Top

The insertive partner in anal sex between men, the one who fucks; as a label, a man who prefers or sticks to that role.

A top is the man who does the fucking: in anal sex, the insertive partner, the one whose cock goes in. As a label, "top" says that this is what a man prefers or always does. Its partner word is bottom, the receptive partner, and in between sit the vers men who like both and the sides who skip anal altogether.

Top is about position, not personality. A top can be shy, sweet, nelly, small or submissive in every other way; a bottom can be the most dominant man in the room. The cliché of the big, butch, silent top is just that, a cliché, and every gay man has met the hulking muscle guy whose profile says "100% bottom".

Where it comes from

The image is simple: in the most traditional position, the top is on top. In slang the word first showed up in the language of S&M and of lesbian and gay relationships in the early 1970s, where top meant the dominant or "masculine" partner and bottom the passive one. Gay men soon used it for anal roles in general, and dictionaries of gay speech from the 1970s and 1980s already pair top man with bottom man. By the 1990s a top was simply "the active or giving partner in sex".

Kinds of top

• Total top or "100% top": never bottoms, or says he never does.
• Service top: tops to please his partner, attentive rather than dominant.
• Dom top: tops and takes charge, the leather-and-orders version.
• Vers top: mostly tops, will bottom for the right man.

The running joke on the apps is that tops are rare and bottoms are everywhere. Whether that is true is hard to say, but the joke is so old that "top shortage" has become a meme of its own.

The health side

Topping carries a lower risk of HIV than bottoming, but not zero. The CDC estimates the risk of getting HIV from a single act of insertive anal sex with a partner who has HIV and is not on treatment at about 11 in 10,000, compared with about 138 in 10,000 for receptive anal sex. Tops can and do get HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis. PrEP, condoms and a partner with an undetectable viral load (U=U) all cut the HIV risk sharply, and regular testing at a sexual health clinic catches the rest. See also PrEP.

Related terms