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The VICE Guide to Being Gay

Everything you ever wanted to know about gayness, but were too afraid to ass.

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Gay was invented by two guys in the city of Sodom in 254 BC. Since then, tons and tons of men have been enjoying sex with other men. But, as fun and as normal as that is, LOADS of people have a problem with it. In fact, lots of people think that putting a dick anywhere near another man's bum or mouth hole is basically the same as wiping it all over God's toothbrush. Because of this, "gay shit" remains a controversial subject best avoided at religious events, or in the presence of idiots. Here's our comprehensive guide to everything you ever wanted to know about gayness, but were too afraid to ass. Oh, and lesbians, we know you're gay too. But this is a guide to gay stuff for guys. You'll get your own guide soon.

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A
Anal Sex
Apparently 15 percent of gay guys don't ever do anal sex. If any of that 15 percent are reading this, YOU SHOULD TRY IT! Until you've had your bell rung from the inside, you haven't rung your bell at all. Sure, it's gonna hurt the first few times, but fuck it, get your boy to stick it in your lil' bum and cum, cum, and cum again! It's great! One warning though, if you go down the rabbit hole enough times, eventually you're going to find a rabbit. But in this case, that "rabbit" is "poop."

Honorable mentions: Alt gays, ABBA. B
Being So Bored in Gay Clubs That You Just Watch the Video Wall All Night
The gay scene fucking sucks. But if you want to have sex even a little bit, you're going to have to take part in it eventually. You'd think that there'd be a gay bar out there that would cater to you, what with all the bear bars, the daddy bars, the punk gay bars, the sissy-bounce gay bars, the Mexican cowboy gay bars, the square-dancing gay bars, and the gay bars for people with ginger hair fetishes (these are all real gay bars I've been to, BTW). But nope. No matter where you go, you're gonna be hearing the same remix of "We Found Love" four times in an hour. And holy shit are you gonna get bored.

Honorable mentions: Bears, brunch, Broadway, Butt Magazine, Billy Eichner,"bisexuals," bisexuals, Bret Easton Ellis, bigots.

C
Coming Out
This girl I know just came out to her friends in a bar, people overheard, announced it to the room and then strangers bought her drinks all night! Great, huh! Another guy I know just came out to his family, and his brother tied his hands behind his back and threw him into a river! Less great, huh! I guess, most of the time, coming out stories are somewhere between those two. Pretty much no dad punches the air when his son brings home a boyfriend, but not too many reverse the car over him, either.

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Still, the main thing about coming out is that it's probably best to ACTUALLY DO IT. I know, at times, it can be kind of exciting to have a big secret you're hiding from everyone (like you're Alex Mack or Batman), but every day a gay man spends in the closet makes him a little bit crazier. So bust down those doors or come to terms with becoming Jeffrey Dahmer Reloaded. Unless you live in Saudi Arabia or some shit. In which case, keep it under wraps.

PS: I'm sorry to break this to you. But everybody already knows. Even your mom. It's pretty fuckin' obvious, dude.

PPS: If your parents are assholes and refuse to accept you, fuck 'em. They get three years to be totally 100 percent OK with it (five, if they're old), after that, they're X'ed. 

Honorable mentions: Chubs, choking, Cabaret, celebrity gossip, Courtney Love, crying, Cyndi Lauper, chick flicks.

D
Drugs
Meth used to be the gay drug of choice. Back in the day, queens would fuck themselves up on it and then go to shitty parties with shitty music and pop a bunch of Viagra and have a ton of unsafe sex and get HIV. Meth is awful. Never do meth. Ecstasy and pot and acid and K are OK, I guess, but can everyone promise to stop messing with meth? And mephedrone or whatever that new shit is that even old men are doing now. "M" drugs are bad, guys. Knock them off.

Honorable mentions: Dennis Cooper, daddies, drag queens, drunk texts, Paris Hilton's "Drunk Text," divas. E
Equality
Neeeever gonna happen! Sez, everyone. Think about it; there are so many places where gays are viewed with about as much affection as a shit on a pillowcase: The Middle East, Africa, 50 percent of Europe, a whole bunch of America, 99 percent of South America, 80 percent of Asia. $800 says that everyone who's ever been on the moon is a homophobe—which means we can't have that either.

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Of course, there's been progress, but even if we're optimistic, and we were to assume that the medieval types still hating queers will eventually be outmoded by new, fabulous, liberal guys; it's going to take so long that by the time they're cool, all the fabulous, liberal places on Earth will have probably slipped back into religious despotism and gay hating. Sucks, huh?

But still, you know what's great? When tough gays kick the shit out of homophobes. Let's do that more. And don't forget to put it on YouTube!

Honorable mentions: Expensive hair products, erections, E! True Hollywood Stories.

Continued on the next page (or just click "Single-Page View" to get it all in one go).

F
Fag
Hey, Straight Folks! This is the gay version of the N-word, so you know how, when you're in a club, and you sing "Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger, but she ain't messin' with no broke *silence*"? It's like that. You can't say it. We can say it. And we will, we'll say: "Hey, fag, what's up," or, "Should I wear this Celine Dion tour shirt? Or is it a bit too faggy?" but you can't. Why? Because it's still something tossed around in schoolyards and locker rooms and football stadiums and other places where wankers congregate. I know your favorite people in the whole wide world said it's OK for you to say it (Louis CK and Tyler the Creator, obvs), but they don't get to decide these things. So, step off the word "fag," you fag.

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Honorable mentions: Female rappers, fag hags, fat girls as best friends, feeling bad for straight guys because they have to live with straight girls and those bitches are craaaaazy.

G
Grindr
Homosexuals have never met a technology that they couldn't somehow adapt to get themselves laid. While breeders are using their smartphones to play MS Paint Pictionary with each other (fun!), gays are using it to get instant contact with any horny homo within 100 miles. Gays have always cruised; on the street, at bathhouses, at porn stores, in public toilets, and in the steam rooms of the finer exercise establishments around the world. Now though, this has all moved onto the phone.

You wanna know how horny gays are? Log on now… See, there are THOUSANDS, literally THOUSANDS of men trying to bone you. Yes, we all hate it, but that muffled atonal ding that announces new messages is officially the new gay mating call, at least until the next technology comes along and we figure out how to make it sexy. (I really, really hope it's those 3D hologram video calls, like in Star Wars.)

Honorable mentions: Gay-listers, gay news websites (don't look at these, they all suck), Golden Girls, girl singers, Grey Gardens, gossiping, Gossip Girl, gag reflex (I fuckin' hate that thing).

H
HIV/ AIDS
AIDS is sad and scary and the worst and you're going to be thinking about it ALL THE FUCKING TIME because you're going to become insanely paranoid about it. If you have a cold? It's AIDS. If you wake up with a sore neck? AIDS. If you come within 100ft of an exposed penis? AIDS. If you get an all-clear on your STD check (and you should get those, BTW), and you are told you definitely don't have AIDS? Well, what about that three-month incubation period, huh? You definitely have AIDS.

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Honorable mentions: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, handjobs, hating Lady Gaga, homophobia being associated with closeted mega-gays (LOL!).

I
It Gets Better
There are those videos where celebrities go on YouTube and tell baby gays who are bullied not to kill themselves because one day, in the vague, grey future, things will be better (and then ask you to buy their new album/movie/book). And what they're saying is true! I promise, it really does get better. But it also gets worse. It's not all sex parties and Beyonce concerts, kids. What the videos leave out is anal wart fascism, the boyfriend who leaves you for a younger guy, always worrying about abs and being laughed at for wearing the wrong shoes. The gay scene is hard! Yeah, there is a ton of great stuff about being gay (mostly sex parties and Beyonce concerts) but it gets worse, too. No one's gonna tell you that, but it's true. But please, don't kill yourself, [see "K"].

Honorable mentions: Internet hookups, intergenerational sex.

J
Jail
I'm only including this in here because I just got done reading an article about what it's like to be gay in prison. And it sounded majorly no bueno. So be good, please. Oh, and if anyone ever tells you prison must be like heaven for gays, rape them, then beat their head with a sock full of rocks, then call them a fag and see how much they like it.

Honorable mentions: John Waters, Judy Garland, Joan Rivers, jockstraps. K
Killing Yourself
Gays do this way more often than straights. Like, two or three times more often, according to a Google search I just did. Obviously, this is not good at all. I guess it's because a very large proportion of the Earth are jerks that like to be mean to us and our kind. All that meanness means that, beyond suicide, mental illness is also something you're going to be dealing with a lot. Almost everyone you sleep with/date is going to be a little bit crazy. But then so are you, so who are you to talk? Imagine how much fun all this stuff makes break-ups!

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Honorable mentions: Kylie Minogue, kissing in public being dangerous and therefore really hot, kikiki-ing.

L
Lesbians
Yes, they are our sisters in struggle, but other than being denied our equal rights, gay men and lezzers have absolutely nothing in common. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Well, we both like Beth Ditto and porn that, at a glance, appears to be two guys, but we definitely don't socialize well together. However, if you're in a town small enough to only have one gay bar, you'll have to hang out. Which is fine, but just so you know, if you pay any attention to your lesbian sisters, you're both doing it wrong.

Honorable mentions: Locker rooms, lying about what the most played song on your iTunes is to straight friends, Liza, little dogs.

Continued on the next page (or just click "Single-Page View" to get it all in one go).

M
Marriage
You can't do this in a lot of places. But why would you want to get married, anyways?  Have you never seen a sitcom? Marriage sucks. It sucks so bad that nearly everyone gets a divorce, which is the only thing that sucks worse than marriage. Still, it would be nice to have the option, though, right?

Honorable mentions: Making your house look nice on a limited budget, Mean Girls, making fun of Sex and the City 2, making out.

N
Nasty Sex
You know how you like to do sex stuff, and it feels good? The great thing about being a gay guy is that nobody gives a shit if you're a slut (except those boring, bourgeois gays who have rants about monogamy on their Guardian Soulmates profiles. But who the fuck wants to sleep with those guys anyway?) However, 95 percent of gay guys have some kind of weird fetish that they'll expect you to indulge. In the last month, I have:

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- Been asked to jerk off into condoms for a week and save them so a guy could drink them.
- Been sent an attachment of horrid things someone had said to them during their school years and asked to write it violently all over their naked body with a permanent marker while spitting on them.
- Been asked to take someone into a field, strip them, kick them as hard as I can without breaking anything, then leave them there.

But, whatever, if you think you can get through it without laughing or puking, go for it! Unless they're into laughing or puking, in which case, go for it then, too. You might even find something new you enjoy.

Honorable mentions: Nicki Minaj, nipple piercings (ew), never having to have sex with a person who's on their period.

O
Old Dudes
Hey, old dudes; it's OK that you're into young guys! There are young guys that are into you, too! But, please, PLEASE try not to become a Weird Old Dude. I don't need to be having polite, get-the-fuck-away-from-me conversation with people in their sixties every time I enter a gay bar. Keep that shit on silverdaddies.com, or wherever.

Honorable mentions: Outing people, o-p-u-l-e-n-c-e, Obama shirtless pics, Oscar Wilde.

P
Pretending You're Starring in a Music Video When You're Walking Down the Street Listening to Your iPod
All gay men do this. Anyone who says they don't is a liar. My favorite is to listen to "Timebomb" by Kylie Minogue and imagine I'm going into Ascot wearing suspenders and the dress code enforcer people are all "no," so I shoot them in the head, and then I steal a TV reporter's microphone and sing the chorus, and everyone is watching on TV (like, 450 million people), and the world's gay kids are like "WOW! Looks like we found ourselves a leader."

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Honorable mentions: Playing as female characters in video games, penises, prick teases (yes, somehow these actually exist on Planet Gay), Phoebe from Friends, peeking at the urinal. Q
Queens
If you're a queeny gay dude, things are gonna be a little shittier for you. Not only are you easier to identify to straight bigots, other gay guys are gonna be mean to you, too. You see, gays love to hate each other. No matter who you are, someone is going to think you're too gay, or not gay enough, or that you're gross because you think Zac Efron is hot, or a self-internalized homophobe because you don't know all of the words to "Vogue" by Madonna. I guess bitchiness is just something that happens when you grow up with everyone being a total dick to you. Like that part in every TV show ever where they have an episode where you meet the bully's parents and they're total assholes and you're all "ohhhhhhh."

But on the plus side, if you are super queeny, you're probably really, really funny, and tons of straight girls are going to want to be your friend. Yay!

Honorable mentions: Queer theory, quips, quoting Clueless. R
Rush
This is a little red n' yellow bottle filled with poppers. Poppers are the best. You huff them and then you give head. Really deep, insane, crazy head where the dick goes all the way down your gullet and into your small intestine.

Poppers turn you into Gay Guy². They make you relax all your involuntary muscles like your throat and your butthole and it makes all those dirty gay sex things so much easier. It also makes you kind of dizzy and feel so fucking horny that you could stuff every dick in a ten-mile radius into any of your orifices right at that moment and still not be satisfied. They also make it feel like someone is piling rocks on your head and you want to pass out, but it is so, so worth it.

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Also, these are marketed as "video head cleaner," which means somewhere out there, there are straight VHS nerds who need to clean their video heads, and have to go to gay sex shops to buy it. Cute!

Honorable mentions: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Robyn (eugh, why guys?), raising dogs as an alternative to raising children, Roseanne, rimming (straight people, you have no idea what you're missing), reality TV.

Continued on the next page (or just click "Single-Page View" to get it all in one go).

S
Stereotypes
There is the stereotype of gay men as effeminate, lisping, fashion-obsessed sissies. Which is, generally, a total bummer to have to live with. But it's also kind of liberating. You see, the majority of gays have incredibly bad taste. So if you like a Katy Perry song, or thought Miss Congeniality 2 was a great movie (it is, BTW), you can just come out and say it and nobody's going to give a shit. People are expecting it of you, even. You don't have to pretend you don't like it, the way straight people do.

And let's just be clear here, straight people: you are pretending. That's entertainment that is created in a lab and then focus-grouped 1000 times in order to make it as universally appealing as possible. You're free to not watch it/listen to it. But don't say you hate it. That's like saying you hate the taste of Big Macs because they taste too popular. Have fun tidying your bedroom to that ten-minute ambient Aphex Twin track, guyz!

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Honorable mentions: Secretly wishing you were a girl, stubble, Showgirls, Sailor Moon, Silo and Roy (the gay penguins in Central Park Zoo).

T
Trans-folk
Not anything to do with being a gay guy, I know. But you're all a part of the LGBTQIWHATEVER family, and trans people are the ones who get shit on the most (trans people are more than four times more likely to live in "extreme poverty;" 41 percent have attempted suicide; and 78 percent claim to be "regularly harassed"), so be nice to them. K?

Honorable mentions: True Blood, telling everyone you hate Will & Grace even though it's basically yourfavorite show ever, thrifting, talking about which celebrities you think are gay, tribal tattoos, trolling Christians, talking shit about people.

U
Underwear
Can we all agree to stop wearing those "Aussie Bums" or whatever the fuck they're called? Elaborate/sexy/expensive underwear is the fucking worst. And while we're on the subject of clothing, new gay-clothing rule: If something doesn't have sleeves, it's not allowed to have a hood. No exceptions. Thank you.

Honorable mentions: Uniform fetishes, using polari in day-to-day conversation, unbelievably small number of out, black gay guys.

V
Vaginas
I know there's a fairly famous standup routine about this already, but I'm not sure where gay guys got this reputation for being fancy and sissy. Sticking your penis inside a soft, podgy, self-lubricating flesh-mound that smells like chamomile is fancy and sissy. Taking a rock hard nine-inch penis inside a hole that's designed for pooping is not.

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Honorable Mentions: Vodka and diet coke, vodka and tonic, vodka and anything, vogueing.

W
Wicca and Other Spiritual Nonsense
I'm not sure why, I think it might be something to do with the popularity of Buffy and The Craft with gays of a certain age, but gay dudes are heavily into hippie bullshit. If someone asks you what star sign you are or talks about Reiki or, and ESPECIALLY, mentions the term "radical faerie," it doesn't matter how hot he is: run. Honorable mentions: Wii, weed.

X
X Chromosome
This is supposedly where the gay gene is. See, Freud was right. It is your mom's fault.

Honorable mentions: Xtube.com, X-dressing, Xena Warrior Princess, Emperor Xizong of Tang (the Chinese are way gay.) Y
Yearning
Oh God, the yearning. Only what, like one or two percent of people are gay? And, as I'm sure you've realized already, straight men are infinitely hotter than gay guys. You're going to fall in love with your brother's friends. And your dad's friends. And your friend's friends. And guys in the street. And the guy who sits next to you at work (hey, Bruno!). Gay cinema would lead you to believe that straight guys are seducible, but they're not and you're going to spend 25 percent of your time embarrassing yourself in front of them. It's probably best not to ever get drunk in situations where you're likely to have to interact with a straight person. It will not end well.

Honorable mentions: You, "YMCA" jokes (good one, grandad). Z
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Being gay makes you part of the gay community, which means you're going to be part of a whole super-serious, unbearably politically correct group of people who throw around terms like "cisgendered" and "heterosexual privilege" and "ultra-commodified, homogenized subculture" and manage to reduce something that, really, could be nonstop LOLs, to the most boring. Fucking. Thing. In. The. World.

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In fact, you'll probably find a few of those guys in the comments down at the bottom of this. Hey guys!

Honorable mentions: Zucchini (AKA nature's dildo, AKA nothing begins with "Z," so give us a break!).

Want more guidance?

The VICE Guide to Dating Rich Girls

A Beginners' Guide to Drugs for Girls

The VICE Guide to Girls

The VICE Guide to Partying

The VICE Guide to Giving Head

The VICE Guide to Eating Pussy

A Slob's Guide to Critical Theory

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