"In 2025 Straight-Acting Masculinity Flows Down from the Top"
"It’s apparently been wishful thinking that thought our culture was moving beyond the straight role that was necessary to keep patriarchy going in the U.S. When I wrote Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to be Human over twenty years ago, I remember I had hope then that my analysis would be outdated by now.
But, on the contrary, as an academic friend who studies masculinity told me recently, that analysis is even more relevant today with the political victories of the old straight-acting masculinity in politics, the renewed down-grading of all things feminine, the media obsession with something they tout as click-bait: the “crisis of masculinity” in boys, and the reactionary and militant embrace by the religious right-wing of a warrior culture that ignores the Jesus of the Gospels.
For a while it was labelled “toxic masculinity” as if it were one version of the masculine gender role that dominated patriarchy, but that label was beaten down by those defending this masculinity itself, a masculinity that’s central to the straight role conditioned into boys and girls. So what is it today that’s the same old “scared straight” that we are now seeing proudly performed and rewarded by the US President, the Secretary of Defense and the rest of his regime, the president’s brown shirts in ICE, their sycophants, and those who were captivated enough to vote for these paragons of straightness?
This straight role is not inherent in heterosexuality or absent from homosexuality. Sexual orientations, we understand, are, as best we can know and as researchers point out, inborn, genetic, God-given, or at least established way before one realizes to whom they are attracted...."
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including his, in this issue, saying that we must go beyond just calling bigots hypocrites - the religion itself has to be held accountable. He names names and is right: 'What we’re seeing is the heart of what right-wing religion itself really is, not merely hypocrisy.'"
-- veteran LGBT activist (since 1959) and a founder of LA's Homosexual Information Center in 1968, Billy Glover
and this organization promotes and is a strong advocate for such thinking. He is a perfect fit for the 21st Century American thinking."
-- Michael Alldaffer, founder of the Great Plains Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
It became the core of training I did called 'Stunned Silent.' Thank you from me, my family and my community."
-- Kathy Reim, retired PFLAG regional and national leader, Washington state public school teacher, and trainer
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from a progressive, healing model which contradicts
the models of leadership found in most popular
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