On the Problem of Coming Out as a Feminine ‘Straight’ Guy

Invisible is how I would describe the feeling as I read a query online about whether there are ‘effeminate’ or ‘flamboyant’ straight men out there — I’m one, well maybe not terribly flamboyant… but the other, in many ways, feminine-of-center. On a personal level, I cringe every time I see the word ‘effeminate’ because I grew up hearing it used as a slight toward a man who didn’t measure up to some John Wayne ideal of manhood; ‘effeminate’ was a nicer way of saying ‘poof,’ ‘queer’ or ‘ f*g’ but the word still dripped with disdain. It sounds so old-fashioned now and laden with condemnation.

Feminine men, or those of us who dare to admire femininity with a degree of aspiration or envy, who have the confidence to look up to women as heroines and role-models are indeed out there. Some of us even like ‘girl things’ so much we show it in the way we dress and behave. I’ve often said that were I to wake up tomorrow and find I had somehow become a female version of myself, some of the logistical issues like identity papers and earning a living and buying a whole new wardrobe aside, I’d be quite happy for the opportunity to experience life as a woman — why on earth not? Well, I’ve an answer for that — women are treated like crap but when whole societies think of femininity as somehow beneath masculinity, why on earth wouldn’t women be treated as second class citizens — in fact why let them be citizens at all?

But yes, indeed, feminine-identified men who are solely attracted to having relationships with women are out there but most of us have learned not to let that femininity show. Most of us have heavily suppressed it because we learned it was safer to keep our mouths shut about it and we became experts at reading the crowd and wearing masks. If women are treated poorly, so too are males who appear willing to give up the social advantages of maleness and masculinity.

To get a bit technical-sounding, I sometimes call myself a feminine-of-center gynophile — which is just a fancy way of saying I am a male who likes to present in varying degrees as feminine and am exclusively, sexually, emotionally, and romantically attracted to women and femininity. Even more simply put, one of my earliest memories was that I got the short straw being born a boy, I sometimes cross-dress or wear androgynous clothing and am married to a woman. Somehow, ‘technically’, that my partner is a woman and I am an adult male makes me ‘straight’ though.

Straight is a word I really don’t like to use but I’ll give my perspective on that a little later. For ease, I’ll keep using it throughout this article. Then there is the term man — I am indeed an adult male human, a ‘man’ according to both definition and physical fact. But then there is the social moniker of man with all its various meanings. Many would insist, by way of an attempted insult, I am not a ‘real’ man because I have any semblance of an aspiration to femininity. Other terms for me could be, gender incongruent, gender variant, femme, gender fluid, crossdresser, transvestite, transgender, trans, metrosexual or even queer. I like and relate to the Native American concept of Two Spirit because before I had even heard it, I would often envision that I maybe had both a masculine and feminine spirit that shared my body. While I am significantly indiginous American, I don’t claim the term because I wasn’t raised within a native culture and identify as white/hispanic. But I often rankle at all these labels. On one level, we need them to be able to identify and name what we are discussing but on another, I like to imagine a utopian world where I can kick the categories to the curb and just be ME without explanation the way any cisgender, heteronormative, white male is permitted to do — more labeles. The Inflexible labeling and living in a world where I am a seeming contradiction puts me in a position where I often feel some need to explain, justify and validate my experience for others. Why not simply BE and be done with all the naming and assigning? Alas, I’ve serious doubt it will happen in my lifetime so instead, I speak out and make my experience heard.

“Ask yourself, if there was to be no blame, and if there was to be no praise, who would I be then?”

— Quentin Crisp

Unfortunately, we are still at an impasse with recognizing, let alone accepting heterosexual gender-variance. Within the lesbian community there are butch and lipstick lesbians. Gay men have categories like femmes or twinks, bears, and straight-acting gay men — mascs as they are often called today. There is, historically, a lot of room for that diversity there but with heterosexuals, your option is to be a man and masculine or a woman and feminine, nothing in between and certainly no attempting to cross to the other side. If you do that, you can’t remain straight, heaven forbid. As a heterosexual man with an internal experience I identify as feminine, and that I increasingly express publicly, I can attest that it is very difficult explaining to people that my gender expression and sexual preference are quite separate. I often thought (and have said) it would have been better for me to live true to my gender variance if I had been ‘gay’ because then I would fit a socially accepted and promoted stereotype and my gender bending would be expected— I understand there are problems, and assumptions with that statement but in my young thinking, I though that maybe being gay would afford me some license within a clearly defined identity wherein I could be feminine or dress and present as a woman and nobody would think it incongruous. To be clear, I am in no way claiming it would be easy to be gay in this society, I’d have a whole other set of cultural biases and gauntlets to overcome but these thoughts were a large part of trying to figure out where I fit.

“I don’t like it when a guy opens his mouth and a purse falls out.”

From Gay Shame Is a Drag, by Q. Allen Brocka, The Advocate (Issue 965)

‘Straight’ men in my culture though, aren’t ‘allowed’ to be heterosexual and do femininity or ‘flamboyance.’ By the way, you can be feminine and not flamboyant, how many flamboyant women do you really know in your daily life? My wife is simultaneously feminine and a tomboy. Kristen Stewart is many things but flamboyant is certainly not one of them. You could say the same thing of Queen Elizabeth and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jodi Foster certainly isn’t flamboyant. Masculinity on the other hand can be very flamboyant, think of peacocks like Mohamed Ali, Connor McGregor, and Robert Plant. Roger Stone is even flamboyant in his grandiose behavior, hats, pinstripes and greatcoats with fur-lined and satin collars. In bro-culture, they speak of turning in one’s man card for dressing that way and once you become emotionally in touch or do anything deemed feminine like wearing pink or caring about your appearance a little too much, you essentially get labeled a ‘f***t’ whether you like women or not. Even riding a bicycle in cycling shorts in my rural hometown not far from San Francisco, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been shouted at and called a ‘f***ing f****t’ over the last 35 years even while presenting as entirely male. I even had a workmate who’d call me a ‘f*g,’ wave a limp writst and affect a singsong lisp for matching my socks and necktie or wearing a pink shirt.

It is the problematic paradox; men like me are heterosexual but not ‘straight’. I think any guy who wants to wear women’s clothes, makeup, longs to be like a woman (whether intermittently or constantly) and who has thought about transitioning — or who has no body hair and has done yoga dressed in women’s yoga clothes, hair in a wispy bun, nails done, no longer fits the ‘straight’ mold. In my case, I believe that the intensity of my ‘transness’ — that is the dissonance and dysphoria — is also a result of decades of pressure, both external and internal, to repress it. Had I been allowed and encouraged to express it when I first experienced it at age 2+ years when I began playing in my mother’s makeup, would it have grown into an obsession or ever manifested as internalised homophobia and transphobia within me the way it once did? When I was three, I remember the profound disappointment of my father yelling at my mother for letting me wear makeup and then my shattered ‘knowing’ that there was something wrong with me and I had to make sure I never let anyone see it.

Today, the label of Straight is worn as a badge of honorific normality. To be straight is the gold standard against which the degree of all deviance is measured. Whereas straight is an accepted norm and considered normal, to be gay or gender non-conforming is to be other than the norm, to be bent —deviant. In fact, like square, straight was originally a somewhat pejorative term used by those who proudly lived outside the norms of polite heteronormative society to laugh at the boring dysfunction of ‘normal.’ Ronald & Nancy Regan and Maggie Thatcher, epitomized this consept of straightness. I thank God every day that she didn't make me straight. I love my imperfectiions, my bentness. Which reminds me, in morning blessings of praise, for many orthodox jewish men, it is common to recite:

Blessed are You, Hashem our G-d, King of the universe, for not having made me a woman.

Women on the other hand say:

Blessed are You, G‑d, our L‑rd, King of the Universe, for having made me according to His will.

In myriad societies, where that is the attitude, that manhood and masculinity are of more social value than womanhood and femininity, It is no wonder males like me have persisted in remaining closeted, we are terrified of losing our status and maybe even becoming ‘less than women.’ Even the blessing recited by women has a subtext of, ‘oh well, I’ll smile and bear having to be a woman because that is what God wants.’ But I am truly grateful to have this inner exeperience of mine because it has made me who I am and taught me some humility and empathy. I am proud to be who and what I am precisely as I am.

I read an article a while back in Racked asking Why most women wear pants but most men still don’t casually wear dresses? The author, Marlen Komar, recounts a story of a woman who, in 1938, wrote to the agony aunt at her local newspaper asking for help with her son. It seems she had allowed him to dress as a girl for a Halloween party and a month on, they could not get him back into boy’s clothes:

“His sisters have to keep their closets and their bureau drawers locked up to keep him from wearing their things. We have tried every way in the world to shame him and his father has thrashed him several times about it, but nothing stops him. What can we do?” she asked.

The response back was surprisingly introspective. The advice columnist wrote, “Isn’t it queer that for a boy to want to be a girl, and look like a girl, and dress like a girl is so unusual that it fills his parents with fear that he is abnormal, whereas virtually every girl in the world wishes she were a boy and the majority of them try to look like boys, and act like boys, and dress like boys? The greatest insult you can offer a man is to call him effeminate, but women esteem it a compliment to be told they have a boyish figure and that they have a masculine intellect.”

That was an amazing and oh so poignant response, especially for 1938. Still, because we are other-sex-attracted males, many of us try desperately in public to shoehorn ourselves into that role of a ‘straight man’ because there is really no other place for us to land. Because many of us have been or remain closeted, our variance flies beneath the radar and gender variance in heterosexual people generally goes unacknowledged because of that; if it’s unseen, the pursuant assumption to that invisibility is that it therefore does not exist. The rare few of us who do come out are prone to be mocked and called sick.

Like the author Helen Boyd, I often fantasize about a day where every gender-incongruent, transexual, transgender, closet crossdresser, every transitioned stealth trans person who passes as their target sex and gender, comes out wearing a button or T-shirt that proclaims, I am Trans! I think it would demonstrate the fact that we all know, or know someone who knows, a transgender person or an other-sex-attracted male who likes ‘girl things.’ I think we would realize there are a lot of us and attitudes would rapidly change. It shouldn’t be a fantasy — the more we come out, the better we can be ourselves and the more people will see and understand that we are not perverts and lavatory rapists. My only agenda is to live my life authentically and go about my business with honesty and integrity and I’m quite certain that is a widely shared ‘agenda’.

We hide our gender incongruence, especially men, because we learn early on to fit in and keep our mouths shut about wanting to do feminine-coded things or, for some of us, to even wish we had been born girls. Later, as we find out we are heterosexual and want to date women, many of us discover that it seems to benefit us to keep it all stuffed away and safely compartmentalised. The thinking goes along the lines of: ‘What woman would ever want to be with me?’ or ‘If I tell her, she will find me disgusting and leave.’ And so, we suppress it thinking, hoping it will just go away.

Shame for me in this regard has come from the tension between my public persona and an unresolved need that disallows me to be fully authentic. Doctor of Social Work, and researcher, Brené Brown writes of shame needing “three things to grow exponentially in our lives, secrecy, silence and judgement.” She also describes shame as unable to survive empathy and that by speaking it, bringing it into the light it cannot survive. That is why I sit her typing away about my experience today.

Through experience as a male with a feminine consciousness, I learned that if I begin to express my gender variance outwardly, as I did for a time in the androgynous 80s, people assumed I must surely be gay. We even draw attention from the sex we have no interest in attracting, that’s how much society equates gender variance with homosexuality, even gay people buy into it. The upshot is that you are caught in this cycle of defending who you are and why you present as you do to an audience that is fully invested in the belief that you are lying. I had an out gay friend in the late 1980s and early 90s who refused to listen to me or respect my sexual preference — I wore eyeliner, long hair, nail lacquer and loved to accessorize. His conclusion was that surely I must be gay and he would not accept my self narrative and chided me for dating women and being in denial about my sexual preference. To be ‘straight,’ feminine-attracted and emotionally feminine of center, is often confusing and lonely because no one will validate the experience. Romantically, if we are honest about our gender variance, some of us find (or assume)most women want nothing to do with us. From their perspectives, we’re either perverted for donning tights and frocks or ‘gay but in denial’ and they’re not going to hitch themselves to the former and your lucky if the latter gets you a ‘lets just be friends.’ As we’ve recently seen played out again in the news, even something as innocuous as the UK’s Prince George doing ballet or a celebrity’s young son having long hair is relentlessly shamed and mocked on social media.

Yet, within males like me, and it’s puzzlingly shocking to learn of ourselves, there is sometimes a certain underpinning of homophobia hitched TO transphobia in our fear of coming out. It is often deeply internalized as a misplaced resentment because we somehow blame femininely flamboyant gay men for having exclusive rights on male femininity and that our het-femme experience is completely minimized, derided and waved off as denial of our ‘true’ sexuality by those we hoped would be our allies. We further blame them that we are misunderstood and assumed to be gay not gay, or G. N. G. as we called it in the 80s. But it’s not gay peoples fault, it is society and it’s misinformed assumptions that most of us participate in. I strongly hold that beneath homophobia, and transphobia is a solid foundation of misogyny, because to many men — being said to be like a woman is the ultimate insult. Let’s really pause here and ask ourselves though, why is that?

For starters, the dominant belief is that gender variant = homosexual. We believe, as a culture, that gender variance belongs to gays and lesbians. It’s a tautology: All gender-variant people are gay and lesbian. She is gender variant. Therefore, she must be a lesbian. In a sense, there is no way for a heterosexual to be gender variant and still be seen as heterosexual; it’s a Catch-22. It’s not just heterosexuals who believe this, either; plenty of crossdressers can tell you how difficult it is to convince a gay man that just because they like to wear dresses doesn’t mean they don’t also like to date women. And older lesbian femmes can tell you how much they weren’t accepted as lesbians during the seventies. The belief that gender normative = heterosexual (and its inverse, that gender variant = homosexual) is so intense that any man “who acts feminine is immediately labeled a fag, and so faces the discrimination gay men face, and likewise for any woman who is perceived as masculine. To avoid being discriminated against, gender-variant heterosexuals submerge or hide or repress or closet their gender variance. While hiding gender variance isn’t entirely stupid, considering the consequences, it does make heterosexual gender variance disappear from public view. If they don’t hide it, they’re assumed to be gay, which means that either way, heterosexual gender variance is effectively invisible, which “proves” that only gays and lesbians are gender variant.

Excerpt From, She’s Not the Man I Married, Helen Boyd

Boyd’s description above was the gist of it for me growing up and well into my late 30s. In public, I hid all variation or ambiguous gradation that might get me clocked as gender-incongruent and I was terrified that if I examined it too closely, I would find out I was transgender and then have to make a decision to transition. I believed there was no in between and I certainly had no concept of a spectrum — you were either all in or all out.

Growing up, the only trans people I saw represented in media were on tabloid TV shows or portrayed as laughingstocks on sitcoms, or they were serial killers. Anytime there was a trans character, or a story in a newspaper, I catalogued it with great interest but also had tremendous fear and self-loathing that I would be seen as a freak and hated were I outed. In my late teens and early 20s, I was a projectionist at a theater and one of the films I ran was Silence of the Lambs. Siting there in the dark, watching the film for the fifteenth time through the projection window, I remember having an enormous crush on Jodi Foster and simultaneously fantasizing about being her. At the same time, I was experiencing great shame and self-loathing because the deeply disturbed lotion-dispensing serial killer in the film was portrayed as transgender.

But even in private, I managed to keep it so compartmentalised that I was able to slip into deep denial for long stretches of time and forget (sort of) that any of this even existed within me. I would go months thinking I was free of it, I’d grow the hair back on my legs and hest and then the dysphoria would hit me one day like a ton of bricks. It was like a profound homesickness that had no remedy because ‘home’ was entirely unreachable as though I were stranded in another planet. I had nobody to talk to about it so instead I’d dissociate from my body and withdraw from other people, even my family.

Very little is purely black and white and between the two is an enormous range of grays. Between the gender ideas of all-feminine and all-masculine, how many of us truly reside at the extreme poles. How many of us within, live so close to the middle or opposite side of that gray zone but live outwardly in deep stealth clinging to the all-black or all-white for dear life?

I am not someone who claims there are more than two or myriad genders, nor am I negating those who do because I don’t have the expertise to say one way or the other, it is just not the way I understand myself. Instead, I am much more of an adherant to the concept of a continuum or spectrum. Our language is very limited for these ways of being, describing multiple genders is one way of using the limitations of language to describe an experience. But I do think the way we experience and express being male or female varies and overlaps — as in the Venn diagram below. That is just my personal way of looking at my experience being gender-incongruent, it comes down to the limits of my own language in an attempt to describe something many of those who don’t have our experience assert does not exist, that it is a figment of our imaginations; I am here to tell you it does exist. And indeed, neuroscientists researching what I and others similar to me describe are saying that the way we think of ourselves our, our gender identity, reside somewhere the brain, they just don’t know precisely how or where and precisely how it intersects with consciousness and what makes each of us self-aware in the way we are.

As an artist, it is of particular interest to me how the blue and magenta mix in the Venn diagram below to create another color altogether. That third color cannot exist without the others and we’ve myriad names to describe it — violet, purple, periwinkle and lavender are but a few of them.

One of the ways I also look at gender expression is as a bimodal distribution. I am not a statistician so my understanding of the term is limited, I admit. I describe myself living an internal experience somewhere in the lavender shading, the valley in this graph and I’ve found myself all my life walking part way up the pink hill, dreaming about the view from its peak and then running back to the safety of the blue hill to hide.

Incidentally, sexual orientation is a separate dimension from either sex or gender. Sexual orientation refers to the sex of other people you are attracted to, regardless of your own sex or gender. Thus, a man (that is, a person with a male body) can perceive himself as having a masculine gender (liking “guy stuff,” doing “guy things”), but have a sexual orientation toward other males. Probably most gay men see themselves this way.

The general population views sex/gender as binary categories — male/masculine and female/feminine. In contrast, some scholars and activists argue that both sex and gender extend along a continuum. There’s some truth to each view.

— David Ludden Ph.D, When Sex and Gender Don’t Match

And again, people like me are unseen and mostly unacknowledged. To paraphrase and twist the preceding quote a bit: ‘…a person with a male body can perceive him/herself as having a feminine gender, (liking “girl stuff” doing “girl things”) but have a sexual orientation toward females. Probably some het males see themselves this way.’

Most of us think men and women are ‘supposed’ to be a certain way based simply on physicality, genitals, genes and hormones; pink is for girls and blue for boys — of course, blue is owned by girls too which never seemed fair to me. And sure, the vast majority of people fall within the culturally prescribed range and expectations of how a woman or man is expected look and present. Most people are at or near the peaks of the pink and blue bell curves in the distribution graph above, that is indisputable. It is also an indisputable fact that reproduction in mammalian species is entirely dependent on sexual dimorphism (i.e., a female and male are necessary to exchange haploid genetic material to create a viable diploid offspring). Nor am I am trying to argue that all differences between men and women are socialised or cultural, because they clearly are not. Men and women, boys and girls are real categories because those people exist as biological entities. My point is that we rigidly limit our thinking about what a man or woman must, shall or should be or how we define masculinity and femininity and shut out any possibility for naturally occurring anomalous blending of the two. This is the case whether it be genetic, physical, emotional/psychological, psychosexual, spiritual or sociocultural. Any complex trait such as masculinity or femininity, come about because of quantitative effects, meaning there are miryad factors that effect the trait. There are intersex advocates, such as Emily Quinn who prove that the way we think of biological sex is wrong — or at least far to simple. Is it really then that far a stretch to countenance the idea that just maybe it is profoundly complex and the way we understand gender is also far from complete? From there, beyond intrinsic traits or identities, we additionally place barriers around any chosen or learned blending of masculinity and femininity. We ignore all the possible shades between our hard and fast rules of all-black or all-white, all-blue or all-pink. In fact, there are even MANY shades and hues of blue and MANY gradations of pink; there is more than one way to be a man or a woman.

At the top of this article, I quoted a book by Helen Boyd titled She’s Not the Man I Married. It is the second of two books in which she writes about her experience being married to a heterosexual, feminine-presenting husband, someone most of us would label a transvestite or crossdresser. I’m going to append to this by quoting significantly from the book because I think her perspective nails it:

The irony of having only two huge, all-encompassing genders is that everyone fits in one or the other or is made to fit. Once you’re in, however, you’re expected to behave in certain ways, look a certain way, and depending on the time, place, and culture, have only certain kinds of jobs, have sex with only the opposite sex, have the right to vote, own property, be educated, or not. That’s kind of a lot to determine by a vagina or a penis, in my opinion, and may explain why, despite parents’ attempts at “correctly” socializing their boys to be masculine and their girls to be feminine, and despite the strong cultural taboos against bending gender to your own ends, there’s so much gender variance out there. …

…Gender is the name for what kind of man or woman you are in social spheres, and your gender changes when the social sphere changes. It’s all based on comparison and context: The most feminine woman in the world can’t be feminine without the idea of masculine existing in the world elsewhere. Even when she’s alone, she feels feminine because she doesn’t feel masculine. We define our genders often by what they aren’t more than by what they are, and we think that being masculine or feminine is mutually exclusive when it’s not. …

…I really enjoy living in a world where a geeky guy such as Mark Mothersbaugh is cool, but so are Prince and Henry Rollins. Women can be geeks, too, like Tina Fey, or kind of gender neutral like Ellen DeGeneres, or they can be Julia Roberts19 — and all of them are still feminine in their own individual ways. Apparently not enough people watched The Twilight Zone, 20 because too many have missed the bit about how being a conforming automaton is a bleak, boring way to live. …

People think of masculine and feminine as being like hot or cold: When you make something hot, it stops being cold. But masculinity and femininity are not like that at all. My femininity didn’t go away because I was exploring my masculine side, and my masculinity — even the innate bits of it — does not cancel out my feminine side. What exploring gender roles does is give you more tools. It gave me back things that I had repressed to fit in better, and I like having those things back. I don’t feel as lopsided as I once did. And exploring gender doesn’t mean that anyone or everyone should feel androgynous, or look gender neutral; those are just choices among the many we have. We give gender way more power in explaining who we are and how we are and how we should be than makes sense. Sure, there are true things you can say about women in general, and true things you can say about men. But if we divided the world into left-handed and right-handed people, surely we’d find that there were true things you could say about left-handed people, too.21 We could split the world into blonds and brunets, and redheads would have to decide if they were more blond or more brunet, as would streaky-haired types like myself. We could find things that were true about a lot of blond people that were in opposition to what most brunets do. Or, we could categorize by blood type like they do in Japan. 22 There are all sorts of ways we could divide up human beings, and no matter how we did it, we would find commonalities within groups and differences between groups. Categorizing people with the labels of “male” and “female” is about as arbitrary.

I’m not trying to argue that there are no important innate differences between women and men — probably there are. But we don’t socialize people differently if they’re blond and not brunet, and we do socialize people differently if they are men or women. It’s nearly impossible to sift out which differences between men and women are the result of the biology we’re born with and which result from the difference in how we’re trained to be men and women. Acknowledging gender difference based on socialization is passé, but my own recent experience in trying to allow my masculinity some expression has drawn attention to exactly how intense socialization is. What concerns me the most is the way we restrict the way people can be, and then point to the successful self-repression as if it were natural, and then argue that people are supposed to behave that way because that’s the way people behave.

Excerpt From, She’s Not the Man I Married, Helen Boyd