Top or Bottom?

So a while ago the gay parts of the internet went crazy over the addition of a new sexual position on grind - a ‘side’. A side is a person (usually gay) who does not engage in anal sex. The usual dichotomy gay men when assigning roles in bed is ‘top’ and ‘bottom’, where the top is the one who penetrates the bottom. 

I was surprised it took this long to introduce this option, since in my experience it is fairly common for gay men to not engage in anal sex, despite the media (queer included) trying to convince us that that’s how gay sex works. The idea that the only way two men can be intimate is through penetrative anal sex feels reductive, and in my opinion is rooted in heteronormativity. 

Many cishet people are still stuck on the idea that in a same sex relationship, one partner becomes ‘the woman’ while the other is ‘the man’. When I was with my ex I actually had an old acquaintance of mine ask me who’s the man in our relationship, to which I said that the point of a gay relationship is that we are not a man and a woman. 

Our society is so obsessed with the narrow heterosexual gender norms that for a lot of people it’s difficult to even imagine a different kind of relationship dynamic. The idea that gay people secretly just wish to emulate a ‘real’ (read: straight) relationship is projected into the bedroom as well, where the bottom is seen as the woman and the top is seen as the man. 

Now I’m not denying that there are some assimilationist gays who do live their lives as heterosexually as their homosexuality allows them to, but to me one of the best things about being gay has always been the freedom from heterosexual gender roles. 

In gay relationships there are little expectations and scripts to follow, which to me makes them flow much more naturally and without the external pressure to conform to a certain idea of what a relationship to be. This to me is the greatest privilege and the thing that allows us to be truly free and honest about who we are.

That is why I have been getting a little annoyed with a lot of gay humour I find online that relies on cheap top/bottom jokes, as if that was the only facet of homosexuality worth humouring. While some of the jokes are lighthearted and funny, I find it strange that so many gay people are eager to box themselves into pretty much the same gender roles that straight people perform, they just swap the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ with ‘top’ and ‘bottom’. It feels like a setback. 

In a lot of these jokes, bottoms are automatically more feminine, emotional, get attached more easily than their butch counterparts tops, who are masculine, careless, and emotionally stunted. 

For me, these jokes got stale pretty quickly because I feel like it’s just the same tired gender stereotypes we see in straight media. What I’m also trying to figure out is what is the appeal of this particular part of gay culture. Is it popular simply because gender stereotypes are universally familiar? Does gay culture really revolve around heteronormative sex and gender labels for so many gay people? Or is it all a one big meta joke at the expense of the straights that I don’t get? 

The introduction of a ‘side’ option on grindr may not seem like a huge deal, but I’m hoping that it will encourage people to explore different possibilities of having queer sex or even living a queer lifestyle. The top/bottom labels may be useful in some contexts and I’m by no means trying to offend people who identify with them, but I also find them limiting and at this point very normative, which is the very opposite of the queer future I wish to see.