![gay men kissing each other gay men kissing each other](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/oUAAAOSwpDdVLYpk/s-l300.jpg)
The soaring popularity of male kissing is, Anderson believes, partly thanks to the behaviour of professional sportsmen, especially top football players. I have also found it occurring in a fifth of the 60 university soccer players I interviewed in the US, and have a friend who is beginning formal research into male kissing in Australia after recording it there." "I've interviewed graduate students who did their bachelor degrees at other universities, and been to undergraduate clubs and pubs from Bristol to Birmingham to Edinburgh – I can definitively say that although the percentages might vary depending on the city, the class and the racial background, these kissing behaviours are happening all over the country. The trend, he adds, is not just in a few UK universities or even limited to Britain. "The kisses seem to be stripped of sexual connotation, and given the percentage of men doing them, they certainly do not indicate a hidden homosexual desire." Young men are becoming softer and more inclusive."Īnderson says men are now kissing each other to show their "intimacy towards one another", but not in a homosexual way. "This is not to say that all youth are gay-friendly, but there's an awareness that anybody can be gay without the homohysteria – where men try to act in sexist, hyper-macho and homophobic ways to prove they are not gay – that used to exist. Young people have disassociated themselves from homophobia the way they once did from racism. "Sexual minorities have made tremendous cultural and legal improvements towards equality – the media is saturated with images of sexual minorities, and homosexuality is almost normalised today," he says. In contrast, Anderson, 43, now believes homophobia is dying out on university campuses, and says attitudes to male kissing reflect that. This is known as human plasticity theory people are stamped with a belief system that they cannot easily shake." So although they had not been in students' clubs or pubs in 20 or more years, they assumed that nothing had changed. They have been stamped with attitudes of acceptable behaviour as a part of their entry into adulthood, and kissing was not permitted between men when they were young. From their 'adult' perspective, this action was unfathomable. Others flatly told me that they did not believe me. "One professor excused it as 'something in the water at Bath' – even though the research covered three different educational establishments. "I started telling people about it, but found that a lot of academics literally did not believe me," Anderson explains. And almost 40% added that they had engaged in "sustained kissing, initially for shock value, but now just for 'a laugh'." The results of his survey showed 89% of the polled men saying they were happy to kiss another man on the lips through friendship.
GAY MEN KISSING EACH OTHER PLUS
He interviewed 145 students, a mixture of men studying sports-related subjects and every third man who left the library on a particular day, from two different universities, plus other male students from a sixth-form college. He was intrigued, and decided to investigate further via formal research. "I started going through my students' Facebook profiles, with their permission, and was inundated with hundreds of photos of men kissing on their nights out," Anderson reports. Anderson discovered that the game had almost died out in the UK in the last few years "because nobody ever loses", and began to consider heterosexual university students' views of kissing other men. His research subjects caught the interest of students at Bath, hence the question about "gay chicken". Growing up in the US, Anderson did his PhD on "the intersection of sport, masculinities and declining homophobia" after coming out at 25.