Homophobia ("gay bashing") is as much about enforcing rigid gender roles as it is about opposition to homosexuality. Which I find confusing, because I consider a group of guys bonding over hypermasculine rituals a whole lot gayer than a man painting his toenails with a bunch of girls. I know as well as anyone that your interests, activities, and gender expression do not determine your sexual orientation, but it's not unheard of (nor hard to believe) for guys heavily involved in masculine culture to turn out to be gay. Yet the stereotype for homosexual men is to have effeminate style. Meanwhile, I wear pink dresses and panties with princesses on them, and I'm the straightest guy I know, strictly in the sense of being attracted to girls. It just so happens that I'm so attracted to girls that I'd rather wear girls' clothes and underwear (among other things) than men's. And so, the weightlifter with his bulging pecs represents, to me, in all his masculinity, homoeroticism far more than my decision to don a skirt and brush my hair. But all of this confusion is, ultimately, a symptom of the fact that we've got the concepts of sex, gender, and orientation all mixed up together. Still, I find it the height of irony that I have to put up armor against gay bashing attitudes from hypermasculine brutes all because I adore females a little too much...
Actually, when I think about it, maybe what's happening with regards to gender policing is that men see feminine cues in me, and it makes them uncomfortable because they're instinctually attracted to those feminine cues. So when they discover that I'm not "really" a woman, they realize they've just felt potential feelings of attraction towards a man. The homophobia kicks in, but ironically, instead of recognizing the source of the problem in themselves, they project it onto me, claiming it's my fault they were attracted to me, because I tricked them by donning the "guise" of a female (this is the mentality behind the phenomenon of "traps"). This could only be possible in a culture where having even a mistaken and transient male homosexual attraction is something frightening that threatens a man's very humanity.
I have, on occasion, seen guys that look like girls and thought at first that they were attractive. Upon realizing that they are guys, the attraction mostly fades - not because I'm scared of being attracted to guys, but merely because there is something about guys that turns me off, and something lacking in them that girls have that turns me on, and so knowing that they are guys does undermine the attraction significantly. I can, however, still recognize that the guys are pretty, or attractive in an objective sense (like being "model pretty" or aesthetically beautiful), and without at any point feeling threatened that I was mistakenly attracted to a guy. I guess I can have confidence in my sexual orientation, both because I've reached a point where even if I did turn out to have some gay feelings, I'd know there was nothing wrong or bad about it, and also because I've explored my sexual feelings pretty far, and I have a pretty solid understanding of what they are.
I can just imagine the following scenario:
Buff guy: Me and the buds are going to the gym to lift weights. You in?
Effeminate guy: Nah, I promised the girls I'd go tanning with them.
Buff guy: Pff, that's so gay.
Effeminate guy: Right. And while you and "the buds" are all sweating together, complimenting each other on your buff bodies, I'll be stripped to my skivvies with a bunch of girls rubbing tanning oil all over their nearly naked bodies. If that's gay, then I'm a flaming homosexual and proud of it.
Buff guy: Ugh, dude, save it for the parade...
