I originally wrote this piece as part of a larger, unpublished book on masculinity around 2018. The figures and stats I quote are accurate from that time. As it’s just been Mardi Gras weekend, I thought it was an appropriate time to send it into the world.
WARNING: This piece talks openly about suicide and violence, particularly among the queer and trans community.
It would be a mistake to presume that gay or bi men are inoculated against toxic masculinity. They're more vulnerable to its effects.
Mainstream masculine ideals are borne out of heterosexuality. Affection between men makes us less manly, so we are doomed to loneliness. If women are objects to be conquered, and our fellow men are loveless acquaintances, then every man is an island, self-sufficient and isolated. We are violently allergic to male homosexual affection - even when physical touch has nothing to do with sexual lust. Same-sex marriage is becoming the norm for many Western countries, but homophobia is still a strong undercurrent in even the most progressive of cultures. Wide-spread homicidal homophobia is within living memory for most of us.
Prominent Australian writer Benjamin Law reflected on the secret stories of Sydney, now known internationally for its Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Many queer Australians loathe the past, and with good reason. When I moved to Sydney four years ago, I remember reading Rick Feneley's Good Weekend cover story about a spate of unsolved murders in the city between the 1970s and 1990s. Over that period, dozens and dozens of gay men were rolled off cliffs, kicked in the head with steel-capped boots outside dunnies or had their skulls smashed in with the sharp end of a hammer until they died. The perpetrators were local teenagers. For decades, it was an unofficial rite of passage in many parts of Australia to go "poofter bashing," with the crimes ignored or shoddily investigated. Most of the crimes Feneley wrote about happened in my lifetime. How had I not known about this?
Ben Law, from his astonishing essay, Moral Panic 101: Equality, Acceptance and the Safe Schools Scandal, 2017.
Worldwide, LGBTI youth are up to five times more likely to commit suicide. Transgender people are up to eleven times more likely.
Inside the male LGBTIQ community, toxic masculinity is rampant. A survey undertaken for Attitude magazine, which yielded over 5,000 responses, showed that 69% of gay, bi or queer men had been made to feel less than a man because of their sexuality at some stage. Almost all - a staggering 92% - said that they felt effeminate gay men were still made fun of in the media. 68% said they had been on the receiving end of abuse that targeted their intrinsic 'femininity'.
This is a crucial point. It suggests that much of homophobia has little to do with a distaste for sodomy or sexual acts or even a flimsy citation of religious text. Male homosexuality's more dangerous threat to civilisation is its perceived femininity and corruption of the masculine. Limp wrists, a high voice, emotional expression - all of these are effeminate behaviours, and therefore render you gay, and lesser then the norm. As the journalist behind the Attitude survey, Matt Cain, points out, these insults only function if we presume that feminine traits are intrinsically inferior to masculine traits. This misogyny is inside the LGBTIQ community as well as outside of it. A clear majority (71%) said that signs of femininity had turned them off in a man.
As an aside, it’s also worth pausing to reflect on this data, as Cain does, to mention an essential point:
Yes being gay can be tough. But at least we’re men. Just how difficult must it be to actually be a woman, and to go through life everyday being made to feel inferior?
Much of homophobia relies on the depressingly bland, familiar fault lines of misogyny. Men can't be physically affectionate, especially not with each other, for fear of being perceived as homosexual and effeminate. But this is a relatively new development in our understanding of sexuality.
Writing for The Art of Manliness blog, Brett and Kate McKay curated a gallery of over one hundred images charting a history of male friendship from the nineteenth century until the 1950's. The collection is breathtaking and touching. Portraits of male friends were typical up until the 1920s, with two or more men attending a studio to have their loyalty commemorated. Here, men - white, black, young, old, thin, fat - lean into each other with an intimate familiarity. They cross their legs, hold each other’s hands, or even sit in one another's laps. Grown military men, dressed in uniform, carrying guns, slide into each other's arms with easy grins. Though they are adults in the pictures, they appear more boy-like, with brothers joined at the hip, vowing to protect one another and their country.
It is easy to romanticise the pictures as relics of a simpler time—perhaps a time worth returning to. But the decline of male affection has a complicated relationship with our cultural understanding of homosexuality. As the McKay's point out, 'homosexuality' as a term wasn't even invented before 1869. Before this, sexuality as an identity didn't exist in the way we would understand it today. It wasn't that heterosexuality was the default identity; it was that it was the only identity. You couldn't be gay, or bi, or gender fluid. Thus, when homosexuality occurred, it was as a subversive, secretive act, and not bound to notions of marriage or family. Homosexuality didn't affect one's lifestyle. But within a generation of the invention of the term, Oscar Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency - a pseudonym for his homosexuality. Not long after, the medical profession officially labelled it as a disorder. The LGBTIQ community has been fighting for recognition ever since - not only as the secret liaisons between 'friends' that was at society's fringes - but as proud members of the community, able to link their sexual appetite with their sense of family and wellbeing.
Platonic, heterosexual male affection has become lost in this exchange. Desperate not to be perceived as a criminal or lunatic, our immediate forefathers kept their hands to themselves. Along the way, we somehow confuse a lack of affection as an intrinsic, natural part of our masculinity. As twentieth-century feminism was popularised and our definition of 'woman' widened, women were reluctantly welcomed into polling booths and workplaces. Threatened and confused about their role, men committed acts of faulty, unconscious logic. Women were maternal, therefore, more prone to emotion and affection. So if we suppress our emotion and affection, we are less like women, and more like men. It's a line of logic that is literally insane, unchained from any reason. The result is an epidemic of loneliness in contemporary men and a frighteningly disconnected relationship with our mental health.
In 2015, my wife and I travelled through India. We fell in love with so much of what we found but were particularly stunned by the open displays of affection between young men. We have a photo of two security guards in their late twenties looking out at a sunset over the River Ganges. Tired from the day’s work, one has his arm draped around the other, who leans against him for support. Their fingers are intertwined. In the distance, glittering in its majesty, the Taj Mahal.
Homosexuality was only decriminalised in India in 2018. Heterosexual marriage remains a cultural touchstone for most Indians, providing the foundation upon which their understandings of family and life are built. Misogyny is also not as threatened as it is in the West. A 2018 survey concluded India was the world's most dangerous country for women. It placed 131st out of 152 countries in the Georgetown Institute's global rankings of women's well-being. In such a culture, men have not felt the need to 'protect' their masculinity by muting their physical affection for one another. Women, meanwhile, live in constant fear.
In the wake of twenty-first-century feminism, men are challenged to respect women as equals truly. We cannot do this until we accept the 'feminine' within ourselves, bizarrely more familiar to our great-great-grandfathers than it is to us now.
You may like to pair this piece with my exploration of bisexuality or discussions of male role models and podcasts.