Late last year, a different "surge" emerged in the headlines. The FBI released its statistics for hate crimes in a good news-bad news report. Good news: overall, hate crimes declined from the previous year; bad news: there was a 6 percent surge in incidents against homosexuals – the only category that increased – the majority of which targeted gay men (59.2 percent versus 12.6 percent for gay women). What was unclear was the reason; the FBI was quick to say its report did not assign causes for fluctuations. But with the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act currently experiencing its best chances for congressional passage in a dozen years, it seems worth proposing one.
Most men will admit that publicly demonstrating affection toward another man – even platonic affection – can incite from fellow men "the look." Often enough, that look precedes threats or much worse, as in the cases of Jose Sucuzhanay (murdered for walking arm-in-arm with his biological brother), Lawrence King (shot in the head for giving an eighth-grade classmate a Valentine card), or any of last year's 1,460 hate crime victims.
So far, I've been fortunate not to confront anything "statistical," but the looks and slurs that I've received make me a guy who alternates between showing affection for my male friends and someone who worries about the implications. Whenever I've experienced this disapproval I've resented those who generate it, which is why it was interesting when I became the "looker."
I was walking in Rome when for the third time that day I noticed two men acting affectionately toward one another. I only realized my eyes had narrowed because, when I passed the third pair, arm-in-arm, they returned my gaze with irritation. Taken aback by the expression I'd made and the one it elicited, I became more astonished by the cause I knew I could assign to it. My problem wasn't prejudice. It was envy.
From an early age, men in this country are trained to go without love or loving gestures from fellow men. When that principle of manhood becomes clear, our longing for such love does a paradoxical thing: it both intensifies and goes underground. Men cannot help but feel an increased desire to fill this void; at the same time, we rarely act on it because, by seeming gay, such a desire still contradicts our modern definition of masculinity.
Enter the "danger" of gay men. These men pursue and act on male intimacy as though it should be a given, even a right. Should a man find himself in the presence of loving gestures from or between such men, he is likely to feel, as I did, a psychic split: regarding such overtures as tempting and incriminating. This internal clash between a man's long-held desire and his self-denial can turn a passing disapproval into problematic envy and that envy into resentment, even rage.
I didn't want to hurt the Italians; on the contrary, they had what I wanted: an open fraternity that was so unassailably appropriate its expression was blase. But no sooner had I felt that longing than it mutated into an instinctive hostility. However absurd this reaction was, I also saw its logic.
As is often true of men, anger conceals our real feelings; in this case, my sorrow. The scorn I'd felt for the Italians allowed me to ignore the ways I daily surrendered to the masculine tragedy of forgoing true male connection. Such a judgment also excused me from being a braver man who would fight against this fate by risking my own gestures. Indeed, the knee-jerk allegiance I had to what a "real man" was prevented me from actually being one, clarifying for me the real root of homophobia.
The aversion to male love – whether it remains internal or becomes criminal – is not about prejudice. Prejudice is a "palatable" alibi that denies a darker truth. Homophobia is a common reaction to love between men because admitting such love is possible forces men to reevaluate the male "contract." And that presents men with their own good news-bad news situation.
Witnessing real male connection – becoming aware of our longing for it – threatens masculinity, not just because it brings up in men our uneasiness in feeling gay, but more because it exposes masculinity for the raw deal it is: an existential cheat that has defrauded men of a full 50 percent of human connection. Unlike women, who create rich ties within the sisterhood, this forfeiture has lodged an unspoken complaint within our psyches, a primal disenfranchisement that prevents our wholeness. But while an unapologetic conviction by men that male love is part of masculinity would free us from an inherent and stunting bondage (good), it would also sacrifice male privilege (bad).
For instance, would demanding love from our fathers be worthwhile if it meant our accountability as fathers became more rigorous? If love between men was more common than exceptional, would we have to meet a standard of brotherhood that exceeded the frat house and was honored beyond the battlefield? If this subconscious grievance in maleness disappeared, would we have to get on with the business of being fully present, intimate, and responsible to the women in our midst? If male love were no longer taboo, would we have no one to oppress to feel better about ourselves?
Indeed the reinvention of masculinity ends with what some might see as a Pyrrhic victory – the extinction of masculinity's excuses, its low expectations. Because renegotiating the male contract will strip from us the straitjacket whose limitations we men may uncomfortably but willingly wear.
This is the real reason men fight demonstrations of male love. Or in the case of gay hate crimes, why we increasingly attack the messengers of what is a new and coming masculinity. Those who get out of masculinity's raw deal by no longer accepting privation is what enrages those who abide by it still. Our closeted envy of gay men, rather than letting it transform us or masculinity's rules, instead makes pariahs out of the pioneers. We turn their example into a grave offense for the worst reason: to preserve a self-destructive privilege.
Is it any coincidence that in the bluest states in America – where homosexuality is presumably more explicit – the FBI counted most of the hate crimes? Massachusetts (80) and California (263) versus Alabama (1) and Louisiana (2). In the case of hate crimes against gays, perhaps it is not a matter of irrational hate at all, but of rational love that men just don't want in evidence. Because even more explosive than a man confronting a perception of homosexuality and exercising his prejudice is the man who admits his crimes have always been against himself, and he has become his own jailor.
Brendan Tapley is currently writing a memoir on masculinity. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, among others. He lives in New Hampshire.