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Double wounding to masculinity


I work with men in therapy, mostly gay men. It's very common to find two kinds of wounds to a male's natural masculine identity when he feels same-sex attraction and/or exhibits significant gender-deviant behavior.
First is the ridicule and exclusion, or worse, suffered in childhood and youth by many boys who grow up gay. A sense that they don't belong to the male gender and are defective. This comes from family and peers, etc. It cuts deep because the very object of your deep desire also represents your failure and rejection. Creates a love-hate dynamic with other men, with self and with the very idea of masculinity and manhood: resentment, defense, devaluing, along with idealizing and (often passive) aggression. You can see this in some of the comments.
The other wound is self-inflicted. It comes from taking on the "gay" identity as a rejection of "conventional" masculinity.  Having already felt excluded from the circle of men (which is sometimes caricatured as "breeder males", etc.) many gay males bond with their wounded feminine, which they often carry in themselves, and pathologize, demonize, hostilely deconstruct, marginalize or evacuate the idea of masculinity. This both satisfies a desire for revenge and creates an identification with a moral good, part of the victimhood dynamic.


In both cases, homosexual males' own claim to participation in manhood is blocked, at the very same time as his erotic desire remains fixed on the male. Hence, the phenomenon of the gay man who thinks of himself as a "good person" who transcends or scoffs at "conventional" or "oppressive" notions of gender.

My experience and opinion is that both these wounds need dealing with: gay men need to reclaim their heritage as men...along with and not against straight men, who are the overwhelming carriers of this heritage...to reclaim it from a position of fundamental honor and respect for manhood...to find their own place within the constellation of manhood. This means healing the wounds of childhood and the often self-inflicted wounds of anti-male ideology.

We are unusual men, but we are men nonetheless and our mental and spiritual health, I am convinced, requires that we face that and engage with our deepest nature, not as aliens but as exiles returning home.

These are just jottings. But I recognize that most homosexual men have a special relationship to the feminine, different from most straight males. We often encounter our own "feminine side" earlier in life and in a different way. Part of the work of developing into a (gay) man is making a healthy relationship with that element in us.

It does not mean destroying it, not at all. But too many of us exhibit a kind of femininity that is either immature (the teenage girl style is pretty common) or pathological (the histrionic narcissist sadist diva-queen) and which remains unintegrated into our fundamental masculine identity, like an alien symbiote. 

That's what "effeminacy" is about. It's not the same as real feminine energy.  It's a kind of faux and distorted feminine performance which, by the way, you rarely find in healthy women! Dominated by an unintegrated feminine, too many of us become compulsive seekers of ornament, decoration and drama. Drug addiction and sex addiction come along for the ride. 

It does not help our relationships with one another. For most healthy homosexual men, the "feminine" in them shows up in a gift for affiliation of all kinds, as a naturally warm, playful, creative and connected energy that colors but does not overwhelm his man's identity. Just wanted to add this point.

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