(Think Katy Perry’s homoerotic “I Kissed a Girl” but, for this study, a male-on-male “I Kissed a Boy” equivalent.) The remaining participants read the same story, yet in this other version the video was said to have caused straight couples to French–kiss in public rather than gay men. Half of the participants were asked to read a brief story about the director of a risqué music video which turned out to have the side-effect of encouraging gay men to French–kiss in public. In one experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 44 undergraduate students from the University of California, Irvine, to one of two different conditions. At least, that’s what Harvard University psychologist Yoel Inbar and his colleagues reported in a recent study in the journal Emotion. And what makes the situation complicated is the fact that, although many people hold the explicit belief that it’s okay for gay people to be affectionate with one another in public (that is to say, if you were to ask them whether it’s okay for gay people to kiss in public, they’d say of course it is), the same people nevertheless hold implicit negative attitudes on the subject. More simply, we’re just wary of making those around us uncomfortable. Not only do gay couples wish to avoid being pummeled by the occasional homophobic thugs who can be lurking anywhere or being subjected to epithets spit at them by simpleminded onlookers.
![gay men kissing each other gay men kissing each other](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/F48H6D/smiling-homosexual-couple-men-kissing-each-other-F48H6D.jpg)
In most of the world, it’s not illegal to do so, after all.
![gay men kissing each other gay men kissing each other](https://assets.ozy.com/ozy-prod/2019/07/488750415.jpg)
Nobody is stopping gay couples from holding hands in public, or from kissing and hugging, for that matter. This is because recent findings indicate that changing negative attitudes toward gays begins not with education, per se, but instead with exposing people more regularly to same-sex romantic behavior. Compared to the issue of gay marriage, gaining equality in the “right” to display such innocent feelings of affection for one’s same-sex partner is an even greater hurdle for gay rights advocates-and, in many ways, it’s an even more important one. In both the UK and the US, for example, I’ve got to first scout out who’s in our immediate vicinity before daring to even brush my pinky finger against Juan’s hand as we’re walking side-by-side.
#Gay men kissing each other free
And that’s when the sad truth struck me: with the exception perhaps of just a handful of places in the world (and even those are questionable), gay couples are not free to participate in this most basic, mindless and normal exhibition of romantic behavior. Suddenly I became acutely aware of the many American and British tourists who-if not quite as passionate as these lustful Magyars-were similarly expressing their attachments to their partners in, say, an arm casually draped around the shoulder, a hand held or a possessive grip on the waist. It put me in an ethnographic state of mind. My partner, Juan, and I witnessed many other public displays of “affection” like this one during our stay in Budapest, which was curious enough from a cross-cultural perspective and a bit counterintuitive for such a socially conservative country like Hungary. The expression, “get a room,” seemed wholly inadequate for this carnal scene.
![gay men kissing each other gay men kissing each other](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/stock-photo-two-caucasian-homosexual-men-kissing-their-apartment-one-them-hugging-other-behind-gay-man-each-188073371.jpg)
My brain, unfortunately, was soon able to peel apart what I was actually observing, which was a particularly corpulent young woman devouring a young man half her size in what can only be described as a feast of open-mouthed, public lovemaking. In that fleeting moment between sensation and perception, when images settle on the retina but aren’t yet processed in a form fully accessible to conscious awareness, what I saw was a multicolored, gyrating mass of vaguely human substance, squirming and twisting on a park bench in animalistic fervor. While walking through a park in Budapest a few weeks ago, I spied a very strange sight.