A narrative exploration of gay men's sexual practices as a dialectical dialogue

This study aims to attain a comprehensive understanding of gay male sexual practices by means of a narrative research approach. More specifically, the study explores the subjective experience of gay males regarding role and self-label during anal sexual intercourse. The findings suggest that the subjective experience of gay men during sexual intercourse is a result of a continuous and dynamic intra- and inter-personal dialectical dialogue that attributes meaning to both their role and their self-label in the sexual act. These findings are in accord with the post-modernist relational psychoanalytic perspective, suggesting that any type of intercourse, including sexual, is an intra- and inter-subjective experience that provides both intra- and inter-personal dialectical meaning. This meaning is dynamic and exists so long as the dialectic is initiated and maintained. In such a case, both partners acquire the freedom to construct and reconstruct their experience and its meaning. The collapse of the dialectic, however, is likely to signify an experience of unsatisfying, meaningless sexual intercourse.