Gay Men and Masculinity: Straight-Acting, Femmephobia and Being Enough

Many gay men keep a running check on how masculine they come across: how they stand, the pitch of their voice, what they do with their hands, whether a laugh sounds too much. Most of them are barely aware of doing it. The habit starts in childhood, usually before sexuality has a name, and it often outlasts any real danger by decades.

This article looks at where that monitoring comes from, what straight-acting and masc4masc culture cost, how masculinity gets mapped onto sex roles, and what it does to gay relationships.

The habit starts before sexuality does

Boys are policed for gender long before anyone talks to them about sex. A boy who prefers dolls, avoids football or moves in a way other boys read as soft is corrected by adults and mocked by peers. A 1995 review by Michael Bailey and Kenneth Zucker found that gay men recall more gender nonconformity in childhood than straight men, on average, which means many of them were exactly the boys being corrected.

Many gay men tell me they were called gay at school years before they knew they were. The word was aimed at how they behaved, and they learned to change the behaviour. That is the beginning of the audit: a constant, low-level check on whether anything about you gives you away. It is a sensible response to a hostile setting. The trouble is that it keeps running long after the setting has changed. I wrote about how that vigilance works more broadly in anxiety and hypervigilance in gay men.

Straight-acting and masc4masc

On apps the audit becomes public. Profiles read straight-acting, masc4masc, or worse, no femmes. Some of this is simply preference. Some of it is something sharper.

The research on this is fairly consistent. In a 2012 survey of 751 gay men, Francisco Sánchez and Eric Vilain found that men more preoccupied with appearing masculine, and more negative about effeminacy, also had more negative feelings about being gay. On average, participants wished their own behaviour were more masculine and less feminine than they believed it to be. Earlier, the psychologist Kittiwut Taywaditep described anti-effeminacy among gay men as one way gay men push the stigma they carry onto those who seem more visibly gay.

Contempt for femininity in other gay men is often contempt for something in yourself that you were taught to hide. I wrote about the approval-seeking that often sits underneath it in male validation. It protects a man from feeling like the target he once was, at the cost of making someone else the target.

Attraction is a separate matter. A preference for masculine men is common, and nobody chooses what they find attractive. The question worth asking is whether the preference comes with disdain, for feminine men or for the softer parts of yourself.

Masculinity as armour

Traditional masculine norms ask men to be self-reliant, restrain emotion, avoid looking weak and win. Researchers call the strain this causes gender role conflict, and in gay men it has been linked to more depression, more shame and more negative feelings about being gay.

In practice, I see it as men who cannot cry in front of a partner, who find asking for help humiliating, and who experience their own need for comfort as a weakness to be hidden. It shows up in therapy as well: men who describe a breakup or a bereavement in the flat voice of someone reading a report, and who apologise when their eyes fill.

Gay men often carry a double load here. They absorbed the same masculine norms as straight boys, and on top of that they had reason to fear that any softness would expose their sexuality. The armour can become very thick.

Tops, bottoms and assumptions about gender

A top is the partner who prefers the penetrative role in anal sex, a bottom prefers the receptive role, and versatile men enjoy both. That is all the words mean. In gay culture, though, the roles are constantly read as gender: tops assumed to be masculine and dominant, bottoms assumed to be feminine and passive.

Contempt for femininity in other gay men is often contempt for something in yourself that you were taught to hide.

Those assumptions do damage. Some men feel ashamed of enjoying bottoming because it seems to say something about their manhood. Some men top out of a sense that it is expected of a man with their build or manner, without much enjoying it. Couples sometimes take on roles in the relationship to match roles in bed, and resent them later.

In my work with men who are anxious about sex, preferences often turn out to be tangled up with masculinity, trust and fear of being judged, far more than with pleasure. Separating them helps. I wrote about that in gay sex anxiety.

Masculinity in gay couples

When two men were each raised to avoid needing anyone, certain patterns are common. After an argument, neither reaches out first, because reaching out feels like losing. Both handle stress by withdrawing. Each waits for the other to show vulnerability, and both wait a long time.

Gay couples have no inherited script that assigns one partner the emotional work, which is a real advantage, and it also means the work has to be learned on purpose. Many of the couples who do well describe having to practise asking for comfort out loud, and practise giving it without fixing anything. I wrote about attachment in gay couples in intimacy and attachment in gay relationships.

Toxic masculinity and the gay version

Toxic masculinity is a contested phrase. As researchers use it, it refers to a narrow set of masculine norms associated with harm: emotional suppression, dominance, aggression and contempt for weakness. Masculinity itself is a separate thing. In 2018 the American Psychological Association published guidelines for working with boys and men that linked rigid adherence to traditional masculinity to worse mental health, and the guidelines drew wide argument.

For gay men the phrase cuts both ways. Gay men are often on the receiving end of those norms, especially in childhood. They can also enforce them on each other, through anti-effeminacy, through ranking bodies, and through a culture where showing need is treated as weak. Seeing both sides is more useful than defending or attacking masculinity in the abstract.

Working with it

In therapy the first step is usually noticing the audit: the moments you adjust your voice, hold back a reaction or brace before walking into a room. Most men are surprised by how often it runs. Then comes curiosity about what it has protected you from, and what it costs you now in closeness, ease and energy.

The aim is a masculinity you choose. For some men that is very traditional, for others not at all. What changes is that femininity, yours or anyone else’s, stops registering as a threat. That is often linked to the work on internalised homophobia and shame, and the page on therapy for shame explains how I approach it.