Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
The Visitation at Fatima is a fetiche-event for what the Rev. Ivan Stang called the Zombo-Catholics. Some of them actually mean this one woman in Queens' visions about The Church, which started when she visited the Portuguese pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair; we used to receive the "Michael Fighting" newsletter (Fatima, the Latin Mass, and Social Credit) from these people.
Wow. I remember them peddling some of this stuff from my Catholic childhood (particularly a Fatima comic book) but the Michael Fighting newsletter is news to me!
Anecdote: was commuting by bicycle back in the longhair days when a pickup pulled up slow behind me and the passenger said "Nice ass!". When the truck pulled even I looked at him and he slumped into the seat, while the driver started laughing loud and long. We both stopped at the light, and I rested my hand on the door of the truck and invoked my deep voice (stored somewhere to be pulled out for just such occasions), saying "Thanks, man. I work out, you know?" The driver completely lost it and the passenger tried to slide under the seat as I rode away.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I had just figured-out that they were regularly screaming 'Faggot!' at (girl-crazy but sports-hating and book-loving) me only because it was a standard insult when they proved me at least somewhat wrong by somewhat aggressively asking me for sex.
I was in North Carolina in the mid-seventies. I had very long hair but I also had a Biblical beard, a white coat and a stethoscope. I guess the beard prevented any inappropriate sexual advances from males. Females were another matter - exoticism, I think. My residency director, in my first annual review, said they'd had a lot of discussion about whether to accept me into the program. I thought he was going to riff on my appearance, but he said, "You know, we never had a person from New York before and we didn't know how that would work out." Another of my med school classmates, similarly hirsute, went to NC. He said, "No one seemed to care about how I looked. They thought I was a Mennonite." It was the racism that made me leave when my training was over, not any personal animosity towards me. I've thought many times that I was a coward not to have stayed to try to combat that racism.
Similar experience. Played in cover bands in bars thru the MTV 80's--big hair, tight pants, the works. A few times on slow nights between sets (when the DJ was playing), I'd be standing at the bar and guys would approach me from behind and ALMOST ask me if I wanted to dance (I'd turn as soon as someone tapped me on the shoulder). I laughed it off, but the look in their eyes, like they'd been deceived or even cheated somehow. I could tell they were pissed off, just couldn't figure out if they were pissed off at me or themselves, or both.
It's worth noting that their leader, their object of adoration, their ideal of all that is truly manly and masculine is Donald J. Trump. You know, former president? The guy who wears heavy makeup all the time? The guy who spends an hour every day getting his hair JUST RIGHT? The guy who wears high heels?
Could it be that drag queens remind them a little too much that their acme of masculinity is actually a fey weakling, mewling coward, and far less than manly?
And let it not be forgotten that he also wants us to return to those storied days of yesteryear, when men were men and elections were effectively redone no matter how many years it took.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I think it goes even deeper than that, to their self-doubts about their own "manhood", whatever that is. Drag just picks at that scab they are terrified of having fall completely off, to show the world just how alone and afraid they really are. Trump is just an avatar for that scab, why else would they splice his big fat head on top of Mr. Atlas wielding an "AR-47" (what the fascist in Texas said the anti-fascist was carrying)?
They've spent their lives trying to live up to a "strong and silent" Gary Cooper standard of masculinity, a standard no real human can actually achieve, and then Donald Trump comes along, a guy who will whine loudly for an hour about one bad review in a newspaper, and they fall head over heels for him.
I still remember when ideals of masculinity meant being a good sport, calmly accepting defeat, maybe even shaking your opponent's hand ("Well played, sir!" and all that). "Waaaah, you cheated!" wasn't any part of the masculinity I was brought up on in my narrow Midwestern childhood.
Losing and bearing it, as opposed to kicking and screaming and whinging and shouting and getting some concession, or at least making it clear that you won't tolerate losing again—above and beyond their having ever paid rent to men like him (thank-you, Thomas Pynchon near the end of "Inherent Vice")—is why he considers them loooosers.
Fair enough, but now I have a Tony Millionaire panel in which Drinky Crow is calling either his love-interest or maybe Sock Monkey in drag 'The Acme of Femininity!' stuck in my head.
[LATER]: I think it's a French/Crocodile captain or admiral admiring Sock Monkey in drag. I'm pretty sure Drinky Crow got him into it, though.
But, honestly, isn't the Acme of Masculinity a spring- or rocket-powered penis that gets you knocked senseless by a cliff-face with a roadway and sky painted-on, flattened by a boulder, and then be subject to a rare and painful condition which causes you to expand upward and contract downward alternately as you walk, and to emit an off-key, accordion-like wheezing with every step, temporarily restricting your ability to make your living in your profession of predator?
I had my fingers crossed that at least one of the transvestites he took home from Studio 54 or similar would talk…maybe Uncle Roy spotted them and waved him away from them.
And then there's that scene in Bridge on the River Kwai, they've finished the bridge, time for a lil' celebration, which naturally involves a show where one soldier dressed as a lady sings a love song to another soldier. Makes the whole film unwatchable now.
There's a scene with an whole chorus-line in "Slaughterhouse-Five', at the P. W. camp where the Brits got four[?] times the Red Cross packages they were supposed to have, and so had energy for that kind of thing.
'Camp' supposedly derives from '[military] camp show'.
Fnord Pater, who as a P.W. when imprisoned with a different group of Brits may have worked in the same syrup factory as a Vonnegut, on hearing of how much those lucky ones had got, responded with a simple 'We didnʼt.', hence his May 1945 mass of about 43kg. (Hence my bearing with his assessment of the devastation of Leipzig in the same raid as Dresden: 'I didnʼt know iron could burn, but we were happy to see it.'—as he also said: 'Starvation is bad for you, you stop being human.')
This just sent me down a youtube rabbit hole which resulted in my watching video of Alec Baldwin doing the Honey Bun number from South Pacific with Reba McEntire at Carnegie Hall just because I wanted to make a crack about how unwatchable that number (with Ray Walston) made the 1958 film.
That unwatchability might reflect a good level of accuracy.
Mind you, in the right mood it puts a different gloss on the proudly announced (when the Japanese advance has been stopped) 'We‘re going the other way!'.
Very cogent and persuasive, Roy. I'd only quibble with "I don’t see any of these guys going 'How dare you play Hakuna Matata around my kids!'” If you follow Right Wing Watch, with their focus on the evangelical right, you're sure to find plenty of those guys -- pastors of megachurches, "prophets" with thousands of followers on YouTube, some of them name-checked from time to time by more "respectable" wingers -- saying Disney movies have been grooming children for the Antichrist since (((Eisner))) took over.
That is very true! All I mean there is that other works of gayness have already been processed and adopted even by bigoted straights. NOW Disney is a "groomer": https://edroso.substack.com/p/hold-me-close-hardcore-never-let but it never clicks with these guys that the musicals their grown kids loved as children were written by a gay man who wore outrageous costumes on stage.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I'm afraid it's been going on for more than a quarter of a century. From the Wikipedia article on "American Life League":
"American Life League was founded on April 1, 1979 by Judie and Paul Brown, Gary Bauer, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and six other anti-abortion Americans after a schism with the National Right to Life Committee. Within less than a year of its founding, ALL had 68,000 members and received assistance founding ALL from Howard Phillips, publicity from Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, and membership lists provided by right-wing direct mail specialist Richard Viguerie. . . .
"In March 1995, the American Life League boycotted the then-owners of Miramax, The Walt Disney Company, over the film Priest, in which a Roman Catholic priest deals with a variety of issues including his own homosexuality. Subsequently, ALL charged that Disney had concealed subliminal sexual messages in the animated films The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin. Disney denied all the claims."
I'll be honest, I had to look up Ionic columns and. their volutes. I still enjoy looking stuff up. Someday, and it'll probably be sooner then later, I'll see stuff like that and not look it up figuring "That's just Edroso being high falutin again"
Here at work we've expanded to the full Fall Season staff - about 140 people. All ages - just as many young's as olds.
Out of 140 people, I bet 25 of them identify as something other than straight. And really, nobody gives a fuck. This is in a small rural community. The people that work here are from here or from surrounding communities just like this one.
I'm pretty sure gender hate as political issue is several years past the sell-by date. Everybody has a gay Uncle/Daughter/Son/ Mom/Preacher/ Teacher and most people don't GAF.
They can still rile the Rubes
up about it, sure. But Rubes are always gonna get riled about something.
They've been through a debate about gay marriage where the face of the opposition was middle-class folks in some VERY Long Term Relationships. They're still smarting after the loss, this is their chance to say, "Nah, THAT'S not what 'gay' is, THIS is what 'gay' is!"
My mother, who spent forty years convinced me being bisexual was the same thing as being a slut (She wasn't wrong, I was a slut, but it wasn't because I was bi.), has now bought me a Laverne Cox Barbie and is apparently defending my brother's nonbinary child.
She used to think Monty Python was disgusting because of the drag. You cannot imagine her response to RHPS.
Me? I think people should be allowed to try on clothes and identities as they wish.
My mother was convinced that drag was intended to mock women; then again her formative experience with known-gay men was what sounded like a very bitchy guy on the university newspaper, who along with her was likely crushing on Lucien Carr. (No, he wasn't Kammerer.)
Climbing out of the box someone stuffs us into is hard enough, I s'pose. Breaking down the boxes we stuff others into is harder, but monumentally important, to us and to them (even if they do not know it).
It's a very standard human behaviour…which is yet another reason why I'm transhumanist, I (in the words of Captain Malcolm Reynolds, who very possibly fought for chattel slavery) 'want to make people better', though I don't want to be fucking stupid going about it. (I'd also like to improve directors and producers so they'd stop screwing actors, at least while they were still their immediate boss.)
My mom won't watch Drag Race because they call each other "bitch" & had no time for Monty Python because their drag characters were less-than-flattering images of women.
And misogyny among cis-gays is alarmingly high, even if most lingers at a junior high school level ("ew... gross!") -- and that misogyny often leads to femme-shaming, twink-shaming, bottom-shaming, & transphobia.
That's an interesting point. It was only on the very rare occasions that my mother made reference to some sexual crudity on TV or on the stage that I got any sense of what informed her opinion on such things. Thanks, I had not thought about that for years.
Yeah, moms...gotta love 'em (assuming they deserve it).
Was a tense evening in our house the night we all watched 'Do The Right Thing' together. I was not happy that the language got heard by me sainted mother...
You don't get much more cishet than me. I've never had the least interest in wearing women's clothes, but I also don't give a shit if someone else does. What strikes me about this anti-drag fervor (which really is a drag in and of itself) is that you don't get much more obviously gay than somebody in drag so that's the extreme example reactionaries seize upon as a focus for their general homophobia and fear of the other. This is basically the same point you were making.
That's a good point. You can no longer tell who's gay. Drag queens prrrrrobably are. And you aren't seeing them in a grainy News photo in the back of a paddy wagon anymore -- you're seeing them celebrated at brunch. THUS FALLS THE REPUBLIC!
There is (or was) a traditional ceremony for sailors in the Navy when they cross the equator for the first time, and it involved drag. I have a bunch of snapshots of one of these events I found at an estate sale. No doubt some of these outraged peoples' dads and grandpas.
Note that there is a species of anti-Semite who doesn't mind Chasidim or other Orthodox Jews who are obvious, but whose berserk-button is pressed by a guy with a big nose who 'dresses like everyone else'.
Unless you're caught stealing classified documents, or you've declared bankruptcy multiple times or you couldn't even win Arizona or Georgia. Shame is for the LITTLE people.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
And anyone who presents as a woman who isn't rail-thin should be ashamed and hide away, out of our sight.
Also, one of the dumber takes on Biden's student loan forgiveness is that it's all part of "participation trophy culture." Because people who need help should have the decency to hide themselves away in shame, instead of loudly asking for help.
If I was Biden (and thank God I'm not) I'd be trolling Trump every day about this: "I have directed the Department of the Treasury to make a large, gold-plated participation trophy for Mr. Trump and will be sending it to Mar-a-Lago to mark that he definitely was a candidate in the 2020 election, right up to the end."
I'm resolutely pro-shame if it's over, say, oppressing workers or the poor, or being racist, or _wanting_ to give other people orders…but not over private and voluntary matters, that's _stupid_.
And yet, literally within a couple of days, this obsession over drag will seem to be the least crazy shit spewing out of their mouths what with senators encouraging violent resistance to holding a lawbreaking/national security threat accountable under the law and whatever spews out of Traitorous Donnie's upper sphincter at the rally Saturday. But, you know, a very limited sense of what lives can be like and zero tolerance who those don't conform... fine people there. Imagine, the audacity not to teach kids to be haters. Terrible.
Oh. Just remembered that President Yang told us that hating those people is bad and not nice.
"[D]rag is associated with gay life. But so are, I don’t know, disco and Elton John and brush mustaches." And, I'd add, a well-closeted senator from South Carolina who I'm dissing there less for feeling the need to be closeted and a hypocrite so much as being so disgusting a human being that, it is alleged, all his intimate relationships are transactions. (Not dissing sex workers, just his complete reliance on them because of an apparent inability to find someone to connect with. I mean, the lack of such a relationship at all or choice not to have one, I think, are not good signs. Willing to be corrected on that point.)
That Lindsey Ladybugs requires the services of sex workers would most likely be seen as a triumph by the sort of minister, preacher, or priest who tells his congregants "We welcome you if you if you're gay... you just have to swear to never act upon those terrible urges."
Speaking as a cisgender heterosexual male of Roy's generation: I'm not terribly proud of this, but when I was young, although I didn't care a bit about someone's sexual orientation, I thought drag queens were, to use a precise word, "icky." I think it was the flamboyance that bothered me, which is essentially what Roy is saying. Along the same lines, it was people not following the rules and just being themselves without worrying about decorum. But if you're a conservative, decorum is very important, because it's the gateway drug to authoritarianism.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I'm the Cis gay guy, who was probably even more freaked out at my first contacts with guys in drag.
But it was the '70s: Bowie was still touring, the New York Dolls were breaking up, Glam and Hair Rock and lots of queer people were about...and as I always hung out with musicians (it might have had something to do with always owning a vehicle capable of carrying band equipment), it was a somewhat more bemused and perhaps open time. By the time I got involved in the art scene in ATL, it was quite gender bent, and I knew RuPaul slightly: seeing his first explicit drag performance at the 688 Club, after he'd had several genderfuck rock bands..
I saw the GAGOP and rightwing preachers rile up the idgits in North Georgia over trans kids IN YOUR CHILD'S GYM SHOWER in the runup to '16. It worked like a charm, and there were indication they were planning to go with the Trans Issue (They are agin it, and Them) in '20. Covid crapped all over that: so they feel it will excite the usual suspects this year..
Pat Buchanan's Culture War speech was some 30 years ago (Aug. 17 1992): it began referencing a N. Georgia town where they loved him. He would love the anti Trans panic the local GOP bastards are running as their signature issue there now.
I'm a genderqueer (it kind of comes with being a multiple personality) bisexual who was taken in by radfems at fifteen. They offered me a view of the world that said my abuse was not my fault, but the fault of the patriarchy (by which they meant penises) and that was incredibly attractive and caused so much baggage. Part of this was an unshaking belief (for about six months) that drag and transvestites and trans people were all the same: men telling women they weren't performing femininity well enough. So I was mad at them until I actually started listening to people, which I admit mostly happened because I was bisexual and oh my god radfems have always hated that. As much as I agree pointing out hypocrisy doesn't really persuade people to stop being assholes, it actually did for me.
Not to be cynical, but do you think it was easier to listen to men because you had some sexual interest in them? I bring it up because 0.) as a cis/het autistic man, I find women more interesting and tolerable to me than men (I try to watch for getting creepy about it, but…), and 1.) because sometimes I wonder if part of the Right's hatred of gayness is rooted in a correct knowledge that their conception of how the world should work _requires_ continual cruelty between men that the tenderness of eros would break.
Honestly, I dunno. I was CSA by a number of dudes, and it left me hating men, being horrified that I was at all sexually attracted to them, and wanting nothing to do with them. Radfem Dianics took me in and taught me feminism, and that was not the best way to learn it. I'm still digging out.
I do tend to cheer for the underdog, and realizing that "cis white woman", even MSpec and severely mentally ill, does not actually sit at the bottom of that list. A series of conversations with a Black bi cis dude broke me out of "But *I* am the victim here". Even if it hadn't, the anti-trans people are so goddamned hateful and vicious against people who are minding their own damned business that it would repel me. I wonder if it does anyone else.
As a CSA survivor, the fact that they're so full on determined to destroy the meaning of words like "pedophile" and "abuse" and "rape" means I want nothing the fuck to do with them, and I've seen a lot of others saying the same thing. Why would you call a non-abuser a pedophile while ignoring actual pedophilia? Because you want the word to mean nothing. The same strategy they used on "racist" and "fascist" and frankly "communist" though going the other direction.
If you want to protect kids, this, just as the Q Save The Children bullshit it grew out of, is the opposite of helpful.
As far as likely to listen to dudes, I dunno. We've always had a thing for MSpec and gay men, and yes I've done plenty of therapy on that. Learning to accept straight dudes has been an ongoing thing. Once we figured out people weren't going to attack us just because they had a dick, we realized we liked, not even just accepted, all sorts of people. I don't think that's something we'd have learned without bi dudes, we needed someone who might be a threat, in our categories, to demonstrate they weren't. (I feel bad about that. People shouldn't have to prove they won't abuse you.)
hell, they tried as hard as they could to destroy the meaning of the word liberal. that's what started me identifying as that instead of democrat, or left wing. fuck their feelings, (if they even have any outside of hatred).
Aug 31, 2022·edited Aug 31, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
This fuckery of an outrage cycle regarding drag (& my transgender/GNC siblings who are its real targets) wearies me: I'm transfemme, genderqueer, & pansexual. I thought it safe to come out of my hedgehog burrow finally after so many years — but no amount of tooth-gnashing or fist-shaking by that lot will drive me back. Or the rest of us: things have changed too much & the obvious distraction of their outrage is much too much obvious at this stage.
Anyways queerphobia won't be truly dead until cishet dudes stop feeling the need to compulsively add "I'm as str8 as they come" before making any public affirmation of support for us queers. Until then my community, mostly especially BIPOC, trans/GNC, & disabled queers (or some combination), will be at a high degree of risk from y'all.
"I'm not a chicken by any stretch of the imagination, mind you -- far from it actually. But we oughta take a look at conditions on industrial poultry farms..." Sounds rather silly, doesn't?
All "the personal is political" really means to me is that your transformation in the former informs your transformation in the latter. And that's always in stages.
There's that, but to me there's also the way personal and political structures interact, most simply by reproduction. A basic example: it's easy for a culture in which fathers absolutely rule their family to be one in which kings or tyrants absolutely rule the nation.
"...drag and transvestites and trans people were all the same..." Had the same mistaken belief when I was a young guy. I think there's still a lot of confusion/misconceptions about these things*, especially among guys.
*I said "things" because I honestly don't have the vocabulary. "Conditions" sounds medical/judgmental; "states" sounds too abstract and goofy; "ways of living"? Naah. Can someone help me?
"concepts" or "identities" might be more helpful -- & both are "things" in the way they are both nouns. I very much appreciate that you're thinking through the implications of various way to talk about it. Queerness has often been stuck in a grey zone between pathology, criminal statute, & fetish -- and those terms hang on because folks are both familiar with them or presume they're "value-neutral."
You want to open a can of worms, start digging into the course of language surrounding trans-spectrum identities, even among different generations of people within them... yeesh...
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
For (small c and big C) conservatives, non-binary identity of any stripe is the last stop on the NO SIR I DON'T LIKE IT express. It threatens the tiny grasp they have on their deeply-held, constructed, primordial identities of 'powerful man, good mother, man/woman' at a base level. They can't accept (or be seen to condone) any drag as even an art form, a cultivated character with a discernible gender identity, even when that IS all it is... (not to mention cis-gendered women who perform as drag artists.) The whole matter of drag as an historical political statement is another matter entirely. Other cultures/nations have supported cross- and non-gender art forms since forever. No matter how mainstream Ru and the franchises have gotten (or how much money their TV stocks benefit) this is personal and will stay that way for good 'mericans.
It's the "pride" part that drives them nuts. They are (or at least were) OK with drag as long as it's absolutely clear that it's being done for THEIR amusement, in the spirit of minstrelsy. But drag in the form of "This is who I am, and too bad for you if you can't handle it" is totally unacceptable.
black and white, 1% doctrine, one drop. fuck, how dull a strictly binary life must be. easy? yes. no thought required. perfect for the modern (post 1500AD, or is it BC?) conservative.
I'm currently reading some things about pre-Columbian, pre-imperialism "native" cultures, and festivals when men and women would exchange clothes and roles, for reasons you state: fun rituals that disrupt the mundane. If "drag" goes back into prehistory, why don't cons relish the historicity of their ancestors they always look back fondly on.
Orthodox Judaism is dead-set against wearing the clothing 'proper' to the other sex…except at Purim (at least most Ashekenazi authorities tolerated such, as well as drunkenness then) .
Yet they support the Sunday worship hour featuring men in dresses who have been reliably accused of sexually molesting children. The Cognition doesn't get more Dissonant than that.
To be fair, some of them still think the Pope Anti-Christ and the Romish church the Whore of Babylon. The _only_ satisfaction I can see getting in Gilead would be the Catholics' getting tossed from the coalition the morning after Der Tag and the Orthodox Jews the next Saturday.
This, and my earlier post about some Catholics, bring to mind a story about a woman seeing Coral Browne leaving church, walked up to her, and reported to her a particularly juicy bit of gossip.
…to which Browne reportedly replied 'How _dare_ you tell me that sort of thing when Iʼm in a fucking State of Grace!?'.
Why should Good Conservatives _care_ what this author says about Drag Queens? His knowledge of 'Ionic [GREEK!] columns' and. 'volutes' makes him (a pronoun!) highly suspect.
The Visitation at Fatima is a fetiche-event for what the Rev. Ivan Stang called the Zombo-Catholics. Some of them actually mean this one woman in Queens' visions about The Church, which started when she visited the Portuguese pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair; we used to receive the "Michael Fighting" newsletter (Fatima, the Latin Mass, and Social Credit) from these people.
Wow. I remember them peddling some of this stuff from my Catholic childhood (particularly a Fatima comic book) but the Michael Fighting newsletter is news to me!
I think it is related to the Fatima Mansions band, they celebrate dead ponies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnvsgWD_pAQ
Well, the name was pretty unique and I have a very good memory for some things
Like a very attractive friend of mine said about his Texas adolescence: they didn't know whether to kill me or fuck me.
Hearted involuntarily.
Anecdote: was commuting by bicycle back in the longhair days when a pickup pulled up slow behind me and the passenger said "Nice ass!". When the truck pulled even I looked at him and he slumped into the seat, while the driver started laughing loud and long. We both stopped at the light, and I rested my hand on the door of the truck and invoked my deep voice (stored somewhere to be pulled out for just such occasions), saying "Thanks, man. I work out, you know?" The driver completely lost it and the passenger tried to slide under the seat as I rode away.
I had just figured-out that they were regularly screaming 'Faggot!' at (girl-crazy but sports-hating and book-loving) me only because it was a standard insult when they proved me at least somewhat wrong by somewhat aggressively asking me for sex.
I was in North Carolina in the mid-seventies. I had very long hair but I also had a Biblical beard, a white coat and a stethoscope. I guess the beard prevented any inappropriate sexual advances from males. Females were another matter - exoticism, I think. My residency director, in my first annual review, said they'd had a lot of discussion about whether to accept me into the program. I thought he was going to riff on my appearance, but he said, "You know, we never had a person from New York before and we didn't know how that would work out." Another of my med school classmates, similarly hirsute, went to NC. He said, "No one seemed to care about how I looked. They thought I was a Mennonite." It was the racism that made me leave when my training was over, not any personal animosity towards me. I've thought many times that I was a coward not to have stayed to try to combat that racism.
Man, the stuff people carry around. We're all loaded down with self-inflictions.
Not that I am authorized to inflict advice upon anyone, but...
Let it go, man. And carry on.
Similar experience. Played in cover bands in bars thru the MTV 80's--big hair, tight pants, the works. A few times on slow nights between sets (when the DJ was playing), I'd be standing at the bar and guys would approach me from behind and ALMOST ask me if I wanted to dance (I'd turn as soon as someone tapped me on the shoulder). I laughed it off, but the look in their eyes, like they'd been deceived or even cheated somehow. I could tell they were pissed off, just couldn't figure out if they were pissed off at me or themselves, or both.
[picture of Rudy in drag with Donald Trump]
It's worth noting that their leader, their object of adoration, their ideal of all that is truly manly and masculine is Donald J. Trump. You know, former president? The guy who wears heavy makeup all the time? The guy who spends an hour every day getting his hair JUST RIGHT? The guy who wears high heels?
Could it be that drag queens remind them a little too much that their acme of masculinity is actually a fey weakling, mewling coward, and far less than manly?
And let it not be forgotten that he also wants us to return to those storied days of yesteryear, when men were men and elections were effectively redone no matter how many years it took.
I think it goes even deeper than that, to their self-doubts about their own "manhood", whatever that is. Drag just picks at that scab they are terrified of having fall completely off, to show the world just how alone and afraid they really are. Trump is just an avatar for that scab, why else would they splice his big fat head on top of Mr. Atlas wielding an "AR-47" (what the fascist in Texas said the anti-fascist was carrying)?
Because it's a reminder that (as much as they'd like to beat it out of us, beginning in infancy) the world is not White and straight and narrow.
They've spent their lives trying to live up to a "strong and silent" Gary Cooper standard of masculinity, a standard no real human can actually achieve, and then Donald Trump comes along, a guy who will whine loudly for an hour about one bad review in a newspaper, and they fall head over heels for him.
I still remember when ideals of masculinity meant being a good sport, calmly accepting defeat, maybe even shaking your opponent's hand ("Well played, sir!" and all that). "Waaaah, you cheated!" wasn't any part of the masculinity I was brought up on in my narrow Midwestern childhood.
Losers whined back then, but it did not change their status.
Losing and bearing it, as opposed to kicking and screaming and whinging and shouting and getting some concession, or at least making it clear that you won't tolerate losing again—above and beyond their having ever paid rent to men like him (thank-you, Thomas Pynchon near the end of "Inherent Vice")—is why he considers them loooosers.
"acme of masculinity"
2 marks for such an evocative phrase. Oh so many opportunities wherein to apply it.
Fair enough, but now I have a Tony Millionaire panel in which Drinky Crow is calling either his love-interest or maybe Sock Monkey in drag 'The Acme of Femininity!' stuck in my head.
[LATER]: I think it's a French/Crocodile captain or admiral admiring Sock Monkey in drag. I'm pretty sure Drinky Crow got him into it, though.
But, honestly, isn't the Acme of Masculinity a spring- or rocket-powered penis that gets you knocked senseless by a cliff-face with a roadway and sky painted-on, flattened by a boulder, and then be subject to a rare and painful condition which causes you to expand upward and contract downward alternately as you walk, and to emit an off-key, accordion-like wheezing with every step, temporarily restricting your ability to make your living in your profession of predator?
Yeah, probly...
I had my fingers crossed that at least one of the transvestites he took home from Studio 54 or similar would talk…maybe Uncle Roy spotted them and waved him away from them.
Uncle Miltie is DEAD to me!!
And then there's that scene in Bridge on the River Kwai, they've finished the bridge, time for a lil' celebration, which naturally involves a show where one soldier dressed as a lady sings a love song to another soldier. Makes the whole film unwatchable now.
There's a scene with an whole chorus-line in "Slaughterhouse-Five', at the P. W. camp where the Brits got four[?] times the Red Cross packages they were supposed to have, and so had energy for that kind of thing.
'Camp' supposedly derives from '[military] camp show'.
Fnord Pater, who as a P.W. when imprisoned with a different group of Brits may have worked in the same syrup factory as a Vonnegut, on hearing of how much those lucky ones had got, responded with a simple 'We didnʼt.', hence his May 1945 mass of about 43kg. (Hence my bearing with his assessment of the devastation of Leipzig in the same raid as Dresden: 'I didnʼt know iron could burn, but we were happy to see it.'—as he also said: 'Starvation is bad for you, you stop being human.')
Damn...
This just sent me down a youtube rabbit hole which resulted in my watching video of Alec Baldwin doing the Honey Bun number from South Pacific with Reba McEntire at Carnegie Hall just because I wanted to make a crack about how unwatchable that number (with Ray Walston) made the 1958 film.
That unwatchability might reflect a good level of accuracy.
Mind you, in the right mood it puts a different gloss on the proudly announced (when the Japanese advance has been stopped) 'We‘re going the other way!'.
Very cogent and persuasive, Roy. I'd only quibble with "I don’t see any of these guys going 'How dare you play Hakuna Matata around my kids!'” If you follow Right Wing Watch, with their focus on the evangelical right, you're sure to find plenty of those guys -- pastors of megachurches, "prophets" with thousands of followers on YouTube, some of them name-checked from time to time by more "respectable" wingers -- saying Disney movies have been grooming children for the Antichrist since (((Eisner))) took over.
That is very true! All I mean there is that other works of gayness have already been processed and adopted even by bigoted straights. NOW Disney is a "groomer": https://edroso.substack.com/p/hold-me-close-hardcore-never-let but it never clicks with these guys that the musicals their grown kids loved as children were written by a gay man who wore outrageous costumes on stage.
I'm afraid it's been going on for more than a quarter of a century. From the Wikipedia article on "American Life League":
"American Life League was founded on April 1, 1979 by Judie and Paul Brown, Gary Bauer, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, and six other anti-abortion Americans after a schism with the National Right to Life Committee. Within less than a year of its founding, ALL had 68,000 members and received assistance founding ALL from Howard Phillips, publicity from Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, and membership lists provided by right-wing direct mail specialist Richard Viguerie. . . .
"In March 1995, the American Life League boycotted the then-owners of Miramax, The Walt Disney Company, over the film Priest, in which a Roman Catholic priest deals with a variety of issues including his own homosexuality. Subsequently, ALL charged that Disney had concealed subliminal sexual messages in the animated films The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin. Disney denied all the claims."
Well, they WOULD deny it, wouldn't they?
I'll be honest, I had to look up Ionic columns and. their volutes. I still enjoy looking stuff up. Someday, and it'll probably be sooner then later, I'll see stuff like that and not look it up figuring "That's just Edroso being high falutin again"
Here at work we've expanded to the full Fall Season staff - about 140 people. All ages - just as many young's as olds.
Out of 140 people, I bet 25 of them identify as something other than straight. And really, nobody gives a fuck. This is in a small rural community. The people that work here are from here or from surrounding communities just like this one.
I'm pretty sure gender hate as political issue is several years past the sell-by date. Everybody has a gay Uncle/Daughter/Son/ Mom/Preacher/ Teacher and most people don't GAF.
They can still rile the Rubes
up about it, sure. But Rubes are always gonna get riled about something.
The falutes way up high on those ionical columns are voot, valoot and GONE!
(apologies to Slim 'n Slam)
Should add here that if those columns were Corinthian, all bets would be off, and Senator Cruz would be calling for investigations...
Son, in our house the columns are plain, simple, and Doric, the way our forefathers intended.
Simple? You call that SIMPLE?! Just sheet rock and 2x4s in OUR abode, boyo!
Columns for show, lumber for dough!
"Columns for show, lumber for dough" -- two marks! (Though I assume this at least alludes to a common carpentry jest.
COMMON??!!
Fightin' words, bro!
Wrecking hammers or rip saws* – your choice!
*Was gonna say 'coping saws', but, well, you know...
They've been through a debate about gay marriage where the face of the opposition was middle-class folks in some VERY Long Term Relationships. They're still smarting after the loss, this is their chance to say, "Nah, THAT'S not what 'gay' is, THIS is what 'gay' is!"
My mother, who spent forty years convinced me being bisexual was the same thing as being a slut (She wasn't wrong, I was a slut, but it wasn't because I was bi.), has now bought me a Laverne Cox Barbie and is apparently defending my brother's nonbinary child.
She used to think Monty Python was disgusting because of the drag. You cannot imagine her response to RHPS.
Me? I think people should be allowed to try on clothes and identities as they wish.
My mother was convinced that drag was intended to mock women; then again her formative experience with known-gay men was what sounded like a very bitchy guy on the university newspaper, who along with her was likely crushing on Lucien Carr. (No, he wasn't Kammerer.)
I'm not gonna say some drag queens and gay dudes are not huge flaming misogynists, because some absolutely are.
But part of growing up for me was to stop blaming entire groups of people for the behavior of some. It took me a while.
Climbing out of the box someone stuffs us into is hard enough, I s'pose. Breaking down the boxes we stuff others into is harder, but monumentally important, to us and to them (even if they do not know it).
It's a very standard human behaviour…which is yet another reason why I'm transhumanist, I (in the words of Captain Malcolm Reynolds, who very possibly fought for chattel slavery) 'want to make people better', though I don't want to be fucking stupid going about it. (I'd also like to improve directors and producers so they'd stop screwing actors, at least while they were still their immediate boss.)
My mom won't watch Drag Race because they call each other "bitch" & had no time for Monty Python because their drag characters were less-than-flattering images of women.
And misogyny among cis-gays is alarmingly high, even if most lingers at a junior high school level ("ew... gross!") -- and that misogyny often leads to femme-shaming, twink-shaming, bottom-shaming, & transphobia.
That's an interesting point. It was only on the very rare occasions that my mother made reference to some sexual crudity on TV or on the stage that I got any sense of what informed her opinion on such things. Thanks, I had not thought about that for years.
Yeah, moms...gotta love 'em (assuming they deserve it).
Was a tense evening in our house the night we all watched 'Do The Right Thing' together. I was not happy that the language got heard by me sainted mother...
When I think Ionic, I think solute, not volute
Well, if the columns are marble, yeah, pretty much...
You don't get much more cishet than me. I've never had the least interest in wearing women's clothes, but I also don't give a shit if someone else does. What strikes me about this anti-drag fervor (which really is a drag in and of itself) is that you don't get much more obviously gay than somebody in drag so that's the extreme example reactionaries seize upon as a focus for their general homophobia and fear of the other. This is basically the same point you were making.
That's a good point. You can no longer tell who's gay. Drag queens prrrrrobably are. And you aren't seeing them in a grainy News photo in the back of a paddy wagon anymore -- you're seeing them celebrated at brunch. THUS FALLS THE REPUBLIC!
"My God, they don't even have the decency to be ashamed of it!"
Hearted for 'celebrated at brunch'. Missing only the addition of 'fabulous'.
1.5 marks!
There is (or was) a traditional ceremony for sailors in the Navy when they cross the equator for the first time, and it involved drag. I have a bunch of snapshots of one of these events I found at an estate sale. No doubt some of these outraged peoples' dads and grandpas.
The death of democracy comes with free bottomless mimosas...
Careful with that 'bottomless', chap.
Note that there is a species of anti-Semite who doesn't mind Chasidim or other Orthodox Jews who are obvious, but whose berserk-button is pressed by a guy with a big nose who 'dresses like everyone else'.
I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but drag is anti-shame, and will naturally attract the hate of those who are resolutely pro-shame.
Yeah, this. Foundational to the cause. If you ain't shamed you ain't with the program!
Unless you're caught stealing classified documents, or you've declared bankruptcy multiple times or you couldn't even win Arizona or Georgia. Shame is for the LITTLE people.
But "Why are people so mean?!"
And anyone who presents as a woman who isn't rail-thin should be ashamed and hide away, out of our sight.
Also, one of the dumber takes on Biden's student loan forgiveness is that it's all part of "participation trophy culture." Because people who need help should have the decency to hide themselves away in shame, instead of loudly asking for help.
If I was Biden (and thank God I'm not) I'd be trolling Trump every day about this: "I have directed the Department of the Treasury to make a large, gold-plated participation trophy for Mr. Trump and will be sending it to Mar-a-Lago to mark that he definitely was a candidate in the 2020 election, right up to the end."
One could also make the case that "participation trophy culture" was what motivated January 6th (and continues to do so).
"I got 75 million votes!"
"Yes, you did, Donald, and that's VERY GOOD. Would you like a Capri Sun?"
Pick up the damn straw!
Yeah, it occurred to me that this particular drag queen is also of a size they consider gross.
🎶 oh it don’t feel the same if it ain’t got that shame! 🎵
"And don't do the crime if you can't do the time!"
(insert little musical note thingies and multiple Doowahs)
This right here. And you don't know that unless you talk to people about what they're doing and why.
I'm resolutely pro-shame if it's over, say, oppressing workers or the poor, or being racist, or _wanting_ to give other people orders…but not over private and voluntary matters, that's _stupid_.
And yet, literally within a couple of days, this obsession over drag will seem to be the least crazy shit spewing out of their mouths what with senators encouraging violent resistance to holding a lawbreaking/national security threat accountable under the law and whatever spews out of Traitorous Donnie's upper sphincter at the rally Saturday. But, you know, a very limited sense of what lives can be like and zero tolerance who those don't conform... fine people there. Imagine, the audacity not to teach kids to be haters. Terrible.
Oh. Just remembered that President Yang told us that hating those people is bad and not nice.
"[D]rag is associated with gay life. But so are, I don’t know, disco and Elton John and brush mustaches." And, I'd add, a well-closeted senator from South Carolina who I'm dissing there less for feeling the need to be closeted and a hypocrite so much as being so disgusting a human being that, it is alleged, all his intimate relationships are transactions. (Not dissing sex workers, just his complete reliance on them because of an apparent inability to find someone to connect with. I mean, the lack of such a relationship at all or choice not to have one, I think, are not good signs. Willing to be corrected on that point.)
"Acme of masculinity Senator Lindsey Graham threatened to unleash the attack hamsters today..."
"If Donald Trump is indicted there will be riots in the streets"
Well, if you want to call me, dancing drunkenly down the center of State Street in Madison, a "riot" I guess I won't object.
"Car 54 Where Are You?"
When I heard that I said to myself, "Where? Oconomowoc?" (little Wisconsin inside joke.)
Dancin' in Chicago,
Down in New Orleans,
In New York City,
All we need is an indictment,
Sweet indictment..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhbM2mqhCQ
That Lindsey Ladybugs requires the services of sex workers would most likely be seen as a triumph by the sort of minister, preacher, or priest who tells his congregants "We welcome you if you if you're gay... you just have to swear to never act upon those terrible urges."
My point was, more or less, that he’s unfit for let’s say non-transactional human relationships.
OTOH, nearly every politician’s primary relationships are transactional.
And now I confuse myself.
Yeah, I was gonna say...
Speaking as a cisgender heterosexual male of Roy's generation: I'm not terribly proud of this, but when I was young, although I didn't care a bit about someone's sexual orientation, I thought drag queens were, to use a precise word, "icky." I think it was the flamboyance that bothered me, which is essentially what Roy is saying. Along the same lines, it was people not following the rules and just being themselves without worrying about decorum. But if you're a conservative, decorum is very important, because it's the gateway drug to authoritarianism.
I'm the Cis gay guy, who was probably even more freaked out at my first contacts with guys in drag.
But it was the '70s: Bowie was still touring, the New York Dolls were breaking up, Glam and Hair Rock and lots of queer people were about...and as I always hung out with musicians (it might have had something to do with always owning a vehicle capable of carrying band equipment), it was a somewhat more bemused and perhaps open time. By the time I got involved in the art scene in ATL, it was quite gender bent, and I knew RuPaul slightly: seeing his first explicit drag performance at the 688 Club, after he'd had several genderfuck rock bands..
I saw the GAGOP and rightwing preachers rile up the idgits in North Georgia over trans kids IN YOUR CHILD'S GYM SHOWER in the runup to '16. It worked like a charm, and there were indication they were planning to go with the Trans Issue (They are agin it, and Them) in '20. Covid crapped all over that: so they feel it will excite the usual suspects this year..
Pat Buchanan's Culture War speech was some 30 years ago (Aug. 17 1992): it began referencing a N. Georgia town where they loved him. He would love the anti Trans panic the local GOP bastards are running as their signature issue there now.
I'm a genderqueer (it kind of comes with being a multiple personality) bisexual who was taken in by radfems at fifteen. They offered me a view of the world that said my abuse was not my fault, but the fault of the patriarchy (by which they meant penises) and that was incredibly attractive and caused so much baggage. Part of this was an unshaking belief (for about six months) that drag and transvestites and trans people were all the same: men telling women they weren't performing femininity well enough. So I was mad at them until I actually started listening to people, which I admit mostly happened because I was bisexual and oh my god radfems have always hated that. As much as I agree pointing out hypocrisy doesn't really persuade people to stop being assholes, it actually did for me.
Not to be cynical, but do you think it was easier to listen to men because you had some sexual interest in them? I bring it up because 0.) as a cis/het autistic man, I find women more interesting and tolerable to me than men (I try to watch for getting creepy about it, but…), and 1.) because sometimes I wonder if part of the Right's hatred of gayness is rooted in a correct knowledge that their conception of how the world should work _requires_ continual cruelty between men that the tenderness of eros would break.
Honestly, I dunno. I was CSA by a number of dudes, and it left me hating men, being horrified that I was at all sexually attracted to them, and wanting nothing to do with them. Radfem Dianics took me in and taught me feminism, and that was not the best way to learn it. I'm still digging out.
I do tend to cheer for the underdog, and realizing that "cis white woman", even MSpec and severely mentally ill, does not actually sit at the bottom of that list. A series of conversations with a Black bi cis dude broke me out of "But *I* am the victim here". Even if it hadn't, the anti-trans people are so goddamned hateful and vicious against people who are minding their own damned business that it would repel me. I wonder if it does anyone else.
As a CSA survivor, the fact that they're so full on determined to destroy the meaning of words like "pedophile" and "abuse" and "rape" means I want nothing the fuck to do with them, and I've seen a lot of others saying the same thing. Why would you call a non-abuser a pedophile while ignoring actual pedophilia? Because you want the word to mean nothing. The same strategy they used on "racist" and "fascist" and frankly "communist" though going the other direction.
If you want to protect kids, this, just as the Q Save The Children bullshit it grew out of, is the opposite of helpful.
As far as likely to listen to dudes, I dunno. We've always had a thing for MSpec and gay men, and yes I've done plenty of therapy on that. Learning to accept straight dudes has been an ongoing thing. Once we figured out people weren't going to attack us just because they had a dick, we realized we liked, not even just accepted, all sorts of people. I don't think that's something we'd have learned without bi dudes, we needed someone who might be a threat, in our categories, to demonstrate they weren't. (I feel bad about that. People shouldn't have to prove they won't abuse you.)
> People shouldn't have to prove they won't abuse you.
Sure, but as Popeye's Pappy put it, you came by that strategy honestly.
Thanks.
hell, they tried as hard as they could to destroy the meaning of the word liberal. that's what started me identifying as that instead of democrat, or left wing. fuck their feelings, (if they even have any outside of hatred).
This fuckery of an outrage cycle regarding drag (& my transgender/GNC siblings who are its real targets) wearies me: I'm transfemme, genderqueer, & pansexual. I thought it safe to come out of my hedgehog burrow finally after so many years — but no amount of tooth-gnashing or fist-shaking by that lot will drive me back. Or the rest of us: things have changed too much & the obvious distraction of their outrage is much too much obvious at this stage.
Anyways queerphobia won't be truly dead until cishet dudes stop feeling the need to compulsively add "I'm as str8 as they come" before making any public affirmation of support for us queers. Until then my community, mostly especially BIPOC, trans/GNC, & disabled queers (or some combination), will be at a high degree of risk from y'all.
"I'm not a chicken by any stretch of the imagination, mind you -- far from it actually. But we oughta take a look at conditions on industrial poultry farms..." Sounds rather silly, doesn't?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJX85xfzkE
All "the personal is political" really means to me is that your transformation in the former informs your transformation in the latter. And that's always in stages.
There's that, but to me there's also the way personal and political structures interact, most simply by reproduction. A basic example: it's easy for a culture in which fathers absolutely rule their family to be one in which kings or tyrants absolutely rule the nation.
"...drag and transvestites and trans people were all the same..." Had the same mistaken belief when I was a young guy. I think there's still a lot of confusion/misconceptions about these things*, especially among guys.
*I said "things" because I honestly don't have the vocabulary. "Conditions" sounds medical/judgmental; "states" sounds too abstract and goofy; "ways of living"? Naah. Can someone help me?
"concepts" or "identities" might be more helpful -- & both are "things" in the way they are both nouns. I very much appreciate that you're thinking through the implications of various way to talk about it. Queerness has often been stuck in a grey zone between pathology, criminal statute, & fetish -- and those terms hang on because folks are both familiar with them or presume they're "value-neutral."
You want to open a can of worms, start digging into the course of language surrounding trans-spectrum identities, even among different generations of people within them... yeesh...
I was very unenlightened as a young man. In fact I'm not really enlightened now. You know how dharma goes.
Reread just now 'cause I knew I'd get more out of it than from just one. Mainly I hearted the whole damn thing for its insight, but there's this, to:
"your average GOP candidate stands on drag queens", which, decontextualization notwithstanding,
2 marks!
For (small c and big C) conservatives, non-binary identity of any stripe is the last stop on the NO SIR I DON'T LIKE IT express. It threatens the tiny grasp they have on their deeply-held, constructed, primordial identities of 'powerful man, good mother, man/woman' at a base level. They can't accept (or be seen to condone) any drag as even an art form, a cultivated character with a discernible gender identity, even when that IS all it is... (not to mention cis-gendered women who perform as drag artists.) The whole matter of drag as an historical political statement is another matter entirely. Other cultures/nations have supported cross- and non-gender art forms since forever. No matter how mainstream Ru and the franchises have gotten (or how much money their TV stocks benefit) this is personal and will stay that way for good 'mericans.
It's the "pride" part that drives them nuts. They are (or at least were) OK with drag as long as it's absolutely clear that it's being done for THEIR amusement, in the spirit of minstrelsy. But drag in the form of "This is who I am, and too bad for you if you can't handle it" is totally unacceptable.
Right, even though every day is Old White Man Pride day
Lettin' our non-freak flag fly every day since god was a pup!
Non-freaks are rare enough that you qualify as a type of freaky.
I lean Freekeh!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freekeh
black and white, 1% doctrine, one drop. fuck, how dull a strictly binary life must be. easy? yes. no thought required. perfect for the modern (post 1500AD, or is it BC?) conservative.
I'm currently reading some things about pre-Columbian, pre-imperialism "native" cultures, and festivals when men and women would exchange clothes and roles, for reasons you state: fun rituals that disrupt the mundane. If "drag" goes back into prehistory, why don't cons relish the historicity of their ancestors they always look back fondly on.
Because someone, somewhere, might be having fun.
oh god no, anything but that. sex standing up could lead to dancing, etc.
Orthodox Judaism is dead-set against wearing the clothing 'proper' to the other sex…except at Purim (at least most Ashekenazi authorities tolerated such, as well as drunkenness then) .
Yet they support the Sunday worship hour featuring men in dresses who have been reliably accused of sexually molesting children. The Cognition doesn't get more Dissonant than that.
Check out the Pope if you wanna see someone who can Vogue with STYLE.
To be fair, some of them still think the Pope Anti-Christ and the Romish church the Whore of Babylon. The _only_ satisfaction I can see getting in Gilead would be the Catholics' getting tossed from the coalition the morning after Der Tag and the Orthodox Jews the next Saturday.
“Darling, I love your dress, but your purse is on fire.” https://robtpatrick.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/my-tallulah-bankhead-stories/
This, and my earlier post about some Catholics, bring to mind a story about a woman seeing Coral Browne leaving church, walked up to her, and reported to her a particularly juicy bit of gossip.
…to which Browne reportedly replied 'How _dare_ you tell me that sort of thing when Iʼm in a fucking State of Grace!?'.
Why should Good Conservatives _care_ what this author says about Drag Queens? His knowledge of 'Ionic [GREEK!] columns' and. 'volutes' makes him (a pronoun!) highly suspect.
Actually, they do get pretty outraged at Hakuna Matata.
Anyway, my plan is to cure my depression and then become the world's glitteriest cis drag queen just to confuse the fuck out of these killjoys.
Carry on, carry on...