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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.
Despite the entertainment value of missing literal rainbow flags, I'll note outright that you did a lot better reading social signals than I did the first three or five times I went to one, and I had about the same level of interest in a casual hookup.
Fair. Not 100% accurately, mostly because some are paranoid enough to have separate phones or be really aggressive about separating files, but yeah, even people who aren't on the meat market'll often have some less-than-audience-friendly photos on their phones.
You might be surprised. I'm not the best person to ask about appearances, but there's a good part of gay society where that'd come across as pretty strong masc top signal.
Sounds about right. My impression's that they were a lot more popular in the 80s, and still had a decent number of strong advocates in the 90s, but even when I was a young bi they'd started to get the same sort reputation whippits did (if far less dangerous). Technically a high, but dumb and risky even by the standards of drugs.
I think there's also some mechanical explanations, in addition to the safety and reputational concerns, though. A lot of by-gay-for-gay literature even into the 90s emphasize them (or similar materials like 'vcr tape cleaner') not for improving climax, but as a muscle relaxant. Improved availability of tools and toys to get certain muscles more trained for certain things, and more expectations for tops to properly manage speed, may have made that aspect a lot less universally valuable.
But they've still got a following for that purpose, and that following has long a litany of first-hand bad experiences (bad headaches) and second-hand horror stories (oh boy, chemical burns).
Huh. Wonder how much of that's a genuine geographic or cultural difference, or something tied to the specifics of how UK bars work rather than US sphere stuff, rather than 'oh, that's just a bidet/enema/lotta shower time, not a douche'. It's always been something some people can't stand at all, and definitely not my idea of fun, but it's something I've been hard-pressed to be comfortable without even when pretty confident about diet control.
From the bi guy side, that's somewhat glossing over the less charitable reasons: there's a lot of gay stereotypes about bi guys as just wanting side pieces, or wanting some fucc in the short time before they settle down with a woman/beard later. But it's not wrong, and people fitting those stereotypes do exist.
You're starting to see that a bit more, but not surprised it's both uncommon and mostly not young gays in your sample. I'm not convinced it's a good decision at larger scales -- a lot of the fresh-out-of-high-school gay guys think it's like complete immunity, rather than 'just' an order of magnitude reduction -- but then again I probably put nowhere near FG's value on sex, so hard to make a serious analysis.
((In the US, they're starting to push it to the point of having advertisements on bus stops and park benches in my local area... and I'm not in an especially gay or even urban space.))
Yeah, they were incredibly rare ten or even twenty years ago, and probably reflected a bunch of conditions that aren't likely to show up again: the whole thing screams of sublimated fears over having to choose between certain infection and complete abstinence not just from sex but even casual exposure in gay spaces. You do still get some people taking incredibly stupid risks, but they're usually more just going 'max bodycount'.
Speaking of which: ugh, that's a sphere I'm glad I have no information about.
In the US, you'll sometimes see jokes about it as equivalent to keeping rent down by firing gunshots off at the street corner. Probably not a turn of phrase that'd be appreciated or understood in the UK, though. I think there's more motivation toward low-grade exhibitionism, since a lot of these habits were common back when (or where) straight guys wouldn't enter a gay bar for a sorority worth of women, but fear of gay spaces getting rolled over by a tidal wave of straights is definitely a thing and not an unreasonable fear.
Oh, boy, that's it's own separate ball of wax. Tbf, there's a lot of complex tradeoffs where the new demographic has some compatibility issues with the standard demos at the same time that it is partly your old clients. But there's also lot of older gay guys that are somewhere between weirded out by and grossed out by trans women as pretty much everything that gay men weren't supposed to do, or just don't like it, and that's a lot more controversial an issue in the field.
What is an honest straight man who is a zero on the Kinsey scale supposed to do? Go topless? I suspect that would make things worse, heh.
What else do I have in my wardrobe? Hawaiian shirt? I can see where that leads.. Barely worn suits? Probably means I'm closeted and looking for fun on a business trip I'm sure.
I mean, I can't blame them, I was an interloper in a gay bar. That is a strong signal of... something. Poor situational awareness, a liberal worldview, a love of cheap drinks? Pick your poison.
FG framed it in a manner I've heard before: Back in the day, you're all but guaranteed to get it, unless you give up on the gay lifestyle altogether. Why not just get it out of the way?
Hang on, another memory unlocked. He told me that he had met three potential partners who were HIV positive. I think he said two of them were on PrEP, and he might have slept with them. The other wasn't, and thus was rebuffed. I think this is what prompted the tirade about HIV and monkeypox. He said that man was being an idiot, and worsening general societal perception of the gays, as well as being a risk to their lifestyle.
Interesting. I'm not too surprised by the existence of conservative or reactionary gay men. These guys seemed to be very liberal in outlook, they were friends with the trans bartender, so I guess they took the concept of LGBT solidarity more seriously!
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Okay, now you've piqued my curiosity.
This is kind of a straight person thing too. I recall seeing memes a few years ago joking about "not opening your gallery in front of strangers." And, really, the era we're living in often involves an exchange of nudes for people in an intimate relationship, so it wouldn't be especially surprising for a straight man to have dirty pics of his wife or his girlfriend on his phone -- though probably an order of magnitude fewer of them. Straight women are maybe? less likely, but I doubt it's unheard of. And both of them might just have dirty pics of themselves in their photos, you have to take them to send them!
The same stereotype works in the opposite direction -- straight women have concerns about bisexual men for the exact same reason. As self_made_human has realized, getting sexual attention from gay men is trivial, and so is both easy to obtain and less valuable per-interaction. So madonna/whoring your mindset and searching for disposable sexual attention from men (whores) while seeking out reliable partnership with women (madonnas) is something you can do, if you're so inclined.
The other thing is that gay men, particularly ones who are interested in companionship more than disposability, often feel trapped by the expectations of gay dating, and are jealous of straight men for whom long-term commitment, exclusivity, and broad social acceptance feel like table stakes. So bisexual men can be "traitors": taking from gay men whatever they can get from them and then fleeing to the arms of a woman when one arises.
This has been somewhat sexualized lately, with the "femboy bf"/"femboy hooters" meme culture which prompts great recrimination in the ongoing femininine-man/trans-woman civil war, but of course that also comes with the corollary memes of "breaking up with my femboy bf because I met a real woman." (I have no idea what the actual prevalence of this stuff is, I'm just way too extremely online.)
Intriguingly, this pattern seems to mirror many complaints about women's sexual behavior from men, and women's complaints about the sexual behavior of extremely attractive straight men: if sexual attention is abundant, using it for temporary affirmation while utterly disposing of your partners' interests and needs is a real possibility. Turns out, sex is not tennis.
I saw a bunch when I visited DC with my girlfriend. Interestingly, they were generally framed as "use PrEP to protect him" not yourself, like that Simpsons meme about Maggie.
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