In Love with Masculinity: Understanding Gay Men in the Alt-Right

Gay men and the alt-right appear ideologically opposed. The alt-right holds up an ideal of the hegemonic man–cishet, powerful, domineering, casting out anything antithetical to the model. Gay men appear to violate this ideal since queer identity is a sign of weakened masculinity, blurring the clearly defined categories of man and woman. The existence of gay men within alt-right circles challenges this incongruence. To explain such a discrepancy, this paper uses the theory of hegemonic masculinity to argue that the alt-right has begun to shift its definition towards a particular focus on homosocial bonding and hypermasculinity. Gay men who feel alienated from queer communities engage in these new aspects of the alt-right in an attempt to join. A virtual ethnography and short-form interviews corroborate this thesis, revealing that gay men do engage with these concepts, but the alt-right is not always willing to accept them into the wider community.