Ask Beastly: Is There Space for Femme Men in the Gay Community?

Keep going. The good ones are out there.

Hi,

Thanks for sharing being positive after a one-bottom experience (sad). Remarkable. I have been having bareback, anonymous sex for 40-plus years (I know I have been extremely lucky). Now, I am on PREP.

My question is, you identify as being Queer, yet it sounds like you have been accepted in the gay community. As a Queer person, (nail polish, earrings, skirts, and blouse) I find gays in the USA (Palm Springs/ Las Vegas) and even in Bangkok, recoil from me. I understand they don't want to be identified as bisexual, being friends with me, but still, where is the community spirit of the lgbtQ community!!!

For now, I am fully accepted in the Kink community, but it is not my community support being Q. Is there only space to be masculine?

Hey there,

I did not get HIV from my first time bottoming. I'm not sure where you got that idea, but it's not true. I had lots of sex—years of sex—before catching HIV. And when I caught it, I was quickly put on medication. I, too, was lucky.

Others are not so lucky. Some do catch it on their first time. Some get it from rape. I had a great life before HIV and will continue having a great life after it.

My feeling on the word “queer” has evolved over time, but I would probably not call myself that now. Others call me “queer,” and even my book calls me queer, though that was mostly a decision made by my editor, and that’s fine. But “queer” is not the word I naturally use. I have not found a better one, but on the list of candidates, "gay" and "pansexual" and "sexually fluid" rank higher than "queer,” and "faggot" sits at the top. I am more faggot than anything else.

“Faggot" does not represent my sexual attraction to certain types of women, but it mostly does the job, and that's the most I can ask of a single word. No person can be summarised in one word. Humans are too complex for that.

Your question proves how different cultures read “queer,” and if I’m being honest, the word’s intentional vagueness—its very malleability—is what dissuades me from using it. In Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan—the land of gay clones, muscle boys, rich fags with expensive gym memberships, a populace many would see as capital-G “Gay”—all the boys use “gay” and “queer” interchangeably. In Berlin, however, “gay” and “queer” not only define very separate groups, but those groups are actively oppositional, even hostile, to each other.

The trouble with “queer” is that it can include and encompass all these (very different) people: the gender-fluid and rigidly cisgender, sexed-up muscle boys and awkwardly bi-curious cisgender women, masc and femme men. “Queer” is frustrating because some use it as a non-cishet catchall, while others use it to define a very particular approach to sex and gender.

Still, others use it to describe a vaguely leftist sociopolitical stance, one that quickly gets annoyingly academic and gets roped into discussions on anticolonialism and so on. All this is to say that “queer,” for me, defeats itself with its very broadness, at least as a self label. I don’t want a single word to state who I fuck, what my gender identiy is, and what my politcal beliefs are—and I don’t think a single word can. It’s possible to ask too much of language.

But back to your question: I think you've had the unlucky experience of meeting mean, shitty gays. Not all gays—not even all masculine gays—will reject you. I’m sorry you've had this experience, and I don't doubt it's painful to be an outlier, especially among people who claim to be your community, your family. I know that hurts.

But we must never give up on our own. We must never paint the community as a monolith and dismiss it outright. We must keep believing in gay and queer people even when they're mean and shitty, because hidden among them are the good ones—the nice guys, the nerds, the artists, the rebels, the angels, the anarcho-fags, the power-dykes, the dance floor mamas, the gender-fuckers. They’re still here.

Just as you have to sift through a mass of mean, judgmental people to find the cool ones, others must sift through those same people to find you. If you both give up, you both end up alone. If you both keep going, at some point your fingers will touch, and the wonder of community will be yours, and it will make the struggle matter.

There were many times in my life, usually in a bar or club, when I felt like my exodus from the LGBTQ community was imminent, when I felt no love from it. And there were other moments when I hugged my friends outside a club—three of us, together, kissing—that could only be described as gay magic.

The times I sat on a sofa with a friend talking about our parents and our suicidal thoughts and our favourite songs: those moments outweigh the rest. Those moments make me happy to be part of this community. Those moments matter. They make me remember that the only people who can understand me are others like me, and those people, for better and worse, are other gay men, other faggots.

So I stay in the community and don’t give up on it. Somebody has to keep believing in us.

Love, Beastly