The future of gay sex

This article is part of our Future of Sex season – a series of features investigating the future of sex, relationships, dating, sex work and sex worker rights; tech; taboos; and the next socio-political sexual frontiers.

When gay sex is discussed today, it’s almost always in negative terms. ‘Hook-up culture’ is pathologised as a consequence of childhood trauma and low self-esteem; the prevalence of non-monogamy points to our outsize libido and inability to commit; and when evidence suggests that Grindr can be bad for our mental health, we tend to blame this on the sex it facilitates, rather than the experience of using the app itself. We fail to consider that, while sexual rejection has its own unique sting, Twitter and Instagram can be every bit as alienating, addictive, and grindingly miserable. It’s undeniable that casual sex causes problems for some gay men, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is just as often a source of intimacy, community and pleasure. If we want to build a safer and more inclusive sexual culture, we have to acknowledge that sexual freedom is a worthwhile cause in its own right, and one which is bound up with economic and social justice. 

In the midst of the AIDS crisis, activist and writer Douglas Crimp argued that “gay male promiscuity should be seen instead as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalised sexuality.” Once a mainstay of gay liberation politics, the idea that our sexual culture might be better has all but disappeared. To make matters worse, the recent monkeypox outbreak has laid bare a revulsion towards gay sex and shown that even the most privileged gay men can be exposed to medical vulnerability through state neglect. This is a bleak state of affairs, but one which provides us with an opportunity to finally reject the politics of sexual shame.

To consider where we might go next, let’s start looking back at our history; at what we have lost and what we might regain. Gay sexual culture has long been hampered by “homonormativity”, a term coined in 2003 by queer academic Lisa Duggan to describe a model of gay politics centred on assimilating into the norms, ideals and institutions of heterosexuality. This approach emerged as early as the 50s, but it wasn’t until the 90s that it truly gained prominence – and it’s no coincidence that this happened alongside the changing nature of the AIDS crisis.

In 1996, the discovery of effective treatment meant that contracting HIV was no longer life-threatening. But owing to inequalities in access to treatment, the epidemic became more racialised, and the burden was shifted onto heterosexual women of colour, Black gay men, and countries in the global south. For many well-off white gay men, it seemed as though the crisis had passed, and HIV became a less urgent priority for the mainstream movement, which started to focus its attention on access to marriage and the military, and on achieving respectability within straight society.

In pursuit of these goals, it was necessary to divorce gay identity from gay sex – the latter still being a little too dicey for many straight people to stomach. As social theorist Michael Warner writes in The Trouble With Being Normal, this entailed the disavowal of anyone who was too ostentatious to fit within the new paradigm, such as “sex addicts, bodybuilders in Chelsea or West Hollywood, circuit boys, flaming queens, dildo dykes, people with HIV, anyone who magnetizes the stigma you can’t shake”. Wealthy white and monogamous couples became the respectable face of queerness and the nexus around which gay politics was organised. For homonormative figureheads like the writer Andrew  Sullivan, gay sexual culture was a form of pathology; something we would have to discard if we ever wanted to achieve the lofty ambition of becoming “normal”.

We can see the long shadow of this ideological shift today, though it doesn’t always look as you might expect. Respectability politics has cleaved into two halves of the same coin: it might look like a management consultant who votes Tory, rails against “sluts” and says he’s “just a regular guy who happens to be gay”; and it might be someone on the liberal left claiming that kink at Pride is immoral because people haven’t consented to see a man wearing leather assless chaps. Fundamentally, these individuals are speaking to the same anxiety: that other gay people, through their excess and perversion, are endangering our own contingent acceptance. Sometimes this kind of respectability politics finds expression in the ‘queer cafe’ as a yearned-for utopian ideal: while it’s reasonable for queer people to want spaces which aren’t sexual, the queer cafe as it is imagined on the internet is often juxtaposed with “hook-up culture” in a way which implicitly denigrates the latter. It is conceived of as a necessary alternative to “bars, sex clubs and bathhouses”, as though these places exist in abundance, rather than being constantly embattled and dwindling in number all the time

For homonormative figureheads like the writer Andrew  Sullivan, gay sexual culture was a form of pathology; something we would have to discard if we ever wanted to achieve the lofty ambition of becoming “normal”

Gay sexual spaces aren’t reliably progressive or egalitarian, nor do they exist outside of hierarchies based on race, age, gender presentation and body type: as Leo Bersani wrote about bathhouses, “Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours.” It would be remiss to advocate on their behalf without acknowledging that they can be sites of exclusion: in recent years, there have been a number of cases where trans men have either been denied entry or thrown out from men-only saunas. But in response, we should be fighting for a better culture of gay public sex, one which includes all gay men, rather than disavowing it entirely. This is work people are already doing: trans health service CliniQ, for example, has published resources for trans men who are navigating the gay sex scene. How can we support these efforts if we’re still clinging to the idea that visiting a sauna is shameful in the first place? Our politics shouldn’t begin and end with sexual freedom, but it’s not trivial, nor is it a distraction from other forms of struggle. During the gay liberation movement of the 70s, the demand for sexual autonomy came alongside opposition to imperialism, racism and capitalism. As Benjamin Shepard writes, “Gay Liberationists worked from the vantage point that all oppression – from sexism to racism, to the Vietnam War – originated from a single source: a white, heterosexist, male-dominated capitalist society.”

In lots of ways, the time is ripe for reclaiming such a tradition. The material conditions which created gay respectability politics – which emerged during a time of sustained economic growth – are eroding. The ultimate ambition of homonormativity was to emulate a middle-class heterosexual life: home-ownership, aspirational consumerism, and entry into the nuclear family. Today these trappings are out of reach for increasing numbers of young people, regardless of their sexuality (although having kids is typically much more expensive for LGBTQ+ parents and there remain inequalities in access to IVF). The assimilationist movement achieved its goals to a large extent: there are fewer legal barriers which prevent gay people from taking part in the nuclear family, and societal acceptance of homosexuality has steadily increased within the last 30 years. But the kind of middle-class lifestyle it saw as the ultimate aspiration is more unattainable for gay men today than it was in the 1990s. In a sad irony, this is precisely due to the failures of the neoliberal economic model it championed as our path to freedom. While homophobia is making a comeback, young gay people today are just as likely to be radicalised by their experiences as renters or precarious workers – to paraphrase Audre Lorde, we don’t lead single-issue lives. If you consider how much more awkward it is to ‘host’ when you live in a flatshare with strangers, it’s clear that the housing crisis is also an impediment to sexual freedom. This landscape makes apparent the need for a more class-based queer politics, not least because the spoils of selling out are becoming more paltry all the time.

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world” – José Esteban Muñoz

While it should go without saying that trans people bear the brunt of the anti-trans panic, the movement is becoming more scattershot and indiscriminate in its targets. Take the recent campaigns of harassment and intimidation against drag queens in both the US and the UK.  While clearly connected to transphobia, this is animated by a loathing towards gender non-conformity and perceived sexual deviance in all its forms. If you read the leaflets these hate groups are publishing, it’s clear they see drag as a sexual perversion and don’t consider the distinction between gender identity and sexuality to be especially meaningful – so much so that a number of prominent anti-trans gay men and lesbians have started voicing concern about where their movement is heading. Considering the direction of travel, even the most respectable gay men – in Warner’s words, “the happily coupled veterinarians in a suburban tract home with nothing more scandalous on their minds than wearing white linen after Labour Day” – could stand to feel a little nervous. 

So across the board, these are dark times for LGBTQ+ people, and things will probably get worse before they get better. But we shouldn’t settle for a defensive position focused solely on shoring up the advances we’ve already made. Like any marginalised group, gay people have always had an invested interest in utopian dreaming. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia. This kind of idealism, Muñoz argues, is a way of critiquing the present; conceptualising new realities which aren’t constrained by homophobia, and rejecting the “cheap and degraded vision of freedom” which is, at best, the only thing neoliberalism has to offer. As reality veers ever more dystopian, we need to reclaim a more radical and expansive approach to gay liberation, one which views sexual freedom not just as a worthy end in itself, but as part of a larger truth: queer people won’t be free from oppression until everyone is.