Side usually describes someone for whom penetrative sex is not the main event — neither the insertive version nor the receptive one. Nothing gets ruled out; the weight simply sits elsewhere. Kissing, oral, hands, bodies, fetish, whatever two men build between them. The American therapist Joe Kort put the term into circulation in 2013.
Two Answers Were Never the Whole Menu
The binary looks self-evident because it is repeated constantly: in profiles, in jokes, in the question asked at every second party before anyone has taken their jacket off. Plot twist — there was always a third answer, it just had no name. A word of its own keeps two options from passing themselves off as the complete list. Anyone who recognizes himself in neither is not an exception to a rule; he has a third description available.
Which explains why the term arrived so late. There was never a shortage of men it fits. There was a shortage of language they could make plans in without opening with an apology.
It marks no deficit either. A side is not going without, he is arranging his priorities differently. That the arrangement needed a label at all says more about how slowly the binary dies than about the men who never had a use for it.
Side Is Not Asexual
The two get confused because both fall outside the expected script, and they describe entirely different things. Asexuality is about attraction: how much desire there is, and toward whom. Side is about practice: the desire is there, the penetrative default simply is not the point. A side can want a great deal, want it often and want it loudly. He wants it in a different arrangement.
AT TWINK DEATH
Different men enjoy different kinds of intimacy. None of them requires a justification, and none of them is the warm-up act for something more official. Hence the line: "There are more than two sides to sex." What counts on the floor and off it is that everybody involved wants the same thing.