Porn star and writer Conner Habib caused a stir on the Internet last week when Salon published his article “Rest Stop Confidential,” a part-exposé and part-confessional about the hidden culture of men who cruise for sex with other men at our nation’s highway rest stops. Habib’s portrait of these men is first shocking, as many are ignorant as to the existence of these practices, but ultimately sympathetic, painting a sobering and sad picture of these men’s motivations.

Reaction to the article was loud on both sides of the spectrum and few were entertained. Many commenters were outraged and disgusted at the “audacity” and “vileness” of these acts; others, especially more liberal readers, saw these men as “setting back decades of effort” for gay rights. For all the uproar it created, too many people missed the actual message of the article: Habib intended to start a conversation.

The majority of us can establish a common ground that this practice is undesirable and that we should do something about it. Before we can address the problem, we need to understand it. Habib explains that rest stop cruising is “for the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding inside of him.” What’s clear, although undeniably puzzling to the average reader, is that these men are not identifying as gay or bisexual. In fact there is “no sexual orientation at all.” These are men who “are of a certain age,” who, growing up, were denied the ability to name, understand or express their sexual desires for other men in a healthy way. They were conversely conditioned to not only deny their impulses, but to be hostile to them, fight them and have disdain for anything with the label “gay.” Now these men are at a crux in their life: denying their feelings didn’t make them go away, neither did starting hetero-normative families nor being celibate. So they default to anonymous and dangerous sex beneath the public’s moral gaze. They are victims of a society of denial, fear and hate.

So how do we fix the problem? Part of me fears that it’s too late for men like this, and that the most effective way to deal with their impulses is on an individual basis of counseling and therapeutic help, bringing them to terms with their sexual desires. We can do more in the meantime for younger generations. Recognition of gay men and women has improved leaps and bounds in the last few decades, but much of society is still tolerating and not accepting. Habib’s memories of college still sound eerily current. “The straight students were going to parties and hooking up, making out on the green, having sex in dorms. The gay guys had to do what they could, wherever they could find it.”

This double-standard still exists, even at liberal UConn. If I, as a gay man, were to meet another man at a Carriage House party and make out with him, I am confident we would get the daylights beat out of us. I can be gay, but if I try to express sexual desires in a setting where hetero is the norm, I am branded a “faggot” and antagonized as such. There are specific places on campus and many groups of friends where I don’t hesitate to express my sexuality, but I fear for the countless men who have been conditioned by fear of rejection to keep quiet.

To fix these problems, we need to not be terrified to talk about them, not be impulsively disgusted by the seedier happenings of repressed sexuality. Habib describes being questioned by a cop about whether he was at the rest stop to search for “fun and games”: “They couldn’t say it. They couldn’t say anything … It’s not ‘fun and games,’ it’s men yielding to something they might be trying to deny, but can’t.”

There is hypocrisy in labeling somebody as a victim of their culture and then persecuting them for it. Instead of moralizing, do something about it. Make sure the message you’re sending to your kids, your friends and your family about sexuality is positive. This problem has arisen not because these men are depraved, but because we, as their peers, weren’t willing to name it and talk about it.