“I just wanna hang out with him so bad, man! Why won’t he call?!”

You’ve got a Man Crush: the state of not actually being gay… just gay for somebody in particular, as in “Dude, you’re totally gay for him.”

It’s a hetero thing.

On the evolutionary scale of gaydom, it’s the emotional spin-off equivalent of Joanie Loves Chachi to our Happy Days: a goofy simulacrum, a jejune take-off, a wacky send-up. Never daring enough to vie the NC-17 and too coy to go full-frontal, it plays like a G-rated apery of the real deal.

Its exact inception is impossible to pinpoint. Historically, the very moment that a man was first esteemed and thus set apart from his peers based on his physical prowess would have been the stone’s throw that commenced the ripple effect down the ages.

The primeval hominid who struck a spark with his flint or felled a mastodon no doubt drew his fair share of admiring tribesmen and exalted cave paintings immortalizing his exploits.

Gladiators — the prototype for modern-day pro athletes — prevailed the literal and figurative laurels from the crowd.

Dashing silent film star Wallace Reid may very well be the first man to lay claim to being Hollywood’s premier dreamboat.

Less due to genuine gonad-triggered upsurges than subconscious wish fulfillment, the Man Crush runs on idolatry, hero worship, a projected narcissism, and a vicarious desire to blur personalities (or, more accurately, personae). There still remains a hairsbreadth of overlap in the two emotions.

Gender-bender Jackie Curtis memorably opined “Well we all have a little dyke in us” in Paul Morrissey’s Women in Revolt, the implication being that complete and total hetero or homo status can never be confirmed. It’s possible that every confirmed bachelor has at least one female (usually an icon or celebrity) that stirs a slight pitter-patter in his heart due to her public recognition or glamor, while even the most debonair lady killer is destined to be once bitten, twice shy when he encounters another man who can best him at his own game.

Gayness is wanting to experience being with another man; the Man Crush centers around just being him.

James Dean was known to nurse an intense fascination with Marlon Brando, boasting he possessed that fabled snapshot of Brando with a cock in his mouth and keeping it as a sort of talisman to summon up his fetish figure’s mystique. Dean would manage to move into a New York apartment once occupied by Brando and speculated excitedly on the object of his adulation’s sexual encounters that took place there.

In turn, Steve McQueen harbored a consuming-if-resentful fixation on Dean, so much so that he confessed relief upon his idol’s untimely demise. With Dean out of the way, McQueen believed he was now free to take his place.

Don’t-you-wish-you-could-be-me? heartthrobs George Clooney and Tom Brady (now canonized as one of the most potent jujus in all idol-worship: the action figure) are the current favored Meta-Men, but the boys’ club that is the political arena isn’t immune to the pangs of the Man Crush.

Benevolent overlord and all-around man’s man’s George Bush has flirted with no less than four high-profile crushes during his reign, playing the love object in his stuck-on-you captivations of buddy-boys Joe Lieberman and Tony Blair, then going all doe-eyed during his infatuated idylls with Euro-swains Vladimir Putin and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Virtually every cross-section of the hetero world plays on the same tango, the hitch being that it’s an inherently unequal dance wherein only one man leads. The Desired has the power, the Desirer covets it. The Gym King with the biggest muscles is bound to have a gang of butch but not-quite-as Machistean followers who bolster his ego and crave his cred.

High-rolling money men with Bondian cavalcades of dispensable babes are apt to throw less prized fillies the way of their loyal yes-men. Athletes, actors and pop stars who hit the big time will inevitably bring with them an entourage of fair-weather male friends from the neighborhood who siphon off their glory while telling their fair-haired boy whatever he wants to hear.

Symbiosis is the name of the game: both sides of the Man Crush will benefit from one another’s company, be it having a mirror to adore yourself in or a idealized male exemplar to emulate and draw orbital respect from. Nature has the crocodile opening its maw to allow the plover bird to feast on parasites found on its teeth, while the Remora suckerfish will trail in a shark’s wake and feed of parasites living on the predator’s skin. A need is served as what would normally result in blood on the water manages to instead strike a fragile balance of shared convenience.

It’s a fragile equilibrium easily broken, though, one derailed by obsession or actual emotional attachment. Fight Club revealed the treacherous path wherein an egodystonic male actually becomes his cavalier fantasy alter self who then proceeds to transform into a Frankensteinian creation his dreamer can never hope to master.

And leave it to the peerless Buffy The Vampire Slayer — whose lovelorn and fucked-up monsters tapped into the queer vein at the heart of all young adults’ sexual urges — to etch the epitaph for a doomed Man Crush gone too far. In a comic apex for the series, the token gay member of the Slayer’s triumvirate of geek nemeses having been seduced and abandoned by his leader, loses his cool and nearly confesses a tearful gay heartbreak. His brilliant deadpan save to cover up the wistful near-slip: “He was just using me. He never really loved…hanging out with us!”

This power divide is key and the main reason why so few camaraderies and friendships form (much more, thrive) between an alpha straight male and an alpha gay one; a fit, confident and shrewd gay guy will balk at playing Robin to his pal’s Batman, and thus the roles are threatened. Alpha or Gamma gays engender resentment from straight males because they’re too resistant to passive corralling. Worse yet, even the most feared/respected hetero male will experience the anxiety of being challenged by his gay match. If the Alpha Gay has his own power and the will to wield it, the paranoia is that he may just decide to take what he believes he deserves. Asses will involuntarily clench at the thought.

Such is the benefit of any look-but-don’t-touch crush: its very distance allows for fantasy without ever leading to any of the perilous entanglements and troubling self-awareness that come with a true hormonal haymaker to the crotch and the heart.