On charming straight men.
Sometimes I experience a feeling that, although never discussed or corroborated by fellow gays, I think might be more common than I think it is. It goes a little bit like this: I meet a charming, probably handsome, polite and somewhat intelligent straight guy and develop what James Wolcott might call a man crush. To be clear: it is not an actual crush on the straight man in question; rather, it is my homosexual version of a platonic infatuation with another man. And I think I’ve just come to understand what this means!Obviously, growing up and discovering that I am gay, I had crushes on straight male peers and straight male celebrities. Gays, as any one of us will tell you, discover their attraction to other men because of guys’ masculinity. So many people in my life (read: mostly girl friends and female acquaintances) have questioned why most gays are not attracted to the “typical” (read: feminine) gay; clearly, the answer is that we are gay because we find masculine qualities attractive. (Otherwise, we’d like lezzies – and that just can’t be!) But also a part of many gays’ development is the realization that – quel surprise! - most straight guys are jerks, especially to most gays. (None of this is news, it just needs to be said for my explanation.) And this was certainly the case for me: there were very few straight guys in my adolescence, and even throughout college, who truly did not regard my homosexuality as a marker of my personality, something to be “looked past” in our friendship.
Imagine the rare occasion, then, when a gay meets a straight guy who, so confident in his heterosexuality, and so cultivated in his contemporary worldview, actually makes no issue of the gayness. He surely addresses it – through jokes, engaged conversations about one’s personal life, etc. - but he doesn’t place a qualitative judgment on it. I had such a friend in college, who, in his relaxed and liberal treatment of me as just another friend, another guy, made me experience for one of the first times, a new kind of friendship – really, that of a guy friend. I guess, because of this, I found him … just, so cool. Sure, it helped that he came from an old, wealthy politically-prominent Massachusetts family and owned an island. But really, that wasn’t why I found him so cool (really!). He sang in choir but also played sports with the guys, was a bit of a cad but knew when to throw his jacket down over a puddle for a lady, and joked with me completely amicably about my obvious crush on him.
Because that’s what it was. A crush. I had so rarely encountered such a species (especially at a conservative Catholic college), that his very existence intrigued and attracted me. And when he could jump from a chat about Homecoming to a joke about how good his butt looked in his jeans (because he knew I was looking) as easily as I could, how could I not have a crush on him? Except, it wasn’t exactly a crush: I didn’t (really) want to sleep with him, I didn’t spend any time dreaming about our names intertwined in treetrunks (althouth Smith-Forbes would have a nice ring to it), or follow him around puppy-eyed. I basically just thought that his coolness-bordering-on-cockiness was serving him well, ingratiating him to most people he flattered with his charming attention. And isn’t that what a man-crush is? When a guy just thinks, “Wow, this guy is so supremely cool; he makes me feel like a million bucks when we’re talking, he knows how to treat the girls (and gays!), and just really pulls it off.”
And I think that it’s not only rare for a gay to feel that kind of infatuation with a straight guy. I’d imagine that “man crushes” occur equally rarely for straight guys. After all, the crush isn’t about the person who has it – it never is – but about the person who can inspire such admiration. It’s why Wolcott’s Vanity Fair piece was written about man-crushes among politicians: because politicians are the ones who, through their charm, can really convince and motivate the masses, both insiders and plebs, to rally around them, often irrationally. It’s about using your absolutely genuine charm (ahem, Bill Clinton) to really win people over and make them like you.
So I guess it’s no surprise that my college man crush, I’ve recently learned, has entered politics? Fear not. For all the obvious, aforementioned reasons, ain’t no Monica part II going to be happening here any time soon.
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