Str8

Straight, written the texting way; on gay apps and porn sites, a man who says he is straight while looking for sex with men.

Str8 is straight, written the texting way: "str" plus the number 8 for "-aight". On gay apps and porn sites it rarely means a man who is simply heterosexual. It means a man who presents as straight, says he is straight, or is sold as straight, while doing something very much not straight: a str8 guy looking for a blowjob, a str8 married man "curious", a str8 jock in a porn title who has clearly been on set before.

In practice str8 is a label for a fantasy and a code for discretion. The man behind it may be bi, closeted, on the down low, a gay man who likes the role, or, now and then, a straight man who really does just like getting his cock sucked by guys.

Where it comes from

Straight for heterosexual is older than most people think, and it comes from gay speech. Green's Dictionary of Slang's earliest example is from 1919, in the transcript of a US Navy inquiry into gay sex in Newport, Rhode Island: "Are you the only straight one in this crowd?". Gay men used it to name the people who were not like them, and only later did the whole world adopt it.

The spelling str8 belongs to the age of pagers, chat rooms and text messages, when numbers stood in for sounds (gr8, l8r, m8). It stuck in gay online spaces because it is short, it is searchable, and it looks a bit rough, which suits the image.

On the apps

A str8 profile usually comes with a set of rules: no face pic, discreet, "masc only", "just want head", host or not. Gay men read these profiles with a mix of lust and skepticism. The joke in every group chat is that the str8 guy on Grindr has been str8 for fifteen years and knows the area better than anyone.

It is the modern face of trade, the old word for a man who has sex with gay men without calling himself one. The difference is that trade was a word gay men used about him; str8 is the word he uses about himself.

In porn

Porn made str8 a brand. "Str8 guy's first time", "str8 jock gets serviced", "str8 bro": the title promises the thrill of the man who should not want it. It sits next to gay for pay, where straight-identifying performers do gay scenes for money, and straight bait, built around tricking or tempting a straight man. Whether the performer is really straight is a question the viewer is not supposed to ask.

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