I was raised in milieu where joto was synonymous with effeminacy, and masculinity with heterosexuality. Only when I entered teenage-hood, when I became increasingly aware that I was what adults referred to as curioso, did I notice that joto-ness could take many forms. And that just like heterosexual men, jotos could construct their masculinity in opposition to femininity and the specter of a fagness—failed masculinity embodied in an effeminate man. (See Dude You’re a Fag) But jotos’ relationship to masculinity is complicated by their object of desire, which is often masculine men.
In our hypersexualized culture, jotos are intimately familiar with one pernicious rule of thumb: jotos desire masculine men, not fags. This generalization pervades queer spaces as "gay culture morphs into ‘straight-acting dudes hangin’ out," and the categories "Masc only, no femmes or fatties. Straight acting, straight appearing" signal the sorts of intimacies that gay men crave. (See Introduction to Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?) Thus, it’s unsurprising that one of Pornhub’s “most viewed gay categories” is “straight guys,” and that popular gay searches include “straight first time,” “straight,” and “straight friend.” What is surprising, however, is that some popular gay searches include descriptors that are linked to the working class, including “redneck” and “cowboy.”
Moreover, data for gay searches in the United Kingdom track America’s. In the UK, popular gay searches include “straight first time,” “straight,” and “straight friend,” plus “british chav.” The latter word, "chav," connotes a person “of a low social status.” And some find the word to be “a nasty, coded attack on the working class.” One has to wonder why these erotic trends/desires persists despite recent cultural progress on gender and sexuality issues.
So while “redneck” and “cowboy” may be erotically fashionable in joto circles today, in the past other class-based, hyper-masculine imagery filled queer landscapes. In 1970s San Francisco, for example, the “clone” was front-and-center. In Gay Macho, Martin Levine, describes the gay clone as an “articulation of gay masculinity... that used sexual activity as a major vehicle of gender confirmation” and that relied on the performance of intelligible sexual scripts that openly and visibly embraced “masculine definitions of masculinity” through working class attire. (p2, 12, & 29) That helps explain, in part, why the dynamic membership of the Village People included a cowboy, a construction worker, an officer/sailor, a GI soldier, a leather-daddy/biker, and a Native American. Racial undercurrents aside, one wonders why the group didn’t include a doctor, lawyer, or businessman—I guess the imagery those professions evoke wasn’t masculine enough! Still, in parodying the hyper-masculine working-class imagery that was commonplace at gay clubs, the Village People managed to expose the fragile nature of masculinity. It seems the more aggressively or blatantly one performs masculinity, the queerer one's performance becomes. That's why the group is often regarded as campy.
South of the border, in México, jotos also have an erotic fondness for masculinities linked to working-class imagery, especially the chacal. In Cinemachismo, De La Mora describes chacales as men who have sex with men, and who are “specially linked to the working class.” (p189) Another writer characterized the chacal as a “macho, rude, tanned, beefy, man from a barrio.” In other words, a chacal is an emerging iteration of a queer masculinity that is strictly linked to class. After all, a well-off person wouldn’t live in a barrio, though he could go there for sexual escape. It remains to be seen whether the chacal will become a fixture of México’s “gay animal kingdom” that jotos use to navigate sexual landscapes. For now, the chacal resides in a sexual limbo, where he “is the image of the macho and the joto a feminine fantasy... [and] his resistance to expressing desire toward his male sexual partners reinstalls [him] in a doubtful heterosexuality.” (Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity, p136-37)
Personally, it troubles me that even when I attempt to subvert gender norms or queer spaces, I remain attracted to iterations of working class masculinities that seem inextricably linked to heterosexuality—ever hear of lumbersexuality! It seems that so long as jotos construct their masculinity, erotic practices, or desires in relation to a triad that fastens working class imagery, masculinity, and heterosexuality together, the emotional pain that some of them endured when they realized they were “different” will continue tormenting future generations of jotos. That is why jotos must be critical of the ways in which culture sutures insidious heteronormative desires in their psyches. And that jotos learn “to desire from within the heterosexual norms and gendered structures” that replicate the status quo shouldn't excuse our inaction. (Homos, p7) After all, historically, the status quo hasn’t been kind to jotos.
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