On Masculinity

Okay, now for something a little more serious.

In today's Toronto Star, sports reporter Damien Cox interviews Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke about the latter's 20-year-old son, who happens to be gay. That fact has been known to the Burke family for almost two years, but it's just now coming out, as it were, in the media.

In the article, the elder Burke quite understandably wishes for the day when items like this won't be considered newsworthy. And some of the readers commenting on the article protest that the day is already here, arguing that the story isn't relevant to hockey fans. That may be true. But the fact is that the article is fully deserving of its column inches for the effect it hopefully will have on a sports culture that lags well behind the times in terms of accepting differences.

Brian Burke isn't just any old professional sports executive. He's a proverbial man's man, an opinionated and tough-minded guy who believes bare-knuckled fighting belongs in hockey and has placed a premium on qualities such as "truculence" and "testosterone" in his so-far unsuccessful attempt to rebuild his team. He's old-school - a beat 'em in the alley type who'd just as soon win a physical war of attrition as a test of skill.

In other words, he's the type of guy you might expect to deny or bury reports about his son's homosexuality. Instead, he's acknowledged it in public with honesty and without squirming equivocation. He doesn't claim, like many in his position would, to love his son in spite of his sexuality, but rather professes more admiration for the young man because of the courage it's taken to come out while still working within a hockey environment (the younger Burke analyzes statistics and video for a U.S. college team).

Moreover, Burke senior shows that he's not afraid to use his famously salty language or his celebrity to defend his son against bigots. Cox's article relates Burke's cussing out of anti-gay marriage protesters in California and his openness to marching in Toronto's gay pride parade next year.

That the coarse, aggressive Brian Burke has taken this stand is meaningful in a sports world where "don't ask, don't tell" would actually be considered an upgrade in terms of the acceptance of gay people. He may be a prototypical man's man, but Burke's uncompromising support for his son is his most admirable display of masculinity.

Masculinity, of course, is a notion under siege these days - and not from the people that some men would complain about. Sure, feminists have for years (rightly) questioned some of the more unsavoury aspects of stereotypical maleness, but as this article from a couple of weeks back by Eye Weekly's Edward Keenan shows, it's actually men who could render manliness extinct. Men like the writer-turned-filmmaker Tucker Max, whose movie I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell opened a couple of weeks ago.

Max - who I hadn't even heard of since the Eye piece - has apparently made a name for himself by evangelizing for what Keenan calls "dude culture," a lifestyle predicated on binge drinking, sexual promiscuity and general obnoxiousness. Keenan makes an excellent argument that this form of "manliness" can be defined more accurately as childishness - the refusal to assume and perform the responsibilities that, in previous generations, would have been central to common notions of masculinity. You don't have to spend much time in a downtown bar, a mall or a movie theatre without encountering this kind of misbegotten idea of what makes a man.

The definition of masculinity will continue to evolve and be debated. With any luck, men will pass up Tucker Max's infantile version for the one exemplified by Brian Burke and his son.

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