Masculinity, Euphoria, Activism.

An image from one of my favorite friends in the suit & tie community. (And a leatherman, to boot.) He once said to me: "Masculinity is defined by ourselves. Make it your own, do good with it. A masculine man such as myself can use it as a platform to show you you can be a hard-faced bastard and still be inclusive."

This is a dark time for queer people. In the United States, conservatives’ assault on trans and nonbinary people has escalated into a religious war on all our rights, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade threatening everything from our right to marry to our right to have sex as queer people. Prominent members of the U. S. Republican party are calling for an end to separation of church and state. Meanwhile, moderates and liberals flail about, doing nothing to stop the onslaught of christo-fascism, and instead expect us to be impressed by singing songs on the steps of Congress and bleating hoarse calls to “just vote.”

All this is to say that there are more important things to think about than queerness and masculinity. My goal in this essay is to think about ways to take back masculinity from those who would hurt us. I want to think about ways to queer masculinity, to go beyond just “detoxing” it. After all, a “nontoxic” masculinity sounds corporate, domesticated, sanitized. And I think a queer masculinity should be anything but: masculinity should be gritty, wild, raw, passionate; it should be kind, self-assured, protective of our LGBTQIA+ kindred who need help; it should be courageous, defiant of conservative Christo-fascist regimes. We cannot surrender masculinity to our bullies. Masculinity should feel good, and masculinity should be used for good.

I wrote several months ago about the difficulties I have with masculinity and body image issues. I intend this post as a way to move past that, and redefine masculinity in positive terms. A queer masculinity should be vulnerable, and it should be resilient. Those are the two adjectives I’d like to use to guide this train of thought.

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Most of the guys I interview in the suit and tie fetish community will start the conversation with masculinity. I’ll ask them, “What drew you to suits and ties to begin with?” They’ll answer, “It’s masculine.” It’s certainly not a wrong answer, but it’s also neither reflective nor satisfying. The more complete response would look something like this: “I am drawn to suits and ties because these garments are a uniform associated with hegemonic corporate power structures that emerged through specific forms of Western capitalism and colonialism, and, through those structures, these garments have come to be associated with a set of ideals and aesthetics that we in the United States have termed ‘masculine,’ and, through the cultural hegemony of European empires, those gender norms have grown prevalent across the globe, even though there is nothing essentially ‘masculine’ about any garment at all, and even though many non-European cultures define masculinity through different aesthetics.” Which is a longwinded way of saying that it’s just a bunch of threads, dear.

Or, more precisely, I think that, when we as queer men say that suits and ties sexually stimulate our appetites, what we mean is that these garments induce in many queer men a sense of gender euphoria. The suit and tie align the queer man’s outward gender presentation with his sense of identity, and that identity happens to be masculine in this case. However, hen I use the term “gender euphoria,” I need to be mindful that this term comes from the trans community, and represents a key experience for trans people. I also need to be mindful that, in the case of masculine gender euphoria, a masculine aesthetic can be used to reinforce the gender binary, and thereby shut out the experiences of nonbinary people. Thus, when I refer to this specific form of masculine gender euphoria brought about by suits and ties, I am trying to be inclusive of any queer person who feels that suits and ties speak to them.

So gender euphoria is important to trans people, but not exclusive to them. Many articles define gender euphoria as the opposite of gender dysphoria: gender euphoria provides a much-needed expression of queer joy in times of personal and political crisis. And, for transmen, gender euphoria is a necessary stage in the process of transitioning and aligning their outward presentation with their inner identity. But it is also possible for cis people to experience gender euphoria, though perhaps in a different way, and perhaps not to the same degree.

For many cis queer men who fetishize suits and ties, the suit feels like armor. It feels protective, powerful. The suit imparts a charge that makes you feel like you can get away with anything. There is a rush to it, the aromas and the textures, the accoutrements and shoes, all amounting to a sense of masculine authority that our ordinary heterpatriarchal existence has denied us: queer men fetishize masculinity because cis straight men try to keep masculinity out of our reach. The suit and tie–as well as any fetishism of masculine clothing–allows us as queer men to reclaim masculinity for ourselves.

Think about this euphoria and reclamation of gender identity is not just an expression of personal identity: it can be an act of resistance, defiance, or resilience. José Esteban Muñoz has written about the way that queer people have used drag as a weapon for liberation and survival in oppressive regimes. The term he uses for this strategy is “disidentification:” “Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” Or, in plainer prose: we suit up to pass. As an armor of respectability, the suit and tie allows us to move through a society that will lash out against us the moment our queerness surfaces. Think about what this strategy means at this political moment, when drag queens have become the targets of conservative rage: because the drag queen defies the conservative white male conception of gender, the suit and tie, as a kind of ur-masculine attire, acts as a protective camouflage. Thus, as Muñoz would put it, the suit and tie allows for a kind of strategic dis-identification: putting on a suit and tie, we as queer people can selectively say “I'm not that kind of gay,” while getting away with being “that kind of gay” in secret. For all of the dapper visibility and attention that the suit and tie commands, the aura of respectability cloaks us and protects us.

This protection is vital because, to the straights, masculinity is a boys’ club from which the queers are perpetually excluded. But for us in the queer fetish community, the suit and tie is a way not only to regain access to that club, but also to form a newer, even more exclusive club, a heightened suited aesthetic that verges into masculine drag. The modest, not-too-gay four-in-hand knot of the cis straight menswear influencer becomes the extravagant, bloated, phallic double-windsor of the suit fetishist. And this heightened drag brings about a sense of renewed masculinity: gender euphoria. I believe that experience must be true for transmen who, after years of trying to actualize their identity, finally find some way to express it. These cis and trans experiences are analogous because they can both be queer, and their queerness and euphoria can both be achieved through this mode of masculine drag.

So—why go on about gender euphoria and suits?

Using the term “gender euphoria” is productive here because, as many transpeople know, gender and sex aren’t the same thing. To say that suits and ties inspire gender euphoria is to de-essentialize them; it is to say that these garments don’t have to be masculine, but for us they happen to be. It’s a way for us to claim ownership of the feelings that these garments give us: the suit and tie is masculine because it makes you feel that way, not because some Instagram influencer told you so. If you take an active role in constructing your masculinity—as transmen must do—then you’re empowering yourself. You’re not assuming that a garment is masculine by default. You’re making it mean that for yourself.

This sense of empowerment and ownership of our gender identity is important because neoliberalism has a way of manufacturing meanings for us, and making us buy those meanings as products. We are told that these garments are masculine, those are feminine, and if you’re born with this set of biological equipment you’re supposed to wear this thing, etc, etc. Entire advertising industries have sprung into being around selling masculinity through objects, allowing both corporations and individual influencer-goons to assign what masculinity means for us. Gun manufacturers, for instance, have long used masculinity as a way to sell deadly weapons to disaffected young men. And Instagram abounds with muscley menswear morons who spout out motivational platitudes that link suits and ties with money, and money with masculinity. Putting all of these hollow images together, the meaning of cisheteromasculinity becomes clear: in order to be a man–or, rather, that kind of man–you must form your identity through greed and violence.

Apparently, pictures with the Impact font aren't photoshopped.

The iconography of male greed is often expressed through objects and motivational platitudes about “success,” which is always defined in individualistic, capitalist terms: the suit and tie paired with whiskey and/or a cigar; a bootstraps or pseudo-stoic mentality in which you, the would-be man, must “master” your emotions or “make your own luck” or prove your “haters” wrong by “pursing your own destiny,” which means being “entrepreneurial” and making sure you earn lots of money so that you can afford your suits and ties and cigars and sire more offspring with your wife, who of course adores you because you’re straight and cis and oh-so-manly. As the unspecified, vague presence of “haters” suggests, this kind of masculinity fantasizes itself as embattled and threatened, hence the lazy slippage from “my way or the highway” to an iconography that explicitly links suits, ties, masculinity, money, and violence.

Waving around a gun isn't a threat of violence. He's just being edgy.

I had to hunt through many unsavory Instagram accounts to find these images, but I believe they represent my point best: corporate bodies like Instagram sell us only one story of what it means to be a man, and that story is a toxic one. Like a sausage machine churning out only the meatiest mealy-mouthed monetization mantras, such Instagram influencers peddle to us an image of masculinity that, for all its trappings of wealth, proves to be impoverished of meaning. And it doesn’t have to be this way. Masculinity doesn’t have to be about violence and greed. As queer men, we have the power to define it in new ways—better ways, ways that resist what the algorithm tells us.

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I’ve spent a great deal of energy in this post defining what masculinity isn’t. I’d like to end on end on some notes about what masculinity could be, and that’s where the resilience and vulnerability come in. As bell hooks defines it in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, masculinity can find courage only through empathy and vulnerability. As it stands, our culture only tells one story about what it means to be a man: suppress your emotions, man up, suit up, buy a gun, get a high-paying job, and care only for yourself. Missing in this story is any space for vulnerability, any space for queerness or intimacy or connection. Man is hetero, man is alpha, man is the lone wolf, man is invulnerable.

Man feels no pain. Which is to say, man must feel no pain, man must pretend that his pain doesn’t exist, man must “control” his feelings. This, in bell hooks’ model, results in “a culture where male pain can have no voice.” Tracing the crisis of masculinity to U. S. culture’s collective attempt to stunt the emotional development of young men, hooks wisely observes that a lack of positive male role models “indoctrinates” young men “into patriarchal thinking that tells them it is their nature to kill and to enjoy killing.” Video games, movies, bullying, sports, locker-room talk that treats women as objects and queer people as punching bags: verbal violence always hinting at physical violence, masked with the ironic smirk of “being edgy.” In order to end this cycle of violence, hooks proposes that we as a society “reclaim the essential goodness of male being” in order to “regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being.” In other words, vulnerability to our emotions—vulnerability to the queer pain that many of us in the LGBTQIA+ community have experienced, and a willingness to share that pain with others as a communal act—that is a path to a better masculinity.

That leads me to the notion of resilience. By letting ourselves be vulnerable to our own emotions, and by letting ourselves be intimate with others, we learn resilience in a world that devolves increasingly into neoliberal cristo-fascism–all of the worst aspects of our conservative bullies, writ large. After all, intimacy is all about vulnerability, and queer, kinky, BDSM sex is all about the voluntary and erotic surrender of power to someone else. And, in community and resilience, we learn solidarity. I don’t think this is a difficult step to master. If we imagine ourselves surrendering our pseudo-masculine sense of invulnerability and control for a more authentically masculine sense of empathy and resilience, then is there not an analogy between the surrender of power in queer sex and the solidarity we feel towards the most vulnerable members of our community? If queer sex is about intimacy, and intimacy is about connection, then ought we not extend those connections outward, and forge a masculinity that envisions itself as protecting those who need protecting the most?

Perhaps my notions of benevolent masculinity are a bit old-fashioned. But I maintain my position that, if we abandon masculinity, we simply give our opponents a weapon that they will use against us–and already have. The Jordan Petersons and Jack Donovans of the world have no qualms about advocating for a “dangerous” masculinity, and wiping their hands clean the moment that their male branding motivates young men to acts of queerphobic violence. As Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller have pointed out in their recent history Bad Gays, cis gay men are frequently attracted to the strongman rhetoric of violence, misled by a false sense that such conservative, fascist, individualistic conceptions of masculinity will protect them: the iconography of muscles, guns, Viking warriors, Spartans, or other such trappings of being a “dangerous” man easily slip into the right-wing agenda of heteropatriarchal conformity.

"You can be a hard-faced bastard and still be inclusive."

Masculinity doesn’t have to be this way. One small way that we as queer men can counteract this hegemony is to show that the straights’ notion of masculinity is deficient: it’s narrow, small, and founded on fear and pain, rather than compassion and connection. That reframing of masculinity, I think, allows us a path towards resistance to the kinds of virulent politics engulfing our lives.

We can align our queerness, our masculinity, and our activism. We can feel good about being men, and we can support the transmen and the nonbinary and queer folks in our lives. Masculinity can move beyond selfishness, and see itself as part of something larger, something greater and more diverse than the puny Instagram influencers could ever have imagined. Your kink for one kind of gear or another needs not separate you from other queer men. Sports gear, uniforms, leather, rubber, cowboys, suits and ties—it’s all drag, honey. You don’t have to be into it all, but you do need to show love and solidarity for your queer family. Violence might be necessary for us to defend ourselves in the coming dark years, but love is what will give us the motivation to survive. As our queer ancestors have shown us, survival is resistance.