Gays being masc has been making people mad for half a century now, and in this episode, we read Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 Christopher Street essay, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?” to find out why. We discuss the rise of “gay macho” in the 1970s, exemplified by the clone, the leather bar, BDSM, and urban gay male promiscuity. We talk about different gay male stances toward feminism, the enduring belief that effeminacy is inherently radical, and the tendency of gays of all styles to declare that “all” gays are being gay in a way that excludes them. We talk about the origins of our erotic fascination with masculinity and the importance of being able to revel in what we find hot without overthinking it.

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Sources

Seymour Kleinberg, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?,” Christopher Street, March 1978.

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Society, Culture, and Politics (2002)

Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.

Edmund White, “Fantasia on the Seventies,” Christopher Street, September 1977.

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (2009)

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Seymour Kleinberg, Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America (1980)

Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1980.

Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (2005)

Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (1990)

Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” London Review of Books, March 22, 2018.

Anastasia Berg, “Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu Responds to Amia Srinivasan,” The Point, July 18, 2018.

Leo Bersani, Homos (1995)