What of a friend?
I received this disconcerting news at the same time that Philadelphia, Hollywood's first big-budget film to confront the issues of homophobia, was drawing big audiences around North America. Meanwhile, several U.S. magazines were running articles about burgeoning gay influence -- from the new "gay chic" of campus social circles to a powerful gay lobby that reaches into the White House.
On all sides, it seems, men are beset with challenges to their attitudes toward men who are sexually different. Challenges men will have to embrace if a "community of men" is to become more than wishful rhetoric. They go to the very core of men's identity -- an identity that many of us are reluctant to examine.
The transsexual man I know has very real fears about revealing his identity. He is terrified that his working life -- not to mention his physical safety -- would be put in jeopardy.
People see us as sexual perverts, but sex has very little to do with it. It's a question of feeling free to express ourselves as we really are -- and I often feel more like a woman. We often hear of transsexuals being ridiculed or treated as freaks. And some get beaten up.That animosity, of course, isn't anything new to the gay community, which has had to confront the menace of "gay-bashing" for years. John Eldridge, a therapist who launched a self-protection plan against such assaults in Vancouver's gay community, says the typical gay-basher is the young male who is insecure about his sexual identity. "We haven't found it to be an individual thing," he says. "It's usually a case of bravado, of the teenager trying to impress the other guys -- and the girls -- that he's not a faggot. Sexuality is rampant at that time in a boy's life, and it often isn't that focused. But there's still a lot of pressure on these kids to prove their manhood."
This bravado-based concept of manhood, of course, is the very one that leaders in the men's community are trying to break down. These leaders -- including best-selling authors Robert Bly and Sam Keen -- have recognized the need to redefine masculinity in a way that would embrace all men; but, at the local level, there seems to be more of a slow evolvement than any desire to meet the gay-straight issue head-on.
"The broader men's movement has to come to terms with a certain homophobic tendency," says Peter Woodsworth, a group leader in the Vancouver men's community. "But this isn't something you can push. The coming together between straight and gay men will happen when it needs to happen."
Mr. Woodsworth notes that the priorities of the men's movement -- reaching out to men in prison, to homeless men and to errant youths -- are "not as immediate or as life-threatening as the issues facing the gay community."
Dan Gawthrop, founding editor of the gay Vancouver newspaper Xtra West, says gay and straight men are dealing with issues of trust between them in more and more real-life situations. "If more understanding is going to occur," he says," it'll happen on the job, in seeing each other's lives and gradually learning not to fear each other."
Mr. Eldridge, whose therapy focus is men's development, says men have to realize there is more than one definition of being a man. He says we need to start looking at all the possibilities -- sexual, emotional, psychological, spiritual.
The sexual one, naturally, is the toughest. When my friend told me he wasn't sure he wanted to be a man, it seemed to open a window into forbidden territory: I was able, scary though it was, to do a rough assessment of my own sexual identity.
I found myself posing a number of uncomfortable questions to myself: How willing would I be to publicly associate with a transsexual? Could I be attracted to this person sexually if he became a woman? Would that be a big deal? How secure was I in my own maleness?
And finally, the only question that really felt liberating: If the person was a friend, what did his sexual orientation matter?
Peter Raeside is based in Vancouver, B.C. Reprinted with permission of the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper.