If you read much mm (or presumably other gender pairing) romance or erotica, you’ve probably come across “gay for you”, or #gfy, stories. They’re pretty much what it says on the label: where an ostensibly “straight” person finds they’re a little more flexible in their orientation than they might have assumed, but only where a particular person is concerned.
Maybe it’s the high school quarterback, dating the head cheerleader but discovering an unexpected affection for the boyishly shy geek giving him math lessons, or a college kid, fresh out of his home town, realizing that when you’re in the real world your emotions don’t necessarily stick to gender lines.
gfy can be popular because it plays into something a lot of us who grew up LGBT fantasized at one time or another: that the people, often straight, who we were pining over would suddenly find they too had reciprocal feelings for us. Not that they’d necessarily do an about turn and suddenly become LBGT themselves (well, maybe bisexual), but that somehow we’d be the “exception” that they found they couldn’t resist.
I find that I often stray into gfy territory when I’m writing. Some people love it, others hate it. Personally, I think it’s different to people getting together because they’re horny and “any hole will do” - I like there to be an emotional connection, too, not just a matter of convenient friction.
“Jock Auction” was criticized by some for being too gfy in its tone. Certainly, Kyle’s discovery that he can have feelings for Craig, despite always previously identifying as entirely straight, plays into the gfy themes. Maybe, in hindsight, I would’ve verbalized more of Kyle’s emotional journey, and that’s something I certainly considered when writing “The Hitchhiker” (which I’m expecting some to classify as gfy but which, I’d argue, is more a case of premature identification).
Does gfy happen in real life, or is it just a fictional flourish? I’d say it’s real: growing up, there was a guy I went to school with who was nearly-entirely straight, but gay-for-me all the same. Certainly, some of it was experimental and playful, but I don’t think that means there was no emotional connection there either, even if it didn’t turn into the beginnings of a grand romance.
If I’m learning anything as an author it’s that reality is up to you to illustrate. There’s nothing inherently wrong or bad with gfy, but it’s up to you to make it seem believable. The people who criticized “Jock Auction” often did so because they didn’t feel like they’d been brought along on Kyle and Craig’s journey, not necessarily because the idea of such a journey was unbelievable in and of itself.
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