Layne Gregory, LCSW
Executive Director

   I think that masculinity is a concept that has changed over time and that in many cases has been misunderstood by the majority of men, either from a lack of adequate information from our parents and/or educational centers and from the exaggerated quantity of wrong information that we get from the different media like TV, music, as well as by the people that surround us. 
    I think that masculinity is a process which takes us all our lives to mature little by little and has different paths influenced by our social environment. At each stage of life we face different aspects and pressures that dictate the type of masculinity we want or the type we are made to take on. 
   Thinking about this I go back to the time years ago when I was a young Mexican trying to be a man and I think how my culture and the people with whom I lived influenced me in my way of showing my masculinity to others.
   The image of the Macho Mexican, a well-known concept of a man who controls, who works, who maintains his house, plays, drinks, goes out with friends and women, fights and protects, of the man who has his weapon, keeps his woman behind him, she who takes care of the home, takes care of the children, and cleans. Images that make us think of Pedro Infante, Pancho Villa, the silver-masked "Santo", Che Guevara, and even Lt. Commander Marcos, and so many other figures that we know through television, radio, newspapers, and magazines.
   Figures that in one way or another influenced my behavior and that together with the normal pressures of an 18 year old young man have made me demonstrate to others that I was macho, to spend a lot of time with my friends, to have many girlfriends, to be aggressive, to be part of gangs, to get bad grades in school, and many other things that sometimes put my life at risk.
   Thanks to the relationship with my parents and their help, I got through these stages of my life and I understood that to be a man didn't mean to be macho, but rather to take responsibility and values that made me grow as a human being and to do healthy activities that satisfied me without having to show others that I was the strongest or the craziest.
   Many years have passed since then and now I am married and living in the United States, in a new country with new people, with a different language and culture, with a system that is not the one I grew up in trying to make my way little by little to create a new life, and I realize that for now I'm the one who works from inside the home: I clean, I wash the dishes, I wash the clothes, I make the bed, I prepare the coffee in the mornings and many times I support my wife because I need her help in certain things.
   This change doesn't make me less of a man or lose my masculinity. On the contrary it reinforces my own masculinity knowing that I'm fighting for a better life and that I can take roles that support my family and make me earn the respect and affection of the people around me.
   I think that masculinity is not something we have to show from inside out, but rather something we have to show to our own selves.

Meghann McCluskey (MM): I'm interested to know how you've approached the subject of culturally constructed masculinity in your academic life, but maybe you could start out by talking about your personal life. How has your own culture shaped the ways you define yourself today? 

Guy Mark Foster (GMF): I'm the oldest in a family of three boys. I'm African American- I'm not sure if you knew that but it's obviously important to this discussion. My family was intact until about three years ago when my father died, and when I reflect on my family life I would say that gender and sexuality issues are definitely in the fore ground. As a young adult my father experienced a society that was still very hostile to black men, and in his efforts to produce black sons who would be successful in this society he felt like he needed to make us strong. He used a sort of military model for this. He had a sense that to make strong men you kind of police their behaviors a lot and teach them the right way a man does things. When one of us did something wrong he wouldn't approach us in a gentle or constructive way but instead used brutal, castigating language designed to embarrass or shame us. One example of this: apparently I used to wear my wallet in the wrong pocket and my father would say that only "punks" did that. For him, the word "punk" signaled a kind of incorrect gender identity. It was a word that was meant to diminish me. And I really felt oppressed by that language.  

MM: When did you begin to develop a sense of alternatives to the kind of masculinity your father was prescribing?   

GMF: I think I began to develop a sense of alternatives pretty early on. I read a lot and reflected and talked to myself about these things. When I was thirteen we moved to the suburbs of Maryland [from inner-city DC] and bought a townhouse. We were the second black family on the block, and I had my own room for the first time. One Christmas my family gave me a TV, and that TV became my connection to the outside world. Through television I found alternatives to manhood. I discovered public television and would often watch ballet- I found myself enthralled by those shows and would watch them at a very low volume with the door closed. Those images were very important to me because they showed me another way to embody my maleness. I hoarded those images because I knew I needed them. I secretly went out when I was fourteen and enrolled in dance classes, but then I needed to get parental permission so I dropped out rather than talk to my parents about it. I didn't have the language for the gender identity I was developing at the time...I did later when I learned ballet, learned to ice skate, and learned I was attracted to boys. I was also attracted to girls, but I knew better than to express attraction to boys publicly, so I concealed this part of myself.  

MM: And how long was it until you were able to openly explore the gender identity you were developing? 

GMF: I decided at some point as a way to break away from my father's images of gender and sexuality that I needed to do the opposite of what he asked me to do. I eventually suppressed my attraction to girls and decided to follow my attraction to boys in order to develop that side of myself because I had been forbidden from it. I needed to break away from my father's control because it represented society's control. I was inwardly raging against my father because in my mind I had always been a model son. I thought that he should have trusted me and instead he attempted to ground me. I decided I was leaving and that he was not going to have control over me anymore. I decided to do what I wanted to do and made a kind of conscious decision to explore a different masculinity than the one that he had laid out for me. I went to New York, and fortunately I met people who were very supportive and helped me strengthen my sense of self. I joined a support group for black gay men called Other Countries, and my fellow members all encouraged me to become person I was trying to be.  

MM: How do you define yourself now? 

GMF: [Other Countries] was very formative for me, but I no longer need group support because I feel more secure about the identity I'm developing. Now I'm really trying to take in the whole picture...Because I know that I consciously suppressed my attraction to women at one point I am now trying to explore that for myself. I have come to define my sexuality as something more complex than any kind of model sexuality. We live in a time where people are really protective of their identity categories but I guess I would say that I resist a universal narrative that's supposed to apply to everyone. The terms themselves can be constraining. I'm trying to work through how I adopt language to describe my political beliefs. Our identities are always under construction and labels seem to be endpoints.

Throughout the past century, male homosexuality in Brazil has taken on a stereotype distinct in its raucous, hyper-sexualized presentation. One major platform for the maintenance of this identity construction is Brazil's annual carnival- a pre-Lent party along the Rio de Janeiro that draws thousands of gay tourists each year. But how does the proliferation of this particular stereotype prevent recognition of the complex struggles of Brazilian gay men? James N. Green demystifies grand generalizations about Brazilian male homosexuality in Beyond Carnival, thereby creating space for a far more accurate analysis of this significantly diverse population.   

Fruhstuck, Sabine. Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. University of California Press, 2007.   

What kinds of contradictions arise when men are armed with state-of-the-art weaponry and then asked to serve as mere peacekeepers in a nation with a non-aggressive militia? This incongruity was first experienced by members of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) after the dawn of the cold war, a period that was preceded by decades of U.S.-enforced demilitarization. Sabine Fruhstuck's research for this absorbing study of gender and culture in military conflict was based on personal experience: she was invited by the Japanese government to participate in training with the SDF in order to better assess the complexities of being a well-armed peacekeeper.    

Manalansan, Martin F. IV. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Perverse Modernities). Duke University Press, 2003.  

White, wealthy hegemonic culture in the United States often creates a totalized view of "otherness" in order to perpetuate its own position of superiority. "Women" are like this, "African Americans" are like that, "gay men" talk like this and "lesbians" look like that. A careful ethnographic study of subcultures like Martin Manalansan's Global Divas , however, successfully debunks the notion of homogenous homosexuality by parsing out the myriad identity characteristics specific only to populations of gay Filipino immigrants in New York City. The study is fascinating: the men Manalansan studied have their own lanuage, their own code of ethics, and their own social structure that operates within and very far away from hegemonic assumptions.  

Morrell, Robert.  Changing Men in Southern Africa.  Zed Books, 2001. 

When studied as social constructs, gender roles become steadfastly adhered to specific historical moments. As history shifts, social prescriptions often shift right along with it.  The various social and political upheavals that have characterized the last century of South African history, for example, have had a dramatic effect on gender identities and the solidity of gender hierarchies. In Changing Men in Southern Africa, Robert Morrell explores the transitions experienced by many men in this region as their nations moved from apartheid states to democratic governments.