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Hi Alex,
I know the distinctions between “gay” and “queer” are varied and somewhat controversial. We have plenty of “I’m gay, not queer” folks who would abandon their trans siblings without hesitation. We have plenty of people who don’t use the term for themselves due to a lot of baggage that comes with the word. There’s lots of discourse.
I guess my issue is this: I almost have the opposite problem. I’m very, very queer. Pride parades. Drag shows. Queer run clubs. Burlesque shows. “They” in my pronouns. So many LGBTQ+ friends of all stripes that I forget what it’s like to be among cishet people. However, I don’t know how to be “gay.”
I don’t know how to relate to men. I don’t know how to do things with men. I don’t know how to be a man. I look at gay men shirtless in their harnesses at parties and wish I could be like them. I look at the darkroom in a local night spa and wish I could use the glory hole or be legs-up in a sling. I watch porn and wish I could have that rough, masculine, raw sex. I look at masculine men with envy and adoration. I end up resenting a gay man I talk to regularly because I wish I could be like him and go to bars and model for known erotic photographers and hang out with sex workers and be hired to be a go-go for a night and be in darkrooms and have leather daddies eyeing them. I envy men for their easy masculinity when it feels impossible for me.
Most of my friends are femmes and nonbinary folks. I don’t have any masculine friends. I don’t even know if I could find someone to be a mentor for me, some daddy who could take me under his wing and walk me through being the gay man I wish I could be.
What can someone do if they feel insufficiently “gay”? Is that something that can be taught, or is it just something innate?
Cheers,
Gay In Theory?
Hey friend,
Your letter treats being gay and being masculine as the same, but they’re not. Feminine gay men are gay. Masculine gay men are gay. Nonbinary gay men are gay. Gender-nonconforming gay men are gay.
There is such a lovely range of masculinity in gay culture. Nobody can be “insufficiently” gay because of how masculine they present. Anyone who says otherwise holds a very narrow, antiquated view of what “gay” is.
I hear what you say about the terms, but the terms themselves are, in the end, clunky, blunt, ill-fitting tools. Yes, there’s lots of discourse. Many gay men use “gay” and “queer” interchangeably. I know many who don’t, and I don’t personally think those words are synonymous (“queer” implicitly suggests a sociopolitical stance, “gay” does not), but who am I to police someone else’s language? Why does it matter?
We are all free to use the word or words that we feel fit us, and we’re free to use those words regardless of how we present.
That must be true. If it were not, if a label depended on presentation, we’d be entertaining a dark and ugly idea, one that has terrorized humankind long enough, that one must present “woman” or “man” enough to be a woman or man. I reject that fully. The idea that a label is earned by presentation has caused so much harm.
As it happens, I’m fairly masculine. Did I choose it? Well, probably, on some level, yes. I grew up in an ultra-straight, rural, conservative environment where being a femme little boy would have been dangerous, so perhaps without even realizing it, I suppressed those sides of myself for a long time, and my life was poorer for it. Am I more masculine now, as an adult, because of that experience? Probably. But the great joy of my life has been growing up and being able to play with gender, to explore my feminine side, and I do believe that being able to appreciate and enjoy a full range of masculinity and femininity, things we all have to differing degrees, is a mark of a healthy, self-accepting person.
The longer I look at how I developed in a masculine direction, the less native and innate and built-in it looks, and the more it looks like self-preservation, like mirroring. I absorbed it before I could choose. I copied my masculine friends to pass through unscathed, to avoid teasing and bullying, and in time, that just became me.
Philosopher Judith Butler describes something close to this experience. Butler argues that gender is made through repeated acts, gestures, and ways of speaking that we absorb from the world around us. In plain terms, we learn how to be a person by copying people: how they stand, how they talk, what they do with their hands. We start doing this as kids, long before we can pick and choose, and the copies repeat until they become habit. This feels true enough: I have an ex-boyfriend’s laugh, a trace of my father’s gregariousness, and so much of my daily phrasing comes from those I love and work with. That’s how we build a self. It is a natural process and a lovely one.
Your nature, now, is a combination of the people you’ve met and spent time with, the experiences you’ve had, your life.
Butler calls this process “performativity,” which is not the same as performance. Performance is a choice: you choose to play a part, put on the costume. Performativity means the part was built into you through repetition, largely before you could choose.
Various experts, Butler included, differ on how malleable they think the self is in adulthood, but from my own observation in gay-and-queer land, people do it all the time. Femme gays become muscle gays! Muscle gays become drag queens! Rigidly masculine, cisgender men become nonbinary and feel more like themselves than ever before, and the reverse happens too: I’ve watched soft guys go hard, hit the gym, code-switch, start wearing leather and buzzcuts, and nothing about it is inauthentic. The self evolves. If anything, it’s easier for us. One of the best things about being part of the gay-and-queer community is that we’re already kicked out of the mainstream, already barred from the norms of heteronormativity, so the self, for us, is something we can more easily play with. And that makes us so fucking lucky.
So, yes, you can become a masc muscle gay if you wish. There’s not really a guidebook for how, but I’d start just spending time with them! Make friends, or try to. Don’t be afraid of them; talk to them in bars and at gyms and online. Ask them out. Mean ones will be mean, and there’s nothing you can do about those except pass on them; nice ones will be nice. There are lots of nice ones.
But before I explore how one changes, how one gets, as you say (and as I wouldn’t say), “more gay,” I want to talk about shame. I hope this is coming from a genuine desire to present differently, play in a different arena, and not out of a sense of shame for how you are now. The fact is, many gay and queer men do feel shame about femininity, and the cultures most of us live in enforce this shame.
When researchers at the University of Sydney asked 256 Australian men, half gay and half straight, to cast one of six gay actors in an ad, gay participants picked the masculine-presenting one 60 percent of the time, a rate no different from straight participants. Which means that regardless of sexual orientation, their shared culture, their shared experience in the world, had resulted in an implicit, even subconscious bias for the masculine.
Dating apps show the same pull. A 2026 study that tracked 234 Grindr users found that masculinity, not femininity, was linked to how desirable users felt. And in a 2016 experiment with 58 Italian gay men, those who were falsely told they scored below average on masculinity were less interested in interacting with feminine gay men, while men who were told they scored above average showed no such shift. Which means that, as men, if we feel we are feminine, we fear even being associated with other feminine men. That shame has powerful repercussions in our social lives and punishes those who are, indeed, more feminine than others.
In a 2012 online survey of 751 gay men in the U.S., run by UCLA researchers Francisco Sánchez and Eric Vilain, most of them wished their behavior were more masculine and less feminine than they believed it was, and the men most preoccupied with masculinity reported more negative feelings about being gay. Which itself kind of proves something we all know: fear of femininity and internalized homophobia are intricately linked. Where does one end and the other start? Are they the same? Is it just plain old misogyny? If we lived in a world that broadly viewed femininity as just as powerful as masculinity, would there be any homophobia at all?
These are bigger questions than we need to answer here, but I want you to think about it. You’re free to evolve in the direction that feels right, that matches who you are and what you want, but if I were you, I’d ask if it’s coming from a place of genuine curiosity and desire or from shame. Do you want to be more masculine to try it on for size, for the fun of it, or do you want it because you feel like you’re lesser without it?
For a “how to,” one interesting place to look would be the leather community, which treats masculinity like a craft. Leathermen build a distinct masculinity that combines care and vulnerability with a heightened masculine look. This scene teaches masculinity in person, and while it often plays with a hypermasculine look, it also defines masculinity more broadly (and, I’d say, more healthily) than just the harness-and-gym version of “gay” you’re picturing. Leather and kink see power in submission and emotional honesty. I think many gay and queer men learn masculinity through leather; many find nurturing, paternal-like figures in the scene (I did) that become stand-in fathers. It gives us dads, instruction, and “guy lessons” all in one, while letting us enjoy softness and feelings and all the lovely gooey stuff we, in truth, so rarely get from our “real” dads and “real” families.
On the other hand, I hope you know that slings and darkrooms and gyms and glory holes and go-go dancing (and, indeed, leather and kink culture) aren’t the exclusive domain of masculine guys! You seem to think they are.
Babe, sluttiness and leather are just as much home to femme, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming folks as they are to muscle marys. No one should be barred entry. No one should be unwelcome. Any sexy space that requires a degree of masculinity to participate is not one that you or any of us should support or give money to.
You can start enjoying these things right now, just as you are.
What kind of life do you want? Who would you like to be next? You are free to ask that question, free to pursue it, free to contain multitudes. But I’d encourage you, at every stage of your journey and in whatever way you develop, to enjoy and appreciate the full gender spectrum that lives in you, the full range of femme and masc that you have. It’s all fun, it’s all lovely, and embracing all sides of yourself will, I believe, lead to true happiness.
Hey there! I’m Alexander Cheves. I’m a sex writer and former sex worker—I worked in the business for over 12 years. You can read my sex-and-culture column Last Call in Out and my book My Love Is a Beast: Confessions, from Unbound Edition Press. But be warned: Kirkus Reviews says the book is "not for squeamish readers.”
Here, I’m offering sex and relationship advice to Out’s readers. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com
