Disturbing Bromances

Why do powerful straight men risk everything for their infatuations with other men?

The men are talking.

With Jeffrey Epstein back in the news, it’s worth asking again: Why do powerful straight men risk everything for their infatuations with other men?

Years ago, I fact-checked two memoirs by two different powerbrokers. Their books wised me up to an invisible poltergeist in world events: The feverish passion of one straight man for another.

One of the authors was Michael Eisner, then the CEO of Disney. He offered insight into how powerful producers of the ’80s and ’90s used to fall head over heels for the glamorous movie star Warren Beatty. After nothing more than an evening out, I learned, they’d give Beatty a blank check to make some loser movie like Ishtar (1987) or Bulworth (1998). It was laughable and also mysterious to bottom-line men like Eisner, who like data and track records, but he couldn’t deny that Beatty’s hold on producers had determined a swath of American film history.

My other boss was Michael Korda, then the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster. In Man to Man, his memoir about having prostate cancer, Korda, who unlike many richies is a deft writer, supplies an exquisitely self-aware account of how he rejected veteran doctors offering data-driven treatments for his disease, and instead turned his gonads over to a he-man surgeon after locking eyes with him in a single meeting.

From Eisner’s and Korda’s descriptions of these dynamics, I came to understand that there are certain domineering, athletic, authoritative, hard-eyed and often deep-voiced or excessively tall men who might seem like vain douchebags to the rest of us but who captivate certain vulnerable other men. So charismatic are they that their prey sometimes will throw caution to the wind and give away the keys to their kingdom, often ruinously.