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The Unwitting Ethnographer: On Pride Flags and Plausible Deniability
I did not set out to do anthropology. I set out to have a beer. The other regular haunts near my flat skewed geriatric, and while I can happily talk to a septuagenarian about buses, I was in the mood for music that did not predate the Falklands. The bar I wandered into had a younger crowd, a decent playlist, and discrete details I somehow failed to parse until much later. Pride flags on the walls. A very large pride flag by the door. A clientele that could only be described as statistically enriched for men in nice shoes.
I was nursing a Tennent's when one of the patrons approached the bar and ordered what appeared to be a small chemistry set worth of brightly colored shots. The logistics fascinated me: he deployed some kind of carrying apparatus that locked under the shot glasses at the rim, allowing safe transport of the entire collection. The British have always been quiet pioneers of Applied Alcoholism, and the field has clearly advanced beyond what I learned in medical school.
"Hey handsome," he said, noticing my interest. "Sorry if I end up spilling any of this on you." I assured him this would be fine, since spilled alcohol represents free alcohol, which represents savings. "I wouldn't mind licking it off you, if you know what I mean."
I experienced a sudden cutaneous vasodilation, a blush, which I hoped was obscured by my facial hair and the ambient lighting. The complexion probably helps.
His companion laughed, but the interaction quickly resolved into a gesture of goodwill. They offered me one of the shots. Morbid curiosity being a powerful motivator, I accepted. The taste was not unpleasant. Upon turning to share this assessment with the group, I was met with expectant looks. "It wasn't bad," I offered. "I could see myself drinking this." "If you think this wasn't bad," a different member of the group replied, "then you'll probably like antifreeze."
I answered, mostly sober at that point, that I had not yet tried antifreeze but remained open-minded.
Etiquette required reciprocation. Also, heterosexual uncertainty suggested that free liquor in a gay bar might have exchange rates I was not qualified to negotiate, so I bought two shots and took them over. The bartender had hinted that the recipients did not like Gordon’s, which I could respect as a principled position. The group received the offering warmly, then kept me at the table as if a recruitable stray cat had decided to sit in their sunbeam.
Cast and setting
There were six of them, give or take my blood alcohol level. Most looked like ordinary men dressed for a Saturday night, with more piercings and better grooming. The one who had flirted at the bar was the outlier. Wife-beater, small tattoos scattered like confetti, a bull ring large enough to restrain mythological fauna. Call him FG, for Flamboyant Gent. His friend with the quick laugh was slight and balding. SG. The third I spoke with most was conventionally handsome and soft-edged in a way that suggests many women have fallen for him and then discovered the plot twist. HG, for Hetero-passing Gent.
I clarified my presence, attributing it to a combination of cultural unfamiliarity and severe myopia. FG gestured towards the numerous pride flags. I claimed to have interpreted them as generic contemporary decor. He then indicated the very large flag by the entrance, to which I could only plead a fundamental lack of situational awareness.
They inquired about my purpose in a city not famed for its nightlife. I gave my standard exposition: I am a doctor, recently relocated from a Small Scottish Town (SST). This news was met with uniform approval. My subsequent anecdote about drunken misadventures in SST was also successful, though their perspective on such small communities was predictably negative. A lot of them disclosed that they had grown up in nearly indistinguishable SSTs, and hadn't enjoyed it. The low-anonymity, high-surveillance environment of a small town is likely a suboptimal habitat for a gay man.
They were all locals. They were also colleagues, sort of. Not mine, yet. Two worked in the biochemistry lab at the same trust where I work in psychiatry. The third did something nearby in clinical science that I forgot as the evening progressed.
We found common ground commiserating over the state of the NHS circa 2025. FG complained about ill-conceived sample requests from junior doctors at inconvenient hours. I reassured him that psychiatry was a low-impact requester; my biochemistry screens were routine and rarely urgent. This professional courtesy earned me an offer of expedited service for future lithium level checks, which I noted for potential future use.
I was also offered, variously, two blowjobs, a rimjob, and a golden shower. I declined with gratitude. It is good to be desired. It is also good to have boundaries.
(As wise men have said: if you're struggling on the local dating apps, it might not be your fault and there's hope for you yet. But if you go to a gay bar and don't get hit on, it might be time to see if monasteries are recruiting)
At one point I unlocked my phone to show photos from Dover. This triggered knowing looks. “So, you are not gay, are you?” Correct. They explained that no gay man would casually open his gallery in public. Too high a risk of unexpected appearances. I learned something.
"Such a shame," FG added, "especially when you're dressed like that." My attire, a polo shirt under a pullover, was chosen for its extreme neutrality. I suppose this can create its own kind of allure through sheer demureness.
I was informed of some romantic tension. SG and HG both had crushes on each other, but neither would make a move. Were they both bottoms? I tentatively asked. Nah, one's a bottom, but the other is a verse.
When they heard FG explaining this to me, HG claimed that he had, in fact, tried to kiss SG, but had been rebuffed. SG was affronted and explained that it hadn't been a good time, he'd been chewing on a chicken tender when the former had attempted to tongue-punch him in the tonsils. They both laughed, and began making up for wasted time. Ah, young love, don't you love to see it?
By now the ethnographer in me, who had apparently decided to write this post retroactively, began asking questions. I apologized for being nosy, but they laughed it off. The answers, heavily paraphrased and possibly misremembered after several Tennent’s, were as follows:
Q1. Poppers
How common are poppers in actual practice? FG looked at me like I had asked how common forks are at dinner. The table consensus: some had used them, none were evangelists. They shared two cautionary fables about people who treated poppers as shooters or aerosolized them and died. The bartender volunteered that poppers slowed time and elongated orgasms.
An unexpected corollary was also disclosed: a high incidence of incontinence issues among the group, to the point where coffee consumption was a calculated risk. They then fielded a surprising counter-query: Does applying sugar to a prolapsed anus aid in its reduction? I admitted that while the technique was vaguely familiar from medical lore, if I tried to put it into practice on the wards, the nurses would have me up in front of the GMC or the police in short order.
Q2. Cleanliness protocols
Do people douche before anal sex? After some deliberation, the consensus was no, not routinely. Diet was preferred. Eat fiber, manage timing, accept that risk can be reduced but not eliminated. You get used to it. I shared that several heterosexual experiments of mine had ended with olfactory regret. They said that in a male-male context the polite response would be to send the man to the shower or call for a reschedule. I said that if I tried that with a woman I would be killed, slowly, and possibly correctly.
Q3. Closeted and bi men
How often do you encounter men who are closeted or who identify as bi? FG avoids them. Too messy, too much drama, too many norm mismatches, and in his experience too much reluctance to test for STIs. Others nodded. This was not about identity policing. It was about risk management.
Q4. Grindr
Grindr, yes or no? A unanimous no. The people on it were described as crazy in the technical sense. Word of mouth, mutual friends, and the bar network work better. I said I had expected at least one notification during the evening. I declined to explain how I know the sound.
Q5. PrEP and HIV risk
Are you on PrEP? Only FG. He is meticulous about screening and uses PrEP as insurance. He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more. I had strong reservations about that claim, and made a note to check later. It was not the time for a literature review in a bar where I had been offered a golden shower five minutes earlier.
Q6. Bug chasers
Do bug chasers still exist? Only FG had even heard of them, and he is slightly older. He said the phenomenon is almost extinct, and was already rare when he came out. He explained the idea for the younger men, who reacted with the combination of curiosity and horror that usually attends bad Victorian surgery.
Q7. Baths
Do people have sex in the baths? Yes, says FG, wistfully reminiscing about a visit to San Francisco.
Is it hygienic? Probably not, he confides. But much like swimming in a kiddie pool, you have to have your faith in the antiseptic properties of chlorine.
Q8. Straight people in gay spaces
Is my presence in a gay bar objectionable?
Not you, you seem like a nice and open-minded lad. But in general?
They gave a quick lesson in ecological progression. A gay bar/night club opens and serves a mostly LGBT clientele. Straight women discover it is a space where they can be drunk and loud without constant male attention (they're very popular for hen-dos). Straight men discover that straight women are there. The venue drifts toward generic nightlife. Even worse, some of these men are alleged to be rather bigoted, and FG said he wasn't willing to take the risk of being socked in the face for merely kissing a partner on the dance floor.
According to him, the only reliable counterpressure is to make the environment clearly and unambiguously queer. Sex in dark corners and in toilets tends to discourage straight tourists and is conveniently hard to legislate away without awkward free speech arguments. They mentioned the only other gay bar nearby, owned by a man who is both gay and loudly hostile to trans people. They had taken their business elsewhere.
My new friends left early. Sunday shifts wait for no man. I stayed until closing and fell in love at a distance with a woman who was almost certainly a lesbian and possibly autistic. Short hair, noise-cancelling earphones in, a single beer, a one-handed game controller, a dog’s full attention, an older man attempting conversation and doing no visible damage. I did not ask for her number. In a Hollywood version of this evening I would mature, learn a lesson about acceptance, and end with a chaste coffee. In the realistic version I walked home slightly drunk, slightly wiser, and extremely grateful that a bar full of men who had no reason to be kind to me were kind anyway.
Methods, such as they were:
This was opportunistic qualitative sampling. The ethnographer was three drinks in and had accepted a blue shot of unknown pedigree. The participants were friendly and practiced at explaining themselves to outsiders. There was music. There were interruptions. Recall bias is certain. Social desirability bias is probable. My notes consist of the phrases I kept repeating to myself while walking home and the sentences that reappeared in my head the next morning like uninvited guests. If you want preregistration and a codebook, you will be disappointed.
That's... pretty damn forward.
This seems like a great opportunity to use the "hide" function in the Photos app.
Such a tease, self_made_human, such a tease.
Hm. This seems to suggest to me that the big problem with this group is that they're cheating on women. In particular, STI testing is relatively uncommon among men who date women, and there's a lot of friction to start if you've never done it before. Or, if finding the answer would mean a messy obligation to disclose a compromising health detail to an intimate partner.
I guess it seems to me that they had every reason to be kind to you -- at least some of them found you attractive. You were offered multiple sex acts. Even after they clarified that you were straight, FG still flirted with you: "Such a shame," FG added, "especially when you're dressed like that." FG in particular seems like he had "elder gay" energy, and a kind of leadership over the group, and he specifically had something for you.
And even then, you came from related fields, and could talk about work. So you built a kind of camaraderie on that detail.
It also sounds like their objection to straight men in the bar was about them talking to women there, and you said you did none of that, and even slightly judged a man who was trying to do so. You went to a gay bar and let men flirt with you, and let them down easy... of course they liked you! For the same reason that women who try to be vague and polite when they reject men tend to prolong the interaction. The door could always be more open than you're saying. And gay men are quite reluctant to take "I'm straight" as an answer. "I'm bi" is an invitation to participation in adultery, "I'm straight" is a challenge.
Apparently late July/August has been "how are the _____ doing sexually?" time on the motte. And, as usual, I have no bloody clue how lesbians are doing, except that the one lesbian I was friends with in college was interested in gender transition. I think they prefer it that way.
There's some advantages to knowing op-sec, but there's also some strong advantages to recognizing when future you might be (probably) drunk or half-asleep, thinking with the wrong head, and making bad decisions otherwise, and recognizing that future you will not maintain the right level of op-sec and changing habits around that.
((That's not even just a photo concern. iOS will quite happily take screenshots if you hit the power and voldown button, and boy can you believe how easy it is to get accidental screenshots of stuff you don't want to be sharing with the hets.))
In practice, yeah, the problems that come with guys cheating on a woman with a guy is still some of the motivation. And there's a lot of other gay stereotypes about bi or closeted men, some of them moderately well-founded. The steelman is that even bi or closested gay guys who don't have and aren't looking for a woman still have some pretty significantly different behaviors than out gays do, and put different expectations on their romantic (or not-romantic) partners.
Trivially, if you're with someone that's not out, in their social environment, it puts a significant onus on you to dial down the flame lest you out them in turn. In gay social spaces, they're likely to be a lot less happy with a lot of more flamboyant behavior. Even without all of the frictions and concerns that a positive STI test result would bring to a het relationship, just getting a test done at all even knowing you're clean still involves a) talking to a professional about your sexual history, and b) doing something that's overwhelmingly advertised as important for the gay guys while you're talking to a professional about your sexual history, and having done it knowing that the professionals don't care about anything but the next break, that's really awkward from the closet.
Some of that's just blaming specific person or relationship issues on the identifiable trait -- especially in these fields, there's a lot of dramatically different expectations for how serious a hook-up's going to be open to becoming, even if I've seen almost every possible combination and direction for bi-on-gay pairs. ((Though there's some fuzziness on the edges of that. I'm not gonna say that bi guys are universally happier with the idea of a threesome, because that's probably not even remotely true. But even and maybe especially closeted gay guys will put a remarkable amount of effort into having a woman tangentially involved in ways that most out gay men will run away from.))
At a deeper level, I think there's some level of 'seen the elephant' involved in really coming to terms with being gay, specifically. But I can't say for sure, because I haven't been there.
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Oh no, he made it clear he'd be perfectly happy bending me backwards. Sadly, my yoga days are behind me.
My thoughts exactly. I wanted to give these guys a lesson in opsec.
Really? You're telling me this now for the first time. And here I was thinking he was being polite.
FG actually looked a lot older than he really was. I think he claimed he was 35? I was thrown off by the gray hair. I'm presuming he wasn't lying about his age.
A lot of memories are finally coming back to me:
They'd asked me how old I was. The answer made them gasp, "you're a baby!" Like, come on, I'm on the wrong side of 25. The youngest was HG, who I thought was younger than me, and I think he said he was 32. I was going to add the topic of twink death to my list of nosy questions, but FG straight up told me that gay men hit a wall after 30. That answered things.
(Am I a twink? Goodness, I hope not. Perhaps @Corvos can answer that, he's seen me in person, even if he's straight)
A lack of opportunity rather than interest! The first two people I thought were women were actually trans. I think a total of two natal women walked in, one left while I was still in conversation. The last one? You know how that ended.
I didn't mean to judge the old dude. He owned the dog, it had a rather painful looking wound on its back, and he wasn't trying to hit on the lesbian woman - he was telling her the story of how it happened. He was telling quite a few other people the same story too.
I'm sure that me being attractive had some bearing on their friendliness, but I don't think it really explains the whole story. Even the men who didn't make a move were perfectly welcoming. There's just something about me that has people opening up (it's a good trait to have in a shrink), and their behavior wasn't out of the ordinary (well...) when it comes to having good conversations with other pub goers.
It also seemed to me that their objection to straight men in gay spaces wasn't just the fact that were straight, or after women but other things:
They dilute the pool of available gay men.
They react negatively to being taken for gay men even if it's literally a gay club. I imagine the average chav wouldn't be as polite as me.
They have the potential to get violent even if the gay men are being gay without involving them. I can believe it.
I was indirectly exploring that with my questions about closeted men and bi men. I think that the gay men who actually get a kick out of "converting" straight men are a minority in practice. Sure, they definitely exist, but I doubt they're representative. In a similar manner, most straight men would bang a lesbian chick and brag, but you don't see the majority of us trying.
I think if I'd reacted negatively to FG's attempts at flirtation, instead of taking it in good cheer, he'd probably have desisted.
Neither do I. I assume they're working on project cars, or playing roller derby. I don't think I know a single lesbian, personally or online.
Interesting. Perhaps this relates to their non-use of Grindr: my understanding is that, like with straight people, young gay men are very app-oriented and non-commital. "Sleep around in the most friction-less (cough) way in your 20s" seems to be a pretty broad strategy for people who can pull it off.
Ah, fair enough. Not her scene, obviously, but my mother is the same way. She used to think of herself as an introvert, but I have been telling her most of my adult life how she's extremely extroverted, and people love talking to her. She talks about how when she meets someone who seems gruff or closed-off, she makes it a mission to get them to laugh.
I guess this was my point -- you made it easy to keep going, and that made you fun to talk to!
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