IN JULY 2003, Bravo premiered Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a reality series in which five urbane gay men give lifestyle makeovers to straight men, and it became an overnight cultural phenomenon. That same summer, The New York Times made the coinage “metrosexual”—a straight guy who grooms himself like a stereotypical gay guy—a household word. Both of these pop culture phenomena reveal that a gay makeover of the straight American male has literally reached prime time.
While the media’s reporting on the subject revealed the obvious—that indeed straight men are looking more gay these days—the real and radical change in straight American men has gone virtually unnoticed. Much more than a matter of heterosexual men simply working out, waxing, and wearing Prada, straight men are liberating themselves from homophobia, leaving themselves open to gay influence, and thus to a more expansive idea of what it means to be a man. No longer averse to “gay traits” in the way that straight men of Ronald Reagan’s and John Wayne’s generation were, the new American man has made his way out of this narrow, homophobic ideal of manhood and embraced a larger world. Those in the vanguard include actor Eric McCormack of Will & Grace, who has said that Will is close to his own (non-gay) personality; San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who has become a leading gay activist; and the Carlson twins modeling in unabashedly homoerotic poses for Abercrombie & Fitch. Right behind them is every straight guy who auditioned to go on prime time TV to be made over by a team of gay men. Call him the “post-straight” American male.
The rise of the post-straight male constitutes a drastic shift in the Zeitgeist, because in traditional American culture homophobia in men has not only been indulged, it has been respected. And the impact of this phobia was by no means limited to maintaining the great divide between straight men and gay men. Anything associated with male homosexuality—from dancing and creativity to male beauty and friendships with women—has been stigmatized, too, estranging the straight American male from human traits erroneously labeled as “gay.” Exerting what is surely the greatest impact on American manhood since the rise of feminism in the 1970’s, gay liberation is not only helping to heal relationships between straight men and gay men, it is also allowing “gay” qualities back into the construction of masculinity, and many straight men are realizing that they’ve been on the losing end of homophobia, too.
This tectonic shift in the expectations of straight American men did not happen overnight but instead belongs to a movement that’s been underway for decades. As gay liberation spread in the 1970’s and 80’s and gay men quietly and bravely came out to their straight friends and relatives and broke new ground for what was acceptable and even desirable in men, there emerged a more open, expressive, gay-friendly male character. Even when it was illegal for gay men to congregate in bars or clubs, and homosexuals were regularly thrown in jail, fired, kicked out of their homes, and given shock treatments as “cures,” there were straight men who defied homophobia. Actually, gay men in big cities have known of the cool straight man’s existence for decades. He was the heterosexual hair stylist at the salon in the Village, the straight DJ at the disco in the Castro, and the fag-hag’s boyfriend in West Hollywood who embraced her gay friends.
Also appearing in gay-oriented books and films, this guy was the straight character who lived or worked in gay environs, or the straight actor who played gay roles with no loss of empathy for the character. For example, in the 1968 play and 1970 film The Boys in the Band, actor Cliff Gorman brought to life the character of Emory, the quintessential “nelly queen,” and did so with a realism and complexity that made it hard to believe it was a heterosexual man in the role. In Tales of the City, which the San Francisco Chronicle began to serialize in 1976, Armistead Maupin created the character of Brian Hawkins, a straight man who lived, worked, and socialized in the gay universe of 1970’s San Francisco.
In the 1970’s and early 80’s Broadway choreographer and director Bob Fosse was defying practically every limit on the straight male identity, first by succeeding in a world dominated by gay men, then by daring to be “flamboyant” in the choreography of his Broadway shows, notably Cabaret. World-famous party promoter Ian Schrager, the straight half of Studio 54, helped usher in the era of “gay cachet” by turning disco, hitherto a gay cultural phenom, into a national craze. Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, considered the father of modern conservatism, became an open advocate for gay rights when his grandson came out of the closet, years later taking a stand against the ban on gays serving in the military by writing in The Washington Post that “you don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.” Phil Donahue spoke publicly about his own journey out of the homophobia of his working-class Irish upbringing and became the first TV host to present gay men in a fair and open light.
Still, with the homo-averse image of Ronald Reagan still representing the American male ideal, this alternate straight man remained ignored in the 1980’s, or under suspicion for being gay himself. (Even Bob Fosse in his 1979 autobiographical film All That Jazz included the death-bed epiphany that his compulsion to sleep with slews of women probably came from his own fear that deep-down he must be homosexual.) It was in the 90’s that the post-straight male started to gain prominence. In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton became the first candidate for national office to court the gay vote and to speak out against homophobia. Also in that year, Calvin Klein hired Herb Ritts to photograph a shaved, plucked, and pumped Mark Wahlberg in classically objectifying homoerotic poses for Calvin Klein underwear, and did the same with Antonio Sabato, Jr., four years later. In 1993, Tom Hanks portrayed a gay man in the movie Philadelphia and later thanked his gay mentor in his Oscar acceptance speech.
By the late 90’s, the examples in the media of this transformation became innumerable. Will & Grace debuted in 1998 and became one of the hottest shows in the country. Not only was the leading gay character played by a heterosexual man who classified himself in an interview with Diane Sawyer as “sexually straight, but socially gay”—a social creature theretofore known only to gay urbanites—the ratings for the show were so high that it was clear that many straight men were tuning in each week and getting a pretty massive infusion of gay culture (or at least a TV version thereof). This included prominent depictions of a reversed world of straight men in the gay mix—as with Woody Harrelson’s role as Grace’s boyfriend learning what it’s like to be in the minority, seeing life through a gay cultural prism, learning the art of playing gay, and ultimately understanding Grace better through her relationship with Will.
A number of movies reinforced Will & Grace’s depiction of the famous attraction between gay men and straight women, notably My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Object of My Affection, and The Next Best Thing, which was further reinforced by such famous real-life friendships as the one between Madonna and Rupert Everett. In addition, many of the most popular shows in the country—from Six Feet Under and Sex and the City to South Park and Spin City—had leading straight male characters who were very open to their gay counterparts and to their own “gay” qualities. And in the Oscar-winning movie Gods and Monsters, Sir Ian McKellen’s older sophisticated gay character brought Brendan Fraser’s young brute out of his homophobic cloister and into a new world of expression and connectedness, encapsulating in fiction a process clearly underway in the larger culture.
Straight men also became inundated with gay-inflected images of themselves.
Abercrombie & Fitch turned homoerotic into hetero-erotic with their Carlson twins campaign, objectifying two all-American straight boys in the same way that straight men have traditionally objectified women. (Of course, they were also pitching to the gay male audience through these images, further shifting the power dynamic between gay men and straight men by placing straight men in the role of conforming to gay men’s ideals.) Even national “man’s man” magazines like Men’s Journal, once content with cover stories on fly fishing, began to put sexy, half-naked guys on the cover, creating a look that could easily be confused with soft-core gay porn, complete with teasers promising the reader gorgeous abs. Puff Daddy’s signature fashion line “Sean John” turned what was once quintessentially “gay” into something “gangsta” by debuting a line of Liberace-inspired, full-length fox furs for men.
Since the turn of the millennium, there have been other revolutionary moments, such as the arrival of the Bravo reality dating show Boy Meets Boy. Heralded as the first dating show to feature gay men—and then trashed for being as vapid as its heterosexual counterparts—there was one spectacular element. In the mix of men vying to be chosen by the lead were a few straight men pretending to be gay. Many gay groups were up in arms about this, observing that straight dating shows don’t sneak gay people in to trick the lead. (That would soon change.) But when the straight men gave post-show interviews, each revealed that he had experienced an epiphany about the illusory nature of the difference between straight and gay men, while gaining insight into what life is like for gay men in the closet.
But it was Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that turned hundreds of years of deep-seated conventional wisdom about American men on its head. While only a make-over show, it resonated with the viewing public because it mirrored something that was happening in the larger culture: gay men were rewriting many of the rules the defined the ideal straight man. Perhaps it was inevitable that labels would soon pop up to describe this new type of male who, while not homosexual, seemed in some ways to be “gay.” Terms like “stag-hag” (a play on “fag-hag”) and “stray” (for “straight-gay”) were applied to straight men who hung around gay ones. “Straight but not narrow” described straight men who weren’t hung up about homosexuality. The coinage “hetero-gay” was soon replaced by “metrosexual” to describe straight men who cared about their looks as much as gay men reportedly do.
Actually, the term “metrosexual” was coined some ten years ago, in England, and appeared in Salon.com about a year before The New York Times used it in 2003. However, it languished in obscurity until Queer Eye made the idea of gay influence on straight men undeniable, and thus the concept of the metrosexual acceptable. The fact that the metrosexual has become widely accepted is significant because it normalizes the idea of a “gay influence” on straight men, traditionally a taboo subject. But the metrosexual is in and of himself a very narrow character defined almost exclusively by his gay-inflected appearance—specifically his worked-out, moisturized, hip urban look, which relatively few gay men even possess. As such, it is limited to the realm of style. But this notion is also quite subversive because it represents a straight adoption of the classically gay experience of being sexually aroused by one’s own body. It also indicates that straight men have morphed into objects of beauty and not just of power, or have at least merged the two qualities. Way ahead of the curve in this regard was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was quite the willing “girlie man” when he posed in the early 70’s for gay magazines like After Dark.
If it was the common cause of women’s liberation that brought straight women and lesbians together in the 1960’s and 70’s (though the relationship was at times contentious), it is gay liberation that has begun to close the divide between straight and gay men. Think of it as straight men’s own gay liberation, just without the gay part. After all, it is much more than one’s sexual orientation that’s liberated when one comes out; it’s also the fear of exhibiting supposedly “gay” traits, as one begins to un-learn the internalized constraints on self-expression. Many heterosexual men are having a similar experience freeing themselves from homophobia and allowing themselves to be exposed to a definition of manhood perpetuated by gay culture that includes traits not associated with traditional masculinity.
WHILE THE RISE of the post-straight male clearly indicates a monumental change in the culture of heterosexual American men, there are of course nuances and countertrends that make the observation of this new identity somewhat more complicated.
First, the post-straight consciousness as defined here is mostly a white cultural phenomenon. Black and Latin cultures are on separate paths with respect to gay liberation, so the dynamics of homosexuality and gay influence are playing themselves out differently in each group. For instance, in black culture, the word “gay” is often associated with “white,” and most black and Latin men who have sex with men do not identify as gay. Also, many of the straight male constraints that are liberated by the post-straight consciousness—such as the idea that “real men don’t dance”—exist predominately in white culture. Although these racial and ethnic differences make the picture more complex, they do help to illuminate the illusions we hold so dear about what constitutes a gay trait or a straight one; to wit, you’ll have a hard time convincing a straight black Brazilian man that swaying his hips when doing the samba makes one “gay.”
The second complication relates to the widespread tendency to conflate gayness with femininity. Homophobia has many of its roots in a hatred of the feminine. As the late Quentin Crisp observed about his trials and tribulations as an out gay man in World War II London, he wasn’t despised because he was gay but because he was effeminate. Many straight men in the 1970’s and 80’s made the genuine attempt to relate to and identify with their feminine side (Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie and Alan Alda in general), while straight men in the 90’s and 00’s have explored their “gay” side (à la Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo and Eric McCormack in Will & Grace). Is there a difference between the “feminine” and the “gay”? Perhaps not—at least in the minds of straight men. Either way, such manifestations in mainstream media reflect a sincere attempt to explore the other side of the sex-and-gender divide rather than simply to mock any transgression of it, as in, say, the gag drag of Some Like It Hot or the Blaine and Antoine sketches on In Living Color.
The third complexity is the entrenched presence of homophobia in American society, which is still espoused by everyone from the President to the Pope. The embodiment of the stiff, homophobic, right-wing male can still be found in plenty in nascar race audiences and evangelical churches everywhere. But it would be wrong to conclude that because homophobia persists in some quarters that the trend I’ve identified is confined to large urban centers in the so-called “blue states.” Over the past six years I have interviewed dozens of straight men all over the country, most of them under forty, and this research has revealed a whole framework of subtle but deep gay influence at work in the “red states” and in the suburbs. Straight men from South Carolina, Michigan, and Mississippi frequently cited the impact of an older gay uncle or other relative who demonstrated an alternate way of being a man to counter their father’s model. Surprisingly enough, almost every straight man I talked to reported that he’d been called “faggot” at one time or another, giving him some experience-based empathy with gay men and demonstrating that homophobia is as much a force for male conformity as against homosexuality.
My own experiences growing up in Alabama and Mississippi match this assessment. My fraternity brothers in college helped open me up to the world, teaching me how to be affectionate with other men, encouraging me to be myself, and in their own ways nudging me out of the closet. Along with my actual brother, they were the first people to run to my side when I came out. A wonderful example of this release of homophobic tension in the heartland could be seen in a recent episode of the Da Ali G Show when the flamboyantly gay host Bruno revealed to a bunch of straight teenage boys on spring break in northern Florida that they’d been performing tricks for a (phony) gay TV show, and the boys simply laughed.
For all its complexities, the overall trajectory of mainstream male culture is clear. Modern gay-inflected, post-straight icons like pop star Lenny Kravitz with his pink boas and perfect abs, Gavin Newsom with his perception that gay people feel for each other what he feels for his wife, and the straight guys on Queer Eye letting themselves be made over by a group of gay style mavens are demonstrating to an emergent generation of boys and men that flamboyance, compassion and openness are not contradictory to manhood or masculinity, nor are they “gay” qualities after all.
Chris Nutter is writing a book on the impact of gay liberation on straight men. For more information on this, contact ChrisNutterNYC@cs.com.
