Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mitch walker

Errrhmm hi *farts violently*! So, to start off, I wanted to say that I discovered your blog recently, basically because I started using tumblr actively recently, and I'm loving it(your blog). I saw that you answer some questions and I hope you answer some of mine :3 Why are these damn fagguettes so obsessed with straight guys? This is something I've known about since the moment I discovered that men can kiss other men. This is something that bothers me a lot, I find it pathetic and depressing, to say the least. In a way, I understand where this obsession comes from, but idk… It seems to be a desire for the "real masculinity" of straight [men]. But why doesn't anyone try to be more masculine too? And why don't some [gay] men open themselves up to other possibilities that might make them feel less "effeminate" like frottage?

To start, I’ll paraphrase some thinkers,

Leo Bersani, Homos (1995): There is a homoerotic fascination with the straight man precisely because he is seen as unassailable, as representing a form of impermeable masculinity that resists the very desire projected onto it.

Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (1972): The homosexual’s desire is directed toward the straight man not merely because he is straight, but because he embodies the place of denial, the bastion of normativity that desire seeks to breach.

Eve Sedgwick, Between Men (1985): Homosocial desire is the complex continuum between male bonding and homoeroticism. Straight male homosociality is both erotically charged and institutionally homophobic, leading to a tense dynamic where gay men might be drawn to straight men as symbolic gatekeepers of masculine belonging.

Gay men look at the figure of the “real man” as a phallos ideal in the symbolic sense. The phallus is not the penis but a numinous archetypal image (the masculine as power, authority and generative force). The “straight man” often becomes the site of projection for this image because he inhabits the cultural role of the phallic bearer, aligned with dominance, normativity, visibility and legitimacy. The gay man does not just desire the straight man but desires what he symbolises. A form of impermeability, social embeddedness and patriarchal authority. Because the homosexual has been historically pathologised and feminised (emasculated/demasculated) he find the straight man a fantasy of wholeness, born out of a system that has excluded gay men from society.

However this desire is not exclusively aspirational. Because homosexuality is repressed, redirected and made into spectacle, the homosexual desire for the straight man is not just a desire for identification with power but also an attempt to penetrate and rupture that power. The fagguetes don’t just want to become the straight man, they want to queer and pervert him, to destabilise the fixity of his gender identity and to undo the myth of “real masculinity”.

Gay men have historically been alienated from masculine archetypes because those archetypes have been colonised by heterosexual norms. This alienation causes them to project power outward onto the straight man rather than internalising it. Heterosexuality and masculinity are part of a capitalist organisation of desire where everything is channeled into recognisable, reductive and reproductive forms. Desiring the straight man is not only about desiring a person but also desiring a coded identity, a socially enforced system of power.

So why don’t gay men explore alternative masculinities? Because culture has failed to offer viable templates for them to embody. The phallic power of the straight men is readily legible, socially rewarded, and mythologised. Queer power however remains ambiguous, marginal and often illegible, especially when it attempts to retain masculine forms without falling into caricature. The gay man’s relation to masculinity doesn’t have to be reactive like the straight man’s, it can be a creative ongoing experiment in living. Becoming-masculine for a gay man should not be about mimicking the straight man, but about deterritorialising masculinity itself, finding new queer configurations of strength, assertiveness and virility without conforming to hegemonic norms.

Gay men must turn inward to discover their own authentic masculinity, the gay male Self. Homosexuals need to reconnect with their phallic energy (a masculine vitality that doesn’t depend on domination, heterosexuality or social recognition) but it is a perilous task for without a conscious relationship to the phallus-as-symbol, [gay or straight] men become inflated, hollow, and dependent on external forms of validation.

I don’t think the desire for straight men is pathetic necessarily. It’s a symptom that points to larger structural wounds in the construction of gender and sexual identity/subjectivity. This desire is classically tragic. It is an entanglement with forces greater than oneself, forged in repression and longing, rich with the potential for reversal and transformation. I think reclaiming masculinity (opening oneself up to other possibilities that make one feel less effeminate) isn’t about conformity/assimilation, it’s about re-enchanting the phallus to rediscover it in one’s own image beyond the constraints of heterosexual reproduction or social conformity. One must imagine their masculinity as penetrable, plural, vulnerable and divine.