These comments show that the responders have failed to engage seriously with McGinley’s argument, which clearly and rightly expresses a distinction between “homosexual desire” and “homosexual acts”. Analogy: I can believe that smoking is bad for you, that it is bad for society, and even that it should be banned, without in any way implying that I hate people who desire to smoke. Other parts of this article (e.g. the analysis of “masculinity” as a set of societal expectations) do not make quite as much sense to me, but on this point the reasoning is very good and, unfortunately, ignored by the responders.

The problem now, according to McGinley, seems to be that you can’t have affectionate male friendships without people wondering if the two might be gay. There are two major flaws with this reasoning. First, there’s the “so what” argument, in other words, so what if people think two affectionate males might be gay? The obvious rebuttal to this argument is that there is a stigma against homosexuality, and thus the appearance of being gay is something to be avoided.

The solution that McGinley suggests would be most preferable, and “obvious”, to remedy this, is to have an even stronger stigma against homosexual intercourse. The second objection then, is that this solution is far from obvious, or at the least that there is an opposite, and just as obvious solution: remove the stigma altogether. If the stigma didn’t exist, then we could all say “so what” when two affectionate males were conjectured to be gay.

I think there are a variety of other problems with the essay’s arguments – it’s not clear from where this supposed vision of masculinity comes from (and it seems likely to me that it may never have existed as imagined). Certain historical claims are also made about how masculinity was in ages past, but it’s not clear when that past was. Certainly at many points in the past the prohibition against homosexual sex was not what McGinley makes it out to be. Aside from the Romans and Greeks, in the beginning of the 20th Century during the campaigns in Haiti, homosexual acts were surprisingly common among American troops stationed there – it was only a stigma to be the receptive partner.

If you want to trace some thread through most masculinities of the past, I might suggest not fear of homosexuals, but dominance. Certainly what has had to be downplayed with the acceptance of sexual equality has been the maxim that to be a man, you must be in a position of power within your social group. Whatever happens to define power in a particular group has often been associated with masculinity. This idea too is in need of complication, but I think it would provide a much stronger starting-point, and is also visible in the whole Dockers Man-ifesto that seems to have touched the whole discussion off for McGinley.

But that’s not my main critique. Brandon dude, I don’t think you realize how offensive this is. You basically just said that gay men can’t be “masculine.” Masculinity is a social construct, so anyone on earth can adopt its norms.

I am so not convinced by your argument that you actually think that stigmatizing gay men is bad.

So, gay men aren’t actually men? I thought part of your argument was to “divorce masculinuty from sexuality,” but you obviously are still conflating the two.