Homosexism and Sides

JOE KORT 0:04
Ronald, welcome everyone to smart sex, smart love, where talking about sex goes beyond the taboo and talking about love goes beyond the honeymoon. My guest today is Dr Ronald Hellman, a distinguished life fellow of American Psychiatric Association. Prior to his semi retirement, he was Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the I Can School of Medicine at Sinai in New York City. Previously, he was the founder and director of the LGBT affirmative program in New York State’s largest mental health center. He has published numerous articles and research papers in the areas of sexual identity, identity development, LGBTQ healthcare and programming and gay male erotic behavior. Dr Hellman is the recipient of many awards, including the Mental Health Achievement Award of the gay and lesbian psychiatrist of New York and awards for ethical practice in community psychiatry, distinguished service to the medical profession, Diversity Awareness and advancing advancing Minority Mental Health. This year, Ron celebrated 30 wonderful years with his husband. Congratulations, by the way, thank you. Today, he’ll be talking about everything you didn’t know and always wanted to know about homo sexism and sides. Welcome Ron. Thank you. Pleasure to be here with you. It’s a pleasure to have you here. So I thought we could start with how we met, because, you know, I came up with the term side just very casually with my friends who were talking about topping and bottoming. And then I wrote that article in 2013 on Huffington Post about sides. And then in 2020, grinder took it on as a sexual position and as a preference. So I, I put this word out into pop culture. And then you and I somehow got into, I think you got in touch with me because you were doing the academic side of this. Can you talk about that?

Speaker 1 1:58
Yeah, this was five years after you introduced the term, and it became so widely adapted, and I was totally unaware of the term through all that time, and in the research that I started to do, Where I was looking at basically cultural portrayals of what it was thought that gay men did in bed, versus what the actual research was showing. I stumbled upon the Huffington Post article. And, you know, it was great to see that, you know, we were coming from, you know, different paths that were coming together. And so it was complete serendipity that I stumbled upon your article. Actually,

JOE KORT 2:53
I’m so glad you did, because for me, like, my stuff is a little bit more, I guess I could call it pop Psych. I mean, it’s thoughtful. And I thought I use other people’s research in the work to incorporate it, but there is nothing that I know of other than your work academically looking at anything about side or outer course behavior. Am I right about that?

Speaker 1 3:14
I started it, you know, with this whole idea about homosexism, I’m I’m happy to say that there have been a number of research publications that have subsequently been coming out. And you know, I know that both you and I are familiar with Angelos bolis, an academic professor at the who’s at the University of Dublin, who has subsequently published on homosexism, based on my original publication. So the concept has been catching on and has really been thought about in some diverse areas that I can talk about a little bit, maybe later, or now, or whatever. Oh, definitely now. Talk about it. Okay, I’ll just give you two examples. So after my paper was published, a couple years later, a publication came out in the academic literature about male rape in the military, which is a very underreported which is somewhat understandable, because in the military, masculinity is so associated with dominance, and you know where this has occurred to some men in the military, just the word rape itself tends to be associated with something that happens to females. And. So it has that kind of feminization aspect to it, and so a homosexism came into the mix in this paper, because there’s certainly a wider spectrum of kind of erotic, unwanted erotic activities that can take place between men that are bonding in in the military. So, you know, there can be erotic horseplay, for example, just grabbing another guy’s genitals or or something. And the idea with homosexism that many of us are familiar with is that, you know, intercourse is sex. You know that’s the prototype of heterosexual sex, and it’s projected onto gay men as anal intercourse, basically. So that’s sex. Anything else is often considered foreplay, so oral or manual sex, mutual masturbation, whatever is not considered sex. So if you’re engaged in this kind of horseplay or hazing kind of activities, you’re not labeled as homosexual because it’s not considered sex. So you know, that was one example in a paper that came out. Another was a paper that came out about attractive young men that were starring in Disney productions, where there was a fine line between one man saying to another that they found say their friend’s physique, you know, attractive. That’s okay, but that’s as far as it goes, should there have been any sexual in innuendo that is verboten? And you know, if you think about any kind of drama story that targets young people, there will not be anything related to sexual innuendo between men, because of, again, that homosexist prejudice, where it’s demeaned, denigrated, whatever

JOE KORT 7:36
examples, though that’s helpful. So when you say homosexism, you’re so like when you say heterosexism, it means, you know, the idea that everything is seen only as heterosexual. In this way you’re talking about a homosexism Is everything is gay or homosexuality, but in terms of sexuality, it’s just anal intercourse, and that’s it. So,

Speaker 1 7:57
you know, I make this distinction between homo, sexism and homophobia, you know, they’re both prejudices, which would be a negative attitude or judgment about a group of people that you project onto them. And so homophobia, you know, is, as we know, is widely adapted as kind of anti gay prejudice, but that functions at the level of sexual orientation, which really has to do with the gender of attraction. You have a same gender attraction, and so, I mean, I’ll just give you a couple of examples of that and how it differentiates from homosexism, just from my medical school experience, where you know if they were gay, medical students in my class, they were in the closet, because if it was known that they were gay back at that time, they would jeopardize their chances of getting into a medical residency program, same with the doctors. If there were gay doctors, they jeopardized their practices. They wouldn’t get referrals from their colleagues. Many people wouldn’t even go to them because of that prejudice. So that’s functioning just at the level of same gender attraction. It says nothing about what they’re doing in bed. So homo sexism. And the way I got around to this actually, was when i semi retired, I had more time for myself, and I, you know, I was watching more movies, TV series, you name it, and that was during an era when gay themes started to really show up in in mainstream movies and television. I think the iconic example was broke back mountain. You know, the one explicit scene in that movie is. Up. You know, it stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, and they’ve never had sex with each other. They don’t discuss sex, they don’t use lubricant, nothing. They just go to bed with each other, and they have anal intercourse, just like you might see in a heterosexual film. And that’s what’s depicted. And the more of these kinds of films that I saw, that’s all that was seemed like it was ever depicted. Was Was anal intercourse. But it was not only movies. It was a television there was a series on HBO. I’m just going to look, look that up for a second. I forget what the title I was here, and now there’s an explicit sexual scene between two men. And in that series, what do they have anal intercourse? And so I, you know, I was saying to myself, and this was back around 2018 well, is that really what gay men do in bed? Is that all they do in bed? And I started to research that further and all throughout various venues in the culture, that’s what was conveyed. Go back to even like the story in the Bible of Sodom and Gomorrah, where lot has these two angels disguised as men in his house, and the men of the community demand that he send them out to them so they could know them. And the only other time that that word in Hebrew is used is when Adam knew Eve and she got pregnant, so no means a means intercourse. For these men, it seems that it must mean anal intercourse. So from the Bible to movies to television, books there, there was a book entitled The almanac of what was that one called the almanac of gay and lesbian America. And in that book, they asked the question, so you know, what do gay men do in bed? And the answer was, the same thing heterosexuals do wrong, right? So it was so pervasive, what the cultural portrayal was anal intercourse, I thought, is this what’s really going on? And so now I decided to research the literature, and I was surprised to see that in the academic literature, it was actually over 100 years worth of research on gay male sexuality, and consistently it showed even up to I think one of the most recent studies had over 25,000 subjects, gay men In their study that anal intercourse was actually number three on the list that oral and manual sex, mutual masturbation were far more common. And so there’s this stereotype that’s being promoted within the culture, and this disconnect between what’s promoted in the culture versus what the research is actually showing. So I documented all that in an initial publication, academic publication, back in 2018 and it was at that time that I think I stumbled upon, you know, your article in Huffington Post. But then, you know, I thought about it more and tried to figure out, you know, so why is that? Why does that disconnect exist? And that’s when I came up with this prejudice, basically, that I thought was a previously unrecognized prejudice, that I called homosexism. Now, homosexism was a word that was actually already around, and to get a little bit of the history of that, I think you have to go back to the work that George Weinberg did. He’s the one that coined the term homophobia in a book that came out in 1972 society in the healthy homosexual Yeah. However, that was not the beginning of that story for him. It actually goes back, according to the story, to 1965 he was a heterosexual psychologist, and he was going to a party that was being given by his colleagues, and he was going to be accompanied by a lesbian friend of his, and they disinvited her, and he was really upset about this, but that’s really what got the ball rolling. Um. For him, he started to think about, you know, why? Why was this? And you know, he thought it was a fear that they had. It wasn’t a fear that she was going to start yelling and screaming at them or physically attacking them or anything like that. The fear was that she could start to upset the apple card in terms of traditional religious ideas, religious traditions, religious ideas about home and and family. Nevertheless, several years later, somebody by the name of Gregory Lynn, who was a researcher psychologist at John Hopkins University. He was working with John Money, who’s considered an icon in terms of the scientific study of sex, he introduced terms such as sexual orientation, gender role. He started the first sexual gender identity clinic for trans people in 1965 there in any case, Len published a paper about four years after George Weinberg’s book came out where he basically made a great argument. He said, Well, you know, the prejudice is really not a phobia, you know, it’s a prejudice. We really shouldn’t call it homophobia. We should call it homosexism. Made a lot of sense, okay, yeah, but the term just never caught on. Homophobia just was it, and it was widely adapted, and it kind of died, um, so as I was thinking about, you know, this kind of erotic prejudice that was going on, where anything but anal intercourse was being demeaned is basically foreplay. It really wasn’t sex. You know, I went back to that term where homo, which means man and same, same sex, basically. And then sexism, which originally referred to, of course, sexism having to do with prejudice, particularly around the female gender. Nevertheless, it incorporated the term sex, sexuality. And so I came up with redefinition of the term and wrote this paper, basically

Speaker 1 17:52
suggesting that could be adapted in this new form as a erotic prejudice. Basically. Do you

JOE KORT 18:01
know, in your research, if I could ask, because I’ve always asked this, and I don’t know, how do we have stats on how many gay men only our size or outer cores, like you say it was number three or four for intercourse, and that’s one survey. How many? What are the percentages? The that largest

Speaker 1 18:24
study I and I am not, you know, by any means, putting down people that you know really love engaging in anal intercourse or take on roles as tops or bottoms or versatile, where they switch between the two, whatever that’s great, you know, I mean, very sex positive. This is more about this kind of cultural indoctrination that maintains kind of a kind of a heterosexual projection, you know, that intercourse is the prototype for everyone that you know. It’s just male, female, top, bottom, the penetrator and the penetrated whatever. And so you know the statistics we’re talking about anal sex. It’s not that different from the number the percentages of straight men that enjoy anal sex and there at some time or another in their lifetimes, maybe. And I’m not, I’m not recalling the exact figures, but for for gay men that you know where that’s really their preference, it’s about a quarter of, probably about a quarter of gay men, a quarter of

JOE KORT 19:41
gay men who do engage in anal sex that prefer

Speaker 1 19:43
it, that really prefer it. Okay,

JOE KORT 19:47
so low, you know, I’m just, I’m just talking with you about this. As you’re saying this, because it seems like in a lot of the sides, you know, we have a Facebook group of 8800 guys in my of they’re all over the world that. Sides. And they’re always getting picked on on these apps who from gay men who say, What’s wrong with you? You know, how could you not like that? You’re boring. I’m gonna block you. You know, all this crap, and it looks like maybe they’re the most visible of these gay men that just prefer anal sex and don’t want to only have side sex. I’m telling

Speaker 1 20:21
you, I think we have our own silent majority. More and more they’re coming out erotically, out of the closet, so to speak, you know, but I’ve talked to some of these men that are on and as you know, you know, the dating hookup websites, up until just two years ago, those were the only categories they gave you. You could be, you could categorize yourself as a top, a bottom, or versatile that just focused on anal intercourse. And, you know, I’ve talked to men that said, Yeah, well, yeah, I put that I was a top, but that’s not really, but I was into, I’m really a side, but it wasn’t a choice. And, you know, so, you know, I, you I know you’re familiar with that YouTube piece that Michael Henry, the gay comedian, did. Oh, I’m a side. And, you know that piece, if, if, if you look at the comment, over 1300 comments from that piece where people you know just express how relieved they were to finally see themselves you know, represented in terms of their erotic predilections. And many of them talk about how it was the same thing that a lot of us went through in terms of, you know, just our our gay or sexual orientation, where, oh, if you only met the right woman, you know? And here it’s like, if you only met the right man, you would just love anal intercourse, right?

JOE KORT 22:03
And then, my whole life, they would think

Speaker 1 22:04
that there was something wrong with them, so it can really affect one’s self esteem. You know? Yeah,

JOE KORT 22:13
I can’t believe, honestly, still can’t believe that one word that I came up with just, I think I told you this, we’re talking about top and bottom, and I’m like, why can’t I be aside? I was just thinking about a box. We were just and we all laughed. And I thought, Well, why is that even funny? Why can’t that actually be the word never, ever dreaming that it would catch on like this. And when I go around the country and, you know, I’m vacationing or on business, and I get on Grindr, and I get on scruff, and I see, I look up sides, I just want to see there are so many and and I love that people are starting to say, I only want to have side sex, like some people are like, I only want to have side sex until I have a partner, then I’ll maybe engage in intercourse. I love I just like the use of the word because nobody knows outer course, and they’re not going to use that word. That word is so formal. Right side isn’t exactly,

Speaker 1 23:02
you know, it’s one syllable. It just slips right out. And it was brilliant, on your part. I mean, I get, I imagine you had no idea, you know, but boy, were we ripe for the term. You know, it’s almost like in the same way that, you know, we’re all familiar now with the term cisgender, which didn’t exist forever. You know, we kind of knew about trans and transgender, but you know what was kind of, you know, the kind of correlation to that and and all of a sudden, you know, their cis gender, heterosexual, homosexual, cisgender, transgender, top, bottom, side kind of has rounded out just The whole idea of sexuality. So it’s not a surprise that it became so commonly adopted.

JOE KORT 24:05
And your work is is so valuable to me. I wanted, I wanted to somehow, uh, infiltrate the work that I’ve done in the popular in the popular culture, because people want to understand it in terms of stats, in terms of research, in terms of, um, academic way of thinking. And that’s why I wanted you on the show. What would you say is the theme of the work you’re doing? It trying to take the prejudice out of the erotic in this way?

Speaker 1 24:31
Absolutely, you know, I think just, just the fact that, you know, we have this popularized term that you came up with, just segs so well into, you know, more of this kind of formal research, and you know, a scientific approach to it. Science is about true. If you know it’s not about ideology, and that’s what the culture is giving us. Is this ideology, and you know we’re seeing it politically now, where, you know, there’s just man and woman and intercourse and traditional families, and that’s it. And you know, even outline now in Florida, for example, it’s against the law to discuss sexual orientation to the first three grades. And there are even states now that have made it’s a it’s another issue Medicaid. It’s illegal to use Medicaid to cover trans interventions in adults, in adults, nothing to do with we’re doing with kids, you know. So you know, it sustains this kind of traditional, kind of sense that, again, has its kind of political overtones as well, to maintain a traditional conservative idea, yeah,

JOE KORT 26:19
what my hope would be, and is that side the term catch on in the L community and the T community and the B community in the straight community. And I talk about this because in my book on side guys, I wrote, I put a story of a black trans woman approached me with she was upset with me, and she said, I want to know why you created a term only for gay men, because I consider myself a side too. She was trans, and I looked at her, I said, Look at me. I’m white, I’m male, I’m gay and I’m cisgender. Can you imagine, in this cancel culture and this, you know, the fact that everyone’s in fighting, if I had created a word for your community, or anybody else’s community outside of mine, I would have been eating alive. I stayed far away from that, and she softened and she said, You’re right. I’m sorry I said that you’re right, and I am right.

Speaker 1 27:12
So I have to tell you in when I was researching that first paper and looking for data in terms of, you know, how sex is portrayed in movies and TV and whatever, the one incident of explicit sex that involved mutual masturbation, I haven’t found One incident of it was between two women, right? Right, right. Yeah, that’s a

JOE KORT 27:44
whole other podcast. I’ve always thought we could learn so much, and we have learned so much about sex from lesbians, where they, you know, have all kinds of outer cores and they’ll only have intercourse. So that’s a whole other podcast. I think,

Speaker 1 27:57
yeah, and so I think, you know, I’m hoping, as this continues to develop, that people will have an appreciation of the deep intimacy that men that are not into intercourse experience with each Other. It is not something to just you know, just wave away as as foreplay. Now it’s not that at all for these men. So

JOE KORT 28:29
So Ron, can you before we go, we have a few more minutes. What would you like people to know about you that we didn’t discuss, like, in a real, abbreviated way? What? What is something else about that we didn’t cover.

Speaker 1 28:41
You know, number one, given all the media portrayals that we’ve just talked about that we are still not holding the media accountable for accurate portrayals of sexuality among men who have sex with men. Number one. Number two, there’s no education about this. And so you know where we’re gay men getting their education. Probably most of them are getting it from sexually explicit websites, porn sites and and those sites as well tend to emphasize anal intercourse. I mean, you will find everything there, but I think you’ll see more of that than just about any anything else. And so, you know, we’re not holding these websites accountable

Unknown Speaker 29:37
and and I’ve also seen in so many different ways. I mean,

Speaker 1 29:44
urology departments, urology is about, you know, urogenital issues in men, and they will routinely administer a sexual function questionnaire to men. And the commonest one is called the shims, the sexual inventory for men, something like that. And I’m telling you, it is an outdated, biased inventory that focuses on intercourse. And you know, it does it disservice, not only to gay men, but the straight men that you know, who don’t so many you know, are older. They may not have a partner anymore. If they had a partner, they may never have really preferred intercourse. And so you have to lie on these questionnaires in order to answer these questions. And, you know, so, so, so, so that’s another area I you know, really,

JOE KORT 30:51
oh, good. Probably have to stop, because of time. There’s so much here. Maybe we’ll do a part two, because it’s so important to me that this message get out there and that people hear your work, and how can they find you? So let’s say somebody’s been listening. They want to know where to find Ron Hellman

Speaker 1 31:07
at my email. It’s my first and last name with my middle initial in there, Ronald E hellman@gmail.com and that’s where they can reach me, they can keep their eye out for a book that’s coming out with Rutgers University Press in 2025 and that’s on a different subject, that right now the title of the Book is loving arrangements, and that is going to be talking about open relationships, and, you know, so that’s a bit of a different subject, but you know, otherwise, people can reach me at my email address. All

JOE KORT 31:56
right. All right, great. Thank you so much for being on my show. It’s so interesting. We might do a part two, because there’s so much more to say. If you are if you you can hear my more of my podcast, smart sex, smart love, by following me at Twitter, on Tiktok, on Instagram and Facebook, and my handle is at Dr, Joe court, D, R, J, o, e, K, O, R t, you can also go to smart sex, smart love.com and you can go to my website, Joe court.com so everyone, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy. You.