Have you heard of Bill Weintraub or the “Buttfuck Dictatorship”? I only heard of him, his writings, and his political cause yesterday from someone I know here in Syracuse, who was responding to a 2022 article published in The Guardian, which I had reposted from someone else on Facebook. The article was prompted by Grindr’s move to include a new option, called “side,” which recognizes gay men who are “not tops or bottoms.” According to the article, the sex therapist Joe Kort coined the term in 2013, stating that “Many ‘sides’ say they’re subjected to widespread rejection and misunderstanding in the gay community, whose member often view them as immature, lazy or even asexual.” In response to me posting this, along with my comments that I found all this “bizarre,” something I have never experienced or encountered anywhere in the gay men’s world, either as an academic/political discussion or as a practice, my Syracuse contact responded with incredulity that I was unaware any of this. Among the thousands of gay men I’ve had sex with in the course of my life time, I have never felt pressured or have had a partner tell me they felt pressured to have anal sex. The guy I know in Syracuse directed me, at my request, to online sources. This brought me to the pages of a gay man named Bill Weintraub. Weintraub asserts there is a “buttfuck dictatorship” controlling and giving mainstream gay male culture “its distinctive and distinctively maladaptive and dysphoric quality.” Anthony, my Syracuse contact, reports that he has always felt pressured to have anal sex and to be “promiscuous.” (Weintraub asserts that the three pillars of “a dominant culture of anal penetration” are: anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy (which he rejects because it is “both a consequence and a cause of anal penetration.”).
My initial reaction has been incredulity, ranging from I’ve never experienced or witnessed this “buttfuck dictatorship” to how have I never heard anything about discussion of it. Anthony, on the other hand, is incredulous that I have never heard of this discussion or experienced this constant pressure to have anal sex or be rejected. He says it has plagued him all his life. I have never seen promiscuity trumpeted as “a sign of mental health and … indicative of a positive self-image.” To the contrary, my experience has been that straight people stereotype all gay men as promiscuous. I was unaware that the cadre of those outside the “buttfuck dictatorship” view it as “dangerous and bizarre: Weintraub writes “Men are encouraged to be promiscuous, and to experiment with a broad range of sexual behaviors, such as oral-anal sex, which those outside the culture generally regard as dangerous and bizarre.”
As I write this now and look more closely to the assertions made here, it strikes me as bizarre, self-deluding thinking. I see no source for it in gay culture or the world outside the writers’ own minds. But, if, as Anthony asserts, he has been subjected to such ongoing pressure, I must respect his experience as valid for him.
I feel like this thinking has drawn me into a funhouse of distorting mirrors. Hence my reaching out and asking for others’ take on this. I remember being skeptical of non-binary and gender-fluidity when I first encountered these concepts. I learned that, while I have experienced the sliding scale in sexual (orientation) identity diversity, I have never experienced it in gender identity. I have had my eyes opened and have recognized the truth of that. However, I don’t know what to make of this “buttfuck dictatorship” we are allegedly living under.
Here are the links I was provided with:
http://man2manalliance.org/crw/defdcap.html http://man2manalliance.org/crw/frot/dictator.htmlhttp://man2manalliance.org/crw/frot/365gay.html http://man2manalliance.org/crw/hyacinthinelove.htmlhttp://man2manalliance.org/crw/frot/revo.html
Les K. Wright 