| Summary: | I interviewed 60 rural, white, straight-identified men who have sex with men (MSM). I did so to answer three main research questions: How do rural, white, straight MSM understand their gender and sexual identity? How do their experiences with sexual flexibility relate to the ways in which they understand their gender and sexual identity? How do whiteness and rurality shape how they understand their gender and sexual identity? While participants shared a diversity of experiences, all aligned themselves with straight culture. Participants had varying levels of attractions to women and different sexual histories, but all identified as straight. Sexual identities are not simply descriptors for sexual orientation. They also indicate feelings of belonging in certain communities and cultures, and not belonging in others. My research shows that rural straight MSM are not closeted gay or bisexual men. They are straight men who occasionally enjoy sex with other men. Their narratives, I argue, highlight the difference between sexual orientation, sexual identity, and sexual culture. The ways participants had sex with other men—what I call bud-sex—both reinforced and reflected their alignment with straight culture.
Enjoyment of straight culture, I argue, is the main reason the men I interviewed in this study identified as straight. None of them considered sex with men an important aspect of their identity. “Straight” was an identity that encompassed participants’ alignment with mainstream heterosexual institutions, such as marriage, and straight communities, to which they and most people they knew belonged. Collectively, these institutions and communities comprise straight culture. Participants considered straightness an identity, a way of life, and/or a community. Having sex with men was largely irrelevant to their sexual identity and how they understood their masculinity. Talking to them highlights how straightness is cultivated in a variety of institutions and contexts, and in numerous ways. Because participants grew up in and/or lived in white-majority rural areas, the rural straight culture to which they felt connected was by definition white. Their enjoyment of straight culture—and the institutions, communities, and ways of life attached to it—was central to their identification as straight and masculine. === 2021-01-11
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