“You’re Really Just a Gay Man in a Woman’s Body!”

Abstract

Queer theory has long argued for the liberatory potential of separating masculinity from men. This article examines whether and how masculinities can be radically transgressive for individuals and simultaneously re-create gendered systems of inequality. In two case studies—a drag troupe and a queer leather club—we find that the cultivated queer sexualities were mimetic iterations of sexual practices among gay men and came rife with both the possibilities and problematics of these real and imagined tropes. We trace the consequences of this in two processes: the eroticization and self-exploration of masculinity and the reliance on validation from gay men. We find that the empowering sexualities taken up by individuals were concurrently rooted in and reproduced sexist meanings of desire and sexual agency. In so doing, we contribute to sociological understanding of masculinities by charting how androcentrism is reproduced in some groups, with or without the presence of male bodies.

Keywords

sexualities sociology United States identity hegemonic masculinity culture

In “Dick(less) Tracy and the Homecoming Queen,” Esther Newton ([1996] 2000) analyzes the growing use of drag and camp by lesbians and suggests that it emerges out of a “tangle of power and precedent” in which drag and camp are the distinct territory of gay men (89). Newton argues that using “queer” to describe both gay men and lesbians “as if gender were no longer a relevant or important difference deletes just what, in my view, we should be highlighting: the appropriation of gay male practices and culture by lesbians” (65). We heed Newton’s call and analyze the complex relationship between gay male cultural traditions and queer sexuality, a sexuality built around an anti-normative ethos and desire for other lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals regardless of gender. We take up the question of why masculinity is so empowering for female-bodied individuals in two micro-communities with distinct relationships to gay male culture: a drag king troupe and leather club.

“Queer” has been used over the past twenty years to describe both an anti-assimilationist political stance (Warner 1999) and an ever expanding set of non-normative sexualities (Doty 1993). Like the research participants we spoke with, we use queer sexuality to describe a relationship to sexual subjectivity that resists normalization, stabilization, and categorization. We argue that in these two groups queer sexualities had a complex mimetic dynamic; for female-bodied participants, queer sexuality was simultaneously a liberatory and transgressive act for participants and deeply reliant on gay male culture, sexuality, and sexism. We argue that queering sexuality can subvert hegemonic gender at the level of identity, body, and desire, while simultaneously reinscribing hegemonic gender structurally by situating the masculine as superior and dominant in relationship to the feminine through discourse, erotic norms, and access to space. We contribute to gender theory an analysis of how the experience of gender as pleasurable and empowering can reinforce hegemonic masculinity and androcentric practices, informing research on the reproduction of gender hierarchies.

Research in sociology on gender generally, and masculinities more specifically, has focused on the hierarchical relationship between masculinity and femininity (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Kimmel 1996) and the way gender hierarchies organize social practice (Connell 1995). Simultaneously, research on nonnormative and subversive genders and sexualities (including those that involve the appropriation of dominant cultural forms) has characterized them as pleasurable experiences which allow participants to “retool” their bodies (Hale 1997) and resignify sexual practices (Weiss 2011). This article bridges the gap between these two approaches to studying gender as social practice. We examine two radical sexual micro-communities—small groups situated within larger subcultural or oppositional communities—a bondage, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism (BDSM) group called The Club and a drag troupe named Disposable Boy Toys (DBT). Our analysis focuses on whether and how queer sexualities were simultaneously structured by gender hierarchies and sites filled with pleasure and liberatory potential.

Queer Masculinity

Existing research on gender and masculinities has focused on the way gender order includes masculinity practices that devalue women and femininity or uphold androcentrism, the social fixation on masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985; Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Kimmel 1996; Pascoe 2007). Mimi Schippers (2007) argues that hegemonic masculinity operates in hierarchical relation to femininity such that hegemonic masculinity is “the qualities defined as manly that establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary relationship to femininity and that, by doing so, guarantee the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (94). These “qualities defined as manly” are reinforced in social interactions, discourses, and social practices (Pascoe 2007; Schippers 2007; Schrock and Schwalbe 2009). Hegemonic masculinity is unattached to a particular embodied man but rather is the creation of models of ways of being, including the “ideals, fantasies, and desires” that are associated with ideal masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 838). These elements are not merely normative but also symbolic and discursive (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Schippers 2007).

Gay masculinity is often theorized as a challenge to hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Heasley 2005; Wright 2005), although the relationship between gay masculinity and hegemonic masculinity is transformed by decreasing homophobia and heterosexism (Anderson 2008; Anderson 2011). However, even within gay and lesbian communities, masculinity has been valued over femininity, upholding androcentrist ideals (Connell 1992; Hennen 2008; Newton [1996] 2000; Schippers 2007; Serano 2007; Ward 2000). More specifically, this valued masculinity is often focused on white, middle-class gay bodies, subjectivities, and issues (Ferguson 2005). Lesbian-feminists have critiqued queerness and female masculinity as a form of misogynistic false consciousness or an insidious iteration of gay men’s dominance within sexual communities and knowledge building (Jeffreys 1993; Wittig 1992). While flawed in their essentialist understanding of gender, these critiques do point to the persistence of misogyny and androcentrism within queer communities. Other scholars have endeavored to examine masculinity without men and suggest that the dismissal of female masculinities by lesbian feminism demonizes queer embodiments (Halberstam 1998). While masculinity may not be the domain of men, its valorization is intimately tied up with gender inequality and shapes LGBT and queer communities; the queerness of femme women is often questioned and butch masculinities are privileged within lesbian communities (Serano 2007). Transwomen often lose the social status while trans men gain it within queer communities because of their shift within a gendered system of stratification (Serano 2007). Many sociologists have asserted that even radical queer approaches to sexuality hide the gendered (and sexist) aspects of contemporary sexual communities and theories by simultaneously disavowing the material significance of gender or gendered bodies and building on the gendered (and sexist) foundations of gay community norms and institutions (Walters 1996; Ward 2000).

Whether the androcentrism of queer theories and communities is inherent in the theoretical and political project (Wittig 1992) or something that can be challenged has been hotly debated (Duggan 1992; Garber 2001; Halberstam 2005). Many sexualities scholars have asserted that the privileging of masculinity within queer communities and knowledge building is not inevitable but rather the legacy of sexism within gay communities and studies. Queer theorists have suggested that queerness is a set of social practices and identities that can destabilize subjectivities like gender, revealing the performative aspect of all identity and disrupting gender as an organizing principle and system of stratification (Butler 1991; Schippers 2000; Warner 1999).

This question of whether queer communities destabilize gender or retrench it by obscuring its structural components has shaped sociological analysis of practices such as drag and leather or BDSM.¹ Both drag and BDSM have been historically shaped and controlled by gay men (Newton [1996] 2000; Rubin 2011). Drag as a queer practice has been elaborated in contemporary research on the gender transgressiveness of drag and camp (Rupp and Taylor 2003; Shapiro 2007). Similarly, research on gay leathermen has highlighted the performative nature of leather masculinities and the queerness of the subculture (Bauer 2007; Hennen 2008; Mosher, Levitt, and Manley 2006; Nardi 2000). In her research on queer sexualities, Wendy Peters (2005) found that participation in leather and BDSM subcultures was often a catalyst for choosing to identify as queer. C. Jacob Hale (1997, 230) also argues that radical sexual communities like BDSM communities allow individuals to “retool” and reimagine their sexual bodies and selves, including the creation of masculine leatherdyke identities through social interactions. Even straight, upper-middle-class, white members of BDSM cultures may subvert traditional organizations of power through play with submission and dominance (Weiss 2011).

Rethinking Pleasure

Implicit in this debate about whether queerness resists or reinforces androcentrism is the idea that gender is a problematic experience—either as a system of stratification that must be dismantled or as a reified subject position that needs to be revealed as ephemeral and immaterial. However, gender and gender play are often sources of pleasure (Hale 1997; Hammers 2008a; Nestle 1992; Newton 1972; Rupp and Taylor 2003). The ways that individuals experience gender, particularly within queer communities, has often been dismissed as irrelevant because of the assumed critique of gender as either performative or inherently unequal. Scholarship by Tey Meadow and Kristen Schilt (2012) suggests that gender scholarship needs to consider the way gender can be a source of joy and empowerment. We contribute to gender theory by contending that sociological theories must take seriously the experience of gender and gender play for individuals while also attending to the structural inequalities and androcentrism embedded in these practices. Like Meadow and Schilt, we contend that sociological theories of gender need to account for gender pleasure in order to understand the reproduction of androcentrism and hegemonic masculinities.

In this article, we take up the question raised implicitly by Newton: why is masculinity experienced as so empowering that it comes to dominate expressions of queer sexuality, even among women? Instead of conceptualizing queer sexuality as either a direct imitation of gay male culture (and thus co-optation) or fully separate from gay male culture (and thus fully liberating for participants), we argue that empowerment and reinscription were simultaneous and mutually constitutive outcomes. Analyzing gender and sexuality at multiple levels of social organization reveals how the same practices can at once transgress and reinscribe hegemonic gender and sexuality (Schippers 2000). This “play of subversion and hegemony” (Schippers 2000, 758) is an important contribution to the study of masculinities, which often struggles to explain how hegemonic masculinity is reproduced (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) and has even fewer explanations for the appropriation of androcentrism by female-bodied individuals.

For this study, we draw on Margot Weiss’s (2011) concept of “mimesis” to understand why female-bodied individuals may experience androcentric practices as empowering, even if they are reproducing an existing social order. In her study of a white, upper-middle class, mostly heterosexual sadomasochism community, Weiss (2011) draws on poststructuralism and queer theory (Butler 1991) to elaborate how the process of calling up and (re)playing an established hegemonic ideal has more complicated outcomes than simple replication or rejection. Mimesis—imitation or mimicry of an original—offers an analytical foothold to understand how gender and sexual practices, “can reproduce material relations of inequality” at the same time as they “also produce new racial, gendered and sexual knowledges, positionalities, and possibilities through resignification” (Weiss 2011, 179). As we explore in this article, queer practices such as drag and BDSM reference and replicate normative practices and tropes in order to turn them on their head. In this process, however, the normative is reinscribed, calling into question the “a priori transgressiveness of alternative sexual practices” (Weiss 2011, 19). Weiss’ work pushes us to complicate analyses of female appropriation of androcentrism, examining it as an imitative, iterative performance, deeply embedded in social structures and simultaneously transgressive and creative. This is a critical intervention in the study of how hegemonic masculinities are socially reproduced.

Methods

In this study, we examined two sexual micro-communities from the West Coast, the Club and the DBT. While associated with larger subcultural movements (BDSM and drag), these groups had consciously constructed norms, ideologies, and practices of their own. The Club is a members-only queer leather club in a West Coast city. Initially a gay-men-only group, the Club became a multigendered community in the early 1990s and now a majority of Club members are women. As of 2008, the Club had over 100 members on their e-mail list with a core membership of 25 to 35 members. The Club was selected as a case study due to its reputation within the local leather community as an organization that encouraged “queer” sexual behavior. Club events—including a summer event and regular parties—frequently include both BDSM and sexual activities with limited dominance and submission dynamics. Almost all members are queer-identified, and many Club members identified the Club as a queer community.

The DBT began as a five-person drag king group (female-bodied individuals performing as men) in 2000 and grew over the next four years into a thirty-one-member drag performance troupe composed of men, women, and transgender individuals who performed both masculinity and femininity. The West Coast troupe called itself a “political feminist collective” and performed typical pop music numbers as well as performances that tackled broad social and political issues or challenged gender and sexual binaries. DBT performances were rife with sexual tension and content. Performances were often overtly sexual, simulating (mostly gay) sex and BDSM practices and full of flirtatious behaviors directed at the audience, and drag shows created a sexualized atmosphere that encouraged flirtation and condoned sexual activity.

The Club

Research on the Club was conducted by Amy L. Stone in the fall of 2008 (see also Stone 2013). Sixteen semistructured phone interviews lasted from sixty to ninety minutes each. All interviews included the same set of questions about sexual identity, gender identity, sexual experiences, inclusivity, and queerness in the Club. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The Club does not allow ethnographic research to be conducted at their events; however, she was allowed to informally attend two social events prior to conducting interviews to meet potential interviewees. She interviewed a range of members across the gender and sexual spectrum, including eight female-bodied individuals who identified as lesbian, gender queer, and/or a woman, four individuals who identified as trans* and queer, and four male-bodied individuals who identified as fags, bisexual, or gay men. Interviewees varied in terms of group tenure, from three to twelve years.

All Club interviewees except one were white, reflecting the lack of racial diversity within the Club, a by-product of the recruitment of members through social networks. The age and education level of Club members is different than other studies of queer communities, which focus on younger individuals. Club members were between thirty-one and sixty-six years old, with an average age of forty-seven years. Only half of the interviewees had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The DBT

Eve Shapiro conducted in-person or phone interviews with twenty-eight of the thirty-one group members as part of a larger study (see Shapiro 2007). Interviews lasted between one and a half and three and a half hours, and were recorded and transcribed. Participants ranged in age from seventeen to thirty-four, and twenty-three members were white, five were multiracial, one was black, one Latina, and one was Asian Pacific islander. Participants in DBT ranged in class position between poor and upper middle class, and educational attainment varied with some members lacking a high school degree and others working on PhD degrees. All members were assigned female at birth, but a substantial portion came to live their lives as trans* individuals or as men during or after participation.

While original data collection for each study was undertaken independently, the methodological similarities as well as a shared analytical and theoretical frameworks makes these cases suited for reanalysis together. The differences between these two groups are critical for understanding the complex role that masculinity plays in queer communities. While the Club was explicitly sexual, DBT created a sexualized space but was not a site of public sexual activity. Each group had a different relationship to gay male culture; the presence of cisgender gay men, along with the proprietary dynamics of a group founded by gay men and developed based on gay sexual culture, made the Club distinctly different than DBT, which was developed as a feminist political collective by female-bodied members. The performativity in drag, as opposed to leather, communities is also an important difference. And yet, many of the same themes emerged in the data, raising questions about whether the mimetic complexities of queer sexualities were shaped by similar social forces.

For this study, we asked new questions of our data and coded interviews and field notes for discourse about sexuality, gay masculinity, and queerness. As themes emerged, we reviewed both sets of data, minimizing intercoder reliability issues. We examined the two data sets alongside one another looking for similarities and differences among participants’ experience and group-level dynamics. As we explore below, we found common themes of the definition of queer sexuality, valorization and eroticization of masculinity, and recognition by gay men.

Queer Sexuality

Over three quarters of DBT and Club members identified as queer (as opposed to or in addition to gay, lesbian, or bisexual). When Club and DBT members identified themselves as inhabiting a queer sexuality they were articulating a nonnormative sexuality that resists identity-based categories and celebrates fluidity. In this queer sexuality, two lesbian and gay-identified individuals could date, flirt, express desire, and have sex with each other without identifying themselves as heterosexual or problematizing their queer sensibilities. For example, Roman, a genderqueer-identified drag king in DBT, summarized this best when he stated, “I call myself queer in that I’m attracted to queer people, it does not matter what their gender is; it does not matter what their sex is. It is just sort of ‘Wow. Gay men are sexy, so are dykes, so are tranny² boys, you know.’”³ Like Roman, most members of both the Club and DBT described queer sexuality as an attraction to other queer identities. At times, this attraction was described as including lesbians or dykes more generally. However, most descriptions of queer attraction focused on masculine figures, including gay men, transmen, and butch women.

These queer sexualities disproportionately focused on masculinity and gay men. The queer sexualities that emerged in our two case studies were reliant on particular linguistic and cultural frameworks for hot, desirable, and agentic sexuality that came out of gay male culture. Queer sexuality was drawn from (but not conflated with) gay male sexual culture. It was not merely an “emulation of gay men” (Wilkinson and Kitzinger 1996, 380), but rather a reliance on complex meaning constitutive traditions—linguistic and cultural frameworks for making sense of the world (Green 2012; Gross 2005)—about a certain type of gay male sexuality that was erotic, desirable, and valued. Broader and more ephemeral than sexual norms, these meaning constitutive traditions provided individuals with shared imaginative tropes for erotic subjectivities, touchstones for collective fantasy making, and the pleasures of valued but heretofore out-of-reach subjectivities. This real and imagined gay sexuality was “anchored to the institutions of sexual sociality” that “promote and valorize sexual exploration, nonmonogamous norms, and extended bachelorhood” (Green 2012, 147).

The queer sexuality crafted by both Club and DBT members relied on this gay meaning constitutive tradition. According to Betty in the Club, she was drawn to the group by “the myth and the lure of gay male culture” which she described as “life is a big party, and it’s all a lot of fun” or “let’s all have sex and we’re all fabulous.” Brie, another Club member, described fellow member, Jona, as having “fag energy” due to her “straightforward, uncomplicated” sexual interactions and carefree promiscuity. In contrast, no members spoke about the resonance or significance of lesbian or butch cultures; the draw of the Club was more than masculinity writ large, it was explicitly about the legacies of gay male sexual cultures. Similarly, within DBT participants described how entering gay men’s spaces and accessing “fag” masculinity freed them to be more overtly sexual and more sexually suggestive both on stage and off. Preston Panic was sexually shy and reserved outside of drag but often embodied a highly sexual and flirtatious gay masculinity on stage, which generated a lot of sexual attention from both gay men and lesbians. While DBT purposefully performed desire for femininity, the intentionality belied the seemingly inevitable desire for masculinity.

These two components—sexual freedom and fun—were a key part of this gay meaning constitutive tradition. Within DBT, there was a bifurcated construction of gay culture. Political numbers often focused on issues such as homophobia, HIV/AIDS, and gender-based violence. At the same time, less overtly political performances often included idolization of gay culture. Embodying gay masculinities and performing in gay spaces was sexually freeing and empowering for members and was a way to garner sexual attention from men and women in the audience. In contrast, Club members rarely mentioned homophobia, HIV/AIDS, death, or shame but rather emphasized a valorization of masculinity and sexual freedom that relied on white, middle-class gay social norms and experiences. But Betty’s description of gay male culture as “we’re all fabulous” also betrayed the complexity of this understanding “fag” energy that also incorporated some elements of male effeminacy and the complex relationships between male effeminacy and masculinity in the gay community (Hennen 2008; Linneman 2008).

The reliance on this gay meaning constitutive tradition shaped two different processes within DBT and the Club. First, many female-bodied group members developed a heightened attraction to masculinity, which was often coupled with an exploration of masculine identities, including identification as a “fag.” Second, female-bodied group members embedded this attraction and exploration in a larger process of recognition (and at times, misrecognition) by gay men. Both of these processes—attraction/exploration and recognition/misrecognition—were simultaneously described by group members as the most empowering sexual experiences and heavily reliant on gay meaning constitutive traditions that marginalized femininity.

“I Had This Really Gay Man Chance to Learn Much More about Myself”

Many female-bodied members of both groups described a growing attraction to masculinity in others, an expansion of their sexual desire that was often accompanied by exploring their own masculinity. Members of both groups went through these processes in a similar fashion, although DBT members were more likely to be critical of the valorization of masculinity due to the nature of their feminist collective. In the Club, masculinity exploration was more frequently connected to sexual practices.

Club and DBT members, with few exceptions, described a growing attraction to masculinity, to gay men, trans* men, or “masculinity on female bodies.” For some participants, the attraction to masculinity was distinct from desire for men (Halberstam 1998). For example, Robin, a gender queer member of the Club described that “I’m particularly attracted to masculinity when it’s not in a traditional male body. I find FTMs incredibly hot. I find butch women who are very masculine very hot.” In these instances while masculinity was desired, this desire was not necessarily focused on men. In other instances, the focus on masculinity was also a focus on and desire for gay men. DBT member Q. Traffic reflected on his own growing attraction to masculinity:

I have become so much more accepting of my own desires… Five years ago… I would never ever have voiced even to myself being attracted to someone with a male body. Now, I talk about male bodies that I find attractive and am totally comfortable with that. Maybe I am not what would be called a traditional lesbian, but I am what I am and there is nothing wrong with desiring what I desire.

For Q. Traffic, DBT allowed him to articulate and normalize attraction to male bodies, a desire that previously made him feel uncomfortable. This attraction prompted Q. Traffic to “retool” his sexuality as queer after a few months of participation in DBT (Hale 1997). We did not find similar retooling or newfound desire for femininity among men who participated in the Club or among DBT members who described themselves as primarily attracted to masculinity before participation.

The process of eroticization of masculinity often went hand-in-hand with self-exploration of an individual’s own masculinity. Nate Prince, a butch-identified member, reminisced that:

I had never performed same-sex desire on stage and watching other people do that made me rethink about how I feel about men and how I think about myself. I remember, there was a number between Damien and Holden… That was one of the first few instances where I considered same-sex desire in the context of two men. I realized that I could actually be turned on by that.

For Nate Prince, thinking about “how I feel about men and how I think about myself” was a simultaneous process. Like other DBT members, Nate highlights here not only the potential for drag to encourage a personal gender shift (Shapiro 2007), but also how this personal gender work is tied up with gendered desire for others.

In the Club, this attraction and self-exploration was embedded within sexual practices. Club participant Nora described a growing attraction to masculinity, which suggested that part of that attraction was “identificatory”; Nora explained that this recognition for being a boy was linked to her desire for her boyish energy and body to be recognized by sexual partners. Club member Eva described how self-exploration “gave me permission to start to connect with my cock.” For this female-bodied, cisgender Club member, her “cock” was a “queer resignifying practice,” an energetic and symbolic genital that was a part of her sexual practice (Hale 1997, 230). Her cock simultaneously naturalized the link between masculinity and the phallus, while also transgressing hegemonic masculinity by not embodying a penis.

For a few group members, this self-exploration process included developing an identity as a gay man or “fag.” Gay male or “fag” identities were named by a few DBT members alongside butch and trans* identities. For example, Jake Danger felt that “playing a gay man [in drag] allowed me to become a gay man in a lot of ways. I think that I have really been able to have more access to a gay male sexuality through the performance and embodiment of that on stage.” In the Club, a few women identified “fag” as one of their many sexual identities. Here, “fag” or being a “faggot” was used as a reclaimed identity (see Hennen 2008) that included both gay camp and a sexual style of openness and promiscuity associated with gay meaning constitutive traditions. One fag-identified woman described her identity as an opportunity to explore her desire toward gay men. Other fags described it as a way to get in touch with their masculine energy and explore a new sexual style. In these instances, participants articulated desire for and as gay men, specifically, and not just masculinity in general. For them, gay male identities and cultures held particular significance.

This simultaneous process of eroticization and self-exploration was a mimetic engagement with masculinity and masculine identities. Club and DBT members consistently described these processes of erotic self-exploration as creating new and exciting types of sexual attraction, desire, and self-understanding. Jona described her sexual experiences in the Club as “an expansion of what was possible in my sexual being and in my sexual life.” This expansion resisted expectations about desire and created new possibilities through the resignification of bodies and erotic selves. Female-bodied individuals resisted existing gender and power structures by exploring their attraction to gay or trans* men and reappropriating traditionally masculine identities and embodiments. Female masculinity both challenged the hegemony of the conflation of masculinity and male bodies (Halberstam 1998) and felt transgressive and liberatory.

However, while liberatory, these mimetic practices also relied on and reinscribed sexist gay meaning constitutive traditions in which sexual agency was marked as masculine and masculinity was (re)signified as more sexually desirable than femininity. In DBT, the performance of masculinity was considered to be more desirable, whereas in the Club sexual agency itself was often described as masculine. The linkages between the eroticization of masculinity and the appropriation of sexist tropes was evident in DBT, where gay Daddy/boy or boy/boy narratives that drew from gay erotica (Rubin 1992) were popular themes for “sexy” drag numbers. Self-exploration itself, and the agency within it, was often marked as male in the Club, along with sexual styles and behaviors. Club member Anna, while describing her process of sexual self-exploration, remarked that “I had this really gay man chance to learn much more about myself and spend a lot more time exploring that.” For this Club member, exploring new sexual desires, acts, and fantasies was a gendered act associated with gay masculinity, which was echoed in other Club members’ accounts of sexual agency.

This valorization privileged masculinity over femininity. Many Club members described the benefits of learning more about gay male sexual culture in the Club, whereas only one bisexual man described the benefits of learning more about lesbian culture at Club events. Indeed, if lesbians were discussed at all, they were described as “boring” and disliking sex. This valorization was rarely challenged in the Club, whereas DBT was committed to supporting femmes as an attempt to counter the privileging of masculinity in drag king communities. However, femme members did not report the same feelings of desirability or connection to gay male sexual spaces as masculine performers and expressed feeling marginalized both within DBT and in performance spaces. It was this androcentrism that prompted one member of DBT to declare during a discussion about feminism that nowadays, “the most radical thing you can be is a lesbian!” For some members, a negative outcome of performing in DBT was the internalization of this androcentrism. One performer asked to remain anonymous when he shared that “I [came to feel] my feminine side was bad. I felt better if I looked more androgynous, more boy than girl. I didn’t like that I was feeling that—that looking like a boy was better.”

The same process—eroticization of masculinity and self-exploration of one’s own masculinity—simultaneously resisted and reinscribed existing gender and power structures. First, female-bodied members were transgressive in their sexual exploration of new desires and identities that subverted lesbian identification and expectations of femininity. Moreover, dominant norms about desire and desirability are challenged when female-bodied individuals take on gay masculinities. Members of DBT and the Club describe their forays into masculinity and particularly gay male masculinity as full of pleasure, excitement, and sexual desire. Within masculinity, they found sexual freedoms and empowerment and retooled their sexual desire. Yet this process also reinscribed existing gender and power structures by valorizing masculinity and privileging gay culture. The simultaneity of this process is not unexpected; female-bodied members’ feelings of liberation may have been embedded in the appropriation of sexual desires and practices associated with dominant social structures in the queer community. Yet this mimesis did not fully replicate gay meaning constitutive traditions. Female-bodied members identifying as “fags” and privileging masculinity were a phantasm of a copy. As Homi Bhabha would say, it is always “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1990, 318). As we explore below, female-bodied group members did not gain a secure place in gay male sexual culture through either their exploration of desire or claims of gay identity. They were reliant on gay men as gatekeepers to queer communities, and sexualities.

(Mis)recognition by Gay Men

Beyond eroticizing masculinity in one’s self and others, central to many members’ understanding of queer community was a process of recognition and acceptance by gay men. Recognition processes are central to the development of alternative gender and sexual identities (Hale 1997; Shapiro 2007). This recognition was oftentimes erotic acknowledgment through sexual practices with or performing for gay men. This process of recognition was often described as transgressive and liberatory by participants yet also reinscribed the centrality of gay men to queer community, as gay men became arbiters of who was really queer. These processes unfolded differently in the Club and DBT. Both groups expressed desire for validation of their masculinity by gay men. In the Club, approval and attraction from gay members of the group was a critical form of recognition. However, in DBT, there was more ambivalence about these forms of recognition. Some Club members suggested that the presence of gay men was what made the Club a queer community and that the absence of gay men, even with a strong lesbian presence, would make the Club a “straight” or merely pansexual organization. One of the Club members described the founding of the group as “a group of men who let women play with them.” In this description, queer men are what constitute the group, and they arbitrate entry by “letting” women in and allowing women to play with them.

One way to be recognized by gay men was to engage with them sexually. One of the norms within the Club was a repertoire of sexual activities and possibilities between self-identified dykes and fags.⁴ The norms of dyke–fag sex included “making out,” BDSM play, and anal or vaginal fisting.⁵ Shared leather spaces, along with the extensive potential repertoire of sex acts, led to more sexual activities between gay men and lesbians (Califia 1983). Jona described these sexual interactions as “enormously healing and enormously fun.” This play between dykes and fags was described by most Club members as the queerest sexual activity. Eva describes a recent queer sexual experience.

At the party on Saturday I was actually playing Daddy to two fags and that was so fun. They were both my little girl and maybe one was my little boy. It was awesome to get to embody this hot hot masculine energy with these fags that were super sweet and good for me… and it was holy fuck! It was so fucking queer!

For Eva, there was an eroticization of “this hot hot masculine energy with these fags.” For her, getting to “play Daddy” and feel a masculine embodiment was simultaneously fun, erotic, and “queering.” To do it with the collusion of two “fags” magnified the experience for her. Part of this pleasure may have been subverting hegemonic gender norms by topping two gay men who were also her “little girls,” but the presence of gay men was central to her queer sexual experience. In the Club, this eroticization manifested as almost all female-bodied Club members valorizing sexual interactions with gay men. Betty, a bisexual Club member, recalled that, after she had a threesome with a gay couple, she felt “vindicated spiritually” when one of the gay men told her “‘you’re really just a gay man in a woman’s body!’ And I was like ‘finally someone noticed it!’” Despite self-identification as a fag, Betty expressed feeling unacknowledged and unrecognized for her inner gay man until this moment of recognition from a gay lover, which confirmed her identity and desire.

In DBT, gay men also figured prominently; doing drag was seen by many members as an entry point to gay spaces and to validate masculine sexual identities. DBT used this process of recognition to trouble and counteract misogyny in the queer community when they performed in gay spaces. Summer’s Eve described how it complicated the sexuality of gay men “who are so about the cult of masculinity” when they “get a hard-on for a drag king.” She suggests that this complication of gay men’s erotic experiences has counteracted androcentrism and misogyny in the queer community. Yet, DBT performers were also troubled by the way gay men felt permission to access their bodies because they were women and society granted men access to women’s bodies. Individual drag kings cultivated and relished recognition from gay men and simultaneously disliked the sexism and misogyny that often came along with this recognition.

There was also disappointment in and disillusionment with not being recognized by gay men. Club member Nora described her anticipatory excitement about playing with gay men when she joined and her subsequent sense of rejection when it did not happen. The most extreme case of overt misogyny was at a “Bears” contest (where bear-identified men competed for a local title), where DBT was invited to perform. When the group arrived at the event, they were shocked to find that members were asked to wait outside of the event because they were women. Frustrated with the erasure of trans men in the group and angry at the underlying misogyny, DBT refused to leave. While the performance was well received, members were shaken. These experiences of overt misogyny (particularly directed toward femme-presenting members) occurred frequently in the gay-male spaces the group often found itself in, and members recognized that the group’s ongoing efforts to perform and enact desire for femininity were not powerful enough to mitigate the sexism.

This (mis)recognition process by gay men resinscribed existing gender and power structures by making gay men the gatekeepers of queer sexuality in the Club and in the gay bars in which DBT performed, determining who or what is of erotic value. Within both DBT and the Club, queerness meant, in large part, the adoption of gay men’s sexual practices and identities and the willingness of gay men to engage sexually with female-identified group members. This process of recognition by gay men validated the queer sexualities of female-bodied group members. These moments of recognition were celebrated as being confirmatory, transgressive, and full of “hot hot masculine energy.” Erotic recognition also destabilized the relationship between gender and sexual orientation, “retooling” and challenging the identities of all participants in the exchange, making sexuality “more profusely multiple than that with which we have all become familiar” (Hale 1997, 223). Yet these “hot hot” processes simultaneously relied on gay meaning constitutive traditions that reinscribed gender hierarchies.

The Lure and Appeal of Masculinity

The desires and practices that were described as the most empowering within DBT and the Club were often the ones that were most reliant on gay meaning constitutive traditions. Through exploration of their desire for masculinity, their own masculinity, or their inner “fag,” participants claimed agentic sexual lives. Yet simultaneously, this liberated sexual subjectivity relied on a gay male meaning constitutive tradition that constructed masculinity as more desirable than femininity and gay sexual practices as ultimate erotic experiences. Members of the Club and DBT were both emboldened by the recognition of their queer sexuality by gay men and also disempowered by gay men who functioned as arbiters of queer community and sexuality. Certainly not all desire for masculinity or masculine embodiment is about desire for men as evidenced by the long history of butch/femme and female masculinities more generally (Halberstam 1998; Nestle 1992). Within the Club and DBT, many participants described newfound queer desires for masculinity in butch, trans, and queer individuals as well as joy in exploring masculinity for themselves. However, for many participants, an explicit component of both attraction to masculinity and the desire for recognition by gay men was the desire to connect with particular elements of gay male meaning constitutive traditions. Whether this was a desire for “hot hot masculine energy” or to be seen as a fag.

We argue that gay meaning constitutive traditions reshaped the sexual practices and possibilities for individuals in the Club and DBT in particular ways (Green 2012). By drawing on gay meaning constitutive traditions, as opposed to lesbian, butch/femme, or heterosexual meaning constitutive traditions, these two micro-communities simultaneously created new possibilities for sexual practice and subjectivity, and reinscribed androcentric hierarchies of desire and sexual agency. The use of gay meaning constitutive traditions was nuanced, as fag identities often included nonhegemonic male effeminacy. The use of gay meaning constitutive traditions was criticized in DBT, where members brought feminist critiques to androcentric practices. In the Club, it was affected by the presence of cisgender gay men, wherein the presence of gay men in a highly sexual community strengthened the power of these meaning constitutive traditions. Despite these differences, participants in both groups found immense pleasure and empowerment in embodying queer sexualities informed by gay meaning constitutive traditions. Yet in both groups, the experience of gender as pleasurable and empowering simultaneously relied on and bolstered hegemonic masculinity and androcentric practices. These findings elaborate one way that gender hierarchies are reproduced in interaction. Future research should examine whether and how other systems of inequality, such as race, class, and age, are reproduced in a similar manner.

This study makes a critical contribution to gender theory through its analysis of the role of pleasure in sustaining and reproducing androcentric sexual practices and hegemonic masculinities. Our research suggests that the question of what makes masculinity so pleasurable for female-bodied individuals needs to be explored in a more nuanced way. By having sex with fags, exploring their inner fag, or exploring their attraction to masculinity, female-bodied members engaged in an exciting and radical remapping of their own desire and sexuality. They reimagined their bodies, explored new sexual subjectivities, and engaged in recognition practices with gay men that affirmed their desires and identities. The pleasure of masculinity in these two groups was derived from the way it allowed female-bodied individuals to explore new sexual subjectivities, inhabit new sexual selves, or escape the contradictory proscriptions of women’s sexuality. And yet, individual participants’ sense of entitlement to sexual agency was tied to dominant constructions of masculine sexual subjectivity. Our data suggest that masculinity was pleasurable precisely because it involved a mimetic appropriation of gay male masculinity, which brought with it the pleasure of appropriating power and status. Although DBT members with their feminist approach to drag had a more nuanced critique of this appropriation of gay masculinity, members of both groups reported the pleasure of this mimetic appropriation. Future research should continue to explore how and with what consequence the pleasures of gender inform the queer sexual practices of women.

We are not assuming that there can be no pleasure, sexual agency, or empowerment without gay male models of behavior (see Hammers 2008a for critique). For example, work on drag king style by Halberstam (1998) traces multiple types of drag king masculinity beyond “fag drag.” Both the Club and DBT could have turned to meaning constitutive traditions from lesbian leather history, BDSM culture, butch/femme histories, or lesbian culture, but they did not. While not inevitable, it is not surprising that both the Club and DBT drew on gay male meaning constitutive traditions given the continued power of sexism generally and the continued dominance of white gay men’s experiences within LGBT communities, politics and cultural production more specifically. The Club was situated in relation to a gay men’s leather subculture that values the production and performance of masculinity (Hennen 2008). Drag and camp are rooted in a long history of gay men’s use of public space (Newton [1996] 2000). Moreover, both of these micro-communities operate within the LGBT community, which has a long history of privileging masculinity and the gay male subject.

What these findings suggest is the need to explore queer communities and sexualities with an eye toward the multiple and contradictory meanings produced within them. Certainly, this research is limited by analyzing only two small communities on the West Coast; this narrow scope of research limits our ability to analyze the way queer sexualities may vary by region or be experienced differently by queers of color. However, the similarities between these two micro-communities with distinct relationships to gay male culture suggest that queerness is a rich site for analyzing gender. What is clear is that it is impossible to make sense of the possibilities and perils of queerness, without accounting for the ways it is always already shaped by existing structures of inequality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Misty Luminais, Carla Pfeffer, Mimi Schippers, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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