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6 Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings That ain’t no woman! It’s a man, man! —Austin Powers There has been much ink spilled in popular media and popular queer culture about the intimate relations shared between gay men and straight women. The “fag hag” role has indeed become a staple of popular film, and at least part of the explanation for how gay male culture and gay male images have so thoroughly penetrated popular film and television cultures has to do with the recognized and lived experience of bonds between “queens” and “girls.”1 New bonds on television between gay men and straight men (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Boy Meets Boy) only solidify a general recognition of the important contributions made by gay white men to popular culture. Still, there is no such recognition of the influence of lesbian queer culture, and there is no relationship between lesbians and straight men that parallels the bonds between “fags” and their “hags.” While the structure of the dynamic between lesbians and hetero-males could change significantly in the next few decades as more and more lesbians become parents and raise sons, for the moment there seem to be no sitcoms on the horizon ready to exploit the humorous possibilities of interactions between a masculine woman and her butch guy pal or set to send five dykes to “makeover” some unsuspecting heterosexual guy or gal. This is not to say that no relations exist between the way lesbians produce and circulate cultures of masculinity and the way men do. These relations, however, are for the most part submerged, mediated, and dif- ficult to read. This chapter recognizes that masculinity has become a hot topic in recent years for both scholars and journalists, but that popular culture continues to protect the essential bond between masculinity and men. Any number of writers claim now to be examining a current “crisis” in masculinity, and in both the United States and England, articles appear regularly in leading newspapers asking questions about male violence, the difficulties faced by 125 parents raising male children, and the long-term effects of changing conceptions of manliness. As another indication of the popular appeal of masculinity in the 1990s, Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man received widespread attention, and was lauded for its attempt to address the trials and the tribulations as well as the power and the glory of contemporary manhood (Faludi 1999). In academia, there are journals and book series given over to the study of men, male bodies, and masculinities; furthermore , there are numerous new titles in the burgeoning field of “men’s studies .” Unfortunately, in this flurry of media interest and scholarly work on dominant maleness and its crises, almost no attention has been paid to the way that the crisis produces its own solution in terms of alternative forms of masculinity. All too often, solutions for the crisis of white male masculinity are proffered in terms of the shoring up of that same form of manhood; real solutions have to be sought out in the minority masculinities that flourish in the wake of dominant masculinity’s decline. As an example of the limited ways in which we approach the crisis of dominant masculinity in the United States, we can turn the series of school yard shootings by white boys in the 1990s—in Arkansas and Colorado most prominently—that rocked the nation and may have had some connection to the escalation of hate crimes toward gays, lesbians, and transgender people , particularly in rural areas. Much of the popular coverage of these seemingly random events asked broad questions about gun control, violence in video games, and the breakdown of the family, but few critics thought to interrogate the construction of adolescent white hetero-masculinity itself. In fact, only rarely were these violent crimes specifically attributed to white boys or white men. More often, school shootings and hate crimes are depicted as random attacks by disparate individuals. While obviously it does not make sense to simply demonize young white men as a group, we should be asking some hard questions about the forms of white masculinity that we encourage and cultivate in this society. I believe that the rise of alternative models of masculinity within gay, lesbian, and transsexual communities in this century has been part of an ongoing interrogation of models of manhood that were previously viewed as “natural,” “unimpeachable,” and even...

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