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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.
Great write-up as usual. I'm surprised at how stereotypically gay these lads were, you really got lucky from an ethnographic POV.
Wouldn't this also be affected by Pride celebration? Where I live even the burrito place will be covered in pride flags for a good two months in summer, and a big greasy burrito full of beans is probably not the kind of food you'd want as a gay man looking for a hook-up.
I'm grateful that no gay man has ever been this crude with me in person. At worst they've just asked me to go home with them and the rest was implied, or made suggestive innuendos.
You could just have said you had a gay roommate or something like that. Declining just invites more questions and idle speculation.
Closeted men is perfectly valid, but bisexuals? That's not risk management, that's bigotry (pun intended?). And they contradicted themselves anyway, they were offering to hook-up with you despite you having clearly stated you were heterosexual from the get-go, so they were hoping you were at least a little bi-curious.
But from your description of these gents I do get it in one sense. They basically want someone of that's "culturally gay" like them, for whom offering a golden shower to a stranger over a couple of drinks is normal behavior.
As far as I know sex in a public lavatory is illegal in the UK regardless of the sex of the participants. I would assume a pub (i.e. a public house) counts? I know straight people who've had sex in a bar toilet, so there's no argument to be made that it's an exclusively homosexual act.
In any case, your talk with these gents made me understand the perspective of some more intolerant people. That "gay culture" seems to be purposefully designed to be repulsive. I understand that being a pick-me isn't helpful, and that loud gays were the ones that paved away for LGBT rights while the polite, respectful homophile movement accomplished little... but still I feel like I've had the most headway with conservatives when I explained that deep down we just want to be free to live the same lives straight people do. Popper-inhaling, incontinent, promiscuous people who go to bath houses and have sex in the corner of a bar where anybody can come in and have a drink, well, I have little defense of that beyond my general liberal principles.
It’s very gay-coded in the UK because it’s associated with cottaging. If you complained about going to a gay bar and finding two men having sex in the loo, people would laugh at you. If you persisted they would call you a bigot.
This and the IRA (who put bombs in them) are the two reasons Britain doesn’t have nearly enough public loos.
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I'm intrigued you feel that way. My understanding is that the same suspicion is even more common among trans women, and that bisexual men are seen as flaky, exploratory sorts whose bisexuality is a fig leaf, who are trans chasing, and would never be caught dead actually dating a trans woman in public. Actually, I'm intrigued in general that you've talked a lot about your concerns about dating and chasers have never come up.
There's many different kinds of bisexual men and you can't paint them all with the same brush. Some are mostly into women and occasionally will top men, some will only bottom for men but top women, some are 99% attracted to women but there's this one guy that takes their fancy, some are just hypersexual and will do anything with anyone. I've known chasers to be bisexual, straight or gay (the latter being into trans men), and I've known bisexual men who didn't want anything to do with trans women. I think trans women would avoid a lot of heartache if they stop being obsessed with dating 110% straight masculine guys and went for the guys that are fine meeting them for a coffee date in broad daylight instead.
My experience with chasers has been that they make themselves known in the first 5 minutes of conversation so it's never been an issue I guess?
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To answer both your and @urquan 's question:
I know the Grindr sound because of a prank video I saw somewhere online. The prankster would clock someone as likely gay, and then play the matching notification sound standing close to them. I think they used women in some scenes, to minimize the assumption it was them. You'd see a lot of men jump and pat their pockets. Including quite a few who definitely didn't look it to my untrained eye.
Possibly. I wasn't keeping track, but since this happened literally this weekend, I guess some of the decor might have stayed up.
The majority of the offers came before the phone gallery bit. I'm sure that FG still made more moves, but they were clearly in the "haha, just kidding. Unless...?" tier.
His explanation covered both clubs and bars. I think the sex in dimly lit corners applied more to the former.
While sex in a loo might be illegal, I sincerely doubt anyone ever gets charged!
FG was by far the most forward. The rest of them, beyond the usual compliments and offers, seemed normal, for lack of a better word. In other contexts, I might have suspected they were gay, but I wouldn't have strong confidence in that notion. They seemed to act like anyone else out for a drink with friends.
I am generally liberal, and I think that's enough here. If they want to do all of that, with other consenting adults, then it's none of my business! As a straight man, if I could get away with the sex bit, I'd definitely go for it. Sadly women don't seem quite so keen. Gay sexuality is male sexuality, without the constraints of needing women to indulge in it or to provide the civilizing influence.
The poppers and incontinence? Not as pleasing to my sensibilities, but I will defend their right to do as they wish.
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I don't believe that it was "designed" to be anything. It's simply male sexuality in its most natural and unrestrained form.
Do you know how straight men would act if women were as DTF as men are? Hooooo boy.
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