I was talking with a newly single girlfriend of mine the other day, about the dates she’s been going on these last few weeks. She told me about one guy who shook nervously the entire time they had lunch. She told me about another guy who wined and dined her with an expensive dinner neither one of us could afford and dancing afterward. And then my friend told me about this one guy she met at a bar, then slept with – and how he wouldn’t stop texting her the next morning, or the next night, or the next few days after that.

I asked, rather obviously, why Texting Guy wouldn’t give up the chase. This guy must really like her, I thought, to be messaging at all hours after a one-night stand. My friend laughed and just handed over the iPhone:

Would you be into playing with my ass later ;)?

And I looked at her, and asked, rather shocked: “Wait – do straight men ask women to do this?”

In 2012, one-year before what is called a “watershed moment” for LGBTQ folks in America by many due a burst in progress, Esquire magazine asked 500 men another question: “During foreplay, what’s the one thing that you want more of from your current partner?” Blowjobs, apparently on the wane, were mentioned by 46% of the men surveyed; “a little rough play” sat at 6%. And rim jobs – or, to the unfamiliar, the act of having your anus stimulated orally – came in at 14%, which is quite surprising because straight men and their own behinds are rarely talked about in the same breath ... unless they’re used in the same breath as a homophobic slur.

As Charlie Glickman, a sex educator and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration of Men and their Partners, explained in an interview last year with Playboy: “We carry a lot of shame around our anuses. ... It’s a shame that starts when we’re in diapers.” According to Glickman,who identifies as bisexual, even as adults, “We look for a reason to justify the taboo. We say it’s disgusting. We say it’s dirty. We say it’s gross.”

“Butt stuff is such a thing,” we say, as New York magazine’s Maureen O’Connor did earlier this year, before immediately getting grossed out at a phrase more lurid than that.

Most commonly, we say that anal play is gay. A lot of people feel uncomfortable with anal sex. But how gay is it, really?

Well, a 2011 study with a sample size of 25,000 gay men living in America found that gay men do like their analingus – just not as much as you might expect. About 26.1% of those men had received and 25.4% had given in their most recent sexual encounter. For straight men, while we do not have data to show if they had performed or received analingus during their last sexual encounter, we do know that according to a study published in 2010 by the Journal of Sex Research, over 51% of men have engaged in “in oral-anal sex, manual-anal sex, or anal sex toy use”.

So it turns out that exploring the most private of private parts with your tongue, or getting pleasure from it, isn’t necessarily a gay thing. It’s a human thing – if we let it be.

Around the world, gay men, bisexual men, and men who have sex with one another but don’t identify with either category, face down so many stigma for so many reasons. But the one that has stood the test of time the longest is the discriminatory focus on the act of sodomy. And in many places, that focus has become the justification for violence perpetrated upon gay men even till this day, with 12 states in America still banning sodomy 10 years after it was ruled unconstitutional.

As many groups across the globe have worked to stop the violence, both systemically and socially, we have seen the urge to desexualise gay men in the mainstream representations of them and make them into fathers, your neighbor, your best friend or your mailman.

This push to make gay people “just like you!” is commonly referred to as heteronormativity – or the act of making subjects fit into the gendered nuclear family and ideals associated with it. And through this process, sex becomes a distant memory. It’s put on the back-burner, and for a group whose identity is founded in sexual differences, maybe it shouldn’t be.

Maybe we should be talking about the sex gay people are having because, when we do, we figure out that they are actually not all that different – without having all of us move to the suburbs.

From the data we know that men, straight and gay and everything in between, can derive pleasure from butts – their own and other people’s. We know that women can, too, with over 43% of women having participated in analingus according to that same 2010 academic study. And according to the most recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, straight people don’t just like analingus – they like going all the way: 44% of men, and 36% of women, reported having had penetrative anal sex.

This week was another milestone for same-sex couples across the US, especially those living in some conservative states where it looks like they, too, will gain access to same sex marriage. But as the LGBTQ rights movement continues to progress around the world, hitting many more milestones, maybe ass should start to become a bigger part of the gay rights conversation. Not just marriage. Not just children. Just butts – precisely because we’ve been avoiding it as the thing that supposedly sets gay men apart when, in truth, it’s apparently one thing upon which we can all agree.

And by destigmatising the pleasure that all of us can gain from it – especially men, who seem to face the most difficulty accepting their own – maybe then we can begin to dream of a world that is truly equal.