Being masculine, and having what girls and sissies, particularly, perceive as a Masculine Persona, like my being gay, was something that just happened to me...

But the fact is that nobody in my life, however angry he (or even she) ever got with me, has ever called me a "faggot" or implied that I was effeminate.  At my most disagreeable--as infrequently, of course, as I ever may actually have been disagreeable--yet to those who, nonetheless, somehow did contrive to find me disagreeable, I have always been a "macho son of a bitch," by fairly universal consensus.

It's not something I take credit for--and frankly I don't know how I do it.  I suspect that DNA--or some such hypothesis as Aristophanes', whereby I simply wasn't born with any (not even the usual number of) female parts--is the root cause of my overbearing masculinity, or, if you will, stony, harsh unfemininity.  (Item) Having been raped myself, I don't see--unless it hurts--what all the fuss is about.  (Item) Though, for the most part, I adore the works and the verses of Jean Racine, I detest the whole sentimental edifice, and even the individual couplets, of Bérénice, causing my revered instructor in college to say, "Vous avez un coeur de pierre."

My guru and mentor, Bill Weaver, sometimes referred to it in rather unflattering terms as the "machismo of you guys who are strung out over in the extreme male/male end of the spectrum"; which is a reference back to Plato/Aristophanes and to the (for my money, somewhat disgusting) Tibettan Tantric Yoga of which Bill was an adept.