Guys, would you cuddle with a man?

RE:Guys, would you cuddle with a man?

I used to cuddle nude with a friend of mine - but both of us are gay. The cuddling did not lead to any kind of sexual intimacy (though we had sexual intimacy on other occasions). I enjoyed it and to me it felt like a form of bonding with a brother. He said very much what someone else on here said, that the nude cuddling "recharged him." For me it was often quite relaxing, even though I had a lot of shame about my body. It was just nice to be held and to chat and to be close and we almost always fell asleep like that and after we finished our nap we would eventually get up and get dressed and go about our days.

Neither nudity nor affection have to be sexual. Perhaps some people simply cannot separate nudity from sexuality and/or cannot separate cuddling from sexuality (and especially nude cuddling), but for many of us, we can.

Of course, growing up gay I experienced firsthand how anti-gay feelings (or homophobia) can negatively impact gay men but it was only as an adult that I saw how much homophobia negatively impacted straight men as well. All men have been harmed by homophobia - it has robbed men of close relationships with other men and one of the ways it has done so is by causing men to be too afraid to be nude with each other and so they shower in locker rooms in their trunks, never or rarely seeing another man's penis outside a sexual context like porn and never or rarely having physical contact with another man outside a sport or an extremely superficial quick half-hug. It's unfortunate and it makes it even harder to accept every aspect of our bodies because we do not see the bodies of our friends, our fathers, and other males in our lives. Men don't just want to see other men's bodies to see if theirs are better or not, but to see if they themselves are "OK" or "acceptable." Seeing what we have in common with other males helps us understand that there isn't anything wrong with us and that we aren't "bad." I think that's partially why there's always such a buzz that goes around when some male celebrity we know about winds up nude on the internet. We recognize them and when we see their bodies and their genitals it's an affirmation of our own bodies and our own genitals, especially if we are a fan of the male celebrity because many people may feel that given their awareness of that male celebrity that they have some sort of connection to them and so the male celebrity basically takes the place of seeing a male relative or friend nude and provides the reassurance that such witnessing provided men in the past. That's my theory, anyway.