The Violate Man is about the discourse of male/male rape in American culture since the mid‑1960s. The book analyzes film, television, and theater to indict how treatments of male/male rape narratives have encouraged us to interpret sexual violence over the last sixty years. This discourse is productive for our thinking about the real world. The Violate Man finds that these narratives establish—and often maintain or reinforce—longstanding racialized and sexualized traditions about where male/male rape happens, who commits it, why it is committed, and which of us is vulnerable to its victimization. The most influential of these rape narratives also reinforce a complex series of masculinist assumptions that produce the male body as able‑bodied, whole, and impenetrable, disallowing bodies broken by violence, sexual and otherwise, from the very category of male.

From the punchline of bro comedies to the vengeance arc of prison dramas, I argue that male/male rape narratives are used by writers, filmmakers, and comedians to make sense of the changing landscape of American masculinity, and that these narratives have shifted widely since the 1960s, reflecting masculinity’s varying anxieties and concerns.

Opening Three Paragraphs

The Violate Man is about the discourse of male/male rape in US American culture since the mid-1960s. Male/male rape, we are told, is something about which people rarely speak and that is surrounded by codes of silence. Powerful cultural forces work to keep male rape victims quiet and keep serious discussion of male/male rape at a minimum. But if male/male rape is a topic that we discuss infrequently (or at least one that we tell ourselves we discuss infrequently), the number of male/male rape narratives on television and in movies has increased exponentially since the 1960s, and for the last twenty years, news media have offered statistics and stories about incidents of male/male rape with increasing regularity. The Baltimore Sun reported in 2013 that a male sailor in the United States Navy who was raped by a fellow sailor was ordered by his commanders not to report the assault, triggering a hearing in the US Senate in order to investigate the way the military justice system deals with sexual violence. A year later in 2014, the men’s magazine GQ ran a damning story on sexual violence in the US military titled “Son, Men Don’t Get Raped,” that opened with the chilling sentences: “According to the Pentagon, thirty-eight military men are sexually assaulted every single day. These are the stories you never hear—because the culprits almost always go free, the survivors rarely speak, and no one in the military or Congress has done enough to stop it.” Most notably, in early 2010, David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow of the organization Just Detention International (formerly Stop Prisoner Rape) began a series of eight articles in The New York Review of Books reporting on the serious crisis of prison rape in US carceral systems, including in juvenile institutions and detention facilities administered by the Department of Homeland Security (now Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE). And although the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003, twelve years later The New York Times noted that little had changed: several states have resisted complying with implementation of the law, and only minimal consequences are in place that might convince state governments to comply.

News reports of male/male rape have not been restricted to describing assaults in prisons or in US military barracks. The Taguba Report, the Army’s military inquiry into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in 2004, includes reports of rapes of teenage male detainees and the rape of an adult male detainee with “a phosphoric light.” And in 2011 a trio of volunteer firefighters in Piermont, New York, a wealthy, majority-white town of about 2,600 people, were accused of putting initiates through a ritual that included forcing a young recruit “to sodomize an existing firefighter.” If male/male rape, in other words, is a topic about which we do not often speak or that is surrounded by silence, it is also clear that we ought not to think of it as a mere topic. Data demonstrate and newsmedia reports substantiate that male/male rape is a lived reality in US American society, a health crisis in US American prisons, a rising epidemic in the US military, and a significant component of the problem of sexual assault on US college campuses.

How we, as consumers of these news stories, are asked to think about male/male rape, however, is a subject that has been given very little academic consideration. This isn’t to say that there is no work at all on same-sex sexual assault. To the contrary, scholars in the fields of criminology, sociology, and social work have all written serious inquiries into the phenomenon, but male/male rape has been understood perpetually as an emergent issue since the 1960s, as though we must always say—before discussing it—that it isn’t something we normally discuss. Further, because of cultural resistance to talking about male/male rape, our thinking about these acts of violence has remained unsophisticated, informed neither by academic studies about its causes, its frequency, or its prevention nor by educational programs that provide structured methods for considering the experience or effects of male/male rape. To the contrary, the way that we think about male/male rape draws primarily on artistic and informal discourse rather than sociological or criminological discourse about this violence: from rumors and innuendo circulated either casually or maliciously; from news stories that report such incidents in order to shock or sensationalize; from jokes that are often aimed at the expense of an imagined rape victim; and from fictional representations that are embedded within narrative structures such as films, television episodes, novels, commercials, plays, and other performances. This informal and artistic discourse—jokes, narrative representations, rumors, and short newsmedia segments—currently shapes our society’s thinking about male/male rape. It is this discourse that The Violate Man addresses.