Don We Now Our Not Gay Apparel: A Partial Analysis of Religious Men’s Struggles to Look Straight
by William Stell
In October 2022, a white evangelical author, pastor, and serial plagiarist named Dale Partridge tweeted, “Men should dress like men and women should dress like women. Culture is clearly trying to blur these lines and Christians should exemplify the distinctions.” His advice to men? “Ditch the gay look, grow a beard, & get strong.” Partridge’s tweet performed well in his social media circles, but nowhere near as well as atheist author Hemant Mehta’s reply: “Ah, yes, the thing that all gay men hate: burly dudes with beards.”
Halfway around the globe, Abdallah Rushdy, an Egyptian celebrity commentator on Sunni Islam, stumbled into a parallel predicament: that is, Rushdy has fashioned an antigay message while drifting dangerously close to a gay style. Unlike other religious leaders in his tradition, Rushdy has not grown his beard long and, until recently, has not donned the traditional jalabiya (what some Islamophobes have derisively called a dress). Instead, Rushdy addresses his millions of followers on Facebook and Instagram with a closely trimmed beard and tight-fitting clothes from high-end brands. The tight fits are particularly conspicuous in the many video posts of his workouts. One follower, whose profile picture is ambiguously gendered, deemed him a “halal thirst trap.”
The predicament surfacing in these snapshots of Dale Partridge and Abdallah Rushdy has deep roots. They go back at least as far as the Book of Gomorrah, written in eleventh-century northern Italy. In that text, as Mark Jordan discussed a few decades ago, the Benedictine monk Peter Damian expressed his concerns about what was happening in hermitages (having been a hermit himself): in short, the fashioning of monastic masculinities had created fertile soil for sodomia.
Across time and place, various male-bodied religious figures have worried that their religious masculinity made them look, for whatever reason, gay—or like a sodomite, or like something else that was not what we call “straight.”
And the worries might be here to stay. There are reasons why religious men today might have to keep struggling to look straight. I’ll name two reasons why. First, the struggle is a consequence—not inevitable, to be sure, but at least predictable—of the numerical dominance of women in American religious communities. Even though “the feminization of religion” is neither an appropriate analytical lens nor a defensible empirical finding, as Ann Braude and others taught us long ago, historical and contemporary associations between religion and femininity still have real-world consequences—including, at least at times, the cultural feminization of men who are religiously adorned. This may be a distinct danger for lay men, given that lay piety has long been associated with femininity, but leaders like Partridge and Rushdy are not immune from it.
A second reason why religious men might have to keep struggling to look straight has less to do with religion and more to do with fashion. Over the past hundred years, including in the last twenty years, an intriguing pattern has emerged: queer people adopt and adapt some unremarkable feature of general fashion, and after this adaptation in queer communities, the feature gets reintroduced as fashionable to a wider public, including and especially to straight men. The queer associations with the feature eventually fade, but they do not necessarily fade quickly or ever fade entirely. This is bad news for antigay religious men, because it means that the more they try to look “relevant” (to use a buzzword in contemporary U.S. evangelicalism), the more they at least risk looking gay.
What’s more, the same is potentially true the more these men try even just to look “masculine.” As Hemant Mehta’s dig at Dale Partridge indicates, when you compensate by butching it up, it just makes you look…more gay.
William Stell is a Faculty Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at New York University. His first book project is currently titled Born Again Queer: The History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity. His research has been published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Church History, and Theology and Sexuality.