Are straight people taking another gay term and misusing it? Or are they simply expanding the boundaries of heterosexual sex?The Gilded Age star Morgan Spector is once again stirring up discourse about straight people (and tops and bottoms) with comments he made in a recent interview with GQ Hype. Spector was asked about accusations of queerbaiting he faced last year when he said he is "very much creatively a bottom" in a Los Angeles Times roundtable."Straight guys can't bottom?" Spector replied. "I mean, people can play with dominance and submission in heterosexual relationships. We're living in a moment now where we're exploding ideas of gender. We deconstruct, these things are not fixed. It's theater, baby. We're all playing in the same sandbox in a way."Ignoring the fact the real people can't queerbait, some in the queer community are questioning what exactly he meant by this. Spector could very well mean top and bottom in the way the gay community has long used the words, and if he does, good for him! However, his full quote indicates he might be conflating being a bottom with being submissive.His original comments also indicate this. "I'm very much creatively a bottom. Tell me what to do and just let me obey," he said.Many in the queer community are all too familiar with power bottoms and bossy bottoms who are the ones who do the telling what to do, and service tops who are more than happy to obey.We don't know how Spector meant the words, and we aren't here to speculate on the details of his sex life, but his comments do feel like a part of a recent trend of straight people taking "top" and "bottom" and conflating them with "dom" and "sub." (@) An example is a recently viral post on X where a woman is asked where her top is from. "Dress is from amazon and boyfriend is from hinge she replies.Girl, that is not a top. That is your straight boyfriend who is having straight sex with you. Have the straights gone too far? Has the word bottom lost its meaning?Like many queer terms, the words top and bottom are becoming more mainstream, and it's good to see straight people challenging heteronormative rules for sex. Still, I ask, is divorcing the terms from their gay origins and context a form of gay erasure?There is some definite crossover with BDSM and the gay leather scene in the origins of using bottom and top to denote sexual roles. However, bottom and top are not synonymous with submissive and dominant.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "bottom" in a sexual context was first recorded in the 1970s in the context of gay BDSM relationships. There, it designated "the person who takes the more passive role in (esp. homosexual or sadomasochistic) sexual activity." Passive is defined here as "esp. the receptive partner in homosexual anal" sex.Another definition given is "the partner who is or prefers to be penetrated in intercourse between homosexual men."A straight man who is submissive and is penetrating his female partner in PIV sex, even if she is physically on top of him, is not a bottom. A straight woman having PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex with her male partner is not a bottom.By the '80s, the terms began to be more widely used in the gay community outside of BDSM contexts. In a 2020 Vice article, Ben Weil, who has a doctorate in social science, pointed out that during the AIDS crisis, top and bottom became more widespread identities in the gay community when each act was seen as having different risks associated with it."Many individuals disavowed bottoming entirely in order to identify as a top and therefore be relatively safer during the crisis," he said. "The logical outcome of this is that you had people identifying as bottoms as a counterpoint. So, that kind of HIV/AIDS risk discourse really helped to crystallize top and bottom as identity categories."The AIDS crisis was also a time when bottom-shaming was happening within the gay community, as it was seen as a riskier lifestyle for gay men. In many papers and studies examining how bottoms have been criminalized and shamed by culture and society, the word is defined as the receiving partner in gay anal sex.Joo Florncio, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures said that, "historically, gays were the bottom. The top was not gay, they were men and just like all other men.""BottomsGay men who prefer to be penetrated, sexuallyare more stigmatized than other gay men, and may develop and experience identities differently than other gay, bisexual, or heterosexual men," write Craig M. McGill and Joshua Collins in their paper The Experience of "Bottoming": Considerations for identity and learning."Bottoms, or men who prefer to have receptive anal intercourse with other men, who may be gay, bisexual, or men who have sex with men (GBMSM), are routinely stigmatized within and beyond LGBTQ+ communities," Richard Vytniorgu and Jaime Garcia-Iglesias write in their paper Bottom Shaming, Anxiety, and Sexual Wellbeing. "The major reason for this stigmatization is usually attributed to a perceived deficit in social and cultural standards of masculinity."Bottom is unquestionably not a slur, but for thousands of years men who receive anal sex have been oppressed for being bottoms. Going back to one infamous ancient Roman law, the lex Scantinia, Roman men were permitted to have intercourse with people of all genders, as long as they were from "less respectable" classes like sex workers, the poor, slaves, and foreigners, and as long as "he was the insertive partner."More recently, when a gay man is called a bottom, it is often meant in a derogatory or stereotyping way. It implies that a person is a sexual deviant, is effeminate, or is doing something "more gay" than their penetrating partner. Now, straight people are using the terms to make their relationships sound more interesting.The fact is: For gay men, bottoming is still illegal in many parts of the world. A man being submissive to his wife or a woman having PIV sex with her husband is not.The term bottom, meaning receiving partner in gay sex, doesn't only have negative baggage though. Within the gay community, the terms top and bottom have also long been used to signify that gay sex is different from straight sex. When a gay couple is asked, "Which one of you is the girl?" the answer is neither. If one partner is penetrating and the other is receiving, there isn't a boy and a girl; there is a top and a bottom.It is also a way for gay people to identify, communicate with, and relate to one another.Much like the Hanky Code or the gay slang language Polari, gay men could use the terms top and bottom to talk about sex openly in a way that they understood.Nowadays, we can also point to the existence of terms like "side," which means a gay man who prefers to have non-anal sex, and "oral top" and "oral bottom," which are similar to top and bottom, but in the context of oral sex. Those words back up the idea that bottom is referring, at least mainly, to anal sex.For many queer people, the word bottom has a lot of strong feelings associated with it, including Pride and history. To separate the word from those meanings is to do a disservice to the gay bottoms who have come before us (or after us, or at the same time, depending on the type of top involved).So the next time you use the word bottom, I hope you think of the thousands of years of anal sex that have led us to this moment.Mey Rude is a staff writer for Out.Voices is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Visit out.com/submit to learn more about submission guidelines. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on any of our stories. Email us at voices@equalpride.com. Views expressed in Voices stories are those of the guest writers, columnists, and editors, and do not directly represent the views of Out or our parent company, equalpride.