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ultralullstuff · 4 years

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Is Paris Burning?

There was a time in my life when I liked to dress up as a male and go out into the world. It was a form of ritual, of play. It was also about power. To cross-dress as a woman in patriarchy -then, more so than now - was also to symbolically cross from the world of powerlessness into a world of privilege. It was the ultimate, intimate, voyeuristic gesture. Searching old journals for passages documenting that time, I found this paragraph:

She pleaded with him, “Just once, well every now and then, I just want to be boys together. I want to dress like you and go out and make the world look at us differently, make them wonder about us, make them stare and ask those silly questions like is he a woman dressed up like a man, is he an older black gay man with his effeminate boy/girl lover flaunting same-sex love out in the open. Don’t worry I’ll take it very seriously, I want to let them laugh at you. I’ll make it real, keep them guessing, do it in such a way that they will never know for sure. Don’t worry when we come home I will be a girl for you again but for now I want us to be boys together.”

Cross-dressing, appearing in drag, transvestism, and transsexualism emerge in a contex where the notion of subjectivity is challenged, where identity is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change. Long before there was ever a contemporary feminist movement, the sites of these experiences were subverisve places where gender norms were questioned and challenged.

Within the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is symbolically crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness. Just to look at the many negative ways the word “drag” is defined reconnects this label to an experience that is seen as burdensome, as retrograe and retrogressive. To choose to appear as “female” when one is “male” is always constructed in the patriarchal mindset as a loss, as a choice worthy only of ridicule. Given this cultural backdrop, it is not surprising that many black comediants appearing on television screens for the first time included as part of their acts impersonations of black women. The black woman depicted was usually held up as an object of ridicules, scorn, hatred (representing the “female” image everyone was allowed to laugh at and show contempt for). Often the moment when a black male comedian appeared in drag was the most succesful segment of a given comedian’s act (for example, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, or Eddie Murphy).

I used to wonder if the sexual stereotype of black men as overly sexual, manly, as “rapists”, allowed black males to cross this gendered boundary more easily than white men without having to fear that they would be seen as possibly gay or transvestites. As a young black female, I found these images to be disempowering. Thay seemed to bothallow black males to give public expression to a general misogyny, as well as to a more specific hatred and contempt toward black woman. Growing up in a world where black women wer, and still are, the objects of extreme abuse, scorn, and ridicule, I felt these impersonations were aimed at reinforcing everyone’s power over us. In retrospect, I can see that the black male in drag was also a disempowering image of black masculinity. Appearing as a “woman” within sexist, racist media was a way to become in “play” that “castrated” silly childlike black male that racist white patriarchy was comfortable having as an image in their homes. These televised images of black men in drag were never subversive; thay helped sustain sexism and racism.

It came as no surprise to me that Catherine Clement in her book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women would include a section about black men and the way their representation in opera did not allow her to neatly separate the world into gendered polarities where men and women occupied distintcly different social spaces and were “two antagonistic halves, one persecuting the other since before the dawn of time.” Looking critically at images of black men in operas she found that they were most often portrayed as victims:

Eve is undone as a woman, endlesslyy bruised, endelessly dying and coming back to life to die even better. But now I begin to remember hearing figures of betrayed, wounded men; men who ham; men who have women’s troubles happen to them; men who have the status of Eve, as if they had lost their innate Adam. These men die like heroines; down on the ground they cry and moan, they lament. And like heroines they are surrounded by real men, veritable Adams who have cast them down. Thay partake of feminity: excluded, marked by some initial strangeness. Thay are doomed to their undoing.

Many heterosexual black men in white supremacist patriarchal culture have acted as though the primary “evil” of racism has been the refusal of the dominant culture to allow them full access to patriarchal power, so that in sexist terms thay are compelled to inhabit a sphere of powerlessness, deemed “feminine”, hence thay have perceived themselves as emasculated. To the extent that black men accept a white supremacist sexist representation of themselves as castrated, without phallic power, and therfore pseudo-females, thay will need to overly assert a phallic misogynist masculinity, one rooted in contempt for the female. Much black male homophobia is rooted in the desire to eschew connection with all things deemed “feminine” and that would, of course, include black gay men. A contemporary black comedian like Eddie Murphy “proves” his phallic power by daring to publicly ridicule women and gays. His days of appearing in drag are over. Indeed it is the drag queen of his misogynist imagination that is most often the image of black gay culture he evokes and subjects to comic homophobic assault -one that audiences collude in perpetuating.

For black males to take appearing in drag seriously, be they gay or straight, is to oppose a heterosexist representation of black manhood. Gender bending and blending on the part of black males has always been a critique of phalocentric masculinity in traditional black experience. Yet the subversive power of those images is radically altered when informed by a racialized fictional construction of the “feminine” that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender, that is to idealization of white womanhood. This is brutally evident in Jennie Livingston’s new film Paris is burning. Within the world of the black drag ball culture she deicts, the idea of womanness as feminity is totally personified by whiteness. What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like “real” black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of feminity that is white. Called out in the film by Dorian Carey, who names it by saying no black drag queen of his day wanted to be Lena Horne, he makes it clear that the feminity most sought after, most adored, was that perceived to be the exclusive property of whte womanhood. When we see visual representations of womanhood in the film (images torn from magazines and posted on walls in living space) they are, with rare exceptions, of white women. Significantly, the fixation on becoming as much like a white female as possible implicitly evokes a connection to a figure never visible in this film: that of the white male patriarch. And yet if the class, race, and gender aspirations expressed by the drag queens who share their deepest dreams is always longing to be in the position of the ruling-class woman then that means there is also thedesire to act in partnership with the ruling-class white male.

This combination of class and race longing that privileges the “feminity” of the ruling-class white woman, adored and kept, shrouded in luxury, does not imply a critique of patriarchy. Often it is assumed that the gay male, and most specifically the “queen”, is both anti-phallocentric and anti-patriarchal. Marilyn Frye’s essay, “Lesbian feminism and Gay Rights”, remains one of the most useful critical debunkings of this myth. Writing in The Politics of Reality, Frye comments:

One of thing which persuades the straight world that gay men are not really men is the effeminacy of style of some gay men and the gay institution of the impersonation of women, both of which are associated in the popular mind with male homosexuality. But as I read it, gay men’s effeminacy and donning of feminine apparel displays no love of or identification with women or the womanly. For the most part, this femininity is affected and is characterized by thatrical exaggeration. It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom feminity is the trapping of oppresion, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo.. What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports... But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine..

Any viewer of Paris is Burning can neither deny the way in which its contemporary drag balls have the aura of sports events, aggressive competitions, one team (in this case “house”) competing another etc., nor ignore the way in which the male “gaze” in the audience is directed at participants in a manner akin to the objectifying phallic stare straight men direct at “feminine” women daily in public spaces. Paris is Burning is a film that many audiences assume is inherently oppositional because of its subject matter and the identity of the filmmaker. Yet the film’s politics of race, gender, and class are played out in ways that are both progressive and reactionary.

When I first heard that there was this new documentary film about black gay men, drag queens, and drag balls I was fascinated by the title. It evoked images of the real Paris on fire, of the death and destruction of a dominating white western civilization and culture, an end to oppressive Eurocentrism and white supremacy. This fantasy not only gave me a sustained sense of plearure, it stood between me and the unlikely reality that a young white filmmaker, offering a progresssive vision of “blackness” from the standpoint of “whiteness”, would receive the positive press accorded Livingston and her film. Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness”. These folks left the film saying it was “amazing”, “marvelous”, “incredibly funny”, worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t just love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The “we” evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that ther is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What would be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfracnhised black folks might rise any day now and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a doumentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited, black folks are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure. Indeed it is the very “pleasure” that so many white viewers with class privilege experience when watching this film that has acted to censor dissenting voices who find the film and its reception critically problematic.

In Vincent Canby’s review of the film in the New York Times he begins by quoting the words of a black father to his homosexual son. The father shares that it is difficult for black men to survive in a racist society and that “if you’re black and male and gay, you have to be stronger that you can imagine”. Beginning his overwhelmingly positive review with the words of a straight black father, Canby implies that the film in some way documents such strenght, is a portrait of black gay pride. Yet he in no way indicates ways this pride and power are evident in the work. Like most reviewers of the film, what he finds most compelling is the pageantry of the drag balls. He uses no language identifying race and class perspectives when suggesting at the end of his piece that behind the role-playing “there is also a terrible sadness in the testimony”. This makes it appear that the politics of ruling-class white culture are solely social and not political, solely “aesthetic” questions of choice and desire rather that expressions of power and privilege. Canby does not tell readers that much of the tragedy and sadness of this film is evoked by the willingness of black gay men to knock themselves out imitating a ruling-class culture and power elite that is one of the primary agents of their oppression and exploitation. Ironically, the very “fantasies” evoked emerge from the colonizing context, and while marginalized people often appropriate and subvert aspects of the dominant culture, Paris is Burning does not forcefully suggest that such a process is taking place.

Livingston’s film is presented as though it is a politically neutral documentary providing a candid, even celebratory, look at black drag balls. And it is precisely the mood of celebration that masks the extent to which the balls are not necessarily radical expresssions of subverive imagination at work undemining and challenging the status quo. Much of the film’s focus on pageantry takes the ritual of the black drag ball and makes it spectacle. Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning and significance beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display. Those of us who have grown up in a segregated black setting where we participated in diverse pageants and rituals know that those elements of a given ritual that are empowering and subversive may not be readily visible to an outsider looking in. Hence it is easy for white obsevers to depict black rituals as spectacle.

Jennie Livingston approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking in. Since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is “absent” from Paris is Burning it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film doumenting the life of black gay “natives” and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed bya a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. By cinematically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see her), Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness “represents” blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counter-hegemonic. By shooting the film using a conventional approach to documentary and not making clear how her standpoint breaks with this tradition, Livingston assumes a privileged location of “innocence”. She is represented both in interviews and reviews tender-hearte, mild-mannered, virtuous white woman daring to venture into a contemporaty “heart of darkness” to bring back knowledge of the natives.

A review in the New Yorker declares (with no argument to substatiate the assertion) that “the movie is a sympathetic observation of a specialized, private world”. An interview with Livingston in Outweek is titled “Pose, She Said” and we are told in the preface that she “discovered the Ball world by chance”. Livingston does not discuss her interest and fascination with black gay subculture. She is not asked to speak about what knowledge, information, or lived understanding of black culture and history she possessed that provided a background for her work or to explain what vision of black life she hoped to convey and to whom. Can anyone imagine that a black woman lesbian would make a film about whete gay subculture and not be asked these questions? Livingston is asked in the Outweek interview, “How did you build up the kind of trust where people are so open to talking about their personal experiences?” She never answers this question. Instead she suggests that she gains her “credibility” by the intensity of her spectatoship, adding, “I also targeted people who wer articulate, who had stuff they wanted to say and were very happy that anyone wanted to listen”. Avoiding the difficult questions undelying what it means to be a white person in a white supremacist society creating a film about any aspect of black life. Livingston responds to the question, “Didn’t the fact that you’re a white lesbian going into a world of Black queens and street kids make that [the interview process] difficult?” by implicitly evoking a shallow sense of universal connection. She responds, “If you know someone over a period of two years, and thay still retain their sex and their race, you’ve got to be a pretty sexist, racist person”. Yet it is precisely the race, sex, and sexual practices of black men who are filmed that is the exploited subject matter.

So far I have read no interviews where Livingston discusses the issue of appropriation. And even though she is openly critical of Madonna, she does not convey how her work differs from Madonna’s apropriation of black experience. To some extent it is precisely the recognition by mass culture that aspects of black life, like “voguing”, fscinate white audiences that creates a market for both Madonna’s product and Livingston’s. Unfortunately, Livingston’s comments about Paris is Burning do not convey serious thought about either the political and aesthetic implications of her choice as a white woman focusing on an aspect of black life and culture or the way racism might shape and inform how she would interpret black experience on the screen. Reviewers like Georgia Brown in the Village Voice who suggest that Livingston’s whiteness is “a fact of nature that didn’t hinder her research” collude in the denial of the way whiteness informs her perspective and standpoint. To say, as Livingston does, “I certainly don’t have the final word on the gay black experience. I’d love for a black director to have made this film” is to oversimplify the issue and to absolve her of responsibility and accountability for progressive critical reflection and it implicitly suggests that there would be no difference between her work and that of a black director. Undrlying this apparently self-effacing comment is cultural arrogance, for she implies not only that she has cornered the market on the subject matter but that being able to make films is a question of personal choice, like she just “discovered” the “raw material” before a black director did. Her comments are disturbing because thay reveal so little awareness of the politics that undergird any commodification of “blackness” in this society.

Had Livingston approached her subject with greater awareness of the way white supremacy shapes cultural production -determining not only what representations of blackness are deemed acceptable, marketable, as well worthy of seeing- perhaps the film would not so easily have turned the black drag ball into a spectacle for the entertainment of those presumed to be on the outside of this experience looking in. So much of what is expressed in the film has to do with questions of power and privilege and the way racism impedes black progresss (and certainly the class aspirations of the black gay subculture depicted do not differ from those of other poor and underclass black communities). Here, the supposedly “outsider” position is primarily located in the experience of whiteness. Livingston appears unwilling to interrogate the way assuming the position of outsider looking in, as well as interpreter, can, and often does, pervert and distort one’s pespective. Her ability to assume such a position without rigorous interrogation of intent is rooted in the politics of race and racism. Patricia Williams critiques the white assumption of a”neutral” gaze in her essay “Teleology on the Rocks” included in her new book The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Describing taking a walking tour of Harlem with a group of white folks, she recalls the guide telling them they might “get to see some services” since “Easter Sunday in Harlem is quite a show”. William’s critical observations are relevant to any discussion of Paris is Burning:

What astonished me was that no one had asked the churches if they wanted to be sared at like living museums. I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover or St. Anthony’s of Padua during high mass -just to peer, not pray. My feeling is that such activity would be seen as disresectful, at the very least. Yet the aspect of disrespect, intrusion, seemed irrelevant to this well-educated, affable group of people. They deflected my observation with comments like “We just want to look”, “No one will mind”, and “There’s no harm intended”. As well-intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions. While acknowledging the lack of apparent malice in this behavior, I can’t help thinking that it is a liability as much as a luxury to live without interaction. To live so completely impervious to one’s own impact on others is a fragile privilege, which over time relies not simply on the willingness but on the inability of others -in this case blacks- to make their displeasure heard.

This insightful critique came to mind as I reflected on why whites could so outspokenly make their pleasure in this film heard and the many black viewers express discontent, raising critical questions about how the film was made, is seen, and is talked about, who have not named their displearure publicly. Too many reviewers and interviewers assume not only that there is no need to raise pressing critical questions about Livingston’s film, but act as though she somehow did this marginalized black gay subculture a favor by bringing their experience to a wider public. Such a stance obscures the substantial rewards she has received for this work. Since so many of the black gay men in the film express the desire to be big stars, it is easy to place Livingston in the role of benefactor, offering these “poor black souls! a way to realize their dreams. But it is this current trend in producing colorful ethnicity for the white consumer appetite that makes it possible for blackness to be commodified in unprecedented ways, and for whites to appropriate black culture without interrogating whiteness or showing concern for the displeasure of blacks. Just as white cultural imperialism informed and affirmed the adventurous journeys of colonizing whites into the countries and cultures of “dark others”, it allows white audiences to applaud representations of black culture, if they are satisfied with the images and habits of being represented.

Watching the film with a black woman friend, we were disturbed by the extent to which white folks around us were “entertained” and “pleasured” by scenes we viewed as sad and at times tragic. Often individuals laughed at personal testimony about hardship, pain, loneliness. Several times I yelled out in the dark: “What is so funny about this scene? Why are you laughing?” The laughter was never innocent. Instead it undermined the seriousness of the film, keeping it always on the level of spectacle. And much of the film helped make this possible. Moments of pain and sadness were quickly covered up by dramatic scenes from drag balls, as though there were two competing cinematic narratives, one displaying the pageantry of the drag ball and the other reflecting on the lives of participants and value of the fantasy. This second narrative was literally hard to hear because the laughter often drowned it out, just as the sustained focus on elaborate displays at balls diffused the power of the more serious narrative. Any audience hoping to be entertained would not be as interested in the true life stories and testimonies narrated. Much of that individual testimony makes it appear that the characters are estranged from any community beyond themselves. Families, friends, etc. are not shown, which adds to the representation of these black gay men as cut off, living on the edge.

It is useful to compare the portraits of their lives in Paris is Burning with those depicted in Marlon Riggs’ compelling film Tongues Untied. At no point in Livingston’s film are the men asked to speak about their connections to a world of family and community beyond the drag ball. The cinematic narrative makes the ball center of their lives. And yet who determines this? Is this the way the black men view their reality or is this the reality Livingston constructs? Certainly the degree to which black men in this gay subculture are portrayed as cut off from a “real” world heightens the emphasis on fantasy, and indeed gives Paris is burning its tragic edge. That tragedy is made explicit when we are told that the fair-skinned Venus has been murdered, and yet there is no mourning of him/her in the film, no intense focus on the sadness of this murder. Having served the purpose of “spectacle” the film abandons him/her. The audience does not see Venus after the murder. There are no scenes of grief. To put it crassly, her dying is upstaged by spectacle. Death is not entertaining.

For those of us who did not come to this film as voyeurs of black gay subculture, it is Dorian Carey’s moving testimony throughout the film that makes Paris is Burning a memorable experience. Cary is both historian and cultural critic in the film. He explains how the balls enabled marginalized black gay queens to empower both participants and audience. It is Carey who talks about the significance of the “star” in the life of gay black men who are queens. In a manner similar to critic Richar Dyer in his work Heavenly Bodies, Carey tells viewers that the desire for stardom is an expression of the longing to realize the dream of autonomous stellar individualism. Reminding readers that the idea of the individual continues to be a major image of what it means to live in a democratic world, Dyer writes:

Capitalism justifies itself on the basis of freedom (separateness) of anyone to make money, sell their labour how they will, to be able to express opinions and get them heard (regardless of wealth and social position). The openness of society is assumed by the way that we are addressed as individuals -as consumers (each freely choosing to buy, or watch, what we want), as legal subjects (equally responsible before the law), as political subjects (able to make up our minds who is to run society). Thus even while the notion of the individual is assailed on all sides, it is a necessary fiction for the reproduction of the kind of society we live in... Stars articulate these ideas of personhood.

This is precisely the notion of stardom Carey articulates. He emphasizes the way consumer capitalism undermines the subversive power of the drag balls, subordinating ritual to spectacle, removing the will to display unique imaginative costumes an the purchased image. Carey speaks profoundly about the redemptive power of the imagination in black life, that drag balls were traditionally a place wher the aesthetics of the image in relation to black gay life could be explored with complexity and grace.

Carey extols the significance of fantasy even as he critiques the use of fantasy to escape reality. Analyzing the place of fantasy in black gay subculture, he links that experience to the longing for stardom that is so pervasive in this society. Refusing to allow the “queen” to be Othered, he conveys the message that in all of us resides that longing to transcend the boundaries of self, to be glorified. Speaking about the importance of drag queens in a recent interview in Afterimage, Marlon Riggs suggests that the queen personifies the longing everyone has for love and recognition. Seeing in drag queens “a desire, a very visceral need to be loved, as well as a sense of the abject loneliness of life where nobody loves you”, Riggs contends “this image is real for anybody who has been in the bottom spot where they’ve been rejected by everybody and loved by nobody”. Echoing Carey, Riggs declares: “What’s real for them is the realization that you have to learn to love yourself”. Carey stresses that one can only learn to love the self when one breaks through illusion and faces reality, not by escaping into fantasy. Emphasizing that the point is not to give us fantasy but to recognize its limitations, he acknowledges that one must distinguish the place of fantasy in ritualized play from the use of fantasy as a means of escape. Unlike Pepper Labeija who constructs a mythic world to inhabit, making this his private reality, Carey encourages using the imagination creatively to enhance one’s capacity to live more fully in a world beyond fantasy.

Despite the profound impact he makes, what Riggs would call “a visual icon of the drag queen with a very dignified humanity”, Carey’s message, if often muted, is overshadowed by spectacle. It is hard for viewers to really hear this message. By critiquing absorption in fantasy and naming the myriad ways pain and suffering inform any process of self-actualization, Carey’s message mediates between the viewer who longs to voyeruristicly escape into the film, to vicariously inhabit that lived space on the edge, by exposing the sham, by challenging all of us to confront reality. James Baldwin makes the point in The Fire Next Time that “people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are”. Without being sentimental about suffering, Dorian Carey urges all of us to break through denial, through the longing for an illusory star identity, so that we can confront and accept ourselves as we really are -only then can fantasy, ritual, be a site of seduction, passion, and play where the self is truly recognized, loved, and never abandoned or betrayed.

Bell Hooks

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unpack-my-heart · 5 years

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Midsommar spoilers ahead – read at yer own risk.

This post contains discussions of suicide, murder-suicide, graphic ritualistic violence, dissociation and mental illness. These are triggers that also apply to the film, so please be careful if you decide to go and see this film.

I went to see Midsommar last night. I thought it was a fantastic film, that raised a lot of interesting themes about gaslighting, dissociation, belonging, fascism and free will.

I’ll start with the cinematography. This film is gorgeous. The scenery is so beautiful it’s almost unbelievable – rolling greens and constant blue skies. Probably not the normal setting for a horror film, right? Compare this to the cinematography of Aster’s other film, Hereditary, with its bleak, oppressive constant grey-tone, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Midsommar was a departure from the horror genre all together. This works in Midsommar’s favour, though. It’s horror in broad daylight, constant daylight. I think it’s important to remember that the horror genre is not, and should not, be limited to just gruesome torture porn, or an endless assault of blood, gore and guts. I mean, I like bloody horror as much as the next person, but that is not where the genre should begin and end. Of course, Midsommar has some incredibly gruesome aspects (meaning that in Britain, the film has received a rating of ‘18’). The suicide of the two elderly members of the Hårga is played on screen with an unflinching gaze, and it is about as shocking as shocking gets. Especially when the elderly man jumps in such a way that he doesn’t immediately die, and instead shatters his legs. The other Hårga members caving in his skull with a large wooden mallet elicited pained gasps from many of the people sat in the cinema with me. It was brutal. But the main thing I took away from the film was an unrelenting reminder that grief is a transformative experience – not always for the better – and that vulnerable people can be drawn to bad people, bad organizations, or to make bad decisions, and we must question whether this means they are irredeemable.

This is actually where I started thinking about free will. The Hårga are a community bound by tradition. Their lives are to be a predetermined length, and within this, their lives are divided up into four ‘seasons’ of equal length. At the end of the winter of their lives, the period spanning 54 years old to 72 years old, you are expected to walk (literally) willingly, and freely, to your death. This is exactly what the two elderly members I just mentioned do. They are carried on sedan chairs to the top of a cliff, and then throw themselves to their deaths. Whilst I must be careful of cultural imperialism, I couldn’t help but wonder how much agency the Hårga have. Is this suicide an expression of free-will or an example of coercion driven by traditional practice? We can only speculate, but I wonder what would happen if someone refused to die at the predetermined age. This really cemented to me that the Hårga are not a peaceful community living in a psychedelic Swedish plane, but are in actuality, uncomfortably close to eco-fascism.

According to eco-fascist ideology, you’re expected to sacrifice your life in order that the group more generally can protect the interests of nature more broadly. This goes some way as to explain why the elderly members of the community, who are statistically more likely to be suffering from disease, ill-health or infirmity, are coerced to take their own lives. They have fulfilled their purpose, and they are invited? forced? to remove themselves from society. This is, of course, a society that is absolutely, entirely white. The only non-white bodies in the community are those of Josh, Simon and Connie – and these people end up dead, murdered in increasingly disturbing ways. Josh is killed whilst trying to take pictures of the Rubi Radr (the sacred text of the Hårga) – something he was explicitly forbidden to do – and his body is dragged away by a member of the Hårga who is wearing Mark’s skinned face as a mask. Connie and Simon both disappear at different points in the story, and both turn up dead. Simon is executed in a particularly graphic way – he is suspended in the chicken coop, as a blood eagle. The blood eagle is a form of ritualistic murder detailed in the Germanic and Nordic sagas, wherein the ribs are broken and the lungs are pulled out of the body, in such a way so that they look like ‘wings’. Simon’s lungs seem to inflate and deflate, as if they were breathing, but we cannot be sure whether he is still alive, or whether this is caused by Christian’s drug-addled brain.

This is where the film becomes uncomfortable for me. Connie and Simon are … very minor characters in this film. They don’t really serve any purpose other than to be tormented, murdered, sacrificed. They do not really interact with the main protagonists (Christian, Dani, Josh, Mark), other than a few pleasantries at the beginning, a shared horror at the suicide of the elders, and a very brief interaction between Connie and Dani when Connie discovers that Simon has ‘left the commune without her’. I am uncomfortable with calling Midsommar an explicitly feminist film as I believe the treatment of Connie, a sidelined, innocent, brown woman, who is brutally killed for no apparent reason other than her status as Other violates any claim the film might otherwise have as being explicitly feminist. But maybe this isn’t the point. I don’t think Midsommar has to be ‘explicitly feminist’ in order to make very valid points about how a very specific kind of female pain, grief and trauma is often ignored and overlooked. Connie’s body violates the very specific white ableness championed by the Hårga, and her experience as Other legitimizes her death. Dani’s body, a white body that does not violate any of their traditions, is permitted to live. She is permitted to access the underbelly of the commune, but this comes at a price, and I believe that price is a combination of her sanity, her sense of self, and any remaining link she had to her past.

That’s what I think Florence Pugh was so unbelievably good at depicting. I was absolutely blown away by her ability to howl like that. That sort of primal, unabashed screaming. I think the two times she -really- cries set up a really interesting dichotomy between female pain and male reactions to female pain. The first time that Dani really howls is when her parents and sister have died. It is dark, she starts this sort of crying whilst alone over the phone, and then Christian is with her but he feels entirely distant from her. The room is dark, he is rubbing her back and she is draped over him, but he feels entirely emotionally removed from the situation - he is not participating in her grief, he doesn’t look that affected by it. His presence makes the scene feel just that little bit more jarring. Actually, does he even say anything to her? As far as I remember, no he does not. She tells him they’ve died, we see a shot of him walking through the snow to her apartment, and then they’re in the apartment. He says nothing. The only noise is Dani’s screams. He is entirely silent. Compare this to the second time she howls, when she’s surrounded by the female members of the Hårga. This scene is entirely different. It’s light, and she’s surrounded by women who are touching her, caressing her, but most importantly, screaming with her. They howl and cry and scream with her. They are her perfect mirrors. They are ACTIVELY PARTICIPATING in her grief, they share in her trauma. This was probably the most harrowing shot of the entire film for me. Not the gore, not the mutilated bodies – but a woman, screaming and howling like a wounded animal, and having a horde of sympathetic women scream back at her. It’s hard to not feel drawn into this community. It’s hard to not forget the evil things they have done, or are willing to do. That is precisely what is so dangerous about the Hårga, or more generally, this very specific brand of eco-fascism.

Some quick fire symbolism stuff that I picked up on:

the symbolism of Christian wearing dark clothing and standing away from the rest of the group when they were celebrating Dani becoming the May Queen. The way he lurches around, looking entirely out of place - she is sat at the head of the table - dressed as they are, crowned with flowers, nature moves with her - she has basically entirely assimilated - he is still outcast.

I thought it was really interesting that the group of women during the dub-con Christian/Maya sex scene mirrored how Maya was feeling. I think the focus on women mirroring each other, appropriating and absorbing how each other is feeling is a fascinating detail. Christian, on the other hand, looks out of place in that room, a male body who only has one purpose and then is entirely redundant. This is reinforced by the bit where the girl he is sleeping with holds her hand out and he tries to grab it but instead one of the women grabs it. He basically serves no purpose beyond impregnating her - and even then he isn’t even that good at it, because one of the other women has to push on his butt to push him along in the process. Women as being the most active and present in sex, men just … seed? Is this a subversion of how sex is usually seen?

The disabled boy seems to serve no purpose in society other than being the oracle - he does not participate in the banquet or any of the celebrations. He is almost never on screen, apart from a few very close up shots of his face, and one occasion where the camera shifts to him from the sex scene - a very jarring decision, in my opinion. Panning to him during the sex scene was super interesting and really not expected. It was an interesting visual choice, and it made me think about whether the point was to emphasise how he will presumably never participate in sexual acts etc. because of the eugenics practiced by the Hårga. This was a pretty damning condemnation of the Hårga as an eco-fascist group who actively engages in eugenics/”selective breeding”. You can definitely see links here between the growth of fascism and eugenics in the early 20th century and the practices of the Hårga.

I really liked how the entire time they were at the commune almost felt like … a fever dream in a distant fairytale land. Walking through the large sun at the beginning, having to trek through the fields to get there, everything looking very idyllic and exactly how a young child would imagine a Swedish landscape to look. The perfect environment to discuss dissociation, in my opinion.

These are some scattered thoughts I had after viewing the film!!

Overall, I really enjoyed it, despite some of the troubling social themes, and it’s another absolute win for Aster in my book.

#midsommar #midsommar spoilers #tee hee i posted it early #i have so many more thoughts but this is already nearly 2k words so i didn't want to post something obscenely long

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blaindersonkummel · 6 years

Text

Klaine Fic - Think of all the Fellas That I Haven’t Kissed (Part 2)

Chapter 2 title: Sign Your ‘X’ On The Line Written for Days 18 + 19 of Klaine Advent 2017 Prompts: “Stir” and “Talk”

Summary: Dragqueen!Blaine AU. Follows on from the end of chapter 1. Kurt takes Blaine on a sort-of date to the diner next door to the drag bar.

Word Count: 2600 (this chapter) - Read on AO3.

Kurt couldn’t quite believe the way his night was going. Earlier that day he was fully expecting to come to a drag show for a couple of hours, support Elliott’s friend, enjoy a few drinks, and head home after a fun, but not overly ambitious, night out.

What he wasn’t expecting was to be sat across from one of the very queens he had been watching perform earlier that night. On a date, nonetheless.

Kurt stood at the back door of the club, waiting for Blaine to collect her bags from backstage (“Should I be referring to Blaine as ‘her’ when he’s not in drag?”), ready to go on a late night sort-of date. The thought was already beginning to mess with his brain.

He fidgeted where he stood as he thought about how this… thing with Blaine might go ahead. Kurt suddenly found himself in a strange headspace, mulling over the fact that not only did he find Blaine absolutely gorgeous, charming and so so sweet, he also saw that in Honey Bee. A person who, for all intents and purposes, presented as a woman.

But Kurt was gay. Like, really truly gay. He had never been attracted to women before and he was certain he wasn’t now. But Blaine – well, Honey Bee – was making him question all that.

Sexuality crisis notwithstanding, Blaine came bounding out of the door to where Kurt was waiting, coat and scarf on and wheeling two suitcases of clothes, make-up, and wigs along with a big grin on his face.

“I’m sorry I kept you. So, you still up for splitting those fries?”

Kurt was suddenly torn away from his moment of panic when he looked over at Blaine.

Beautiful, adorable, bubbly Blaine with the most warm eyes and kind smile he’d ever seen. How did an eighteen year old manage to exude both such confidence and innocence at the same time?

“Sounds great,” he responded tightly, holding out one hand to offer to wheel Blaine’s bag, and taking hold of Blaine’s free hand with the other.

“…some more ketchup, please? Thank you so much.”

Kurt was yet again pulled out of his daze and back to the present when he realised he had been blanking on Blaine almost since they sat down and ordered. The waitress taking Blaine’s request for more sauce jotted something on her notepad with a bored expression and walked away with a grunt.

Blaine looked down at the bowl of fries on their table then looked up through his lashes at Kurt as he reached forward and took a few in one hand. He then took an individual fry and dipped it into his chocolate milkshake before popping it into his mouth with a satisfied expression at finally being able to eat that night. The move reminded Kurt of the same thing Blaine had done earlier with the cherry from his drink.

“Is there…” Blaine began, an unreadably curious expression on his face. But instead of carrying on his sentence, he seemed to cut himself off and instead moved to dunk another fry to eat. He tried again.

“Is something wrong, Kurt? You’ve been stirring that milkshake for about ten minutes now. In fact, you’ve been acting kind of odd since I left to get my stuff earlier and…” he looked sort of upset now. “I’m sorry if I’ve done something to suddenly put you off, or if I’ve been too forward, or not forward enough, or if I’m too young, or if I’m not really your type or-“

“Woah, hey,” Kurt suddenly jumped to action, unwilling to sit and watch Blaine pass out from not taking a breath. “Hey, it’s fine. It’s okay.”

He laughed a little and stopped stirring, but instantly felt guilty at Blaine’s worried expression.

“It’s, well,” Kurt didn’t really know where to begin with this one, “I’m finding myself in a bit of a crisis at the minute and whilst I do want to tell you “it’s not you, it’s me”, I’m afraid I’d be totally lying.”

Blaine looked taken aback by that and instantly it looked as though tears were springing to his bright amber eyes as he tried to look away.

“Oh. Oh, right, yeah, okay I get it.”

Blaine was trying so hard to hold it together, but Kurt was quick to reassure him.

“Oh, no! No! That came out completely wrong. I should have finished.”

He wrung his hands together and thought to himself. “Ugh okay how do I word this?”

“See, I’m having a bit of a crisis because I… I really like you.”

The tears in Blaine’s shining eyes seemed to subside a little at this and he looked up at Kurt with curiosity.

“It’s kind of freaking me out a bit that I like you so much. For a number of reasons. And I’ll be honest – part of that is me dealing with the fact that you are insanely attractive… as both Blaine… and as Honey.”

Blaine’s face seemed to go pink at that and his eyes widened.

“Oh god,” Kurt instantly felt bad, “Was that offensive for me to say? Ugh, I’m really sorry. I don’t really know how to go about this thing with pronouns and genders and everything.”

Blaine was still pink in the face but he was now smiling widely and his eyes were scrunching at the corners as he made a small giggle.

“It wasn’t offensive, Kurt. I just… do you really think that?”

Kurt was caught offguard.

“Think what?”

“That you find me attractive as… as both me and Honey?”

Kurt knew the answer immediately. Hell yes. He really did.

“Yeah. I do.”

Blaine blushed again and brought his hands up to his face to hide his smile. Kurt was instantly struck by how much he suddenly looked like a child.

“I mean, I’ve heard guys find it an appealing quality but I never-”

“Wait,” Kurt cut him off, instantly curious. “You mean I’m not completely left of field here for freaking out about this?”

Blaine looked sort of taken aback at that.

“Errrr no. Of course you’re not. Drag is a very…” he paused here to find his words, “subversive kind of art form. It’s meant to make people question themselves. I mean, I’ve seen the effect first-hand. I’m fairly new to Cooties but even in the month or so I’ve been there, I have seen it all. Gay men, straight men, bisexual, non-binary, heck even straight and lesbian women, find something attractive about the queens I share a stage with.”

“Huh.”

Kurt was kind of stumped at that. All the anxiety he’d been building inside himself seemed to dissipate rather quickly after Blaine had reassured him that no, he wasn’t weird for finding an instant connection with Honey Bee on the stage and Blaine Anderson off the stage. He started to stir his milkshake yet again.

“I guess, for another thing, it’s not just the gender thing I’ve been thinking about. You’re so young. And I know I’m only 22, but you haven’t even been in the city very long and you already seem so confident. I mean, you’re a performing drag queen! And a damn excellent one! I can’t believe you were doing this in Ohio!”

Kurt took a sip from the milkshake but he didn’t miss the way Blaine bit his lip for a second, looking away the next.

“Ummmm. Well…”

Kurt’s expression shifted.

“You weren’t performing before you came here, were you?”

Blaine looked back now and shrugged with a pained look.

“Elliott told me you’re also from Ohio so I know you’ll understand when I say this. I never performed there. In fact, no-one besides my best friend Tina even knew about the drag thing.”

Kurt was kind of stunned.

“But Blaine, you’re so good! You blew half of those seasoned queens off the stage tonight!”

Blaine laughed a little and sipped on his own milkshake to give him something to do.

“Thank you,” he said once he swallowed, “but I’m just getting started really.”

Kurt looked Blaine over thoughtfully now, sure he was missing something about this mysterious young boy.

“So then how did you start?”

It was a simple enough question but one Blaine froze up at.

“It’s… I don’t know if I should tell you. If the gender thing kind of freaked you out before.”

Blaine was biting his lip again and goddammit, if that wasn’t becoming ingrained in Kurt’s brain as one of the cutest things ever…

“Oh. Well, please don’t feel like you have to tell me anything you’re uncomfortable with. I just want you to know despite how I felt moments ago, I am in no way going to judge you.”

Blaine continued to worry his lip before he took in a breath and straightened himself up in his seat.

“Okay. So, errr, I already knew I was gay from a fairly young age. I came out to my parents when I was fourteen and things were… well, my mom was fine. My dad was, well, not such an easy ride. But they accepted me, at least.”

Kurt was listening with bated breath as Blaine continued, and when it looked like he got kind of stilted at the mention of his father, Kurt didn’t hesitate to slide his hand across the table and wrap it around Blaine’s.

“When I was sixteen I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race,” he laughed to himself here, “It’s very cliché, I know. But it happened.”

Kurt laughed lightly too but allowed him to continue.

“I thought about it for a while – maybe trying drag. But I started to question myself. At this point, I wasn’t sure what part of drag appealed to me. I became kind of obsessed with…”

Blaine trailed off here and sucked in a breath like he was preparing himself for Kurt’s reaction.

“I became obsessed with the idea of women’s clothing. And one day, when my mom and dad were out, I snuck into my mom’s wardrobe and pulled out the most gorgeous dress she owned, and a pair of heels. I sat on my bed for about thirty minutes before I plucked up the courage to just put on one shoe.

But when I did… I could feel that thing I knew I’d been wanting to feel for a while. So I somehow also managed to get into her dress and the second I had it on, I felt like a different person. You might think that’s kind of the end of it but… well, there’s more.”

Blaine pulled his hand from Kurt’s now and started to bite at one of his nails as he looked down.

“I began to wonder if that feeling was something else. If, maybe, I was suddenly feeling like that was the real me. So, that night, I got online and suddenly I found myself ordering a whole load of stuff which included women’s clothes and…” Blaine trailed off slightly as Kurt leant forward to hear him. “And underwear.”

Kurt was taken aback, not for the first time that night, but he managed to school his expression into something fairly neutral when, in actual fact, something was stirring in him at those words.

“The thing is, when they came, I was nervous. I wondered if putting these clothes on would suddenly spark this thing in me telling me that I was no longer Blaine – but someone else. However, in fact, it actually gets kind of boring here. Long story short, I went all out the next day and… well, I kind of went to school wearing the underwear.”

Kurt’s face must have given a lot away because, if he had been taking a sip of water at this point, the liquid would have probably been sprayed all over Blaine. Blaine laughed at his expression.

“Okay, I admit, so maybe boring isn’t the right word. I just mean, I found out that day that perhaps my gender wasn’t really being called in to question after all. I just happened to be a gay man who felt really sexy and empowered in women’s clothes.”

Blaine stopped here and lifted his milkshake to take a sip like he hadn’t just told Kurt he wears women’s underwear to feel sexy. And Kurt was supposed to act like that wasn’t one of the hottest things he’d ever heard.

“Woah,” he began, still unsure how to continue.

“It’s okay,” Blaine replied, “I understand it’s a lot to take in.”

Kurt pondered it for a second before he couldn’t hold in the questions any more and he had to ask.

“So if you weren’t performing before, how did you get into becoming a queen? Being in drag is about way more than just the clothes surely?”

Blaine’s smile titled up at that and he looked really quite impressed by how Kurt was reacting.

“You’re right, and it’s a good question. The day I realised I just wanted to wear the clothes, I got online right away and watched hours and hours of YouTube videos of drag performances, make-up tutorials, and hell even the documentaries about drag culture.”

“But you didn’t tell anyone?”

“At first. But when I realised how hard it would be to get more clothes and to even buy and hide make-up, I told Tina. She was amazing. She seriously helped me through a very… errr… confusing time. Plus she did my make-up the first time. I still like to think of her as my drag mother, even if she did an absolutely terrible job.”

Blaine laughed so sweetly again and continued eating his weird milkshake-covered fries. Kurt felt kind of sad for Blaine at first, having to keep this thing hidden that he was so breathtakingly brilliant at. But it led him to here and now – an excellent performer in a great drag bar, doing what he loves.

“So, there’s one more thing I’m wondering about. But, y’know, like I said, don’t feel like you have to answer or anything,” Kurt said as Blaine waited for him to continue. “What have your boyfriends thought about all this?”

Kurt pictured many responses from Blaine to this question. He expected maybe he would get defensive and not answer, or he would walk away, or he would calmly explain. What he didn’t expect was for Blaine to laugh out loud and then cover his mouth and look all shy and unassuming.

But still, he waited for an answer which Blaine didn’t give for a good couple of seconds.

“Oh! You’re… you’re not joking?” Blaine asked, eyes wide.

“Errr, no. I’m not,” Kurt suddenly felt uncomfortable again like he really had said something wrong.

“Well,” Blaine began, suddenly shy again, “the thing is… I’ve never… had one.”

“Oh,” Kurt really didn’t know how to carry on after that so he too picked up his milkshake and took a slurp to allow him the time to process.

“But, y’know,” Blaine continued, waiting for Kurt to put his glass down before he slid his hand across the table, palm up, “I’m certainly open to the idea.”

Kurt looked down at the hand and then back at Blaine’s face as, yet again, he did that absolutely adorable lip bite that Kurt was quickly falling in love with. Kurt was definitely becoming totally powerless to that face.

He slid his hand across the table to meet Blaine’s and he smiled.

“So am I.”

#klaine advent 2017 #klaine advent: talk #klaine advent: stir #drag queen!blaine #klaine fic #klaine #my fic

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mitchellkuga · 6 years

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Some Libraries Are Facing Backlash Against LGBT Programs — And Holding Their Ground

Published by BuzzFeed News

Recipient of 2019 NLGJA Excellence in Online Journalism Award

Drag queen storytimes and other LGBT programs are meant to create safe spaces for the queer community. The librarians running them are getting death threats.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon in October, Bella Noche sashayed into the reading room at the North Forest Park library in Queens. She wore a teal wig that matched the color of her sequin top, and strappy gold stilettos. The audience of about 20 children, ages 3–6, and their caretakers erupted in applause. As the noise settled, Bella Noche eased into a chair and read three books, which playfully addressed themes of diversity and acceptance, starting with Julián Is a Mermaid. The picture book by Jessica Love tells the story of a young Latino boy mesmerized by the sight of three women dressed as shimmering mermaids.

“I love mermaids!” yelled one kid after Bella Noche introduced the book’s title.

“I love mermaids more!” yelled another.

“I love mermaids more than anybody!” yelled a third.

Parents chuckled.

“I am a mermaid,” said Bella Noche, who pinned a large, bright orange crab to one side of her hair. “Does that mean you love me?”

“No!”

Bella and the parents laughed. “OK, we’ll work on it.”

Between books, she led animated singalongs, challenging the children to “catch a bubble” — cheeks puffed dramatically, mouths closed — whenever it got too noisy. She concluded the hour with crafts, including excerpts from The Dragtivity Book, a coloring book co-produced by Drag Queen Story Hour and Sez Me, an LGBT web series for kids. The coloring book featured activities like “Find Your Drag Name!” After the event, a librarian told me this was one of the library’s most well-attended storytimes, a particular feat considering the torrential rain.

Author Michelle Tea started Drag Queen Story Hour in 2015, shortly after giving birth to her son Atticus. As a new mother, she suddenly found herself at events like storytimes at her local San Francisco library, which felt welcoming but “really straight,” she said. The writer, who identifies as queer, imagined a storytime that promoted diversity and inclusion, with a pinch of camp — a family event that reflected her own family. “There is just a sort of flair with which queers do anything,” she said. “It's just a certain sense of humor, a sense of the fantastic.” So Tea, in collaboration with RADAR Productions, organized her own fantastic take on storytime at a library in the Castro, one of the country’s most historic LGBT neighborhoods. The concept was simple: a drag queen reading queer-inclusive children’s books to kids. “It was a huge hit,” Tea said, “and then it just spread.”

Today, Drag Queen Story Hour has 27 official chapters in cities ranging from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Bristol, England, and it has inspired countless unofficial offshoots. Readings have taken place at schools, bookstores, and museums but have mostly found a home at public libraries. For Tea, the pairing makes sense. “Librarians are the unsung heroes of our culture,” she said. “They are constantly fighting for our freedom of speech. They are on the front lines.”

Each chapter of Drag Queen Story Hour runs independently through grassroots organizing, but there have been attempts to scale. Last year, the New York chapter established itself as a nonprofit, and it has since received funding from the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and two city council members. These resources go toward purchasing books, paying drag queens, and funding training programs — two hour-and-a-half sessions that teach drag queens to talk effectively to children and their parents about gender identity and drag.

“We really wanted to make sure we were presenting an inclusive, open definition of drag,” said Rachel Aimee, a freelance editor who’s the executive director of the New York chapter. “We didn't want to define it as a man dressing up as a woman, because that's not the case for every drag queen and we didn't want to reinforce the gender binary. That's why we felt it was really necessary to make sure everyone was on the same page.”

This mission of inclusivity has inspired other programs. Recently, Aimee started a training program for Drag Queen Story Hour specific to autistic kids, in partnership with the New York Public Library and in collaboration with a friend who runs a blog reviewing books for autistic children.

The program’s expansion has been fueled by high-profile media attention, drawn in part from the wow factor of two seemingly disparate communities converging. “People think librarians wear glasses and ‘shhh’ people all the time and aren't friendly,” said Todd Deck, a member of the American Library Association’s GLBT roundtable. “And people think drag queens are wild and crazy — but the truth is they have so much in common as far as storytelling, community building, imagination. A good children's librarian is really crafty, and I believe a lot of drag queens are pretty good with a hot-glue gun.”

As the program has expanded to more conservative parts of the country, drag queen storytimes have been thrust into the crosshairs of the culture wars. Protestors have gathered outside of libraries in Mobile, Alabama; Columbus, Georgia; and Port Jefferson, New York, with Alex Jones and other right-wing shock jocks condemning the program. For the most part, attacks on programs like the Drag Queen Story Hour have been scattershot attempts from religious groups or lone zealots — like an Iowa man who recently filmed himself burning LGBT-inclusive library books by a lake — who’ve been far outnumbered by supporters, and events have proceeded as planned.

But in Lafayette, Louisiana, backlash against the program has proven effective. In September, both Lafayette Public Library and Lafayette Community College indefinitely “postponed” a drag queen storytime, citing safety concerns. The library had received pressure to cancel the event from Joel Robideaux, a top Lafayette official — and lawsuits filed by Warriors for Christ and Special Forces of Liberty alleged that the Lafayette Public Library violated the First Amendment by promoting “human secularism”; following that logic, if public libraries hosted drag queens, they should also permit room rentals for all religious groups. The person spearheading the lawsuit, Chris Sevier — who previously sued the state of Alabama to legally recognize his marriage to his laptop — framed the lawsuits as a matter of equity, not hate. “Our objection is not against the LGBTQ community,” he said. “It is against the library’s actions.”

Aside from unfounded and bigoted concerns that drag queens are predators thrusting children into a state of gender confusion and homosexuality, attacks against drag queen storytime have stirred debates about library neutrality and what responsibilities a tax-funded civic institution has in serving its community. In July, this debate reached a fever pitch when the American Library Association introduced a revised interpretation to its Bill of Rights, stating that if libraries rent meeting rooms to charities and nonprofits, it cannot exclude “hate groups from discussing their activities in the same facilities.” (A representative from the American Library Association said the revision was “not connected” to Drag Queen Story Hour.) Outcry erupted, and ALA’s council has since rescinded the revision.

At the heart of the debate is a central question that has challenged the library community for decades: What is the role of a library?

Public libraries as we know it have always contained the promise of democracy — institutions tasked with connecting all people to a wealth of information, free of charge. When Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of over 2,500 libraries at the turn of the 20th century, he imagined a space that would "bring books and information to all people.” He also waxed poetic: “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”

For their part, librarians have looked to the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights, which emphasizes the values of equity and access, best summed up by this statement from library consultant Matt Finch: “Libraries are innately subversive institutions born of the radical notion that every single member of society deserves free, high-quality access to knowledge and culture.”

But by virtue of existing in America, public libraries have historically failed to live up to this promise. When public libraries began proliferating in the South, African Americans were denied access by laws that weren’t formally overturned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination also affected libraries at their most “objective”: Under the Dewey Decimal Classification system, used in over 135 countries, LGBT nonfiction was classified next to books on incest and sexual bondage, in sections titled “mental illness” and “abnormal sex relations.” This wasn’t amended until 1996. Under its new heading, “sexual relations,” the books are shelved next to books about sex work, suggesting that sex is the defining aspect of the lives of LGBT people.

Within the fantasy of the library as a democratic third space, librarians are tasked with being objective civil servants, a notion that rankles many in the field. In library school, “a lot of us get fed the line that libraries are neutral, which is a very dangerous and inaccurate piece of rhetoric to give librarians,” said Ingrid Conley-Abrams, a school librarian who previously worked at the Brooklyn Public Library for over seven years. “Every program we offer or don't offer, every book we shelve or don't shelve, is a stance. So this notion that libraries are neutral is hurtful nonsense. Libraries, as long as they are run by human beings, will always have some sort of mission.”

The Task Force on Gay Liberation was founded in 1970, a year after the Stonewall riots, by librarians Janet Cooper and Israel Fishman. The next year, they threw a party at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Dallas that featured a “Hug a Homosexual” kissing booth, a radical (for its time) attention-grabbing stunt that proclaimed gay people’s existence to the library world. The task force, which has since been integrated into the ALA as the GLBT Round Table, fought to make libraries more inclusive for gay and lesbian library users, creating gay and lesbian bibliographies and combating discrimination against gay and lesbian librarians, who sometimes risked losing their jobs when coming out.

In light of the current political moment, librarians across the country are expanding that fight, with an uptick in drag queen storytimes and other queer-inclusive programming to send the signal that libraries are safe spaces for marginalized people. But some librarians said that these events, for all their messages of inclusivity, are not enough.

“If the drag queen needs to use the bathroom at your library after their reading, are they going to have trouble accessing a toilet?” asked Conley-Abrams, stressing that she is “100% in favor of drag queen storytime” but noticed that some libraries were using the program as a stand-in for the quieter, but just as important, work of affirming queer library users — like abolishing gender-segregated bathrooms and library card applications. “If you've got ‘male,’ ‘female,’ and ‘other’ [on your application], you're literally othering queer people, which is not a good look,” she said.

Many of the librarians I spoke to emphasized the importance of visually proclaiming libraries as safe spaces by developing a diverse selection of LGBT-inclusive books in easy-to-access areas, building extravagant displays for PRIDE month — “You couldn't walk anywhere without being knocked out by a quote from Harvey Milk,” said Conley-Abrams — and organizing community groups like queer book clubs, gay-straight alliances, and teen pride parties.

But in more conservative parts of the country, where attacks against drag queen storytimes have been most aggressive, creating a safe space for queer library users can be an act of discretion. Todd Deck, a librarian at the rural Tehama County Library, three hours north of Sacramento, said that community bulletin boards advertising queer-friendly events — typically placed in prominent areas in urban libraries — are most effective in areas of his library with less foot traffic, particularly for LGBT youth. He also emphasized the privacy afforded by self-checkout machines in small towns where “maybe your mom is best friends with the clerk.” “In a rural space, most likely everybody is connected in really beautiful but also really tricky ways,” he said.

Caring for LGBT youth can sometimes mean caring for people who are experiencing homelessness; they are 120% more likely to experience it than their non-LGBT peers. Julie Ann Winkelstein, a professor at the University of Tennessee who specializes in libraries as safer spaces for LGBT youth experiencing homelessness, stressed the vital role that libraries play in the lives of a particularly underserved demographic. Beyond loaning books, Winkelstein said LGBT youth experiencing homelessness are in need of other vital resources that libraries offer but are seldom recognized for: a sense of community, shelter from extreme weather, and access to resources for employment, housing, legal advice, and social workers.

“You have young people coming in who are carrying a huge amount of trauma — they need to be in an environment where at least it's not expanding on their trauma,” said Winkelstein. “They need to be in a place where they don't see something that feels anti-queer or anti-homeless,” which includes an excessive amount of negative signage — “It’s very triggering for a young person who already experiences a heck of a lot of ‘no’s’ outside of the library” — uniformed security guards, and address requirements for a library card.

Above all, librarians who identified as LGBT stressed the importance of being out at work. This can be communicated through accessories like queer-affirming pronoun buttons — “I'm not really a big button person, but some librarians are obsessed with them,” Deck said — rainbow pins, and bracelets. But mostly it’s about being confident in your own skin.

“The best thing you can do for kids is to be yourself as confidently as possible, which I know sounds really cheesy, but it's very, very true,” said Conley-Abrams, whose hair, cut short on the sides, is dyed a pinkish orange. “Because kids can't be it unless they see it, and kids have to see that there is a place for them in the world. And if they're just seeing homogeny they may worry that they have to completely change themselves in order to just be in the world, which is really scary. I am a symbol of someone who doesn't really look like other people at school but I still have a job and I'm a happy person and I found a place. And even if they're not just like me maybe I'll remind them that they'll have their place too.”

In May, when librarian Jennifer Stickles announced an event at the Olean Public Library, in a rural part of western New York, called Drag Queen Kids’ Party, she anticipated some pushback. The head of youth and adult programming wasn’t naive about the politics of Olean, which voted heavily in favor of President Trump. “We knew that there was going to be a few people who would call and complain,” she said. “We didn't know it was going to get as bad as it got.”

A post from the library’s Facebook page explaining the event — “teaching the children about acceptance, gender stereotypes, and that being different isn't a bad thing” — went viral locally and attracted a flood of negative comments, some of which, Stickles said, equated the program with rape and threatened to burn down the library. For weeks leading up to the event, the post galvanized conservatives: A local pastor barged into the library and told Stickles that she would burn in hell; people called the library saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to work with children because she identifies as queer; and neo-Nazi Daniel Burnside announced that the National Socialist Movement would be protesting the event. Stickles said that when she called the police department to organize security, they advised her to cancel the event.

The day before Drag Queen Kids’ Party, a local reporter called Stickles to ask about the death threats issued against her — threats that she was unaware of. After hanging up the phone, she stood alone in her office overlooking the parking lot. “The walk between my office to my boss's office is the only time I thought for a split second like maybe I should reconsider,” she said. After talking it over with the library director, Michelle La Voie, Stickles made her decision: “I have to. There's no way I'm calling it off.”

After a night of tossing and turning — “I got an hour and a half of sleep. I was so nervous. It had just gotten to be too much,” she said — Stickles pulled up to the library, bracing for a scene. What she encountered shocked her.

“Just rainbows everywhere,” she recalled. Over 200 supporters flooded the front lawn of the library, many of whom arrived three hours before the event to deter protestors, including a group of drag queens who drove down from Buffalo. They waved pride flags and held signs advocating acceptance and diversity. Protestors, for their part, amounted to “mostly little old ladies from church,” said Stickles, and neo-Nazis who stayed in their vehicles and drove around the library yelling obscenities. Inside, over 70 children and their parents crammed into a reading room to watch Flo Leeta read two books and lip-synch songs from “Frozen.”

Two weeks later, connections fostered at the library led to Olean’s first public Pride event: a picnic in the local park. About 100 people showed up. “I've never been around so many gay people in Olean,” Stickles said. “We're doing our best to keep the momentum going and make the whole community more inclusive.” A few people from the picnic started a group called Cattaraugus County Pride Coalition, and they’ve already discussed securing a permit for Olean’s first ever Pride parade, in 2019.

It was an unexpected outcome but one that Stickles sees as integral to her role as a librarian. “That’s the job of the public library,” she said, “to fill a need when we see it, you know?”

Backlash against programs like Drag Queen Story Hour have cast libraries as dynamic centers for civic progress, inadvertently reanimating conversations about who tax-funded institutions are responsible for serving — if the library is really for everyone, does that include hate groups? — and spotlighting the role of librarians as stewards of access and inclusion, a role that many have double-downed on since the election of President Trump.

“It's more an act of rebellion than it was before,” said Michelle Tea. “Under Obama, [Drag Queen Story Hour] just seemed like a really fun program to do — it was just fun — and it still is that, especially for the kids, but I think that one of the reasons why it is so popular right now is people are looking for things to support in space of what is happening to our culture, where so much hate is being emboldened.”

In Queens, as kids colored pages from The Dragtivity Book, Bella Noche stood to the side and reflected on the crowd, which seemed distracted at times. “This is a genuine audience,” she said. “If they're not interested, they will not hesitate to ignore you. It's cool winning over an audience of children, but also their parents — they’re protective over their kids. Their kids are the whole reason why they're here.”

She recounted an interaction with a mother after one of her readings. The mother’s son of about 7 years old approached her excitedly: “Mommy, Mommy, I know what I want to be,” he said. “When I grow up, I want to be a drag queen mermaid, too.”

📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚

Photo by Eugénie Baccot.

#libraries #drag queen story hour #drag queen story time

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chelseaandthediscourse · 7 years

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Drag vs Trans and how everyone loses

As I was unable to address it in my presentation, I would like to take the opportunity to use this blog entry to discuss the feud between drag queens and trans women. These are two groups that, decades ago, often shared spaces and common interests, but have since been pushed apart by identity politics. And it is, I believe, this very thing that continues to drive the two groups apart and fuels the animosity between the groups. It is not my intention here to suggest that these two groups should be pushed back together. No, quite the contrary, I would argue that there is an extent to which a firm boundary between the two is useful and perhaps necessary for trans advocacy politics. This boundary may be complicated by the presence of individuals who claim membership in both communities, but, I believe, it does not nullify it nor reduce its necessity to trans advocacy. However, it is not my intention here to address this issue of those who traverse the boundaries, if only because this question quickly becomes one of why people perform drag, a question that is far too complex to attempt to answer within a single blog entry. What I do wish to discuss here is some of the root causes of this feud and to perhaps offer ways that trans women and drag queens can come together as political allies in ways that respect each other’s identities.

From the perspective of many trans women, one of the root causes is a conception of drag queen performances as being, by their very nature, transmisogynistic. They are not the first to level these kinds of claims against the drag queen community. Writing specifically about black men performing drag, bell hooks argued that drag performances seem “to allow black males to give public expression to a general misogyny.” [1] This is an argument that has been repeated by many cis women in criticism towards drag performance (often without the racial specificity) and trans women critics utilize similar logic. For them, drag queen performances are merely an extension of the man-in-a-dress trope that turns the existence of trans women into a running joke in popular culture. However, to conceive of drag performances as always-already transmisogynistic is an over-simplification. Judith Butler, writing in part in direct response to bell hooks, locates these kinds of arguments on the same continuum as reducing lesbian desire as a product of failed heterosexual love. “This logic of repudiation,” Butler argues, “installs heterosexual love as the origin and truth of both drag and lesbianism, and it interprets both practices as symptoms of thwarted love. But what is displaced in this explanation of displacement is the notion that there might be pleasure, desire, and love that is no solely determined by what it repudiates.” [2] While here we again come again to the question of why drag performers perform drag, my only intention here is to argue that the always-already argument is a simplification that blinds us to the subversive potential of drag that can be used to denaturalize the ideology of gender that perpetuates harm against the trans community.

But this is not to say that all drag performances are subversive. Butler herself recognizes this when she states “that there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms.”[3] Rather, drag performances may reify or subvert gender ideology, or perform in a way that expresses ambivalence between these two options. Jose Esteban Munoz, in his work on disidentification theory, posits that “Commercial drag presents a sanitized and desexualized queer subject for mass consumption … [that] has had no impact on hate legislation put forth by the New Right or on homophobic [or transphobic] violence.” [4] I might add the caveat that the performances to which Munoz is referring have had no positive impact on hate legislation. Certainly, there is a history of mainstream drag performances actively disseminating transphobic discourses (see, for example, RuPaul’s Drag Race), and these may have arguably had a negative impact on the progress for trans rights. But there is a possibility of for drag that subverts. I think, again, here of Munoz’s work, in which he examines the drag performances of Vaginal Crème Davis, quoting her as saying, “I didn’t wear false eyelashes or fake breasts. It wasn’t about the realness of traditional drag – the perfect flawless makeup. I just put on a little lipstick, a little eye shadow and a wig and went out there.” [5] Further, I think of the film Madame Sata, in which the protagonist performs drag with no regard to passing, fully displaying their typically male coded body.[6] These performances subvert through highlighting the performative nature of gender, removing femininity as always-already attached to female coded bodies. I do not wish to posit this kind of drag as the only way in which to perform subversively, but only as one option.

Here it becomes necessary to address the drag queen community specifically, because it is my belief that the drag community has a responsibility here. Stephen Schacht and Lisa Underwood, in their study of the culture of female impersonators, argue “that any meaningful models of what is subversive must take into account an actor’s explicit intent, the audiences for whom she/he performs, and dialectic between the two.”[7] I have to agree with this. And while, of course, no drag performer can be held responsible for how the audiences read their performances, I do believe it is their responsibility, to cis and trans women, to examine their intentions and their performances and make an active attempt to not reproduce harmful ideology, if not to actively attempt to be subversive. Perhaps more importantly, this responsibility does not stop at the boundaries of one’s own intentions and performances. While perhaps most drag performances that are culpable in perpetuating discourse that harms trans women do so unintentionally and/or out of unexamined intent, there are those who actively and knowingly perpetuate them. In an examination of the drag queens of the 801 Cabaret by Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp, the performers express their worry over one of their own exploring the possibility of identifying as transgender, stating that to do so “means you’ve lost your identity.”[8] A similar sentiment is expressed by Pepper Labeija in the documentary Paris is Burning. In the film, Labeija speaks at length of their belief that being transgender is “taking it a little too far” and expresses thankfulness that they were smart enough to never have a sex change.[9] These kinds of sentiments seem to be rampant within the drag community (see, again, RuPaul’s Drag Race), and any drag queen that wants to be an ally to the trans community has a responsibility to call out their fellow performers for perpetuating these ideas.

Lest we place all the blame of drag queens, however, trans women have a responsibility to drag queens as well. As discussed, a large part of the animosity coming from trans women towards drag queens is the idea that their performances are inherently transmisogynistic. Stemming from that is the belief that their performances are helping to perpetuate the common belief amongst the general public that drag queen and trans woman are synonymous terms and that the latter are, like the former, (typically) men performing a role. But, as has also been stated, drag queens cannot be held responsible for how the audience reads their performances. Given the deeply entrenched nature of binary gender ideology, even the most subversive performances will still be read by some in ways that reify strict and essentializing gender norms. Trans women must understand that the onus of dispelling these ideologies is not on drag queens. As an extension of that, I do believe that there is an extent to which this feud is fueled by some akin to jealousy. The simple, sad fact is that drag queens have, by and large, reached a much higher level of acceptance in mainstream culture. There are those, I have met them, who love drag shows and refer to drag queens as she/her, but will not give trans women basic human respect. This is not the fault of the drag queen, nor is it a reason to attack the performer or the performance. Trans women, stop displacing your aggravation with a transphobic public on drag queens.

This is a very complex topic for a relatively small amount of discussion. I have not endeavored here to solve the feud in its entirety. Rather, my hope here is to have highlighted some of what I believe are the major causes for this feud and offer some ways in which both parties can work towards ending it, possibly towards working concurrently to change gender ideology that harms both groups. As members of the wider LGBTQ+ community, there is, I feel, every reason why these groups should be working together instead of against one another, but we have to stop needlessly fighting each other first.

[1] bell hooks. (2008). Is Paris Burning? Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (pp. 275-90). New York, NY: Routledge.

[2] Butler, J. (1993). Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex”. (pp. 121-40). New York, NY: Routledge.

[3] Butler, J.

[4] Munoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.

[5] Munoz, J.E.

[6] Ainouz, K. (2002). Madame Sata [motion picture]. Brazil: VideoFilmes.

[7] Schact, S.P. & Underwood, L. (2004). The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators. Journal of Homosexuality, 46(¾), pp 1-17. DOI 10.1300/J082v46n03_01

[8] Taylor,V. & Rupp, L.J. (2004). Chicks With Dicks, Men In Dresses: What It Means to Be a Drag Queen. Journal of Homosexuality, 46(¾), pp. 113-33. DOI 10.1300/J082v46n03_07

[9] Livingston, J. (1990). Paris is Burning [motion picture]. U.S.: Miramax

#transgender #social justice #drag queen #drag #trans #identity politics #lgbtq #lgbt #lgbtqia #queer #queer theory

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philaprint · 7 years

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Give Much Respect Due: How Female Rappers Inspire Black Queer Boys

MARCH 02, 2017

By Devyn Springer

It’s 2001. My mother opens the bathroom door and I am in my underwear, breathing heavily like a backup dancer. I have a smile on my face and sweat on my shoulders. My little ribs under my brown skin are sore because I’ve been shaking my hips from left to right for an entire verse and chorus. I’m looking at myself in the mirror and seeing myself as what resembles a Keith Haring painting; vibrant colors, bold lines creating motion. My mother lets out a small laugh, reminding me she is still there watching, and then she joins me in singing the chorus and moving her hips, “Chumpy, I break up with him before he dumps me/ To have me, yes you’re lucky.”

I have an obsession with flipping through my mother’s book of CDs and looking at all of the album art with awe until I find my selection, and I always seem to gravitate towards Missy Elliott, Da Brat or Queen Latifah; not that I am familiar with who those people are at 5 years-old, but because the album art has a curious way of making me feel something that resembles confidence.

It’s 2008. The Keith Haring painting the mirror had grown familiar with has turned into a small medium brown boy who looks more like a Basquiat painting, or a question walking around waiting for someone to answer it. My body feels awkward like my limbs and shoulders are a bit too big for my middle school being, and I am no longer the best dressed in class. I got headphones for Christmas and haven’t stopped playing Trina’s “Glamorest Life” in my ears since Christmas morning because when her loud and braggadocious voice comes crashing onto the treble-fueled beats, I feel like I fit in a bit more. I feel a strange confidence become me when I hear her rap “who you lovin’ who you wanna be huggin/ I seen her in your six hundred and you claim it's your cousin,” and I am proud of myself for understanding the first half of that line as a Lil Kim reference.

It’s 2011. The Basquiat painting feels like a Marina Abramović piece at this point, as I’ve begun to master the performance art of my own sexuality. I am driving the first car I own at night with the windows down, and Lil Kim tells me, “I used to be scared of the dick/ now I throw lips to the shit, handle it/ like a real bitch/ Heather Hunter, Janet Jacme.” I grip my hand on the passenger’s thigh, we kiss at a red light, and I say “Yo, you’ve gotta Google who Heather Hunter and Janet Jacme are real quick. Kim always comes through with the crazy references!” We laugh and pontificate on that line for a second before kissing again. I used to be scared of the dick lingers in the air, with Kim’s voice heavy and thick and a certain kind of honesty that is uncomfortably interesting, as I sit in the car with the first person to ever have sex with me.

They tell me all I ever do is listen to female rappers. They assure me they don’t think that’s a bad thing. They ask me why that is, and I explain how much I admire not only their lyrical delivery and dramatized personas, but I also love their performances of gender. I adore the way they help me, in some strange and almost inexplicable way, navigate my own relationship to the gender I was socialized into. I enjoy the way their gender within hip-hop, within their songs and lyrics, within their aesthetics, is politicized -- because it is something I am familiar with, and didn’t know how to express until I found them. My relationality to gender has always been one of having identities and labels ascribed to me, with terms and assumptions projected onto my body, and I saw pieces of that in the Black women who inspired me through their music.

Female rappers have narrated more moments of my life than I know how to explain, and have projected feelings on me I either forgot I needed to feel or couldn’t explain that I felt. When Nicki says “you was sleepin’ on me, thinking it was sumber time/ Now I’m a trending topic, lil mama, number signs” there is a breath of relatable energy that exists between us. It is in the way she openly refers to being slept on and openly discusses her struggles being a Black woman in a male-dominated industry that I am able to vibrate in a similar wavelength to her. The way that she is referred to as “difficult” for simply being about her business is a sentiment that resonates deeply with me as well because queer Black boys aren’t allowed to be outspoken without being “sassy” or seen as a queen. And if Nicki Minaj is slept on, her bravado simplified, her demands demeaned, then I can relate to her on a deeper level. And it is in the way she snaps back, reminding her ‘haters’ that she’s now a trending topic, that makes the inner scared and awkward queer boy in me go back to swinging his hips like a Keith Haring painting.

To be Black and queer is to have a strange relationship with space, or the lack thereof, and to have an even stranger relationship with confidence. The space that we are able to carve into this world looks a little different than other people’s. Our space looks nocturnal; night clubs, ballrooms, and dancing in our underwear with our friends to the newest Remy Ma song, grabbing pieces of her confidence and wearing it like an invisible cloak that hides us from the world. Women who rap, much like queer Black boys, manage to be both hypervisible and invisible at the same time; our bodies are sexualized before we have the choice to do it ourselves, and when we do own our own overt sexuality we are called conceited.

We can also look at the queer aesthetic often found in female rappers presentation to fully understand the massive appeal they are able to have to the Black queer community. I heard a friend say one time, “Nicki Minaj is one of the world’s greatest drag queens.” At the time, I was offended. What I assumed to be a transphobic remark likening Ms. Minaj’s appearance to that of a masculine figure was really a sly and subverted critique on the queerness of her aesthetic.

In reality, she is one of the world’s best drag queens, as are Lil Kim, Eve, Missy Elliott, and Left Eye, and several others. Drag and ball culture are such large parts of our Black queer community that you can’t help but notice the aestheticism seeping into the music video of Missy Elliott’s new single “I’m Better,” or the outlandishly early-2000s era fashion that Foxy Brown often adorned. The only one who switches a wig as much as a drag queen is Nicki Minaj, with the extravagance of a couture outfit and high-contoured cheekbones to match.

I am reminded of the artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s “dear friend, I am black...” calling cards she would give to people who said racist or problematic things to her, and it feels that in this similar sentiment exists female rappers’ performance of gender and sexuality. As if through lyrics and aesthetic they are reminding you, “dear friend, I am a sexual being, I Black woman…” It is as if they understand the need to subvert femininity and sexuality into a performance, one that at times is even exaggerated, for the sake of the artistic statement. And because so much of the vitality surrounding modern interpretations of gender and sexuality is performance, the female rapper has the transcendent ability to do what only an artist can do: blue the line between sociopolitical commentary, art, and expression.

Whether through intentional subversion or simple fashion-forward styling, several female rappers have played with the traditions of gendered clothing and presented themselves as something far more interesting than a gender binary could ever allow them to be. I am reminded of Left Eye in the music video for “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” wearing baggie jeans and t-shirts, holding her crotch while she raps her sex-positive lyrics alongside the feminine presentation of Chilli and T-Boz. I think of Lady of Rage in the “Afro Puffs” music video, dressed almost like a biker chick, with her broad shoulders, dark and oversized leather draped from her body, and it makes me think of almost every Da Brat, Queen Latifah, and Yo-Yo music video I’ve watched where they wore traditionally masculine suits and clothing.

Plenty of the visual specificities in fashion and art between the early 90s and now have been influenced by this presentation, with women and other queer people drawing inspiration from this aestheticism. So, when we arrive at a Nicki Minaj, or an Angel Haze, or an Azealia Banks, or a Princess Nokia, or a Lola Monroe, or a Young MA, it is no surprise that they continue to transform and uphold the legacy that was established for them through generations of foremothers. They continue to be the fire-spitting drag queens at the front of a battle for inclusivity and acceptance in a cis-hetero patriarchal industry, one that often reflects the values of the Black community.

As a Black queer boy, female rappers embody much of the confidence we often aspire to and achieve. When Trina taught me to be the baddest bitch, I didn’t know that Queen Latifah had already told me I need to be addressed as “your highness.” When Foxy asked why “all the sudden all these rap bitches got accents too?” Nicki Minaj was ready to ask where the fuck is her curry chicken and her rice and peas? You see, it is in the way they demand to be referred to as a queen and the Queen Bitch, to be given what they deserve, to be adorned with the highest fashion and pop bottles right next to the male rappers, that a confidence so bold and unique exists and flourishes. They are able to embody a powerful, magical feminine strength that reads like confidence but feels like life being handed over in a syringe.

When I was the small boy who was still carefree and still had space in his chest for joy, Missy Elliott, and Left Eye were there to help me shake my hips; their music would bring me the movement and vibrations like in the Keith Haring paintings. When I was an awkwardly small child in a world that felt too big, Trina, Remy Ma, and Foxy Brown gave me the confidence I didn’t know I deserved but definitely needed. I heard Foxy tell me she has these rap bitches in a chokehold at least once a week. And when I became intimate for the first time and love tasted like sex, I had many Lil Kim lyrics that lent themselves to me.

Today as a Black queer activist and artist navigating the world through an intersectional lens, I’m able to see just how monumental the role of a woman rapping on the radio can be for a Black queer boy. I now have the language, voice, and ears to realize that it has been female rappers playing in the background of my life for decades. They’ve always been the ones that have given me life time and time again when the world hands little queer boys nothing but death, and they’ve always been the ones to be doin’ things that you won’t regret.

https://www.philadelphiaprintworks.com/blogs/news/give-much-respect-due-how-female-rappers-inspire-black-queer-boys

#queer #black #women rappers #rappers #rap #music #identity

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ismael37olson · 5 years

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Come and Investigate the Dark Side of Your Soul

As I wrote in my first blog post about this show, the title La Cage aux Folles can be translated a few different ways, but the one that makes most sense to me is The Cage of Madwomen. And yet, while folles usually means crazy or foolish, it's also a slang word for effeminate gay men. Think about that for a second. The name of the show -- and the name of the club at the center of our story, and the name of our show's title song about that club -- is all about ambiguity. As Georges quips in Act I, "If you can't be truthful, be vague." The title song itself, the lyric, is about how all the labels and categories are blurred, even erased, in this world. Because we don't need them. Because the world is more complex than that. It's the conservative Dindons' worst nightmare: social and cultural complexity. Or maybe we'll find out it's Mme. Dindon's liberation. (Fun fact: dindon is French for turkey.) The content of the show's title song is all about erasing the lines between male and female, moral and immoral, classy and tacky, "royalty" and "riff-raff," "Perrier" and "Canada Dry," etc. What's the point? Labels are meaningless. People are individuals. People are who they are. Labels can't contain us. So whoever and whatever you are, you're safe here at La Cage. There are no expectations, no assumptions. During one of Georges' interactions with the audience, he says, "Duchess is that you? I didn't recognize you behind the moustache. It brings out your eyes." It's funny on the surface, but it's more than that. It's also about not judging, or maybe even more than that, celebrating what makes us individual. Look at this funny, rich, subversive lyric...

It's rather gaudy but it's also rather grand; And while the waiter pads your check, he'll kiss your hand. The clever gigolos Romance the wealthy matrons, At La Cage aux Folles.

So it's gaudy (tasteless) and grand (tasteful). The waiter will steal from you and treat you warmly. And then a mention of rich women and their boy toys, right before we return to the title phrase, which means The Cage of Madwomen.

It's slightly forties, and a little bit new wave. You may be dancing with a girl who needs a shave. Where both the riff-raff And the royalty are patrons, At La Cage aux Folles.

It's both old-fashioned and up-to-date (remember, the show's set in the 1980s). And gender is ambiguous. And money doesn't mean much. And now we switch from a minor key to major.

La Cage aux Folles, The maitre d' is dashing; Cage aux Folles, The hatcheck girl is flashing. We import the drinks that you buy, So your Perrier is Canada dry!

This place is both classy -- they have a dashing maitre d' -- and tacky -- the hatcheck girl is flashing her business at passers-by. And the "foreign" is a matter of perspective. In other words, all bets are off. The usual rules don't apply here. In fact, virtually no rules apply here. Except one -- dignity. The music returns to minor...

Eccentric couples always punctuate the scene; A pair of eunuchs and a nun with a marine. To feel alive, you Get a limousine to drive you To La Cage aux Folles.

The tone changes here. It's no longer self-depricatingly ironic. This is a weird place, but it's also a good place, a safe place, an interesting place, a place where you can be fully, unapologetically you. Where you can be alive... with the obvious implication that you're probably not alive anywhere else.

It's bad and beautiful; it's bawdy and bizarre. I know a duchess who got pregnant at the bar! Just who is who And what is what is quite a question At La Cage aux Folles.

This is a place of freedom and excess. Note that it's bizarre and bawdy, even bad, but it's also beautiful. The pregnant duchess embodies the ethos of this place -- Follow Your Bliss and Discover Your True Self. And don't worry about categories, definitions, norms, proprieties...

Go for the mystery, the magic and the mood; Avoid the hustlers And the men's room and the food. For you get glamour And romance and indigestion At La Cage aux Folles.

You get everything! La Cage represents the yin and yang of our lives, in miniature. And as if in celebration of that, the music turns major as more voices join in choral harmony.

La Cage aux Folles, A St. Tropez tradition! Cage aux Folles, You'll lose each inhibition! All week long we're wondering who Left a green Givenchy gown in the loo!

That last image is so subversive. Someone left a designer gown in the restroom. It instantly conjures questions -- was it a man or woman? what were they wearing when they left? who leaves their dress in the bathroom? But all those questions tell us everything we need to know about this place. We can't impose the rules of the outside world on the people and behavior in this world. As evidenced by the next, delicious lines...

You go alone to have the evening of your life; You meet your mistress and your boyfriend and your wife! It's a bonanza, It's a mad extravaganza, At La Cage aux Folles!

Then there's a big dance break and the Cagelles dazzle us. Eventually, Albin returns... and the music returns to minor...

You'll be so dazzled by the ambiance you're in, You'll never notice that there's water in the gin. Come for a drink and you may Wanna spend the winter At La Cage aux Folles!

Sounds like fun, no? The music turns to major one more time.

La Cage aux Folles, A St. Tropez tradition; Cage aux Folles, You'll lose each inhibition. We indulge each change in your mood; Come and sip your Dubonnet in the nude.

That last image is even funnier when you know "Dubonnet" is short for "Dubonnet Rouge Grand Aperitif de France" (I didn't.) Drinking that in the nude is even funnier to me.

The Cagelles return for a can-can, the once notorious dance originally performed at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, a fitting tribute to the dancing girls that came before them. After the rowdy, carnal dance break, Albin returns and he brings the minor key -- and complexity -- back with him.

Come and allow yourself to lose your self control; Come and investigate the dark side of your soul. Come for a glimpse and you may Wanna stay forever At La Cage aux Folles! You cross the threshold and your bridges have been burned. The bar is cheering for the duchess has returned! The mood's contagious; You can bring your whole outrageous entourage! It's hot and hectic, Effervescent and eclectic, At La Cage aux Folles!

Who wouldn't want to go to a place like that? We're in Shakespeare's Woods. We're through Alice's looking glass. And we're here to learn something about ourselves. Songwriter Jerry Herman's subtle but powerful trick of switching back and forth between major and minor is really clever. The minor key gives us that sense of the dark side, the wildness, and the major key delivers the joy and playfulness. Like the rest of the show, it's ambiguous. It's the musical yin and yang of La Cage aux Folles and La Cage aux Folles, and it connects this title song to the major textual themes of the show.

In most of Jerry Herman theatre scores, he uses minor keys not to express sadness, but complexity. Look at "Ribbons Down My Back" in Hello, Dolly! and much of the score to Mack and Mabel. He does the same thing in La Cage's "Song on the Sand," which also alternates major and minor, but for a slightly different reason. Here, the intro and first verse are about an only partly remembered past, but in the second verse when Georges switches to the present, the music moves to major. But before it ends, it moves back to the past and back to minor. The past is bitter-sweet, but the present is good. Relationships are hard, but this is a strong relationship genuinely built on love.

We think of songwriter Jerry Herman as one of the shining lights at the end of the so-called "Golden Age" of musical theatre, and we lump him in with other writers of lightweight fare. But Herman didn't write fluff. Even his earlier works, Hello, Dolly! and Mame featured decidedly subversive, nonconforming women, whose nonconformity up-ends everyone and everything around them. Many stories have an "agent of chaos" who bring disruption to a story. But it's not usually the protagonist. Isn't it interesting that Herman's leading women are always the agents of chaos in their own stories? Merely the desire to control their own lives and destinies is disruptive to the men around them. Maybe that's why gay men like to read Dolly and Mame as subliminal drag queens. And after all, isn't that essentially the story of La Cage aux Folles? Albin causes chaos by being who he is, and refusing to apologize for that. And isn't that exactly the kind of disruption at the heart of progressive political activism in America right now? Who knew in 1983 that this musical would be so relevant in 2019? We open this week! Get your tickets! Long Live the Musical! Scott

from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2019/02/come-and-investigate-dark-side-of-your.html

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