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NM, you say that I am personalizing the issue, which is, you say, really objective and macrocosmic. Except that I have never heard anyone else make your argument before, and it doesn't really appear to be an issue that concerns or has even occurred to anyone I have ever met.

The article you cite wherein certain gay men bemoan a perceived lack of butchness in their community and an overabundance of swish is, first of all, an opinion rendered by the author about his community as he personally perceives it. It is no more persuasive of an objectively factual social phenomenon than an article in Vogue about the sudden prevalence of bridesmaid dresses being worn to Manhattan clubs is indicative of women worldwide suddenly choosing to wear nothing but bridesmaid dresses. There are trending phenomena in every community. At the turn of the 90s, I recall my gay friends in San Francisco bemoaning the pervasiveness of butchness, and how they missed the good old fashioned queens. These things come and go. Second of all, just because one article says there aren't enough butch gay men doesn't mean homosexuals are all effeminate and manly men need to learn to have sex with each other without categorizing themselves.

Do you have sociological studies? Anthropological studies? Historical documentation? Anything from a peer-reviewed journal?

You seem angry that your opinion is shut out of the gay world, but I don't see why that doesn't just mean gay people don't agree with you, and choose to perceive things differently. And unless you're gay, I don't know why it makes a difference.

Yes, I know you say that somehow manly men not being able to go around having sex with one another without somehow being gay destroys male intimacy and bonding. But I don't know how that is so. I have many male friends with whom I have a deep and intimate connection. And I have never desired to have sex with them, or felt that the connection would be so much better if only we could just have sex and yet somehow not be gay. I don't know that I have ever encountered anyone who did think that way.

Frankly, it sounds like you have love and sex and intimacy and gender identity all tangled up in a huge snarl. None of those things actually must always be entwined with any of the other things.

I think masculine, manly men can have deep, intimate connections with each other. They can be vulnerable and open with each other. There is nothing gay or straight about that. It just is.

I also think masculine, manly men can have sex with each other. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's also homosexual. If you prefer to not have a label and refuse to embrace the identity that comes along with the term "gay," fine. But it doesn't change that a man having sex with a man is, purely in clinical biological terms, homosexual activity.

I don't mean this in an attacking or offensive way, but it seems to me that the more we all get into this conversation, the further away from any recognizable reality your arguments get. Which makes me think that at base, this is something personal. If someone tells me that cucumbers are fruits and not vegetables, but are called vegetables for communist reasons, and that people everywhere are crying out for relief from the oppressiveness of having their produce labeled and categorized instead of just being the fruits or vegetables they are (or in some cases, a combination, the fruigetable, a third type of produce that communist grocers don't want you to know about, but everyone knew about before communism), but no one seems to understand the horror of the situation, even vegetarians...I'm going to end up thinking that this is not really about society and the politics of produce, this is about a certain individual's own issues with cucumbers.

I don't intend to be mean, or deliberately disrespectful. But I'm getting to the point of feeling like this is less a debate about social philosophy, and more about you needing to convince someone, anyone else that your issue with men, masculinity, and homosexuality is really external and objective.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)