Abstract
Nearly two decades ago, with books like William Pollack’s Real Boys and Dan Kindlon’s Raising Cain, young males became prominent in discussions of American masculinity; like their fathers and older brothers, boys typically came to be characterized as persons with a plight. Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets is the rare work that neither pities nor demonizes boys. Of the dozens of books to scrutinize boyhood in recent years, this may well be the best of the lot.
Way makes boys’ relationships with each other an instructive lens through which to view maleness itself. Her body of evidence—extensive interviews with hundreds of boys at different stages of their young lives—is substantial; and, in refreshing contrast to those studies concentrating on middle-class whites, Way’s group is meaningfully diverse. A New York University (NYU) developmental psychologist and former school counselor, Way conducted longitudinal studies of young males’ emotional journeys from early to late adolescence. She alternates between stories of individual boys, with a novelist’s feel for her subjects, and broad generalizations based on her two decades of research.
The boys’ friendships are Way’s particular interest. She is out to test the pervasive idea that boys, like their older brothers and dads, are typically inexperienced with, perhaps actually incapable of, the deep and emotionally complex intimacy that females of all ages are commonly thought to experience with each other. That influential paradigm of males’ emotional inexperience and inability fails Niobe Way’s test, fails it conclusively, in fact. With compelling excerpts from the conversations enlivening her book throughout, what Way’s interviews convincingly show is that for a significant portion of their young lives, American boys of various identities and stations seek, find, and savor an intimacy with each other that powerfully challenges the influential notion that heterosexual boys are, when it comes to same-sex intimacy, emotionally illiterate, bereft of experience, maybe even of capacity.
Way wisely seeks only to show typicality, and avoids looking for statistical exactitude in presenting her findings, satisfied simply that she has discovered a substantial group of boys who thoroughly defy generalizations about the ineptitude and disinterest of young males in “both having and wanting intimate male friendships” (p. 7). Way and her associates obviously were attentive, patient listeners in the interviews they conducted, wise enough to realize that “the language of sensitivity and explicit vulnerability” (p. 146) might take a while to surface, both in boys’ dealings with each other and with the people interviewing them for this book. The patience pays off, as Way uncovers an unexpected skill and pleasure among boys when talking with and about each other, a strong preference for talking intimately to other boys, not to girls, and even a frequent use of what Way aptly calls “the language of romance” when boys describe their closest friends (p. 101).
Way has not set out to refute the notions of an emotionally perilous “boy code” as much as she has looked for—and found—signs of boys’ resourcefulness in resisting and circumventing the cultural constraints that have bothered many other observers of American boys. “Once I became attuned to the possibility of intimacy between boys,” she writes, “I began to hear it everywhere” (p. 18). Not exactly everywhere: the boys found to be most familiar with same-sex intimacy were those whose parents supported emotionally venturesome sons and those young males who had social power, such as athletes. And it is indeed largely verbal evidence of intimacy that Way has documented: what she heard the boys say and report having said. That many boys delight in talking to each other and are quite willing and able to give words to their affection for each other—to an interviewer and to each other—is noteworthy, no doubt about it. But whether this verbal intimacy is accompanied by physical expressions of intimacy is beyond the purview of Deep Secrets and could profitably be studied by someone as attuned as Way to evidence of cultural resistance.
It is not only physical expressions of affection that are absent in this book; also missing, as objects of separate study, are the guys for whom physical involvement with other males eventually becomes a marker of sexual identity. Deep Secrets is a gender book, about being a boy and becoming a man; sexual orientation enters the picture mostly as an eventual object of fear, a sensation from which gay men, of course, are not themselves immune. While the realities of actually being gay are not explicitly part of her book’s focus, Way does, however, record vast differences, linked to race and class as well as age, in what behaviors get coded, and hence often avoided, as gay.
The resourceful, heartening resistance that Way uncovers among boys does not, she openly laments, last even through a young man’s teens. Late in adolescence, the defensive “no homo” mantra that boys learn early in their lives begins to be taken much more seriously, Way found, making the late-teen years for many “a time of disconnection and loneliness” (p. 184). When boys reach their late teens, she maintains, the notions of “progress” and “development” that are her own profession’s stock in trade are inappropriate for describing what happens to many young men. Healthy emotional development, she believes, is inextricably bound to feelings of connection with others; that becoming a man so often means learning to disconnect from other males, to sever the ties that had so recently meant so much, commonly makes the late teens “a period of profound loss,” a time when a male’s development actually ceases (p. 184).
Despite that somber declaration, there is something profoundly hopeful about Deep Secrets, something that indeed sets Way’s work apart from the other examinations of the contemporary American boy. Deep Secrets introduces some boys whose large numbers, indeed whose very existence, have gone largely unnoticed. Way’s abundant evidence of young men’s verbal tenderness with and about each other strips the notion of male emotional constriction of its aura of inevitability. This is a book about eventual loss, but also about the possibility of rediscovery.