Negotiating the “Lavender Whiff”: Gay and Straight Masculinities in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines, 1990-2010.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the construction of masculinities in U.S. men's lifestyle magazines at the turn of the twenty-first century. As media focused on providing audiences with notions of normative male identity, these publications are a productive site to make sense of cultural negotiations of masculinities during this era of pronounced shifts in attitudes about and discourses of sexual difference. I specifically consider the conditions of gay inclusion in GQ, Esquire, and Details through examination of these magazines' editorial content, trade discourses, and production processes to assess changing configurations in the co-constitutive relationship between straight and gay men. In contrast with historical strategies of gay exclusion that were intended to avoid what an editor once described as the "lavender whiff" associated with fashion-based consumption, in the 1990s and 2000s editors did not seek to distance their magazines from gay men and editorial content included discourses of gay equality. Although this suggests progress toward the construction of straight masculinities less disciplined by homophobia, the conditions of inclusion in fact reinforced heteronormativity and straight privilege, functioned to operationalize and "protect" straight masculinities by demarcating gay-straight boundaries, and were utilized to distinguish between straight readerships. Through the introduction and theorization of the term "discerning savvy," I further explain how the magazines' editorial possibilities regarding male identity are limited by organizational structures, informal knowledge, and departmental cultures rather than by editorial policy or conscious efforts by editors. This dissertation extends existing work at the intersections of media studies, masculinities, and critical media industry studies, particularly in theorizing issues of sexual difference in media as well as cultures of media production more broadly.