Shortly after moving to Chicago for a new job, Jim got a call from his ex informing him that he’d tested positive for HIV. He even went to a gay doctor who explained that he was a big guy with a small pelvis whose rectum “isn’t really built for this.” He put up with it, despite it being “really fucking painful,” which never improved. After college, while living in San Diego, Jim met such a man, whom he says “fucked the shit” out of him. After losing his receptive anal virginity in college, which he found to be “utterly and prohibitively painful,” the 58-year-old commercial real estate developer vowed that if he were ever to attempt it again, it would only be with someone he cared for deeply, proudly noting the “moral compass” he developed growing up in the Midwest. Jim attempts to further reassure me by explaining what led him to become a side.
“I don’t care what society says a man is supposed to be,” he explains. After all, what self-respecting gay man doesn’t like butt-fucking? That’s why I’m pleased to connect with Jim, the organizer of the L.A.-based sides Meetup group who promises me that it doesn’t make me any less masculine because I don’t fuck. Gay people are part of that mix.” Indeed, as Kort notes in his HuffPo article, lesbians are often told that they aren’t having “real” sex.Īnd yet, I can’t help but internalize some of that aforementioned shame in bypassing anal sex. “People just aren’t as focused on intercourse every time anymore, particularly in the kink community.
“There’s a misconception about what sex means,” he says. “While vaginal intercourse remains relatively common, that trend looks very much like the anal sex behavior in gay men,” he notes, adding that straight couples’ sexual events involve penis-in-vagina penetration only slightly more than half of the time. population and says intercourse is down across the board in both gay and straight couples. While Reece’s study was conducted more than seven years ago, his team continues to undertake nationally represented studies of the U.S. They’re much more likely to include what most consider to be foreplay, he tells me - i.e., mutual masturbation, kissing, cuddling, massage, fingering and oral interaction - with anal intercourse “probably only happening in about a third of gay sexual events.” “I’d say it’s probably in the low to mid-30s,” says Michael Reece, a professor in the School of Health at Indiana University who co-authored the study. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that a 2011 study by researchers at Indiana University and George Mason University revealed that less than 40 percent of men interacting with other men for sex actually had anal intercourse in their most recent sexual event. “I wanted vanilla people to understand that being a side is just as masculine as someone having penetrative sex.”īut as gay apps and hookup sites don’t allow users to identify as such - Grindr, for example, only offers “top,” “bottom” and “ versatile ” (indicating a willingness to go both ways) - sides have struggled to connect with like-minded gay men, leading to the formation of Meetup groups like the one I recently joined in L.A.
“Men have been conditioned to think that penetrating a vagina or an anus with their dicks is everything,” he says, which he thinks has become inextricably linked to masculinity, particularly in the U.S. After receiving dozens of calls from ashamed and upset gay clients, many who used the term “broken” to describe their sexual proclivities, Kort (who also identifies as a side) would talk them off the ledge. “I wanted people to understand that it’s okay if you don’t like anal intercourse,” Kort tells me, adding that when people say “sex,” they usually think of “penile penetration,” especially gay guys. He explained that sides enjoy practically every sexual practice aside from anal penetration and choose to be sexually peripheral, so to speak, rather than on the top or the bottom. In a HuffPo article, Kort presented an alternative to the binary classification employed by most gay men to note their preferred sexual position - i.e., “ top ,” the penetrat or in bed, or “ bottom ,” the penetrat ee - by introducing the term “sides” to indicate one’s affinity for neither - and maybe more importantly, disdain for both. They call themselves “ sides ,” a term coined in 2013 by Joe Kort, a Detroit-based clinical therapist who’s been counseling such men for nearly 30 years.
with a handful of gay men who have sworn off anal sex for good. I’m nibbling on a grocery-store cheese plate in a spacious home in East L.A.