Straight Men's World (nsfw)

"the only major writer... who isn't a pederast"

As part of my research on the idea of a “gay world,” I came across an issue of Tiger, a straight men’s magazine apparently founded in the late 50s and running for at least a decade after.

Tiger was a somewhat lower-brow Playboy (founded 1953) clone, based on the premise that men, the real ones anyway, are all “Tigers.” It combined in a way rather similar in tone to later gay magazines like Blueboy, Honcho, or Mandate cheeky soft-core porn with cultural commentary, light fiction, etc. I love this mix of writing and smut and wish that there were more venues in that vein today. Straights have I suppose the ‘based’/corny Man’s World and gays have Gayletter and Butt; but none of them are going to publish me or make for good reading/flipping.

The closest I’ve come to appearing in such a context is when Tablet, in June of 2021, published my review of Dan Oppenheimer’s book on Dave Hickey at about the same time it ran a profile of Jewish Onlyfans performers. I thought, how perfect! yes! This is where I want to be read—my theorified ruminations on the self-shattering/self-constituting power of beauty next to pics of, and vacuous blurbs from, hot guys; my own version of Zizek’s special, delirious, perfect issue of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. As Hume says in one of his great early essays, it’s the bringing-together of the “learned” and “conversible world.”

Well, that’s what I want in principle—if not to actually be read by the smoldering go-go dancer, at least to appear in print next to his bush peeking out from his Calvin Kleins and a quote about how making porn helps him find his “authentic self.”

This issue of Tiger, though, is already pretty close to the ‘based’ retardation of something Lomez/ZeroHPLovecraft would put out, with, between the cheesecake, warnings that (white) men are under attack from a combination of uppity minorities (who don’t really want or deserve equality), out-of-place women, and conventional morality.

There’s I suppose a naturally enduring appeal of a political aesthetics of caddishness to a certain kind of straight guy; what if we could abolish the norms that hold back our virile, dynamic, conquering potencies (our Tiger natures) while continuing to keep down other groups (rather more) historically oppressed by social hierarchies? A barbaric revolt against bourgeois civility, plus a traditional conservative contempt for Others made to seem fresh and excitingly vivified with explicit, uncivil hatred. The wish—what if people like me, and only people like me, were allowed to vulgarly assert ourselves?—wasn’t new in 68 and it’s not new now!

Anyway, even back then manly straight writers already felt that they were being crowded out—not yet by ‘The Great Feminization’ and actual women, but by a Great Effeminization of semi-closeted homos who were keeping the heirs to Hemingway and Mailer out of print.

Gays aren’t really much represented these days as insidious Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevist spiders, spinning their conspiratorial webs to control culture. But in the 50s and 60s, as Mike Sherry documents there was a widespread fear among conservative straights—and a certain pride among some homos—that networks of sodomites were running America’s theater, ballet, poetry, cinema, etc. There was some degree of plausibility to it. Certainly the influence of say, Auden in poetry (launching Ashbery and Merrill) or Lincoln Kirstein in a range of fields, was striking, considering that homosexuals were, generally speaking, a despised and persecuted minority with few institutions of their own.

It’s interesting to see, though, that straight male writers have been feeling for such a long time now—at least half a century—that they can’t get a break, and that there was then, as there is now, a certain mystique one might obtain in styling oneself The Last Straight Male Writer:

And even then, there was an unpleasant conservative woman to agree with the put-upon men! (I loved Tuchman as a teenager discovering history; I haven’t read her since and didn’t know she was such a Midge Dector).

The essay runs through various examples of Homo Power in the Arts, from Warhol’s movies to the crypto homosexual themes of Albee’s plays, before concluding on two odd notes. First, gays are ruining Judy Garland! And second, having stirred up alarm and disgust, the article concludes that, after all, more gays means better times for straights:

Would that culture/gender ragebait slop always wrapped up so shrugging and benign…