Straight Husband Describes The 'Vibes' After Stumbling Into Pride Parade — 'We Need More Straight Men Like This'
"The non-toxic masculinity, we love it!"
David Levingstone / Getty Images / Canva Pro It's become a cliché over the years, but given the backlash against LGBTQ+ people nowadays, it bears repeating: Men who are truly secure in their masculinity aren't threatened by the existence of Queer people.
It's like insisting you're not afraid of ghosts and then running out of the house every time you hear a creak upstairs. You seem pretty afraid of ghosts, my guy!
One straight man is going viral for the opposite take, for once. And his thoughts on the LGBTQ+ community have people hoping more men will learn to emulate his attitude.
Straight Australian "Bachelorette" star Timm Hanly's surprising response to a Pride parade has people cheering.
After years of increasing acceptance, Queer people and culture are once again Public Enemy #1 to people of certain political and religious bents. Men in the misogynistic right-wing "manosphere" have even reverted back to calling everything they don't find sufficiently masculine "gay" — including, absurdly, having sex with women (which just goes to show you how cooked these men's brains are).
It's all very dangerous and retrograde, yes, but also incredibly stupid, which made the response one straight man had to Pride all the more surprising and refreshing, even though it would've been pretty pedestrian a few years ago.
The man, who turned out to be Australian "Bachelorette" star Timm Hanly, was interviewed by internet personality Chris Stanley, whose content about LGBTQ culture includes interviews with people on the street — in this case, at Los Angeles' big annual Pride Parade in West Hollywood. And Hanly's unbothered two cents on Pride could teach a lot of other men nowadays a thing or two.
Hanly and his family stumbled into the Pride parade having no idea it was happening, and decided to just go with it.
Stanley, like most Americans, seemed to have no idea who Hanly was, so he asked the questions he'd typically ask anyone else, starting with whether or not Hanly is gay. When Hanly replied that he is straight with a wife and child, Stanley asked the obvious: "What are you doing at Pride?"
"You know what? We’re here from Australia. It’s our second day here, and we just stumbled across this," he said, adding, "I’m just here for the vibes. That's it. We love it."
It really is that simple. At the end of the day, though your average Pride Parade usually contains a few adult-oriented elements here and there, it's really little more than a street party — just with much better music and costumes.
Hanly agreed. When Stanley asked him if he thought "the gays can throw a good party," Hanly heartily concurred, saying, "100%, no one does it better."
Hanly also said when men hit on him, he finds it completely flattering, even though he's not interested.
Almost as if to test Hanly's non-homophobic mettle, Stanley then moved on to the next obvious question, and that's where Hanly showed his true colors in the best way.
"How do you feel if a gay guy is hitting on you?" Stanley asked Hanly, whose face immediately brightened. "Oh, I love this," he said.
He went on to explain that it feels no different to him than being hit on by a woman. "I'm walking down the street, and a gay guy's like looking at me like 'hmm,'" Hanly gamely said. "That's as good as a girl looking at me. That counts!"
Contrast that with your typical macho "alpha male" nowadays, whose response is more likely to be an epithet, if not something a whole lot worse.
I've never been one to reflexively assume homophobes are gay themselves — it's reductive and uses LGBTQ people's identities as a tool for shame and mockery. But are homophobes astonishingly weak and deeply insecure? There's no question about that. The alpha males doth protest too much, methinks.
People online have praised Hanly for his 'non-toxic masculinity' and attitude toward LGBTQ+ people and culture.
It's very weird and silly that Hanly's perspective feels so revolutionary once again—until just the past few years, when the religious and political right reverted back to attacking LGBTQ people now that they can't use their promise to overturn Roe vs. Wade to drive people to the polls, a response like Hanly's would have seemed more like the default position than anything special.
But we are definitely in a time when people need a reminder of what actual secure masculinity looks like, and people loved Hanly's simple take on the whole thing. "We love this level of self awareness and security," one person commented, while others praised Hanly's "non-toxic masculinity" and said "we need more men like him."
As a Queer person myself, I can't help but feel hopeful after watching Hanly's take on Pride. Granted, he doesn't live in this deeply divided and misguided country. But still, he's a reminder that not every straight man is so fragile and weak that he has to attack other people's identities to feel secure in his own.
In the end, while Americans' support for LGBTQ+ people is sadly retracting — propaganda works — those who hate us are still very much in the minority. An extremely loud, caterwauling minority, but the minority nonetheless, and by wide margins. It's easy to forget but important to remember, and it's good to have a guy like Hanly as a reminder now and then.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.