The Cult of Masculinity Unmasked

Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life
By Michelangelo Signorile
HarperCollins, 312 pp.

In a 1991 issue of the now defunct gay-oriented New York-based weekly NYQ magazine, writer Avram Finkelstein advocated for gay separation as a way to escape "the din and indoctrination of a missionary, heterosexist world." According to him, "Queer willingness to confront diversity makes us the hope for future humankind."

This rosy, utopian view of the gay male world is refuted in Michelangelo Signorile's latest book Life Outside, the culmination of two years of interviewing hundreds of gay men "of varying ages, races, classes, geographic locales, occupations, religions, and political affiliations" about what he calls the "cult of masculinity."

Signorile points out in the introduction that his study is not meant to "encompass all of urban gay life." The world he describes in the first half of the book and that goes by nicknames like "the scene" and "the hot boy party life" represents "one predominantly white, middle-class and often upper-middle-class segment of urban gay life" whose inhabitants, despite that demographic, have "a significant cultural influence on much of the gay population throughout its various racial, social, and sexual subcultures."

Divided  into two sections--"Life Inside" and "Life Outside"--the book offers us a disturbing and more honest portrait of a community populated by many men enslaved to the notion of masculine beauty and its attainment. Life Outside also introduces us to gay men who have found alternative ways of living their lives, far from the gyms and circuit party venues where the repressive doctrine of the "body thing" rules.

If gay people ever decided to follow Finkelstein's advice and "separate from straights," this new society would no doubt resemble the urban gay ghettos of today, a place where a premium is placed on those who conform to "an idealized version of physical manhood--muscles, mustaches, and tight jeans" and where "white, upper-middle-class (gay) men" are the primary movers and shakers. And despite the fact that this image is "an idealized, fragile, ephemeral form of beauty that few men can attain and none can retain," many gay men through steroid use and extensive (and expensive) plastic surgery opt for the type of body that will make them and keep them desirable in the highly competitive fast lane of the gay world.

At the root of this need to be desirable, this need to conform is low self-esteem. "I think I use my body a lot as a way of feeling good about myself," says 32-year-old Alex, a New York consultant. "I go out, I think, sometimes to feel desired and wanted and that makes me feel superior, and then it offsets my feeling bad."

The cult of masculinity isn't anything new, except in name only. It has persisted for decades. In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, Beat Generation novelist/poet Harold Norse has written in his memoir that gay men like himself "cherished and idealized" masculinity. Those who didn't pass muster--"youth, virility, and athletic good looks"--were classified as "hideolas," a word Norse coined to describe anyone he and his friends thought were hideous.

In the 1990s that attitude survives, however, it has intensified and become commodified via the mass media (e.g. Calvin Klein underwear ads). This "highly commercialized gay sexual culture," writes Signorile, a columnist for the upscale gay magazine Out (itself a part of the commodification of masculinity), "sells a particular physical aesthetic to us and demands that men conform to it."

In an attempt to undermine the cult of masculinity which threatens to further marginalize and stigmatize gay men already suffering from heterosexist repression and persecution, Signorile found men living in small towns and  in rural and suburban communities whose "simple and traditional" lifestyles mirrored their heterosexual counterparts and whose goals were to "meet someone, fall in love, and settle down." These are the men Signorile holds up as examples for the gay community to emulate.

This "deurbanization of homosexuality," as Signorile terms it, to some extent is "influenced by the overall greater acceptance of homosexuality in America." However, he points out, "the greatest influence on the deurbanization of homosexuality is the many gay men of younger generations," who prefer remaining in "the places they grew up in and want very much to live close to their families but out of the closet."

Although the first half of Life Outside (dealing with the sex, drugs, and hedonism of the fast lane) is the most riveting part of the book, Signorile's efforts have produced a work of journalism that is highly informative, cautionary, and encouraging. With its "Six Ways to Deprogram from the Cult" as a parting message, Life Outside is an important blueprint for any gay man who wants to "find another way" to live his life.

This article was submitted to the Oakland, California-based, African-American-oriented magazine Whazzup! It was not published. What appears here is a slightly edited version of the original article which was written in November of 1997.