Words by JJ Croucher

There was a time when this would have felt unimaginable: I am sitting outside a sushi restaurant in Bloomsbury with Matthew, a man – soon to be married to a woman – who I was once desperately enamoured with while occupying an ambiguous place in his heart. Over California rolls, Matthew has agreed to answer some questions I have about men on the down-low – a slang term for closeted gay or bisexual men. When we start our conversation, he seems to think it’s a ruse to re-hash our bygone tryst, telling me that he’s not sure he’ll be able to give me what I want.

Matthew and I shared a house in university and what was an “at first sight” attraction on my part soon bloomed into a protracted dance, harmless flirting leading to drunken, experimental kissing. Matthew was ostensibly straight, having recently broken up with an angelic woman of cottagecore composition. For months we teetered on a knife’s edge and I indulged my transfixation, knowing it was not meant to last. But unable to deal with the relentless uncertainty, I decided to put a stop to things the night before we embarked on a big group holiday. Creeping up the stairs of our student accommodation, I was on a kamikaze mission: in confessing my love, and being rejected for it, things with Matthew would end.

He hit me with a devastating one-liner: “Well, if you were a woman we would be together now.”

As he lay tucked under a gingham duvet, in gingham pajamas, I managed to spit it out – “I’m, kind of, erm, in love with you”. Matthew didn’t respond at first and then plainly said that he felt the same. The catch came a few seconds later: because I was not a woman, things could go no further. What followed was a fortnight of misery, my Fitbit documenting my anguish as blips in a formerly commendable resting heart rate. We had the same discussion over and over as I struggled to come to terms with the arbitrary nature of his decision, but Matthew had resolve in his choice; when I asked him how he actually felt about me, he hit me with a devastating one-liner: “Well, if you were a woman we would be together now.”

In Bloomsbury, Matthew tells me that he was never sexually attracted to me; when I press, he says that he found me “compelling” and that there was perhaps something he had repressed in himself that he saw acted out by me. He also tells me that any latent bisexuality has lain dormant for too long and that he has since foreclosed on the idea of exploring it. But what he tells me – that he’s straight, that he’s in a monogamous relationship with a woman – does not chime with the other experiences he describes: that he’s interested – hypothetically, at least – in the idea of encounters with different genders and different configurations of people; that many years ago, he suggested that my love was reciprocated.

When I point out the fact that some would consider him definitionally “bisexual”, he rejects the idea of anyone else labelling him. One thing that stops Matthew from describing himself in this way is the association he thinks comes with being part of the LGBTQIA+ community. He seems to think of it as a political, dogmatic identity, questioning our need to “label” and our apparent desire to squash ourselves into restrictive boxes; I point out that in deciding to be “straight”, he has done the same and – almost getting it – he concedes that I have resisted becoming a stereotype myself. As I slurp the chalky dregs of my miso soup, Matthew tells me that he’s defaulted to heterosexuality because it’s simpler – though he might not completely fit in, he feels at home in the straight, well-heeled, West London ilk.

Online, speculation that straight male public figures might be into guys too is used as ammunition

He admits that he’s taken the easy path, but I wonder if he really has.

DL men, “under-cover brothers”, the “straight acting”, and the so-called discreet have a bad rap; queer TikTok is awash with memes at their expense – in one, a creator sits stunned on the corner of a CGI bed while an audio snippet of a crashout plays: “I fight demons every god damn day” the voice booms. The caption reads ‘POV: your DL hookup is explaining why he’s straight’. Elsewhere online, speculation that straight male public figures might be into guys too is used as ammunition; when US Republican senator Lindsey Graham died earlier this year, the internet took glee in sharing stories of his apparently voracious appetite for gay hookups. For a few weeks, his closetedness became the punching bag of many a US netizen. As I’ve written about before, the same “gay libel” is lodged against the detestable figures of manosphere: Clavicular, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes. 

Telling jokes at the expense of DL men is not a purely heterosexual pursuit either – on Instagram, I find a number of LGBTQIA+ creators making bombastic videos that appear to cater to heterosexual anxieties.