Real men don't care if other men are gay. They don't think about it much, don't worry about it.
A real man may, however, on occasion, worry that other men will think he's gay.
Or, as the great moralist and philosopher Sam Malone would put it, a real man doesn't care if other men think he's graceful. He just doesn't want to get a reputation for being too graceful.
The fear here isn't that other guys will think he's queer but that they'll think he's a sissy. The two terms get mixed up in a lot of people's heads but they really don't mean the same to men. A sissy isn't a guy who likes guy. A sissy is a guy who is afraid. Sissies are weaklings and cowards, and weaklings and cowards are dangerous to other men. You can't bring down a mastadon, storm a castle, hit a beach, or rush into a burning building with a weakling and a coward by your side.
If you're a sissy, or if the guys think you're a sissy, other men won't trust you. They won't want to have you around because they can't depend on you.
Worse, if they think you're a sissy, some of those other men will decide you are easy prey.
But by and large men are easy-going characters, inclined to give each other the benefit of the doubt, especially since we all want to be given the benefit of the same doubt, and so the topic of other men's sexual proclivities almost never crosses our minds.
Because of this, most men know to be suspicious when another man starts carrying on about the fags.
Since it's a topic most of us would rather avoid---a game of quien es muy macho all of us can't afford to lose---anybody who starts it is going against the code. Going against the code is not something we like to do. It feels, well, unmanly. You have to wonder, then, about another guy who goes against it. What's his problem?
Well, it's easy enough to guess.
Gay bashing is, in addition to being a hate crime, quite often a self-hate crime as well.
These are things we know about each other. Guys who talk a lot about sex aren't getting any. Guys who brag about how tough they are, are scared. Guys who talk obsessively about money aren't movers and shakers, they're thieves and suckers. Guys who boast about what great athletes they are, you don't want on your team. Guys who hate women feel whipped and castrated. And guys who go and on about the fags are probably fags themselves.
If they're not, then they're really, really, really scared that they are.
These are guys who have mixed up sissy with queer, and since they probably know whether or not "it" moves when they are around men and so shouldn't have any worries on that score, then what worries them is something else they must know about themselves---they're sissies. Weak, scared, and not to be counted on when the going gets tough.
The raging homophobia of the Right these days is so obviously a cover for fears of latency and inadequacy that it's laughable. Or it would be laughable except that apparently there are enough closet cases and enough cowards out there that the Republicans can induce mobs of them to go to the polls and vote their self-loathing.
And that it's a national movement to teach thousands and thousands of teenage boys and girls to hate themselves.
Which brings us to this guy, Alabama State Representative Gerald Allen.
Allen has introduced a bill to ban books written by gay authors or that contain gay characters from the state's schools and libraries.
Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon has no trouble laughing Allen off the stage for being an illiterate know-nothing.
[T]he "homosexual agenda" to destroy America book by book goes back a long, long way. Shakespeare's love sonnets may seem like simple poems written to a young man, but we all know his real intent was tearing down a nation that didn't exist yet. Even Sappho's seemingly innocent love poetry to women is part of the long-standing homosexual agenda to destroy America, even though she had no way of even knowing the landmass it would exist on was there. And of course, she was out to get Christianity, too, even though that didn't exist yet, either.
But I'm too astounded to laugh. It's just stunning to watch another man boldy demonstrating to the whole world that he's a raging closet case and a complete sissy.
It appears that plenty of Allen's fellow legislators have him figured out too and want nothing to do with his weirdness. Amanda reports:
Luckily, it seems like Alabama legislators realized that they didn't want to even be present at a debate that might feature an argument about whether or not cross-dressing to avoid harassment like Viola was just too gay or what have you, since most of them refused to even show up and vote on this turd of a bill.
I'm inclined to think that what most of them refused to show up to do was stand next to a man this confused about himself.
(Mac Thomason blogged about Allen back in December when Allen first began peeking out his closet door. Shakespeare's Sister has found a county commissioner in North Carolina who has even more complicated issues with his own sexuality. And, an update correcting an omission caused by a bout of amnesia, Coturnix has a series of posts on the femiphobia he sees behind the Right's many pathologies, including their gay bashing, power worship, and hysterical desire to dominate.)
Like I said, real men don't worry about homosexuality, let alone obsess so much over it that they can't even stand the thought that other people are reading about it.
There are, however, one class of real men who do worry about it. Athletes.
Athletes are and have to be terrified of being weak. In some sports---boxing, football, basketball, hockey---just the appearance of weakness can be devastating. It marks you as easy prey. In team sports a guy who is weak and cowardly is dangerous. Imagine being a running back having to depend for protection from angry linebackers on a blocker who is afraid of taking a hit.
Most athletes are neither well-educated nor particularly sensitive. So of course they confuse queer with sissy.
Now imagine being a gay athlete.
A particular kind of athlete.
A boxer, say.
A gay boxer.
You're a gay boxer, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and you're opponent starts calling you queer. In front of the whole world. You're a good boxer. No, you're a very good boxer. You're one of the best of your time, one of the toughest, one of the most successful. A guy all the other fighters have to beat if they want to get anywhere.
Those guys are coming after you hard already. It's dangerous to be a fighter as it is. More dangerous to be a champ with everybody out to take you down.
Imagine now that all those guys coming after you think you're a sissy. Weak. A coward. How scared of you are they going to be? You need them to be scared. You need them to worry every time they get in the ring with you. Their fear is your protection. If they stop being afraid of you, you're in trouble.
On top of this, like everybody else around you, you confuse queer with sissy too. You can't admit you're gay because it would be admitting you're a coward, you're a weakling. How are you going to stand in the ring with all those guys looking to clobber you, thinking to yourself, I'm weak, I'm scared?
So this opponent of yours, calling you queer at the weigh in, taunting you in the ring, you can't let him get away with it, you can't let him expose your weakness like that.
You got to shut him up.
Which is what you do if you're Emile Griffith, it's 1962, you're fighting Kid Paret, and Paret keeps calling you maricon.
You shut him up, do it the best way you know how. You hit him hard. You hit him a lot. You got him up against the ropes, he's done for, but you keep hitting him. You hit him 29 times, fast and hard, without him being able to throw a single punch back.
You hit him until you scramble his brains and kill him.
Midway through the 12th, Emile stuns Benny with a short right. Benny reels into a corner, eats another hammer, then another. His head and shoulders slump. The only way to nail his jaw now is with uppercuts, and so that's what Emile begins to hurl -- or rather, that's what hurls out of Emile, an eruption of fury so mechanically precise that it seems to come from an engine house in hell rather than from the realm of human kinetics. At last Benny tilts, but the turnbuckle keeps him from collapsing, from saving himself, and now begins the terrible tick-tock of his cranium, left-right-left-right-left-right, combinations bursting from Emile faster than eye and brain can process.
The ref! Where's the ref? Who's the ref? Ruby Goldstein, a victim of his own expertise, a respected pro who knows this sport so well that he knows Emile's not a big finisher, knows Paret's a chronic possum, knows the Hispanics in the house will riot if he stops this fight just as their possum's about to pounce. Goldstein is caught flat-footed as 18 punches land in six seconds -- 29 consecutive unanswered punches in all -- bouncing brain against skull again and again. Eyes puffed shut, blood oozing from his nose and his cheek, Benny slithers down the ropes, at last, as Goldstein grabs Emile and his cornermen run to wrap him too.
That's from an article in Sports Illustrated, Shadow Boxer, by Gary Smith. I'd call Smith my favorite living short story writer except that short stories are presumed to be fiction and Smith is a journalist. But read Shadow Boxer and tell me you didn't read a short story better than any that's won an O.Henry lately.
I think this is a stereotype that is fading, actually. A friend has played against a gay Rugby team, for example, and had nothing but respect for them-- something I can't even imagine 20 years ago.
We may be getting to a place where this turns into a non-issue. I think it mostly is for people my kids' age-- unless they are exposed to bigotry, the default seems to be tolerance. And athletes-- athletes have a yardstick. They measure other people by how well they do what they do. We haven't seen the gay Jackie Robinson yet, but I think when we do it will be the fans that are the problem, not the majority of other athletes on the field.
Of course, my optimism keeps getting me tripped up, so I suppose this could be just one more example of how wishful thinking colors my perception. I know that Mike Piazza was worried enough about being thought gay that he had a press conference to deny it-- and although I love Mike Piazza, I will always be a little disappointed in him for that.
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Saturday, April 30, 2005 at 03:20 PM
I was eleven and living in LA when the Griffith/Paret fight took place there. I remember it pretty well, and as a subscriber to SI I saw the story. As far as gays in baseball go, I think Glenn Burke came out after he retired, and there may have been another guy (Billy Beane, maybe? I'm unsure) who also came out. I'm sure there have been others; I think I saw a quote from a current pitcher who said he was sure he'd played with gay teammates, and he was sure he would again.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Saturday, April 30, 2005 at 09:00 PM
In a follow-up to my post on Gerald Allen, I posted a question that my husband asked:
Should the Sistine Chapel be burned to the ground since it’s graced with over 300 figures painted by raging homosexual Michelangelo?
The thought of removing all traces of contributions to our culture by the GLBT community is ludicrous, and truly one of the most hateful and self-defeating notions I have ever encountered. And, as Bill astutely noted, with homophobia becoming a thing of the past with increasing tolerance (or, more accurately and even better, indifference) toward it among each new generation, such notions become the province of small minds populating ever-shrinking arenas. And that is a very good thing.
Posted by: Shakespeare's Sister | Saturday, April 30, 2005 at 09:01 PM
I think there is a shift going on, and that that very shift is inspiring the terrors in gay-haters everywhere, whatever the source of their hatred. Everyone's aware that studies have shown that the more virulent a man's hatred for gays is, the more likely he's "inspired" by gay porn.
Anyone read The Alphabet vs The Goddess? Interesting take on the reasons for misogyny and homophobia there, seems right on, and is validated by the way fundamentalisms of whatever stripe all seem to agree on these sexual matters.
But I do think things are changing - kids today are much less frightened of their own or of others' sexuality. So the fundies will lose this one.
Posted by: Douglass Truth | Sunday, May 01, 2005 at 07:56 AM
Thank you for confirming what I already suspected. I have three blue-collar brothers-in-law (merchant marine, diver, construction contractor) and none of them by deed, gesture, or speech over the last 20 years have given me any indication that my being a homo was any kind of a problem. They weren't being "tolerant," they just didn't give a crap which was totally charming, and it spoke to their essential hetero dudeness.
I think you're off the track with athletics being a special category. Though I loved your excerpt from "Shadow Boxer," I think ethnicity may have had as much to do with the tragedy as the "maricon" business. Here's a counter-story, from San Francisco in the early 1980s, at a pick-up softball game at a public park. The $10 rental for the field was being paid each week by the Gay Softball League, but anyone could show up, and it was about three-quarters gay and one-quarter hetero dudes who just wanted to get some Sunday exercise and baseball was probably the only game they were all good at. The guys who showed up on these Sundays weren't just "straight acting," most of them were essentially "straight" except for their actual sexual preferences, and I always thought it was unkind of God to do that to people who would so obviously have fit into society seamlessly, except for...
One day a new person arrived, named December, a tall, skinny, shaved-head black queen wearing a leopard-skin print blouse that was torn off the shoulder a la "Flashdance" and a matching set of leopard-skin hot pant shorts. We had all learned to be "tolerant" but we didn't really care for drag queens as a general rule. In fact, when December stepped into the batter's box, all the outfielders looked at each other and we all marched 50 yards towards the infield, and waited. What we hadn't noticed was that December's body looked like Jesse Owens and on the first pitch he didn't just hit it over our heads, he hit it so far that it ended up resting in another softball field 200 yards away. We didn't even chase after it but fell to the ground in "we are not worthy" postures.
Real athletes, pro and amateur, don't care what anybody does with their dicks. They care whether somebody can torque their body and deliver the hit, or make the catch or pass the puck/ball. Our pickup group got over our "tolerance" of December real fast and started the competition of trying to get him/her to play the next year for our respective teams.
Posted by: sfmike | Sunday, May 01, 2005 at 09:58 PM
The fear of being preceived as feminine is called femiphobia. It is the subject of Stephen Ducat's "The Wimp Factor" and recently a lot of my blog-writing. Just search "femiphobia" on Google or Technorati.
I have recently linked to a post from Pam's House Blend about a particularly self-hating gay-bashing County Commissioner.
Publius of Legal Fiction (http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com) posted last night (May 1 2005) a funny post about the way anti-gay censorship may play out if Allan wins.
Posted by: coturnix | Monday, May 02, 2005 at 09:52 AM
I wonder if that ban in Alabama would include anything written by Roy Cohn? Or a future book by Jeff Gannon?
Posted by: Erik Loomis | Monday, May 02, 2005 at 11:27 AM
Funny, Publius also brings in Roy Cohn in his parable...
Posted by: coturnix | Monday, May 02, 2005 at 01:12 PM
Wonderful post. Shadow boxing is a superb metaphor for what's going on with this eruption of phobic fear of gayness.
Absolutely right about Smith's piece; a fine piece of writing. And I'll take real journalism any place I can find it. Thank-you for the links.
Posted by: Leah A | Monday, May 02, 2005 at 07:29 PM