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I am a simple man, if another man has sex with men at a rate >0 without duress or deprivation, I'd call them bi.
The reason I specify a lack of duress or deprivation, other than the obvious of rape, is that men often have sex with other men when deprived of opportunities to get the fairer sex. Think prison, or boys only boarding school.
I was in a boys only school, albeit not a boarding one, and I never got it on with my bros.
(I say this without any moral condemnation, at all, it's just a question of labels)
Of course, there are all kinds of edge cases, what if they didn't know someone was a man? Wiser men than me have ended up in Thailand drunk off their tits, and didn't realize their partner was a lady boy. Or what if they're post-op trans?
I agree with you that retroactively labeling people in the historical sense is a questionable task. Many cultures, particularly the Romans or Greeks, had models of sexuality that don't cleanly match onto our own. Even when it was two men, the question of who was on top versus the bottom was very important. The latter was condemned, the former condemned weaker, tolerated or extolled as virtuous depending on the exact moment in time.
Even today, the Turkish army excludes people bottoming from the mandatory draft, but doesn't allow tops to use the same excuse. There are doctors working for the government whose job it is to look at pictures of people getting their backs blown out, while having to decide if that counts.
If they look like women, and if they don't have a dick (or you're unaware of it due to drunkenness), how is that an edge case? And what about the reverse - a man having a passable trans male partner? Are both scenarios gay/bi?
I think it's easier to just think of it as, if you're a man and only attracted to male characteristics, e.g. penis, body hair, muscles, general masculinity, etc. you're gay, if you're only attracted to female characteristics, e.g. vagina, breasts, small waist/large hips, you're straight. If you're attracted to both, you're bi, past a certain fuzzy point (being attracted to tall women is fine, but being attracted to tall, muscular, hairy women with small hips and deep voices starts getting a bit sus). You're not suddenly gay for being attracted to a drawing of a woman if the artist later goes "ha, I actually intended it to be a male, it just looks like a drawing of a woman!".
There does seem to be this universal male anxiety over "does liking/doing X make me less of a man?" though. In modern times this seems to have become "am I gay for liking/doing X" which adds an layer of worry over things Romans or Greeks wouldn't have cared about, like being the dominant partner of a younger male of lesser social status. Although the Romans thought having a goatee or touching your head with your finger was effeminate, so maybe it evens out.
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I wonder if AI makes this easier, although I presume there are simpler ways for the committed pacifist and/or coward to get out of it.
I remember my grandfather saying that in the US military during the war there were countless easy ways for someone smart to avoid actual front line combat, but they had to join first so as to allow the military the plausible deniability central to conscription; it is important for the fighting plebs to believe that nobody is “getting away with it” lest overall morale suffer. He hated those people, even though after a relatively minor injury he sat out much of the war.
I’ve heard that dodging the draft in Vietnam by pretending to be gay was doable as long as you pretended to be playing along.
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If they're using AI for this purpose, well, that would be unusually forward thinking for the Turkish military. It probably doesn't take long for a military psychiatrist to take a look at an image, and trust me, we've seen much worse so it's not an onerous task.
I have never needed to dodge a draft, but I could see worse options on the table. Paying a gay man a few bucks to put on a condom and stick it in? Do you even have to pay? On the topic of AI, I'm sure it would be possible to deepfake it.
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