Identity Development, Attraction, and Behavior of Heterosexual-Identified Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction Heterosexual-identified men who have sex with men (H-MSM) experience sexual identity and behavior discordance. H-MSM may comprise 0.5–3.5% of adult heterosexual men. Understanding and accepting H-MSM as they self-identify may be necessary to implement effective public health and psychosocial interventions. This scoping review synthesizes research on H-MSM’s identity development, attraction, and behavior. Methods Thirteen databases were searched and, using Covidence software, two independent reviewers screened 3617 titles and abstracts and 269 full texts to arrive at 124 articles meeting entry criteria. Ten independent reviewers then conducted thematic content analysis. Results H-MSM either expressed sexual identity uncertainty or justified maintaining heterosexual identity, due to fear of discrimination and little or no social support. H-MSM compartmentalized sexual behaviors as isolated events unrepresentative of their sexual identity. H-MSM further minimized same-sex behaviors to infrequent, recreational/sport, or economic coincidences with little partner communication regarding HIV and sexual health. Many H-MSM depersonalized male sex partners, denied same-sex attraction, and avoided gay-identified venues. Reviewed articles further reported H-MSM had negative emotional responses to sex with men (e.g., guilt, shame, disgust). Conclusions H-MSM are unlike other heterosexual men and other MSM and require unique considerations for social policy and approaches for care. Policy Implications Findings suggest H-MSM are mislabeled as “behaviorally bisexual” in sexual health screening, which may cause inaccurate epidemiology of sexually transmitted and blood borne infections.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".