Masculinity as Theatre

Masculinity was never natural to me.

It always looked rehearsed.

The way men stood. The way they entered a room. The way they slapped each other's backs, raised their voices, occupied space, laughed too loudly, hid tenderness inside insult, hid fear inside noise. The way they became men in front of other men.

As a child, I watched this carefully.

I did not have the words for it then, but I understood that masculinity was a kind of theatre. There were roles. There were gestures. There were punishments for forgetting the script. A boy had to know when to be brave, when to be silent, when to laugh, when to touch, when not to touch, when to pretend that nothing had hurt him.

The first stage was the family.

My father returned from the port carrying the world on his body: sweat, metal, oil, grease, hunger, exhaustion, command. He did not need a uniform. Labour had dressed him. His body announced authority before he spoke. The kitchen became a small theatre of power. The chair, the plate, the food, the white underwear, the elbows on the table, my mother standing behind him. I watched from the edge, both repelled and fascinated.

The second stage was the street.

Boys knew how to claim pavement, how to kick a ball, how to shout across distance, how to turn a joke into a test. I often failed these tests. I preferred wandering, looking, disappearing into side streets. I trusted corners more than playgrounds. I trusted the unknown more than the group.

The third stage was the army.

In the army, masculinity became official. It wore boots. It carried weapons. It slept close to other bodies and pretended this closeness was only discipline, necessity, brotherhood. Soldiers hugged, kissed, leaned on each other, slept beside each other, showered together, joked, wrestled, played, touched. The body was everywhere, but desire was not supposed to be named.

This was the confusion.

The homo-social and the homoerotic were not separate territories. They were two lights falling on the same skin.

A soldier could say 'I love you brother' and the words would be allowed to remain innocent because the army had given them permission. A hand on a chest could be friendship. A shared mattress could be exhaustion. A naked body in the shower could be nothing. But for a gay soldier, nothing was never nothing. Every gesture carried a double exposure.

The image had one official meaning and one private wound.

This is where my work began, even before I understood it as work.

I returned to those scenes in Views because I needed to look again. Not to expose the soldiers, but to expose the ambiguity. To ask what happens when masculinity creates forms of intimacy that it then refuses to recognise as desire. To ask how a body can be so close and so forbidden at the same time.

Photography gave me a way to hold that contradiction without solving it.

A photograph can preserve a gesture at the moment before it becomes explanation. A hand. A glance. A body leaning into another body. A pause. A smile that could be nothing, or everything. The still image allows ambiguity to remain alive. It does not force the scene to confess.

Years later, Cuba returned this theatre to me in another language.

Rafael ran onto the football field and was immediately absorbed into the group. Men shouted his name from every direction. Rafael aquí. Rafael aquí. He belonged to the game, to the noise, to the sweat, to the instinctive knowledge of where to stand and how to move. I watched from behind the white line, the same line I had stood behind as a boy.

But I was no longer only afraid.

I was looking.

And looking changed everything.

In Cuba, masculinity was everywhere: on horses, in open shirts, in old cars, in broken machines, in the way men fixed things, lifted things, shouted things, refused things, touched things. The male body appeared as work, performance, seduction, danger, pride, hunger, tenderness and display.

What disturbed me was not that Cuba was foreign.

What disturbed me was that I recognised it.

The port had returned in the village. The army had returned in the football field. My father had returned in Rafael's hands. Israel had returned through Cuba's roads, sweat, food and night.

This is why I call Cuba a mirror.

Not because it reflected me clearly, but because it reflected the masculine codes I had spent years trying to escape.

I began to understand that masculinity is not only something men perform for women, or for society. Men perform it for other men. They perform it to be accepted, feared, desired, protected, obeyed, forgiven. They perform it to hide the softness that might betray them. They perform it because someone performed it before them.

I inherited some of this theatre.

Even when I resisted it, I carried it.

My pride after leaving Rafael at the football field belonged partly to my father. My refusal to turn back at first, my wounded silence, my need to be right, my anger at being ignored, all of it came from a script I thought I had rejected. That is the cruelty of inheritance. We do not only inherit what we love. We inherit gestures we hate.

The camera became my way of interrupting the inheritance.

Not destroying it. Not escaping it completely. Interrupting it.

When I photograph men, I am not only photographing desire. I am photographing the codes around desire. The permissions and prohibitions. The public mask and the private tremor. The space between wanting to look and fearing what the look reveals.

Susan Sontag understood that looking can possess. I know this danger. The camera can turn a body into evidence, object, trophy, secret, accusation. But it can also preserve an uncertainty that the world wants to flatten. It can say: look again, this scene is not as simple as it appears.

That is why I am drawn to male-coded places: the army, the port, the football field, the village, the road, the bedroom, the shower, the forest, the bar, the car.

Each place has its own choreography. Each one teaches men how to behave. Each one hides desire differently.

In my work, the male body is never only beautiful. It is loaded. It carries childhood, power, shame, fear, attraction, violence, tenderness and social law. It is an image I cannot stop reading because I was trained by it before I could speak about it.

Masculinity is theatre, but it is not fake.

The performance becomes real because bodies suffer inside it.

The soldier must perform. The father must perform. The son must perform. The stranger must perform. The lover must perform. Even the artist performs by pretending he is only observing.

But I was never only observing.

I was looking for clues.

I wanted to know why certain gestures wounded me. Why certain bodies frightened me. Why desire often arrived disguised as danger. Why tenderness between men had to hide inside violence, jokes, games or discipline. Why the forbidden image kept returning.

This is where the Reminiscence Narrative begins again.

A scene appears in front of me, but it contains an earlier scene. A man on a horse contains a father at a table. A football field contains a schoolyard. A soldier leaning on another soldier contains a boy trying not to look. A stranger in Cuba contains Israel. A photograph contains movement. A moving image contains the stillness of a wound.

The archive does not give me answers.

It gives me rehearsals.

Again and again, the same theatre appears with different actors.

Again and again, I return to the stage.

I photograph masculinity because I am still learning which parts of it were imposed on me, which parts I desired, and which parts I must finally leave behind.