From Quora.
My answer:
From the point of view of your average straight man, gay men are a plague. A lot of us support equal rights for them and some even support almost their entire political agenda. For instance, I am on the mailing list for some gay rights organizations and I happily participate in their political campaigns. On the other hand, most of us want gay men to keep as far away from us as possible and from my point of view, the fewer gay men I have to interact with in this world, the better. It would be nice if they would keep 50 or 100 yards away from me at all times. They do not add anything pleasant or good to my life and they often cause me problems. So they’re nothing but a problem and there’s no reason to want them around at all.
Now, to answer the question. 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.
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 upset, 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. This is a very sad story, and I did feel sorry for this tragic man.
On the other hand, when I told people about his incident, I automatically became a “suspect” because they said. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The gay guy is supposed to ask to suck your cock. He’s not supposed to ask you to suck his. If he does, it’s because he thinks you’re gay.
It is generally not true that straight 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 is the standard Cultural Left response to any straight man who gets angry or upset if a gay man hits on him. It means we’re gay, 100% scientifically proven, no doubt about it.
This goes back to the stupid but very popular notion that homophobes are all gay themselves. They’re not. Yes, there are men who are engaging in some reaction formation and this is where the silly theory comes from. Most men engaging in this reaction formation are probably not gay. Instead, they men are probably 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. They also flip out if a gay man hits on them for a variety of reasons. Reaction formation is probably only one of those, and it’s probably not even the most common.
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 hypermasculine and hyper-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 punch 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: “Well obviously that means that you’re gay, Bob.”
Get it? See how people think?
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? Obviously because you act gay! So when you admit that a gay man hit on you, you are admitting that you act gay.
I admit that I often worried about this long ago in my late teens and into my twenties. 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? Why do I seem 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. Actually masculinity is far bigger deal to women than it is to men. It’s women who make all the fuss about it. Men are a lot more relaxed about this. Feminists complain about hypermasculine men and even masculine men and the idea that masculinity itself is a problem is current nowadays. “Toxic masculinity” is the latest Cultural Left meme.
Now when a gay man hits on a straight man, the straight men see it is he has just given us the message: “I think you’re gay.” Other possible messages are: “You are 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. By doing so, the gay man is telling the straight man that he’s not a man. He’s calling the straight man 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. There’s no reason for me to care or worry that some guy I am talking to is gay or not. If he is, I will find out soon enough. Gay men usually reveal that they are gay by acting like they are attracted to you very quickly in the first 5-10 minutes of conversation if not sooner. If a man hasn’t given off gay vibes like that pretty quickly, he’s probably pretty damn straight. Gay men simply cannot hide their orientation. When confronted with a handsome man, they can’t help but act like they are attracted to him.
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 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.
