ABSTRACT
With the challenges of feminism and gay liberation men have had to rethink their relationship to heterosexuality. This has been part of an exploration of remapping what it means ‘to be a “man”’. In what spaces do boys grow up into men and how is this related to different masculinities—both gay and straight—that are available? If we can no longer assume the ‘naturalness’ of masculinity, what does it mean to say that masculinities are ‘socially and historically constructed’? Often the dualities between what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘constructed’ are asserted too readily before we have fully understood what is at issue. There is still a lot of confusion about mapping the terms in which some of these questions are raised, and whether we are asking the most helpful questions about how men learn their sexual identities. Often men who identify themselves as ‘heterosexual’ have wanted to leave these issues alone, seeing sexual politics as concerning ‘others’.
