I wanted to share a personal experience I’ve had with my roommate and close friend, to see if anyone else has been through something similar or has advice on how to handle this situation.
It all started in 2023, when I entered college. My friend (let’s call him “Alex”) and I became roommates from freshman year. Alex is bisexual, although I didn’t know that at the time. We got along really well from the start, and living together was pretty normal. Back then, I had a girlfriend, and Alex always gave us space when we needed privacy in the room.
My girlfriend and I broke up. After that, the dynamic between Alex and I changed. We spent a lot of time together in the room, and over time we became more comfortable with our intimacy. There were a couple of times when we caught each other masturbating, but instead of it being awkward, we talked about it and normalized it. By the end of 2023, we were already so comfortable that we could stand in our underwear in front of each other and even change clothes without any problems.
In 2024, things took a more intense turn. One night, after a tiring day of studying, we decided to smoke weed. It was my first time doing it, although Alex was already experienced. We were watching an episode of Game of Thrones when suddenly, we ended up watching porn together. We started masturbating at the same time, and at one point, Alex touched me and I touched him. He ended up masturbating me until I came. The next day, we talked about it and we both agreed that it wasn’t awkward, although it was a little weird.
After that, we started watching porn together more often, but without touching each other. However, our senior year of college, we decided to become roommates again. During that year, the dynamic intensified. We started masturbating each other from time to time, and while it was sporadic at first, it eventually became more frequent.
After graduating, we decided to continue living together to save on rent. That year, Alex confessed to me that he was bisexual, although he clarified that he was not attracted to me. At the time, I felt a little rejected, I don’t know why, but we talked about it and got over it.
We decided to do adult content together again, but this time more explicit. We recorded videos of each other masturbating, and on one occasion, Alex gave me a blowjob. While I enjoyed the experience, I still don’t consider myself gay or bisexual. I don’t feel romantic or sexual attraction towards men in general, or Alex in particular. He’s also made it clear that he’s not attracted to me, and we’ve both set clear boundaries in our relationship.
Now, in 2025, we still live together and occasionally make content together, but always respecting our boundaries. However, Alex recently made me a proposition that has me thinking. He told me that we could do anal penetration content, and that he’d be willing to have me fuck him. For me, that’s already a boundary I’m not sure I want to cross. While I enjoy the dynamic we have, I feel like this could change things between us.
Has anyone else been in a similar situation? How do you guys handle the line between friendship and physical intimacy? Do you think crossing this boundary could affect our friendship in the long run? I appreciate any advice or insight. Thanks for reading.
Hi OP, I’m not really going to question your experiences here - I just think you should also know that 100% straight men are not comfortable having any kind of sex with other men, whether they feel attraction or not (I can only think of extreme counter-examples, such as male rape in prisons where straight men might have sex with other men, but this is usually situational and due to no heterosexual outlet being available).
I understand if you film sex with a man for money (there are absolutely straight men who have sex with men for money), but that doesn’t explain why before then you seemed to choose to engage in sexual encounters with your friend without a motivation like money and seemingly because it was sexually pleasurable.
To me it reads as though, even if you don’t feel romantic feelings for your friend, there is some level of comfort and enjoyment you are getting from sex with this man, and from my perspective that is not compatible with being 100% straight.
But as has been said before, it hardly matters whether you identify as straight, gay, or bi - you just need to be clear with yourself and with your friend to avoid hurt feelings.
I understand what you say and I partly agree, but I would never do this with any other man, I do it with my friend who I have known for 5 years and only in the last 2 years we have started doing these things. And yes of course I feel enjoyment and pleasure, to any man, even the one who is 100% heterosexual, you blindfold him and tell him that he is going to receive a blowjob and he enjoys it even if he later finds out that the one who sucked his cock is a man and contrary to what you claim, enjoying it is not going to make him lower his percentage of heterosexuality, I think that measuring sexuality with % is ridiculous.
Being gay doesn’t mean that you are a man capable of having sex with any other man, any more than being straight means as a man you would have sex with any woman. Having and enjoying sex with a man as a man is kind of the definition of being gay, however. That you have sex only with your male friend doesn’t make it not gay, hopefully this is obvious to you. It doesn’t really matter that you have known him for 5 years and only for 2 years have you had sex, what makes it not straight sex is that you are both men.
I’m a bit confused as to why you think these objections somehow make it not gay, if you think about them at all you can see they don’t make sense. Surely if you imagined your friend were telling you these things you would be able to see this a bit more objectively.
And yes, if you blindfold a straight man and he enjoys being blown by a man, it doesn’t make him gay - correct, but he is also not aware he is having sex with a man. You are notably not blindfolded, you are knowingly engaging in sex with another man as a man and enjoying it. You don’t have to be in love or to feel romantic attraction for sex to be gay, what makes it gay is that it is between men.
In the case of the blindfolded straight man, the sex with a man would be non-consensual and likely if they ever learned it was a man they would probably feel lots of negative emotions and feel violated, and indeed it would be a major violation. Meanwhile if you wanted to avoid consent problems and a man consented to being blind-folded and having some chance of being blown by a man, you would think that man is maybe not completely straight because he is willing to chance sex with a man.
When I say 100% straight it isn’t because I am focused on percentages, but because it is relevant to the discussion that there are different levels of straightness and gayness, and that there absolutely are straight men who are not capable of engaging in consensual sex with men. Meanwhile there are bisexual men who are mostly still straight, i.e. they are not equally attracted to men or women, but as men are almost entirely still attracted to women.
I don’t think it’s ridiculous to recognize this variance, and it seems directly relevant to our discussion. And I’m not the only one who finds these distinctions relevant - look for example at the Kinsey scale, which is the main way researchers describe the sexuality of test subjects. A Kinsey scale of 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 6 is exclusively homosexual. A 0 on the Kinsey scale is what I mean by “100% straight”, and a 6 is what I meant by “100% gay”.
A 1 on the Kinsey scale is someone who is almost entirely straight, but is “only incidentally” homosexual. The idea is that a man that is a 0 on the Kinsey scale would feel extremely violated to learn they just had sex with a man, whereas a 1 might be more capable of accepting that even if they are predominantly straight still.
It absolutely makes sense that a 1 on the Kinsey scale might still identify as straight (men especially seem to be pressured to identify as straight still), since for the most part they are, but there is still a relevant difference between a 0 and a 1.
Yes, if you tell a man he’s going to get a blowjob from a woman and then it’s a man, that is rape, but if you just tell him he’s going to get a blowjob and don’t specify, I don’t think it’s rape. Do you think if a 100% heterosexual man took off the blindfold when he was close to climax and saw that it was a man, would he get up and leave? Or would he keep going until he came? I think absolutely no man would leave.
I think a 100% heterosexual man would be horrified to discover a man sucking him off, and he would absolutely stop the sex and not continue. In fact I think this would likely lead to violence, and these kinds of situations do lead to violence, as evidenced by the gay panic defense. Straight men are more likely to kill the man blowing him than let him finish.
I think you have projected your openness to sex with men onto straight men, which probably helps you rationalize and preserve your straightness. If you think any straight man would have similar openness as you to having sex with men, then you can continue thinking you are completely straight. However, straight men do not have sex with other men, they do not want to have sex with other men, and they would be horrified to learn they were tricked into sex with a man.
Also, if don’t specify to a presumed straight man who will give him a blowjob, and the man agrees assuming it will be a woman but then finds out he is having sex with a man, that straight man will likely experience that as rape. The consent rests on the assumption that you aren’t going to violate certain boundaries, one of those boundaries being that a man is not having sex with him. Most straight people would not feel the need to specify this boundary, the heterosexual nature of sex is assumed.
so you’re saying i’m not straight?
What do you think about what I’ve actually said? Twisting this into an accusation that I’m asserting your identity is one way or another and ignoring the objections I have raised feels like an intellectual cop-out, and a misrepresentation of what I am doing.
EDIT:
Have you watched the film Brokeback Mountain?
I don’t think that having gay sex makes me gay, being gay is that you like men, that you feel attracted to a man, it’s something that doesn’t happen to me. I don’t have fragile masculinity and I’m capable of enjoying a blowjob, it’s just that, a blowjob, it has no depth, for me it’s just a game, a hobby, a way to pass the time and work, because it’s my job too.
That letting a man suck your dick is a gay act, yes, I agree, I do gay things, but it doesn’t make you gay.
And no, I didn’t see Brokeback Mountain
You might enjoy watching Brokeback Mountain, it seems relevant to this discussion (I won’t spoil anything, though).
Can I ask: What makes someone gay, what does it mean to be gay to you?