Every boy who is drawn into the world of all-male homosexuality goes there because he is seeking something; for the most part, he is pursuing a masculinity which he failed to achieve as a pubescent. This has been recently most demonstrably revealed by several off-the-cuff remarks made by gay male celebrities: model and fashion designer Colby Melvin said: “I struggled a lot. Especially when I came out, with masculinity and being butch and what it meant to be a man.” Gay soccer star Robbie Rogers mirrored much the same battle when it comes to homosexuality and masculinity while describing the actor he would preferably like to play him on film: “It’s gotta be someone funny, someone who doesn’t care and someone very masculine; someone you wanna grab a beer with.” In both of these men, masculinity is indelibly linked with images of how straight men appear and act; for, they define what masculinity is – even the first pop-culture gay icons, The Village People,” were amalgamated tropes of perceived heterosexual manliness: the cop, the construction worker, and the cowboy. To this day, gay dating internet sites are awash in the most commonly repeated phrases of: “no fems,” “no queens,” “st8-acting only.” As of late, gay theorist Niall Richardson from the University of Sussex, summed it up like this: “‘Straight-acting’ is, arguably, one of the most offensive terms of contemporary slang. To be ‘straight-acting’ is to be ‘masculine’ and the term therefore insists on essentialist ideas of gender in which masculinity is perceived as the inherent property of straight men while gay men can only ‘act’ or ‘pretend’ to be masculine.” Although, Richardson is rallying against this concept – it is a completely valid one. In an all-male commune, masculinity becomes hyperactive and inherently false. In the late-1980s and 90s, I saw this in the Castro with the continuing popularity of the 70s hold-over from the Tom of Finland mystique: leather-clad muscular men usually sporting a mustache. It was an idolization of manliness that morphed into something monstrous: symbolized by the lost male who sought out a string of dominant men to repeatedly take him anally – in an early visit to a bathhouse I witnessed a lone “bottom” with a line of men waiting to mount him. John Steinbeck explored the group-male-think phenomena gone wrong in “of Mice and Men,” through the eyes of a male character’s wife:
“If I catch any one man, and he’s alone, I get along fine with him. But just let two guys get together an’ you won’t talk. Jus’ nothin’ but man…You’re all scared of each other, that’s what. Evr’one of you’s scared the rest goin’ to get something on you.”
In simple language, a world without women is not a world of pure masculinity, but of masculinity unfounded, tenuous, and grossly self-centered. For, without the feminine life-force, masculinity is never fulfilled – it remains locked into a series of clichés. In gay men, therefore, masculinity is never realized. Eventually, it turns on itself and results in further fragmentation: hence, the seemingly endless obsession with over-particularization and fetishizing of various body parts from silicon-engorged penises to grossly elongated nipples. Amongst all of this, the human being is lost; ultimately all that is left is the body, and, in the end, it also destroys itself; for this reason, the gay male community is still plagued by AIDS and a cadre of new and more deadly viruses. The all-male world of gay men is physically, hormonally, and psychologically out-of-balance; the drive towards same-sex marriage, a uniquely heterosexual institution, that gay men once ridiculed as nauseatingly conventional, is a last-ditch attempt at restabilization. Collectively, the current situation has continually reached a point of singularity – a point in space where everything turns into nothingness.