ANDROPHILIA

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“Mr Malebranche is a straight-talking Drill Instuctor for today’s gay generation, weaning them off pop divas and bear beauty pageants and licking them into a more manly, more self-reliant shape, ready to re-join the masculine fray. Androphilia is his persuasive, compelling, no-frills Boot Camp. After completing it, you may or may not decide to save your drama for your mama and join the company of men, but you’ll certainly wonder why the gay male world, a community of men who like other men, seems to have such a problem with masculinity.”

The word gay has never described mere homosexuality. Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona—a lifestyle. It's a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality.

Androphilia is a rejection of the overloaded gay identity and a return to a discussion of homosexuality in terms of desire: a raw, apolitical sexual desire and the sexualized appreciation for masculinity as experienced by men. The gay sensiblility is a near-oblivious embrace of a castrating slur, the nonstop celebration of an age-old, emasulating stimga applied to men who engaged in homosexual acts. Gays and radical queers imagine that they challenge the status quo, but in appropriating the stigma of effeminacy, they merely conform to and confirm long-established expectations. Men who love men have been paradoxically cast as the enemies of masculinity—slaves to the feminist pipe dream of a 'gender-neutral' (read: anti-male, pro-female) world.

Androphlia is a manifesto full of truly dangerous ideas: that men can have sex with men and retain their manhood, that homosexuality can be about championing a masculine ideal rather than attacking it, and that the wicked, oppressive 'construct of masculinity' despised by the gay community could actually enrich and improve the lives of homosexual and bisexual men. Androphilia is for those men who never really bought what the gay community was selling; it's a challenge to leave the gay world completely behind and to rejoin the world of men, unapologetically, as androphliles, but more importantly, as men.

The word gay describes a whole cultural and a political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics. As a man, why should I treat men as oppressors and masculinity as a universal evil? Why must I constantly think of myself as a struggling minority when I’m doing fine? And what does socialism have to do with who I think is hot? ...

Feminist disdain for ‘the construct of masculinity,’ widespread in the gay world, may actually cheat men out of a masculine value system that has historically been proven to bring out some of men’s best qualities. Men who are often single for a significant part of their lives could benefit greatly by championing self-reliance and personal responsibility over perpetual victimhood, and blaming society for their predicaments. It may also prove a cheaper and more effective guard against the spread of disease than the glamorized, affirming, nonjudgmental, velvet-gloved finger wagging of the average anti-AIDS ad campaign. Perhaps holding personal achievement higher than the self-congratulatory, therapy-induced ‘emotional survivor’ mentality that holds sway over the gay community might actually be a good thing. And the concept of masculine honor, when not taken to self-destructive extremes, might prove a welcome change of pace from a community known for incessant gossip and henhouse bitchiness...
It makes more sense to discuss homosexuality in terms of desire, and in variations of that desire, than it does to shove any male who experiences that desire into one limiting category.
Why would a man who values his masculinity, who wants to be taken seriously by other men, want to identify himself as gay? To do so is to put oneself in the position of having to disprove the connotations of frivolity and effeminacy that the word absolutely does carry. If you're male, referring to yourself as gay is a bit like wearing eyeliner: you can get people to look past it, but they probably wouldn't be surprised if they caught you wearing a dress.
The Gay Advocacy Industry must maintain the illusion of oppression and victimization so that hundreds of thousands of checkbook revolutionaries can believe that they are fighting for their own freedom. But the truth is that they're already free to do just about anything.
Supporters of gay causes consistently compare homosexuality to race, and play on white Americans’ fears that they are secretly racist bigots, a mere noose and white sheet away from the Southern good old boys of yesteryear.
Now that tolerance for homosexuality is widespread and oppression is minimal, the next step in sexual liberation is to challenge the idea that sexuality creates ethnicity—to do away with the assumption that a man who prefers men is a separate, essentially different sort of man, a gay man, whose sexuality determines his interests, his politics and the way he expresses his gender. The idea that same-sex-oriented men are not true men is perhaps the most deeply ingrained and most limiting prejudice they face, and it is one that the gay identity only reinforces by socially segregating men into two groups—straight and gay.
The real ‘internalized homophobia’ is the belief that you can’t truly be a man simply because you love other men. Over the course of history, psychological and physical castration have been the most powerful weapons of those who despised homosexuality. Institutionalizing the idea that all homosexual men are fundamentally different from other men, and fundamentally less masculine, essentially says that, on one level, those homophobes are right. Gay advocates argue that they are ‘second-class citizens,’ but they seem to have no problem with being ‘second-class men.’
The gay community, by rejecting all masculine cultural ideals, rather than only those which prohibit homosexual expression, allows its males to remain boys. Many gay men never grow past a focus on instant gratification and devil-may-care, hedonistic sensualism. The gay community promotes nonjudgmentalism and relativism, only expecting its males to accept their gay identity and find happiness by doing whatever feels good to them at any given time. Gay culture celebrates superficial pursuits like fashion and looking good, but rarely celebrates potential role models who do anything more substantive—unless they’re political activists working on behalf of the gay community. By separating gay men from other men and quarantining them in a ghettoized gay culture, the gay community deprives its males of productive masculine role models. It mothers its boys according to a misguided feminist understanding of masculinity, but deprives them of father figures who will challenge them, demand more from them, hold them to a higher standard—a masculine ideal—and inspire them to become men.
The culture of anything-goes nonjudgmentalism isn't working. Homosexual men, as a group, need some sort of standard that promotes productive rather than destructive sexuality, and they have to stop being so afraid to differentiate between the two.
Gay masculinity is a fetishistic, masturbatory reading of masculinity; it’s mute, like a page torn from a porn or bodybuilding magazine. Gays stop at sartorial and physical imitation, or cop a particular hypermasculine attitude drawn from some dreamy archive of fuzzy pornographic memories. ‘Masculinity’ in the gay community is more often than not a form of drag; it seems shallow and affected and silly—like some Halloween costume designed by the Village People. Many gay men want to look like men, but they’re unwilling to try or uninterested in really becoming men.
It has always seemed like some profoundly ironic cosmic joke to me that the culture of men who love men is a culture that deifies women and celebrates effeminacy. Wouldn’t it make more sense if the culture of men who are sexually fascinated by men actually idolized men and celebrated masculinity? The essence of embracing androphilic desire is embracing the fact that you actually are a man who loves men. As a male who experiences that desire, perceiving yourself to be more womanlike is a cop-out, a compromise that places homosexual desire into a more familiar Mars/Venus polarity; it is essentially heteronormative. People expect men who prefer sex with other men to be constitutionally effeminate; gay culture conforms to those expectations. A movement of homosexual and bisexual men who refuse to conform to those expectations, who refuse to surrender their masculinity, who uncompromisingly relish the fact that they are men who love men and embrace that Mars/Mars sexual dynamic would be truly revolutionary. A group of androphiles who champion and embody masculine ideals, who go out and earn the respect of other men on their own turf, who actively invalidate the smear of effeminacy by living as exemplary men? Now, that would really challenge accepted cultural norms.
It is one of the great failures of the The Gay Party as a whole that it advocates males coming to terms with and taking pride in their homosexuality, but never advocates these men coming to terms with and taking pride in being men.

KEY 64 INTERVIEW

Click here to download and listen to Jack Malebranche discussing Androphilia.

Click here to download and listen to Jack Malebranche reading the first chapter of Androphilia. (Thanks to Herr Paul Smalley for the brief intro.)