Masculinity and Party Politics - Salon.com charts the overlap between traditional definitions of masculinity and gay marriage. What I identify as the key quotation:

"The only argument [against gay marriage] that requires a more complex answer is...the truly fundamental one. Gay marriage calls into question established roles; it scrambles the basic coordinates we use to define ourselves. If married couples are to include "husband and husband" and "wife and wife" sets, or "husband and wife" sets from the same gender, what does being a husband or a wife actually mean? And if that becomes open to interpretation, what does being a man or a woman mean? A stand against gay weddings is, at its core, an insistence...on traditional notions of masculinity. A man is he who is married to a woman, and who's the undisputed father figure, provider for the family, maker of important decisions. (A man is also physically strong, adept at sports, comfortable with bikes, horses and other means of locomotion, not too big a talker but good with one-liners -- all important qualities, but clearly subordinate to the ones expressed in the traditional family structure.)"

Is it subversive to paint a nursery with a shade of green or yellow instead of pink or blue? Does giving a doll to a little boy or a toy dumptruck to a little girls cause so much tension and confusion that railing against the gays is the only way to retain one's own identity? Maybe Queer Eye and it's praise of all things metrosexual is the real thing that's undermining the move toward gay marriage?