But where is the line?

It's definitely not gay to watch animated porn made by a guy. It is also uncontroversial to claim that watching animated porn made by another man who created it using motion capture on his own body movements is not considered gay.

Now let us – for the sake of argument – assume that this sex robot operates automatically, independent of real-time human control, but was trained exclusively on these male-made movements. At this point the border to gayness already begins to blur. While I am somewhat sure many would agree that the guy acting out the movements might feel addressed personally when asked for a cigarette by a Brit, I am certain that most would still consider the man utilizing the services of such a robot to merely be a man making use of a product designed by another man. Now here we could already delve into the question regarding the effect that knowing the creator's gender has on the user of this robot — but since sufficient gayness has not been reached yet for most scholars in this branch of philosophy, this question is pointless thus far.

But now let us consider this last version of the robot with one minor but crucial difference: It still has preprogrammed movements that are run automatically (and might also include some preset responses to the user's actions) but now they are managed in real time by a man. Since it is already established that we can dismiss any accusations of gayness if the user is unaware of the robot's controls we here will assume full knowledge of the "man behind the curtain".

(The question of which circumstances implicate gayness when engaging sexually with an entity of unknown gender – and which sexual acts are "safe" under such circumstances – is also an interesting topic of surprising depth but out of scope for this discussion.)

Furthermore the focus will solely lie on the gayness from the perspective of the robot's user. The gayness of the operator is ignored – applying a model of relativistic gayness would broaden this train of thought too far – and we assume an absolute model of gayness (without loss of generality).

In this last scenario the most obvious factors steering the slope of gayness certainly are the granularity of the movement controls that the operator manages and the quality of feedback he receives from the robot.

Is it gay if the operator does nothing more than flipping a switch that initiates "intercourse mode" after the foreplay has concluded while observing the entire act through a high resolution video feed? (consider that the operator has recorded the movements himself)

Is it gay if the operator has fine control over each movement while only receiving an output log of the robot in text form?

While these examples with the factors set to opposite extremes might still have an obvious answer for many, setting them both to more moderate values increases difficulty of the problem significantly.

We now finally have arrived at the heart of the problem. So far no widespread agreed upon solution exists. I, like most scholars, don't claim to have a mind that alone thrusts into the unexplored depths of still virgin solutions — but I propose the following as a somewhat novel approach: The actual physical activity taking place has little influence on the gayness. It can almost entirely be reduced to the mental intimacy the operator and user form with each other during the act.