State of the Strait
Digital Photo Collage 2026
Totally straight and emotionally unavailable? Straight acting and appearing but deeply embedded in the closet? Gay for pay? Gay baiting? Anti-gay politically and pro-gay on the apps? Straight men are all over the place. Sloppy.
Research confirms what gay men have always known from lived experience. Studies estimate that between 0.5% and 3.5% of men who identify as heterosexual are also having sex with men — a population researchers now formally classify as H-MSM, heterosexual-identified men who have sex with men. Many of these men associate bisexuality with confusion and weakness, equate identifying as gay with vulnerability, and maintain their straight identity primarily to comply with social expectations around family and masculinity. Meanwhile a 2023 longitudinal study found that sexual identity change is bi-directional and ongoing across a lifetime — people move toward and away from LGBTQ+ identities throughout their lives. The emerging diverse sexual world is not a crisis for gay people. It is a crisis for straight men who were told the map was simple and are discovering, app by app, that it never was.
— Behan
