Where did the “gays are feminine and lesbians are masculine” stereotype come from?
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Prior to the modern era, most cultures – including the English-speaking culture we’re presumably both part of since we’re having this conversation in English – didn’t make a strong distinction between being gender-non-conforming, being gay, being trans, and crossdressing. They all got kinda lumped together under “people not having the way their gender is ‘supposed’ to”. And this lumping was done to some extent – maybe a lesser one, but some extent – even within the queer communities that existed at the time; the gay/trans split only emerged reliably in the last 50 years or so.
You can kind of see where they were coming from, in the sense that “wanting to have sex with men” is a trait normally* associated with women, and “wanting to have sex with women” is a trait normally associated with men. So a gay man was, in some sense, “acting like a woman” within that model, and a lesbian woman was, in some sense, “acting like a man”. And so, if a gay man would “act like a woman” in one sense, it wasn’t a huge leap to think they might “act like a woman” in other senses.
Moreover, since men who were effeminate (and women who were butch) were quite a bit more likely to be pushed into queer-heavy circles (because they weren’t “straight-passing”, even if they were in fact straight!), queer circles became dominated by those groups. So gay culture – as opposed to simply the existence of gay people – grew up heavily influenced by such people, which means that the signals, cultural norms, art, music, etc. of queer circles draws from their experiences. Early gay icons, as a result, tended to be pretty gender-non-conforming, because when you’ve been ostracized from society for being gender-non-conforming, of course you’re going to idolize people who own it and are loved anyway.
(Of course, many queer people – including myself – don’t fit into that cultural background very well, but if it were a few decades ago, that culture would be the only place we could reasonably expect to be accepted! Today, the effect is a lot weaker because queer people are much more accepted.)
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* I use the word “normal” here in a purely value-neutral “typical of a large percentage of the population” way, not in the sense of “normal” vs “disordered” or “bad”.
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