Deep Secrets

It's a staple of all the conversations we have, gay men and straight women, that straight men are emotional pygmies, that they don't want intimate friendships, that they can't express their feelings, that they don't love other men.

It's worse than that, actually.  They do, when they're young.  It's only as they grow up that they deliberately step away from intimacy into emotional indifference.  This newly released book , Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, makes the the point that intense intimacy among boys in early and middle adolescence is very common, but it is replaced by competition, mistrust and loneliness as they grow into men.

As the publisher's puff says:

“Boys are emotionally illiterate and don’t want intimate friendships.” In this empirically grounded challenge to our stereotypes about boys and men, Niobe Way reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys especially during early and middle adolescence. Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go “wacko.” Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.

Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, Deep Secrets reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature. Boys’ descriptions of their male friendships sound more like “something out of Love Story than Lord of the Flies.” Yet in late adolescence, boys feel they have to “man up” by becoming stoic and independent. Vulnerable emotions and intimate friendships are for girls and gay men. “No homo” becomes their mantra.

These findings are alarming, given what we know about links between friendships and health, and even longevity. Rather than a “boy crisis,” Way argues that boys are experiencing a “crisis of connection” because they live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither. Way argues that the solution lies with exposing the inaccuracies of our gender stereotypes and fostering these critical relationships and fundamental human skills.

At sixteen, my best friend and I loved each other completely.  It had nothing whatever to do with sex and everything with intense friendship.  It was entirely innocent.  It never struck me that perhaps we grew apart because we were both "manning up" -- though we were an unusual pair, neither of us sporty, both of us fascinated by ideas.  I always thought that the reason we grew apart was because he found girlfriends and I, well, I didn't, not really, not like him.  After all, it is the expected path of our society that the intense friendships of 12 or 14 or 16 are replaced with the intense emotion of marriage.  You are expected to love your best friend less than you love your wife.  Because loving another man  -- even non-sexually -- is simply not kosher.  It's something you might indulge when you're sixteen, but real men end up loving their woman more than their man.  That's the way it is.

I never had a problem being intimate with my friends.  But the men I tried to befriend did.  They were uncomfortable with intimacy, even when they didn't know my sexuality.  They found it hard to talk about their fears and weaknesses, their loneliness, their need for love and empathy.  I'm told by blokes who have navigated the rapids of male friendship more successfully than I have that sportsmen (o happy breed!) can bond, and ultimately can talk about those things which are dear to their heart.  For me this is an alien world.

Men are afraid to be intimate, to show their pain, to discuss their lives because, as the blurb above says, "human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither".  

In this context there is no more sinister phrase than "you have to man up" or "making a man of you."  The users of these baggage-loaded horrors have someone like John Wayne in mind, taciturn, noble, violent, suffering in silence, a loner who doesn't even connect to his women.   Real men are strong, of course they are.  And noble.  And brave.   But they're also empathetic, caring, compassionate, loving, supportive, generous, and friendly.  Straight or gay.  And our culture takes sensitive teenage boys and turns them into lonely, unconnected automata.  As my elder son says:  so much of the sex obsession men have is really about trying to connect in the only way they know.   And that is desperately sad.

The Village Path

At the gym I go to -- though I haven't been there for 3 months :-( -- there is a mix of blokes. Some are oldish like me, and fighting the good fight against flab and sag. We get on well together. Getting older teaches one tolerance, unless of course you are a right dickhead -- and there are alas plenty of those. So we are nice to each other. We talk about our jobs and children and our lives.

Then there are the youngsters, a mix of perfect physiques and beautiful faces and, well, less perfect physiques and faces. The less beautiful are shy, but mostly likable. The beautiful divide into two groups. Some are polite to me, nodding and wishing me g'day. Others ignore me. They -- o paragons of beauty -- are too far up the golden ladder which reaches to the abode of the gods to talk to mere ugly overweight old mortals like me. They ogle fourteen-year old girls and talk loudly about conquests at parties and recent footy games. Mind you, the footy teams they play for are just the local amateur teams, and encounters with the 14 year old girls seem to my jaundiced -- but experienced eye -- to be sheer fantasy. I was a teen too, you know, once, long ago.

Anyway there are two blokes I'd like to talk about. The one is one of the nicest, least up himself, most likable 18 year olds I've met in a long time. He has a lovely body, all firm muscle and long legs, and a face filled with merriment and kindness. We talk often and I am quite open with him, telling him of the problems in my life and advising and mentoring him about the pitfalls and dangers of growing up. I try not to patronise. He is, I think a sort of friend, and I suspect if I was 10 kilos thinner and 100 times more unscrupulous, I could get him into my bed. He's at the age where one will try anything once.

The other is a startlingly beautiful guy, perhaps a little older, 19 or 20, with a mane of thick straw-gold hair and piercing blue eyes and a body to die for, looking amazingly like Peter Winterbottom in the photo below. And he's an arsehole (not Peter Winterbottam, idiotai, the one who goes to my gym.) Arrogant, indifferent, solipsistic, self-absorbed, he's utterly dislikable. And very sexy. He ignores me completely. He is, I think, incapable of love because he has never got over the love affair with himself. Yet sometimes, as if he senses my nature, I've seen speculative -- interested -- looks, quickly hooded.

One day last summer after I had worked out at the gym, I was walking back up the hill from the village to my house. It was a warm peaceful evening and the late light was dimming in the far western sky over Bullengarook's native forests. The pathway up from the valley where the township lies parallels the road, but is not right next to it. For a fair way it's much higher than the road, and you can look down onto the passing cars and lorries. That evening as I was making my way home, exhausted from the workout and (let's be honest) the steep ascent, Mr Mane drove down the road in a brand-new ute, with one of his friends. He looked up and caught sight of me, and his gaze sharpened. For a moment I was utterly terrified, and thirteen years old again. There was that speculative cast to his look which bullies get. I know it well. Is it worth stopping and beating him up? I was alone. I'm not exactly young. And even when I was young I wasn't very good at fighting off the bullies. I'm blind in one eye because of them.

Yet was my fear irrational? In one sense yes, because it was triggered by a specific look, and I regressed nearly half a century. I'm not a young teenager any more. I'm a man who has lived through much and endured much, and knows how to deal with bank clerks and bank managers as well as feisty teenagers. But in another sense no. We know that old queens routinely get beaten up by young thugs. Especially young thugs who feel the impulse to connect to other men. Young thugs whose hormonal drives are still fierce, who need to burn their more tender gay side out of themselves in order to grow up as 'real' men, with a wife and kids and a mistress on the side. Recently I heard about just such an assault, where a group of teens savagely beat up and injured an older gay man, and the police thought it was funny and wished they had finished the job. So perhaps not that irrational, after all.

The path down to the village is no longer as pleasant as it was.

Peter Winterbottom, England rugby player.
Who I'm quite sure is not a thug.
And is prolly not gay either.
(Pic from here)