Empty Seats

Don't Look Gay: Why American Men Are Afraid of Intimacy with Each Other By John Ibson, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted July 4, 2007.

"Why do adolescent boys often leave empty seats between each other when they go to the movies? It's a product of the culture of male homophobia in America which pushes men to avoid intimacy and gay stereotypes."

On Saturday afternoon at the Cineplex you can see them: adolescent boys, there to watch one of the action films that Hollywood makes with an audience of young males in mind. What’s distinctive is where the boys sit in the theater. Though they might’ve come to the movie together and might even be close friends, they’ll leave an empty seat between them.

Just where the empty physical, as well as emotional, space between men comes from has been the essential subject of my research as a scholar of American culture. My work has culminated in a recent book, Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography.

What accounts for that space? A short answer, something academics like me are notoriously reticent to provide, is that countless American boys and the men that they become are afraid of intimacy with each other, fearful of how intimacy might be construed -- of what others and maybe even they themselves might decide that the closeness suggests. What I’m alluding to, of course, is homophobia.

I have examined the shifting history of intimacy among American males, charting the role that homophobia has played in the shifts that men’s intimacy has experienced over the last century and a half. What are the implications that my historical work might have for two matters prominent in contemporary public debate: first, the so-called “boy problem” in the United States, and secondly, whether persons of the same sex should be permitted to marry?

At Cal State Fullerton, I teach courses called The American Male and Sexual Orientations in American Culture. In some ways these classes occasionally overlap, as my students and I discuss the differences and the similarities between men who consider themselves gay or bisexual and those who think of themselves as straight. Though of course widely accepted today in the United States, the idea that one’s own identity is grounded in the sex of those whom one desires sexually, that the sex of the object of yearning identifies the yearner, rather than simply defining his desires, is a comparatively recent cultural notion.

But it isn’t a universal way of thinking about human sexuality. Scholars too rarely ask if what we know as “sexual orientation” is a fundamental distinction between human beings, or instead is less significant, perhaps much less significant, than gender distinctions.

My students and I often consider whether various kinds of fuss over sexual orientation actually are indirect ways of addressing more basic issues of gender, the ways that a particular society defines the appropriate behavior of males and of females. We examine the ways that negative stereotypes of gay men, for example, not only stigmatize those males considered gay, but also coerce all men to stay within the boundaries of culturally prescribed “male behavior,” lest they be thought queer. It’s common in our culture for a gay male to be thought “unmanly,” but it’s not inevitable that this equation be in force, or even that sexuality be viewed as a simple question of one or the other, gay or straight, with bisexuality in the middle ground.

Such, however, has been our society’s obsession with sexual orientation -- and with “appropriate” manliness -- that an association with gayness came to include certain occupations, words, gestures, and items of apparel, as well as one male’s willingness to express intimacy with another. The greater the scorn heaped upon gay males, the more that all males have been discouraged from displaying behavior associated with gayness -- with anything resembling intimacy heading the list of taboos.

Reflecting the powerful significance of gender in our society is the fact that lesbianism functions quite differently in the culture than does male homosexuality. Though lesbians and gay men are subjected in common to certain forms of discrimination, lesbianism is both stigmatized in some segments of “straight” society and powerfully eroticized in some “straight” quarters as well, a largely unknown occurrence with male homosexuality.

One hardly need suggest that life is easy for lesbians to observe that gay men seem to trouble straight people more, to observe that gay men are more associated with “perversion” than lesbians have been. A tomboy, revealingly enough, is often thought appealing or amusing, qualities never attributed to sissies.

This situation, rather than suggesting that lesbians (often stereotyped as the ultimate tomboys) have it easier, probably attests instead to the fact that the doings of men are simply paid more attention in our society. With male behavior mattering more, those who deviate from the strictures of manhood, then, are singularly bothersome. For those who believe in traditional gender distinctions, females whose behavior is thought to mirror that of males would be considerably less annoying, disgusting, laughable, or even noteworthy than that of “effeminate” men. Whatever the reason, a dislike of lesbianism did not bring about severe restrictions on displays of intimacy among all women in any way analogous to how homophobia prompted distancing between all American men.

For many centuries, various societies in various ways have differentiated between same-sex and different-sex activity. But the word “gay” and, according to many historians, even the very notion of sexual orientation on which it’s based, are of comparatively recent vintage. “Heterosexual” and homosexual” were coined, initially in German, less than a century and a half ago, a simple fact that should give pause to those who speak as if everyone everywhere has always been subject to inborn biological imperatives directing their sexual attention.

Societies may vary in terms of how sexual activities between persons of the same sex are scorned, ignored, or endorsed, but about the existence of oriented sexuality -- even the existence, some suspect, of a gay gene -- there is rarely any doubt. Those who expect to discover a “gay gene” may be just as wrong-headed as those who believe that they have discovered a Biblical injunction against homosexuality.

My own belief, by contrast, is that sexual meanings do not travel well across time and space, that history suggests that “sexual orientation” may be more of a recent human contrivance than a timeless biological phenomenon. Yet one doesn’t have to solve or even directly address the nature versus nurture riddle to simply observe that belief in an oriented sexuality brought with it a fear of male intimacy.

In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, as Americans increasingly came to believe that “homosexual” was both an adjective and a noun, and that the word referred to something highly undesirable, men became much more hesitant to express, and even perhaps to feel, intimacy toward one another. In what might aptly be called a lost world of American men, it once was different. Other scholars, notably E. Anthony Rotundo in his 1993 book American Manhood, have shown that intimacy between men was once so encouraged and so widespread in our society that we may accurately speak of “romantic friendships” between males of the nineteenth century.