You probably know that I love Twitter, and a person I follow on Twitter is @A_Tyrone. He describes himself:
A DC dichotomy in the form of a tattooed, sardonic, preppy, dancing queen blended together into a freelance journalist/social media aficionado. Engage me!
He also has a blog, and  I ended up there, this morning as I was web surfing, where there is a blog post about Ricky Martin coming out. I was never a bog fan of Ricky Martin, in that I didn’t go out and buy his music or have photos of him on my desktop, but I always that he was a powerhouse of a performer, and the epitome of hot and handsome. and there, in this blog post was a picture of Martin that exemplifies that in a big way.
I have been thinking a lot recently about what it is underneath all the hate-filled rhetoric- what is it that makes  homophobia flourish? Why is it that being gay is not OK, and those who seek to oppress gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans folk work so hard to paint a horrific picture of who we are and what being gay is all about. How much of it has to do with defining masculinity?
After Ricky Martin came out, there were tons of blog posts- some congratulating him, while others chastised him for not coming out sooner. My personal opinion is that everyone deserves to self-disclose or not. No one should be forced out of the closet as long as their actions are not directly being hypocritical or hurting others. This happens most frequently in politics and Roy Ashburn was a great example. Here he is, a closeted gay man, yet he is voting anti-gay in his legislature. Otherwise, everyone deserves to come out at their own rate and to whom they choose to come out.
But this wasn’t meant to be a post about the protocols for Outing. Check out the picture. Isn’t Ricky Martin a hot, purely sexy man? So who gets to define masculinity?
Do some straight men hate gays because gay men seem more free to fit whatever mold of masculine they choose? Some guys are more rugged and butch, others more flamboyant, and many somewhere in between. We can, but don’t always choose to fit into some tight stereotype mold of what it means to be a man. Yet, as Ricky demonstrates, we can set the mark for what it means to be masculine.
What do you think? Who gets to define masculinity? Should any definition of it become a constraint others are forced to comply with? Is there a connection between masculinity and homophobia?