
Queering The Strong Male.
The subject I write about here is not exclusive to the gay/bi/queer male. I have, however, had some of these feelings and experienced them from other gay/bi/queer males so therefore I feel that I can write with some authority. I am not, thought, putting words and feelings to people who belong to queer spaces. You may find yourself in this article or you may not, it is merely my perspective.
When I begin reading a story that is written by a male and the subject is emotions, I will predict that there will be a line in the article/blog post such as this:
“As men we are supposed to be strong…”
Then some more rhetoric about how men are expected to be independent. I would argue that this type of article will, mostly, be from the perspective of straight men.
Being strong for gay/bi/queer men in society has a multitude of layers. Perhaps we are more attuned to this than are straight men. Often this is because we have become strong due to our experience of other males. In a sense we, through our own and others history, are the subject rather than the object. Queering Simone de Beauvoir (who I am completely engrossed in at the moment; her life, her work) and her writings on the experiences of women as the other, we can position our male-selves as the other, and sometimes to be very grateful for being the other.
Right back at school we were the other. Many a story is told by a gay/bi/queer male of not having been strong enough. This was back at a development age when being strong enough was not crying and being good at PE. That was all we knew as being strong. Even though it was centred on emotions and physical stability, it was encapsulated by physical strength. We didn’t know about resilience, but to have resilience is to have strength. That was something we would gradually learn.
Some gay/bi/queer males embodied the subject as the other. They found a way to express themselves. I found a short clip of Miss Fame from Season 7 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2015) on Youtube doing a ELLE shoot and speaking about the persona of Miss Fame as the female presence that he allows to move through him.
Often for some of us gay/bi/queer males we found our strength through female representation; in families and through media. For us the male was the subject, the other we desired but the female became our object. However, we still embodied the male and maybe it took us years to realise that our strength came from inside and was just a facet of our male bodies.
School finishes eventually and we enter another part of our lives. We can become our own freedom. Yes, we danced around with women as the other to Gloria Gaynor or Cher but we found strength and became strong from the message that we heard in the words. For some it was Boy George, Kate Bush or Beyoncé. Boy George, for us 80s kids, found us a different male identity, strong in a different way. He embodied the other male, and some of us loved it!
