by BateBroTPA
What is my sexuality? As I’ve grown more comfortable openly identifying as a bator, I’ve thought a lot about this question.
It’s been a journey. It started when I hit puberty and realized I was primarily attracted to males. (To date myself: there’s a scene in the movie Far and Away in which Tom Cruise is entirely naked expect for a bowl covering his junk. I spent many sticky, happy nights thinking about that scene in bed.)
I “wrestled” with my sexuality throughout high school because I was raised in a conservative, religious environment. (It would actually be more accurate to say that I sought out a sheltered, homophobic environment because I was afraid of who I was.)
Further complicating matters was the fact that my parents had separated after my mom was pregnant with me but before I was born. Cause of divorce? My dad came out as gay. I didn’t discover this until I was in junior high. Since he had been an absent father and I resented him for being gone, that definitely added another layer of resistance to my attraction to other men. I didn’t want to be like him. (As an adult, I realize now how difficult this all had to have been for him, too—in a way that I never could have understood when I was younger–but we still aren’t in touch.)
Given that trajectory, I ended up attending a small, conservative, Christian college—the kind of place that kicks people out for being gay. I continued to fight my attraction to men for most of my time there, without a lot of success (I remained a total virgin). To get around the Internet filtering system used on campus (yes: you could not use the network in the dorms to access adult websites), I subscribed to a bunch of Yahoo! Groups and got sent dirty porn pictures via email every day. So, there I was, sitting in the little private bedroom I had in my dorm/apartment shared with three other guys, quietly masturbating to Internet porn of the early 2000s, exclusively in pic form.
By the time I was a senior in college, I was also regularly hanging out in Men4Men chatrooms on AOL (it occurs to me that this is a very Millennial coming-of-age story), jerking off while having cybersex with other guys. I knew by then that when I graduated college I was going to leave the closet behind and move to a place, away from family and friends, where I could live as an openly gay man.
I did that when I moved to Austin, TX, to start graduate school right out of college. It was the best decision I ever made: Austin is an amazing place, it’s a great place to be gay, and I met so many amazing, openly gay men, including the one I went on to marry (and am still married to). I got to live my best gay life in my mid-to-late twenties. Sometimes I regret not coming out sooner, and I definitely regret how hung up I was throughout my teen years and early twenties, but that’s life. Mostly I’m grateful that I lived in a time and place when the life I came to achieve was even possible.
So, coming to terms with my sexuality as a gay man took some time—like it does for a lot of people—but ultimately I have happily embraced it for many years now.
Discovering bate culture, however, has changed how I think about my sexuality.
I still proudly identify as gay.
My attraction is still pretty much 99.99% to men.
But am I a solosexual? Am I a pornosexual? Am I a side? And does “gay” really cover all of it?
In reality, I don’t think the labels other people attach to me are that important, and I’m not especially worried about figuring out which label is the “correct,” “forever” label that identifies me.
In terms of what gets me off, it’s definitely primarily masturbating with men, either on cam or in person. I do still enjoy other things with men, including oral and anal, but they have really faded for me as primary pastimes. I definitely don’t seek out hookups where they are the primary goal. (However, I love group sex environments like bathhouses, and those activities are more likely for me in those spaces.)
However, I don’t exactly identify as a solosexual because of the exhibitionist component of my bate: I want to be watched. I want to share masturbation with others as an experience. I want to bond with other men on penis, masturbation, and the brotherhood that comes from exposing your hard penis and stroking it with other men.
And that’s the part that *actually* makes me think differently about my sexuality: the brotherhood vibe.
It feels like it sort of…goes beyond being gay. Even though it’s still men with men, it’s different somehow. To begin with, I don’t care what the other men identify as: if they are gay/bi/straight. It feels even more primary than identifying as “gay” or “homosexual”: it’s more like experiencing something that is primal, first order, essential.
Part of the story may be that, for me, there is a real argument for primary homosexuality: that men are socialized into being straight, or at least that they are socialized and policed out of being gay and/or acknowledging their sexual attraction to other men and/or acting on that attraction.
In a way, then, what I may be trying to say is that in the process of coming out as gay, I felt like I was entering into or taking on something external to me or outside of me, but that the process of “coming out” as a bator has brought me back “home,” so to speak: to see my sexuality as really an essential part of myself and not something I have to learn, adopt, become, or “be,” since I already just am…a man who realizes that men being with men is a primary part of what it means to be human, not something to be feared or something to have to adopt as an identity.
I just am…a man who prefers men.
As an aside, it also all starts to creep into that hard-to-define relationship between sexuality and gender identity. Part of it is attraction to masculinity, manhood, and males: it is attraction to a specific form of gendered expression that has not usually been coded as gay, and in fact is more often coded as bro and therefore hetero.
However, I don’t just mean that I have an attraction to masculine, straight, bros: in fact, I’m into lots of different kinds of guys—many different body types and gender expressions, including fem boys.
In the end, I think the answer is that this essay is not about my sexuality as a bator, but about the fact that bator is my sexuality. My primary sexual pleasure comes from masturbating with other men who love masturbating with other men, regardless of their “regular” sexuality identities (gay/straight/bisexual/asexual). I love men who submit themselves to penis, who celebrate it, who expose it and share it and bond over it and aren’t ashamed of it, because it comes naturally and because it feels good and because it brings us into connection with our brothers.
I know that people outside of bate culture would probably say that a dude who loves to jack off with dudes is basically the literal definition of gay, but I think that guys in bate culture will hopefully understand what I mean. To be honest, it’s hard to put it into words exactly. Maybe one day I’ll become a better writer and find a better way to put it. In the meantime, keep stroking, brothers!