Silva sought to find out more about these men, so he recruited 19 from men-for-men casual-encounters boards on Craigslist and interviewed them, for about an hour and a half each, about their sexual habits, lives, and senses of identity. One relatively neglected such group, argues the University of Oregon sociology doctoral student Tony Silva in a new paper in Gender & Society, is rural, white, straight men (well, neglected if you set aside Brokeback Mountain).
But not all straight MSM have gotten the same level of research attention. In it, Ward explored various subcultures in which what could be called “straight homosexual sex” abounds - not just in the ones you’d expect, like the military and fraternities, but also biker gangs and conservative suburban neighborhoods - to better understand how the participants in these encounters experienced and explained their attractions, identities, and rendezvous. Last year, NYU Press published the fascinating book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men by the University of California, Riverside, gender and sexuality professor Jane Ward. Being Into Middle-Aged People Is Probably a Sexual Orientation
