But a bigger change is afoot. A popular online collection of old photos shows how much American men used to casually touch each other: Victorian gentlemen posing with hands clasped; grizzled cowboys sitting with arms entwined, and a striking amount of lap-sitting. But such pictures from the middle of the 20th century and later are rare. The culprit is homophobia: as gay men became more visible, they were reviled, and men in the English-speaking world (though not only there) started avoiding any touch that might indicate they were that way inclined. [...]
It turns out that straight men’s need for intense, intimate relationships with each other never went anywhere, as evidenced by the ebullient burst of words celebrating it. Pop culture has been a leading indicator: our Prospero blog recently reviewed two movies in the same week—“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The End of the Tour”—which our reviewers concluded were essentially “bromances”, a male friendship at the heart of each story. The word itself was boosted by 2009’s “I Love You, Man”, which Wikipedia describes without scare-quotes as a bromantic comedy—a genre with its own Wikipedia entry, created in 2014. [...]
A whole generation of young men feel comfortable taking man-dates out together, saying “I’m gay for” a male celebrity they like, and generally pressing man-, bro- (and dude-) into service for new words signalling that their straight-maleness is secure. The eagerness is refreshing, and telling. Everyone wins when no one is afraid to appear to be something that was never wrong in the first place.
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