Resident OT masculist, rolfboy here with another thread for thought. IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not debating the morality of the gay orientation, just putting my thoughts on how it gained political leverage. Here's the thing, the idea of what constitutes gay has fluctuated depending on what society and time we're talking about. Its never really been static and it ties directly into what is accepted as "masculine" in each individual society.
Simply put, the less people confident of their masculinity, the more they either move towards the gay identity or to merely break off from the persuit of being socially regarded as a man altogether. Note that lesbians can socialize among straight women for a large part with little conflict so thats why I didn't include them. Really, the only things these days accepted as definitively masculine is how many women you can ****, the military, and football. Virtually ANYTHING else can in some respects be construed as gay these days. The less that emotionally and socially binds adult males together as "men", the more men as a group are diminished and the more off-shoots are developed to replace each man's individual masculine identity, including the gay identity.
The gay stigma was for a large part of history usually reserve for the men who were flaming queens, extremely flamboyant, and those who embrace feminimity completely. I mean just take a look at Ancient Rome/Greece, we accept that almost all of the men there were gay or bi and yet their societies flourished considering their lasting legacy and the men seemed alright with their fellow men. Men in Western society by constrast may and will dismiss other men as not being "men" (if not outright gay for the following offenses: queers, men emotionally attached to other men, young males who look like "pretty boys", anybody who likes to wrestle, men who show any signs of not endeavoring on the behalf of women, males who get raped in prison, men who haven't had sex with a woman, deliberately or not, and I have to be forgetting others.
I will not waste my time debating on what thing I listed is gay but I will simply state that the identity of social masculinity is MUCH more narrow than it was even a few decades ago; really, the only result this could lead to is less men who qualify to embrace social manhood as brothers. Not all or even most of the displaced males embraced the gay label, but men as a single class (who would have naturally been most opposed to the gay orientation as being mainstream) has been severely weakened to the point that the gay demographic just walked right into largely being social accepted in the span of one or two generations(though liberals had something to do with it). The average man just didn't care about homosexuals as they weren't really all that invested in being socially regarded as a man.
Considering how many gay people could pass off as straight, I'd be willing to bet that many of them would consider themselves as "men" as opposed to "gays" if the standards of being a man was actually relaxed a bit. I personally wouldn't even care about this issue at all if such a superfluous detail couldn't get a guy social entitlements (and this is coming from a gay guy mind you) because the issue is that trivial.
I may be right or wrong, butI just like to think outside the box.
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