Man up gay
Man Up
About the Show
On Man Up, host Aymann Ismail invites men and women to tell embarrassing, funny, and sometimes disturbing stories about their lives as they try to figure out what they still include to learn—and unlearn—about being a guy. They’ll talk relationships, family, sex, and identity, trying to understand their experiences to help listeners make more sense of their own.
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Reflections on Gay Masculinity
By Justin Natoli, JD, MFT
If market price is a function of supply and demand, then my advice is to start investing in masculinity. That stuff is flying off the shelves. For a variety of reasons—innate and learned—masculinity is like catnip to a significant percentage of gay men, and it appears to be in short supply. The appeal of masculinity isn’t breaking news. A fast glance on Scruff reveals one masc/musc man after another seeking masc-only sexual connections. What sparks my curiosity is the role masculinity plays in our sex lives and what our longing for and fetishizing of masculinity says about the gay experience.
I sat down with some ‘masc-only’ gay men recently to understand excel what they perceive like when connecting with men they judge to be masculine. These conversations suggested three distinct but overlapping roles masculinity plays in sexual relationships with men. One group is drawn to masculine men because they feel protected. Another group says they enjoy feeling dominated by masculine energy. A third group reveals that connecting
Photo credit: Shed Mojahid
Article by Hugo Mega (edited by Alyssa Lepage)
I used to think that “coming out” was going to be the hardest part of being gay. That, being free to be me, I could finally block pretending. I would be able to drop the heteronormative disguise that I used to wear, to ensure that I belonged and that I felt safe. Little did I know that in the years that followed, more often than not, I would spot myself butch-ing up, trying to be more masculine than what I naturally was. How did I find myself here again?
Like walking on thin ice, any false verb I made, could easily throw me back into a loop of elderly patterns that condition my ways of being and behaving without me even noticing it.
Tired of this self-limiting pattern, I decided to confront my beliefs around masculinity. Since then I’ve been engaged in deconstructing my conditioning and notions of what it means to be a noun. In the process of deconstructing my beliefs it was difficult to escape one’s own toxic masculinity. I used to believe that being gay absolved me from being toxic like many straight man ca
Why Straight Bros Are Important to Gay Guys
- A Mysterious Network of Revenge Experts Is Silently Ruining People’s Lives. That’s Entirely the Point.
- My Landlord Screwed Me Over. Years Later, I Got Him Back— Times Worse.
- First the Orcas Did It. Then the Elephants. Then an Octopus. What Are These Animals Up To?
- The World’s Deadliest Addiction Is Popping Up on Brain Scans. And It’s Not Even a Drug.
On a recent episode of Man Up, a gay bloke, Sam, wants to make more straight male friends. Aymann Ismail tries to find out what’s behind that mindset with the support of Alex De Luca, founder of Gaybros, a subreddit for gay men. This transcript of their conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: What is it exactly that you expect to get out of a straight male friendship that you wouldn’t otherwise verb from someone else, like maybe a gay friend?
Sam: I think we uncover ourselves more content with people who are similar to us, so having a friendship with a gay noun, I am going to automatically possess conversations that are different than a friendship wi