This article explores the gender complexities of men caught between social power and powerlessness. Specifically, I consider the cases of Jewish men and gay men in the late modern West, two demographics with deep historic ties to both abjection and privilege. Such "in-between-ness” steers many, especially those who are white, cisgender, and/or otherwise privileged, toward what I term liminal complicity, a normative adaptation whereby men embrace manly ideals while disavowing femininity in themselves and others.

“The logic of homosexual desire,” Bersani suggests, “includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man’s enemies.” Indeed, Perez argues that modern gay subjectivity has, since the late-nineteenth century, been intertwined with sailors, cowboys, soldiers, and other hetero-masculine frontier icons, figures whose continued cultural salience is evident in their portrayal by the Village People

gays love settler colonialism and fascism? Gorky was right!

Gay men have worked to distance themselves from the stigma of gender deviance by various means, including physical fitness training, masculine self presentation lessons, male bonding, and militarization.

psychotic steroid using Instagram neoliberal gays

To this day, liminal gays assert normalcy by disregarding fems as friends and partners. Liminal gays use similar contempt and condescension to distinguish themselves from women

are fems friends?

If liminal gays are so often denied, on account of their sexuality, the manly dominance promised to them in youth, wielding what limited power they have against others helps compensate for feelings of impotence. In the sexual marketplace, this involves sexually assaulting, coercing, and/or manipulating those marked as attractive while inferiorizing those marked as unattractive. Exemplifying the latter, Ayres’ (1999, 89) recounts the “overt belligerence [of] drunk queens who shout in my face, ‘Go back to your own country.’” Such verbal aggression, together with an “almost imperceptible feeling of exclusion” (ibid.), ensures that BIPOCs feel unwelcome in implicitly white settings, thus enabling white gays to maintain their implicit control over those spaces. details how homonationalist discourses have increasingly brought white gay subjects and their Western nation-states together in opposition to “backward Islamic extremists.” Displacing anti-queer stereotypes of deviance and perversion onto Arab Muslims thereby facilitates imperial aggression in the Middle East with the implicit support of patriotic gay citizens.

“patriotic gay citizens”

Where assimilationist Jews challenged Aryan hegemony by pursuing equal citizenship, colonial Zionists would embody Western values from afar, embracing a tough, masculine, but ultimately unthreatening posture for Western elites. U.S. Zionists likewise elevated themselves by supporting both Israeli and U.S. projects of masculine dominance. In a similar vein, affluent white Western gays attained relative acceptance in the LGBTQ rights era in part by limiting their demands and making themselves useful to commercial markets and nation-states

“making themselves useful” listen, twink,