"Any straight guys horny tonight? Need to bust a nut with no strings? On your way home from work and need to release some stress? Looking for a cool, in shape str8 guy who is discreet and in need of some hot, safe fun. Don’t even need to talk—just drop by, undress, sit back, and enjoy. Just be 20 to 50 the kind who has wife/GF at home and no one would guess you like this too.”

Dude Sex.

I didn’t coin it, and I’ve already heard how offensive the term is. But according to the all-knowing Internet, that is what it’s called when straight-identified men have sex with other straight-identified men.

New phenomenon? It certainly wouldn’t appear so, but Dude Sex seems to have been brought into the mainstream by sites like Craigslist. I lifted the above ad from the Casual Encounters section. There are hundreds of ads just like that one. Hundreds.

What does this behavior say about sexual fluidity and identity? Is it sexual repression and internalized homophobia, as some friends expressed when I asked this on Facebook? Or is it possibly a step toward sexual expression that doesn’t depend on the need for labeling or pigeonholing an identity?

Historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, author of The History of Sexuality, theorized that as a society we have produced and overblown the idea of sexual repression. He also believed that identifying sexual “norms” regulated sexuality by deeming anything outside of those norms as deviant—making such deviancies something against which to transgress.

Are straight-identified men interested in engaging in sexual behavior with other men because we—in both the straight and gay community—have judged this behavior so taboo? Or have we as a society evolved to a place where talking about sexual fluidity is more acceptable and acting on it not as shocking? I think it’s a mixture of both.

When I posed the question, “What are your thoughts on ‘Dude Sex’—hetero-identified men having sex with other men?” on my Facebook page, I was surprised at how many of the answers weren’t focused on the behavior but rather on the sexual identity of the men exhibiting that behavior.

Almost every person seemed to be bothered that these men identify as straight and immediately wanted to point out that they are not. Even the few who had the “to each his own” attitude still wanted to find a label that was something other than heterosexual.

I found this fascinating, although I was not surprised; our civilization is hell-bent on categorizing people and defining who they are. If we don’t like how they identify, we make a decision for them, whether or not they agree. It’s very difficult to discuss sexual behavior without bringing up the idea of identity because it appears that we cannot differentiate between the two.

This is the same in mainstream culture as in the gay community, where we add a new letter of identity to our acronym so often that it’s hard to keep track of what they all represent.

Does this notion of “Dude Sex” upset things because we don’t have a letter for it? Or is it more about heterosexual masculine privilege?

Straight-identified men enjoy an entitlement not shared with gay or bisexual-identified men, and that’s a bit troublesome; guys who participate in “Dude Sex” get all the privilege of their heterosexuality and still get to engage in the behavior they desire. Not fair, or does it not matter?

It certainly matters when we live in a world in which those whose identity is other than heterosexual are oppressed as a marginalized minority. Dudes who have sex with other dudes but maintain their heterosexual status get the milk for free, so to speak, and that certainly pushes people’s comfort zones. I once had a professor tell me, “If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not learning.”

Sexual identity is not just about behavior or even orientation but rather how someone sees themselves in their world, their community, their family and their own life. Identity is where we fit, not what we do.

Men having the freedom to experiment, explore and discover their sexuality in this way, although not altogether socially acceptable is, at least according to Craigslist ads, part of the mainstream culture. Don’t we as a gay, lesbian, bi and trans community encourage this kind of sexual fluidity and want our own identities and expressions validated?

Dude Sex is not a new idea and reaches back long before we as a society determined that there was such a thing as straight or gay sexuality; before there was assigned identity, there was only behavior.By hyper-labeling identity based on behavior, do we get further away from or closer to a world in which every individual is simply accepted as a person?