The “cool straight guy”: your best gal pal’s boyfriend, an awesome colleague or some guy you thought was hitting on you, but turns out he’s just…(drum roll)….nice? Who knew! Some guys just think for themselves and are clearly more open-minded than ever before.  Straight guys increasingly feel less threatened because they realize there was never a reason to be threatened in the first place.

Growing up, it’s the leering lurker stigma that fuels people’s ignorance or fear every gay man is out to get them. In the past decade, however, it’s increasingly more popular to be gay friendly due in part to gay themed TV shows, music videos or exposure from his girlfriends who drag him to the gay clubs every week.  He even gets extra points with the ladies because he is comfortable with her homo entourage, smart man.

 He has long accepted the fact that he doesn’t need to be wearing football gear to hug another guy or slap another dude’s ass as an act of friendly playfulness.  Not that spanking is requirement of true male bonding, but simply drawing a parallel that football doesn’t make it any less “gay”, if that’s by chance whatever holds some guys back.

Totally speaking from a big city perspective, most straight guys are pretty comfortable with themselves and that’s awesome. In less accepting parts, some straight men feel they can’t be gay friendly because that alone would spark ridicule from their friends and maybe even some women.  It makes you wonder what kind of people he keeps around him. I must add, however, if our friends had some racial prejudice, most wouldn’t feel ashamed or scared to speak to them about it. So there is a little more to this mystery it appears.

Sexuality seems to be one of the last frontiers of acceptance because it specifically calls into question someone’s ego; engrained concepts of masculinity or femininity, social hierarchy amongst friends or colleagues, and the misinterpreted threat to their own identity. That’s a lot harder for someone to breakdown within themself than deciding to no longer use racial slurs and get with the times.

Sexuality has no color or country, yet our world’s cultures determine how people negotiate their identity. The government determines how school boards will conduct sexual education, so did our toys and TV shows as children. Everything plays a little role to raise healthy adult heterosexuals.

Growing up, we begin thinking the opposite sex is “icky” or “gross”, and each thinks the other has cooties.  The onset of puberty just around the corner, these are natural defense mechanisms to the conflicting curiosity towards the maturing opposite sex. I, however, never thought girls had cooties…let that tell you something.

Being gay is an invisible difference in this world and whoever isn’t exposed to learning about it at a young age may first understand it as foreign. Many straight men don’t want to appear standing on the “wrong” side of the fence lest it be forever stamped on their heterosexual passports.  I’d argue, it is projection when he assumes how his buddies would react or how a gay friend in his life would behave towards him. My friend once told me, “oh Brian, you think everyone is little bit gay”. I responded, “no, just the straight men who think I have cooties.”

Herein lies the irony, the straight guys that are comfortable with their sexuality don’t care if they appear gay alongside you, show friendly affection or even flirt jokingly. They know that if there is something more lurking, you can try all you want, but it’s not going to happen.  They also know that not every gay guy wants them in bed and those whose egos think otherwise, enjoy the attention and even seek it out, such teases… There appears to be doubled irony here, but I’ll save my views on the fluidity of sexuality for another time.