We're all gender rebels, every queer person everywhere – including heteronormative cisgender gay man and lesbians, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
It's funny, when I was younger, gay men were more likely to celebrate femininity than some are today. We gay people were despised and excluded as a class, and when we came together, we didn't hesitate to communicate and celebrate with drag and other forms of more personal camp. Walk into any gay bar in the 1980s, and you might feel you were in the world of Cabaret — as effeminate men swished around, often gathering around a piano to sing show tunes from Cabaret, wrists limp, scarves and ascots flouncing.
Hyper masculinity in gay men at the time was seen as just another form of camp — as performance, and usually as subversive performance. (Poking gentle fun at heteronormativity, though that wasn't a word at the time.)
Somehow, over the decades, a message of "stop stereotyping" started to make traditional cis-gay gender bending seem "wrong" to some people.
"You can't," they would say, "presume that a gay man is effeminate or that an effeminate man is gay. The only thing that distinguishes us as gay is that we're attracted to other men. We are not more likely than other men to be effeminate."
Soon, allies were parroting the same not-quite-accurate idea.
And before long, the idea of cisgender gay men as de-facto gender benders became either unacceptable or disputed— as heteronormative gay men took public spotlights and assumed mantles of leadership.
That pushed more ordinary, typically gender-bending gay men into a sort of second-class status.
Hyper-masculinity, rather than being perceived as a form of camp, became a sign of high status, while feminine performance became a sign of lower status.
The oppressed became oppressors as some gay men (intentionally and otherwise) leveraged societal disdain for gender bending to their own advantage.
"Butch it up, honey," used to be funny. Today, it's often oppression, dished up by one gay man to target another who isnt sufficiently performing masculinity.
That's quite a turnaround just in my lifetime.
Of course, none of this is universal. Prominent gender-bending gay leaders and influencers exist. Not everyone on Grindr loves the "No fats, no femmes, no Asians" paradigm.
But, as much as we know that gay men (for unexplained reasons) often grow up being judged by straight people as too effeminate, we don't seem to want to face up to how our evolving gay culture makes life harder and more toxic for those young people.
This isn't the same thing as trans people oppressing other trans people, but it's still queer people using zero-sum thinking to oppress other queer people over gender expression.
And I don't like it. I say that as a gay man who grew up taunted over a sort of innate femininity I wasn't conscious of possessing.
As a very young adult, I felt welcome, wanted, and supported in gay spaces, free to me, celebrated for being me.
My younger self would not feel so welcome in today's gay spaces, and that's a real problem.
