Quien es mas macho?

Straight-acting vs. gay-acting: It's just acting

A recent chance discovery(https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-pressure-to-act-like-a-man-starts-in-preschool?utm_source=pocket-newtab) got me thinking.

Who knows whether there’s anything to it, but this story rings strangely true. My own experience of learning how to act like a straight dude was that it involved a lot of training: consider how you walk, how you gesture, the pitch level and contour of your voice, the play of expression on your face, your stance. How you take your shirt off (crossed arms, or hand over head?). When your hands are on your hips, are the thumbs pointing forward or back?

That last one is a huge tell.

It’s really a role we play, no matter how interested we are, sexually, in girls or guys. I don’t think it comes naturally, or falls out from what your “orientation” is. I think it comes from socialization, and how you learn, or want, to present yourself socially.

Maybe the difference between “straight-acting” and “gay-acting” guys is that the former have taken on the burden and the latter have thrown it aside. “Gay-acting” guys have a wider repertoire, no doubt about it. Straight acting guys walk around like they’re in, well, a straight jacket.

I personally act a lot more gay around my gay friends. It’s not flirting – well, okay, maybe a harmless little bit – I’m a hopeless flirt, with anybody and everybody. But around my supposedly straight friends, I’m channelling Clint Eastwood. Which might be a kind of flirtation too. Quien es mas macho?

I know gay guys who habitually, and convincingly, act like laxbros – the easy spreadeagle in the dorm armchair, the casual ball-scratching, the beer, the unceremonious belch – and conversely, straight guys who act like Oscar Wilde.

I think what it comes down to is that demeanor has nothing to do with “object choice”, meaning whether you’re into girls or guys. Perhaps the “gay acting” demeanor is partly a subculture marker, originating in the bad old days when male same-sex sex was medicalized, pathologized, and criminalized, and yet had to represent itself somehow.

So then maybe the “straight acting” demeanor is the mirror image – the symmetrical artefact of the medical-police complex. If acting gay says “I’m gay”, then maybe acting straight says “I’m NOT gay.”