AbrahamLincoln's Blogs

“I think ‘homosexual’ is a bit clinical, and lots of people use it negatively,” he says. “‘Gay’ has a certain lifestyle attached to it, which I don’t recognise myself in.”

Nicolas doesn’t relate to what he calls “the clichés you could attach to the ‘gay’ scene". He’s a club photographer, but he says, unless he’s working, “I don’t go clubbing. I don’t like shopping."

So, in the early 2000s, he came up with an alternative term to describe himself as a man who finds other men sexually attractive: 'androphile'.

“I made it up from my vague knowledge of Greek,” he tells me. “Putting two bits together” – the prefix 'andro', meaning man, and 'phile', denoting a love for something – “to come up with androphile."

Since then, the word has mutated into a label of choice for some young gay men, often politically right-wing, who identify with a new kind of sexuality.

In 2006, the right-wing polemicist Jack Donovan took the word as the title of his book, which was subtitled, 'Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity'.

(Donovan, who has become an icon for androphiles around the world, did not respond to a request to participate in this story.)

More recently, as the ‘alt-right’ has become more visible, the term androphile has too.

A generation of young men who are attracted to men - but who eschew the liberal, activist politics they believe are associated with the gay liberation movement – have chosen it to describe themselves.

It's a label that is used exclusively by men, with no real equivalent for gay, right-wing women.