The Pros and Cons of Gay ‘NSA’
“No strings attached” isn’t the stuff of true romance, but wait …
I’m not sure if three’s company or a crowd, but when it comes to letters, I tend to be a reluctant bedfellow with these three: NSA, aka no strings attached.
Even if I weren’t completely over acronyms, I’d probably never use that one in everyday conversations — not even the ones that begin on gay dating/hook-up apps like Grindr and Scruff. In the gay lexicon of lust, NSA is something considerably colder and less romantic than the straight version of it that inspired the 2011 Ashton Kutcher-Natalie Portman rom-com No Strings Attached, which was not about puppet love.
In the cinematic version of NSA (and, by extension, the straight one), there’s more of a human element to sex without emotional attachment. It’s a lot like the FWB thing also documented in a 2011 movie, Friends with Benefits (starring Justin Timberlake, whose former group NSYNC once released an album called No Strings Attached, and Kutcher’s future wife and Portman’s Black Swan costar, Mila Kunis).
Gay NSA is generally less personal and personable and also kind of preemptively rules out sequels — at least as I understand it in Grindr-speak. Size (“Hung?”) and preferred position (“Top or bottom?”) are far more important than pesky details like names. Yes, it’s as unromantic as it sounds, but when you wake up horny…
