Let's Deep Dive into the Gay Dude Subreddits

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I do this irregular series called Butt Stuff in Books, which is this kind of academic slash critical look at queer male sexual activity in romance and erotica. And I guess this video is part of that series, but it's a little more casual. I want to talk about a long-running conversation on the queer male subreddits and the history of not just butt stuff, but all the stuff.

All right, so what I'm talking about in particular is this thread on r/AskGayBrosOver30, which is "how was anal decades ago?" All right, to understand this, you need to know a few things about the queer male subreddits. There's kind of like a hierarchy of queer subreddits, if you're not familiar with Reddit. I'm pretty sure the largest, widest one is r/LGBT. That's got like over a million members. It's pretty tightly moderated. It's got lots of different kinds of conversations. I'm in the LGBT subreddit, but I don't spend a lot of time there. Tends to feel focused a little younger, like fairly – I would call it like a positive, almost cringey meme focus to it.

All right, and then the biggest subreddit for queer men is not r/gaybros. It is r/AskGayBros, but those are kind of like linked communities. So gaybros is like the meme posting, kind of like open discussion version of the community, but AskGayBros is like the community, and it has a bad reputation. It's historically been like not super moderated, even though it has like half a million people in it. And there is like just a fucked up amount of anti-trans conversations in there and misogynistic conversations. There are conservative Trumpy gay guys who post in there. And I would – it's not like a war zone exactly, but there is a – there's a lot of contention in the community about that stuff. So like very regularly, I don't know about like weekly, but at least a couple times a month, there will be someone complaining about like – the biggest complaints these days are like women on Grindr and like biological women invading male spaces, and it feels just very TERF-y, but that's not the whole community. It is like everything. AskGayBros is like the id of the gay male community.

And the other thing that is there just like constantly is just like the craziest questions. Oh, and lots of questions that are actually just like creative writing exercises, you know, like, what should I do about my best friend? And then it's like a ten-paragraph, obviously fictional story about hooking up with your college best friend. But anyway, the questions that supposedly the subreddit is about, right, it's like AskGayBros, the questions are frequently just like unhinged. I would say like on a daily basis, multiple people are asking like, if this thing happened to me, was this sexual assault? Constant, never ending questions about how to prep for bottoming, about like dick size. And I have noticed in the past like month or so, the volume, the ratio of these unhinged questions that seem to be from extremely young people has tipped up. And it's the first time I've ever put together like, oh, school is out. These young gay men are bored and they're going on Reddit. Ah, finally, I put it all together. But it's not like when school is in session, you're not seeing all of these wild questions.

So anyway, like a very, very frequent mode of discussion in r/gaybros is like, I don't like all the prep I have to do for bottoming. What can I change? Or like, I want to get into bottoming and I'm worried about prepping for it. Or maybe the most frequent thing, why does it take forever for me to prep for bottoming? And like people are talking about douching. And you'll get basically three types of comments on those threads. One, just like trolling, shitposting. Two, legitimate advice, which is almost always like, "you're using too much water". And then three, the huge cadre of older gay men who are saying like, "I don't understand why everyone is douching so much when back in my day, we never douched".

All right, now I need to take you to the subreddit that we are talking about now, which is r/AskGayBrosOver30, hello. So AskGayBrosOver30 is like the chill uncle or older brother version of AskGayBros. It is actually moderated. There are rules in that subreddit. Everybody has their age in here. You're allowed to be under 30 and in that subreddit, but most people are at least in their 30s if not older. And the conversations tend toward more discussion. So finally, all of the six minutes to get to like why this thread got started, how was anal decades ago? This gay-bro-over-30 is engaging in this conversation. They didn't say it in this post, but they're asking this question because it comes up so frequently. They're like, okay, all you older gay bros who comment this all the time, can you expand on that?

All right, so what are all of these older gay dudes saying about their experience with butt stuff in the long, long ago, in the before times? So number one, and this is the thing that comes up constantly, not just in this subreddit, but in AskGayBros, much less douching. People just like – people just didn't do it. And there was a lot of theorizing about this. And the two most common theories for this are one, that porn has cooked everyone's brains. Everyone looks like squeaky clean in porn and they want that kind of experience. But two is diets have changed. People's diets are different today. And so there's like, if you don't clean, there's like a higher likelihood that you're not getting enough fiber, you're not drinking enough water, you're eating like too many processed foods or whatever. And so it's like a higher likelihood that you're gonna have like some gross stuff down there.

But there is a third explanation, and it's a second more common thing among these older guys talking about butt stuff in the long, long ago, which is much greater use of condoms. So from the late '80s through the 2000s, HIV was an extreme concern for the queer male community and condom usage was much greater. And if you have a condom on, it's, you know, maybe like the cleanliness down there is somewhat less important, right? So much so that this gay bro over 30 is saying we were more scared of HIV than poop on a condom, while that implies that there were condoms.

A final thing though, is what kinds of lubes people used, including spit sufficing for many butt stuff opportunities. This is something that I have noticed among older guys too. If people – like men over 45, like in 2025, are not like dramatically more likely, but a lot more likely to think that spit is enough. And actually a friend of mine who is just a couple years older than me, who is just pushing 40, and I were lightly discussing this in comments yesterday. And it seems like we are right, like right near that borderline where I'm like, oh no, lube is a must, you gotta use lube. And he's like, you don't need to use lube.

And then also talking about all of the – I mean, this is a gay bro, like not just over 30, but over 60, talking about the historical lubes that were used. And like, okay, like baby oil is fine, but I don't think baby oil is really gonna – it's like, it's such a mess. I wouldn't recommend it. Crisco, for Lord's sake. I mean, if you're gonna use an organic thing like that, coconut oil is the standard recommendation these days. And my God, don't use Vaseline. A bunch of people, like this person saying, oh, we still use Vaseline. Please don't use Vaseline. I am not a sexual health professional, but Vaseline like had its time in the past when there were not better options, but like, please don't use it today. Vaseline is for these lips, not those lips, either of them. And the reason why you don't wanna put Vaseline up your rear end is it doesn't go away. So water and silicone-based lubes or coconut oil will like easily come out. Vaseline can and does get stuck up there. That's why this person is like, oh, it lasts forever. That's right. It's petroleum jelly that is now lining the inside of you and it's not gonna very easily come out and it can become a breeding ground for bacteria.

So anyway, like I was saying before when I was describing these subreddits, there's not exactly a war going on, but there's a very clear generational divide on a lot of butt stuff practices: on condom use, especially because of the availability of PrEP and also doxyPEP, something that you can take afterwards that helps with other STIs besides HIV, differences in lubrication practices, and differences in hygiene practices.

So anyway, turning this into a butt stuff in books kind of video, this is something that you could be thinking about when you're thinking about characters in your book. Their life experiences in their generational cohort is probably going to have an influence on the types of activities that they are interested in. And people's practices are socially influenced. So some of these gay bros over 50 or even over 60, they did not have access to the online communities that younger gay bros – and now I'm even including myself, someone who's almost 40 – had access to when they were growing up. One of the older gay bros in this thread was talking about how they grew up in a rural village in Poland and they just met their partner when they were young and they felt like they were inventing gay sex with each other because they just didn't know and they didn't have access to any communities, there was no internet. But nowadays, if you are under the age of 40, if you have had a queer thought in your head, one of the first things you are going to do is you are going to Google about it, and that is gonna take you to some of these online communities where you are going to get exposed to these discussions.

And that's another thing that is pretty relevant for character building. I don't know if this is a universal experience, but when I was young and I was having thoughts about boys, for sure one of the first things I did was go to the internet and do some version of "am I gay?" or "how do I know if I'm gay?" And that was, you know, interspersed with the insert actor that I had a crush on shirtless image searches. For me, it was Chez Starbuck from that Disney Channel original movie, The Thirteenth Year. And yet somehow I never developed any like merman fantasies.