The mostly straight man belongs to a growing trend of young men who are secure in their heterosexuality yet remain aware of their potential to experience far more. Women, by contrast, we give more space to be sexually fluid, as the sizeable literature on the subject attests. Even if this isn’t immediately apparent, we tell men, it will become so once you come to terms with your true self and exit your “phase” of bicuriosity or questioning. Traditionally, our understanding has been that if you’re male and have even a slight attraction to the same sex, then you must be gay. Talking to them, I found that in the most general sense, a mostly straight young man is sexually and/or romantically distinctive we might say that he’s fluid or flexible, supposedly uncharacteristic of male sexuality. They wanted to change the world, fit in, drop out, go into medicine, advocate marketing strategies, fight for social justice, write novels or be unemployed, and many have no clue what they’ll do. Long hair, short hair, clean-shaven, bearded, tattooed, pierced, muscular, lanky, hyper and pudgy.
In high school, they were hipsters, jocks, nerds, druggies, skaters, class clowns, burnouts and straight-laced achievers. For my book, I spoke with 40 mostly straight young men, some over the course of several years.
