Meet ex-gay twitter, a community of bisexual men who believe they can turn themselves straight with "hetero hypnosis porn"

I'm confused. How can they be "ex-gays" if they're bisexual? You can't be an ex-gay if you weren't gay to begin with

In ex-gay Twitter, like most parts of the pornographic internet, the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred. At first glance, it looks like a community of gay men who watch straight porn, even lesbian porn occasionally. A bit odd, yet not unheard of1. Similar phenomena exist for heterosexuals and lesbians: straight men watch lesbian porn, and many women, including lesbians, seem to enjoy gay male porn. Ex-gay Twitter isn’t remarkable simply because of its porn preferences. Rather, it’s their unique relationship to the porn and how they consume it. In many cases, they seem to be using the porn ‘hypnotically’, posting or retweeting it in ways meant to convince the poster (or his followers, as the case may be) that he’s sexually attracted to women, using hashtags like #gay2straight and captions like “she thought going to a gay nude beach was gonna be really fun. and it was, it was really fun” (NSFW link). Sometimes, literal hypnosis videos are posted. This one (NSFW link) starts with a kind of hypnosis spiral illusion and fades between it and different straight porn scenes. The origin of the porn varies, and most of it is taken from outside the community, but some comes from users who document their own heterosexual exploits. This tweet (NSFW link), captioned “Pounded that Pussy hard and show her who is in control 💪🏻 she will never forget that fuck with my exgay cock 🤤everybody can achieve that #exgay #exhomo #converted #lovepussynow #straightpride #gay2straight #nothomophobic,” shows an ameteur hetero POV video, presumably taken and uploaded by the OP. Cunnilingus seems to be a recurring theme, as does double penetration, often by men with visible and good-looking faces, not always a given in straight porn. The homoerotic nature of the latter isn’t surprising, of course, but it hardly qualifies as a tell. For every user who claims to be “fully converted” (NSFW link), there is another who makes no such claim, and posts and retweets bisexual and gay porn alongside that of the straight and “gay-to-straight” variety.

Is the ex-gay Twitter phenomenon a peculiar gay fetish, one that some are more committed to than others? When asked privately, one Twitter user, a 27-year-old Uruguayan man named Alexis, confirmed that there was indeed a fetishistic aspect to it. “I feel the kink to be fully transformed into a straight guy,” he told me, but noted that he couldn’t articulate why, and that there are a variety of “motivations” in the community. When I asked him if his sexual and romantic interest in women, which he had spoken about earlier in the conversation, came before or after he discovered this fetish, he said he wasn’t sure, but “thought” perhaps the kink came first.

In Alexis’s case, stereotypes about the motivations of gay men who want to change their sexuality, i.e. “internalized homophobia,” don’t really apply. He said that his family had always been supportive of him as a gay man. He also told me he had “never experienced aggressive homophobia” and that the “machismo” culture common in South America is far less pronounced in Uruguay. And though the pressures of the traditional, conservative variety were largely non-existent in Alexis’ case, he still felt a sense of shame and guilt around his sexuality. He said he accepted he was gay as a teenager, and “got really into the world of gay porn,” but would occasionally watch straight porn and “repent like it was wrong or something…something I wasn’t supposed to see because I was gay.”2

Another young man I spoke to, Louis, 21, recounted his sexually confusing teen years. He fell in love with another boy at 14, and believed he was gay until he lost his virginity to a woman at 18. Now he has a girlfriend and, in our conversation, referred to himself as “definitely bisexual.”

Although Louis and Alexis seem to have nearly opposite sexual histories, both formerly considered themselves gay, but now admit a sexual desire for both men and women. It seems that for many in ex-gay Twitter, the straight label is a stand-in, goal, or fantasy, and that for all practical purposes, most are ‘merely’ bisexual. What seems to set them apart from other male bisexuals is that they once identified as gay.

But why all the window dressing? Why does this community, largely composed of presumably bisexual men, express their sexuality by play-acting straight men in the hetero porn videos and lurid, misogynistic captions that they tweet? After all, it’s 2022, and who cares if you’re bi? Even culture is on bisexuals’ side—it’s hardly uncommon to hear that sexuality exists on a spectrum, and that one’s position on that spectrum can exist in a constant state of flux. For example, a worksheet provided by The Trevor Project, the “the world’s largest suicide prevention and mental health organization for LGBTQ…young people,” compels its readers to “Mark how you identify today on each line, but don’t feel limited – it’s ok to mark something different tomorrow!”

People—at least liberal ones—say sexual fluidity is valid, but in practice, they only mean it for women. A straight woman’s drunken, sapphic hookup is safely categorized as a wild Friday night. She’s a party girl, not a lesbian. She won’t think twice about recounting the experience to future boyfriends, who will either be turned on or indifferent. On the other hand, the only way to interpret the identity of a straight man who has a drunken hookup with another man is to immediately view him as a suspect. He is immediately regarded as bisexual, if not a wholly repressed homosexual, and closeted for not identifying as either. Unless he finds himself in leftist activist circles, the media, or some other place where “queer” identities can be leveraged for material gain, he will be remiss in sharing his experiences with anyone. On the other hand, young women who identify as bisexual, queer, or lesbians in their teen years can simply say they’ve changed their minds when they become adults, and people are generally inclined to believe them. As far as I can tell, the experience does not affect them so greatly that they develop an entire internet subculture around it, as many of our subjects here seem to have done.

In his 1996 essay “Gay Dream Believer: Inside the Gay Underwear Cult,” the British writer Mark Simpson, best known for later coining the term “metrosexual,” portrays coming out as an evangelical experience, writing that:

“To be ‘reborn’ you have to destroy the wrong person that existed before. So the out-person now recalls that he knew he was gay from the earliest age; before he encountered puberty, before the afterbirth was cold, etc. Early playground friendships with members of the same sex are now seen for what they were: passionate gay attachments which no one straight could possibly have entertained. On the other hand, any encounters with, interest in, or marriage to the opposite sex is now quite rightly seen as nothing but an ill-judged attempt to satisfy one’s peers, parents, guilt, false consciousness, or just sisterly feeling. You know the scenario: I thought I love you, but really I just envied your makeup skills.”

This is correct, and has always applied to men more than women. Looking at recent history, it isn’t hard to see why. In the latter half of the 20th century, lesbian activists aligned themselves with the feminist movement, portraying lesbianism as praxis, a revolutionary act of female solidarity. In other words, a choice (does anyone really think former New York City first lady Chirlane McCray, a one-time radical who in 1979 published an essay called “I am a Lesbian” in Essence, has gone “back into the closet” because she married Bill de Blasio?). On the other hand, gay male activists stressed that their sexuality was not a choice or political act, but an immutable characteristic. This was practically a survival skill, a bid to garner sympathy from a public that saw them as criminals, predators, or psychiatric patients in waiting. And so, now, it is almost unheard of for an openly gay man to suddenly start dating women, and those who do are assumed to have fallen prey to social pressure and internalized homophobia. It’s impossible not to see this theme at play on ex-gay Twitter, where porn videos feature captions like (NSFW link) “I literally want a woman to strap me down, force feed me viagra, and ride my gay cock until it can't remember why it was ever gay in the first place. Convert me. Fix my gay dick. Turn me straight.”

In both private interviews and public posts, I often encountered negative perceptions of gay culture, particularly its feminine aspects, and a stated desire to live as a “normal” (read straight) guy. To dismiss this as self-hating misses the point. Perhaps what these men really hate is not their attraction to other men but rather the realities, limitations, and sociology of gay life. Having already identified themselves as gay, men who, in previous generations, would have happily married women and raised children, making room for furtive truck stop blowjobs or semi-annual camping trips with friends on the side, now find such a possibility impossible. However unfair it might have been to those who did find such a life miserable, and the women caught in the crossfire, “having it all”—a Norman Rockwell life with a twink on the side— maybe was the ideal situation for some men. Now, men who have identified themselves as gay categorically forfeit not only relationships with women and a traditional family, but also their ability to be seen as a “real man.” Instead, they’ll forever be associated with poppers-filled orgies, RuPaul’s Drag Race, HIV, Charli XCX, Sunday brunch mimosas, and perhaps worst of all, the sancitimonious blue-haired horde that is “queer activism.”

The truth of the matter is that progressive culture views male bisexuality as a gay cope, a transitional phase, a one-way bridge to Homoland. It does acknowledge the existence of bisexual men, but only if they are sufficiently butch, (usually) semi- or fully-closeted, and exclusively date women, maintaining a healthy distance from all gay culture outside of Grindr.

This community has existed online for years, with virtually no attention from a media obsessed with “problematic” internet subcultures or human sexuality academia, so far as I could tell. I only discovered it by happenstance a few months ago, in a Twitter rabbit hole researching another topic. It’s easy to see why. Exploring kinks means exploring the taboos that create them. Taboos are dark, but sometimes they feed easily into safe and established political narratives. Not this one.

This looks like Ted Haggard's kinda party.

The mind of the delusional wanna be hetero is full of derangement.

Men love cock and raw dogging other men's asses. THE END!

[quote] a candidate who’d always seemed more mech than man.

Wut?

They don't really seem that convinced. Conversion rooted in watching straight porn seems weird.

My gay-to-straight erotic stories will convert you:

Doesn’t the guy in OP’s pic look a LOT like Eric Dane? 😂

We must either die, convert to heterosexuality or have a sex change in order to please the brainwashed masses infected by the plague that is normality.

Perhaps I'm being a bit judgemental and perhaps I don't fully understand their situations or their mindsets but I utterly despise gays who despise being gay.

P.S. I also despise people who are stupid enough to believe that they can fundamentally better themselves through porn.

Gays are so fucked

Bi scum thread

Any gay man who thinks he can switch was never a gay man, he was a bi-sexual man.

And when they watch this straight porn I'm sure they never pay the slightest attention to the hairy, muscular male ass bouncing up and down...

R12 - that looks like him in a scene from Euphoria, where he had that old Jeep from high school. Odd choice for a picture.

The pathetic gay men that I groom into heterosexuality are only allowed to watch hot girl-on-girl action.

If they watch straight porn, they are cheating and really watching the men.

Silly cunts

Okay Coomer

Why do people care so much about gay people and their sex lives? It’s weird. I couldn’t care less about heterosexual couples and their sex lives.

Haha. Jobman34, that story is laughable.

If pro-trans supporters don’t support ex-gays, they’re hypocrites.

[quote]I'm confused. How can they be "ex-gays" if they're bisexual? You can't be an ex-gay if you weren't gay to begin with

Can you be a woman or man if you were neither to begin with?

So, we're back to conversion therapy working.

I'd laugh if it weren't so damaging and dangerous.

This conversion story will make you cum, r24:

[quote]I'd laugh if it weren't so damaging and dangerous.

As opposed to transitioning surgeries and hormones?

[quote]Meet ex-gay twitter

Thank you, no.

[quote]If pro-trans supporters don’t support ex-gays, they’re hypocrites.

That’s my only though about this as well.

Ah, doubtful Jobman34. Unless it’s filled with hot, passionate man on man sex. You see, I’m a homosexual.

[quote]Pete Buttigieg said that in his high school and college years, if he’d known what it was inside him that had made him gay, he would have cut it out with a knife.

I hope this man is never president. He is absolutely awful.

Jobman34's kink basically.Gay men having boring vanilla straight sex 😂

Just become a woman, like I did! Now my family doesn't have to have an icky gay son.

Stepping out from behind the fake persona:

The kink is completely made up of cosplay. NONE of these losers ever"turn" straight or bisexual. The kink is thinking about gay men fucking women. Guys start acting like it's infected them, and they pretend that they've been stroking off about hot chicks, etc.

It's all lies.

The guys who claim to have turned straight eventually go as far as they can go, and have to delete their Twitter (since they are still liking pics of hot naked men on Twitter). Then they make a new account and start all over. Cosplay 100%.

I think the kink comes from being attracted to straight men and wishing they were gay. That becomes inverted into gay men turning straight.

These guys don't even see the women in the straight porn, just the men, wishing those men were gay like them.

It's just a kink and "JOBMAN34" is just a character playing out that kink. But none if it is really real.

So they suck each other off to pussy porn? It could be a lot worse!

[quote]If pro-trans supporters don’t support ex-gays, they’re hypocrites.

Or, you could have a brain and recognize that they're two unrelated things whose internal logic have nothing to do with each other.

Whatever your position on Ts is mostly irrelevant.

It's like DEMANDING black people support gays or immigrants or homeless people. They have nothing to do with each other.

How are ‘ex-gays’ (at least the true believers, not this weird new niche fetish) any different from same sex attracted males who transition to ‘women’?

I’m surprised ex-gays aren’t more popular today, R39.

Here's what you need to know today

There's a lot of truth in there.

Guys who are not Gay From Birth are always troubled by being gay. Who wants to be different than all their friends? Pete's experience was not uncommon and guys who were Always Gay have a hard time getting that.

The whole being associated with RuPaul and drag queens and brunches piece keeps lots of guys in the closet, makes the rest of us feel like alienated from what passes as mainstream gay culture.

The whole jerking off to straight porn is from some guy back in the 90s, he was an actual shrink, who claimed he could turn gay guys straight. I don't know enough about conversion therapy to know if that is one and the same, but it's not a new idea. (It doesn't work.)

We have discussed many times that guys are cool with women who are bisexual but women (even Gen Z women) tend to stick to the theory that "suck one dick and you are gay for life"

Many (most?) DLers are very effeminate and don't get any of this.

Maybe you should transition or go through reparative therapy, R42.

R42 sounds like a homophobic crazy person.

Hi, YourMillennialFriend @ R42. So glad that you're still the voice of the point zero eight "non-effeminates" around these parts.

I’m this kind of gay/bi guy. I don’t tend to watch a lot of guy on guy porn, but I love to watch hot guys fuck girls, and I love to watch hot guys fuck girls together.

I’ve yet to have sex with a girl. But of all the guys I’ve hooked up with, I’ve yet to get off because I’m more of a side and oral doesn’t really do anything for me.

I agree with you, R42, about all of that — including what you said about most DLers. It’s painfully evident, which is why you got the responses you did.

[quote]but I love to watch hot guys fuck girls, and I love to watch hot guys fuck girls together.

I'm completely gay, no sexual interest in women at all, and I still occasionally watch stuff like this. It's all about the guys, especially love homemade vids of a group of mates running a train. Usually the camera is much more focused on the guys anyway.

Yeah -- good luck with that!

Their bedroom antics probably look like this (NSFW).

Looks like Pete Buttigieg ^.

I also agree with / went through a great deal of what R42 describes.

To those who think he’s homophobic and crazy I have an honest question - do you think the Kinsey Scale is a reasonably accurate model for mapping human sexual attraction or not?

Personally I found it accurate for sorting out my own desires - I would say I’m a Kinsey 5. While I don’t think the old word “preference” is accurate, I am attracted to males much much more than to females, so I didn’t “choose” or prefer to be gay, I simply am. The sex I have with men is much more satisfying then the small amount of sex I’ve had with women. But growing up in the 70s / early 80s there was so much negativity in the culture around being gay that if you are a certan type of person who had even a slight attraction to some women you’d latch onto it and try and ignore / rationalize the stronger feeling you had for guys out of fear and shame.

I don’t expect this explanation will convince those who find Pete’s statement abhorrent, but for those of us who it resonates with it is very understandable. Also, based on countless conversations I’ve had with other gay men over the decades I think R42s point of view is much more common in the general gay make population than it is with the subset here on DL.

R46 is fakegay. R48 is on tbe border.

And JOBMAN is a piece of shit as always. You finally brought your sick self to Datalounge. Your "kink" is conversion therapy, you're anti-gay is every way. You entire imagination about men "de-gaying" - the stories, the photoshopping of gays having straight sex, you're obsessed with pussy, gays discovering the "miracle" of vagina, such a pathetic waste of skin. You're as a big an enemy as any deplorable or right-winger. I loathe you. The day you choke to death in that Mexican ranch you live in can't come soon enough, homophobic turd.

The f is gay/bi guy? If you're gay then you're gay. If you're bi then you're bi. Know the different. R46 is obviously a bi scum

*Know the difference

Please. This is junk - the ex-gay bisexuals (!!!) are tools or fools. Above, and often, there’s mention of porn: excluding lesbo porn, porn has cock in it. Watching straight porn is still watching cock. All this is just porn fantasy stupidity. If the self loathing is real: move on. There’s never a reason to be friend a self loather. Life’s too short to waste on adults uncomfortable in their own akin

“I don’t like men’s no more!”

(Above) friends with a self,etc. akin-skin. Messy! Get me coffee! 5:20 am

This is the weirdest thread I have seen on DL. And that’s saying a lot. And I have been here for decades.

How pathetic.

“Suddenly, the men bonded not over pictures of the other mean but suddenly over each each other!”

Men*

OP, are you the poster from last week who kept saying ex-gays were an oppressed minority?

Gays don't even like other gays, especially if they're too [insert undesirable attribute here].

That's why it's funny when I read comments here about how we're expected to be fully supportive of the Stunning and Brave. How are we going to support another group of people when we don't even like each other?

Spencer Kornhaber is the most vapid Atlantic contributor. Whenever DL complains about how many adult gay men are obsessed with teen girl culture, I think of him. He makes David Frum seem smart.

Why does R66 not stay blocked?

[quote]oral doesn’t really do anything for me.

Low self esteem

[quote]Gays don't even like other gays

Was it always like this?