I thought about that drag show yesterday, when I read that this actress Rose McGowan had said, in a podcast interview with the gay author Bret Easton Ellis, that "gay men are as misogynistic as straight males, if not more so. " They’d fought “for the right to stand on top of a drift wearing an orange speedo and take molly, ” she added, within a hilarious bit of reductionism.
For context, McGowan was calling out gays with regard to boycotting fancy hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei, who recently implemented a stone-the-gays law in his country. She was arguing that gays just protest Arab countries when antigay things happen, but never step up in order to protest the oppression of women in those nations. McGowan herself hosted a good anti-boycott party at the Beverly Hills Hotel a few months ago, and her rant in order to Ellis, who set her up for it by pooh-poohing the boycott themself, may have been a bit defensive. (Was she paid for hosting that party? ) Which may make it easy to dismiss what she’s said, if it didn’t strike a real neural.
Now, let me be clear, as McGowan initially was not. I don't think every homosexual man is a misogynist. Plenty are acutely aware of intersectional social-justice issues, and the developing awareness of trans issues has made boundaries even less clean-cut. (Last I examined, seems like transgender boldfaces Laverne Cox and Janet Mock are out there talking up for plain old women's rights as much as they are for LGBT ones. ) An excellent you're a gay man who's been on the scene for any length of time, you needed either be lying or a dumb-ass to say that you don't see and hear informal (and not-so-casual) misogyny flying through the air all the time.
Can we take the wildly well-known show RuPaul's Drag Race? Again, let me be clear. That show makes me personally laugh my head off, and even occasionally cry; one of my best friends, the wickedly brilliant John Polly, writes for it. Yet on RuPaul's Drag Race, the greatest compliment you can pay a drag queen, to tell her she's "real" as well as authentic, is to call her a "fishy bitch. " Never mind the "bitch. " "Fish" has long been gay slang for a woman, because, in the historic gay-male imagination, a vagina smells like fish. Just as Noreen Malone pointed out on this web site that it's "fun" to say "basic bitch" - well, it's fun to say "fishy bitch, " right? It just sounds funny! Girl, you're one fishy bitch! When I've told gay male friends I hate this term, sensation like a P. C. schoolmarm, they've told me to lighten up, that "it does not mean anything. " This, to me, feels akin to various rappers who've stated their repeated use of the word faggot "doesn't mean anything. " They're not really talking about homosexuals; they're talking about guys who are stupid or weak or... what ever. Sorry, gays and rappers - if you're part of a certain group and listening to a certain word makes you feel like you just got slapped hard in the face along with, well, a big, cold fish, then it means something.
Then there's the extremely complicated meanings of drag itself. I love drag. I think it can be one of the most lively, strange, hilarious, challenging, moving forms of performance I've ever seen, and I really like how gay men (and some lesbians... and some straight women) have used this for decades to unleash themselves and express all manner of humor, rage, sorrow, as well as rebellion. But at the end of the day, drag is (usually) men dressing up as women in a way that frequently opens the door for ridicule, exaggeration, mockery, grotesquery. Two summers ago, I remember awaiting the boat to leave Fire Island, watching a drag queen named Broken, with ratty hair and taped-up heels, stumble around with a cigarette as well as drink in her hands. Busted was both hilarious and disturbing, simply because she was a spot-on facsimile of a homeless, cracked-out hooker. That describes lots of drag. Gay men don't get up onstage and send up the straight males who've harassed or ridiculed them. They get up there and they send upward women. The bigger the hair, the more outrageous the makeup, the huger the juggs and ass, the more references to the vagina, the funnier it is. Many times, I have sat back at a drag show and watched the gay men howl like they were at a football game while the handful of women in the house stood generally there with tight, awkward smiles on their faces, trying to be game.
I talk only for myself, but I suspect many gay men would agree when i state that gay men's identification with women is not a campy, draggy putdown but a complicated, combustible reality. Many of us, either rejected by or unable to connect with the straight men in our lives, have taken our entire moral and emotional tips from women - our grandmothers, our mothers, our aunts or siblings or teachers or best friends. They gave us love, albeit often complicated love, when men did not, and we have utterly absorbed their tics, their own points of pride and delight, their hurts and bitternesses, their sayings as well as gestures, their often complicated relationships to other women. To a large extent, that is where drag comes from.
But what it’s easy to forget, and what a childhood to be trampled on because I was gay has sometimes obscured for me, is that of training course I am not a woman. I'm a man. Gay men are men. You may not know the worry we carry when we walk certain places, but we still walk in the man's body. You only have to look at the danger a transgender person places on their own in when they go from presenting as a man to a woman to know just how much more vulnerable you are walking through life as a woman. And as men, we have male privilege. If we're white and well-educated, we carry a lot of opportunity. I've gotten by in this city for 25 years significantly thanks to a system of other (mostly) white, well-educated gay men.
But gay men have additionally long relied on women for both emotional and political support. Polls have shown again and again that, especially in the red states, women are the ones who are likely to vote or protest for your marriage and other rights, who are going to join a person in the streets when your safety is threatened. Say what you will about Will and style, but I strongly believe the friendship on that show set the actual model for a major shift in attitudes toward gays in American hetero culture. It can be annoying; as my friend Adam says, "I hate it whenever girls treat me like they want me to be Stanford Blatch to their Barbara Bradshaw" - but when these friendships are real, they’re important.
And recognizing the full humanness of a friend often means thinking about things in life that you have that they avoid, on the systemic level. Gay men, you don't make 77 cents to a mans dollar. You don't have to worry, based on the state where you live, about losing access to birth control or even abortion. You (generally) don't worry about your biological clock ticking, or have to create complicated choices about how to balance childbearing and work, as many women perform. Before you go all drag-queen on Rose McGowan, as many of you already have with your on the internet reads about her plastic surgery (which she had after a disfiguring car accident), sit for a moment with what she said. Can you really find no truth in it? You may have the very best damn tuck in the drag competition, you fishy bitch, but you still completely don't know what it feels like for a girl. And neither do I.
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