It's a dirty secret of a subculture of the gay male world about women: That they're essentially unwelcome, unless they come to us as a Real Housewife, a pop diva, or an Tony award winner–or an unassuming fag hag. To anyone just coming out of the closet and hoping to get his bearings in the gay male community, the attitude towards women is simple: They are just objects whose function is to serve gay men. Maybe it happens when gay men get too comfortable in newly-discovered safe spaces–where they get to call the shots as their proudly out new selves. Or maybe it happens through cultural conditioning. Whatever the cause is, it becomes clear: If there isn't any kind of transactional exchange happening, then women lose their value in gay male subcultures. . . .

I used to have a best friend of over 20 years who had taken to calling his closest girlfriends the b-word and that c-word regularly. He had taken to screaming at them and insulting their bodies. When prodded about his disrespect, he'd dismiss it as humor. "God, can't you take a joke?" would be one of his favorite refrains. I say, "I used to," because sometimes you have to draw a line about who you keep in your life and who you don't. I couldn't stand to be around this kind of language any longer. Because as gay men, we actually have to find ways to empathize with our female friends, not use them as props to boost our own self-worth. It turns out even gay men objectify women–but dismiss such thoughts on the basis of their sexual orientation. Guys, no. "But, I'm gay!" can't be your excuse for anything, not in a world where entire industries now make concerted efforts to court our demographics. . . .

So many of us are only familiar with the idea of male privilege being the province of straight men that we discount how gay men are able to exert dominance and control over women. We may forget this because much of American history has painted gay men as victims–and as gay men, many of us blithely buy into this narrative even if it isn't our own personal history, because it allows us an easy way to assimilate to the larger gay male culture. Only in the last decade has gay male identity become accepted into casual discourse–and normalized into our cultural diet. Before we dive too deep into this, it's careful to delineate that for the purposes of this piece, "gay men" is a subjective, if imprecise lumping of all such men. It's not a static grouping of such men–it's a cluster that even included me for a time.. . .

For example, in 2010, Project Runway judge and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi grabbed Scarlet Johansson's breasts on the Golden Globes Red Carpet. When she looked visibly mortified, he retorted that he's gay so it's okay. Not so by her count. But when he acts so intrusively with little to no consequences, it sends a message to gay men who are still negotiating their identities and attempting to figure out how to fit into a world that still hasn't found a way to reconcile queer identity completely.

Over at The Good Men Project, Yolo Akili writes:

At a recent presentation, I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman's body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to "improve" her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.

So you have young gay men witnessing Mizrahi's behavior; "I'm gay" gets handed down as an acceptable excuse for gay men to probe and disrespect women's bodies. It's endemic of a gay male culture that would sooner trot out a history of being victimized as an excuse for acting like assholes rather than taking ownership for said behavior, or better yet, correcting that kind of behavior.