I found out I'd been a side for almost 30 years before I ever heard the word. Nobody handed me a flag for it. I just quietly liked what I liked, filed it under "my thing," and figured every other guy in every locker room and every bar was running some script I'd never gotten a copy of.
Turns out I had the memo. I just didn't have the word yet.
What "side" actually means
A side is a gay or queer man who prefers sex without anal penetration: oral, frottage, mutual masturbation, kissing, kink, whatever gets you and your partner where you're going. It sits right alongside top, bottom, and versatile as a fourth, fully real category. Sides have complete, satisfying sex lives built around the acts they actually enjoy.
That's the dictionary answer. Here's the part that actually matters: the word for it is younger than most of the men living it.
Top, bottom, versatile... and the one everybody left off the list
Quick refresher, because the conversation usually stops at three. A top prefers to penetrate. A bottom prefers to be penetrated. Versatile does both, depending on the night, the guy, the mood. Every gay dating app in existence asks you to pick from that list, and for a long time that was the entire menu.
Side is the fourth option nobody printed on the card. A guy whose sex life doesn't center anal penetration at all, and whose sex life is complete exactly as it is. For years these guys filled in "versatile" by default or skipped the question altogether, because the form never had a box that matched the honest answer.
The word is barely a decade old. The experience isn't.
In 2013, sex therapist Dr. Joe Kort sat down and gave a name to something that had been going on, quietly, in gay bedrooms for as long as there have been gay bedrooms. His HuffPost essay, "Guys on the 'Side': Looking Beyond Gay Tops and Bottoms," introduced "side" as a term for men who skip anal intercourse and still have a complete, satisfying sex life built around everything else. His whole argument fits on a bumper sticker: it's still sex, even if you don't have intercourse.
Do the math on that if you're reading this in your 40s or 50s. You were already a full-grown adult, dating, hooking up, building a sex life, for twenty years or more before this word existed anywhere. That's two decades of quietly assuming you were the exception, the guy who hadn't gotten around to the "real" version yet, because nobody had told you there was a name for what you already were.
You were never the exception
Here's where the math gets almost funny. A 2011 survey of nearly 25,000 gay and bisexual men, run out of Indiana University and George Mason University, asked what actually happened during guys' most recent hookup or date. Anal sex showed up in about 35 percent of encounters. Oral sex showed up in about 75 percent. The act everybody treats as the whole point of gay sex was absent from roughly two-thirds of the nights those men described.
Worth being precise about what that proves, though. Plenty of the men in that 65 percent top or bottom happily and simply didn't on the evening they got asked about. The survey counted nights, and a night is a much smaller thing than an identity. Read at its actual strength, the number still says something worth hearing: an evening without penetration is completely ordinary. Common enough that calling it a deviation from the script says more about the script than it does about the evening.
My favorite number in that whole study has nothing to do with anal at all. When the researchers sorted out what those 25,000 men actually did with each other, they counted 1,308 unique combinations of behaviors. Thirteen hundred. And the single most commonly reported act across all of it was kissing. That's the real headline, and somehow it never made it out of the press release. There was never one script. There were thirteen hundred of them, and yours was in there the whole time.
If you've spent years feeling like the odd one out, here's your permission slip: an enormous number of the nights in that survey looked a lot like yours. It just took until 2011 for anyone to run the numbers, and it's taken most of us even longer to hear about them.
I've written about this same kind of gap before, the one between what gay bodies actually look like and what gay culture insists we should expect (see Showers vs. Growers). This is that gap again, applied to what happens after the shower runs out.
Frottage, and the rest of the side playbook
So what does a side's sex life actually look like? Oral sex, obviously, given that 75 percent figure. Mutual masturbation. Kissing that isn't just a warm-up act. Kink, if that's your thing. And frottage, which might be the single most underrated act in the entire gay sexual repertoire.
I've gone deep on frottage before: what it is, the real health picture, how to bring it up with a partner, why it gets confused with a completely unrelated clinical term (see Frot, Frottage, and Why Nobody Talks About It). If side is the identity, frot is very often the headline act. It's full-body, face-to-face, skin-on-skin contact, and for a lot of sides, it's the main event.
The part nobody brings up: there's almost no side porn
I've read a lot of these explainers and I've never seen one mention this. I think it might be the single biggest reason the word took until 2013 to show up.
Porn is where most of us learned what gay sex was supposed to look like. For guys my age it was the only instruction manual on offer. No sex ed that admitted we existed, no older guys around to ask, nothing on television past a punchline. Just a tape, and later a browser tab, quietly teaching us the shape of the thing.
That shape has one ending. Gay porn is built almost entirely around penetration as the payoff, and everything before it gets filed as setup. Kissing, hands, grinding, oral, all of it is the ramp. The scene resolves when somebody gets penetrated, and the camera tells you what counts by where it lingers and when it stops.
So grow up on that, then have sex you genuinely loved, and notice that yours ended somewhere the movie would have called intermission. Of course you assumed you were doing it wrong. You'd watched a thousand hours of a genre that never once showed you your own good night.
One of the men interviewed in Xtra's piece on sides said bottoming "hurt every single time and I never experienced anything close to what I saw in porn." He knew better than to measure himself against a movie. He measured anyway, because that was the only ruler anybody ever handed him.
Now put that against the real number from the 2011 study. Thirteen hundred different combinations of what men actually do with each other. Porn, near as I can tell, shoots about one.
Frot content exists, and there are guys out there making it. It's a rounding error against the volume of everything else, and you have to already know the search term to find it. Which is the trap, right there. You can't search your way to a thing you've never heard named.
Being a side after 40
Here's the part I actually want to talk about, because it's the part nobody puts in the encyclopedia entry. Bodies change after 40. Erections get more complicated. Recovery time gets longer. The performance-on-demand model gay culture sold us in our twenties starts creaking under its own weight, and if you're only measuring your sex life by one specific act, that's a lot of pressure riding on a body part having a good night.
Kort's whole argument releases you from exactly that pressure. It's still sex even if you don't have intercourse, and that line does even more work once your body stops cooperating with the old script. It was true for a lot of guys the whole time. It's just more obviously useful now.
I've written about turning 40 and actually liking what shows up in the mirror (see The Glow-Up Nobody Warned You About), and my contributor Joseph Federico wrote something that belongs right next to it, on giving your body the same respect you'd give anyone else's (see Let's Hear It for the Bo(d)y). Being a side at 45 looks a lot like being a side at 25, except now you've got the nerve to say it out loud before anything starts. It looks like telling a guy exactly what you're into on the first date instead of hoping the mood carries you there. It looks like an evening built around oral, frottage, and however long the kissing wants to go, with zero mental math about whether penetration is supposed to happen at some point too. It looks like a good night that doesn't hinge on one specific body part cooperating on command. That's the whole upgrade: less performing, more doing exactly the thing you actually like.
Is "side" a real identity or just a preference?
Not everyone agrees "side" deserves to sit at the identity table next to top, bottom, and versatile. Some guys will tell you it's just a preference, a detail about what you like in bed, and not a category worth naming any more than "prefers Tuesdays" would be. That's a fair position, and plenty of thoughtful people hold it.
Here's what's changed the conversation. In May 2022, Grindr added "Side" as an official position option and search filter, after Kort spent years pushing for it and Grindr emailed him directly to say it was coming. A dating app with millions of daily users doesn't add a menu option lightly. Scruff followed, and lists Side right alongside top, bottom, and versatile now too. When two of the biggest apps in gay life both decide their menu was short an item, that's the market catching up to something guys had been telling them for years.
And in 2023, a researcher named Angelos Bollas published a study titled "Men, Sides, and Homosexism" in the Journal of Homosexuality, specifically examining the lived experiences of men who identify as sides, treating it as a real, standalone category worth academic attention.
Op-ed to app menu to peer-reviewed research is a pretty specific path for something to travel if it's really just a preference with no weight behind it. I land where Kort lands. Call it whatever gets you to say it out loud. The label matters less than the sentence it lets you finally say.
Somebody already built the room
Here's the part that got me. There's a subreddit called r/GaySides, and there are a few thousand men in it. Guys who found the word and then went looking for everybody else who'd found it.
That's what the definition posts leave out. A word by itself is vocabulary. What makes it worth having is that it lets you locate the others, and once enough of you are in the same place, the explaining stops. Everybody there already has the premise. The conversation starts somewhere past the disclaimer, past making the case that what you do counts, at the part where you just get to talk.
They've also done the reading. The sub keeps a running list of the essays, interviews, and videos that built this conversation out, Kort's original piece included. If this post is the door, that's the hallway.
We've been doing this for generations, by the way. Somebody names the thing, the name finds the people, the people build the room. It happened with bear, with leather, with clone, with gaymer. It's happening with side right now, and it's happening fast enough that a guy who's 45 today gets to watch the whole arc from a word he'd never heard to a room he can walk into.
Frequently Asked Questions About Being a Side
Is being a side normal?
Yes. A 2011 survey of nearly 25,000 gay and bisexual men found anal sex happened in about 35 percent of encounters, while oral sex happened in about 75 percent. Sex without penetration is an ordinary part of how gay men actually have sex, and sides are far more common than a three-item app menu makes them look.
Do sides have "less" sex?
No. Sides have complete sex lives built around oral sex, frottage, mutual masturbation, kissing, and kink. Sex quality was never about that one specific act to begin with.
What's the difference between a side and versatile?
Versatile means you're open to topping or bottoming depending on the situation. A side's sex life skips anal penetration entirely, in either direction. It's a genuinely different menu.
Who coined the word "side"?
Sex therapist Dr. Joe Kort introduced the term in a 2013 HuffPost essay called "Guys on the 'Side': Looking Beyond Gay Tops and Bottoms." Grindr added it as an official app option in May 2022, and Scruff lists it now too.
Where can I meet other sides?
Grindr and Scruff both list Side as a position and let you filter for it, so the apps are the fastest route. For actual conversation, r/GaySides is a community of a few thousand men where the premise is already understood and nobody makes you explain it first.
I want to know when you first heard the word "side," and whether it felt like a label or like a relief. Drop it in the comments. Team side, team top, team bottom, or still figuring out where you land, you belong in this conversation either way.
Wear it Proud. Make it Hunky.
Stay Hunky.
Christian from Hunky Tops
