dylanndr:Hypothesis: Izzy knows he’s attracted to men, he doesn’t have an issue with tha
dylanndr:Hypothesis: Izzy knows he’s attracted to men, he doesn’t have an issue with that per se, and his expressions of homophobia and misogyny are characteristic of a specific subset of openly gay male culture.Izzy has, after all, spent the last several years helping to command a vessel that might as well be called The Eagle, it’s so full of leather men. I think he’s well aware of his own queerness, but he lacks the ability to sit down and do the introspection that would let him realize his relationship to his queerness is way out of whack. [His capacity for introspection is, IMO, limited by his undiagnosed and untreated chronic depressive disorder, but that’s another post for another time.]Way back when I was first exploring life as a queer guy, I remember going to a leather bar with a friend. Said friend told me I shouldn’t be wearing the spiky wrist cuffs I had on because they were sending a message that I was thus and such type of top, and I was too short and skinny and hairless to be allowed to present that way. There were five thousand other rules I was apparently breaking because I hadn’t memorized all the secret codes and I was just doing leather wrong and so forth. I ended up noping out of the experience; it seemed tediously prescriptivist to me.For sure not all queer leather subculture spaces are going to be like that, but you know who would be super into such a rigidly hierarchical system? Izzy Hands, that’s who. He is highly invested in routine and predictability, and has a strong inclination to force people to stick to their prescribed roles. Your place in the hierarchy tells you who you’re allowed to hookup with and who is supposed to initiate the hookup, which is why he absolutely would not make the first pass at Edward. It’s Edward’s place to initiate something like that (and why Izzy responds so strongly to even the slightest touch from Ed; there’s probably a tiny shred of persistent optimism lurking somewhere under the depressive fugue that says, “maybe this time it’s really going to go there?”).He would likely feel comfortable in a system where you don’t have to use your words to express desires and boundaries because everything is clearly communicated through long-established codes you can just memorize. There was a back room at that leather bar for cruising, which had its own separate bouncer, and where conversation was actively discouraged; Izzy would have haunted the shit out of that room. He refers to other, subordinate members of Blackbeard’s crew as “the boys,” which in the context of that particular ship and crew is in contrast to the daddies (Ed being Daddy Supreme, Izzy being Emergency Backup Daddy). His place as First Mate means, in his rigidly defined worldview, that he can only sub for the captain, to everyone else he has to be a dom.This mindset could potentially be reinforced by a common iteration of warrior culture where the older, more experienced man is the top, the young acolyte is the bottom, and a sexual relationship between the two is fine, but a romantic one is mostly not (at least, not once the acolyte ages out of that status). As you get older and grow in skill, and shift from acolyte to master, you’re obligated to switch from bottoming to topping. It’s entirely possible Young Izzy had a much more enjoyable sex life as an acolyte, if that is indeed how he learned to fight, but as he graduated into his obligatory top status, his sexual encounters became so unsatisfying he may well have drifted into celibacy.While he’s good at ordering people around and berating them, he finds actually managing people to be immensely stressful, and hasn’t got a fucking clue what to do when he needs to try to read a room. He’s not a creative thinker. What happens when you bark an order and the person refuses? He doesn’t have a fallback for “this person went off script,” which is probably why his interactions with Lucius in episode 5 go so far off the rails. Getting shoved into a position of submissiveness to a guy who is Not Supposed to Be Topping Because He Looks and Dresses Wrong for the Part throws him completely off kilter.Oh, and let’s talk about that interaction with Lucius and how it relates to homophobia in gay male spaces. I went into great detail about that scene here, but for this I want to focus specifically on the Kiss That Wasn’t. Y'all, Izzy wants to kiss someone SO BAD. In his “I’m being intimidating at you” interactions where he gets up in someone’s face, when he should be making unbroken eye contact, his gaze constantly falls to the other man’s mouth. With Lucius, he’s pulled so far out of his normal headspace he comes within a fraction of a second of giving in to that desire before he stops himself and turns tail.In the world of homophobic (internalized), masc (toxic) gay spaces, sex is fine. He knows, for example, that Edward hooked up with Calico Jack, and this isn’t presented as any kind of issue for him. But kissing? Kissing is perceived as an act of romantic affection, and THAT is forbidden. You can fuck other men, but you must NEVER fall in love with them or you’re a namby-pamby ponce who [gag] pines for a boyfriend. Ergo, kissing bad.Back in the early 2000s, there was a trend amongst a subset of gay men to label themselves as “straight-acting.” Again, these were openly gay men operating in queer spaces, but who built solidarity with each other by bragging about how not stereotypically gay they behaved. Izzy in 2002 would have been taking those “are you straight-acting” quizzes online, and been super proud of himself if he scored a 10/10. (He would have lied in some of his answers to force that 10/10 outcome, probably.)TL;DR: Izzy gay, he knows it, and he probably wouldn’t care but for the fact that he has internalized so much toxic sludge around the specific things he actually wants and needs out of his relationships with other men. ^^ Yep, all of this. -- source link