Egyptians projected the national anxiety resulting from the social and economic unrest of the 1970s as a threat to their masculinity. After the 1973 October War with Israel, Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat started a new economic policy called Al-Infitah “Open-door policy,” which opened Egypt for international private investments, ended Egypt’s close relations with the longtime ally and aid-giver the USSR, and replaced it with the United States. As novels, films, and other cultural productions function as a platform where nationalist ideas formulate, this paper studies the representation of nationalist masculine subject formation in Egyptian cultural productions. During the 1970s, Egyptian cultural productions borrowed the nationalist masculine discourse produced by anti-colonial nationalism, a discourse that responded to colonial orientalist depictions that usually emasculated Egyptians. The cultural producers of the Sadat era appropriated the nationalist masculine discourses by assigning their protagonists the “masculine” role of the penetrator. In the movie Alexandria Why? (1976), the main focus of this paper, the nationalist Egyptian director Youssef Chahine explores the relation between Egyptian nationalism and British colonialism through a sexual relationship between the Egyptian male protagonist and a British soldier. Nationalist notions of masculinity influenced the power dynamics in which the relationship functioned. Even though, the relationship is not hetero-normative, it embraced hetero-normative dynamics, which endorse social and sexual patriarchy. It assigns the penetrator the social privileges of males, leaves the penetrated with a lesser social status, and depicts him as a lesser of a person. Nationalist historiography of modern Egyptian history rarely discusses non-hetero-normative relationships. By focusing on a non-hetero-normative plot, this paper provides a new way of understanding the multiple discourses that shaped nationalist subject formation.