What We Know Now

This post was constructed as part of a public scholarship project on Race, Media, and Popular Culture at the University of Maryland, College Park. It also serves as part of WWKN’s purpose: creating a safe, healthy, reflective, and developmental digital space for discussions on our media landscape.

If you’re not on Grindr (or a dating app focused on connect between gay-identifying men) the phrase “masc-for-masc” or M4M may have missed you. We are digging into that today!

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Planning to skim?

• The Argument: The archetypical masculine dating scenario in modern “soft-serve” or “beach read” media isn’t becoming more representative. Instead, it is increasingly driving toward a troubling set of simplified complex representations that can do serious harm to our understanding of queer relationships and heteronormative binaries.
• Why it matters: Our media diet is full of highly popular texts (movies, books, etc…) that can idealize unrealistic experiences of heteromantic-homosexuality.
• What I’m considering: Our present day questions about masculinity, the manosphere, and variations of popular media.
• What’s next: A change to how we script, write, cast, produce, edit, and critique the nature of queer-presenting medias.

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On the apps (colloquial term pointing to Tinder, Grinder, e.g.) you can catch the phrase coming from people interested your (literal) neighborhood’s trade — those casual partners in gay relationships that are both masculine-presenting and potentially straight or closeted.

Now, masculine (masc) and feminine (femme) are useful for targeting outward expressions of gender identity that is aligns with or is perceived as aligning with normative masculine characteristics. In the U.S., you can think of these expressions as being much more connected to style, mannerisms, and appearance. At least, that’s what Grindr says.

“Masc doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a person’s sexuality or gender identity, and you certainly don’t have to be male or super manly to call yourself masc. Still, it often denotes that a gay or queer person’s identity or presentation skews toward the traditionally masculine. Just like a person may want to be perceived as femme, it can be gender-affirming and downright comfy for someone to present as masc.“

They say “masculine” was born out of some necessity for gender nonconforming, transgender, and lesbian’s who believe the term is useful. (Grindr says the term “has a bit of baggage” here. Grindr has a hold on gay and masc-presenting queer dating norms, so I won’t question this too much.) I don’t question use cases, or choices for presentation, as a practices in queer media.

I do, however, choose to question the representations we see in queer media, especially in beach reads and other media we use for escape from reality.

Why “simplified complex” representation?

When I first saw the term “simplified complex representation” I was reading the work of Evelyn Alsultany.

In Alsultany’s book Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11, explores those shows and media movements that had deleterious effects on Arab and Muslim people. She explores how shows like “24” and “Law & Order” provide “positive” representations but continue to [re]produce harmful that perpetuate inequality.

Alsultany doesn’t explicitly expand this work to encapsulate queer identities, but I see her work as closely tied to the writing of scholars like José Esteban Muñoz (in Disidentifications and Queer Futurity). Her look at media is useful, as is the term, for understanding how our media ecosystem operates.

If she’s right (and I argue she is) there are likely more simplified complex representations that extend beyond our racial and religious markers. They likely extend into and through sexuality.

In addition, when we add her work to queer scholarship, we see the ability that it has to break the binary adjudications that we have of “good” and “bad” representations, acknowledging a grey space that can target and commodify queer consumers.

Masc for Masc Soft-serve

The best example I can think of (when it comes to commodifying these simplified complex representations) is built into a narrative I spoke highly of some time ago: Red, White, and Royal Blue.

Avid readers know just how deeply involved I am in this book and movie. I am an appreciator of simple “ice cream” or “beach read” stories as much as I am complex novels and academic papers. They provide escape and (when done right) can bring a bit of fictional fantasy into a relatively bleak world.

It also presents a challenge to pin down — a simplified complex representation of queer relationships lives free in this text.

While the book leaves some components of masculine and feminine identity to the imagination (and certainly presents a good chunk of challenge to normative queer relationships) it relies on masculinity to center its characters. The book and movie is clear to point out that princes and first families have some social responsibility to represent a normative social practice.

In the case of Alex and Henry, those social practices are highly masculine.

This isn’t to say masculinity (toxic or otherwise) is a product of an enemies to lovers trope, that masculinity cannot be present in queer media, or even that queerness has a set definition. We are allowed to break molds in all ways and all identities can be as bounded or unbound as those involved want them to be.

It is, however, a frequent method of getting queerness into more popular mass media spaces.

Masculine characters populate those short video platforms (like DramaBox, for example), the Amazon Prime space (in the RWRB case above), YouTube moviemaking, and television. It crosses racial spaces, putting heavy priority on masculinity as a productive, aggressive, “top” positionality. Bottoms are feminine, at least in these productions, and femininity is for women.

I won’t speak to masculinity and the nature of homo-eroticism here, but it is an important bridge for someone to cross.

We are engaging with an increasing number of popular media franchises, production companies, and writers who pull toward masculinity as a normative queer presentation. We are not, however, seeing these representations as becoming more reflective of queer identity.

The simplified complex representations begin to emerge in the 21st century. Fewer stories that we tell feature gay stereotypes that are overtly feminine, cartoonish, or disrespectful in nature. There are fewer stories that read like an afterschool special teaching people to be respectful of two-male-parent households. The actors in Modern Family exist and present gayly (double entendre) for American populations!

At the same time, the book and movie that topped charts was Red, White, and Royal Blue. The movie-length shorts that are on DramaBox (with more than 500K saves each, mind you) have titles like “The Mafia’s Obsession,” “My Secret Agent Husband” (and the second installation), “Desired by my Unknown Husband,” “My Serial Killer Lover” and “Mafia Lover.” Protagonists in each movie are straight men who only discover they are gay through fantastical interactions with gay men or (in half the situations) two straight men. What? How?

Those representations are aggressively masculine soft serve. Line by line.

• Augusto and Pietro’s narratives in “The Mafia’s Obsession” center exclusively on Pietro (a mafia boss) marrying Augusto (a straight mafioso) in order to save his family. Up until they consummate their marriage, the only signal that Augusto is queer is the descriptions of “soft” and “softie” affixed to him. Even those descriptors aren’t real. The story quickly shows that Pietro is protecting Augusto, which leads others in the Mafia to believe he is soft. Shoutout for the switch narrative, though.
• “Mafia Lover” is shorter, though it’s character Ace literally pins (and owns?!) new bodyguard Max. Among the telling lines: “But who protects you from me” and “pretend I’m a woman,” from openly gay mafia leader Ace. Max is eventually seduced, but identifies as variations of straight up until he admits to loving Ace.
• “My Secret Agent Husband” literally begins with Lucas (son of a bitcoin enterprise) and a secret service agent named Wyatt getting into a contract marriage to avoid marrying a woman by force. The first series doesn’t see a queer reciprocal (let alone consensual) relationship until both characters have implied sex at a literal strip club. The second part of the two-part series literally includes masc-femme dichotomies as Lucas imagines what a relationship with Wyatt could be in a different time (including an I Love Lucy style depiction of the 1950s and ancient China).
• “Desired by my Unknown Husband” is wild. Like, the two men are gay and out. They also readily admit to being “conservative” and focus exclusively on suit-and-tie norms. Shoutout to Andrew/William and Frank for being down for kinks, even though Frank needed to “hide who he was” before dating a bi man who was literally married, deceived Frank, and pushed him out of the city for “seducing a married man.” Gitte was rude.
• “My Serial Killer Lover” is among my favorite. Clearly built on kinks, it centers on traumatic (PTSD, murder is in the title) material. Our murder is a young student and his lover is a professor. (I won’t yuck kinks/yums but I pray anyone who has this yum is not attached to a student the way Prof. Charlie Cottingham is to Hunter.) The dichotomy is uniquely masculine-feminine, but not unlike those items we’ve seen in other movies.

These are great “soft-serve” or “beach read” items, but they aren’t the only topics. “Call Me By Your Name” and “Brokeback Mountain” are unique staples of queer media but they thrive in masculinity and masculine notions of identity. Lavender Scare-era Showtime series “Fellow Travelers” sits with a gay relationship where people are forced to present masculine or face literal repercussions. Is present-day media bound by that same code? I think not.

What I know now, however, is present day media is bound by some semblance of audience narrativization. Here, we return to Red, White, and Royal Blue.

Screenplay writer and director Matthew Lopez said he took Casey McQuiston’s book and (with their vision and writing credit) built a text that could work on screen. He also said something very telling about the ending of the movie.

He liked that the queer book featured a happy ending rather than an easier-to-develop and perhaps more true-to-reality breakup between two potential world leaders/public figures. The ending was one that he said was more common, “audacious” and representative of a trend toward happy endings in these stories.

It reads, as some social media users rightfully say, as a safe mix of postmodernism with traditionalism. It isn’t trying to do hard work and it is more joyous than complicated. It isn’t trying to represent the whole of queer existence; it is a romantic comedy.

It is also a part of our mass media landscape. We go back to these items (even if with disdain or unwittingly while scrolling through social media ads) and we ingest some part of this. We see representations, but we don’t really (or regularly) see the grey space that really exists in queer spaces. We see masculine gay bodies — which can be movie-star-quality physiques, mustaches — but gayness and queerness aren’t meant to be reduced to physicality.

What are you saying?

We need to think critically about how we engage with these soft serve media items and their representations for two reasons.

The first is simple: increased representation of persons on screen doesn’t necessarily mean we are getting “good” or “bad” representations. Sometimes we are only balancing out the bad stereotypes of old (the flamboyant queer stereotypes most notably) with “good” stereotypes (gay men are just “normal guys” who happen to fall in love with other “normal guys”) for normative purposes. Those representations just reify structures that are already in place. They do not expand the representations, they only expand the justifications for what most would consider a good representation, perhaps to ensure that members of a postmodernist or predominantly neoliberal capitalist society will spend a few extra bucks to watch.

The second is harder to read: we use and engage with these soft-serve medias.

When the going gets tough (see literally any headline from January or February or March of 2025) we retreat and recuperate using these stories. During a pandemic, as the world went online, we didn’t just travel to the store and pick up groceries. We picked up year-old soft stories from McQuiston with enough passion to encourage production companies (at Amazon, no less) to pay actors and make a decent film. (There’s a second coming out, so I know it did numbers and found justification for continued productions.)

Doing something new — re-evaluating how we depict queer relationships in this format — means changing how we cast, direct, write, and purchase media. It means shifting popular culture further away from the easy work of making safe characters and pushing toward the difficult, challenging work of making more real and representative depictions of people and people groups.

That isn’t to say that queer-identifying directors like Matthew Lopez are doing something inherently wrong. We are in no board rooms, see no audience tests, and would only be guessing at the economic interplay at the production company that hired Lopez.

It is a statement, however, to just how covert masculinity can be in soft-serve popular media. How beach reads and normative sexuality can cross the transom from easy-to-read media to covertly harmful media representations. It speaks to how we can experience heteronormative practices in queer-oriented media. And, if any one component of media effects research on identity and affect is true, how these representations can idealize heteronormative reality in queer communities and broader society.