is so effeminate that he is out and out campy, he could be straight, but the odds that he is gay or will come out as gay later on are quite a bit higher than for non-effeminate straight men. In fact, I would wager that most of them are closeted gays or will come out as gay later on.
You cannot be effeminate at all in straight male culture. Even being feminine as above is quite frowned upon. A campy straight man would not be well liked and would have to endure a lot of abuse from his peers. This sort of peer pressure keeps most straight men from behaving this way, which I feel is a good thing.
