What is a side in gay terms
I’m gay and I’m not a top or a bottom – I’m a ‘side’
As a gay man, prying strangers and potential hook-ups alike possess asked me one question more times than I’ve had hot dinners.
‘Top or bottom?’
Words get me out of bed in the morning, and when uttered by the right people at the right time, they’ve also been recognizable to get me into bed.
But neither of these – top or bottom – accurately describe what I prefer to obtain up to in the boudoir, so my response has always been a guarded mix of shrug and mumble.
Here’s the tea: I’m actually a ‘side’, a term coined by American psychotherapist and sexologist Joe Kort to explain those, like me, for whom penetrative sex – in either position – does very little.
Getting the peach involved is, quite literally, a pain in the ass, but as for the aubergine, let’s just say that hands and mouths always understand the assignment way better.
To continue the diet metaphor: if man-on-man action were a dinner party, I’d have zero interest in sitting down to a bland meal when the amuse-bouches are so good.
I confess that I indulged in a lot of sex in my 20s – penetrative sex.
It oddly took yo
Rise of the sides: how Grindr finally recognized gay men who aren’t tops or bottoms
Every month, nearly 11 million gay men around the world go on the Grindr app to gaze for sex with other men. Once there, they can scroll through an endless stream of guys, from handsome to homely, bear to twink. Yet when it comes to choosing positions for sex – a essential criterion for most gay men – the possibilities have drawn-out been simply top and bottom. The only other choice free toggles between those roles: verse (for versatile).
“Not fitting those roles has made it really tough to find someone,” said Jeremiah Hein, 38, of Long Beach, California. “There’s no category to choose from.”
“Whenever I’d look at those choices I’d think, ‘I’m none of those things,’” said Shai Davidi, 51, of Tel Aviv, Israel. “I felt there must be something wrong with me.”
Last month, however, that finally changed. In mid-May, Grindr added a position called side, a designation that upends the binary that has historically dominated queer male culture. Sides are men who find fulfillment in every kind of sexual act except anal penetration. Instead, a broad range of oral, manual and frictional body techniques provide
.
.