One reason gay guys are bitchy

"School is learning things you don't want to know, surrounded by people you wish you didn't know, while working toward a future you don't know will ever come." - Dave Kellett

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"Many gay men rejected manly activities for such womanly pursuits as fashion, gossip, and culture, especially opera and theater (Karlen 1971; Hooker 1956; Altman 1982, 154). Other feminine practices entailed bitchy humor (Read 1980, 105—8), “drag” balls and shows (Newton 1972; Cory 1951: 129—34), old movies (Dyer 1977), and celebrity worship (Tipmore 1975)...

In our culture, the conversational style known as "dishing" was regarded as appropriate for women (Richardson 1981). This style included bitchy retorts, vicious putdowns, and malicious gossip. Far earlier in the century, closet homosexuals adopted this style as a means of articulating their feminine identification; it was especially characteristic of homosexuals in the theatre of entertainment industry... They dubbed it "fag talk" or "chit chat"... Again, clones transformed and modified dish, just as they embraced and appropriated it"

--- Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone / Martin Levine, Michael Kimmel


Book description: "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 presents the ethnography of this homosexual clone. Martin P. Levine, a pioneer of the sociological study of homosexuality, was among the first social scientists to map the emergence of a gay community and this new style of gay masculinity. Levine was a participant in as well as an observer of gay culture in 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 sexuality. According to Levine, his life centered around the "four D's: disco, drugs, dish, and dick.""


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Sexual Orientation and Personality

"Self-ascribed masculinity-femininity (Self-M-F) and gender-related interests showed the largest heterosexual-homosexual differences (respective ds = .60 and 1.28 for men, and -1.28 and -1.46 for women) and the largest sex differences (respective ds = 2.83 and 2.65). Instrumentality and expressiveness showed much smaller heterosexual-homosexual and sex differences. Big Five traits showed a number of small-to-moderate heterosexual- homosexual and sex differences. Bisexual men were much more like gay men than like heterosexual men in their Self-M-F and gender-related interests, whereas bisexual women were intermediate between lesbian and heterosexual women. Homosexual participants were more variable on some gender-related traits than same-sex heterosexuals were. The gender inversion hypothesis--that gay men's traits tend to be somewhat feminized and that lesbians' traits tend to be somewhat masculinized--received considerable support"