Masculinity in Gay New York

I left class today with SO MANY thoughts racing through my head.  But the one that I kept wanting to say was about this second passage that I had also picked out for class:

There was this whole worry that the masculinity of men was being damaged in the early 1900s; that because of this gay movement, the image of the typical American masculine man would be destroyed.  But this didn't really happen, did it.  Men are still the "head of the household" and are still very respected.  They even still are regarded as (maybe) superior to women in the workforce.

Chaucey writes: "But the fairy also provoked a high degree of anxiety and scorn among middle-class men because he embodied the very things middle-class men most feared about their gender status.  His effeminacy represented in extreme form the loss of manhood middle-class men most feared in themselves, and his style seemed to undermine their efforts to shore up their manly status" (115).

This is so crucial because part of America has always been about men;  European men were the "first ones here" with Christopher Columbus.  We've always had male presidents. Male soldiers dominate. Men. Men. Men.  The masculinity of our culture is so evident, it kind of seems silly to me that these middle-class men were so afraid of losing it because of the fairies.  If you look at our culture now, men are still the center of it. I don't like admitting it, but they are.  Perhaps this gay movement that emerged in the early 1900s proves that the masculinity of men will never disappear -- it's always been here, and it will never be undermined.