I think my boyfriend may not be straight..

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06/10/2025 17:36

Subject: I think my boyfriend may not be straight..

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Anonymous

Has anyone else had experience with very repressed gay or bi men hiding it in plain sight—especially through intellectual or academic interests?

I've been with my boyfriend for several years. We had sex during the first year, but even then, it always felt like he preferred to schedule it rather than be spontaneous. He’d say things like “we’ll do it later,” but then “later” didn’t always come. Over time, it just got rarer, and now for the past two years, there’s been no sex at all. There’s always a reason—he’s tired, stressed, I lost too much weight, or I was annoyed with him (which I admit I have been, because he’s very secretive with his phone and just seems totally uninterested in intimacy so him using that as an excuse never fixed it).

I’ve asked him directly if there’s someone else, and he gets defensive, saying no, of course not. And usually I do believe he cares about me—he supports me while I’m in school, he tells me he loves me—but lately I’ve started to wonder if he might be gay or bi and just not out, maybe not even fully to himself.

One reason I’m starting to wonder is this close male friend of his he spends a lot of time with—someone I’ve never met, despite them knowing each other for years. They talk a lot about philosophy (they both teach it), and he helped this friend write a paper on anal pleasure—which honestly flew over my head regarding what it's actually about, but it definitely made me pause. I’ve also started noticing other things: he reads a lot of ancient Greek texts and once joked to me that “the Greeks were all gay with each other,” and he’s obsessed with James Joyce—especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. AI tells me there may be a lot of tales of regressing who you are with gender and sexuality in those books... I used to just think he was a quirky academic, but now I’m wondering if those interests have more personal resonance for him. He remembered Bloom's Day this month but forgot my birthday until my friend sent me flowers...

He also wears a lot of pinks and purples, has rainbow stickers on his water bottles (rainbow colors not just a rainbow), he loves P-Town when we go to the Cape, and while I always thought of that as just part of being a liberal, nerdy academic guy… now I’m not so sure. He annotates books in ways that seem very intimate—like underlining his friend’s name in a Greek tragedy.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have even questioned any of this if I hadn’t started asking AI about certain behaviors or interests, and whether they could be queer-coded. It’s not that I have any issue if someone is gay or bi—but if I’m being used as some kind of “safe cover” for someone who is and not ready to be out with it, and I'm just a cover for his Catholic family or to avoid dealing with his own repression, that’s something I can’t ignore. I care about him, but my own mental and emotional health has been really affected by the lack of intimacy and the growing sense that he might not even be attracted to me, possibly because he's hiding who he truly is from me but allowing these males friends to see it.

I don’t feel like I can just say, “I think you’re not straight” as a reason to break up—it feels cruel, especially if he’s deeply repressed. He's stubborn. He wouldn't tell me and would get upset so I will not ask. But at the same time, I’m not okay with the distance and secrecy anymore. He won’t even let me know his phone passcode (never has), saying it’s because of HIPAA (he’s a therapist), but I’m not asking for access to a database of his patient files—I just want the same level of openness I offer him.

Has anyone else been in a relationship with someone who might have been deeply closeted or used intellectual or academic interests to mask their queerness? I’m trying to make sense of this and would appreciate any thoughts or similar experiences.