After I published my essay wrestling with femininity, a gay man named Chris (who is a kindred spirit) left a powerful comment that I have not been able to shake. He wrote about the revulsion so many conservative men and self-styled alpha males feel toward gay men, and he named it with a clarity I could not improve on:
“We gay men are a threat to the conservative men’s idea of who they think THEY should be, and we mirror something back to them that they can’t handle. This exposes the fragility of their male egos… The fragile masculine is truly afraid of the strength of the feminine. What they don’t realize is that true strength comes from embracing both the masculine and the feminine that resides in all of us.”
What I am able to talk about, and what I am not
I am a straight man. I think. At times, my sexual preferences are up for debate. But I do not know what it is like to move through this world as a gay man, or a lesbian, or a trans person, or anyone under a banner whose very letters are still argued over. That story belongs to the people living it, and they tell it far better than I could. Chris did, in four sentences, up above.
What I have earned the right to talk about, after thirty years inside the culture that manufactures this fear and six weeks writing about the men it produces, is the frightened man himself. His terror is my subject. I have borne the brunt of it. I watched it propel a hundred pulpits. I know its unhealthy face. So I am going to keep the focus on him, and let the people he fears speak for themselves.
The woman was only the beginning
I have been building toward this for weeks without seeing this step.
I wrote that a powerful woman terrifies the fragile man because she mirrors his own exiled feminine, his anima (Jung’s term) walking around outside his body, sovereign and unafraid. She is the symbol of the soul he was taught to amputate. A soul that is alive and thriving in someone else, and he cannot bear the reminder.
The gay man is that same mirror, moved one devastating step closer.
Because the powerful woman, however threatening, can still be filed under “other.” She is a woman; the feminine belongs to her; the frightened man can tell himself it is okay, there must be women in the world to propagate.
The gay man detonates that story. Here is the feminine living inside a male body. He sees a body like his own but the man carrying it has not died of being feminine, has not been unmanned by it, and is often more at home in himself than his accuser will ever be. The gay man is proof of the one thing the frightened man’s entire identity depends on denying: that a man can hold the feminine and the masculine.
That is why the revulsion runs so hot, and so specifically. It is recognition. He looks at the gay man and does not see a stranger. He sees a possibility, his own buried possibility, and slams the door so hard because some part of him felt it swing open. “I am not like THAT,” he says, the way you say it only about the thing you are most afraid is true of you.
The trans person, and the box itself
If the gay man threatens the frightened man’s belief that the feminine cannot live in a male body, the trans person threatens something deeper still—the box itself.
The whole ranked and bolted-down world I have been describing needs the boxes to be permanent: man here, woman there, no traffic across the border, everyone in an assigned slot and grateful for it. A trans person, simply by existing, says the border can be crossed and that the slot you were placed in at birth is not a life sentence. That the thing the frightened man believed was fixed by God or nature or biology is, in fact, something a human being can examine, question, and change.
I will not presume to narrate what that journey is or costs; that is not my story to tell, and trans people are telling it themselves, often at great danger. I only want to name what the frightened man sees when he looks. He sees the lid come off the box. And a man who has spent his whole life obeying the box, shrinking himself to fit it, amputating everything that would not fit. That man cannot survive the sight of someone walking free of the thing that caged him. Their freedom is an indictment of his castration. He calls it a threat to civilization. In reality, it is a threat to his settlement. He gave up his wholeness to stay in the box, and here is someone who refused the trade, and their life is unbearable.
Even the words are contested
I want to stop and admit something, because it gels with everything I have been writing.
I do not fully know what to call the people this essay is about. LGBTQIA+. Queer, reclaimed with pride by many and still felt as a wound by others who had it screamed at them. The letters are meant to evolve as language and culture change. And it is not my place, as a straight man standing outside, to appoint the right word and hand it down. It IS my place to learn and use the right terms to honor these beautiful, wild, and free human beings.
The fight he will not have
I keep returning to the same tragedy, in a new reflection.
These fearful men will battle anyone different. They will fight a culture war, a pulpit war, a comment-section war. Yet, inexplicably, they will pay to watch two nearly naked men wrestle each other to the ground in a cage. What they will not do, the one fight they flee their whole lives, is turn and face the person in the mirror. Because the son they cannot accept is exposing their own tenderness, the stranger they mock is showing them their own buried freedom. Every person they fear is holding up a reflection, and in it is the self they were too afraid to become.
The mirror, and the way out
Here is what I have come to believe, watching all of it.
The frightened man is not actually fighting gay people, or trans people, or powerful women, or feminists, or any of the enemies the culture keeps naming for him. He is fighting his own emptiness, wherever he encounters it. Every person he fears is simply more free than he has allowed himself to be, and their freedom shows him the size of his own cage.
He thinks he is defending manhood. He is defending a prison, and calling the walls God, or Republican, or Christian.
The way out is the same for him as it was for me, as it is for all of us. Turn toward the mirror instead of smashing it. Meet the exiled self it shows you. Let the gay man, the trans woman, the powerful woman be our teachers instead of our targets, because every one of them has already done the thing we are most afraid to do, they stopped performing a self that was killing them, and they are living life to its fullest…and truest.
I will give the last word to Chris, because it was his to begin with, and because he said it better than I can:
“True strength comes from embracing both the masculine and the feminine that resides in all of us.”
That is the whole of it. The strength these men are chasing has been staring at them the entire time.
Over the past weeks, I set out to examine a trauma that has haunted me my whole life: the frightened, furious man, and the political and religious cultures that keep him afraid…and angry. What began as one essay became seven, and they have been my most popular Substack posts. Here they are in order.
Why Conservative Men Fear Women
JUN 13
I gave the Southern Baptist Convention thirty years of my life. So when I tell you the vote to silence women was never about the Bible, I’m not guessing.
Why This White Man Loves Powerful Women
JUN 15
Last week I wrote about why conservative men fear powerful women. It became one of the most-read things I’ve ever published. So this week, the confession underneath the indictment: why I love them.
She’s a Man: The Last Move of a Frightened One
JUN 16
Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” No. She’s a powerful woman you can’t survive looking at. There’s a difference, and it’s the whole difference.
Who’s Selling These Men Their Rage?
JUN 19
How loneliness gets manufactured into fury, and sold back to men at a profit.
Wrestling with Masculinity
Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers. They call it bonesmashing, and they believe the bone grows back sharper. I’m sixty-eight, and I fell down this hole for hours. I think most people my age have no idea.
A Man Wrestles with Femininity
I will not tell you what a woman is. I’ve watched too many men do that, and seen what it costs the women they do it to.
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