Amazon review of “Androphilia”
After three decades of it, I might not be ready to start “rejecting the gay identity” but “reclaiming masculinity” is something I have been engaged in for a long time. So Jack Malebranche’s “Androphilia” is a welcome voice. When he noted, just for starters, the pervasive infections of “anti-male feminism, victimist mentality and left-wing politics” in the gay mainstream, he had my attention. And kept it. Although Androphilia is a manifesto, it is well-written, accessible and yet richly packed with content that you can return to and mull over after first reading. I have.
An image of my own that supports his take on the Orwellian strangeness of current gay identity/culture: A transgender man who asserts, “Just because I don’t have the `right’ equipment doesn’t mean I’m less a man”, will be praised and defended. An ordinary gay male who asserts, “Just because I’m a Republican doesn’t mean I’m less gay”, will be booed and booted out.
Malebranche has a strong point: contemporary gayness is a pre-packaged ideology and lifestyle often at odds with the natural masculine identity of its own population, and pressure to buy the whole thing is very intense. Deviance, ironically, is not well tolerated.
The primary slur against homosexual men is that we are not men at all, but something less, something like faux-females. Malebranche underestimates the deep contempt many men still have for one of their own who, how shall I put it, kneels or bends over. One defense against this is for us to identify with the slur and defiantly transform it into a mark of pride. This is how the cross, the ancient analogue of our noose or chair, became a religious symbol of victory. The same inversion with the pink triangle.
So, many gay men embrace the feminine that they are accused of aping. And in its defiance, it is a masculine act. But far too often, it is an unintegrated and adolescent, even pathological, femininity. And it remains perpetually stuck in defiance mode, becoming a pose or a cartoon, retarding their maturation as men. Rather than refuting the slur, they sadly prove its point. It is not necessary. It is painful to see. And it is not rare. And it is very rarely challenged from within the gay world.
Although I may differ with Malebranche on the depth of the feminizing stigma, or his reflections on desire as preference vs orientation, or his regrettable but minor decision to use Andrew Sullivan’s bogus “Christianist” lingo -and I am glad that he minimized his old notion of fetish–, I stand with him solidly and gratefully on his central androphile point, true for all men, but especially now for us men who love and desire other men. To paraphrase, “Manhood is not the problem, it is the solution”.
