The gay handshake

In March, QX Magasin in Sweden ran an interview I did with Ronny Larsson. It ran in Swedish, so what follows is the English of what I said. This is the line from it I'd point to first:

We gay men are so used to "the gay handshake", you know, that all our relationships with other gay men begin with flirting or having sex. And now maybe that gets broken.

Most gay men know exactly what that means without it being explained. When I look at my own gay friends in London, a good proportion of them were people I hooked up with and then became friends with. That's the handshake. It's how a lot of us were introduced to each other.

The dance

Straight guys don't have this at all. When they meet, they just have things in common, or not, and the question of sex doesn't really come up. As I said on Friend of Dorothy, gay guys have stuff in common too, "and yet sex can be, and often is, the first thing."

If you both fancy each other, that's great, and if you're both available, that works. If you both don't fancy each other, that sort of works too. But if one of you fancies the other, there's always some element of rejection going on, and a dance where you have to make it clear whether you fancy each other or not.

I think it's very freeing to be able to connect with a gay guy and literally just talk, without having to have that dance of are we going to hook up or not. And it can come later, if you want it to, once you get to know them. You've even asked their name, maybe.

Cliques

The other thing the handshake does is decide who ends up in the room. I said this to QX too:

You see groups of guys on Instagram: 20 people celebrating someone's birthday and they all look exactly the same. In the end we only socialise within those kinds of cliques.

If the way in is attraction, then the people you end up with are the people you were attracted to, and the people who were attracted to you. Everyone else stays on the other side of it. Everyone, meet everyone. Enough of the cliques.

A break, not a ban

None of this is a case against sex. I have nothing against people having sex. It's the attitude that it's all about that which I find tiring. I don't want to forbid people from cruising. I give people the option to choose a break from it for a while. I just want to make it easier for people to talk to each other, and to become involved in each other's lives.

The way I put it to QX was that I wanted to find out how easy it would be to make contact with others if sex wasn't the currency. The code of conduct puts it like this: seeing each other, and ourselves, without the lens of objectification, status, conquest, or validation through sex, and engaging with each other as people first, not sexual prospects.

That doesn't stop attraction. People ask me what would happen on a longer weekend, and whether people would have sex. Well:

If two people genuinely like each other and haven't had sex for, say, four days, and they've managed to hold to that, I think they really have an incredibly solid foundation for something special afterwards.

It also works for people who aren't single. Most people come alone, though bringing a friend is welcome, and for those in open relationships it's a great way to make friends. If you're in a relationship, monogamous or open, you can come to our events and meet gay guys without that pressure as well.

I just think it sounds fun, being able to meet other gay men without it needing to involve sex or cruising. A handshake that's just a handshake.

The next weekends are on weekends.