This is from the How Can You Tell If a Man is Gay? post which, incredibly, is consistenly one of the most popular posts on this site. I also get huge numbers of women coming to that posts asking about their boyfriends and husbands. There are also some gay men trying to figure out where their male friends are at so they can figure out if it is ok to bust a move on them or not. And there are a few straight guys who are nervous or worried about some of the guys they know. I try my best to figure out where the guys in question are sexually, as I am pretty good about this.
Quite a bit of my work as a therapist revolves around sexual orientation stuff. I get people coming to me trying to figure out if they (or in some cases, a woman’s husband) is gay or a pedophile. I can tell very well if a man is gay, bisexual or straight just by carefully asking him a few questions. And pedophilia is usually quite easy to diagnose, although I have had a few horrendously tricky cases.
I often reprint these as posts and a lot of the readers have fun with them trying to figure them out.
OK…here goes nothing I guess… I met my now-husband at a bar three years ago. It was his birthday, and I had a girls night out with my friend, and my Mom was watching my daughter who is now 4 so I could go do something. We never go out anymore btw, I don’t frequent bars being a parent. We dated for a few months and then we started moving pretty fast. He moved in with me, and we got married in Sept 2012.
I got pregnant a month into the marriage, and now we are raising my 4 year old daughter from a previous marriage together (the dad terminated his parental rights and pays no child support so she calls my husband daddy), as well as our son who will be 1 this summer. He is a great father to both of them, and we go to church together and have a lot in common which I think is why our relationship is so strong, and I never really worried before.
When we started dating, he swore off talking to other females and told everyone he was exclusive with me (apparently, although I haven’t met all his friends). Before me, he had only had one serious relationship with a girl, for about 2 years, and they broke it off because she was unhappy. He has only had sex with about 4 girls in his entire life. He is in his mid 20′s.
My brother and his friend have met him, and they joke with me all the time that he is a “butt pirate” and make gay comments about him. I used to laugh it off, but I got to thinking about it. We were out the other day, and a gay friend and his boyfriend saw us together and told his boyfriend that my husband was DEFINITELY gay just from looking at him and “he could smell it on him”.
He likes to go shopping, he had a chihuahua when I met him that he would carry around all over the place, he is comfortable walking around shirtless even in front of other people guys, when he gets drunk he pinches guys’ nipples, he says some super gay stuff like about penises, (apparently he has seen his friends’), and he said what guy hasn’t seen his friends dicks or talked about their dick size, and when I get mad, he thinks I am just being homophobic.
He vehemently denies being gay, and he does have sex with me, although lately his drive is reduced, and he told me he wants to start taking testosterone. He’s also been going to the gym almost every day, looking at bodybuilder magazines and exercise videos on YouTube and stuff and becoming a total fanatic about it. He also spends about an hour at the barber shop “because it takes a long time to get a chair” although I think he just wants to go shoot the shit with the guys.
He tells me he likes my purse, and he likes to look at clothes with me. I mean like I said, he does get a boner for me, but if he’s bi, that doesn’t mean anything. I have asked him several times if he’s gay, and he gets mad, but the other night it was late, and before we went to sleep I said, “Well okay, you’re not gay, but what about bi? I just need to know if you’re interested in something other than me”. He paused for a long time and then told me that he just loved me, and he only wanted to be with me and spend the rest of his life with me. I still have a lot of doubts though.
Oh another thing, he has this friend he buys weed from. I know because I’ve seen him with the weed, and I don’t think he’s 100% using that as a coverup, but he will get a call from his friend at like 7:30 and go get weed, and I won’t know anything about it until his phone rings and he talks to the guy.
Like he doesn’t tell me about stuff before he does it as much as he used to. He claims it helps him with “stress”. I wonder if he’s stressing about his sexuality. And he just recently started watching game of thrones, which he didn’t fail to mention has a lot of giant flaccid penises flopping around all the time, and I was like WTF, then he said, “I was joking, it doesn’t really.” well I looked it up and yeah, it does have penises hanging around as well as a huge gay romance in the first couple of episodes.
Sigh. Please help me with this. Also I’m sorry it’s so long. I really need advice and I have nowhere to look, and I don’t want to tell my Mom everything because she’s judgmental, and the people in our church wouldn’t get it.
That long pause before the bisexual question was extremely bad and makes me think he might be bisexual.
4 lifetime sex partners for a male in the US is pretty near normal, not abnormal. Only a few us are doing the Wilt Chamberlain thing and guys like that are outliers.
Who does he look at? Does he look at women? Does he look at your body in a sexual way during sex or outside of sex? Does he look at women on TV and in magazines, etc.
Talking about gay stuff and dicks in movies is weird. If there were dicks and gay romances in a movie I was watching, I would be complaining about it to my girlfriend. He’s not complaining.
I talk about dicks and gay stuff too, but mostly as a joke. Like, “LOL I am such a fag LOL.” My girlfriends usually go along and say, “Yeah you are such a fag LOL.” But then when they talk seriously they say, “You are one of the least gay guys I have ever known, etc,” so I know they are not serious. Lots of straight guys like to joke around about gay stuff, like, “I am moving to Frisco with my boyfriend” “I sure would like to suck his dick LOL,” stuff like that. It is considered hilarious to say you’re a fag if you’re straight. But this guy doesn’t sound like he is joking, which is very weird.
Why would I tell my girlfriend about flopping dicks and comparing dick sizes. I have discussed this with girlfriend but all I say was I saw my friend’s dick and it made me very uncomfortable because I really do NOT want to see my friend’s dick!
Not sure if he should get furious if you ask him if he is gay. Sometimes I get mad, sometimes I don’t. I get mad if they are asking the question for the umpteenth time, yeah. And I do get asked that question by girlfriends I assure you, but more like, “Are you bi? Are you bisexual? Did you used to be gay? Was that back when you were gay?” The reason chicks usually think I am bi is that it is painfully obvious to a woman whether a guy has a heterosexual component. Look at his eyes and his body language when he is around women. Gay men don’t look at women. PERIOD.
As far as what the gay man said, screw that. There have apparently been a number of gay and bi men who were absolutely insistent that I was gay. They simply would not accept that I was not, and they kept saying that I was lying and a closeted gay who won’t come out and admit all of my relationships with women were tragic frauds. Whether this is some sleazy fag pickup scam (It could well be because fags have done this to a couple of my straight friends too), I have no idea. And quite a few straight guys insist that I am gay or bi, and of course there are or were a lot of women who thought that, though like I said they usually think I am bi as my heterosexual factor is utterly blatant to any non-blind female.
Ditto with all the faggy stuff he does. Personally, I wear my girlfriends’ clothes (especially coats and shirts). Walking around shirtless in front of other guys is weird unless you are at the beach, otherwise it would make me very uncomfortable. Pinching guys’ nipples is profoundly weird and implies very much a faggy component. I do not talk to my male friends about dick size as that is considered to be a faggy thing to talk about with your bros and my friends would get alarmed if I talked like that. I comment on girlfriends’ clothes all the time would compliment a purse too I suppose.
Carrying your chihuahua around with you all the time is extremely lame and rather queery too. No way would I do that. Lots of guys go shopping. A lot of straight guys work out. I am a bit worried about your brother and his friends joking that he is gay. No girlfriend has ever told me that her friends, siblings or parents thought I was gay. The only problem I have in that area is that my girlfriends’ sisters and mothers often outrageously flirt with me and frankly act like they want to fuck me, If the sister is younger – a teenage girl – she often gets a crush on me. All of this makes for a a weird scene.
Does he look at men? Does he look at men when you are out in public, men on TV, men in magazines?
Look, next time tell him that sexuality is not black and white, instead it is a gray area and a continuum. Show him this chart:
100-0 Maximal heterosexual response, minimal gay response
90-10 Maximal heterosexual response, incidental gay response
80-20 Maximal heterosexual response, more than incidental gay response
70-30 Maximal heterosexual response, significant gay response
60-40 Maximal heterosexual response, very strong but lesser gay response
50-50 Maximal heterosexual response, maximal homosexual response
40-60 Maximal gay response, very strong but lesser response response
30-70 Maximal gay response, significant heterosexual response
20-80 Maximal gay response, more than incidental heterosexual response
10-90 Maximal gay response, incidental heterosexual response
0-100 Maximal gay response, minimal heterosexual response
Many guys who behave 100% heterosexually and commit no homosexual acts are like than 100-0′s, I assure you of that! Anyway, tell that if he is not totally 100-0, that is OK with you, but just ask him to level with you.
