Here at Xtra, we’re always looking for the next great culture or politics story. We also like to talk about sex; and time and time again, readers prove that they’re glad we do.

Sex advice and how-to content will now live on our sibling site, Script, but that doesn’t mean there’s no place for sex on Xtra. This year, our horniest stories range from an account of cruising park sexcapades to a reported piece on why our community still needs places for public sex, to an essay about a first threesome that was surprisingly tender. Let’s dive in.

1. After my breakup, I fucked straight married men in the bushes

Topping our list for horny content in 2025 is this personal essay by Martin Cloutier about his experience having sex with straight-identified, married-to-women men. Cloutier tells of a number of explicit encounters, how these men make sense of being MSM in straight-married relationships and what this era of his life, post long-term relationship, meant for him. And readers ate it up.

2. Inside the history of Boston’s bygone gay bathhouses

It’s absolutely no surprise to me that this story was a hit: our readers are interested in both bathhouse culture and LGBTQ2S+ history, and this piece combines the two. Two standouts from this story: a source in his 80s, which is very rare, and a historian who happens to have worked at a bathhouse earlier in his life. When we were pitched this story, I recall discussing the Boston factor and if readers would be interested. But, not everyone lives in New York, Toronto or San Francisco and you proved that there was, in fact, great interest.

3. The queer community still needs places for public sex

It’s a fine line, wanting to be accepted as regular people and wanting to be proud perverts, and this piece is for the pervs among us. Public sex and queer culture are forever intertwined, and many members of our community are not interested in having their experiences sanitized and pushed behind closed doors. Here, Adam Rhodes talks to representatives from the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, a popular leatherdyke cruising party in Montreal and the International Mr. Leather contest about this part of the queer experience.

4. Department stores are dying. It’s the end of an era for anonymous sex

Speaking of public sex, this year’s closure of Hudson’s Bay department stores across Canada meant one less place for gay people to cruise, and the Bay had been a reliable option for many for years. Sometimes, in editorial meetings, we discuss what “the queer angle” on a story is, and this was one angle we knew wouldn’t be captured by the mainstream media’s coverage of the Bay closures. “He had his shirt off with the fitting room door open, flexing his pecs. I went into the fitting room, closed the door and got down on my knees. I wasn’t expecting anything when I went,” recalls one source in the story.

5. I had a threesome with my monogamous partner, and it couldn’t have been better

Tale as old as time: boy meets boy, meets boy. But it’s not as simple as that. Denys and his boyfriend meet, they have casual sex; they date for a couple of months before making it official. For the first couple of months they are open, before becoming monogamous and giving themselves some time to build a relationship between just the two of them.

Later, unplanned, at the end of a night out, an opportunity to connect with another man together comes up. The timing is right, it feels good, they do it. “Perhaps it was the stink of testosterone seeping from our skin and the bodies of those around us? Or maybe the simple uncertainty of what our next move would be?” Denys writes.