Sunday, January 4, 2015

A World Without Women

Joseph Sciambra, a former gay porn star, reflects upon his experiences. (Warning: graphic language.) To quote:
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.” (Read more.)
Share

No comments: