I think that I would rather like
To be the saddle of a bike.
—A friend of W. H. Auden
Some gay men come out twice. First as gay, then as bottoms. For me, the first rite occurred early enough, tethered to a sunken knowledge as old as my earliest memories. The second came in my late twenties, nearly a decade later. In high school, tormented by unspeakable desire, I’d climb over the wrought-iron gate of my house in the dead of night for trysts with men thrice my age—trysts punishable by death in the Arab country in which I was raised. All the men—Italians, Americans, Indians, but mostly Emiratis—insisted on topping. For the Arabs in particular, leaning on a precept that dates back at least to ancient Greece, topping spared grown men the ignominy, emasculation and identity crisis brought about by passive sodomization.
I was a scrawny thing, with narrow apertures that did not take well to large items traveling in anomalous directions. I endured the agony with gritted teeth and pleas for patience, garnering pangs of pleasure only at the other site, round front, and only by my own hands. Later, in New York, at college, at bars, I’d do the topping, but reflexively, on autopilot, not because it brought me to the heights of pleasure but because it was the easy, obvious route to consummation—mindless rubbing, the way of the humping dog. Yet curiously, all the while, my fantasies had me receiving men—the object of their brawny frenzies, even as the mechanics of such objectification for years remained unresolved.
This breach between ideal and practice among gay men is so commonplace that no peer-reviewed study of their sexual roles asks one question (what is your ideal position?) without the other (what position do you usually assume in practice?). Reading through research papers on topping and bottoming—which, unsurprisingly, desiccate the terms of their eros, leaving them on the table as “receptive and penetrative anal intercourse”—feels a bit like setting up camp in a research station at one of the Arctic poles. Almost everyone is either British or Canadian, and everyone knows each other, cites each other and laments the dearth of existing scholarship, the injustice of so prolongedly spartan a frontier. One study found that the average gap between the dawning of sexuality and that of an ideal sexual position was nearly thirteen years. Another found that younger men were prone to oscillate between sexual roles—a sort of fine-tuning—while older men were more likely to have settled into a position.
For bottoms, this discovery is almost like that of a secondary sexual orientation: one realizes one likes men, then realizes one likes being fucked by men. Tops, after all, seldom come out twice.
●
Days after I came out (for the first time), I received a call from an aunt in India with whom I was particularly close. Homosexuality was unnatural, she told me. I assured her my urges, my lust for men, were so belligerently overpowering that they felt almost comically natural. But as the years passed, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the repetitive friction of topping. It felt sad, indiscriminate, eerily akin to masturbating, less a culmination of fantasy than fantasy’s relegation to the realm of mechanical dispatch. Worse, it disappeared my counterpart’s penis. It rendered it inapplicable, producing the dreary impression that I could have been having sex with anyone or anything when what I really wanted was a man to have sex with me. If anything was unnatural about being gay, I was realizing, it wasn’t my desire for men but how to consummate that desire.
Bottoming is so complicated that it can indeed feel unnatural. There’s no lubed-up apparatus at the ready. It doesn’t always work. For some, the piping is optimized. The trains run on time. For others, railroads are congested, prone to delay and derailment, like Amtrak passenger trains that dodge and defer to those monstrous, freight-laden locomotives with which they are forced to share tracks. Some tops say they don’t bottom because it’s too fraught or too painful. But one doesn’t bottom because it’s easy or painless—one bottoms whether it feels good or not. The core of the experience isn’t really physical anyway. It’s psychological. Perhaps this is what sullies the bottom’s good name with depravity: his hunger to be fucked is so great that he’s willing to get it by any means necessary.
So what precisely foments this hunger? The question is not unlike asking what precisely foments one’s attraction to men. Somberly auditing desires as subterranean as sexuality tends to fail when we use scientific language—the same way the beauty of richly blue skies and the flavor of mangosteen dissolve into incoherence when enclosed within science’s fixation upon the perceptibly imperceptible, upon strictly physical causes and effects.
Lyrical, eidetic language, on the other hand, tends to give us a better shot at fidelity. So, here goes: at a time when ascendant cultural and political blocs wish to vanish gender entirely, men somehow remain our favorite culprit, misandry our most kosher vice. Men are martial. Men are violent. Men bring us misogyny, corruption, rape, colonialism, genocide and all the muck in between. But men also penetrate. To shortchange the phenomenological valence of penetration would be to shrug away the highest order of masculine subsummation. Penetration by a penis produces both a sensation and realization of being devoured by a man that cannot, I am convinced, be replicated in any other way. While others certainly are more resourceful and adaptable in their views of sexual experience and identity, in my mind, my venereal imagination, if men are allowed to have exclusive purview over anything, it ought to be this inimitable impalement. And if maleness itself, also in hot water lately, is to be boiled down to an essence, it ought to be the sexual desire to, above all, penetrate.
Perhaps the word “penetration” doesn’t do the phenomenon justice. It sounds a bit prickish. It conjures images of mosquitos, needles and straws, when in reality it bears the hefty import of an enforced accommodation, like a reverse birth. Penetration occasions not merely the insertion of object into subject but a state of peculiar communion and outlandish vulnerability—the makings of emasculation’s messy transcendence.
When I came out as a bottom, the moment was marked by neither public proclamation nor inward knowingness—both would have been redundant—but by a private relief that I’d finally found a way, that my hunger for men, for femininity, could be slaked after all.
It happened on a July afternoon in Bangkok, Thailand, in the spare apartment of a mighty fine Filipino lad who called himself “Sting.” We’d planned on an array of non-penetrative tricks, but he’d suddenly flipped me on my back, mounted me and told me to prepare myself. Somehow, it worked. It felt so intensely pleasurable that, for the first time, I was able to transcend mere sensation and float upward to the heavenly observation tower of emasculated voyeurism that all bottoms know as their happy place. Here, I was able to watch him devour me, to watch as he turned me into the conduit of his (and thus, in a way, all men’s) most lustful frustrations and energies and shibboleths, to become for him an interchangeable object, “Just Another Hole,” as a gay country song ought to title itself, thus permitting me the privilege of enjoying him while remaining at the mercy of his masculinity.
This is what it takes for a bottom to come out—he must sink to the very depths of gayness in order to rise to its heights. And once he is able to clinch like a trophy the rousing truth that he now constitutes the very fulcrum of sodomy, there arises a sort of incredulity at his fortune: How on earth is every gay man not here too?
●
The penis, if I may dwell for a moment on its physics, its metaphysics, proceeds outward rather than inward. It is the body’s sexual argonaut. It explores crevices, an insistent boulevardier, remaining hard, self-assured and distinct as it pioneers its plunges. Holes and crevices might bear differentiable exteriors, but their insides are dark, indistinct, a sensual ambience that not only facilitates the top’s pleasure but also powers his aggrandizement, casting this exploitative distinction into a paradigmatic erotic powerhouse—a place where two bodies meet but only one coheres. Naturally, the bottom is thrilled to relinquish his distinguishability in the service of being devoured. Far from leaving him despondent or annihilated, it sparks within him a psychological frenzy of elation.
Of course, there are noble dissenters among us. Not every gay is a top or a bottom. Some are “sides”—penetrative prohibitionists who do everything but. The largest portion of gay men, as it happens, call themselves “versatile”—bipolar renegades who are neither strictly tops nor strictly bottoms but who to some degree merrily juggle the two. “Vers tops” lean in one direction, “vers bottoms” in the other, while straight-up versatiles occupy an almost supernatural nonpartisanship. Like the term “homosexuality,” these positions and designations joined the gay (and then the public) lexicon thousands of years into the game. Men fucked men for millennia before gay sex congealed into social taboo, then psychiatric disorder, then medical ascription, then cultural identity. Similarly, topping and bottoming existed long before tops and bottoms. The roles acquired contemporary rhetorical traction during the rise of BDSM counterculture in the 1950s. Heterosexual “doms” and “subs” were transposed neatly into “tops” and “bottoms,” their anal counterparts. The terms receded in the early 1970s, post-Stonewall, when it seemed as if all gay men had become hypermasculine, leather-wearing, flip-fucking “clones.” Versatility felt culturally remedial and thus became politically correct. “This sort of role-playing, held to as a strict division, seems increasingly on the wane,” wrote Charles Silverstein and Edmund White in their brave 1977 Kama Sutra for sodomites, The Joy of Gay Sex, which, incidentally, didn’t even mention “tops” and “bottoms” until it was reissued in the Nineties.
Alas, predilections rebounded. The AIDS epidemic, far more hazardous for bottoms than for tops, had the strange effect of resuscitating the dichotomy privately, between gays, as a sort of epidemiological I.D., while kindling anxiety about public perceptions. Then “in 1990 came the ‘queer’ moment,” David Halperin notes in How to Be Gay, with “its delight in butch display and high-femme theatrics.” Sexual roles “did not disappear in 1969, or in 1975, then, despite the many obituaries that were written for them. They just went underground for a while.” Designating the roles as inventions, in other words, did not make them so.
Today, in an era of, shall we call it, hegemonic queerness, everything is okay and nothing is okay. Sexuality is flaunted, categories flouted. Preference is emboldened, polarity embattled. Identification reigns, while partiality, that cartographer of desire, languishes. And yet, still, tops and bottoms persevere! The digital profile, capped by Grindr, sees gay contestants leading with their height, weight, size, girth, foreskin status, HIV status and, above all, position. This tidy feat of digital engineering has shown gays around the world just how pronounced their denominations remain. (Grindr even allows premium users to simply filter out incompatible positions, fortifying the binary as other binaries crumble.)
But by now, my versatile and side readers are surely incensed. How can I disenfranchise a sexual majority within this phenomenology of gay sex, especially when, as a widely circulated 2011 study found, less than 40 percent of gay men reported being anally penetrated during their most recent sexual encounter? For a great number, probably a preponderance, of the researchers camped out in the arctic wasteland of rectal exploration, sides and versatiles reign as virtuous and true. They are our paragons. Fretful about the crystallization of sexual roles, the experts wring their hands over associations between bottoming and submissiveness, bottoms and femininity, topping and dominance, tops and masculinity. Bottoms, they tell us, are marginalized by everyone, including gays, and the doggedly exclusive bottom has thus interiorized a self-destructive aspiration. Queer scholars, so intent on disavowing masculinity that they shame total tops and total bottoms into versatility, inadvertently end up pamphleteering the idea that masculinity equals power, that what happens in the bedroom assuredly masterminds the currents of the legislature.
“One should not reduce the reversibility of power dynamics to penetrative reciprocity, as it tends to reify and privilege the insertive position as powerful in an absolute sense,” goes a typical (and typically graceless) passage in a research paper on intercourse and power in sex between men, this one published in the journal Sexualities in 2001. Another paper on the subject, anxiously apprehending perceptions that penetration results in a “dejection of masculinity,” tries to flip the script: “Could the penetration be reconstructed as an anus engulfing the top’s penis?”
But who is casting aspersions here? Today’s sexually active gays certainly aren’t. The uneasy authors of this scientific and sociological literature, some of which was published as recently as last year, clearly haven’t gone cruising in the last decade. If they had, they’d have found that bottoms are in high demand, that the marketplace for queer femininity nowadays might be more competitive than the one for masculinity. There’s certainly no top shortage, despite all the memes and avowals that bottoms are doddering through some dickless desert.
Not to mention, of course, the fraught premises underlying this literature’s reappraisals. What is wrong with femininity? With submissiveness? With being perceived as either? With drawing parallels along gender lines? On the one hand, we’re told that femininity is a sanctified, protected behavioral class. On the other hand, we’re told to assume femininity is always invoked pejoratively. We’re told not to presume that femininity means you’re a bottom or that bottoming means you’re effeminate, despite a good deal of evidence that it often does mean these things. We’re told not to place topping and bottoming within the analogical purview of heterosexuality, as if most people on earth are not heterosexual, as if men don’t almost always penetrate women. So why can’t the bottom frame himself as the “woman”?
Perhaps sex itself is taken too seriously when the experts urge us, in the spirit of egalitarianism, not to settle into roles. “Many gay men hold an unspoken, often-unconscious contempt for bottoms, just as straight men often hold contempt for women,” the gay psychologist Walt Odets writes, confoundingly, in 2019 and not a century earlier. Exclusive tops and bottoms, he says, frequently suppress “aspects of their unconscious sensibilities that might, if recognized and allowed expression, nurture a broader, more authentic experience.”
This movement to democratize the binary bubbles over excitedly in the likes of Them, Teen Vogue and HuffPost by writers who conserve the distinctly unerotic premise that all queerness is politically implicated, threatening the ecstasy of imbalance afforded by gay sex. It burdens gay sex with numinous radicalism all while other pleasures, like eating at an Ethiopian restaurant, are left happily autotelic. It forgets that eros flourishes in political abandon, that it comes to life when the conscious and unconscious are in bed together. More bizarrely, these exhortations reek of conversionism—quite like forcing gays to be straight or, perhaps more aptly, bisexual. But if we can declare we’re faggots in peace, why can’t we do the same with bottoming? Surely we can form our metaphors in peace too.
●
Despite the constructivist consensus, a coterie of researchers have sheepishly conceded that sexual roles aren’t just culturally significant for gay men but possibly bear behavioral correlatives rooted in biology. The vast majority of surveys on the subject find that tops more often than bottoms report being masculine, dominant, tall and bigger-dicked—while bottoms more often than tops report being feminine, submissive, short and modestly endowed. A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Toronto found that people were able to guess gay men’s sexual roles with surprising accuracy just by looking at photos of their faces. An even more dramatic study published in 2017 found that gay bottoms were more likely to be left-handed than both tops and straight men. The authors noted that a number of hypotheses link handedness to prenatal developments—such as varying degrees of exposure to androgens, namely testosterone, in the womb. Prenatal androgen exposure is also thought to inform sex differences. Building upon this, the study proposed the possibility that prenatal processes influence not only sexual orientation but anal sex roles too, possibly validating Aristotle’s queasy implication in his Nicomachean Ethics that some men were more fated than others to passive homosexuality.
But for most of us, desire doesn’t feel cleanly predetermined. We feel our sexuality hatch reactively, in locker rooms, during sleepovers, as we try to keep our heads above water in seas of sweaty straight boys who play rough and dream of sports and then breasts and then holes. Our longings are wrought in the shadows of these boys, and they leave us only one choice. Or do they?
I went to a high school that might as well have been called the International Academy for Rich and Gorgeous Young Olympians. Surrounded by such agonizing beauty, what choice did I have, what choice do any fledgling fags have, but to consummate our desire for these boys in the realm of fantasy by bending over, by becoming their objects of pleasure, by becoming simulacra of women, by becoming holes?
But here’s the really fascinating thing: tops liberate themselves from this! They become, mysteriously, straight boys themselves. They crave holes and empty, indistinct spaces. They see holes as independently beautiful, even ambrosial. In this spirit, they treat boys like girls. They call our openings “bussies” or, more bluntly, “pussies.” They make us lie prone. They clap and jiggle our cheeks like we’re voluptuaries in the worst rap videos of the early aughts, while we bottoms, the luckiest men on earth, rejoice. How wrong Michel Foucault was when he insisted to an interviewer in 1978 that male homosexuality had no fundamental connection to femininity!
Here lies the true sexual divide between men. It falls not between gay and straight, but between penetrators and penetratees, between tops and bottoms. Rather than disregarding the penis, bottoms require it. It is they who are the true homosexuals, desiring the male body but repudiating their own ability to give dick in order to receive it. Tops, on the other hand, are alienated from gay sex’s gayest pleasures, but they preserve the bottom’s very existence. They turn toward the hole, a fixture both universal and hidden, which incarnates the penetrability that differentiates anyone who chooses emasculation, indistinction, castration. The masculine top thus unmasks the fallacy in the “straight-acting gay,” because the only difference between him and the straight man resides in the latter word, “gay.” Otherwise, they are the same—there is no acting. Perhaps the ancient Greeks and those chauvinistic Arabs with whom I had my earliest encounters were right after all: tops are scarcely gay. They are men.
If men loaf impishly at the heart of my sexual desires, the desires themselves are eidolons from a past life. Most of the time, it feels like the only way to bring them to fruition is by evoking the quasi-traumatic frisson out of which they were born—a frisson that is a welcome guest within the homosexual condition. To be topped, after all, is to be aggressed upon with motions that trace rough-and-tumble schoolyard play, that resurface my boyhood feelings of being inadequate in the arena of physical domination but thrillingly adequate in the finer points of social grace, in conversations with my teachers, in spinning rococo fairy tales. Here was the genesis of my homoerotic longing, and it was flush with a glorious wretchedness, desperation and fear not because it made me gay but because I was already gay. Whether or not I was already a bottom, however, feels less important to me now than bottoming’s magical largesse: that I can have men over and over again, whenever I want, as their object of pleasure. Thank god, then, for the trauma! It has given me a lifetime of fantasy fulfillment, wanton hedonism, emasculation as high art and sempiternal relief from the duties of masculinity.
The thing is, if, one day, I were to fall in love with a bottom, I might be willing to renounce gay sex. Being fucked by a man is not the same as loving a man or knowing a man or thinking with a man. Still, if gayness is less something I lean into than something I’m swallowed by, bottoming is closer to the Edenic fruit that can’t be uneaten: now that I know what it feels like to be surrounded by men aching to have their turn at glorifying my gayness, how can I reasonably be expected to want anything else? These small subversions are among the most satisfying things I know.
Art credit: J. Carino, Narcissus, 2022. Acrylic and oil on linen, 29 x 21 in. Courtesy of the artist.
I think that I would rather like
To be the saddle of a bike.
—A friend of W. H. Auden
Some gay men come out twice. First as gay, then as bottoms. For me, the first rite occurred early enough, tethered to a sunken knowledge as old as my earliest memories. The second came in my late twenties, nearly a decade later. In high school, tormented by unspeakable desire, I’d climb over the wrought-iron gate of my house in the dead of night for trysts with men thrice my age—trysts punishable by death in the Arab country in which I was raised. All the men—Italians, Americans, Indians, but mostly Emiratis—insisted on topping. For the Arabs in particular, leaning on a precept that dates back at least to ancient Greece, topping spared grown men the ignominy, emasculation and identity crisis brought about by passive sodomization.
I was a scrawny thing, with narrow apertures that did not take well to large items traveling in anomalous directions. I endured the agony with gritted teeth and pleas for patience, garnering pangs of pleasure only at the other site, round front, and only by my own hands. Later, in New York, at college, at bars, I’d do the topping, but reflexively, on autopilot, not because it brought me to the heights of pleasure but because it was the easy, obvious route to consummation—mindless rubbing, the way of the humping dog. Yet curiously, all the while, my fantasies had me receiving men—the object of their brawny frenzies, even as the mechanics of such objectification for years remained unresolved.
This breach between ideal and practice among gay men is so commonplace that no peer-reviewed study of their sexual roles asks one question (what is your ideal position?) without the other (what position do you usually assume in practice?). Reading through research papers on topping and bottoming—which, unsurprisingly, desiccate the terms of their eros, leaving them on the table as “receptive and penetrative anal intercourse”—feels a bit like setting up camp in a research station at one of the Arctic poles. Almost everyone is either British or Canadian, and everyone knows each other, cites each other and laments the dearth of existing scholarship, the injustice of so prolongedly spartan a frontier. One study found that the average gap between the dawning of sexuality and that of an ideal sexual position was nearly thirteen years. Another found that younger men were prone to oscillate between sexual roles—a sort of fine-tuning—while older men were more likely to have settled into a position.
For bottoms, this discovery is almost like that of a secondary sexual orientation: one realizes one likes men, then realizes one likes being fucked by men. Tops, after all, seldom come out twice.
●
Days after I came out (for the first time), I received a call from an aunt in India with whom I was particularly close. Homosexuality was unnatural, she told me. I assured her my urges, my lust for men, were so belligerently overpowering that they felt almost comically natural. But as the years passed, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the repetitive friction of topping. It felt sad, indiscriminate, eerily akin to masturbating, less a culmination of fantasy than fantasy’s relegation to the realm of mechanical dispatch. Worse, it disappeared my counterpart’s penis. It rendered it inapplicable, producing the dreary impression that I could have been having sex with anyone or anything when what I really wanted was a man to have sex with me. If anything was unnatural about being gay, I was realizing, it wasn’t my desire for men but how to consummate that desire.
Bottoming is so complicated that it can indeed feel unnatural. There’s no lubed-up apparatus at the ready. It doesn’t always work. For some, the piping is optimized. The trains run on time. For others, railroads are congested, prone to delay and derailment, like Amtrak passenger trains that dodge and defer to those monstrous, freight-laden locomotives with which they are forced to share tracks. Some tops say they don’t bottom because it’s too fraught or too painful. But one doesn’t bottom because it’s easy or painless—one bottoms whether it feels good or not. The core of the experience isn’t really physical anyway. It’s psychological. Perhaps this is what sullies the bottom’s good name with depravity: his hunger to be fucked is so great that he’s willing to get it by any means necessary.
So what precisely foments this hunger? The question is not unlike asking what precisely foments one’s attraction to men. Somberly auditing desires as subterranean as sexuality tends to fail when we use scientific language—the same way the beauty of richly blue skies and the flavor of mangosteen dissolve into incoherence when enclosed within science’s fixation upon the perceptibly imperceptible, upon strictly physical causes and effects.
Lyrical, eidetic language, on the other hand, tends to give us a better shot at fidelity. So, here goes: at a time when ascendant cultural and political blocs wish to vanish gender entirely, men somehow remain our favorite culprit, misandry our most kosher vice. Men are martial. Men are violent. Men bring us misogyny, corruption, rape, colonialism, genocide and all the muck in between. But men also penetrate. To shortchange the phenomenological valence of penetration would be to shrug away the highest order of masculine subsummation. Penetration by a penis produces both a sensation and realization of being devoured by a man that cannot, I am convinced, be replicated in any other way. While others certainly are more resourceful and adaptable in their views of sexual experience and identity, in my mind, my venereal imagination, if men are allowed to have exclusive purview over anything, it ought to be this inimitable impalement. And if maleness itself, also in hot water lately, is to be boiled down to an essence, it ought to be the sexual desire to, above all, penetrate.
Perhaps the word “penetration” doesn’t do the phenomenon justice. It sounds a bit prickish. It conjures images of mosquitos, needles and straws, when in reality it bears the hefty import of an enforced accommodation, like a reverse birth. Penetration occasions not merely the insertion of object into subject but a state of peculiar communion and outlandish vulnerability—the makings of emasculation’s messy transcendence.
When I came out as a bottom, the moment was marked by neither public proclamation nor inward knowingness—both would have been redundant—but by a private relief that I’d finally found a way, that my hunger for men, for femininity, could be slaked after all.
It happened on a July afternoon in Bangkok, Thailand, in the spare apartment of a mighty fine Filipino lad who called himself “Sting.” We’d planned on an array of non-penetrative tricks, but he’d suddenly flipped me on my back, mounted me and told me to prepare myself. Somehow, it worked. It felt so intensely pleasurable that, for the first time, I was able to transcend mere sensation and float upward to the heavenly observation tower of emasculated voyeurism that all bottoms know as their happy place. Here, I was able to watch him devour me, to watch as he turned me into the conduit of his (and thus, in a way, all men’s) most lustful frustrations and energies and shibboleths, to become for him an interchangeable object, “Just Another Hole,” as a gay country song ought to title itself, thus permitting me the privilege of enjoying him while remaining at the mercy of his masculinity.
This is what it takes for a bottom to come out—he must sink to the very depths of gayness in order to rise to its heights. And once he is able to clinch like a trophy the rousing truth that he now constitutes the very fulcrum of sodomy, there arises a sort of incredulity at his fortune: How on earth is every gay man not here too?
●
The penis, if I may dwell for a moment on its physics, its metaphysics, proceeds outward rather than inward. It is the body’s sexual argonaut. It explores crevices, an insistent boulevardier, remaining hard, self-assured and distinct as it pioneers its plunges. Holes and crevices might bear differentiable exteriors, but their insides are dark, indistinct, a sensual ambience that not only facilitates the top’s pleasure but also powers his aggrandizement, casting this exploitative distinction into a paradigmatic erotic powerhouse—a place where two bodies meet but only one coheres. Naturally, the bottom is thrilled to relinquish his distinguishability in the service of being devoured. Far from leaving him despondent or annihilated, it sparks within him a psychological frenzy of elation.
Of course, there are noble dissenters among us. Not every gay is a top or a bottom. Some are “sides”—penetrative prohibitionists who do everything but. The largest portion of gay men, as it happens, call themselves “versatile”—bipolar renegades who are neither strictly tops nor strictly bottoms but who to some degree merrily juggle the two. “Vers tops” lean in one direction, “vers bottoms” in the other, while straight-up versatiles occupy an almost supernatural nonpartisanship. Like the term “homosexuality,” these positions and designations joined the gay (and then the public) lexicon thousands of years into the game. Men fucked men for millennia before gay sex congealed into social taboo, then psychiatric disorder, then medical ascription, then cultural identity. Similarly, topping and bottoming existed long before tops and bottoms. The roles acquired contemporary rhetorical traction during the rise of BDSM counterculture in the 1950s. Heterosexual “doms” and “subs” were transposed neatly into “tops” and “bottoms,” their anal counterparts. The terms receded in the early 1970s, post-Stonewall, when it seemed as if all gay men had become hypermasculine, leather-wearing, flip-fucking “clones.” Versatility felt culturally remedial and thus became politically correct. “This sort of role-playing, held to as a strict division, seems increasingly on the wane,” wrote Charles Silverstein and Edmund White in their brave 1977 Kama Sutra for sodomites, The Joy of Gay Sex, which, incidentally, didn’t even mention “tops” and “bottoms” until it was reissued in the Nineties.
Alas, predilections rebounded. The AIDS epidemic, far more hazardous for bottoms than for tops, had the strange effect of resuscitating the dichotomy privately, between gays, as a sort of epidemiological I.D., while kindling anxiety about public perceptions. Then “in 1990 came the ‘queer’ moment,” David Halperin notes in How to Be Gay, with “its delight in butch display and high-femme theatrics.” Sexual roles “did not disappear in 1969, or in 1975, then, despite the many obituaries that were written for them. They just went underground for a while.” Designating the roles as inventions, in other words, did not make them so.
Today, in an era of, shall we call it, hegemonic queerness, everything is okay and nothing is okay. Sexuality is flaunted, categories flouted. Preference is emboldened, polarity embattled. Identification reigns, while partiality, that cartographer of desire, languishes. And yet, still, tops and bottoms persevere! The digital profile, capped by Grindr, sees gay contestants leading with their height, weight, size, girth, foreskin status, HIV status and, above all, position. This tidy feat of digital engineering has shown gays around the world just how pronounced their denominations remain. (Grindr even allows premium users to simply filter out incompatible positions, fortifying the binary as other binaries crumble.)
But by now, my versatile and side readers are surely incensed. How can I disenfranchise a sexual majority within this phenomenology of gay sex, especially when, as a widely circulated 2011 study found, less than 40 percent of gay men reported being anally penetrated during their most recent sexual encounter? For a great number, probably a preponderance, of the researchers camped out in the arctic wasteland of rectal exploration, sides and versatiles reign as virtuous and true. They are our paragons. Fretful about the crystallization of sexual roles, the experts wring their hands over associations between bottoming and submissiveness, bottoms and femininity, topping and dominance, tops and masculinity. Bottoms, they tell us, are marginalized by everyone, including gays, and the doggedly exclusive bottom has thus interiorized a self-destructive aspiration. Queer scholars, so intent on disavowing masculinity that they shame total tops and total bottoms into versatility, inadvertently end up pamphleteering the idea that masculinity equals power, that what happens in the bedroom assuredly masterminds the currents of the legislature.
“One should not reduce the reversibility of power dynamics to penetrative reciprocity, as it tends to reify and privilege the insertive position as powerful in an absolute sense,” goes a typical (and typically graceless) passage in a research paper on intercourse and power in sex between men, this one published in the journal Sexualities in 2001. Another paper on the subject, anxiously apprehending perceptions that penetration results in a “dejection of masculinity,” tries to flip the script: “Could the penetration be reconstructed as an anus engulfing the top’s penis?”
But who is casting aspersions here? Today’s sexually active gays certainly aren’t. The uneasy authors of this scientific and sociological literature, some of which was published as recently as last year, clearly haven’t gone cruising in the last decade. If they had, they’d have found that bottoms are in high demand, that the marketplace for queer femininity nowadays might be more competitive than the one for masculinity. There’s certainly no top shortage, despite all the memes and avowals that bottoms are doddering through some dickless desert.
Not to mention, of course, the fraught premises underlying this literature’s reappraisals. What is wrong with femininity? With submissiveness? With being perceived as either? With drawing parallels along gender lines? On the one hand, we’re told that femininity is a sanctified, protected behavioral class. On the other hand, we’re told to assume femininity is always invoked pejoratively. We’re told not to presume that femininity means you’re a bottom or that bottoming means you’re effeminate, despite a good deal of evidence that it often does mean these things. We’re told not to place topping and bottoming within the analogical purview of heterosexuality, as if most people on earth are not heterosexual, as if men don’t almost always penetrate women. So why can’t the bottom frame himself as the “woman”?
Perhaps sex itself is taken too seriously when the experts urge us, in the spirit of egalitarianism, not to settle into roles. “Many gay men hold an unspoken, often-unconscious contempt for bottoms, just as straight men often hold contempt for women,” the gay psychologist Walt Odets writes, confoundingly, in 2019 and not a century earlier. Exclusive tops and bottoms, he says, frequently suppress “aspects of their unconscious sensibilities that might, if recognized and allowed expression, nurture a broader, more authentic experience.”
This movement to democratize the binary bubbles over excitedly in the likes of Them, Teen Vogue and HuffPost by writers who conserve the distinctly unerotic premise that all queerness is politically implicated, threatening the ecstasy of imbalance afforded by gay sex. It burdens gay sex with numinous radicalism all while other pleasures, like eating at an Ethiopian restaurant, are left happily autotelic. It forgets that eros flourishes in political abandon, that it comes to life when the conscious and unconscious are in bed together. More bizarrely, these exhortations reek of conversionism—quite like forcing gays to be straight or, perhaps more aptly, bisexual. But if we can declare we’re faggots in peace, why can’t we do the same with bottoming? Surely we can form our metaphors in peace too.
●
Despite the constructivist consensus, a coterie of researchers have sheepishly conceded that sexual roles aren’t just culturally significant for gay men but possibly bear behavioral correlatives rooted in biology. The vast majority of surveys on the subject find that tops more often than bottoms report being masculine, dominant, tall and bigger-dicked—while bottoms more often than tops report being feminine, submissive, short and modestly endowed. A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Toronto found that people were able to guess gay men’s sexual roles with surprising accuracy just by looking at photos of their faces. An even more dramatic study published in 2017 found that gay bottoms were more likely to be left-handed than both tops and straight men. The authors noted that a number of hypotheses link handedness to prenatal developments—such as varying degrees of exposure to androgens, namely testosterone, in the womb. Prenatal androgen exposure is also thought to inform sex differences. Building upon this, the study proposed the possibility that prenatal processes influence not only sexual orientation but anal sex roles too, possibly validating Aristotle’s queasy implication in his Nicomachean Ethics that some men were more fated than others to passive homosexuality.
But for most of us, desire doesn’t feel cleanly predetermined. We feel our sexuality hatch reactively, in locker rooms, during sleepovers, as we try to keep our heads above water in seas of sweaty straight boys who play rough and dream of sports and then breasts and then holes. Our longings are wrought in the shadows of these boys, and they leave us only one choice. Or do they?
I went to a high school that might as well have been called the International Academy for Rich and Gorgeous Young Olympians. Surrounded by such agonizing beauty, what choice did I have, what choice do any fledgling fags have, but to consummate our desire for these boys in the realm of fantasy by bending over, by becoming their objects of pleasure, by becoming simulacra of women, by becoming holes?
But here’s the really fascinating thing: tops liberate themselves from this! They become, mysteriously, straight boys themselves. They crave holes and empty, indistinct spaces. They see holes as independently beautiful, even ambrosial. In this spirit, they treat boys like girls. They call our openings “bussies” or, more bluntly, “pussies.” They make us lie prone. They clap and jiggle our cheeks like we’re voluptuaries in the worst rap videos of the early aughts, while we bottoms, the luckiest men on earth, rejoice. How wrong Michel Foucault was when he insisted to an interviewer in 1978 that male homosexuality had no fundamental connection to femininity!
Here lies the true sexual divide between men. It falls not between gay and straight, but between penetrators and penetratees, between tops and bottoms. Rather than disregarding the penis, bottoms require it. It is they who are the true homosexuals, desiring the male body but repudiating their own ability to give dick in order to receive it. Tops, on the other hand, are alienated from gay sex’s gayest pleasures, but they preserve the bottom’s very existence. They turn toward the hole, a fixture both universal and hidden, which incarnates the penetrability that differentiates anyone who chooses emasculation, indistinction, castration. The masculine top thus unmasks the fallacy in the “straight-acting gay,” because the only difference between him and the straight man resides in the latter word, “gay.” Otherwise, they are the same—there is no acting. Perhaps the ancient Greeks and those chauvinistic Arabs with whom I had my earliest encounters were right after all: tops are scarcely gay. They are men.
If men loaf impishly at the heart of my sexual desires, the desires themselves are eidolons from a past life. Most of the time, it feels like the only way to bring them to fruition is by evoking the quasi-traumatic frisson out of which they were born—a frisson that is a welcome guest within the homosexual condition. To be topped, after all, is to be aggressed upon with motions that trace rough-and-tumble schoolyard play, that resurface my boyhood feelings of being inadequate in the arena of physical domination but thrillingly adequate in the finer points of social grace, in conversations with my teachers, in spinning rococo fairy tales. Here was the genesis of my homoerotic longing, and it was flush with a glorious wretchedness, desperation and fear not because it made me gay but because I was already gay. Whether or not I was already a bottom, however, feels less important to me now than bottoming’s magical largesse: that I can have men over and over again, whenever I want, as their object of pleasure. Thank god, then, for the trauma! It has given me a lifetime of fantasy fulfillment, wanton hedonism, emasculation as high art and sempiternal relief from the duties of masculinity.
The thing is, if, one day, I were to fall in love with a bottom, I might be willing to renounce gay sex. Being fucked by a man is not the same as loving a man or knowing a man or thinking with a man. Still, if gayness is less something I lean into than something I’m swallowed by, bottoming is closer to the Edenic fruit that can’t be uneaten: now that I know what it feels like to be surrounded by men aching to have their turn at glorifying my gayness, how can I reasonably be expected to want anything else? These small subversions are among the most satisfying things I know.
Art credit: J. Carino, Narcissus, 2022. Acrylic and oil on linen, 29 x 21 in. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.