My two cents at this late date...
The OP mentioned the idea that the whole concept of virginity is tied up in heterosexual sex, which I hadn't really thought about but that's really it.
Oral sex, anal sex, etc. traditionally isn't sex - it's sodomy. "Sex" in that context means penis-vagina sex exclusively, so having that experience meant losing one's virginity whether male or female. Very black & white, no gray.
Once you leave that context, 'virginity' gets very gray. When to declare one's virginity revoked when there's oral active, oral passive, anal active, anal passive, two genders, etc. etc.
Me personally I would consider one to have lost his "gay virginity" once he has fucked or gotten fucked, lining up with the heterosexual principle. OTOH, my first time with a guy did not involve that yet I was quite aware that a line had been crossed. FWIW.
Hmmm, see I find this slightly baffling, I'm not criticising or anything, just kinda being honest.
See the problem for me about imposing that symmetry of Virginity=never having engaged in vaginal penetrative sex/bum fucking is composed of a number of questions really.
Firstly, I've met heterosexuals (not huge numbers but enough to make me wonder) who dated their loss of virginity to an act of non-vaginally penetrative sex, and in general these people were male, which has always made me think that in heterosexual terms the concept of virginity is sex discriminative. Heterosexual women in my experience tend to date their loss of virginity to the first time they had penetrative vaginal sex but there are some heterosexual men (and women for that matter, though a lot fewer) who date it to other kinds of sex, normally it involved the first time a girl ever made them cum.
In fact, if you look at the whole concept of virginity there's always historically been more focus on it as an aspect of female sexuality. Many cultures imposed the demand that women keep their virginity and their hymens intact as long as possible, indeed preferably until marriage, and while male virginity was in some ways also highly prized in some cultures there's always been less focus on it in the majority of the larger historically attested cultures around the world, and what male virginity is exactly was always less clearly defined, rather conveniently (or indeed incoveniently for our purposes). Even in christian cultures (where virginity was often an almost sacred or holy state, in theory) a greater degree of double standardisation and hypocrisy has often existed on the matter.
So attempting to impose what is already a fairly unclear standard, and a set of extremely malleable rules garnered from heterosexual sexual culture on Gay sex where formal definitions of what sex is are even now not agreed upon seems at best problematical.
I mean we could apply the same standard exactly and say that virginity is lossed by participating in an act in which you are penetrated by a penis, but why we would decide to make the anus the analogue of the vagina for these purposes, rather than or to the exclusion of the mouth, is unclear to me. And this applies to the notional penetrator too, why penetration of an anus rather than of a mouth is analogous to penetrating a vagina is unclear.
And we could say that if another member of the same sex as you performs as sex act on you that makes you ejaculate then you've lost your virginity (which is at least sometimes the standard heterosexual men apply to themselves) but that would include a very broad range of activities and besides would have to apply to both partners. The other problem with this is that while I'm sure it's rare it's nonetheless a fact that penetrative sex acts might not lead to ejaculation and we end up saying that even if you've fucked someone and not ejaculated you remain a virgin, or that if someone has fucked you but you didn't ejaculate during the fucking then you remain a virgin, unless someone else fucking you and ejaculating thereby (even if you don't) counts as loss of virginity on the receptive partner's part, which seems to me to be even more illogical.
For Lesbian sex the above criteria become even more troublesome.
So what we're left with, which was kinda my first suggestion in the thread, is that if you engage in a sex act which has the possibility of producing an orgasm in either participant, regardless of whether an actual orgasm ever occurred, then you've lost your homosexual virginity. It's broad I know, but it's probably the most logical and certainly least complicated way of viewing virginity in a same sex sex situation. :redface: