



Just two bros not thinkin' about hoes...


Rather, the lack thereof.


While this trope can apply to both male and female same-sex couples, you are more likely to see two females being romantic or intimate than two males. This is due to a combination of Male Gaze and Girl-On-Girl Is Hot, which has led to lesbianism being turned into a promotional strategy that is expected to attract viewers rather than repel them.

Of course, this is a common source of Unfortunate Implications. Values Dissonance plays heavily into this trope regarding acceptance of homosexuality, though, and it varies from country to country, from decade to decade, even within countries and communities. As the tolerance toward homosexuality grows (at least in the West), this trope is fading little by little, though old habits can die hard. This Trope may also occur due to heterosexual actors feeling uncomfortable going too far with someone of their own gender.


See also Get Back in the Closet for media with gay love content, but it is just rated higher than media with heterosexual love scenes and the like. There is some overlap with Hide Your Lesbians. Related to Girl-On-Girl Is Hot in regard to Double Standards regarding love/affection scenes between lesbians being more "acceptable" rather than gay men (by way of providing straight male Fan Service). For bisexual characters, see But Not Too Bi.

See Have I Mentioned I Am Gay? when a show with supposedly gay characters doesn't ever reach even this level of physical affection between gay characters.

Examples of But Not Too Gay include:

Anime and Manga

  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has Les Yay overflowing in teasing and subtext, up and including two women sharing a bed and raising a daughter together, and plenty of mentioned groping in the visual novels. But good luck seeing an actual kiss or explicit flirting in the actual show.
    • Although to be fair, there isn't much in the way of heterosexual romance either, so this might be a case of No Hugging, No Kissing.

Comic Books





  • Team America: World Police parodies this trope with two starkly different scenes of puppet-sex: when Gary performs fellatio on Spottswood to show his loyalty, the action is essentially off-camera, with only Spottswood's face visible; moreover, Spottswood is fully dressed and his only reaction to the BJ is to blink once or twice, and there are no sound effects suggestive of oral sex. In contrast, the sex between Gary and Lisa is fully nude, acrobatic, and extremely kinky—and is accompanied by the song "Only a Woman," with lyrics that include: Only a woman / Is allowed to touch me there / All I ask is that you're a woman
    • Probably justified, given that the straight example is supposed to be romantic (and whilst it's obviously played for laughs, it's based on an actual relationship). The gay example is essentially a case of male-on-male rape. They aren't really equivalent situations.
  • Philadelphia - Andy and Miguel behaved more like a pair of roommates than a couple.
  • In The Family Stone, Thad and Patrick never kiss.
  • I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry: the two characters that are (pretending) to be gay never kiss each other even during their own wedding ceremony—they hit each other instead. Why? Because the MPAA threatened to give them an 'R' rating and Adam Sandler wussed out.
  • In Valentines Day, Sean and Holden are the only couple that doesn't kiss at some point.
  • In the film version of Mamma Mia, all of the adults of the older generations ended up in a romance that got development (or at least a musical number) Except for Harry. He comes to the island seemingly single, and then shows up with a boysfriend in the last two scenes without ever explaining it futher. And the pair's screen time can be comfortably counted in seconds.

Live-Action Television

  • Played straight in Game of Thrones with Loras Tyrell and Renly Baratheon. Although they do have sex like every one else, it all amounts to Loras ducking out of the picture. Contrast this to the graphic depictions of straight sex, and the difference might be a bit jarring. This only applies to the television series, since when GRRM revealed that they were a couple before the TV series aired there had been so few hints in the books that some people couldn't believe it.
  • This trope is a common criticism of Will and Grace regarding Will's flaccid love life.
    • It wasn't until the two very last seasons that he could actually kiss someone (the early kiss with Jack doesn't count, seeing as that was an eyes-open smack on the lips) - the last season was the only time he could have a proper, goddamn finally make out with a Special Guest.
  • South of Nowhere dipped in and out of this trope. Teen Nick apparently had no problems with cute pecks and hugging with the two lesbian characters Spencer and Ashley, but this was in contrast to the straight couples fully making out and displaying more affection for each other. And most of the time, they didn't even touch other.
  • In Desperate Housewives, for example, the one lesbian couple that only stayed for a couple episodes had two on-screen kisses - which was basically the same as what you'd get for a straight couple. Bob and Lee, however, have never kissed once and usually don't touch although they've been on the show for at least two seasons.
  • True Blood has this problem too. Even after Camp Gay Lafayette gets a boyfriend, Ethnic Magician Jesus Velasquez, they are never seen making love while Sookie spends literally half an episode getting it on with Eric.
  • On Glee, it has become a point of contention among many viewers that the number of times the two same-sex couples (Kurt & Blaine and Brittany & Santana) have kissed can be counted on one hand, while Finn and Rachel make out almost every episode.
  • Torchwood. In the first series, we had Gwen and Owen's affair getting constant references, Owen's love affair with a time traveller getting two sex scenes and kicking off the final story line, and Tosh's affair getting its own episode. When it comes to captain Jack though, he had one love affair that never amounted to more than a kiss, and apparently he also had a thing with Ianto, to which we get exactly four hints over course of the series. Resolved from series 2 onwards, when Jack's same-sex activity is far clearer.
  • Skins received this criticism in its first generation with the relatively little screen time and focus given to gay character Maxxie and his love interests, compared to the various opposite-sex couples on the show. However, they promptly subverted the trope in the second generation with lesbian couple Naomi and Emily, widely considered one of the best queer couples on TV ever, and basically an Alpha Couple by Series 4. They opened the floodgates again, though, with the American remake, where the show even focused more on the "lesbian" character's confusion over and sex with a boy than they did on her relationships and sex with girls.
  • Discussed in The Golden Girls. In one episode, Blanche spends some time trying to get used to the idea of her brother Clayton's sexuality. She accepts it and they move on. In a later episode, her brother actually does meet a man. This episode is again spent on Blanche accepting her brother's homosexuality, because she was okay with it as long as it was only a word and a thought, not an action.
  • Justified in Soap because it was made in the seventies and Jodie was one of the first homosexual characters on television. All of the homosexual relationships are done purely by words, hugging and a lot of suggestive phrases.
  • Thomas of Downton Abbey has a kiss in the first episode, and is rebuffed by a guest in the third. Apart from that, his sexuality is rarely mentioned. Some excuse this with homosexuality being illegal at the time, but considering that Thomas has been able to have at least one affair in his lifetime adn that a queer culture did exist even then, it's not a satisfactory exaplanation.


  • Adam Lambert is this in spades. In RL, his sexuality has no shortage of mention. If you look at the few music videos he has, though, you'd get the impression that he is either Camp Straight or a snake zoophile.

Video Games

  • Curtis, the protagonist of Phantasmagoria 2, has three love interests—two women and one guy. The women both get multiple sex scenes. The guy? Well, they almost kiss. Apparently, showing men actually kissing is sick and wrong much edgier than showing fairly explicit straight BDSM.