It’s well-established that gay men love women. It’s a truth universally acknowledged, et cetera. So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago, when a report of a most alarming nature reached me via Instagram.
“Gay guys do not respect women,” said content creator Christianez Kiruba in a reel posted last month, starting off an anecdote about a gay man who would fight with her on her content regarding the perils of pregnancy. Spreading such information would discourage women from having babies, he argued, and rob many men of their “god-given right to pass on their genes”.
“Even as someone who isn’t attracted to a woman, you feel entitled to the reproductive-household labour that you think she needs to provide,” Kiruba said in the reel.
Many in the comments argued that Kiruba was painting the community with a broad brush or citing anecdotal evidence. But when I asked a drag queen if she knew any misogynistic gay men, she slyly said, “You can find a lot of them at Depot 48.”
As I tried to think of gay men I knew who would say such a thing, I came up empty… for all of one second. Then I thought of a group of bi and gay men I met in Pune who perfectly fit the bill. One of them is married to a woman now. And no, he’s not bi. Just a coward.
Misogyny in that group also took the form of bottom-shaming. Femininity opened you up to raunchy, degrading jokes. The self-hating band was living proof of how gay masculinity had gotten to this point. All of them had grown up on anonymous gay Facebook, where memes painted the masculine, stoic homosexual as a sane alternative to the glitter-drenched wretch that prances at Pride marches semi-naked. Those memes were the scarecrow on Mark Zuckerberg’s website that drove many budding gays away from femininity.
Of course, the memes borrowed from real-life gay men in search of respectability—who in turn were borrowing from a generation harrowed by the AIDS crisis, where a ‘fit’, hunky body had become synonymous with health. But what does that have to do with how gay men treat women?
Of all the letters in the queer alphabet, gay men are the closest to power under patriarchy. As ‘bros’, they can access the world unhindered, but it comes at the cost of a cursed covenant with straight men. That is how you get gay misogynists—the man pestering Kiruba, or, as many friends pointed out, Abhijit Iyer-Mitra.
Also read: Drag is not ‘womanface’. It’s more than just men pretending to be women
Does the ‘b’ word spell misogyny?
A Pune-based friend shared an anecdote that left me a little uncertain. When she complained to a gay friend about her manager, who is a woman, the friend proceeded to call the manager the ‘b’ word (it wasn’t ‘boss’). He also made some unfunny memes with the manager’s photo… for some reason.
“A straight man doing this would get him cancelled,” said my millennial friend. “And I think some gay men have gotten far too uncomfortable with the ‘b’ word.”
As someone who has recently started using the ‘b’ word for friends and enemies of all genders alike, I was taken aback. Had I been a misogynist all along and not known it? Is the call coming from the house?
When three women in the office accused me of misogyny for hating on a badly written scene in White Lotus Season 3—where three middle-aged women sit around a table and use the blandest word soup to discuss friendship—I took it in stride. If female friendship is that surface-level to you guys, I thought to myself, you need to get better friends.
But there have been other moments. One time during my master’s, when I called a dear, dear friend the ‘b’ word in a moment of frustration, she was heartbroken. I knew better than to use the word after that. More recently, in a heated argument, a friend brought to my attention that I was being obstinate in the exact manner that I’ve watched straight men act, and hated them for it. We talked for hours about how I came to be so callous, but the rupture in the friendship hasn’t healed yet.
Clearly, gay misogyny is not some faraway demon one can shame into submission. It exists among many in the community. And if we allow it to pass unchecked, we’re hurting the people who have historically offered us the most love. Puppy play aside, it’s not a good look to bite the hand that feeds us, guys.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Janaki Pande)