#masculunity

The oppression of homosexuality facilitates and even in part explains gay serial killing. But it's worse than that. Given that it is in conditions of anonymity and danger that gay sex has been found, those very qualities can become aphrodisiacs, producing a disposition that is even merely taken to serial murder. Moreover, the world of gay sex is a world of men. Lesbian networks have not fostered serial killing (and the images we have of lesbian serial killers - Basic Instinct, Aileen Wouronos - involve killing men, not other lesbians). Much of the gay world is an extension of masculinity. The ideology of gay promiscuity builds on the belief that men must just go and have sex, capitalizing on a male dissociation between sex and feeling. Gay men (just like straight ones) are besottedly enamoured of masculinity, of traditional notions of the male - only we intensify it by eroticizing it. In short, despite all the ways in which gay masculinity can be an alternative to mainstream masculinity, nothing actually stops it also developing as a heartfelt exaggeration of it. Serial killing comes with that territory.