In doing so, he introduces a really interesting and catchy concept, “bud-sex”: Ward (2015) examines dudesex, a type of male–male sex that white, masculine, straight men in urban or military contexts frame as a way to bond and build masculinity with other, similar “bros.” Carrillo and Hoffman (2016) refer to their primarily urban participants as heteroflexible, given that they were exclusively or primarily attracted to women.
Specifically, Silva was trying to understand better the interplay between “normative rural masculinity” - the set of mores and norms that defines what it means to be a rural man - and these men’s sexual encounters. But the point of Silva’s project was less to draw any sweeping conclusions about either this subset of straight MSM, or the population as a whole, than to listen to their stories and compare them to the narratives uncovered by Ward and various other researchers. These were just the guys who agreed to participate in an academic’s research project after they saw an ad for it on Craigslist.
Since this is a qualitative rather than a quantitative study, it’s important to recognize that the particular men recruited by Silva weren’t necessarily representative of, well, anything. All were from rural areas of Missouri, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, or Idaho, places known for their “social conservatism and predominant white populations.” The sample skewed a bit on the older side, with 14 of the 19 men in their 50s or older, and most identified exclusively as exclusively or mostly straight, with a few responses along the lines of “Straight but bi, but more straight.” Silva sought to find out more about these men, so he recruited 19 from men-for-men casual-encounters boards on Craigslist and interviewed them, for about an hour and a half each, about their sexual habits, lives, and senses of identity. One relatively neglected such group, argues the University of Oregon sociology doctoral student Tony Silva in a new paper in Gender & Society, is rural, white, straight men (well, neglected if you set aside Brokeback Mountain). But not all straight MSM have gotten the same level of research attention. In it, Ward explored various subcultures in which what could be called “straight homosexual sex” abounds - not just in the ones you’d expect, like the military and fraternities, but also biker gangs and conservative suburban neighborhoods - to better understand how the participants in these encounters experienced and explained their attractions, identities, and rendezvous. Last year, NYU Press published the fascinating book Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men by the University of California, Riverside, gender and sexuality professor Jane Ward. Being Into Middle-Aged People Is Probably a Sexual Orientation
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