ABSTRACT
Since the early 1970s the style and image of gay men in North America and Western Europe has undergone a dramatic shift. Whereas previously the most characteristic practice and most pervasive popular image of the male homosexual were effeminate, over the last twenty years the predominant styles of gay men have become increasingly masculine. The most obvious aspect of these new styles is clothing. The central styles have been the ‘clone’, partially supplanted in the mid-1980s by the sportsman. Alongside these have grown other, more specialist images: the leatherman/biker, the construction worker, the squaddy, the skinhead, the cowboy. Many, though not all, of these styles of clothing mimic those of occupations and pursuits which are strong male preserves. But the prescribed forms of masculinity extend beyond dress to gestures and ‘body language’ (no longer the limp wrist, no more ‘mincing’), to ways of speaking (no more screaming and lisping), to language (we are no longer to be ‘Miss So-and-so’). The change is also present in the body: hours in the gym are required to create, not necessarily an inflated muscle man, but a male-athletic body. The category of the sportsman, and to a large extent that of the leatherman, is centred on this notion of the masculine body. The opposition here is not merely femininity/masculinity but male/female: the body is to be what-is-specifically-male, thus apparently rooting the new gender style in physiology, the social in the biological.
