Gay men are obsessed with masculinity. Lowering the voice, don’t move your hands too much when you talk, control the pitch of your laugh, edit out the bits that read as “too fem.” Most of us do it without thinking. It’s like a background radiation among us. And it’s costing us the connection we are really seeking…
Open Grindr right now and count how many profiles say “masc,” “no fem,” or “straight-acting only.” It’s a lot. We’ve created a hierarchy where masculinity is more desirable and femininity gets you filtered out. And what I find saddest is that gay men are doing this to other gay men. The same men who got bullied at school for being “too gay” now policing each other for the same thing. And I’ve come to realise that most of us aren’t even sure what we mean when we say “masculine”.
What Do You Actually Mean When You Say Masculine?
If you ask gay men what they’re looking for in a “masculine” man, you’ll get a list of physical and behavioural traits: Deep voice (or at least not “gay voice”). Muscular body. Doesn’t move his hands too much when he talks. Doesn’t get over excited. Act like a bro. A dude.
Personally, I don’t think this is masculinity. It’s a costume we’ve all agreed looks like masculinity. Real masculinity is a set of qualities, an essence, an energy… not a set of physical attributes. For me, those qualities are groundedness, stability, presence, holding space for others, centred compassion, no need to prove, someone who can stand steady when life gets messy, someone who can listen, someone who can be vulnerable and open and honest.
These qualities have nothing to do with voice depth or how you hold your wrist. You can be camp as god damn Christmas and embody all these qualities. You can be flamboyant as fuck and hold the attention of a room. An expressive, colourful, unapologetic soul can be the most grounded person in the room.
When gay men say they want a masculine man, I don’t think we’re really after someone who acts like a straight man. I think we’re after someone who’s grounded, present, stable, someone who feels solid and safe.
If you have a kink for a macho dude, gofer your life. Do what you need to do. Work through your shit babe. But if we’re honest, what we’re really looking for in another human are their qualities, values, the way they think and move through the world… their integrity.
The masc4masc culture isn’t about masculinity. It’s really about internalised homophobia dressed up as preference and demonising anything that’s feminine as weak, unsexy and invalid. At the deepest level it is a form of misogyny. Anything that alludes to the female is wrong.
We learned that being gay was wrong. We learned that being feminine was worse. So we built a community that punishes the men who couldn’t or wouldn’t hide it. The men who showed up as their full expressive selves. And then we wonder why we feel disconnected and why our spaces can feel hollow. And we wonder why so many gay men are lonely. The version of masculinity we’re chasing doesn’t really exist. It’s a performance, a mask, and an armour.
The men I see embodying genuine masculine energy in queer spaces are often the ones who got the bullying worst. They had to develop something deeper than the performance to survive. They had to become solid in themselves and they had to find a confidence in who they actually are.
Meanwhile, the “straight-acting” guys are often the ones most controlled, most rigid, most stuck in performance. They’ve been so busy maintaining the costume that they’ve never asked what’s underneath it…
This is what we should be reclaiming. Masculinity as embodied quality, rather than aesthetic performance. We need to think of masculinity as something that can show up alongside our camper, our self-expression, our flamboyance and colour. And a form of masculinity that doesn’t require femininity to be the enemy. Masculinity and femininity aren’t opposites, but partners. The yin and yang. The up and down, in and out, dry and wet, dark and light. Two sides of the same coin. The most magnetic men I’ve ever met are the ones who can hold both at once; grounded and expressive, stable and colourful, strong and soft, centred and radiant.
At Pleasure Medicine, the sober connection workshop and conscious dance for gay and queer men I run in East London, we explore exactly this. We move our bodies in new ways, expressive and free. We hold space for each other through connection practices and vulnerability games. We get to embody masculinity and self-expression at the same time, without one cancelling out the other. And when men taste what it’s like to be truly themselves, they feel so much sexier and more attractive. And trust me, they look it too!
With Love & Pleasure Gary x
Gary Albert is the founder of Pleasure Medicine, a bi-weekly connection workshop and conscious dance for gay men in East London.
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