Coming Out As Straight: A Guide to Student Sexuality

Our Deviance ed has a few hints on how to keep things running smoothly with your new-found cohabitants. The cliff notes version; be honest with them

Feature by Ana Hine | 03 Sep 2012

So you’ve unpacked your clothes and your sex toys. The spines of your new textbooks are not yet cracked. Pots and pans are sitting in your empty allocated cupboard still in their clingfilm and cardboard. It’s been a couple of days since you moved in with the strangers who are now your flatmates – it’s time to come out. Do it now before things get messy.

Tell them you’re straight. Or promiscuous. Or homophobic. Or moralistically religious. You need to get it out there, clear the air, because you’re living together now and some of you are going to be having sex. 

Is it okay, for instance, if you watch porn on the TV in the living room? Do you want your flatmate to come home to find you having a wank on the communal sofa? Broach it as you take the bubblewrap off the remote.

What about one-night-stands? It’s worth drawing up a list of rules. Maybe your flatmates don’t mind people staying in your room, but would prefer not to walk into the kitchen and see your fling making breakfast in their underwear. Discuss it.

A lot of the problems and tensions caused by sex are actually problems of communication. Your flatmate doesn’t want your boyfriend hanging around eating all the bread because they’re a virgin and you’re making them jealous. Or they’re secretly gay. Or they can hear you both having sex through the wall and it makes them awkward. It’s a better idea to be open from the start, rather than to have things like that fester.

I didn’t come out to my flatmates until they cornered me and asked if the girl sleeping in my room was, possibly, my girlfriend. I should have just said over dinner a week or so after we’d moved in, “By the way I may be bringing people of all genders here for casual sex, hope that’s okay?” In that case it was. If it isn’t okay not talking about it isn’t going to make it better. A lot of the time prejudice is just a lack of familiarity.

The thing is not to make a big announcement about it. Being a lesbian, or a domintrix, or polyamorous doesn’t make you special – it makes you pretty normal actually. You have a sexual orientation, a sex life. That’s cool, most people do (though it’s also perfectly okay not to be particularly interested in sex as well).

This doesn’t just apply to freshers or gay people, this is basic new flatmates etiquette. Long-distance relationship? Remember that your flatmates may not enjoy walking into the living room and suddenly being beamed half-way across the globe. Have a little, ‘I’m on skype’ sign or do it in your room. Long-term relationship? When your flatmates signed up to live with you they may not also have signed up to live with your partner. Promiscious? Kinky? Conservative? Working in the sex industry? Why not just be open about it from the start? 

If it helps leave this article around with a note on it saying, “I’m a bit of a noisy shagger, hope we can make it work.” Trust me, your flatmates would prefer you told them. There’s still time to get out of the lease.