Why Can’t You Just Butch Up? Gay Men, Effeminacy, and Our War with Ourselves

What does that mean anyway: to be a “man”? Most of us talk like it’s self-evident, like biology determines behavior – except for those few stubborn individuals who refuse to go along with the show.

Women’s figure skating is graceful and lyrical while men’s skating is about power, strength, and endurance – by definition. It’s just self-evident.

Or is it? Isn’t this exactly how anti-gay bigots talk about GLBT people – that their point of view is so self-evident that they don’t even have to bother explaining or justifying it? Which is a good thing, because when they actually do try to justify it, they usually end up saying variations on, “Because I said so!”

The anti-effeminacy arguments are just as specious. The traditional stereotypes are not biology. Or if they are, effeminate behavior is about biology, too. After all, effeminate men act exactly the way their brains are telling them to act.

And anyway, it’s simply a fact that a lot of gender behavior is arbitrary, a cultural construct. How do we know? Because these gender “codes” change over time and vary from place to place.

Anyone who’s ever been to Europe knows how much more affectionate the straight men they are to each other and no one in those countries views them as less masculine. And according to Green, research shows that the current generation of young men is more androgynous – more like gay men have long tended to be – than the generations that came before.

For Bergling, the hatred of effeminate men is all about these gender codes, and about gender in general. “There really is an ingrained feeling in society that masculinity is better than femininity,” he says. “And there’s this idea that when a man gives up his masculinity, he should be treated with scorn.”

Sure enough, when Bergling surveyed a large group of men, he found a strong correlation between negative feelings about women – holding stereotypical views of them, or seeing them solely as sex objects – and negative feelings about effeminate men. The two bigotries go hand-in-hand.

According to Green, rigid gender codes make sense from an evolutionary perspective. In pre-agrarian society, men were the hunters and the warriors. These communities needed men to be bold and ruthless and competitive and stoic with their feelings. To encourage men to be the best warriors and hunters they could be, they adopted all kinds of prohibitions against “unmanly” behavior.

Needless to say, we’re not in a pre-agrarian society any longer. Yet these prohibitions against men being softer, less aggressive, and more emotional have persisted, long past any usefulness.

Actor Wilson Cruz ran into the prejudice against the swishy when he camped it up in a gay role in the movie He’s Just Not That Into You.

Wilson Cruz (left) in a scene from He’s Just Not That Into You

“Some people had something to say about the fact that I may have been too effeminate,” he told GreginHollywood.com. “We do have a lot of effeminate men in our community. I celebrate that. And I celebrate the fact that they should be willing and able to be exactly who they are. When we as a community start to tear each other down because of the fact that some of the members of our community feel so free and so alive, that they feel they can be whoever they are in public, then we have lost the whole purpose of our movement.”

"Why can't men have strong feminine sides?" agrees Adam Lambert in Rolling Stone. "Does that make them less of a man? I don't know why our society has such an emphasis on masculinity and femininity — it's really gross. I don't think you're truly sexy until you don't care about that." 

Or as Bergling puts it, “Nobody should have to apologize for what gets them hot. But just because you find someone unattractive doesn’t give you license to be a dick.”

Next Page! The insidious plot to keep gay men hating each other (and themselves)!