[LINK] "Meet the Gaybros"

[rfmcdonald]

J. Bryan Lowder's recent article in Slate about Reddit community gaybros, populated by self-defined masculine gay men with decidedly masculine (heteronormative?) interests who feel rejected by a GLBT culture that doesn't respect their interests.

It’s a snowy Saturday night in Boston, and the bros are moving in pack formation. As we trudge through the fresh powder toward South End, the 10 or so guys I’m walking with jostle and joke their way forward through the frigid air, bouncing with that particular surge of giddy energy you sometimes get when you’re hanging out with people you have never met in real life.

As members of Gaybros—a Reddit-based community for gay guys with traditionally manly interests like sports, hunting, and beer—the large majority of their bonding takes place through comment threads under topics like “Ron Swanson vs. James Bond” and “My Gay Card Has Been Revoked.” But in cities like Boston, New York, L.A., Toronto, and even London, they try to regularly “meet-up” at a local restaurant or bar, exchanging Reddit’s upvotes and downvotes for proper handshakes and side-hugs. These “IRL” encounters can, understandably, feel awkward at first, as this one did when we had all gathered for dinner earlier in the evening at a crowded Italian cafeteria. Much of the conversation revolved around how the so-called bartender had asked if seltzer was a spirit. But bros being bros, the group made the best of their over-salted pasta and soda-fountain tap water, and we were quickly on our way to a more dependable source of alcohol.

“Where are we going again?” I ask, dodging drifts and shivering from under-preparedness. “To Fritz!” someone I’m too cold to look toward explains, referencing the city’s premiere gay sports bar. Once past the middle-aged bouncer’s baritone “evening, gentlemen,” I could see why. If the Gaybro’s mission statement is “a place for guys to get together and talk about, well, guy stuff. Sports, video games, military issues, grilling, gear, working out, gadgets, tech, TV, movies, and more,” Fritz is their ideal arena. The decor is classic pub, all dark woods and vintage trophies, but with a decidedly gay twist: Look even briefly at the house-made baseball and football player posters decorating the walls, and more than sportsmanlike appreciation for the athletic male form quickly becomes apparent.

There are, as Lowder notes, obvious issues with this. Is it actually true that gay culture doesn't privilege masculinity, especially masculinity in a heterosexual mold?

When Buzzfeed interviewed the group’s founder, Alex Deluca, on the occasion of their one-year anniversary this past January, the comments section immediately filled with screeds about “masculine privilege” and “femmephobia” within the gay community. (I may have scrawled something to this effect on Facebook myself the day the story broke.)

Deluca, 23, spoke in the Q-and-A about his dismay at encountering a “very narrow definition of what it means to be gay” in mainstream culture, one that apparently doesn’t make room for guys with interests like “video games, paintball, and sports.” “I created Gaybros to provide a space for these guys,” he said. “[A place for them] to gather and talk about shared interests and to break down stereotypes and promote the idea that you could be a gay man and still be exactly who you've always been.”

Eli Fox, a commenter from New Orleans, captured the general complaint of those who took issue with Deluca’s treating the gay “stereotype” like an unwanted cardboard box: “This is such bullshit and just perpetuates the idea that femininity is fake or that people put it on […] He makes it sound like masculine gay guys are somehow OPPRESSED. No, they're the most desired, because masculine traits are prized in the gay male community just like practically every other social group […] Masc guys aren't the ones who need to spend time promoting some agenda of masculinity and "regular guy" culture crap. Society has already done that for them.”

Still more to the point, Lowder's arguments later that gay culture is fragmented, even self-identifying gays not sharing in a single interpretation of what it is to be gay, are on the money. IMHO.