Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen

I am currently reading a book that my friend J lent me, called "Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine" by Peter Hennen.

The basic idea is that three uniquely gay/queer male cultures, in particular the Radical Faeries, the Bears, and the Leathermen cultures, have partially been constructed as responses to, reactions against, and/or repudiations of the ways that gay male sexuality has historically been linked with effeminacy.

These three groups engage the 'problem' of stereotypic gay male effeminacy in three different ways. For the Radical Faeries, it has been through a deep embrace of the feminine through adorning dresses, communal-Goddess worship, female-kitsch (e.g. the sacralisation of Barbie dolls), etc. For the Bears, it has been the embrace of a 'regular joe' type of masculinity, with the fetishisation of larger, hairier, beer-drinking bodies, and with the Leathermen, it has been through the re-appropriation of costumes and sometimes sado-masochistic impulses historically associated with violent masculinity.

Hennen is careful to avoid pathologising any one of these response-styles, and is quite clearly grateful for having been given the opportunity to participate in the various social spaces and rituals of belonging that each community has constructed for its members. At the same time, Hennen hints at a deeply troubling dialectic that underlies the ways that these gay male communities and identities have been constructed. In particular, with regard to the fact that they, at least in his North American experience, these three groups tend to be disproportionately White, and are concurrent with many other male-centric movements that organise around the 'reclamation' or glamourisation of masculinity without either questioning the fear of the feminine or any other unconscious roots of their undying loyalty.

I am personally troubled by hegemonic masculinism in gay culture(s). I am nervous about the way that gay male culture in general has conflated manhood with the repudiation of the feminine, and indeed, with the repudiation of even our own association with 'gay,' as it has historically been linked with effeminacy. Thus the ubiquity of "str8-acting" as a self-descriptor or as an identity deeply invested with gay male desire.

Secondarily, I am also interested in the way that whiteness is also hegemonic in these communities in the USA which, unlike masculinity, Hennen has largely not interrogated. White masculinity seems far less rooted in ironic play or reclamation.

Questions/Crises of masculinity have occupied me for awhile. In a Euro-centric hierarchy of masculinity, the Grecian male model has been somewhere at the top, whereas, in my experience, the hairless Asian body has been feminised and placed somewhere at the bottom.

I long for spaces I might comfortably exist in. Spaces which do justice to my gendered/racialised identity and body, and in which I can explore a self-communal expression with others in a shared, sacralised experience of sexuality. Spaces which allow for and embrace my capacity & need for critical awareness...

A monastery for colonised whores?