ALPHA: My Love/Hate Relationship

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I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life having very mixed feelings about the idea of the “alpha male.”

While the term has always possessed problematic ideas associated with its meaning, over the last decade or so, it's become hijacked by MAGA Republicans, a mob of mostly white dudes with podcasts and X-validated check marks who have turned the concept of being an alpha into a cartoon of patriarchal chest-pounding.

And politically, culturally, morally—I want nothing to do with any of that bullshit.

But if I’m honest, I’m also a gay man who has long appreciated the art of getting fucked into oblivion by a confident, hard-bodied dominating “alpha” male. There’s something empowering in that experience for me. I love the experience of surrendering my body and my control over to a confident, masculine presence and submitting to their will, their enjoyment, their lusts…

But there’s tension between those two truths—my wildly ANTI-MAGA politics and my deeply-felt carnal desires (the more deeply felt, the better!)

As a young gay in college, I thought of the “alpha” as the hot confident man who walked into a room and everybody felt his presence. He didn’t need to raise his voice. He didn’t need to prove anything. He just was. Those men made me weak. Those men make my asshole wet.

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The men I thought of as alphas never used the term alpha. Their presence did the talking. They weren’t narcissists. They weren’t assholes—I mean, sometimes they were assholes—but that wasn’t their whole personality.

Prior to Trump’s MAGA movement, whenever I met a man who I thought might be an alpha, those men didn’t demand my surrender, they didn’t feel entitled to my submission. I wanted to give them those things. I wanted them to become the center of my pleasure. On a few occasions, I called them alphas in the bedroom, but they never used the term as a promotion. In fact, doing that almost always made them not alphas.

Today, the most popular concept surrounding being an “alpha” is that “real men” dominate everything: women, gay men, whole cultures. They have squeezed all of the complexity and nuance out of masculinity and have made it about being loud, being controlling, being pompous windbags.

In my experience of the “alpha,” it was never about political dominance. It was about something far more intimate—a kind of quiet power I felt around certain men.

I remember one certain moment: I was 23 and met an older guy at a bar. When it became clear that we were going to fuck. I let him make all of the choices. He didn’t demand that. I wanted to give him that power. I wanted to feel his hand on my back guiding me through a crowded bar, moving me toward the space or condo or car where I would succumb willingly to whatever he wanted sexually.

In my own experience, the alpha male has never been a symbol of oppression but of possibility. He’s the man who stands close enough that I feel the heat of his body before he touches me. He’s the one whose confidence doesn’t crush me but invites me to let go.

In the bedroom, that dynamic becomes a space where I can hand over my tension, my constant self-management, my need to be in control. I can soften. I can breathe. I can surrender in a way that feels like freedom.

That version of the alpha isn’t about performing “masculinity theater” for a crowd. He doesn’t need to posture. He doesn’t lecture. He doesn’t bark orders.

He just knows himself—his body, his desire, his strength—and he knows how to use all of it without losing sight of mine.

But of course, in these difficult times, my political brain never fully shuts off.

I know what the word “alpha” has become. I know how it’s wielded to justify cruelty, rigidity, and small-mindedness. And most of us have witnesses this “MAGA ALPHA” ideology seep into (or try to) gay and queer spaces. And I have no fucking patience for that kind of assholery.

But sometimes I wonder if my sexual desire somehow feeds into those negative and oppressive ideas. I mean, I know that it doesn’t—not really—but the question still flickers through me. I’ve learned that desire isn’t a referendum on my values. It’s a language of its own. And it tells the truth in a way that politics almost never can.

I’ve had to make peace with the fact that two things can be true at once:

I can despise the cultural MAGA version of the alpha male.

And I can be deeply turned on by the man who embodies strength, confidence, and the kind of grounded dominance that makes my whole being unravel in his hands.

I don’t believe that makes me contradictory. I think it makes me human.

I’ve tried, in certain instances, to reclaim the word alpha as I once understood it. And in some cases, that’s possible. But usually it requires so many disclaimers of what it’s not that my point gets lost.

I sometimes call my boyfriend “my alpha”. But when I first uttered the word to him,, I had to explain all of what it didn’t mean before he felt okay owning it.

The other thing I think about is that I how I don’t want the assholes to WIN. They don’t fucking deserve to win.

My story (and my point) isn’t about choosing between the political MAGA bullshit side of alpha and the desire that rises in me when I come face to face with a man who oozes true alpha charm.

But I believe that my human sexual desires live deeper than any fucking slogan or stereotype promoted my an obnoxious white podcaster.

For me, being an alpha will always be about how my being and body responds to a man’s presence. It will be about my desire to surrender and not about some fucking entitled asshole demanding my surrender. It will be about me feeling seen and wanted in a way that is entirely my own. And the MAGA douche bags aren’t taking that away from me.