Men with men, again

This is a set of comments I left at Gay Patriot. I like sharing the wealth :) and Ex Cathedra readers get illustrations as well. For free!

(Later note: I realize I have posted on this issue before, here.)

A global/historical survey shows several different styles of male/male sexual interaction: initiatory, or age-graded (older w younger)…Greece seems to a combo of both…

situational (military, prisons, etc.)…

transvestic, with a masculine-status top and a feminine-status bottom (I call this “heteroid” because it mimics male/female structure: everything from the “rough trade” and “queen” style of preStonewall days, and the “berdache” of the AmerIndians).

 

At left, unknown. At right, extremely queeny skater Johnny Weir

Tiny minority of military couplings (Theban band, some samurai).

What all these have in common (Thebans perhaps excepted) is a hierarchy of top/bottom, so that the male/male coupling, rather than undermining or subverting the masculine culture, supports it. Tops did not lose masculine status; bottoms had feminized status (which they outgrew if based on age). All these formats reflect the fundamental concern about gender identity and gender opposition in the service of maintaining a patriarchal gender order. Exceptions were very rare indeed.

What is (or was) unusual, even revolutionary, about the modern “gay” construct is that the distinction of masculine tops and femininine bottoms was submerged into a commonly embraced identity based on the gender of the partner, not the role; and that this was proclaimed as an enduring and important marker of personal and group identity, like race; and that all “gays” either laid claim to full status as men OR used their difference, drawing from feminism, to deconstruct (aka attack) the idea of masculinity for all males, not just themselves.

The current sexual Yugoslavia known as LGBT follows that last stream. IMHO, same-sex attracted men who wish to assert their share in the male tribe are a minority, while the public face of gaydom is dominated by the gender-deconstruction ideology. It had two novel possibilities: to have men who love men claim their place in the male world, rejecting the historical assignment of tops and bottoms to separate genderized realms OR joining with dissatisfied females to attack the ancient regime of nature as sexually binary: males and females as distinctly different and opposite ways of being human. Especially with the inclusion of the T in LGBT, this agenda is solidified.

For this conservative “gay” man, only the prior novelty is attractive. The LGBT model and its feminist dominated agenda is both personally unappealing and IMHO unsustainable over the long term and therefore culturally suicidal. To put it in Jack Donovan’s typically brusque way: A society dominated by women and effeminates cannot survive.

PS It is perfectly possible for men to develop deep emotional, passionate attachments to each other that are not sexual. Male bonding is a powerful archetypal force.  Militaries run on that energy.

My guess is that most friendships of this type were, as advertized, not sexual, even if they sounded, or even were, romantic. (I’ve had some experience of this myself.)

But that having been said, if two males whose sense of themselves is that they are men did or do in fact have a passionate physical connection, it would make sense for them to deny (and to believe it) that they were “queer”.

Because the price of that admission is loss of manhood status. And in any society not in the process of decay, that is a priceless possession, usually gained at a cost. And as any honest homosexual can tell you, that judgment against them, that they are not really men, remains one of their deepest wounds.