“Why don’t you have the sex that you want to have?” Investigating how homonormativity shapes queer men's sexual attitudes, behaviours, and representations.

Queer men’s social integration into mainstream heteronormative culture has led to a rise in homonormativity. Homonormativity affords basic gay tolerance but dampens liberated queerness while maintaining systems of hetero-masculine dominance. This study aims to determine the ways that homonormativity has impacted queer men’s attitudes to sex, their sexual behaviours, and their sexual representation on screen. Specifically, it scrutinises sexual positioning roles as a key locale of insight into the social construction of sex for queer men. Sexual positioning roles determine which behaviour is adopted in anal sex: the sexually-insertive position (top), sexually-receptive position (bottom), or both (vers).

To discover the impacts of homonormativity on sexual positioning roles, semi-structured one-on-one interviews were conducted with ten queer men and non-binary people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Participants were asked about their experiences of topping and bottoming, about total tops (men who exclusively perform the sexually-insertive position during anal sex), and about their reactions to three queer male sex scenes from television and cinema. Exploratory data analysis unearthed key themes associated with facets of homonormativity.

The results show how hetero-masculine hegemony is maintained by queer men’s conceptualisation of sexual positioning roles. The queer men in this study seek and have sex within homonormative terms, where assimilation to expected masculinities prevails above actual desire when determining topping or bottoming behaviours. Furthermore, sex between men on screen is constructed in adherence to homonormativity’s preference for mainstream heterosexual acceptance over diverse queerness. The future of queer male sex must be interrogated within the growing influences of a homonormative landscape.