Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities

I choose to play with edge configurations to strengthen our creative and moral imaginations. Through collective vulnerability and difference as physical and emotional strength we can breach seemingly intractable conflicts—an enfoldment of ambiguity, the unknown, and the uncanny. The more we straddle “us” versus “them” illusions, the more we co-create common ground.

At the height of the sexual revolution in the 1920s, young middle-class men sought advice about sex from an unlikely source: Judge Ben Lindsey of the Denver Juvenile Court. In the absence of formal sex education, young people desperate for information, guidance, and comfort found him through magazine and book pages and rendered him an authority figure and confidant. Drawing on correspondence between Lindsey and his young readers, this article explores young men's experiences and anxieties about sex, masculinity, and intimacy. Through a close reading of these quotidian accounts of ignorance and shame, as well as curiosity and discovery, the article illuminates a generation's effort to grapple with changing sexual mores and to reimagine the nature of sexual education, moral authority, masculinity, and homosocial support.

This article is dedicated to the nonverbal linguistic landscape (LL) of male homosexual bathhouses. Drawing on 30 years’ experience of attending bathhouses in Europe, Africa, and Asia within an artisticized, erotic, embodied autoethnography, the author observes that nonverbal auditory, visual, somatosensory, olfactory, and gustatory signage constitutes a critical and complex component of the LL. While the study corroborates the agentive and stratifying character of signage postulated for homosexual spaces, the restrictive, hegemony-reinforcing role of signage found elsewhere is less pronounced here. Because it is profoundly multimodal, embodied, and esoteric, this LL constitutes a highly unorthodox type of LL. Access to verbal signage is not necessary to navigate and thrive in homosexual bathhouses; nonverbal practices, largely similar across countries and continents, are far more relevant.

This study explores how toxic masculinity norms are constructed, reinforced, and challenged on Facebook in Vietnam. Drawing on the theory of hegemonic masculinity, the concept of toxic masculinity, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the research combines an analysis of seven highly interactive Facebook posts with in-depth interviews with 13 young people aged 18 to 26. The findings reveal three dominant discursive trends: (1) the reinforcement of traditional masculine norms; (2) the psychological pressure and emotional toll resulting from the internalization of these norms; and (3) the emergence of critical voices and alternative, more compassionate models of masculinity. Facebook emerges as a public space where gender norms are both upheld and contested. This study fills a gap in the academic literature on gender and digital media in Vietnam and highlights the crucial role of youth in shaping more inclusive gender discourses.

This article explores the vicarious initiation into the “adult” realm of sex and sexuality. It argues fiction fills in gaps in formal sex education by contextualizing an interest in sex and sexuality. Gary Lonesborough's Ready When You Are—a love story about two cis-male Aboriginal boys and Vitor Martins's Here the Whole Time—a body positive love story about two cis-male Brazilian boys, challenge heteronormative expectations of what it is to be masculine and who can be lovers. The familiar, and relatively simplistic, romance pattern is used for complex purposes. Difficult and thought-provoking topics are explored in a reassuring format.

This article revisits the hypothesis of a “clerical closet” to illuminate the contemporary crisis of Catholic vocations in Western societies. Drawing on interviews with priests and monks and a survey of former vocational candidates, it shows how sexual dispositions interact with celibacy and heteronormative norms to shape vocational trajectories. Historically, the Catholic Church could offer men with same-sex attractions a legitimate and partly protective space under the cover of consecrated celibacy. As homosexuality has become more socially accepted, this arrangement has entered into crisis and increasingly resembles a “glass closet” marked by partial visibility and tacit acknowledgment. At the same time, the Church's reinforcement of heteroconjugal norms and anti-gender discourse both attracts and destabilizes non-heterosexual candidates. This produces a structural chiasm—a crossed pattern between the decline of heterosexual vocations and the overrepresentation of non-heterosexual men within the clergy—revealing an unacknowledged crisis within the broader vocational crisis.

Romit Chowdhury's City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023)