Does watching gay porn make you gay?

I have a question for you but I would prefer to remain anonymous. I'm just gonna be straightforward and ask away. I am a longtime watcher of porn, I enjoy it very much and, for some reason, I'm able to get off to gay porn. I know that I'm not attracted to men in real life at all. So my question is: Is it normal for a straight man to do this?

— Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

So, in a recent episode of "Family Guy" (pants down, the funniest show on TV), Peter Griffin summarizes his daughter's Christian abstinence program: "Premarital sex turns straight people gay and gays into Mexicans. Everybody goes down a notch."

My point, and I do have one, is that I don't think you're slipping down a notch in Peter's eyes. It would be easy to think you're so far into the closet that you're crowding out the skeletons, but I don't think that's the case.

You only have to see the very real phenomenon of lesbians who watch gay porn to see my point. They don't watch it for the men; they watch it for the power dynamics that they can bring in to their own beds.

For example, masculinity turns on many lesbians. They want to see it, emulate it and apply it, but they don't necessarily want to see straight men "exploiting" women.

They also use it as a master class on strap-on dildos. Lots of lesbians use them. They have to learn how and if straight porn is too exploitative and lesbian porn is too boring, then what's left? Gay porn.

Clearly, it's a minority of lesbians who do this, but it's well documented. Me? When it comes to porn, I only want to see what I want to fuck. Period, end of stroke.

But you? You're just like those lesbians. You're getting off to gay porn without being attracted to the men in it. Of course, you have different reasons — all subconscious.

Let's start with a strong need to dominate or feel dominated by good-looking men.

There's no way you can safely express that to other straight men. Well, you could — just like you could walk into Taco Mac and change the TV channels to "Glee" during March Madness. I'm just not sure you want to go there.

So how do you express that intense need to dominate or submit to male power? Watching gay porn, where you can see it in spades.

Another possibility is that you secretly want to have anal sex and there's no way for you to express that to a woman without feeling emasculated, so you unconsciously seek out expressions of it through gay porn.

Listen, you wouldn't be the first straight guy who wanted a woman to buckle up a strap-on and have at you. Straight men are wired exactly like gay men — we all have a prostate gland (the male G-spot) that rocks our world when it gets stimulated in the right way.

Last time I checked, there weren't any straight porn videos showing a woman fucking a man with a strap-on. Gay porn may be the only outlet to your fantasy.

Your situation reminds me of an immortal line by lesbian comic Lea DeLaria: "It's not true that lesbians don't like dick. We just don't like them on men." Like lesbians, it's possible that you love dick but only when it's on a woman.

God, I love saying that. Let me say it again: It's possible that you need a woman to fuck the daylights out of you. Your job isn't to judge yourself for watching gay porn. It's to find that woman.

Got a burning or a why-is-it-burning question for the Sexorcist? Email him at sexorcist@creativeloafing.com. Mike Alvear is the author of the Meet the Hottie in the Corner e-book and teaches monthly blogging workshops with Hollis Gillespie.