Too male to be gay?

My very dear friend L was here this weekend and she took a picture of me with the GG bridge and SF bay in the background. The sun was in my eyes and my squinting brought out even more of the "character lines" in my face. But it was a decent shot, I thought. (I've blurred it out for the sake of my privacy and survival; a man with my opinions could find himself pretty unwelcome in the open and tolerant neighborhood where I live).

She emails me that some straight women friends of hers who saw her shots could not believe I was gay because I looked too "male" in the picture.

Well, there we go.

I do keep getting unhappy confirmation from the environment that for mostly everyone, gayness is not about the object of your sexual desire, but the deviance of your gender behavior. For mostly everyone, gay usually means effeminate.

Actually, when I saw the picture, I thought of how gay I looked! Here I am, about to be 62 years old, in jeans, a Henley shirt and a leather jacket, tall and lean, with a very short haircut and a goatee. How many straight men, especially of my vintage, look like that? I just think of myself as an updated version of the Castro Clone.

Manhood, of course, is not simply a matter of style and presentation. At its base, it is about a particularly gendered kind of strength, archetypally expressed in a variable triad of power, courage and skill. Just dressing for the part or looking tough is not enough. If that were the case, then the leather queens and muscle Marys of the Castro would have achieved what heroes risk their lives for.

I am well aware of my deficiencies as a man. I am a better man than some, but there are indeed (many) better men than me. Being honest about that is part of specifically masculine honor, I think. But I don't usually elevate my flaws into virtues or, less, victimization tokens. And I am also well aware of the qualities in me that lie closer to the feminine end of the gender spectrum, many of which I like.

Imperfect though I be, I like being a man. Don't want to be anything else.

My ex and I frequently take on this subject, masculinity, and although he usually agrees with me by the end of the evening, grudgingly, his initial testy (sic) response even to raising the issue is typical of gay men, most of whom have truly been wounded precisely in their masculine identities and are very reactive about it. He is a black man, and so I have come up with an analogy which I hope will make clearer to him why I even give a damn about this stuff...which is one of his questions.

I will ask him to imagine two neighborhoods. One is mostly black, but the black people there work hard at appearing to be white, and white of a certain kind, a kind of stereotypical whiteness. They have a shared contempt for blacks. Another neighborhood is mostly white, and there the style is to be a Wigga, which they practice along with a disdain for other whites.
Discuss.

I think he will get the point. The fakery and especially the disguised self-hatred. There are certainly lots of ways of being black and being white and some of them overlap, naturally. We have lived together on this continent for centuries; how could it be otherwise? But there's a big difference between putting on a performance and living out an individuality.
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