Fairies, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine (review)

In his engaging study of three gay American male subcultures, Peter Hennen analyzes the play of what he calls the effeminacy effect (the stigmatizing of homosexual men with femininity) and its social-historical role in shaping the gay masculinities of fairies, bears and leathermen over the past half century. Using multiple methods, from ethnographic participant observation to conducting 23 in-depth interviews as well as drawing on archival and historical secondary sources, Hennen draws a clear and thorough picture of the masculinity dynamics that animate each community’s approach to negotiating the “effeminacy effect.” He situates his three case community studies of gay masculinities as responses to the social-historical context that constructs male same-sex desire as “failed” forms of masculinity.

In a wide-ranging and insightful chapter on the cultural and historical construction of effeminacy, he defines the term as “a historically varying concept deployed primarily as a means of stabilizing a given society’s concept of masculinity and controlling the conduct of its men, based upon a repudiation of the feminine.” Hennen, rightly, focuses our attention on effeminacy and its disciplinary shaping of (gay) masculinities. What I like even more than this clear contextualizing is his use of Bourdieu’s concept of embodied masculinity. By focusing on the embodiment of masculinity in the three communities, he brings to the analytical fore the role of the body in gender and sexual identity politics and subcultural community formation. Each subcultural gay community is given its own individual chapter, moving the reader from the most (fairies) to the least (leathermen) effeminate embodiment of masculinity.

The Radical Faeries, formed in 1979, are a group of gay men who reject urban gay culture and its consumerist and sexual cruising habitus. The Faeries’ response to the hypermasculine images of urban gay men (men who wear tight jeans and form-fitting shirts to reveal their muscular bodies) is to do an about face and instead embrace their femininity through the practices of drag. However, while aiming to subvert normative gay masculinity, Faeries’ drag practices do not paint the typical drag queen portrait, passing and “realness” are not the standards they apply to their drag practices. Rather, faeries in drag “look very much like men in dresses.” However, due to their predilection to seek “sanctuary” in the woods and nature, thus secluded from the world around them, Hennen views the Faerie community’s agency for challenging gender normativity as limited and confined to the subculture’s members.

The Bear community emerged in the 1980s in part from a national organization called Girth and Mirth (large men and their admirers). Like the Faeries, the Bear community embraced a new type of gay masculinity that eschewed effeminacy. Rather, the gay masculinity of Bears eroticizes a male body that is heavier, hairier and older than the normative gay male body. However, Bear men also embody a form of “complicit masculinity,” the author argues, as they want to be viewed as regular guys. They are gay men who are gender conventional, probably perceived as straight by the casual observer, but identify as gay. Nonetheless, the Bear community’s contestation of effeminacy and male homosexuality might also portend “the potential to turn back on the very system that produces it,” as it clearly undoes associations of feminine men and homosexuality and masculine men and heterosexuality. Bears are masculine gay men.

Coming out of the ashes of WWII, gay veterans traumatized by the war, along with the newly formed gay biker clubs, started the gay leather community in the 1950s. The gay leather community is also the community that most strongly disavows the association of male homosexuality and effeminacy. Embracing a hypermasculine sexuality, the leather male community eroticizes the male body through leather clothing and a variety of sexual practices, ranging from sadomasochism and bondage and discipline to other “kink” practices. This community remakes the gay male body into an aggressive instrument. Here rough and often public sex and...