Gay Macho: The Life And Death Of The Homosexual Clone, New Book From NYU Press Due Out In January

Before gay liberation, gay men were usually perceived as failed men – "inverts," men trapped in women’s bodies. The 1970s saw a radical shift in gay male culture, as a male homosexuality emerged that embraced a more traditional masculine ethos. The gay clone, a muscle-bound, sexually free, hard-living Marlboro man, appeared in the gay enclaves of major cities, changing forever the face of gay male culture.

Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (264 pages/$50, cloth; $17.95, paper), to be published in January by the New York University Press, presents the ethnography of the homosexual clone. The author, the late Martin P. Levine, was a pioneer in the sociological study of homosexuality and one of the first social scientists to map the emergence of a gay community and a new style of gay masculinity. Levine was a participant as well as an observer of the gay culture of the 1970s, and this perspective allowed him to capture the true flavor of what it was like to be a gay man before AIDS.

Levine’s clone was a gender conformist, whose masculinity was demonstrated in patterns of social interaction and especially in his sexaulity: "so many men, so little time." According to Levine, the clone’s life centered on "the four D’s: disco, drugs, dish, and dick."

Throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s, clones set the tone in the homosexual community. "Glorified in the gay media, promoted in gay advertising, clones defined gay chic, and the gay life style became culturally dominant. Until AIDS. As this new disease ravaged the gay male community in the early 1980s, scientists discovered that the clone life style was `toxic’: specific sexual behaviors, even promiscuity, might be one of the ways that the HIV virus spread in the gay male population. Drugs, late nigh ts and poor nutrition weakened the immune system. To survive, many gay men abandoned the clone life style."

Gay Macho provides an anecdotal discussion of gay urban male life in the 1970s and early ‘80s in its early chapters and a portrait of the demise of that life in its latter. Based on Levine’s pathbreaking empirical research, these latter sections explore some of the epidemiological and social consequences of the AIDS epidemic on this particular substatum of the gay community. Although Levine explicitly refuses to pathologize gay men afflicted with HIV, his work develops a scathing, feminist-insp ired critique of masculinity, whether practiced by gay or straight men.

Martin P. Levine, who died of AIDS in 1993 at the age of 42, received his Ph.D. in sociology from NYU. He taught at Bloomfield College in New Jersey and at Florida Atlantic University.

Michael S. Kimmel, who edited Levine’s work after his death, is professor of sociology at SUNY, Stony Brook, and author of several books including Manhood: A Cultural History, The Politics of Manhood and Against the Tide: Profeminist Men in the United States.

12/2/97