Gay Masculinity and Its Discontents

Show Notes

Gays being masc has been making people mad for half a century now, and in this episode, we read Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 Christopher Street essay, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?” to find out why. We discuss the rise of “gay macho” in the 1970s, exemplified by the clone, the leather bar, BDSM, and urban gay male promiscuity. We talk about different gay male stances toward feminism, the enduring belief that effeminacy is inherently radical, and the tendency of gays of all styles to declare that “all” gays are being gay in a way that excludes them. We talk about the origins of our erotic fascination with masculinity and the importance of being able to revel in what we find hot without overthinking it. 

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Sources

Seymour Kleinberg, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?,” Christopher Street, March 1978.

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Society, Culture, and Politics (2002)

Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.

 

Edmund White, “Fantasia on the Seventies,” Christopher Street, September 1977.

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (2009)

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Seymour Kleinberg, Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America (1980)

Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1980.

Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (2005)

Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (1990) 

Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” London Review of Books, March 22, 2018.

Anastasia Berg, “Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu Responds to Amia Srinivasan,” The Point, July 18, 2018.

Leo Bersani, Homos (1995)

Creators and Guests

Host

Blake Smith

Blake Smith is a historian, writer, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, Tablet, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.

Host

David Sessions

David Sessions is a historian and journalist. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Dissent, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others.

What is Off Christopher Street?

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip through the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

speaker-0: And I do think that somehow the feeling that I'm being gay in the wrong way, like I'm being gay in like, you there's a hegemonic way of being gay, which is either mask for mask, like pool party, hot white guy, or is like the queer effeminate politically correct. One of those is dominating the gay culture and I'm not a part of it, so I'm suffering, but also I'm a brave rebel who is opposing.

speaker-1: Yeah, right.

speaker-0: ⁓ And, you know, mean, shocking idea. What if gay culture were sort of multivalent? There were different kinds of gay guys, but they're all still gay. They're all still guys. ⁓ That seems, that's a thought that people were having in the 70s, but it seems hard to hold on to.

speaker-1: This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast where we look into the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions and I am joined by my co-host, fellow historian, and Mandarin knower of all things gay, high and low, Blake Smith. In this episode, we talk about the rise of so-called gay macho in the 1970s, which cultural commentators both inside and outside the gay world connected to the new prominence of the leather bar and BDSM sexual practices. We take a look at the March, 1978 issue of Christopher Street, which bore the cover line, the new masculinity of gay men. Where have all the sissies gone? In the accompanying essay, the gay academic Seymour Kleinberg was not happy about this masculine turn in gay culture, which he saw as a betrayal of the political radicalism of 60s androgyny and gay men's alliance with feminists and the women's movement. We discuss different gay stances in relation to feminism, both past and present, and the idea, which is still with us today, that effeminacy is inherently radical, that being more effeminate and therefore a more abject political subject somehow confers some kind of ethical authority. We also reflect on the roots of the persistent tendency in the gay world to complain that other gays are being gay in the wrong way. One production note before we get started, we had some technical difficulties with my audio in this episode. A reminder of the fact that we are noobs and we are learning how to do this as we go. We have smoothed it out as best we can, but you will probably hear a bit of roughness in the audio. So sorry about that, but we thought it was one of our best conversations that we've had so far and we really wanted you to hear it. So let's get to it. We hope you enjoy our conversation about gay masculinity and its discontents. Okay, so I thought maybe we could ⁓ talk a little bit about, just set the stage a little bit for people who are not familiar with what the 70s was like, what moment this is coming along in. This is originally appears in Christopher Street in 1978. So it's like a late 70s moment in what is widely tested to be this moment of gay macho. We have the village people song Macho Man, which is-

speaker-0: Macho Man and then I think maybe in 80 or 81 there's the Patrick Cowley and Sylvester Mannergy. Mannergy!

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, that would seem to be, I would think in every way that village people song is probably an anthem of this. Like it's describing like the muscles and going to the gym and having a great body and being a macho man. And it's also like kind of dumb and like, you know, mainstream disco. ⁓

speaker-0: One must say already the categories begin to undermine themselves because the song is pretty camp. I mean it is

speaker-1: I mean, I think that, I think the village are the, you know, the great formative, you know, refutation of this essay is that it's simultaneously macho man and extremely campy and, you know, kind of cartoonish.

speaker-0: But okay, before we undermine the categories, we should establish them.

speaker-1: Yes. Okay. I looked at this, this book, the seventies by the historian Bruce Shulman. And it's not a textbook, but it's like a book you would read if you wanted to get like a cultural and political overview of the seventies in the U S. And so I looked back at that and it just, it like reinforced this moment of gender questioning of uncertainty about what it meant to be a man. There's lots of books in the early seventies about you know, masculinity and what it, this kind of sense that the meaning of what it used to mean to be a man in the fifties and sixties has kind of faded or has kind of shattered maybe in the wake of the sixties. And now we have to like figure it out again.

speaker-0: There's this real interest in the 70s in Alan Alda among women as like a symbol of a gentle, sensitive masculine. Alan Alda was a sex-

speaker-1: He mentions that I don't know who Aldo Nalda is, I just saw his name in the book.

speaker-0: ⁓ he was the wisecracker from MASH. So he's like skinny, gentle, acerbic. He's like ⁓ a not so aggressively Jewish Woody Allen, who was also very much in people's mind. And this is a little later, but in 1982, there's the great ⁓ real men don't eat quiche, which is like looking back at the 70s and like the gentle masculinity and. and trying to mock it. yeah, this was an era of the newly sensitive man, the man who's taken on a bit of feminism. It was the performative man.

speaker-1: So in the broader culture, it's a moment of sensitive masculinity or kind of a new sort of man or a blurring of the old gender roles. And so in a way, like this gay turn to macho, which starts in the early to mid seventies in San Francisco and the Castro and then is spread into New York and the broader gay culture through this explosion in the seventies of gay software magazines like Blue Boy and then born nationalized this gay aesthetic. it's more of a late, it's by the late seventies, it's both, ⁓ I think maybe you could say that gay culture is like on, on the vanguard of the turn away from the rest of the seventies, like the turn toward the Reagan, or, know, retrenchment of gender roles, even though it's, no, I don't think it's that necessarily.

speaker-0: Yeah, so mean, in 74 already, Sontag is one of the first maybe national critics to note this turn in gay male culture toward a pornography-informed, newly masculine style where there's like leather and chaps.

speaker-1: Is that are you referring to the fascinating fascism essay in 70s?

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the essay is supposed to be 90 % about Lenny Riefenstahl, but the last 10 % is like, ⁓ and by the way, you know who's into Hitler now is these gays with, you know, they're sort of Kenneth Anger looking like porny, acting like Marlon Brando from the 50s. And, you know, I mean, she would know because most of her friends were homos. And so she's very concerned about this politically.

speaker-1: Yeah, so that's what we talked about clone style and culture before. That's this thing that comes from the Castro, this kind of style of gay men dressing in flannel and 501 Levi's jeans and wearing boots and kind of presenting or forming these roles of maybe what trade used to be.

speaker-0: That's right, by the 70s, has disappeared. Trade knows it's gay to have sex with a guy. And so we have to become trade. That's an unexamined piece of this story, by the way. know, people now are talking about trade. Trade has somehow come back into discourse, but classic trade, I don't know if it exists.

speaker-1: So I thought maybe like to get started, I will read a quote from Kleinberg, this Kleinberg essay that is setting up his observation about gay culture in the late seventies. And then there's another one from Edmund White that appeared in Christopher Street the year before that is also summing up the seventies as a decade and contrasting it with the 60s that kind of, even though I don't think Edmund White would agree with this Steinberg essay at all, it does give a similar perception of what the 70s are about as a decade. So why don't you talk about a little bit about the beginning of how the essay begins, because that sort of takes us into the world of late 70s New York. And it's also a bit of a weird beginning.

speaker-0: It begins in a way, relatedly enough. ⁓ don't know if, depending on the order in which episodes will have been released, listeners may or may not know that David is a sometime go-go dancer. So this begins with Kleinberg who will properly introduce, I guess in a minute, but let's say he's a middle-aged academic and he has decided to go to the Anvil and is very taken by the performance of a go-go dancing Daniel, who is very hot, very fit, who can do great things on the trapeze, which I guess the anvil has like a whole kind of gymnastic set for the go-go dancers, but Daniel is one of the few who can really work it. And he then, like, I don't know how, learned

speaker-1: And his, and we should say just because it's fun, his party trick, apparently his performer trick is that he can take dollar bills from the customers with his ass cheeks. ⁓ It has never occurred to me to even try to do that, so I don't know.

speaker-0: Can you do that, David? Well, you should, you should. So yeah, for one thing, I wonder, can we all do that? Is it actually really difficult? I've never tried to hold a piece of paper in my butt.

speaker-1: I cannot work very well, we were, which-

speaker-0: That did not surprise me in the... Yeah, that...

speaker-1: Yeah, it's not really my style, not really what I would do, but this past Sunday, the other dancer was kind of comically trying to teach me to twerk in front of the audience. then, of course, because I'm trying to do it and overthinking it, I can't. And so I'm just...

speaker-0: Were people into that? Were they like perversely into the not being able to do it?

speaker-1: I don't know, I- sometimes it's just boring and like we have to do something to be, you know, to be interesting.

speaker-0: But okay, so Daniel who can hold a dollar bill between his clenched ass cheeks, he looks like a college athlete or construction worker, which Kleinberg notes are like the big porn archetypes. So this go-go boy is really embodying like the spirit of 70s porn. And he's a total ⁓ masochist bottom, which Kleinberg finds fascinating. And then after. Going on about how Daniel is into degrading sex for a while, Kleinberg says that this is representative of the new masculinity in gay culture, which is informed by pornographic images like the construction worker or the athlete and is informed by BDSM sexual practices. And Kleinberg does not like it, although he clearly is thinking a lot about Daniel. is very, back again at the end of the essay for quite some time.

speaker-1: So what did you make of this as a, it's kind of a weird intro because it's not clearly about the subject of the, you know, it's not clearly related to the subject of the essay at all. Or maybe the way that he tries to make it relate to the essay kind of illustrates what I think are some of the confusions or equations. So we have hot guy who like has a masculine image, a guy who is, you know, is a submissive product or is into what he calls degrading sex and the conflation of those two things. He says, ⁓ he's gone to this bar scene. He's talking about like the macho bar scene where it's full of clones, full of dancers like Daniel, full of people in the back room getting fist fucked. And then he says, whether or not one wishes to refrain from judgment, one thing is clear, if not glaring, the universal stance is a studied masculinity. There are no limp wrists, no giggles. No, indiscreet, hip, swiveling. Walk, talk, costume, grooming are just right. This is macho country. It is a rigorous place where one destroys himself in drugs and sexual humiliation. So that's the other part I was trying to remember. So he's like equating kind of drug use and like promiscuity with this, you know, masculine macho moment. So the other one, I wanted to put that paragraph in comparison to this other one from Ed White, from his essay that was also in Christopher Street the year before called Fantasia on the 70s. It's a really great essay. It's like a great short piece of, for a short essay, it does a lot. It's a great piece of cultural criticism and observation. Edmund White says this, he says, indeed the unisex of the 60s has been planted by heavy sex in the 70s and the urge toward fantasy has come out of the closet and entered the bedroom or the back room. The end to role playing that feminism and gay liberation promise has not occurred. Quite the reverse, gay pride has come to mean the worship of machismo. So here we go, like move from unisex 60s to role-playing 70s. Gay pride is equated now with machismo. And then he says, no longer is sex confused with sentiment. Although many gay people in New York may be happily living in other less rigorous decades, the gay male couple inhabiting the 70s is composed of two men who love each other. share the same friends and interests, and fuck each other almost inadvertently once every six months during a particularly stoned impromptu three-way.

speaker-0: Right, that seems very pointed and specific. ⁓

speaker-1: We have this very sense, this identical like bundle of conflations. So we have gender roles, machismo, promiscuity, group sex and drugs, just all kind of mashed together.

speaker-0: And I think probably all of these things are really happening in the 70s, that there's an explosion of promiscuity, like in gay New York and gay San Francisco. ⁓ There's a certain macho looking, sartorial visual style. And there's a ⁓ popularization of BDSM practices. And people like White and Kleinberg and Sontag. are sort of packaging them all together to say there's a new kind of gay guy. Like in the 60s, the gay guy was into cunty little lamps and going to the opera. And now gay guys are wearing leather and fisting each other. Don't we love a cunty little lamp? mean, that's, you know.

speaker-1: ⁓ Yes. Well, this is like, this is interesting because I actually don't know what I don't know what the 60s gay guy was like. ⁓ Or even even in 69 when, you know, when Stonewall happens, I don't, you know, we don't have the clone yet, but I don't really know what the typical We had like, there was Frank Kameny and we had these 50s, know, Manischin activists and they were very respected politics and like, we're dressed in suits and we look like men and women.

speaker-0: So one surely non-representative way of thinking about this, know, Sontag has her essay on camp from 64, which she defines as a really like gay male sensibility. And there's a passage in Ed White's City Boy where he's recalling how he was trying to suck up to James Merrill, who was born in like 1930, I think, heir to

speaker-1: James Brown is a poet, by the way, right? He's like a rich poet who was a benefactor of lots of gay artists.

speaker-0: Yes, and so heir to the Merrill Lynch fortune and big old queen, you know, classic, you know, living in Greece, speaking French and German, you know, being very like, fae and cute. And in the early seventies, White was trying to cozy up to Merrill to get a taste of that money. Eventually, Merrill sets up a foundation that distributes grants so that, you know, there's not this weird just hitting him up directly for money. Right. Yeah, yeah. White is trying to befriend Merrill and his circle of gays who were like 10 or 15 years older than White. And what Merrill at the time is really into is he has this friend from Alexandria, Bernard de Zogreb, who writes puppet operas in the Creole.

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, I remember this. Okay. This is also in the, like everything in Ed White, it's in multiple books.

speaker-0: Yeah, keep using it. It's in my novel. It's in my memoir. And so he writes these like insane operas in this like Italian, French, Arabic, Greek, Pidgin language that like the servants in the kitchens of the aristocrats of Alexandria spoke at the beginning of the 20th century. And Merrill is like, ⁓ wonderful. Yes, the covered opera. And White is like, has to pretend that this is cool and that he's into it. What the fuck is this? But yeah, this world of gay guys who are into like antique furniture and the novels of J.R. Ackerley and Ronald Furbank and you know, like the coded, the indirect, like the tittering. And White has a little bit of that aesthetic himself in his first novels, but like the 70s see this shift to a more direct, confrontational, open, sexually aggressive, non-oblique kind of gay sensibility, which. You know, the macho, the pornographic is like one manifestation.

speaker-1: Yeah, I guess maybe, maybe Isherwood. You might, I don't think these writers are necessarily typical of much as individuals, but Isherwood might be a 60s gay who's, he's kind of, you he's as an elite education, this aristocratic, very much a homintern type figure. He's also like, as I understand, like fairly masked himself. And he writes, you know, books like A Single Man, which are about fairly conventional, know, masculine figures.

speaker-0: And are like direct, straightforward or not. Yeah, not at all.

speaker-1: Yes, they're very real, you know, very direct kind of writing. So what we've been saying, there's this impression of the 70s, like at the same time, it has been this cultural searching for a new vision of what it means to be a man or trying to replace, to expand or interrogate kind of what masculinity is. And then by the late 70s, this gay style at least that is sort of theatrically almost formatively macho. And that is what Seymour Kleinberg is responding to in this and know, Sontag writes about it, Edmund White notes it in that essay. That's what Seymour Kleinberg is.

speaker-0: Right. And for him, this, you know, turbo bottom BDSM go-go dancer is emblematic of the new masculinity in which you can be, for instance, like a super bottom, but also have this virile muscled body, this kind of athletic moves. One of the things that Kleinberg is thinking about, he both wants to contrast this new masculinity in gay culture with the old world of camp, you know, that was discussed in the 60s, and with the idea that there used to be like defined sexual roles, so that if you're a bottom, you're like especially effeminate and you're like doing your hair up like a woman and you're tittering around. And if you're a top, then you're straight acting. And now everyone can be, regardless of sexual position, tough, macho, and you can only tell by where the hanky is. That's what-

speaker-1: Yeah, so that passage about the hanky is, I don't want to jump into before we kind of walked through the essay a little bit. So let's come back to that. I just wanted to like pay close attention to this part that we have read already. So this kind of this initial observation, Weinberg has gone into the bar, he's seen Daniel, he's seen the clones, you know, he's calling this the macho bar scene. And he has this summation of it. The universal stance is a studied masculinity. I think you put that really well there. Like I think what these cultural critics are doing, they're noting that something has happened. They're conflating a little bit. You know, there's this macho style, there's this explosion of promiscuity. There's this cultural kind of interest in BDSM. It shows up in art and also in what gay men are doing at these leather bars and back rooms and stuff. And so the cultural critics like Sontag and White are kind of that together. But do we buy it? Do we buy that? Do we really think that there was a universal stance of studied masculinity?

speaker-0: At a leather bar, maybe sure. I don't know. I don't know if you've watched Bros. My partner just watched it. Justice for Billy Eichner. I love Bros. Billy Eichner is deeply annoying, that's no reason

speaker-1: Yeah, I've watched it a couple times. He's hella annoying, but it's quite a good movie. I enjoyed it. I felt a little sad that it flopped.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's very, yeah, I mean, many things went wrong with the marketing of this film. And then Eichner had like, you know, his meltdown where he's like, you know, it was very like Hillary Clinton saying, shame on women for not voting for me. I hope he gets to make another and there's that great scene where, you know, he goes home with this black guy who then has the poster of is it Barbara or it's one of the divas and Eichner is like,

speaker-1: Yes. But-

speaker-0: ⁓ my God, you're also a queen. You're supposed to be like giving like Dom Top, BBC, Realness.

speaker-1: There's also the love interest that he ends up with. You know, he's this huge, ripped, very kind of guy that, you know, might, might be dumbly said that he has internalized homophobia. He's like the football player, the macho man and his dream that Billy Eichner helps him realize is to make faggy little chocolates. Opens the chocolate store. Yeah.

speaker-0: ⁓ I forgot about that. ⁓ I mean, this is also like, you know, to all the rice queens out there or potential rice queens, this is a thing about Asian guys is they don't know that cooking undermines your masculinity in Western culture. So yeah, I mean, a man who can cook.

speaker-1: here's another, let me read another passage. is the central message of the macho bar world. Manliness is the only real virtue. Other values are contemptible. And manliness is not some philosophical notion or psychological state. It is not even morally related to behavior. It lies exclusively in the glamorization of physical strength. So there's a lot of very, very declarative ⁓ words here.

speaker-0: The bar has a message. There is a universal message and everyone is somehow communicating the same thing. But it could even be true that like, okay, I'm not hanging out so much at leather bars, but when it's time for me to have sex with my partner or back in the day when I'm looking for it, I do not queen out with my partner. I do not call him girl. do not like, ⁓ no, she didn't.

speaker-1: The bar has a message.

speaker-0: That's for like my sisters. And that like we can have both of those in our repertory. Like, yeah, if I'm like at the bar to get but I'm not gonna like, you know, okay, girl, how you doing? Like, okay, so for instance, when you are in professional mode, when you are being Daniel, are you expressing a universal stance of studied masculinity? Are there no limp wrists, giggles or indiscreet hips swiveling?

speaker-1: Yes, right. ⁓ I probably perform a sort of masculinity that's more than my natural state. ⁓ cause I know that that's what, that's what people find hot or like what they like. Yeah. So there you might say that is, that is a studied masculinity. It's a kind of style of, especially for dancing, like, you know, I'm not really a real dancer or not good, certainly not good at it. Then, you know, the, the ABCs of dancing is that loose fluid movements look feminine and constricted jerky ones look masculine. And so like, you know, that's the one thing I've learned how to do.

speaker-0: I love the choreography of the guys from Troye Sivan's Rush video, which is like, cartoonishly over the top. Yes. Doing like a pro, but they're doing like swastikas with their arms. Yeah. Like, are so butch. But, I mean, one thing that I wonder, like, in general, whenever someone is, like, accusing a gay guy of being too masculine and therefore, like, reactionary or too normative, too, like, ⁓ too straight passing, like, Daniel...

speaker-1: Yes, yeah

speaker-0: has dollar bills clenched between his buttocks. So like, is that masculine? Is that like, it's maybe, I guess, but it seems also pretty gender non-normative.

speaker-1: Yes. Well, he does, he does, you know, ultimately say that like try to use Daniel as some like example of ⁓ an extreme individual like Quentin Crisp, who is not following the crowd, you know, in any way. But otherwise, I think the example of Daniel as super masculine is kind of weird. But so let's let's summarize here what his overall argument is since we clearly want to jump in.

speaker-0: Taxing in a phrase he has here, young gay men seem to have abjured effeminacy. So I mean, the title, which we haven't yet referred to, Where Have All the Sissies Gone? The sissy is gone. The camp queen, she has passed. And this is like, there is a widely held belief in the late seventies, this is in White's Fantasia on the seventies. This is, if I haven't mentioned it, I think 79 or 80s when the play premieres, and then there's the movie in 82, 83. Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, which begins with his wonderful monologue as he's applying the makeup for his drag in Mirror. And he says, know, soon we're going to be gone like Emma Sinanti. know, like drag will disappear as part of the disappearance of the sissy, effeminate gay culture. Of course, the sissies are still here, drag is still here. But there is like, there is a really strong thought that, okay, this is going. Like the young gays are not in.

speaker-1: Right, which is, I guess it's plausible that, you know, as we've talked about before, like this is an important moment of gay culture where it genuinely feels like something new has happened and it's very much up in the air, like what's going to become of it or which direction it's going to go. This is the first generation that is fully out and participating in this kind of gay culture. So like, it's not impossible to think that this is things that used to be part of this are not going to be around forever.

speaker-0: Right, that's good point. Retrospectively, okay, you're right. It's easy for me to say how dumb they were, but it could well have felt very real, very plausible.

speaker-1: Because there's another essay in Christopher Street about that, you know, stop being so mean to the drag queens.

speaker-0: We should have bullied them more. Now, you know, we're going to have 50 seasons of Drag Race.

speaker-1: So what's going on here is he thinks, or he says the sissy is gone. The sissy is fading. Why is that bad? Why do we-

speaker-0: Sissy is fading and I don't like it and the sissy is exemplified for him by the wonderful Quentin Crisp who at this point in Crisp's career like Crisp also I think was born in like the 20s 30s and

speaker-1: Let's just let's footnote and say like who's going Chris?

speaker-0: Quentin Crisp is a sort of commentator, entertainer, had been just a kind of London cultural figure and person about town who was noted for his eccentric, flamboyant, super-faggy, effeminate dress in like the 40s, 50s. And in the early 70s, I think, had published his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, which became a made-for-TV movie, which had made him really famous, and then he'd become sought after for talk shows. both in the UK and in the US. And eventually he becomes a writer for Christopher Street. For some reason, he becomes the movie reviewer, which doesn't make any sense, but he's an entertaining movie reviewer. He's someone who like sort of a Fran Leibovitz is just sought after for his opinion on whatever random thing.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, and sort of like I would say like Gore Vidal too, even though Vidal wrote about politics and was seen as like a serious thinker and generally commented on more serious subjects, there was that sense of like the media likes him because he's flamboyant. He's going to say something outrageous. can call him up for a quote. He's going to give you a good line.

speaker-0: I mean, Crisp has many wonderful one-liners. He's very entertaining. He's sort of our Oscar Wilde or like the Oscar Wilde of this Post Stonewall era. He moves to New York like to further capitalize on his fame. Kleinberg makes him out to be representative of the camp spirit, which is effeminate, flippant. Like that's Crisp's way of dealing with homophobia is both to be very obviously like a faggot, but also to be constantly joking. to have a very English, stiff, mocking response to whatever is happening. Kleinberg doesn't want to uphold that as the model of how gays ought to be, but he's sort of more full of-

speaker-1: He very much recognizes that that was part of pre-Stonewall closeted gay culture, it was a response to oppression, he makes very clear that he's not saying we necessarily should go back to that. Continue.

speaker-0: But I think he was hopeful that as part of the 60s counterculture kind of generalization of effeminacy or like that sort of stance of anti-normative gender transgression ⁓ could be a way of turning down the key on gender difference, on patriarchy, chauvinism, all of that. That men be learning from the camp aesthetic, could be learning from people like Crisp, how to access their own internal femininity. There was a lot of stuff in the 70s both about getting in touch with your inner child and getting in touch with whatever your gender is with the other gender inside you so that you can balance. And that is not what happened with Gay Liberation. Kleinberg is a bit salty that instead of us all becoming a little bit Quintin Crisp, instead we're looking like extras.

speaker-1: Right, yeah. In one of the other essays that in his book, Alienated Affections, I'm not sure if this one appeared in Christopher Sheet or not, I copied out this paragraph because this one is like his kind of his political biography or his political and intellectual biography. And he says very explicitly this politics or this ideal that I think comes out in this other essay that we're discussing. So he talks about immediate stonewall gay liberation politics. He finds it like a little bit ⁓ a little bit bombastic and childish for like the revolutionary tenor of it. And then he's like, but you know, I was wrong. Like it got after a few years, it got a little bit more serious and started focusing like on real politics as opposed to this performance of revolution. And then he says this, this new seriousness ⁓ was partly expressed in the aesthetics of sexual life, the androgynous look that swept away all of the old fashions and stances. We were consciously and defiantly rejecting the verities about masculinity and role, masculinity and dominance. It was unclear where all of this was heading, but it didn't seem to matter. And then he says something like, but it seemed pretty sure that it was better than what came before it. And then he talks about the gay academic union and working together with gay men and women scholars and them all having a dance together and being in solidarity. So there's that aspect of it. thinks of the sixties as this kind of the androgyny, the style of the sixties as an androgynous look as not being necessarily good in itself, but in opening the possibility of questioning patriarchy, questioning gender roles. And this is the, the, the, political core of this is that he's basically a feminist. He's basically saying that gay, you know, the correct gay stance or gay politics is a variant of feminism. and it is a challenge to patriarch.

speaker-0: One thing that I've been thinking about from my own work recently is there's maybe two importantly different ways that gay men in the late 60s and 70s are thinking about the message of feminism. Secondly, feminism is about women learning to psychically disinvest from male patterns of thinking, from male chauvinism. There's a lot of critique among feminists of the male identified woman. You need to stop thinking about your life through your husband, through male validation. Oh yeah, yeah, stop being a pick me girl. Um, I mean, I want men to pick me. I want them to pick me up, but where was the

speaker-1: And there is a moment we should talk about in this essay where he's basically like, don't be a pick me, like you're trying to be a respectable black or an assimilated Jew. Like you're trying to be a mass gay guy. You're just being a

speaker-0: two ways that gay guys learn from the feminist movement. So one is there are these ⁓ effeminist groups who put out like an effeminist manifesto who are part of the gay liberation front founded just after Stonewall, who say like, yeah, gay men also suffer from patriarchy, from male chauvinism, suffer from the way that maleness is defined, and they need to also disinvest from masculinity. to do this. internal psychological work to pull out from their identification with traditional maleness. The other way of learning from feminism would be to say like, well, yeah, women need to stop identifying with these male concepts and inherited male values. Women need to separate from men and think about, like in consciousness raising circles in the political women's movement, what it means to be a woman. Similarly, gay men need to not just like download the program of what women are doing, but gay men also need to have like their separate groups. They need to think about, what would it mean to be a man if being a man is no longer about dominating women, right? If being a man is no longer defined in relation to women, then what could gay men be? And one thing that men might do by themselves is like live out their cowboy biker porno fantasies. or be like naughty school boys together, I don't know. Yeah, I think it's important that like for me, neither of those is necessarily more or less obviously feminist or more or less obviously leftist than the other. And in some ways, like a certain gay male separatism or a certain like gay male interest in masculinity is informed by the model of second-wave feminism, right? Like, ⁓ yeah, it seems like you women are doing something interesting. What if we tried to also do a version of that? Which would mean not just like following your like trying to not be men the way you're trying to not be men, but trying to not be straight men.

speaker-1: Yes, right. Yeah, Yeah, so I think what's interesting there is that, and I don't know if we could attribute one of those options to Christopher Street as a whole, but I would certainly Denany and probably Christopher Street as a whole are, it's more like we are copying the identitarianism of the women's movement or other minority groups and we're trying to do a gay version of it. And that's more about who are we as gay people. gay men as a gay culture, like what does that mean for us to define ourselves as opposed to being defined by straight culture? Whereas what Kleinberg is doing, I think, is something more like just gay men are feminists. We are part of feminism or we are part of the women's movement or we are allies in a joint war against patriarchy. And he says, like at the end, the very last paragraph of the essay is like, what is worth affirming is not bravura, but political alliance with women. and with a whole liberal America that is dedicated to a freedom of personal

speaker-0: And as you mentioned, he keeps warning gay guys not to identify with the enemy, to dress like the oppressor. And at some point he means this specifically in a kind of funny way, like don't dress like Nazis, because there's a lot of reading of the like BDSM culture. This is in Sontag of like seeing that as being somehow about fascism, as being about like getting off sexually to Nazis. And you see this with like critiques of Tom of Finland.

speaker-1: That it's a kind of, there's something inherently fascist about domination. Sontag basically says that. And so does, you mentioned the midge dector, is off the beach essay earlier. She also says that.

speaker-0: There's the great scene, turning into faggot, where the old Jewish father sees this leather orgy and thinks it's bunch of neo-Nazis. There's also a very funny scene in Larry Kramer's rant from the 2000s, the tragedy of today's gays, where he's saying that gays need to stop doing meth. He's like, you know who loved meth? Hitler. But I bet that just turns you on more, doesn't it?

speaker-1: But okay, so where we go, so we are making this distinction between two different gay responses to feminism. Like one is like, we are feminists, we are part of the women's movement, we are a branch of the women's movement. And the other one is like, we are doing an equivalent thing to what feminists are doing.

speaker-0: Right, and Kleinberg is very much in the former and when he says, don't identify with your enemy, sometimes he means specifically Nazis, but more generally he means like straight conservative traditional men. And he has a lot of ire and critique, not just for the leather queens, but he mentions these two gay pioneers, Leonard Matlovich, who was I think in the Air Force and outed himself in the 70s to protest, you the anti-gay policies in the military and this football player, David Copay. And both of these are also very contemporary stories. mean, we still are hearing about professional athletes coming.

speaker-1: Right. So David Cope is a football player who comes out. assume he is not an active NFL player because he's still much later talking about there's never been an out gay NFL player. But, but David Cope right comes out as a football player, writes a memoir. It's excerpted in Christopher Street. He's very much one of these, one of these figures who's kind of like the first to come out in their field gets a little bit of media attention. Usually Christopher Street is like. running EPSR.

speaker-0: Yeah, sadly there's very few first gay guy to come out in the role of X available still. I don't know. Like, what's... Yeah, we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

speaker-1: I mean, for the NHL, still, apparently we have to do a fictional version.

speaker-0: A heated rivalry discourse I you know, I had not wanted to participate in and then I think because of you, because of your text, I am now getting on the algo clips and then I did click on them and now I can't escape. I can't help it. The Wajian one looks like my future son. So I got to... Where was this going?

speaker-1: David okay, so we're talking about these these mainstream kind of kind of masque guy

speaker-0: Kleinberg hates it. mean, hating the mask gay guy and imagining that this person actually has it really easy is a classic seething gay left intellectual, now social media kind of thing. yeah, have you pulled up the passage of see if not, I have it in front of me. Leonard Matlovich, when media reporters treat him and copay just like the mainstream Americans they have always been.

speaker-1: Go ahead.

speaker-0: They make a point many gays approve of. Homosexual men are really like everyone else. If beneath Matlovich's conservative, be-medaled chest beat aberrant yearnings, the public, not the army, can accommodate them. What makes Copay and Matlovich seem acceptable to gays and straights alike, although Quentin Crisp remain pitiful? Now, of course, Quentin Crisp is like on the Tonight Show and has a best-selling book. Matlovich gets thrown out of the military. It's like, who's having a good time? I don't know, but... There is a strong belief, you see this also in the very activated response to that white picket fence photo of Pete and Chastain a few years ago.

speaker-1: The girls went crazy

speaker-0: They were like, this is so homonormative. They are sellouts. We hate them. And it's like two guys who butt fuck are on the cover of Time and like Buttigieg is running for president. So like, isn't that pretty radical? Isn't that a bit strange?

speaker-1: I was going to say there is, and you kind of gestured at this already, there is this system idea that I think we're seeing here and is still, it's now a social media discourse, a dumb kind of gay left politics where The more effeminate you are, the worse off you are in the privilege Olympics. Like the lower down you are, you're more oppressed the more effeminate you are. If you're a femme gay, if you're a drag queen or trans, like everyone hates you. You don't have your cis male privilege. so you are, somehow because of that, you are a more radical subject.

speaker-0: You've suffered more and you threw the first brick at Stonewall. was a clocky, clocky...

speaker-1: The revisionist history about this is like you threw the first brick at Stonewall and you and blah, blah, blah. So why is, I guess the question is why is that wrong?

speaker-0: Yeah, so mean, it's a very appealing thought that like, effeminacy is radical. It like, endangers, you know, the patriarchal system. So the more effeminate you are, the better. But also, the more effeminate you are, the more like, you suffer, the more you're abject. And we know that being a miserable abject person is a source of ethical authority. So, you know, we should, we should bow before you. Meanwhile, like, you know, I am... I don't know, like reasonably effeminate. I get, I, you know, I, I persistently get perceived accurately as gay and no one thinks I'm a top. And so like, I am the kind of person who gets called like a faggot on public transportation. You know, I've been in some like dangerous situations that has not generated any moral authority for me, I feel like, or made my politics any sharper. And I certainly feel like within the gay community, right? So there's a kind of double belief where like, if you're more effeminate, you're more in danger and therefore have a kind of authority from that, but also that you're less valued even within the gay community, right? Like no one wants the effeminate, which like, I don't know if that's a skill issue. I don't know if other people are uglier than me, but I have never experienced femme phobia among other gay men.

speaker-1: I mean, I think that that is connected to this idea that also comes up in the essay that he says something like, we didn't become, or the person he's like conjuring to argue against is what that person says is like, the reason. we have this macho culture is that the foundation of all of our sexuality and all of our attractions is our attraction to straight men and to jocks. like we didn't become, we didn't become sissies, but you we didn't see sissies and turn gay. We saw, we became sissies because we saw straight guys. like this idea that the core of gayness is an attraction to a pure version of masculinity as, or maybe as represented ultimately by a straight version of it. And so therefore the people, even the gay men who are closest to embodying that are the highest on the privilege pyramid.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is good. This is good. yeah. Because like it, Kleinberg constructs like, the old model was you try to become the closest thing to a woman so you can attract trade. And now you try to become trade. But both of these assume that like real masculinity is straight guys. It's like a certain kind of like maybe working class straight guy. And gay sexuality is all either appealing to that by negating your masculinity or trying to fulfill that. And it's like, well then. How come people want to fuck me? What's that about? Like, and you know, I find traditional masculinity in some respects appealing, but I also like, well, how is it that I'm with gay guys? It just seems like if this theory is true and it seems it has still a powerful intuitive hold. If you look on any miserable gay Reddit, you will find many people like spontaneously creating new versions of this theory. Right?

speaker-1: Yes, which is the internet term these days for that is creating it from first principles coming up with something on your own that

speaker-0: There's always a term for it. love you know, bless the internet David is in a mood of being very optimistic about the affordances of the internet so we should critical solidarity with the internet

speaker-1: I don't know. We'll see. Okay, so this is, I think that idea is powerful because there is an element of truth to it. So there's a part of the essay where he presents the kind of excuses that other gay men make for participating or being okay with this macho culture. ⁓ And here's one of them. So men tell me that I do not agree... this new celebration of masculinity that I am overlooking an important fact. We fell for masculinity when we were 12. There must be something to it because it made us gay. Most of us didn't become gay because we fell in love with sissies. We became sissies because we fell in love with men, usually jocks. So this is a thing, like I basically believe this. I think there is...

speaker-0: Right, I guess I don't know your sexual type, so this, you're into the jock, that's the...

speaker-1: The, well, let's just, let's generalize here. Yes, but let's generalize here. Like, I think this makes sense. Like we, a lot of our, a lot of our sexual awakenings comes just ambiently by the things that we're around. So that it could be the other boys that were around in school. could be whether we are a part of them or we are kind of lusting at them from a distance. the men that were around in our families. Even if we don't directly desire them, it's where we become aware of masculinity and whether we are a jock ourselves who are passing or hidden among them in the locker room or we are the one who yearns to see what happens in the locker room. have this very, from the beginning, this primal relationship. to these everyday sort of expressions of male sociality and behavior, which is why I think why those things, gyms, locker rooms, sports, like all those things are such a persistent part of the gay like fantasy pantheon and the-

speaker-0: There is a certain both biographical and cultural truth to this fantasy. There's this great book from the late 80s ⁓ that Denny published on St. Martin's Press, The Arena of Masculinity by Brian Ponger about gayness and sports. Also, of course, the columns of Boyd McDonald have a great sense of this. The tweets ⁓ now deleted, maybe he's on Blue Sky, of Corell of Bros. There's a lot. great thinking about the origins of mask for mask in locker room fantasy. I don't know, think part of the problem is that who writes anything, who writes is like former nerds. There are any number of non-hegemonic male styles that gay guys are also sexually invested in. So, I mean, for instance, like my partner, know, sexual. awakening is like the gentle white boys in choir, which God bless, you know, but no one is, I think, very curious about like, what is the desire of the non-mask from people who are not so sexually invested in like the hegemonic jockey masculine type, people who are like after fragile nerds, you know, I mean, there used to be

speaker-1: Well, what I was going to say is like, I don't think that is necessarily the limits or the universe. It's not the universal taste and it's not the limits of anyone's tastes. Like not mine either, but it is the root of the perception that that is like everyone's and especially its dominance in media and representation. like, especially in pornography. The fact that that is what most of the guys in porn look like makes everyone think that this is the ideal. Even if in reality that's not what most people, exactly what most people want, the kind of people that everyone fucks or even wants to fuck, I think that's what gives it, what creates this impression that there's this hierarchy of, you know, who's closest to the ideal and who's not. ⁓

speaker-0: think maybe there's also, there's something interesting about, you there's both a supposed displacement of the sissy in the seventies, but there's also like, you know, more unspeakable, like early 20th century homosexuality, especially in European literature, is understood as pederasty. So like, Gide, Thomas Mann, like they are thinking of homosexuality on an intergenerational model, which really is being renounced in American gay culture in the seventies. And so I think maybe part of like the insistence on masculinity, the jock, yeah, like the high school jock as like the sexiest thing and to be sexy is to be as close to that as possible or like the biker or you know the leather guy. I think some of that is like erasing this connection between like homosexuality and pederasty which like the twink maybe problematically embodies. But people do still like twinks, I mean you know that's the

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, the spirit of pederasty is alive and well for sure.

speaker-0: Which thank God, know, that's what paid for my lunches. Where is this going? Like, one thing I also, you know, in moving into contemporary discourse, frustrating about Kleinberg is like, his proximity is like similarity to the way that like many of us still talk, which is like, there is a way that all gay guys are now in terms of gender, there is a thing that all gay guys want, and I'm not part of it, I am frustrated, but I can do this kind of diagnosis of like the problematic way that all gay guys are. I mean, one could put together an anthology of tweets about the white, mask, pool party, gay, why they shouldn't exist.

speaker-1: Yeah, and we should say I was thinking about this a second ago. There's also the tweet of which everyone dunks on and makes fun of every time it happens but there's also the tweet of the mass gay guy is somehow oppressed in gay culture because he doesn't like divas.

speaker-0: Everyone can feel like, I mean, this is my ex in France was like, you know, traditional masculine guy and felt like, ⁓ I'm excluded from gay culture because like I'm not a Toulouse, you know, I'm not into like the drag culture. I'm not like, she or like everyone can feel like gay culture is one way and that one way excludes them. And there's I guess something satisfying to people about that

speaker-1: Yeah. So I wanted to read one of these letters in response to, so the next issue after this essay came out, there was like a bunch of letters and basically all of them were negative. But I thought this one in particular had an interesting response. So just everything that Kleinberg says about the macho scene is contrary to my own experiences, which I seem to have survived fairly intact. The real crux of his claim is that homosexuals who adopt images of masculinity are eroticizing the very values of straight society that have branded their own lives. That's a quote. Then he says, this is wrong in a number of ways. First, people do not eroticize values, but find certain things erotic. We discover what turns us on. The patterns are already there set at a pretty early age. Should we ignore the allure of butchness for moral reasons and repress the sexuality as Kleinberg seems to imply, Or should we welcome it and explore all its different levels, complications and contradictions? I like this point about we don't eroticize values. Like that gives this kind of consciousness and agency to it. These capital V values, which is kind of like when he's saying like the bar has a message, you know, it's this very like projection of ideas and ideologies onto things that are not really experienced that way. As if bars speak in ideas or people choose to eroticize some certain values as opposed to like, they just discover what they're into. And I think this comment here like points to a debate that is around today and it's still like in feminism where like this Ami Estrinovassan essay about, what is it called? About ncell. the right to sex. ⁓ Is it like, should we interrogate the things that we desire and consider how they're politically constructed and try to change them? Or is desire something that we just discover and we can't do anything about, which that's the Andrea Long-Chu position.

speaker-0: Right. I mean, neither of these seem like terribly well women. This seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. I guess one cool thing about sex and embodiment is, you know, there's really not so many things you can be doing. There's a pretty limited repertory of moves, ⁓ but they can keep signifying differently, right? I mean, the 5,000 times I've gotten fucked, you know, it can be angry, it can be combative, it can be. you know, gentle, can be about intimacy, it can be about creating distance. the meaning of the penis is not like determined once and for all by some patriarchal schema that we then have to be exploding. You know, the penis can keep meaning differently.

speaker-1: Well, that's, that's what I think is weird about this, part where he talks about the old way that in the era of the sissy, there was the one who basically, the bottom basically was a woman and the top was, was a man, was still, you know, pursued respectability as he says. And then he talks about how like, if, know, if you don't want to risk, if you're one, if you're a, you know, a sissy and you don't want to risk being fucked by trade, then, then, then another gay guy will like act out the fantasy with you. pretend to be trade and then he associates this desire to be fucked by trade as a desire for, as a self deception or desire for degradation. And that's related to the seventies, the seventies BDSM and being fist fucked and all that kind of stuff, which is like, he just interprets broadly as a desire for like oblivion or degradation. And that's, that's what's always so weird to me about ⁓ way of like everything has to mean one thing.

speaker-0: Well, and who actually ends up getting smart about this in his old age is Leo Bersani, who, and maybe with this we can head toward a close, but in Is the Rectum a Grave from 87, he really aligns in a heroic way, bottoming with the annihilation of self, construction of masculinity. No one is ever really interested in theorizing topping, I noticed. I don't know if it's that all the theorists are. nerdy bottoms. But there's a lot from that perspective and there's very little about what topping is like. But then in homos, which is like 95, I think, Bressani thinks more playfully and less, in a sort less charged way. it's like, think about anal sex as a kind of hide and seek with the penis. Like, oh, we love the penis, it's big and hard. like, oh, it's disappeared, what happened to the penis? Like, oh, there it is again. I don't know that either of those is like a great reading of what sex is like, but I love we have at least two, we can keep generating more. And the idea that like bottoming either is this like self hating, like attack on one subject. Or is actually the same thing but coded as brave and progressive and feminist because I'm throwing.

speaker-1: Yes, right, right, right. Or the very, ⁓ the refusal to recognize or accept the very thing that's always seemed very obvious to me is that like those positions, sex acts, what it means to you is just so relative to situations and even the same like episode of fucking you can maybe want to do more than one of those things.

speaker-0: I mean, one could be, I would love a kind of short film based on Kleinberg, like following Daniel home from the bar and having all kinds of really intense fantasies about what Daniel is up to and what bottoming means for him. It does feel very like, you if you ever watch high school or college wrestling videos on YouTube, you know, they have millions of views. many pervy comments and it feels very like that. Like there's a lot of theorizing that Kleinberg is doing about where sexuality is at, where bottoming is at today, that is really coming from thinking about like Daniel specifically. Which means you better be careful because, you know, who knows, who might be watching you.

speaker-1: Somebody might be doing cultural criticism about me.

speaker-0: Yeah

speaker-1: All right, well, let's find a way to wrap up. I guess the question I would ask after reading Kleinberg and thinking about this perennial way that the question of how masculine we are seems to be invested with these broader political meanings, the way there seems to be this permanent question about whether other people are being gay the right way.

speaker-0: And I do think that somehow the feeling that I'm being gay in the wrong way, like I'm being gay in like, you there's a hegemonic way of being gay, which is either mask for mask, like pool party, hot white guy, or is like the queer effeminate politically correct. One of those is dominating the gay culture and I'm not a part of it, so I'm suffering, but also I'm a brave rebel who is a

speaker-1: Yeah, right,

speaker-0: And, you know, mean, shocking idea, what if gay culture were sort of multivalent, there were different kinds of gay guys, but they're all still gay, they're all still guys. That seems, that's a thought that people were having in the 70s, but it seems hard to hold on to.

speaker-1: So what is your philosophy of masculinity? What is the correct way to think about gays and masculinity?

speaker-0: ⁓ my God, I think, I think tops should be masculine and they should put up with me being hysterical. Masculinity for thee and not for me. What do you, do you have a line on masculinity?

speaker-1: I guess my line is kind of like the people that he disagrees with in the essay is that it's one of the possible gay performances. It's something that we have a multivalent relationship to. It can be kind of playful and fun and ironic, or it can be meaningful to us as like a redemption of our past, our, you know, being closeted or bullied or whatever. It can have all those meanings. It can also be you know, like an aesthetics quest to look a certain way or to transform yourself into a certain aesthetic ideal. It can be all or any of those things or it can be none of those things. You can not care about it.

speaker-0: I also, you know, it can just be hot. like, you know, like my partner like fixed the shower recently and like that's hot, you know? ⁓ Or like, you know, if I'm like face deep in armpit, like huffing stink, that's not, is that redemptive? Am I like coming to terms with what I missed out on in my adolescence when I didn't get to huff? the jocks state. is. Maybe on some level, but I don't think it's like that circuitous. think it's pretty like it just is, you know, there's the part of our brain that said, yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, that's what I was saying. It's just, some of this is just in our lizard brains and it's beyond the reach of rational understanding or politics. It's just hot. And I think that being able to revel in things that are just hot, even if they're somewhat odd and problematic is, you know, it's important. And being able to enjoy them and still, you know, think critically about them, I guess.

speaker-0: There's nothing problematic about being stinky, guys. Stay stinky.

speaker-1: And don't shave your pits boys, because we like to see them. Well, what better note could there be to go out on than pits? So we will wrap up there. See you next time.