This lecture draws on two disparate sites of informal ethnography— Samuel Delany’s research in the Times Square porn theaters of New York City at the twilight of the twentieth century, and Tim Dean’s research in the strip clubs of Key West, Florida (2010-18)—to investigate the phenomenon of ostensibly straight men having sex with other men. The aim is not to ‘queer’ straight masculinity, much less to demystify it as closeted gayness, but rather to consider how masculinity mediates relations between and among men. The concept of homosociality—crucial for Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and subsequent queer theorists—maintains that women (or signifiers of women) mediate relations between men: the ‘traffic in women’ is the exchange system that holds patriarchal society together. But what happens when masculinity mediates relations between men? [The video screened at the start of the talk was Bryan Hawn’s “Bromance Parody,” and it’s available on YouTube]