Originally posted 2017-05-31 17:09:47.
To understand the development of trans culture in the West, you need to understand the development of the contemporary Western face of male sexual intimacy, The New Gay Man. He’s not as old as you think and is restricted in his range to North America and Northern Europe. Everywhere else, an older model, which I call the Roman, is dominant.
We have become used, in the West, to a particular type of Homosexuals: outwardly somewhat masculine, good-looking, well-dressed, often cultured. It has become such a commonplace that today it would be easy to think that this representation of Homosexuality, the New Gay Man, has always existed and is, indeed, the only such presentation. In fact, the aim of many gay activists is to persuade the public that the New Gay Man is all Homosexuals have ever been. But this is nonsense.
The truth is that the New Gay Man only came into existence in the late 1960s. Prior to that, in every piece of scientific and historical literature, Homosexuals are presented as overtly feminine or effeminate, about as non-masculine as can be imagined. The only contrary voice was Alfred Kinsey’s, but he didn’t study gender at all!
Effeminacy goes back a long way
This image — of Homosexuals being effeminate — goes back to the earliest known texts, the Hymns to Inanna, first written down in the Goddess city of Uruk in Sumer (the Biblical Erech) sometime before 3000 BC. It persists through Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures. In fact the New Gay Model would have been incomprehensible to the Ancients.
All Roman Emperors, by repute, with the exception of Claudius, took boy lovers. Despite the predictable hysteria from the New Gay Man lobby, these men were not Homosexuals, because they only penetrated. In these cultures — which forbade intercourse between adult men — sex with a boy or a slave carried no opprobrium, as long as the man penetrated. This remains the case — to the horror of Westerners, we are sure — across much of the world today. Roman sex demanded what the New Gay Man refuses: a status hierarchy.
In the Roman Model, he who penetrated was just being a man; it was the act of being penetrated that carried the shame and the sanctions.
Dr Michael Bailey, of NorthWestern University in Chicago described this as ‘transgender homosexuality’. In it, one partner only penetrates, playing the male role, and the other only receives, playing the female one.(1)
This, then, was the face of Homosexuality — in Italy in the Renaissance, where rent-boys hung around street-corners, some to be immortalised by their artist lovers; or in the fetid sexuality of the molly-houses of the 17th and 18th centuries, where effeminate homosexual males would dress as women to have sex with men. It is the Homosexuality that Quentin Crisp so eloquently described in pre-1960s London.(2)
Research in the 19th Century
When researchers like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld began to try to analyse what Homosexuality was about, in the 19th century, they universally described their subjects as highly effeminate. Ulrichs, who was himself a Homosexual, called them Urnings and others Uranians or Inverts — born males with feminine personalities and quasi-female sexual desires: they wanted to be nailed by big powerful men. The important point here is that they were not like other men, indeed far from it. This denial cut across the bows of the New Gay Movement, as it developed in the USA and the result was that those who were small, pretty and feminine (assuming they were Homosexuals) were vilified. The USA, especially in its so-called ‘liberal’ elements, is one of the most aggressively conformist and anti-individualistic cultures in the world (although US Americans deny it) and in this case, what was being enforced by the New Gay Man thought police was this axiom:
It’s okay to be ‘gay’ as long as you’re our kind of gay. No more wigs, lipsticks or pretty dresses. And lose the heels, bitch.
In other words, until only around sixty years ago, a Homosexual was defined as feminine and youthful (or at least youthful-looking); but mainly, as receptive in the act of anal sex. This was exactly the model that the New Gay Man sought to destroy.
So where did today’s butch buff ‘gay’, with his locker-room faux masculinity, replete with the odour of socks and liniment, come from? When did his aspiration towards masculinity appear? Because it simply did not exist before the 1960s, anywhere.
A little history
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States mobilised over 16 million men to serve in the World War. Most of these were boys from backwoods America, the land of cosy safe towns, mom and pop stores and church on Sundays; most definitely not the sort of place where an effeminate young Homosexual could easily survive.
If we apply the standard estimates of the prevalence of male homosexuality in the West, at between 1-5%,(3) we arrive at a lower bound of 160,000, and an upper bound of 800,000 full-blown Homosexuals serving in the armed forces. Even if we take the lower, that is a significant total; and remember, we are talking here only about sexually receptive males, not their lovers.
Demobilisation
At the end of WW2, the US’ armed forces were demobilised at three major centres: San Diego and San Francisco on the West Coast and New York on the east.
Not surprisingly, many of the homosexuals thus liberated decided that they were not going back to Hicksville, Wyoming, to marry Suzie Creamcheese and live Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare. After all, these were sexually receptive feminine males who had been serving in the testosterone-heavy milieu of the armed forces. It is certain that many, if not all of them had, as the delightful Quentin Crisp put it, ‘their minds broadened — as well as their anuses.’
The result of the demobilisation of such numbers of homosexuals was that large and obvious populations were established in New York and on the West Coast, where their descendants, at least figuratively, remain today.
The presence, and visibility, of these populations had two consequences. The first was that the broader society took notice — and reacted; the second was that Homosexuals began to group together to resist the resulting social rejection.
The Mattachine Society
The first well-known Homosexual activist group in the US was called the Mattachine Society. This was formed in 1950 around a Marxist called Harry Hay, who was overtly effeminate and often cross-dressed. Despite this, he was actually married. It appears he did this in order to follow the Communist Party line, which was hostile to homosexuality.(4)
By 1961 the Mattachine had splintered into disparate regional groups with no central organisation. During that decade, these and other similar groups were taken over by a movement that later became known as the ‘accommodationists’. The best known voice for this movement is probably Jim Fouratt, who appeared during the Vietnam era. Fouratt was a regular feature of activism over the next four decades, becoming notorious for his anti-femininity stance — despite his own effeminacy.(5)
In essence, the accommodationist argument is that the best way to protect Homosexuals — who would soon adopt the term ‘gay’ and try to make its use obligatory — from social rejection, was to hide in plain sight. No more girly mannerisms, effeminate voices, flouncing around or, heaven forfend, wearing dresses. At the same time advocates of open effeminacy were silenced.
At a stroke, the historic link between femininity and Homosexuals was, if not broken, disguised from public view. The accommodationists’ mantra has always been, ‘We’re just like other men, but we love men’. Masculinism, to coin a term, became the order of the day.
A problem that became obvious in the 1970s
In parallel with this new style came a change in the definition of Homosexuality: from now on, men who penetrated receptive males would also be considered Homosexuals. This idea was not originally his but it was promoted relentlessly by Alfred Kinsey, an academic charlatan who took it upon himself to ignore all the papers and books that affirmed the effeminate nature of Homosexuals, in favour of his own opinion. Unfortunately he gained widespread popularity.
These men had inhabited a somewhat vague Twilight Zone. As we have seen, myriad cultures either ignored, condoned or actively promoted the penetration of boys and feminised males — Homosexuals — by men. Even in the West, such proclivities were generally swept under the carpet; a notable exception was Oscar Wilde’s conviction for sodomising boys in 1895.(6) He probably would have got away with it, but for buggering a Peer of the realm’s son and bragging about it.
Now, however, ‘transgender homosexuality’ was to be replaced by ‘egalitarian homosexuality’. In this, the partners switch sexual roles and were both expected to appear to be masculine, since for at least part of the time they would penetrate.
This caused a problem. If Homosexuals are invisible — appearing to be like other men — how do they find sexual partners?
Transgender to Egalitarian
The heterosexual men involved in ‘transgender homosexuality’ were not attracted to masculine males at all; often they were happily married. Indeed, Fouratt described the Stonewall Inn in New York, seat of the eponymous protests, as a haunt of ‘white boys and their married johns.’
These married men — who paid to penetrate rent-boys — did not consider themselves to be Homosexuals; this was because in the first place, they were just doing what men do and in the second they were simply carrying on a tradition that has existed since long before Rome, largely without social repercussions. They persist today and as a result of concerns about the spread of HIV, have even been recognised with a new label — men who have sex with males, or ‘MSM’.(7)
It was their sexual partners’ femininity that attracted these men: look again at the picture above. It would not take much to turn the smaller male into a convincing girl, would it? Some make-up, a wig, a slinky dress — believe me I’ve seen it done. But with this gone, so were the men. They were not interested in sex, and certainly not in relationships, with other men at all; they regarded boys — or very boyish young men — as a sexual delicacy. Perhaps more to the point, they were aficionados of anal sex, which at the time was a taboo subject and their sexual targets were gagging to feel a man inside them.
Such men refused to join the nascent ‘gay’ movement, because they were not attracted to masculinity and it is this attraction– rather than the act of penetration — that the New Gay Man has defined himself in terms of. They do hang around in places where Homosexuals congregate — like the old Stonewall — but their activities are strictly clandestine.
In order to fly under the radar, the ‘married johns’ did one of the following: they went underground and carried on in secret; they gave up boys and went only with women, possibly seeking to penetrate them anally; or they sought out receptive Transsexual Homosexuals. These last, in addition to being naturally petite and girlish, maximised their femininity, to the absolute horror of the New Gay Man. However they were and remain rare in the West. where the dominant transgender form was the Autogynephilic Transvestite. Hello, Pattaya.
Clone Gay: the first New Gay Man
Their former lovers — and sources of income — having made other arrangements, Homosexuals had to become each other’s lovers. For the New Gay Man lifestyle to work at all, both parties had to appear masculine and be prepared to penetrate; to be switchers, what an Asian would call ‘bisexuals.’ Thus was born the 70s ‘Clone Gay’ with his moustache, white tee-shirt and skinny jeans, the first widely-recognised incarnation of the New Gay Man.
The rigorous policing of gender behaviour that goes on within the New Gay Man community, in order to reinforce his veneer of masculinity, leads to wider intolerance, most notably of Transsexual Homosexuals. This is why New Gay Man apologists today are so quick to erase the historical roles of transsexuals, ‘trannies,’ ‘queens’ and other feminine expressions of Homosexuality. After all, they are doing exactly what almost every New Gay Man would love to do but is forbidden to.
But there is an alternative.
Last month, in Manila, I watched, mesmerised, as a ladyboy made her way through a crowd outside the terminal at NAIA. It was broad daylight. With every step her buttocks twitched from side to side, her exaggerated sashay attracting the attention of everyone there.
‘Look,’ she was saying. ‘Look at my ass. Isn’t it taught and rounded? Isn’t it delightful to observe? Don’t think you can kid me, I know how sexy I am.’ To the men she said, ‘I know you want it; so be a man and come get it,’ and to the women, ‘Well, you may have boobs and a pussy, but I have this — and it’s all I’ll ever need.’
Nothing further from the affected faux masculinity of the New Gay Man could be imagined. That girl was sex on legs and she had the measure of her audience. You could see the men leering and the furious glares of their wives.
But for the intolerance of male femininity that led to the appearance of the New Gay Man, she might have been the face of homosexuality in the West; paradoxically, she may yet be again.
Part Three next week!
Footnotes
1 The Man Who Would Be Queen (2003)
2 The Naked Civil Servant
4 https://sfpl.org/?pg=2000517301
5 In the row over the film Stonewall, Fouratt claimed that there had been no trans or black people at the eponymous riots. (http://bitterqueen.typepad.com/friends_of_ours/2017/04/nightlife-legend-jim-fouratt-on-drag-queens-and-people-of-color-at-stonewall-riots-the-problem-i-hav.html) This is in direct contradiction of Marsha P Johnson, who also claims to have been there. However, we note that in a 2015 letter to Mark Segal et al, available here (http://www.tangentgroup.org/foratt-on-stonewall/ ) Fouratt says that Johnson was indeed there. We suspect Fouratt is somewhat less than rigorous in his recollections.
6 It is likely even this would not have happened had Wilde not been so careless as to be intimate with the son of Sir John Sholto Douglas, an outspoken critic of homosexuality.
7 Not all MSM conform to the description above. Amongst them are many who seek to be penetrated, but they have been lumped in together as a catch-all. This derives from the term’s invention by HIV awareness campaigners who realised that these men simply would not respond to being called ‘gay’ or homosexual. I’ll discuss the variations in a future piece.
Other Links
https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/femme-shaming-and-fighting-back-against-gay-on-gay-prejudice