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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17464 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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There's a specific type of news story that works like a Rorschach test for whether you believe in the official version of reality that institutions present, or the messy, underground reality of actual human beings. The recent case of Dr. Samuel Stefan, a colorectal surgeon at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, is a perfect example. The headlines are all about a "doctor struck off after stripping naked in a toilet and propositioning a colleague." It's framed as a story about a predatory surgeon and a bunch of shocked, innocent victims.

But if you actually read the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) report with any kind of awareness of how the modern world works, you'll spot a massive hole in the story where a very popular yellow-and-orange smartphone app should be.

The tribunal tells us that Dr. Stefan had been "chatting to a colleague online" even though they were "unknown to each other." They arranged to meet in a toilet. The colleague, we're told, thought this was a "mutually convenient place" and "did not plan to have sex" with Dr. Stefan. When the cubicle door opened to reveal a naked surgeon beckoning him over, the colleague was "shocked, numb, and scared."

Let me just pause here to appreciate the absolutely wild level of benefit-of-the-doubt the MPTS is giving this situation. We're apparently living in a world where the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service believes that two men who've never met, after chatting on some unnamed internet platform, regularly arrange to meet in a hospital toilet cubicle to do... what, exactly? Exchange sourdough starters? Talk about the finer points of laparoscopic mesenteric excision? Compare notes on the hospital's pension scheme?

If you follow the link to the actual MPTS ruling, you'll come across gems such as:

Mr A said that he had met Dr Stefan the day before on XXX and they had chatted by message and had arranged to meet in the Hospital toilets on B level once it had become apparent that they both worked for the same hospital. Mr A said that Dr Stefan had first suggested meeting at night in a woodland area for ‘sexual actions’ but that he had declined this and said he wanted to see Dr Stefan’s face first and did not do sex in public.

Mr A said that he thought they were simply meeting in the toilets to get to know each other and that they would go for coffee afterwards. Mr A stated that it now sounds silly, but he had thought that perhaps in wanting to meet at the toilets, Dr Stefan had wanted to stay hygienic and maybe wanted to wash his hands or for Mr A to wash his hands. Mr A denied that he had any intention of sexual acts whilst at work.

Sounds silly?

Sorry, Mr. A, it sounds retarded. But I'm impressed at the chutzpah. Maybe he wanted to apply mouthwash to your cock too, to be extra safe. You "get to know each other" in public toilets in much the same way that "Netflix and chill" involves ardent attention to the best of the Silver Age of television.

Of course, there was catfishing involved:

Ms G said that Mr A continued to explain to her that, as he started work on that day at 1:30pm, he arranged to meet with the person prior to his shift starting, at the B-Level toilets. However, Mr A then received a text to meet at the C-Level toilets on the third floor of the Hospital from the Main Entrance on A-Level. Mr A told her that he then sent a message to the person to say that he was at the toilets, and one of the cubicle doors inside the toilets then proceeded to open. He then saw a man naked, with scrubs hung up, and playing with himself. The man gestured down with his head, nodding towards his own penis and Mr A understood that this meant for him to do something to the person or watch what he was doing.

Mr A told her that the man looked nothing like the XXX profile, in looks or age. The profile had stated that he was a 28-year-old white male, but that the person in the toilet was at least 10 years older than that and not white. Mr A said that he had seen XXX, panicked, and left the toilets.

Unless the "online platform" was LinkedIn and the "chat" was about a job opening in the proctology department, there's exactly one reason why two men who don't know each other arrange a meeting in a toilet stall. That reason is Grindr. And the main purpose of a Grindr meeting in a toilet stall is definitely not a "mutually convenient" chat.

The tribunal's choice to just accept the colleague's claim of shock at face value suggests one of two things. Either the MPTS members are literally the last three people in the UK who don't know what a hookup app is, or they're putting on some kind of elaborate legal performance where everyone pretends the "victim" was just an innocent bystander who stumbled into the world of public sex by accident.

If you're a man and you arrange to meet another man in a toilet stall after an anonymous internet chat, the "naked" part of the reveal is usually what "meeting" means. The idea that this was some kind of ambush on an unsuspecting guy requires us to believe in a level of innocence that would make a Victorian governess look like a hardened cynic.

And yet, this is the story the tribunal went with. Why?

Maybe it's because the legal system just doesn't have the right words for "misunderstood sexual subcultures." In the official world of the General Medical Council, there are only Doctors and Patients, or Harassers and Victims. There's no category for "Two guys who tried to have a quick hookup during a shift, but one of them got cold feet or thought the other was being way too weird and decided to blow the whistle to save his own ass."

To be totally clear, Dr. Stefan sounds like a nightmare. The report lists other incidents where he tried to kiss colleagues or repeatedly touched the genitals of junior doctors on the wards. Groping people while they're trying to do their rounds isn't a "misunderstanding of subculture." That's just being a sexual harasser. If the tribunal wanted to strike him off for the ward-groping alone, they would've had an open and shut case that didn't require them to pretend a toilet meeting was some kind of platonic coincidence.

But the toilet incident is the one in all the headlines. It's the "deplorable behavior" that the public finds most shocking. And because it's the main charge, the tribunal has to treat the colleague's story as the gospel truth. They have to believe that a grown man walked into a toilet to meet an internet stranger expecting a perfectly normal, non-sexual encounter.

This creates a really weird set of incentives. If you're a junior doctor and you get involved in some risky, slightly unprofessional behavior (like meeting a senior colleague for a hookup in the hospital)*, and it goes badly, your best move is to claim you had no idea what was happening. You have to play the "shocked and numb" innocent to avoid getting caught in the fallout from the other person's misconduct. The tribunal, meanwhile, has to go along with this performance because admitting otherwise would mean acknowledging that NHS hospitals are places where people have complicated, messy, and sometimes illicit sex lives.

The MPTS is obsessed with "public confidence." They mention it specifically: "The Tribunal was of the view that public confidence would be undermined if Dr. Stefan was permitted to practise."

Public confidence is a weird thing. It's rarely based on actual truth, it's based on keeping up a certain appearance. The appearance here is "The Medical Register is a Sacred List of Saints." If the tribunal admitted that Dr. Stefan and his colleague were probably engaging in a common, if risky, gay subcultural practice, it would mess up the appearance. It's way better for "public confidence" to pretend that Dr. Stefan is a lone predator lurking in toilets, jumping out at innocent men who were just looking for a "mutually convenient" place to stand around.

Why did such a murky outcome where neither the primary accuser or the defendant come out smelling of roses collapse into such a binary outcome? We might prefer thinking about it as legibility, in the same sense as Seeing Like A State. The state and its institutions (like the GMC) need the world to make sense in a certain way. A "predatory doctor" makes sense. A "messy situation involving two men, a hookup app, and a complete disaster of professional boundaries on both sides" doesn't make sense. It's too complicated. It raises too many questions about what else is going on in those toilets. It suggests that the hospital isn't just some sterile place of healing, but somewhere humans with hormones and smartphones actually exist.

(And absolutely don't ask about what happens on the beanbags, the ones in the mess)

Watch what happens when you try to tell the truth:

"Dr. Stefan and Mr. A met on Grindr for a bathroom hookup. When Dr. Stefan turned out to be older and a different race than his profile pictures, Mr. A got uncomfortable and left. Later, when Dr. Stefan was under investigation, Mr. A decided to protect himself by claiming he never intended a sexual encounter."

Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?

This is all rather inconvenient. Messy.

So the tribunal goes with the version of reality that makes the most sense in their framework, even if it's the version that makes the least sense to anyone who's lived in a city in the last twenty years. They treat the colleague's "shock" as a medical fact rather than a legal move.

We should also think about the "timeline concern" the panel mentioned. Dr. Stefan was already under investigation for the toilet incident when he allegedly went on to grope people on the wards. This is where my sympathy for the "he was just a guy on Grindr" defense completely disappears.

If you're a surgeon and you've just been caught in a toilet cubicle with your pants down, and the GMC is breathing down your neck, the rational response is to become the most celibate, professional, and invisible person in the history of medicine. You should be the guy who won't even look at a colleague's thigh, much less touch it.

The fact that Dr. Stefan apparently kept making unwanted advances while actively under investigation suggests a level of impulsiveness or lack of reality-testing that's genuinely incompatible with being a surgeon. Surgery is all about extreme impulse control. It's the ability to stand still for six hours and make movements measured in millimeters. If you can't stop yourself from grabbing a junior doctor's genitals while the medical board is literally in the middle of deciding whether to end your career, you probably shouldn't be holding a scalpel inside someone's abdomen.

So yeah, the guy had to go. Getting erased from the register was the only possible outcome. Even if there's no evidence that he was a threat to the general public (or an incompetent surgeon), he certainly was a menace to any nearby twinks, and not a great colleague.

(This is dry British understatement, before someone gets their knickers in a twist)

But I still can't get over the toilet thing.

I keep imagining the tribunal members sitting around a mahogany table, reading the transcript. One of them says, "So, he met a man he didn't know in a toilet stall. Why would he do that?" And another one says, "The witness says it was a mutually convenient place. Maybe the library was full?" And they all nod seriously, recording in the official judgment that this was a believable and logical chain of events.

There's a real cost to this kind of institutional blindness. When we force people to lie about the context of their lives to fit into the "victim/predator" binary, we lose the ability to actually regulate professional behavior effectively. If the NHS wants to stop people from having sex in the toilets, they have to admit that people want to have sex in the toilets. They have to deal with the reality of workplace culture, the stress of the job, and the way technology has changed how colleagues interact.

Instead, we get this whole show. We get a "Digital Reporter" (are there any analog ones left?) writing about "deplorable behavior" like we're still living in 1955. We get a tribunal that pretends Grindr doesn't exist. And we get a medical register that's "protected" from a man who was clearly falling apart, but for reasons the tribunal is too "proper" to actually spell out.

Dr. Stefan didn't show up to the hearing. He offered no remorse and no attempt to fix things. He's basically vanished from the profession, likely on a one way flight to Romania. Maybe he figured there was no point in showing up to a trial where the fundamental premise of the "crime", the toilet meeting, was being discussed in language that had nothing to do with the reality of what actually happened.

In the end, the system worked. A surgeon who didn't have the basic judgment to function in a professional environment was removed. The "public confidence" has been "maintained." But as I read the article, I can't shake the feeling that the only person who's truly "shocked, numb, and scared" is anyone who expects our public institutions to have even a basic understanding of how modern humans actually live.

Queen Alexandra Hospital will keep on functioning. The toilets will stay "mutually convenient" for all sorts of activities. The GMC will keep striking people off using the moral language of the mid-20th century. And the rest of us will keep reading these articles, squinting at the space between the lines where the real world, messy, sexual, and mediated by technology, is hiding in plain sight.

It's a comfortable fiction. It's a world where doctors are either saints or monsters, where toilets are just places for quiet reflection, and where online chatting between strangers is always leading up to a polite conversation about the weather. It's a world that doesn't exist, likely never has, but it's the only one the MPTS knows how to deal with.

*It's worth noting that Stefan was a SHO/Senior House Officer. That's an antiquated but commonly used term, and it absolutely doesn't mean a doctor very high up the totem pole. That doesn't necessarily mean that he wasn't senior to many people, but they'd have to be interns of one flavor or another.

Updated version on Substack, with a few juicy extras.

Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?

Meeting someone (colleague or not) for sex in a work bathroom is obviously professional misconduct. It's also the case that a lot of gay hookup norms are a kind of conspiracy against broader cultural norms. They're not the first gay men to meet for sex in a workplace bathroom! But you're not supposed to talk about it, in the same way that gay men all have porn of each other but you've only ever heard about the Senate Twink.

I think its silly way of doing it anyway. Why can't they meet up in a public place for 5 minutes like a cafe or bar to 'see what they are buying', before heading to a second destination for the tryst. (Promiscuous) straight people do this all the time because of the risk of being catfished and to quell anxiety that your random partner doesn't reek of crazy or look completely different to how they presented themselves online.

Why can't they meet up in a public place for 5 minutes like a cafe or bar to 'see what they are buying',

Horny behavior mixed with poor impulse control.

direct link to the MTPS report. On one hand:

In his police statement Mr A said that when he had received a message from Dr Stefan asking him to meet in the woods and a photo of an erect penis, he had replied that he did not randomly meet with strangers and liked to get to know people first, nor did he do things in public. When Dr Stefan suggested meeting places, Mr A said that he had replied that they could have a chat and get to know each other. Mr A said to Dr Stefan that it was a good thing that they were not looking to do anything private as he was quite loud. Mr A said that this had been a joke.

Mr A's claims might just be a 'the lady doth protest too much' and the board had to pretend to believe it. My gut check is that Mr A probably wanted to actually get a name and more conversation than is typically allowed in men's restrooms, rather than being entirely against screwing in toilets, and that's a kinda arbitrary dividing line, but the direct summary is a lot more candid than I'd expect from a group trying to paper over anonymous sex between professionals. The 'just bros washing hands' defense is hilariously threadbare, but someone being down for action and yet not wanting to have a fully-stripped man trying to get them into a stall with nothing more than a handwave, even if just because they would have rathered move to a supply closet or something.

If so, it's a weird rule, but honestly, I've seen weirder.

That said, I'd point to something else:

When Mr A entered the toilets that day, he said that one of the three cubicles was occupied. Therefore, he waited a couple of minutes, and no one emerged. Mr A stated that he approached the door and opened the door to see a man who was quite tanned and around the age of 36 to 38. In his interview with the Trust Mr A had stated that Dr Stefan had opened the door and his statement to the police, he maintained that he had heard a toilet door unlock, he waited around 2-3 minutes, the toilet door had then opened, and Mr A had seen a hand come and gesture towards him. Mr A had maintained this in his statement to the GMC, in that he had seen a hand come around the cubicle door. In his oral evidence, Mr A further clarified that after he had been in the toilet for a minute or two, Dr Stefan had put his hand out of the cubicle and gestured for him to enter the occupied cubicle. Mr A said that when he went over to the cubicle and peered inside, he could see that Dr Stefan was naked and playing with his penis in an attempt to make it erect. Mr A said that he could see Dr Stefan’s scrubs hanging on the cubicle door.

Ms H recalled that Mr A said that the incident had taken place in the toilets near the north entrance of C Level of the Hospital, which is the second floor of the Hospital. She said that Mr A told her that while in the toilets, the man had walked out of the toilet cubicle and was naked. Ms H said that she and her colleague were shell shocked at this.

[Mrs J] said that Mr A had told her that he had arranged to meet this doctor in the toilets in the Hospital, and although Mr A may have told her which toilets, she could not recall. Ms J said that when they met, Mr A and the doctor may have spoken, and then the doctor acted inappropriately, however she could not recall the details. She said it may have been that the doctor dropped his trousers and told Mr A to get on his knees. Ms J recalled that Mr A had said that he was frightened and ran out of the toilets.

Ms K said that Mr A told her and her colleague that a doctor dragged him into a toilet and assaulted him. She said that Mr A did not explain what he meant by being dragged or assaulted and thought that he felt embarrassed that it happened, ashamed, and scared that he could not say anything because no one would believe him because he was young

There's some discrepancies, here. I'd expect as much of them are Mr. A giving more palatable explanations for the sequence of events to his interlocutors or reinterpretations by the listeners (especially given the gender he was reporting to!), as are the more conventional hearsay problem where recollections change over translation and time. In particular, the bits where Mr. A can't seem to remember who opened the stall door... well, I'm gonna guess that Mr. A did, and he wasn't doing it to ask if anyone wanted to hear the good word.

But even the scenario that looks best for Dr. Stefan, he's coming across as... more than porn-level aggressive, even by the low standards of cottaging. I mean that quite literally; even in pornography (or drawn porn) where the pragmatic concerns can be left fully ignored, you're pretty likely to see people pretty deep in coitus with more clothes on than that. I'm sure there's people who sign up for it, don't get me wrong! But I don't think it's even necessarily what someone who gave a thumbs-up to "want sum fuk" grindr message would involve.

This seems common to one of the other allegations: Mr B's allegations seem to be reported as just 'groping', but the full summary has what started out as some consensual kisses and turning into:

Mr B confirmed that no words were used but it was inferred in the form of eye contact and holding out his penis. Mr B said that he tried to ignore Dr Stefan and at that point, he was encouraged further to do so with the words ‘go on’. Mr B said that Dr Stefan tried to persuade him to suck his penis. Mr B said these were the only words used. Mr B said that Dr Stefan pulled down his trousers slightly and began moaning whilst masturbating himself next to Mr B.

That's not in a restroom, but in what looks to be some sort of examination or procedure room. So basically what we're proposing that the MTPS doesn't want to admit happens.

It's the action scene from a porn flick, but without the setup or reciprocity of Lemon-Stealing Whores. I can't tell from the report where the review board was using a very loose definition of consensual for the earlier kisses, if Dr. Stefan was just cranking his hog at random guys and only the gay ones were willing to testify or complain, or if there was more backstory behind the kiss, but optimistically it's a guy pushing a relationship as hard as he can.

Which is probably the bigger driver. I dunno exactly what the UK's exact rules are, but in the United States, the rules-as-written are usually some variants of prohibiting on-the-clock sex period and off-the-clock relationships within a chain of command, and the rules-as-practiced are "don't make me go over there" and "the squeaky wheel gets the grease". That's not necessarily an unreasonable thing for an organization to do: as annoying (and potentially gross) as employees shagging might get, the actual meat-and-potatoes of enforcing a ban on such things is just impractical if they aren't actually interfering with work or leaving suspicious stains.

But then there's a problem, and both the assailant and the victims are in violation of the rules-as-written, if you ask too hard or too loud. One answer is to let justice ride, and to hell with the consequences, and that's died with modern social media if it survived the 90s; another is to just bask in the inconsistency, and sometimes that works if it's convenient enough.

The easier answer is to not ask stupid questions, and not hear stupid answers, at least in any way that requires writing them down. Any question about how many times Mr A has used the mysterious XXX App while on the clock would be off-topic, and slut-shaming besides. The inquiry isn't about him, and had it not been necessary to support Mr A's written documentation I doubt we'd have seen even the few references here.

It's... not a good compromise, like anywhere else where the contradiction between the rules and the policies are in high tension, not least of all because no one, probably not even the MTPS board here, can really spell out what the actual rules-as-practiced are. But it's a compromise that beats most BATNA, and takes no real negotiation itself.

I don't know. Maybe I am too credulous but Mr. A's account seems fine to me. Was he naive about why someone might want to meet at the toilets? Sure, but even he admits that! As best I can tell he expressed a consistent preference against having sex in public, or proceeding to sex without getting to know Dr. Stefan better. Even before the incident occurred. I guess I'm not sure about other people but I would consider "the toilets at my work place" to be "public", at least in terms of having sex. As the tribunal mentions it's also not clear to me what Mr. A has to gain by reporting this as sexual harassment if he didn't think it was. Like, what's the downside to him if he never says anything about it to anyone? Mr. A's disturbed demeanor after the fact was also noted by, like, half a dozen colleagues who testified. I guess this was all a Machiavellian show he put on to get the guy who catfished him in trouble?

I am happy to believe Mr. A was willing or intended to proceed to a sexual relationship with Dr. Stefan at some point in the future but I am skeptical he went to this particular meeting with the intention of having sex.

I think the debate we're really having here is:

What level of activity do you consent to when you consent to meeting someone from a dating app?

This is essentially the same as the debate over whether you need to [consent to every action in a romantic escalation] or whether there are basic menu expectations you have, an overton window of things that you consent to when you start. And then of course the argument over what is in that overton window.

Do I have to ask specifically before trying to put my arm around a girl on a movie date, or is that basically expected and her saying "no" after is sufficient? After a date, if I try to kiss her goodnight, is that allowed? Clearly kissing someone who says they don't want to be kissed is bad, but when you get kissed once when you didn't want to be, that's just a hazard of being in certain situations with someone, you have effectively consented to it by going on a date/going to the movies/going to a dance club etc.

But of course, we're talking about gay men so the question is, do you consent to seeing a naked man by going to meet a man in a men's room stall. I think the answer is probably yes, inasmuch as it is bad and offensive to see a naked man you didn't want to see, that's just a risk you took when you met a guy on Grindr.

But they should probably both be fired for this.

Was he naive about why someone might want to meet at the toilets? Sure, but even he admits that!

He admits to a level of naïveté which I would expect from an adult suffering from Down's syndrome, not from a medical doctor. If he really is as naïve as he claims to be, he has no business working in this capacity and ought to be struck off.

(Paraphrasing) "I met a man via an app which everyone knows is a hookup app for gay men. When he invited me to meet him in a bathroom, I assumed this was because he was concerned about being hygienic and wanted to make sure we both washed our hands (even though he never even suggested that this was the reason for the choice of venue). I had no idea that he wanted to have sex with me in the bathroom – I just use the app in question (which everyone knows is a gay hookup app) for professional networking. Also he wasn't anything like as hot as pics made him out to be but that's neither here nor there..."

I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe a qualified medical doctor can be this naïve. I'm even having a hard time believing that you are this credulous.

It struck me later, but it's worth noting that A is consistently referred to as Mr. A throughout the report.

In the context of a British hospital, that means:

  • A senior surgeon, since they shirk the doctor title for ~traditional reasons
  • A med student, since interns are called doctors
  • Someone who isn't a doctor at all: nurses, ward staff, admin etc

It is very unlikely that he's a senior surgeon. He could be a med student. He might be a particularly dimwitted porter.

Does this make things better or worse? Idk. I would only hope a medical "colleague" would have the common sense not to come up with such farcical excuses, but I've met idiots in the profession. They are overrepresented in both those making and receiving GMC complaints.

That being said, it is still idiotic, regardless of career choice.

Mr. B doing some administrative task while in the same room as a Dr codes as young intern to me (and his included writing, like 'not very slay' codes as very young), but you'd know far better than I how the UK medical norms on that go. Doesn't necessarily mean Dr. Stefan was looking especially young as chickenhawks go, but could be part of it.

Agreed that it's a hilariously bad as an excuse, even assuming Mr. A was genuinely derpy enough to have bought Grindr's 'it's a social meeting app' spiel.

I guess I might buy this if he's young and this is his first attempt at "okay I am gay, I want to do it with guys, how do I meet guys, okay there's an app for that" and he didn't know the rules of how encounters off Grindr are supposed to go.

Yeah, maybe he's stupid, but being socially awkward and stupid in that way can go along with "smart enough to become a medical doctor".

It does seem quite plausible he didn't want to engage in sex that day with Dr. Stefan. That's a wise and rational move for many reasons.

But if you are chatting to a man on Grindr, by far the most "hookup" of all hookup apps, and you agree to meet a man who you met on Grindr (who had already asked if you wanted to fuck in the woods!) in a BATHROOM, I genuinely don't know what to expect.

"he had thought that perhaps in wanting to meet at the toilets, Dr Stefan had wanted to stay hygienic and maybe wanted to wash his hands or for Mr A to wash his hands. "

I can't even begin to attempt to explain this logically. Why would you need to meet up to mutually wash your hands? If anyone needed to wash their hands, couldn't they just do that before? If washing your hands before a coffee date is important to you, just do that? Has anyone ever said "hey I know we're chatting over coffees and not touching, but it's really really important to me that I know your hands are washed"

Similarly, back to the bathroom, why not just meet for a coffee in the place where coffee is (the cafeteria, a nearby cafe)? Why on earth would you detour to a bathroom with a man you just met on Grindr? No one could be this oblivious. I'm not gay and I know for a fact if a gay man invited me to a bathroom, it's because he wants to fuck me. If I was talking to a girl on ChristianMingle.com and she asked me to meet her in a bathroom, my first thought would not be "damn she must love washing her hands".

I expect that Mr A pictured the encounter as "we meet fully-clothed, size each other up, flirt and banter a bit; if the chemistry is off the charts we are already in the perfect place to take things further, if not we can take things slower or end it there".

That sounds very plausible

My guess is Mr. A's justifications for meeting in the bathroom are post-hoc but I don't think it's in, like, a malicious way. Stefan probably suggested meeting in the bathroom. Maybe Mr. A thought it was weird in a general way but he didn't interrogate him about why he wanted to meet there. Any explanation is Mr. A trying to come up with what he could have been thinking when he actually didn't think much of it. But he doesn't feel, for whatever reason, like he can just tell the investigators that he didn't think anything of it, so he has to concoct come post-hoc explanation and there are, frankly, not many good ones!

I don't understand how you couldn't think anything of "this man I met on the gay sex app wants to meet in a bathroom after previously asking if I wanted to have sex in the woods"

But thankfully, this isn't my job to understand, I just get to be amused by this incredible story.

Probably he is trying to come up with post-hoc explanations, but Dr Stefan seems to have wanted to get straight down to it, Mr A wanted to take it slower, so "meet me in the loo" was the compromise choice. Private enough that they could, as you say, size each other up; public enough that Dr Stefan can't just jump his bones immediately. At least, that would be the idea, looks like Dr S was ready to get to the jumping right away even so.

Yeah this tracks

There's a significant addendum that I discovered on a second trawl through the tribunal records. It's in the Substack version, I didn't bring it over here because I'd have to juggle markdown and HTML.

The gist of it is that there are significant discrepancies in A's accounting of events. Just after the incident happened, he claimed he was physically dragged in and assaulted. This was later watered down to being flashed and inappropriately beckoned.

Call me cynical, but I don't see how even the immediate shock of seeing a dude horny and nude would cause someone to jump to accusing them of physical assault.

I'm not sure what A is getting out of this. Perhaps he just was that genuinely spooked, and decided to escalate pre-emptively. He might have thought that rejecting a senior would come to bite him in the ass (metaphorically), or he might not have been thinking straight (pun not intended).

A hospital toilet... Well, it's a bit of a liminal space. Not quite private, not quite public. This one seemed very low traffic, it seemed to be specific to a floor and surgical theater, so probably closer to private for the purposes of a quick fuck.

While I was willing to give A the benefit of the doubt, his rationale for even being there is ludicrous. Does he expect us to believe that handwashing was all that was on his mind?

The least unlikely explanation, to me, seems to be that A felt genuinely aggravated by the catfishing, lost their cool, and disclosed too much before they were able to calm down and collect their thoughts. Or perhaps they didn't like the surgeon in the first place, he seems like a rather unpleasant chap. But it's all speculation, and I haven't heard anything on the grapevine.

I had the same thought. Even if you do meet someone with the intention of having sex with them, it's a further escalation if they get fully naked before you arrive. The combination of catfishing and rapid unwanted unreciprocated escalation would certainly shock me, although I admit I'm not a gay doctor so maybe I'm not as jaded as Mr A.

It actually feels to me like a comedy beat in some kind of off-beat sketch.

"I've got a hot date?"

"Where?"

"In the bathroom on the 3rd floor."

"Is he hot?"

"Check out his profile pic." (The profile pic shows an attractive white man in his late 20's who vaguely resembles Pete Buttigieg.) "Wish me luck!"

<Smash cut to the bathroom. A stall door slowly swings open to reveal a fully-naked older man of ambiguous ethnicity, grinning creepily while maintaining eye contact. The camera is aimed too high to see his genitals, but his arm can be seen moving suggestively in that area.>

<Pan to Mr. A, who looks into the camera and screams.>

record scratch

You're probably wondering how I got into this situation

Hey, he's a colorectal surgeon. The toilets might be like a second office for him! 😁

Yeah, asking someone to meet you in the loo should be suspicious. On the other hand, if they were arranging a "date" (cough cough) then it might be for mutual privacy reasons. They're meeting up in the workplace, maybe they don't want colleagues to know about this or maybe one or both of them are not out at work. If they're seen chatting in the canteen or wherever by others, that's gossip fuel. A discreet, private, secluded place for first contact? Toilets are not the worst idea! X goes into the public toilet followed later by Y? Any bystanders will first assume they're just using the facilities for the intended purpose, not hooking up. It's a hospital bathroom, not the bathroom at a pub or club.

If they're seen chatting in the canteen or wherever by others, that's gossip fuel.

Is it really? I don't work in a hospital, maybe the culture is wildly different, but I can't imagine seeing two coworkers chatting in a public place at work and thinking that was worth mentioning to anyone. Even if I thought both were gay, "Preliminary meet and greet as precursor to later activities" wouldn't even occur to me; much less if I thought one was straight.

Now, I'll have to ask my (far too many) gay buddies about the finer etiquette of illicit gay romance once I'm back in Scotland, but at the moment, I'm imagining just how I'd die if I tried to convince the average woman on a dating app to meet me in the loo.

On a more serious note, there are tons of places that aren't the woods (the first choice, sadly shot down, read the tribunal minutes) or a hospital toilet. Doctors are allowed to step out of the hospital, mostly. How hard is it to grab a coffee at Costa's after work??? There really are so many better candidates that it just doesn't add up.

How hard is it to grab a coffee at Costa's after work???

That sounds like what Mr A wanted (if we can believe his varying accounts) but Dr S wanted "sex first, don't talk to me ever again after". So the loo was maybe a compromise choice. It sounds like a really bad idea all round, but equally clearly neither of them were thinking with their brains.

I've said female and male sexuality are very different, and I think this is one more grain of sand on the evidence pile. Yeah, most women would indeed hit you with a rock if you suggested meeting up for a first 'date' in a toilet. (Some would not! There are stupid/horny women out there, too!) But gay men seem to operate on "this is what 100% male sexuality is like without women to soften it down".

They'll probably have a better idea than I do, given what it sounds like they're up for from the last talk, but from my understanding:

It varies from person to person, and some people just can't manage to plan a more discreet approach, without the ability to set up something like a hourly motel room (eg, if a wife can access his credit card statements) or bath house (eg, if you don't want to be seen in a bath house). There's a lot of drama around 'can host' as a result, here, in grindr sphere spaces. Possibly including this guy, given the whole 'I'm Tots Straight In Monogamous Het Relationship' bit.

... but for those with it as a kink, it seems pretty overtly about the risk of potentially getting caught, the violation of norms, and the degradation. So the stuff that's a problem for you (or me!) is part of the point in the fantasy.

I mean, there may well be a ‘don't have sex in the bathrooms at work’ policy, even if implied. This may simply be a plausible excuse to hit him with a ‘please do your extracurriculars when you’re not technically supposed to be working’.

You might say gay men arranging to have sex with each other in a toilet shows how disgusting gay men are, but I'm pretty sure it shows how much women class up the sexual experience. There would be a 10000x increase in straight couples having sex on oily cardboard in alleyways if women were down with it.

I never planned for so many of my sexual encounters to be on high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets in nice clean rooms but I'm glad women are there to carry the load on this one.

EDIT: I just remembered a story. A friend of mine was visiting my city. He was staying in a nice hotel. The next day his girlfriend was scheduled to arrive and they would go back to his hotel room. So, that morning he made his bed and scattered rose petals on it to dial up the romance. He then met up with his girlfriend, had dinner and drinks and took her back to the hotel room. The bed was not how he left it! Apparently, housekeeping had come in, seen the clumsily arranged rose petals, seen the shitty way he made the bed, and undid the whole thing, made the bed so that it was crisp and perfect and then more tastefully scattered the rose petals.

I like to imagine that the female hotel housekeeper couldn't even bear the thought of his girlfriend being fucked on messy sheets.

I'm glad women are there to carry the load

No one had better laugh at that! Not even a snicker! We're better than that, guys.

I can only hope your buddy left a nice tip. That kind of thoughtful approach to hospitality is on the outs.

Now, personally, I'm not "disgusted" by gay male sexuality, at least not in the usual sense. It's more confusing to me, I can no more relate to the desire to have my back blown out by a hairy Greek bull than I can to the idea of getting off to a woman's armpits. I am also deeply jealous, buggers live the straight-man dream, as much sex as they can stomach with an unending cock carousel a single swipe away. A mid gay man gets ten times the action of a top 5% straight dude, with 10% the hassle.

I can no more relate to the desire to have my back blown out by a hairy Greek bull

So, I'm not sure that gay men find each other as attractive as straight men find women.

More story time: when I was younger I thought I could be gay and got really wasted one night and visited a gay bathhouse[1]. And there were men everywhere in towels making eye contact each other considering hooking up. All you had to do was meet and go to one of the many rooms nearby to fuck. And it was NYC so everyone was fairly attractive and fit. It was actually as efficient a system as it could possibly be. But something I noticed was that there was actually much, much less hooking up than you'd expect. Don't get me wrong it was a den of depravity, but men would cruise past one another for a long, long time before they found someone they wanted to actually have sex with.

I'm very sure if it was a room of half men and half women, every woman wearing a skimpy towel that was at least as fit and put together as the gay men in my bath house were, would be propositioned 5x a minute.

Gay men can be sex pigs but there's some other dimension to having sex that's clearly more complicated than if attractive man then sex.

  1. I learned that night that I was absolutely not gay.

You may be interested in the infamous Red Means No review from last year’s contest.

So you already know that at a typical orgy the median attendee doesn’t have sex, and the majority that do have sex only do so with the partner(s) they came with. You’re also aware that an RMN orgy averages 5+ sexual interactions per person, making it a breakthrough in modern orgy technology. Sounds great on paper, but what is it actually like to go to one of these?

If those are the stats for orgies, perhaps the bathhouse was pretty competitive.

That was... something. I have been around the block a time or two, but orgies where you pretend-rape women are a tier of degeneracy I have never really seen before.

Fair, though the median orgy has the failure mode where the average attendee is unattractively old or ugly or gives off psycho vibes.

Can’t say I’ve been to a gay bathhouse, but I’ve been to plenty of gay clubs. Sometimes it’s to go meet a girl who’s with her gay friends, because I couldn’t talk her into ditching her friends and coming over. Sometimes it’s me who brings the group to a gay club because I’d like to shake off a gay friend or gay friends of a girl I’m trying to bang.

I’m actually way more down to meet a girl who’s at a gay club with her gay friends than at a regular club with a mixed group or just her girlfriends. Gay friends play the least defense and are the easiest to shake off.

Sometimes a girl’s straight male friends will befriend you, especially if your presence occupies a potential cockblocker—the girl you're trying to bang—in which case you all suddenly become mutual grassroots wingmen. However, sometimes straight male friends can be more hostile or territorial. Understandably so, as oftentimes they’re subsidizing the bill or splitting it with the other guys in the group. Few guys would be happy about sponsoring a girl’s night out only for her to get poached away to poundtown by some other random guy. However, there’s a limit to how overtly they’re willing to try cockblocking since they don’t want to look like a jealous cuck. They’ll eventually leave you be as they see you’re not that easily outmogged and go off on their own quest to get laid.

Girlfriends are more of a double-edged sword, more feast or famine. Girls care more about the opinions of their girlfriends than straight male friends. If girlfriends wish to try to cockblock, they’ll be way more shameless than straight male friends in doing so. They’ll stick to the girl you’re trying to bang like gum and help pester and shit-test you to death. They may even try to pressure you to pay their bill. Girls don't have the burden of performance that guys do and girls have automatic social currency that guys don't, so girlfriends can throw hissy fits and manufacture drama to cockblock you in a way that would be social kamikaze for a straight male friend. On the other hand, if girlfriends are flirty with you, it can skyrocket the girl you’re trying to bang’s attraction toward you thanks to female mate-choice copying. Additionally, the girl will then be more willing to leave with you to get you away from her friends.

But yeah, I too have Noticed that the vibes of gay clubs tend be to tamer and less horny than what straight men might have in their heads as a stereotype. I’ve chalked it up to gay men having more of an abundance mentality than straight men.

For a straight guy, if he doesn’t strike while the iron is hot with a given girl, who knows when the next opportunity might come with a new girl. For a gay guy, the next nut with a new man is always around the corner. The gay guy is also more likely to have recently gotten laid, perhaps earlier that same day or night. He might still be recharging, still in the refractory period from his last romp.

The sense of urgency is different between straight and gay men. It’s always two-minutes-left-in-the-4th-needing-a-touchdown for a straight guy trying to seal the deal with a chick he hasn’t banged yet. For a gay guy, it’s always pre-game warmups.

Being a gay man is like a superpower. Operating under a permanent state of post-nut clarity if you so choose, but otherwise still having the mental hardware of a man—plus the time, money, energy, and headache saved from not having to deal with women in sexual/relationship contexts.

Being a gay man is like a superpower. Operating under a permanant state of post-nut clarity if you so choose, but otherwise still having the mental hardware of a man—plus the time, money, energy, and headache saved from not having to deal with women in sexual/relationship contexts.

It's a plausible theory, but why go to a gay bath house if you have post-nut clarity? They're not even bath houses in the traditional sense. You'd hate to just chill out there if you're not trying to get laid.

A gay bar or gay club is still fun even if you're straight and not horny. A gay bath house is not.

Speculating off your description of the NYC bathhouse you attended and my background vibe:

Even gay clubs, including those in NYC, generally aren't open 24/7 (much less having a decent crowd 24/7). Why not just chill out at a gay bathhouse on occasion in your free time? If some guy catches your fancy while you're chilling, you have the option of flagging him down for a session in one of the side rooms. If not, not a big deal, there's always some other day.

I learned that night that I was absolutely not gay.

I can only encourage self-discovery.

Now, you have to remember that gay men are satiated! The regularity with which Genghis Khan fucks his bountiful and bodacious harem might start off strong, but will inevitably taper due to boredom. On the other hand, if you suddenly gained access to the lady's quarters, you'd spray seed while the sun shines, or some other incredibly mixed metaphor.

I'm very sure if it was a room of half men and half women, every woman wearing a skimpy towel that was at least as fit and put together as the gay men in my bath house were, would be propositioned 5x a minute.

This is a rare occurrence. Fit gay men can go to a bathhouse whenever they feel like it. Hetero men in the former scenario would make the most of it with a scarcity mindset, gay men might well be bored and there just to do something more interesting than rubbing one out.

Same reply as for @Sloot

https://www.themotte.org/post/3442/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/398788?context=8#context

You might say gay men arranging to have sex with each other in a toilet shows how disgusting gay men are, but I'm pretty sure it shows how much women class up the sexual experience. There would be a 10000x increase in straight couples having sex on oily cardboard in alleyways if women were down with it.

Agreed. Male homosexuality just shows you what male sexuality looks like when it's unconstrained.

I actually disagree and I wonder if this line is just propaganda that millennials have been fed our whole lives.

It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant. The gayness is part of their expression of being counter to normal behavior. Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it. Deviant, abnormal sex is explicitly part of the appeal.

It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant.

I'm sure there are some, but celebration of deviancy is often a reaction to being stigmatized. If you're an American homosexual older than ~30, you grew up in an environment where casual homophobia was virtually guaranteed even in fairly liberal environments. Much of the point of Pride was(/is) to be in-your-face in reaction to people telling you to stay in the closet (or die) because you were a moral abomination.

Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it.

See also: Taliban fighters complain about having to work in an office instead of waging jihad. There's always going to be some people for whom the struggle was a source of meaning and excitement. The normalization of homosexuality means less interest in flamboyantly transgressive behavior as a show of defiance and more PTA meetings.

See also: Taliban fighters complain about having to work in an office instead of waging jihad.

Bro.

I feel their pain.

It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant. The gayness is part of their expression of being counter to normal behavior. Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it. Deviant, abnormal sex is explicitly part of the appeal.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are a lot of straight men who would be deviant if they could get a woman down with it.

I've spoken with a middle aged straight man who admitted to me he was constantly fantasizing about some pretty out there fantasy fetish scenarios involving his wife, but who knew from the few times he had brought them up that she would never come around to trying any of them. Who knows how many people are in marriages or relationships where they quietly settle for never getting the deviancy they crave?

We often only know about historical fetishism due to (possibly libelous) accounts of rulers with fetishes. Who knows how old some popular internet fetishes were historically? Maybe gay guys are more likely to bring up their deviant desires, and thus more likely to find someone at least game to try them out.

Where gay men have deviant sex with one another, straight men are balls deep in weirdo niche porn and gooning for hours.

Degeneracy finds a way. There's still a case to be made that solo, self-destroying degeneracy is Less Wrong (lulz) than inducing others to degeneracy with you.

Sure, lots of gay men enjoy being deviant, no argument here. But I'm curious how many straight men would be as deviant as that, were it not for a dearth of willing participants. I would hazard a guess that most straight men who've watched porn have watched and masturbated to pornographic videos depicting deviant sex acts that they've never had the opportunity to perform themselves. I would likewise hazard a guess that most men watching these videos would jump at the chance to perform these sex acts IRL if the opportunity presented itself. Like, if you were to conduct a survey asking straight people "would you participate in a gangbang if the opportunity presented itself and there was no risk of contracting an STD or impregnating someone/being impregnated?", I suspect the proportion of men who would answer in the affirmative would vastly outnumber the proportion of women (which is appropriate because... well, you get the idea).

Likewise, look at the kind of shit exceptionally wealthy men get up to (Arab princes, Epstein's clients etc.). You could interpret this as proof that wealthy people are all perverted sociopaths, or that power tends to corrupt; alternatively, you could interpret it as evidence that most straight men have fantasies that would strike the average woman as deviant, and only the sufficiently wealthy have the purchasing power to make their fantasies a reality.

At the same time, there are enough women to maintain the market for their own brand of sexually deviant books as well, yet we don't hear about men who have women waiting in line for a sliver of their attention.

Wait, actually, we do. They are called cult leaders. They swim in poontang. I don't know if having fantasies about jacking minotaurs off makes it more likely that the same woman will join a cult, though.

Hypothesis: Some portion of men we (and they themselves) would call gay are not so much gay as hypersexual. If you want to have anonymous bathhouse group sex and gloryholes, men are just your only option. They are more accurately bathhouse-sexual than anything else and the gender of their partners more or less just follows as a consequence.

For the most part, market forces are such that if you can have sex with men you will have sex with men. In the same way that if you're neutral between shopping at Target and shopping at Neiman Marcus, you'll probably buy all your clothing at Target.

Sure, but that understanding (which I agree is the correct one) would, if adopted, have negative effects on the interests of:

  • Traditionalists, who claim that gayness causes bathhouse-sexuality (this is an instinctual reaction to gayness for a few reasons, plus the New Testament lists them separately)
  • Non-bathhouse gays, where the Overton window protecting scoundrels bathhouse-sexuality provides broad cover for most bedroom activities
  • Progressives, who claim zero correlation simply to spite the traditionalists (most progressives lack the same instinctual negative reaction to gayness anyway [i.e. they're women, or were raised nearly exclusively by them], and it's natural/easy for them to tolerate something that isn't an injury)
  • Liberals, who want to conserve the fact there was a time in living memory when it was possible to do this with women too

Which has the ultimate effect of no group really wanting to be less wrong about this until they're forced by bad luck to address a bad actor.

I think you're describing bisexual men. If someone is equally attracted to both genders, but one of them is much easier to grab a hold of than the other, it makes sense to go for them first and then settle for women when you want to get married or go for the more socially acceptable option.

And lesbian bed death shows you the same for many women

He's Romanian, but not white? Is he a Gypsy? I've never heard of a Gypsy with an M.D.

Roma =/= Romanian. Roma are actually a minority within Romania as well.

I can't find any pictures of him online, so your guess is as good as mine. While Romanians (non-gypsy) are debatably white, I would still assume it's a shock to have be mislead by a photo of some young white dude and then run into a swarthy middle-aged bloke. One flashing you to boot. Probably doesn't trim either, he doesn't sound like the type to bother.

I've never heard of a Gypsy with an M.D.

It could well have fallen off the back of a truck.

While Romanians (non-gypsy) are debatably white

This is nonsense. Non-gypsy Romanians are physiologically as white as Poles or Hungarians, and the only reason why they are not as politically white is because the kind of person who cares about whiteness-as-political-identity is usually dumb enough not to understand the difference between Roma and Romanians.

I know the difference between Romanians and Romani. I do not particularly care to litigate whiteness, by "debatably" I only point to the fact that some people do. Besides, the "victim" of this farce specifically claimed that he was catfished with images of a different race, and I doubt he would have said that if he'd expected a Frenchman holding a baguette and got a Pole wielding a... pole.

I believe the most Pole-appropriate anatomical euphemism would be kielbasa.

It seems there's cultural precedent for just this sort of misunderstanding.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mo4sCn1I7-g

My girlfriend and I live right next to a shopping centre. The public toilets are on the second floor, and owing to their relative seclusion (you have to walk down a long hallway, at least a hundred metres from the nearest shop) are a popular spot for gay men to meet up for dogging. They're generally used not by out-and-proud types, but by closeted gay men with wives and children who wouldn't be caught dead setting foot in a gay bar. Standard procedure is for these men to find an empty cubicle, open Grindr, and camp until a willing participant makes themselves available.

When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she was appalled. It never ceases to fascinate me, the kinds of behaviours that are seen as perfectly normal within the gay community, and what straight people think of them when confronted with them. The gulf between the sanitised "love is love" omg yass queen slaaay portrayal of the gay community and the gritty reality (of rough sex in public toilets between two men who met each other all of two minutes ago, literally don't know each other's names, at least one of whom presents himself as straight and has a wife and children) is almost incomprehensibly vast.

I'd quibble a bit about 'perfectly normal'. Even for Grindrites, cottaging isn't a standard behavior, and I'd bet a sizable amount of money that >50% of gay guys haven't cottaged ever, and a smaller bet that around 80% either haven't or have only done so rarely and in non-central examples (eg, screwing in the restrooms of a gay club after you've danced with the guy for ten minutes). In addition to the safety and privacy concerns, or the various problems of preparation, it's also just a hilariously uncomfortable kink, and there's ways to execute on the kink side without busting your knees to hell and back.

But I could believe it's a 10-20% thing, and it's a slang that most gay guys either know or know under a different name, so it is a quibble. And there's a lot of other less-immediately-squicky stuff that's still definitely very far from the Hallmark-style "love is love" gay life-as-greeting card. I think there's ways to make these things compatible -- there's more than a few self-identified 'sluts' with lower body counts than the average straight guy and saccharine-level relationships with their husband, who enjoys orgies or partner swaps a couple times a year with the same close friends -- but that's not all of the sluts, and not even interesting to many of them.

cottaging isn't a standard behavior

It’s obviously standard enough that there’s a word for it.

Not a good criteria, there's a word for eating excrement and a word for obsessively eating dirt, but neither are standard behaviors.

In high school there were half a dozen terms for crazy sex acts that I’m sure none of us had ever performed but we did talk about them quite a bit.

‘Furry’

Eh... in the sense that if a sizable minority of a population does something, you probably will end up with a (recognized) word for it, maybe? But then it's 'standard' for men to get fucked by other men, because we have the word 'gay'. Even for definitions of standard where that's not wrong, it's not really clear.

((And there's a lot of things we have words for that are pretty uncommon, but I don't think we need to dive down the vore hole now.))

I never liked this argument. There are lots of words for things few people (if any) have ever done. We even have standard terms for hypothetical situations which have never come to pass and probably never will.

I never claimed that a majority of gay men engage in cottaging. By "perfectly normal", I merely meant that it's a concept that most gay men could be assumed to be familiar with, and which most would consider unworthy of comment if it came up in conversation.

That's fair, and why I put it as a quibble more than any real disagreement. I have had people who assumed it was so common as to be a rite of passage, so it's something I prefer to have more specifics about.

I mean, I find this… disgusting- and I’m not female.

I think that's the modal response from the typical heterosexual of either sex.

Full disclosure: while I've never had sex with another man in a toilet cubicle, I have had sex with a woman in a toilet cubicle within a couple of hours of meeting her. So I'm not really one to throw stones here.

I also find this disgusting. Some people are just not meant for the bathhouse life.

When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she was appalled. It never ceases to fascinate me, the kinds of behaviours that are seen as perfectly normal within the gay community, and what straight people think of them when confronted with them.

“I’d always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth,” said @FtttG’s girlfriend, mortified at the thought of gay men treating the toilets of her neighboring shopping centre as a revolving door for casual sex. “Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong.”

Let's not blame the gays alone. Yeah, this has been part of gay culture for a long time, but straights have enthusiastically adopted "let's do drugs in the bathrooms/let's have sex in the bathrooms" as well when going for a night out.

It makes me sad seeing old Onion articles, back when they were funny.

Most important question is, how do you know this? Especially the exact standard procedure?

I imagine you are going somewhere specific with this line of questioning but it is worth noting that a lot of gay guys will just explicitly tell you this sort of thing, even without you asking.

Even at work.

As a statistician, gay men are pretty much the only demo that are honest-ish on surveys about sex and relationships. It makes comparison data even more alarming to look at if you aren't ready for it. While on average a gay man in the US has about 7x more unique partners than a straight man, there are a large fraction of gay men that aren't actually into the casual sex/hook up gay culture at all really, or aren't attactive enough to participate even if they want to. If you only look at the numbers of the top 25% or people that have had more than 4 lifetime partners, its starts looking like someone made a calculation error. Epidemiological data in college comparing gay men to straight men and all women was how I learned what an axis break was as a freshman.

edit vv - yes, only self identified are considered gay. the other group are 'men who have sex with men' (MSM) a unique demo that is somehow often 100% straight. researchers generally focus on behavior and not labels/identity here as the MSM demo esentially cannot be intereacted with in a cooperative way if treat them like they are "gay".

As a statistician, gay men are pretty much the only demo that are honest-ish on surveys about sex and relationships.

If you mean self identifying gay men, maybe - but a lot of "gay" men don't identify that way and will lie a great deal.

And sometimes, you're bored and slightly drunk in a gay bar, and you whip out a clipboard for an interview. Pure hypothetical, that, couldn't be me.

For some reason that is not something that has happened to me, despite having studied/worked alongside gay guys, including going drinking with some (not a high barrier in the UK though). They'd maybe lightly flirt or joke about going with some guy to the toilet in a way that would be considered inappropriate for straights, but they never got explicit, let alone talked about specific casual meeting spots. But they also were more the turtleneck sweater and glasses kind of nerd gays, I guess. Gays in nightclubs are something else, of course, but then again, nobody is surprised about what happens there.

In any case, FtttG has answered already.

A decent % of gay men aren't into the party scene at all and want the same sort of long term relationships that hetro men and women generally have.

Yeah, just meaning to say that some of us know way more about this than we wish to.

I experimented with Grindr many years ago and was invited to a toilet cubicle in this shopping centre by an Irishman in his forties, who I can only assume had a wife and children. I decided I'd rather be sodomised for the first time by a handsome Brazilian in an actual bed in an apartment.

was invited to a toilet cubicle in this shopping centre by an Irishman in his forties, who I can only assume had a wife and children.

I just realized that the secretly-gay-family-man phenomenon is a complete mystery to me. Not the sex part, but the family-raising part. What's in it for them?

From a female perspective, so much of heterosexual family/married life seems like a hugely complicated problem of channeling the flow of male sexual appetite to incentivize prosocial behavior, like running a complicated steam-powered manufacturing plant or something. Yet this mid-40s Irishman signs on for (at least some part of) the burdens of married life with no libidinous prompting at all, no little penis angel goading him at any point? Even for someone from a conservative culture, can it be worth going to that level of heroic effort just to convince your mates that you're really, truly not gay?

I would never have sought treatment for same sex attraction if family life hadn't had appeal. Raising children(not babies but kids), for one thing. And you do realize that dishes are, like, part and parcel of the whole 'eating' thing? There isn't a universe where chores just don't get done. If you live alone that just means you don't get to split them.

What's in it for them?

Some relevant reading -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down-low_(sexual_slang)

This is why medicine uses "MSM" (men who have sex with men) because of people who do that, have corresponding risk factors, but deny gayness.

They might be bisexual. They might want kids. They might be severely repressed and in partial denial, or caved to societal or familial pressure. Or all of the above.

I suspect that a lot of these men were in denial about their sexuality for decades, and by the time they realised what was really going on they were in too deep. But rather than coming clean, they just pursue anonymous gay sex on the down low.

I get denial temporarily suppressing the Irishman's awareness of desiring men. I get denial making him able to white-knuckle it through successful intercourse with a lady. But like half of the culture war hereabouts is people pointing out that there's no earthly reason a man would ever want to do the dishes, change a diaper or go for that promotion at work, if it weren't for his burning innate desire to also get laid. So here's a person who doesn't even especially desire that, but he's signing on for the dishes and diapers anyway?

Why do men have affairs? I think there's a certain element of "have the domestic life where someone runs the house, cooks the meals, we have a comfortable life together, then for the hot kinky sex I hit that sexy co-worker/neighbour/woman I met while on a work trip" for some guys.

One is the support structure of ordinary life, one is the no-strings attached, no responsibilities, we just meet up for sex and maybe some romance and then I go home to my wife and don't have to have discussions about taking out the bins or whose turn it is to cook dinner with my mistress.

I imagine some MSM men are "yeah of course I like having my cock sucked, everyone likes that, it's just way easier to get guys to do it on a casual basis but that doesn't mean I'm gay".

Humans are complex beings, even men. Family life used to be the norm and promoted in the media. It's not inconceivable that a man might want a Norman Rockwell family to feel complete and get sexually aroused by muscular male-presenting buttocks. With gay marriage being legal in the US and thus inevitably normalized it has become easier to square the circle, but someone older didn't have this option.

Yeah, there's similar drives behind surrogacy debates, and toward the gay mentor/'uncle' stuff comes from similar sources for men who can't have kids by blood.

It's... not a great situation. Even the best-case scenario for a 'down low' gay guy in a het marriage -- a wife that's aware and accepting, the guy being able to hit her needs, and a limited number of external partners that aren't Catching Feelings -- there's a tendency for them to kinda detonate as often as they work out. And most don't really achieve that level of openness, either out of fear or cowardice about coming clean to the wife, or inability to think with their bigger head if they try to button it up.

I reckon it's probably a case of a typical-mind fallacy. Growing up, these men would have understood that their peers craved sex with women. The first time they had sex with a woman, it probably wasn't wholly unpleasant (after all, it's a bit like having sex with a man), but they may have felt a certain feeling of anticlimax, a sense of "is that it?" But they probably assumed this is what it's like for everyone, and they've heard so much about how sex is so much better when it's with someone you love. After meeting a nice girl and getting to know her, the sex becomes a bit more enjoyable because of the greater emotional intimacy, even if they can't quite shake the feeling that this isn't exactly what they were led to believe about sex. They assume this is what everyone feels about sex. The idea that they could only feel true sexual fulfilment by having sex with a man never even occurs to them, because as far as they're concerned, they have achieved true sexual fulfilment. Having started on the path of the traditional success script, they continue down it: marriage, mortgage, kids. They suppress the nagging feeling that sex with women wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Then upon reaching middle age, they experience a sexual awakening. Maybe the wife's out of town, they fire up Pornhub and accidentally-on-purpose open the gay section instead of the straight section; maybe they're in a bar, another man makes a pass at them and they feel not repulsed but excited. Whatever it is, the sexual excitement they experience is nothing compared to that when they were having sex with a woman. All of a sudden it clicks: this is what it must feel like for their male peers when they have sex with a woman. The internal experiences I've been having all these years are totally different from those my friends were having when they were having sex with women.

Having had this realisation, the morally upright thing to do would be one of the following:

  1. Acknowledge it, but refuse to act on it. You made a commitment to your wife, and commitments are not meant to be broken, even if you made it at a time when you had an incomplete understanding of yourself and your desires. Divorce would be devastating for your wife and for your children. So you soldier on, performing the role of a straight husband and father at least until your children are of age.
  2. Come clean to your wife. Divorcing your wife and children will be profoundly upsetting for everyone, but better to be honest and open about who you are and what you want.

But these men are stuck between a rock and a hard place: desperately wanting to act on their desires, but not wanting to bring scandal upon themselves or their families, and reluctant to alienate their friends with their newfound realisation. Instead of doing the most or second-most decent thing, they take the maximally cowardly third option: not telling their wives anything, but acting on their desires by having illicit trysts with strange men.

Was it at least a nice shopping center?

Not at all. Not the worst but nothing swanky.

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