Jerry McGuire wrote:All I'll say is that it's deliciously ironic for a community that has progressed and grown so much from preaching unity, tolerance, and acceptance to be so vile towards one another. It's quite sad that some homosexuals feel that there should be only one "archetype" of gay man.
I agree with you, Jerry. It's an all-too-common human frailty. What fascinates me is that they reflect the same sort of mindset among too many heterosexual men (and women) that there should be only one "archetype" of straight man. What some people fail to recognize is just how diverse men are. This sounds like a moronic statement, considering that men are roughly half of the human race; but it's profoundly true. So many people expect "real men" to fit a particular stereotype.
I have a comment to make that may startle you, coming from a moderator in a forum for "sports haters" (a label that I don't apply to myself); and that is, I wish my sister had married an athlete she had known when she was attending a college back in the 1960s. I never met the guy, but she told me about him years later. (She wasn't even a sports fan, by the way.) I wish that I could have met him. He was on both the hockey team and the football team. Since he had been cruelly abused emotionally by his father (who rejected him), he had to control his anger. To manage his anger, he became a pacifist out of religious or philosophical convictions. On the ice rink and on the gridiron, he was a fierce competitor. But when he was not competing as an athlete, he was gentle and could not be provoked into fighting anyone. Some of the smaller men who heard about his pacifism tried to provoke him into betraying his convictions (which, of course, as someone with religious convictions myself, I find to be contemptible); but they always failed to encourage him to strike back at them. He showed a particular kind of strength that those who subscribe to the mindset of machismo prefer to ignore. My point is, such a man does not fit a convenient stereotype.
There's another personal observation of mine that I will share with the reader. The fact that I believed this when I was a teenager may strike some of you as being stupid, but it really was a common view at the time I grew up. I thought the scale of masculinity ran from physically rugged (if not athletic) heterosexual to effeminate homosexual. Of course, this view put me (as a nonathletic, physically weak teenage boy) closer to the homosexual end of the spectrum (even though I wasn't gay) than to the "normal" end, which means that I didn't think highly of myself. (Of course, this is all immaterial now, anyway, because I've been working out at a health club; and my physique has changed considerably and will change a lot more hopefully.) If I had realized that this simplistic scale of masculinity was flawed, I would have felt better about myself.
in a state of shock. 
