Straight Talk About Being Gay

Transcending orientation helps straight men and boys too

In my last post I wrote about the concept of sexual orientation as a relic of a social and political environment that no longer represents where we are.

It might seem counterintuitive, but the first group I want to focus on that will benefit from shifting away from essentialist ideas about orientation are straight men, and the boys they used to be. Instead of writing another piece about the crisis of masculinity, though, I’m with

Noah Berlatsky

when he suggests that masculinity is the crisis. One aspect of that crisis is that our current flavor of patriarchy considers homoeroticism feminine, and therefore undesirable. Other masculinities held different values, but here and now heterosexuality is the measure of manliness.

This hurts straight men and boys first and foremost. I don’t mean it hurts them worst, I mean it hurts them first. It’s only through the violent process of turning a boy into a straight man that all the violence against women and children becomes possible and permissible. bell hooks explores this in depth in her book The Will to Change, which excavates the wounds patriarchy inflicts on men and boys, how it teaches us to cling to power at the expense of being able to love.

We can break these patterns. The safer boys are to explore themselves and the world, the healthier they become as men. Reframing homoeroticism as unthreatening to masculinity, then, becomes vitally important. So how do we do that?

First, we can recognize what different models of masculinity thought about homosexuality. To make a gross generalization, the ancients conceived of sexuality more like an appetite than an identity. Many indigenous cultures accepted what to us appears like a vast spectrum of gender roles and sexual practices. Some patriarchal societies, like the ancient Greeks, included homosexuality in their understanding of masculinity, so it was expected and encouraged. They were misogynist but not homophobic. Other patriarchal societies, such as our own between the 17th and 19th centuries, banished homoeroticism to the imaginary of cultural taboo. They couldn’t conceive of it, so it was ignored and overlooked (and therefore didn’t disrupt platonic male intimacy).

We can’t go back of course, but the point here is that other constructions of masculinity, some homophobic and some homophillic, allowed male intimacy much more space than ours does. Sorting boys and men into sexual orientations doesn’t help this problem. The idea that gay and bi people are some kind of sexual “minority” reinforces the idea that heterosexuality is normal — and normative. It reinforces the false binary at the core of masculinity-as-crisis: that there are two ways of being, one masculine and right, the other feminine and wrong.

Fundamental to this bifurcation is the idea that power is strength, and vulnerability is weakness. This expresses itself in what’s called rape culture. The opposite of rape culture, as Nora Samaran’s viral essay beautifully illustrates, is nurturance culture. Replacing rape culture with nurturance culture means taking on “feminine” characteristics and claiming them as masculine, too. Boys need to see men nurturing women and girls, and boys also need to be nurtured by men. I mention this point first because unless we can tend to ourselves and each other, none of the other changes will catch.

Another shift we can make is to lower barriers to entry into homoerotic experience by decoupling sexual behavior from identity. As the gays can attest to from experience, many a straight man ends up having gay sex. We usually explain this by saying such men are in the closet. Sometimes we say it’s internalized biphobia, or bi erasure. Sometimes those explanations fit, but not nearly well enough. Queer folk can also end up (or start by) experimenting with straight sex. It seems to me that our sexual appetites, corralled into orientations, nevertheless spill out the sides in unpredictable ways. We could dismiss all this with the phrase “everyone’s a little bi,” and while I’ll get into the implications of that in another essay, it’s very strange for those who believe in orientation to mean it literally. It’s basically admitting “gay” and “straight” don’t exist at all.

There has to be space for exploration without identification. Men who are raised to be straight but desire other men are often wracked with anxiety about what those desires say about them. If we lowered the temperature, if we didn’t rush to prescribe patterns of behavior or cultural expectations for people (especially the young) because they deviate from heterosexual scripts, all of us would be safer. This is a problem inherent to heterosexuality in particular; queer spaces are generally better at embracing autonomy and encouraging curiosity.

Speaking of queer spaces, while the science behind sexual orientation is shaky at best, queer cultures exist now that didn’t before. Claiming an orientation often means identifying with these cultures, which many boys and men are not prepared to do (often because of stereotypes and stigma). In fact, as part of policing masculinity, they’re more often ready to prevent those of us who are from doing so.

Undermining the idea of orientation opens queer culture to everyone. This helps queer folk by making our world safer, and helping us figure ourselves out sooner. When queerness is not confined to a certain subset of human but rather an experience potentially available to everyone, it’s less easy to other those of us who embrace gender deviance. When the stakes of such experimentation are lower, mistakes or false starts or changing your mind doesn’t carry as much risk.

Another way this shift would help all of us is by removing sex as a psychological barrier to platonic intimacy (especially between men, but really anyone). Remembering earlier masculinities, even those that upheld misogynist power structures still often allowed men greater freedom to love each other. Ours seems to be a particularly restrictive patriarchy, where the specter of sexual desire haunts platonic interactions. Boys who show affection for each other are branded as gay, which means feminine, which means betraying or forsaking their gender. But if homoerotic desire were not threatening, platonic affection would be easier to express. Their confusion would not be cause for alarm.

People across the political spectrum recognize that men, particularly American males, are lonely, isolated, frustrated, and resentful. The right, exemplified by the manosphere, offers the false promise of fraternity to boys and men in genuine need. What they deliver, of course, is hatred, bigotry, and destruction. If boys learned from a young age how to build intimacy with other males, unobstructed by the fear of erotic desire, how attractive would the fascist framework really be?

Right now I’m focusing on straight men and boys — the “badguys” of patriarchy. But they’re only bad because they hurt other people, and they hurt other people because they hurt themselves first, and they hurt themselves first because they’re taught to by patriarchy, and patriarchy demands they wound themselves because it cannot accept the truth: that all of us contain parts that are soft, sensitive, empathetic, and vulnerable; that all of us have strange and unruly desires; that love and intimacy transcend all borders including gender; that all of us are a little bit queer; that heterosexuality is just a myth.

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