Can straight guys have gay butts?

Hold onto your hips, because straight men may finally be discovering the wild, wonderful world of the butt.

At least, that’s what the word on the street tells us—quite literally. After one TikToker waxed lyrical on the idea of gay butts on straight men, we couldn’t help but wonder…

Is this actually a thing?

How about we take this to the next level?

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TikToker Noah Reedy was walking in the West Village when he passed by the comedian and actor John Mulaney taking a stroll in the neighborhood. But Reedy noticed something interesting about Mulaney during the brief encounter that got our spidey senses tingling.

“He has a very gay butt. You know what I mean? Like it’s…I don’t know how to say it, it’s very proper.”

We know exactly what you mean, Noah. But this encounter brings up an intriguing question. We know straight men are often behind on the body trends created by the queer community—could this mean that the straights are finally jumping on the bubble butt wagon?

“Queer men have long appreciated a good butt, and are often trailblazers when it comes to male aesthetic trends,” a recent GQ article explained. “But recently straight men have been catching on. And the tides are slowly shifting, one shapely bottom at a time.”

Honestly, we love to hear it. It’s about damn time! The same article explains that in 2023, the possible peak of the BBL renaissance, 400 men in the US shelled out for the booty-enhancing surgery.

There’s also a renewed focus on glute workouts in recent years, as men’s fitness reorients itself around a once under-appreciated area of the straight male form.

The only problem? It’s throwing some people off. “It confuses me a lot to see so many straight guys with 5 inch shorts all stretchy, with big round butt, skin tight and walking calling for attention to their butt and enjoying people admiring it,” wrote one Redditor on the sub r/askgaybros. “It’s very confusing because they’re completely straight…It has messed up my radar.”

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It’s definitely making it harder to tell someone’s sexuality by looking at their butt. However, BBLs and glute exercises alone do not a gay butt make. So what actually qualifies a nice butt by gay standards? Luckily, we’ve already done the research.

In 2023, Queerty’s David Hudson looked at the science behind what makes an empirically desirable tush—and what he found was quite interesting indeed.

The 2023 study cited explained that: “the preferred lateral ratio in the anteroposterior dimension was 1.18; the oblique angle between the sacrum, lateral gluteal depression, and point of maximal projection of the gluteal sulcus was 60 degrees; and the posterior ratio between the waist and maximal width of the hips was 0.66.” Which probably doesn’t immediately call a juicy image to mind, but if you need one, they can be found in the study.

And, interestingly enough, only 25% of the men surveyed here identified as queer. Which means that there are a whole lot of potentially very curious straight men out there thinking about what makes a great butt.

But let’s face it: gay men will always be the standard bearers for a** excellence.

Back in the days of the hanky code, part of the signaling revolved around helping gay men find each other by directing their attention to the posterior region. In that era, of course, it was more about the hanky than the butt itself, but a well-developed butt could still serve as a kind of bat signal during a more closeted era.

“Flagging was SASSY,” wrote Papa Tony in a Medium article for Leatherati in 2011. “It was bold, in-your-face sexuality. If you walked like you knew what your butt was for, and you had a Dark Blue bandanna in your right rear pocket while strolling through a major-city crowd, you wouldn’t be lonely for long.”

If straight men are finally reading the room and deciding to do some serious glutemaxxing, that’s all well and good. We can all appreciate a great butt, no matter who its owner is. As one Redditor put it in the r/askgaybros thread, when they encounter a great butt on a straight guy: “I’ll keep move[sic] along, ‘Thank you for sharing those goods with me.'”

Now, that’s the right attitude!

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