He lives under 24-hour police protection, with bars on his windows. In, by the way, a council flat, because he has no money, because you don't get rich in life by (A) invading militant Muslim rallies to issue counter-fatwas to their leaders' faces, (B) confronting the Archbishop of Canterbury during his own sermon and (C) performing a citizens' arrest on Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.
He is Peter Tatchell, and the inimitable Johann Hari (himself no slouch in the "go into harm's way" department) has an interview with him here which tells his unbelievable story.
I say unbelievable because that is precisely the level of physical and moral courage Tatchell has shown throughout his life: un. be. lievable. He really did disrupt, not just one, but two radical Muslim rallies to criticize its leaders to their faces. He really did do the exact same thing to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He really did open the door of Robert Mugabe's stopped car and risk death at the hands of Mugabe's bodyguards to inform Mugabe that he was under arrest for torture. He's been severely beaten by Russian police. Forget Eric G. Wilson (though I do still like him a lot), I want to absolutely litter the world with Peter Tatchell's progeny in hopes that just one or two of them would inherit their father's backbone and sense of justice.
But I suppose that every time someone is inspired by one of Tatchell's deeds, he has another child.
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Now here's the thing. If you hit any of those links, you know that Peter Tatchell, and Johann Hari too, are gay. Tatchell undertook many of his most dangerous missions, such as confronting the militant preachers in mid-rally, on behalf of gay rights.
Which brings us to questions of masculinity.
On his website, Tatchell has an article about masculinity in which he says that gay men are not very masculine and thank god. The thing is that, by "masculine," Tatchell means only "soccer hooligan." Domineering and stupidly aggressive. And yes, most gay men do give those lovely qualities a wide berth in their journey through life.
But how else can you describe Peter Tatchell's deeds except as staggeringly, literally death-defyingly, masculine? The man puts his life and specifically his body at risk every day in a fight against people who outnumber and outgun him. He does this coolly, calmly, and for the sake of protecting and defending the vulnerable.
That's what Johann Hari does too by the way. Column after column, he takes it to the powerful for the sake of the voiceless, and this has not gone unnoticed. There are websites (which I won't link to) inciting people to kill him.
If this is not masculine, if this is not what we mean by "manliness," then nothing is.
Tatchell and Hari, of course, would be the first to argue that "manliness" per se does not exist; there is only courage. And they're right. But: men with courage are considered manly and masculine (whereas women with courage are usually just called bitches or crazy, but that's another post).
Or at least, men with courage should be considered manly and masculine. But Tatchell's own essay shows that they are not. He himself doesn't even seem aware that he's an exemplar of Three-Musketeers-esque daring, that he has a share in western culture's traditional masculine ideal.
And this is because that ideal has become so crusted over with aggression and posturing and strutting around on flight decks in military costumes.
And thus, deliberately, it excludes gay men. Yes, heavens, Manly Men can't let in a bunch of gentle, cultured creatures who sip tea with upraised pinkies and care about the arts and treat women as equals. Men who wouldn't even get in a drunken fistfight. Men who don't even want to harshly dominate anything. If THEY are allowed to be seen as physically butch, it ruins all the fun! How will the Manly Men stoke their egos if they're forced to acknowledge that this other sort of man is actually just as macho, and in fact more so, than they are? (Taking hits on the soccer field is one thing. Being what you are, when people in this world want to kill you for it, is something else. Confronting those people on the level of Tatchell and Hari--forget it.)
I think that what we mean by "masculine" no longer has anything to do with actual masculine traits. It's a visual style, a fetish. There are people who look butch and strut butch and talk butch, and in this decayed and rotten age, that's what we care about.
Yes, there are guys who look butch.
And then, there are men who really are.
ED.: I realize I didn't quite, quite, complete my thought. What I mean by all this, what I'm getting at, is that everyone should apply masculine words to men like Hari and Tatchell. We should not just call them brave or courageous. We should call them manly and masculine and macho and studly and tough and daddies and badasses and warriors. We should gender the words we use to describe their bravery because they are men and they are brave. We should give them their danger, the danger that all truly brave men represent. We should give them their glamour. Here in America, we have aircraft carriers' worth of Republicans like George W. Bush who like to perform the pleasing visual rituals of masculinity. In the mainstream media, they get called all the loaded, admiring words. Since we do have these words for men, I want them to go to men whose conduct actually merits them.
