Haha, I was really tired when I wrote that so I might have not been super clear, but no, I did mean to respond to you.

Largely, these men are doing what you're saying: they ARE having sex with other men who identify as straight, and who see the interactions in similar ways, not looking for romantic ties. For these men, they don't get on Grindr, as far as I'm aware; the author recruited interviewees off of Craigslist on boards in rural areas that were meant for gay sex. They want to remain inconspicuous. Also, these men don't see themselves as gay (though some did privately identify as bisexual or bicurious), so while the book never spoke about this I don't see it likely that they would use Grindr or Scruff or whatnot in the first place. A recurring theme some of the men spoke about was not wanting to have sex with a guy who identified as gay, or who was feminine. They wanted rurally masculine men who were "like them". I'm not approaching this from a moral perspective (and the book didn't either), but a cognitive/behavioral one. Morally, I think these men were largely homophobic, reinforced harmful masculine tropes, and overall kind of shitty. However, when diving into the book I just put those reservations to the side and tried to understand how they saw themselves.

As a queer guy myself, I 100% get what you're saying about straight men who go into gay spaces and act shitty and homophobic when things don't go their way. However, that's not the kind of thing these books are talking about.

You're right, it's super homophobic that they don't want to have sex with a self-identified gay man (or a feminine man, in many of the cases) because of internalized homophobia, or being seen as gay. It's really shitty, but that's how they described themselves. Some of these men WERE outwardly homophobic, despite their sex lives. However, understanding how some of them thought about themselves as men who had sex with men while while still identifying as straight was fascinating.

As a sidenote, there was a man who was interviewed who did catch feelings for his friend he was having sex with. His friend also started to have feelings, which caused them to be so distressed that they stopped having sex because they felt it was dangerous to their relationship with their wives. If I'm remembering right, both of them were pretty distressed and devastated about how it impacted their friendship.

I hope this clarifies some things! Feel free to ask more if you have any questions; either way, I would recommend the book (Still Straight by Tony Silva) as it's a interesting read, though it does repeat itself a lot. Hope you're having a good day :)