Читать книгу Still Straight - Tony Silva - Страница 6

This project began in 2014. After reading some primarily theoretical work about straight men who have sex with men, I became fascinated by disconnects between how men behave and how they define themselves sexually. By this point I had also heard countless stories from gay men about hooking up with straight men, and I wanted to better understand what was happening. How could a man identify as straight yet have sex with other men?

Also on my mind at the time was the fact that most sociological research about sexuality and gender focuses on people who live in urban or suburban areas. How interesting it would be, I thought, to interview men from rural areas and small towns to find out how they approached this issue.

This focus builds on my personal background: I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s on ten acres of woodland in Palo Cedro, California, a town of about twenty-five hundred people just outside of the city of Redding, which today has a population of around ninety-two thousand. This area is located in far Northern California, which is completely unlike the rest of the state culturally and geographically. The Redding area is over two hundred miles north of San Francisco and feels like a different world. Central California includes the San Francisco Bay area and Sacramento, the state capital, although most people—incorrectly, in my opinion—refer to it as Northern California. The far north is filled with farms, ranches, vast expanses of beautiful public lands, and communities that are mostly rural and small town in nature.

Redding is, technically, an urban area, and it is much larger than the towns from which I recruited men for this project. Still, having grown up where I did, I enjoyed many activities characteristic of rural areas and small towns, and I spent time in the surrounding rural areas. In part for these reasons I am familiar with many rural and small-town attitudes and norms, and I was able to bring that knowledge to this book.

Far Northern California faces issues similar to those faced by rural areas across the nation. These includes high rates of unemployment, substance abuse, and other social ills. Climate change is having an outsized impact on this area, too, as it is in many other rural areas and small towns. The 2018 Carr Fire destroyed over a thousand homes in the Redding area and almost completely charred the once green and beautiful hills surrounding Whiskeytown Lake, a popular recreation area. As bad as this was, however, the 2018 Camp Fire in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains has become the poster child for climate change, as it was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. Paradise, a city of about twenty-five thousand, was almost completely destroyed in less than a day. Ironically, many residents of rural areas and small towns either do not believe in climate change or typically vote for officials who block any attempts to address the problem. Sadly, this does not protect these people from the effects of climate change. These effects are becoming even more noticeable, too. In 2019, for instance, the electric company PG&E shut off power to millions of people in California to make sure no fires could accidentally start when record winds swept across the state. Climate change is affecting the day-to-day lives of people in California, and especially those in rural areas and small towns.

Many residents in far Northern California are also deeply conservative, so much so that some are trying to secede from California to create the State of Jefferson. Unsurprisingly, a majority of residents in the far north voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and typically vote for Republican congressional candidates. At the same time, far Northern California offers some of the most enjoyable outdoor activities of anywhere in the country. It contains incredible natural beauty, particularly in the wilderness areas known mostly by local outdoor enthusiasts.

While far Northern California is unique in many ways, it also shares similarities with other regions that are primarily rural, small-town, and home to a white majority. I point all this out to indicate that as a result of my background I am familiar with rural areas and small towns in the American West. I decided to focus on men living in these places in order to address the lack of research about gender and sexuality in these areas, taking advantage of my own familiarity with small towns and rural areas. It is useful to understand this context as you hear from the men who live in them.

This book contains information that will probably surprise you and challenge your beliefs. Sexuality and gender are complicated, and there is no right or wrong way to label people’s attitudes or behaviors. While a reader might view these men’s actions as contradictory, inauthentic, or disingenuous, they are not. In fact, many of the men I interviewed were fairly nonchalant about their activities. Perhaps most important, they did not think it was contradictory to have sex with men yet still describe themselves as straight and masculine. These men’s stories are complicated and often filled with irony and paradox. The results are messy, as are most aspects of our social world.

I talked to sixty men between 2014 and 2017, and they lived in far Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West, and the Midwest. It was difficult to recruit men in such a secretive population, but I did so by posting ads on Craigslist. To protect their identities, I use pseudonyms instead of their real names, and do not report identifying information.

Several things are notable about the stories told by the men I interviewed. First, they identified as straight primarily because they are deeply embedded in institutions, communities, and networks that expect and reward male heterosexuality and masculinity. I refer to all of this as “straight culture.” By “embedded,” I mean they are a part of and feel connected to these institutions and communities. Most of the men I talked to did not identify as straight because they hated gay or bisexual men. Instead, they felt that most aspects of their lives were heterosexual. Those married to women wanted to stay that way and saw their role as a husband as key to their straightness. They considered their sex with men mostly irrelevant to their identity. All described themselves as masculine, too, and many felt that identifying as gay or bisexual would have threatened their masculinity. Wanting to avoid discrimination and enjoying being part of a socially dominant group played roles as well.

Second, most of these men were primarily or exclusively attracted to women. Many began having sex with men only later in life, and for a host of complex and sometimes murky reasons. Why they had sex with men is as interesting and complicated as why they identified as straight.

Third, the way these men saw themselves as men and perceived the world is shaped by their rural and small-town roots. For instance, marriage as an institution is generally considered more socially important in small towns and rural areas than in urban areas, which typically have more diverse populations and reflect a broader range of attitudes. Many of the men I interviewed were not particularly attracted to men, but reported that their wives had mostly lost interest in sex. The men I talked to wanted to continue having sex but without feeling as though they were cheating on their wives or harming their marriages. To them, sex with men was the perfect compromise. Many of the men I interviewed were not all that attracted to men, but liked being able to “get off” without feeling as though they were cheating on their woman partner.

Fourth, their stories show that even with remarkable increases in LGBTQ visibility, many men still identify as straight despite enjoying sex with other men. Today, nearly everyone in America knows that it is possible to identify as gay or bisexual, but that does not mean that all people with same-sex desires or practices identify themselves that way. Our world is more complicated than that. These men’s narratives are filled with irony and paradox, as are those of most people, albeit for different reasons.

A key conclusion of this book is this: While attractions have biological roots and cannot be intentionally changed, identities are a social creation. How people label their sexuality and express masculinity or femininity will differ according to social context and time period. How these men understand themselves is unique, not wrong, even though their understanding contradicts the way most Americans currently understand sexuality. While men have been attracted to women throughout history, perceiving that being heterosexual is a key element of oneself is historically very recent. Classifying people on the basis of their sexuality only started in the mid-1800s. As this form of classification spread, laws and gender norms also changed. In other words, our social world today is regarded as primarily “straight,” but it was not always this way.

Talking to men like the ones I interviewed, men whose actions appear to contradict their identities, helps uncover the social processes that socialize men to be straight and masculine, processes we take for granted. Identities like “straight” do not just indicate attractions or sexual practices. They also represent embeddedness in certain institutions and communities, and often adherence to certain attitudes and social practices. As the men I talked to explained: sure, they had sex with men, but that did not make them any less straight.