Your Straight Boyfriend Isn't Gay

Or a twink, or a lesbian.

“Being a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man just means your boyfriend is the gayest straight man you know.” She shuffles offstage to reveal her “gay-straight” boyfriend: ugly ash-grey skinny jeans scrunched up against brown hiking boots, a boxy tank on top.

“Outfits looking fire today... Uh💅” he says with a forced inflection and a kick of the foot.

Not only does the boyfriend not look gay at all (where is the bowler shirt? The white Converse?) – but when has a gay man EVER said, “Your outfit is looking fire”? In my anthropological research, gay guys usually parrot some variation of “you’re serving cunt PERIODDD.”

When she says her straight boyfriend is gay, she doesn’t actually mean he likes to get rawed in the Basement catacombs. She means he is culturally gay – narrow-shouldered, patchwork tattooed, familiar with his astrological sign. In other words, he’s Not Like Other Guys. Except he is, just in a serif font.

This TikTok is emblematic of a broader trend I’ve seen of women referring to their heterosexual boyfriend as anything but. Some of y’all bout to be real mad at me, but it must be said: Your straight software engineer boyfriend is not a twink or a lesbian. I don’t care if he gardens in Carhartt overalls, bakes sourdough, and listens to boygenius. That is a BOY, genius.

Assigning queerness to a straight man erases centuries of history and the deep interiority of queer identity. It flattens queerness into limp wrists, millennial hipster aesthetics, and “feminine” hobbies. Worse, most of these so-called gay-straight men are just dudes with a modicum of communication skills. He goes to therapy and treats service workers like humans—should we invite Bella Hadid?

In seriousness, I can forgive the confusion. Well-adjusted men are rare, so maybe he is queer in the 16th-century English sense. I have a theory that whenever a straight man is home-trained, there is usually a reason: one of my friends’ boyfriends is really nice, but it made more sense once I found out he has a gay older brother. Another guy I know who is unusually kind was raised by South African anti-apartheid activists. As a joke, I used to claim credit for mothering my childhood best friend into a decent human being. But none of them profess an alternative queer aesthetic; they’re just... nice.

Which is to say, I don’t have a problem with nice guys. I have a problem with Nice Guys™ who talk about their “golden retriever energy” in their Hinge prompt. So often, these new-age Renaissance metrosexuals are a product of their environment. In New York, queerness is cool, irreverent, aspirational. Being ‘alternative’ is a status symbol instead of a scarlet letter. They clamor to be one of the “4 men that bisexual women are attracted to” – and what better way to attract than to emulate? In my circles, we have a less charitable name for these men: Straggots.

In contrast, Southern divas are cunt in spite of our environment. My 10th-grade civics class debated same-sex marriage, and when the “pro” presenter showed a picture of two guys holding hands, the boys all turned around, too disgusted to bear witness. My queerness was crystallized under pressure, not as a kitschy term of endearment.

Their contrived relationship to culture leaves straggots perpetually in the shallow end. He watches Drag Race to tell you he watches Drag Race. He gets a rush from declaring that The Devil Wears Prada is his favorite movie. He drinks Cosmos instead of Old Fashioneds. Sex and the City 2 instead of The Godfather. That’s why I respect autistic guys – they will be deeply invested in steam-engine trains and particle physics, unperturbed by the gender superstructure.

The only thing worse than the golden retriever boyfriend epidemic is the sassy man apocalypse (two sides of the straggot coin.) These men have been promoted from Devil’s advocate to Devil’s cumdump, begging for the opportunity to unnerve a queen. In this national crisis, I have deputized myself as a Sassy Man Destroyer. I’m like Anthony Fauci for humbling men.

Picture my perfect night: my girls and I are at the bar, having a ki in our opaque language of internet memes and gayphorisms.¹ I’m talking about how “gurllllll, we are not Thanksgiving Turkeys,” my friend finger-wags in response, “that part.” The whole time, there is a man sitting at the end of our table, some acquaintance’s boyfriend, who has been passively listening with a face of confusion and... disgust? He is a SCAD graduate wearing a layered Goodwill vintage sweater with a charming print of a family of brown bears. I clock his slight attitude and rev my annoying gayspeak further, taunting him like a peanut gallery that’s been bound and gagged. “Trump is a sissy queen, likeeee I kinda live for her.”

He can’t help it. The 4 vodka sodas he’s drained congeal into a voice: “I think both parties are shit.” Record scratch.

When someone says this, it's either because they are a leftist or a Republican. I put on my detective hat and ignited a quick-fire interrogation of his voting history. He refused to answer, but the familiar lip-biting and deflection betrayed him. I was caught off guard, misjudging his bisexual coffee-barista chic attire as representative of his political leanings.

For the record, I do not live for the Democratic party in any way, shape, or form, but it’s like how I hate the South until a Northerner hates the South. At this point, it became clear that he was an undercover Joe Rogan stan larping as a bookish Nice Guy. MANY such cases, and that is what frustrates me about straggots – their aesthetic says so little about them because it’s rarely an expression of identity. It's a social currency. At least in my hometown, I could identify a transphobe before he called me a slur.

We don't need men to abandon the project of manhood, that's a doll's job. And we certainly don't need girlfriends infantilizing them with queer euphemisms to defang their masculinity. We need men who role model masculinity that isn't violent and bigoted without annexing them from their wider cohort. I don't want to fall into the cesspool of betacuck soyboi 4chan discourse around the Modern Emasculated Man, but I do think the lack of progressive masculinity has left a cultural vacuum that's been filled with Andrew Tate and incel ideology.

But too often, straight men who reject traditional masculinity do so as personal vanity projects with no interest in rectifying the ways that masculine norms subjugate women and queer people. I’m reminded of a guy in frills and a pastel beret who posted a video peacocking about how he is the first straight man to wear acrylics. Being the first straight man to do something in fashion is like getting the highest grade in remedial English. You're the first of the last. Congrats!

The crisis of masculinity will not be solved by straggots in crop tops and Dior sunglasses. We need plumbers, and more importantly, we need plumbers who won’t gawk when a trans girl opens the door.

1. In actuality, most of this language originates from Black trans women & the ballroom scene