The Rise of the Straight-Acting Man

[Shana A]

The Rise of the Straight-Acting Man
Filed by: Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer
December 5, 2010 5:30 PM

http://www.bilerico.com/2010/12/the_rise_of_the_straight-acting_man.php

Kevin Troughton, in an essay in Tuesday's Guardian, declares that effeminacy in gay men, a sad vestige of our oppressed past, is on its way out. Sighting a pathetic stereotype of a queen in his provincial gay bar prompts a bit of grand theorizing on masculine and feminine behavior in homosexual men with the conclusion that "'[m]asculine' gay men are in the ascendancy."

Troughton lays out a sweeping hypothesis which rests totally on the (unstated, unquestioned) assumption that there is a natural state of man, which is essentially masculine -- a word he does not define -- and that, left alone, we will return to it. Feminine men are aberrations.