Richard Lyon

Queer activist

The Cult of Gay Masculinity

Posted: 06/28/2012 6:32 pm

The threat that gay men have long posed to the cultural dominance of
straight males has always had a close connection to gender and
gender-related behavior. Across most human societies there has
historically been social tension arising from the struggle to maintain
male dominance. In Western societies, particularly in the U.S. and the
U.K., male homosexuality has been seen as a threat to that dominance.
It is a failure to conform to expected notions of masculinity. Highly
repressive laws and customs forced homosexual men to relate to each
other in very secret and clandestine networks. As a result, the
general society had very little opportunity to experience the personal
diversity of this group of people. The ones who were visible were
those who displayed gender-variant behavior, such as cross-dressing.
Out of this set of circumstances, there emerged a broadly held
stereotype that all homosexual men were effeminate in their taste and
behavior.

Around the middle of the 20th century, a gay subculture began to
emerge and become increasingly visible to the general public. One of
the tasks for the developing gay movement, as for other oppressed
minorities, was to combat stereotypes that presented a distorted
picture of reality. The issue of gay masculinity has always been
central to this debate. By now most members of the general public are
aware that gay men are not uniformly effeminate. It's been pretty well
established that we come in different shapes and sizes and behave in
diverse ways.

Of course, the emerging gay subculture and movement was a sideshow to
the massive upheavals in gender roles and behavior that were going on
in mainstream culture. Feminism was posing a challenge to traditional
male domination, and with it came an extensive debate about what it
means to be male or female and to what extent people should be
expected to conform to strict roles assigned to their gender.
Historically, we have had binary notions of gender, with the belief
that there should be a clear-cut distinction between males and
females. Things have now changed to the point that even staunch
conservatives would not really expect people to adhere to the gender
roles that were prevalent in the 1950s.

It seems to me that there is now something of a countervailing trend
afoot among many politically self-conscious gay men. From an effort to
counter the notion that all gay men are effeminate, they have moved
toward the position that all gay men should present an image of
red-blooded American masculinity. The drive toward becoming
respectable leaves no room for the presence of gay men who are less
than fully and thoroughly butch. I just watched a documentary called
The Butch Factor
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBLmRHr0Ujc&feature=mv_sr> . It
unrolls a long series of interviews with gay men pushing and shoving
each other on the athletic field or subduing wild animals. In the
interest of balance, they manage to squeeze in a couple of unfortunate
men who are unable to measure up.

It seems fairly inevitable that a certain number of children will
begin to display behavior and preferences that don't conform to
traditional gender roles at a young age. The general term for this
phenomenon that psychologists are presently using is "gender variance
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_variance> ." This is an umbrella
term that includes a broad range of situations and experiences. Being
transgender is a more specific situation under that umbrella. There
have been multiple studies that have found a correlation between
gender-atypical behavior in childhood and eventually developing an
identity as gay/lesbian/bisexual and/or transgender. However, not all
children who grow into such identities display gender-atypical
behavior.

The point of this is that not all boys are cut out to be the
personification of masculinity. I was a kid who started life as an
identified sissy and grew up to be a gay man who still hates sports
and likes to cook. By and large, it is the kids who look and/or act
different who are most likely to be targets of bullying. Recently,
there has been a long-overdue effort to focus attention on the
problems faced by school-aged children who are perceived as being
sexually different. However, for all the "It Gets Better" videos, the
problems faced by such people don't end once they get out of school.
Within the adult gay subculture there is a pervasive emphasis on what
strikes me as a cult of masculinity. It appears to be, among other
things, an overreaction to historical stereotypes.

John Aravosis has opposed the inclusions of transgender interests in
the LGBT movement and he and Dan Savage are involved in continuing
controversions and conflicts with the transgender community

We see a good bit of political conflict about the inclusion of the
transgender community under the LGBT/queer tent. Self-declared gay
pundits like John Aravosis have, on repeated occasions, questioned
<http://www.salon.com/2007/10/08/lgbt/>  the desirability
<http://www.americablog.com/2007/10/transgender-fiasco.html> of a
close alliance between the two groups. To my mind it is not just a
clear-cut issue of trans vs. gay. There seems to be a notion that the
all-new and improved gay image will be devalued by association with
anyone who doesn't conform to the masculinity specification. This
includes gay men who fail to measure up on the butch index.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this piece asserted that, Dan
Savage, like John Aravosis, has questioned the desirability of a close
alliance between the the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community and the
transgender community. Although he has clashed with some in the
transgender community, he has made no such statement.

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