Drag Is a Form of Blackface. So Now What?
Female impersonation has become a multimillion-dollar industry headed by RuPaul. It's pure misogyny, and causing a host of other issues for the LGBT community. But can it be canceled?
Exciting times, but hard to keep up with: Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s rapid fall — after getting trapped in her own gender-queer wokie-talkie purity spiral while trying not to sound like a science-denying nutjob, but at the same time also defending Woke pseudoscience that insists trans women/men are biologically no different from women/men, or you’re a “transphobe” who deserves as many death threats as JK Rowling — has kicked things into high gear.
Then came the fuss about new Republican legislation barring drag queens from reading fairy tales to young children. And then Tucker Carlson finally broke open the detransitioning scandal, which non-Fox News media have been ignoring, in complete contravention of all journalism ethics. He very compassionately interviewed a male-to-female detransitioner who had become a celeb on r/detrans on Reddit. The subreddit, which I’ve been monitoring for weeks, posting screencaps of the rapidly rising numbers, has now reached 44,600 members, a combined ~70% of whom are in some stage of detransitioning/desisting. This is the brave fella and the post that got Tucker’s attention:
Still no word of this scandal from the usual suspects. Rather, 200 trans activists and their enablers allies at the New York Times scribbled a delirious letter to the paper’s execs about how the Times fails to represent trans issues properly — a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance — and staged a walkout. I actually felt sorry for The Gray Lady, for a change, rather than wanting to smother her in her sleep with one of her own embroidered cushions.
So, I had to stop writing the second Establishing Shot piece about victimhood that was scheduled next, and pivot to this writhing Medusa’s head of drag queens and other gender-queer issues.
It’s also very clear from the stats of my posts so far that you don’t want the fluffy froufrou Scribbles about arts, entertainment and storytelling — I feel so gay about that, now. Yeah, well. But you do want all this Woke-schmoke mess explained. Your preferences are my command.
It’s a long one, couldn’t help that — I have a lot to say, with more to come. I believe it’s worth a few extra minutes of readers’ time.
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IN WHICH I BECOME A PANTO DAME
I went to an English primary school in Rome. Mum is Australian, which reinforced the Anglo culture my siblings and I swam in every day. Dad was a classic New York Yankee who traveled constantly, as all sharks must; he had less day-to-day influence, but Anglo-American culture is little more than British culture with the fun bits taken out. His Majesty’s government might as well keep it honest and issue me an honorary passport.
My maternal grandfather and his wife lived in England. I saw my first Christmas pantos when we visited them for Christmas. Panto — short for ‘pantomime’ — is an English tradition dating from the early 1700s when, per History Extra, “entertainments heavily influenced by the Italian commedia dell’arte became increasingly popular thanks to their crowd-pleasing mix of humour, mime, spectacle and dance.”
An integral part of the panto tradition is cross-dressing leads. Peter Pan, a popular show and character, is usually played by a woman, known in panto tradition as a ‘principal boy.’ The point of an adult woman playing the role is she sounds like a pre-pubescent boy, but can belt out songs to the exacting standards of English stagecraft.
Panto is often instructional. At a Christmas show on the West End in London when I was eight or so, all the children had to repeat the “three magic words: please, thank you, and sorry,” at intervals throughout the play, when instructed by a woman performing as the boy who never grows up.
The Wicked Stepmother and the Ugly Stepsisters in another panto staple, Cinderella, are usually played by men, called ‘panto dames,’ not ‘drag queens.’ The characters are made all the more menacing by the fact they are clearly men threatening a defenseless girl. The threatening tone is mitigated by the absurdity of having men perform the roles; the characters themselves are all the uglier and more comical because they are men.
The Fairy Godmother is also usually played by a woman; she represents something of an ideal motherly figure; the reason Cinderella is in this predicament with her father’s second wife is because her own mother died, a children’s anxiety nightmare that also befell Snow White. Cinderella herself is normally played by someone of the sex the character was written for; that is, until I broke that norm myself as a teen.
Mum played the Fairy Godmother in the school Christmas panto when I was eleven. Already a theater groupie, I volunteered as a stagehand and watched her from the sides in rehearsals, and then in the actual performance. She was always the most beautiful woman in the world to me, but seeing her up there, shimmering in a silver ballgown, a fairy queen floating above the play like an angel Christmas tree topper, was another experience of her altogether. The next day, cool older boys from the high school came up to me and said, “Your mum’s a real bonaccia” Roman slang for “‘hot af.” I was too proud to be offended.
The Wicked Stepmother was played by our rakish, perpetually hungover drama teacher, Mr. Looney, the Ugly Stepsisters by the chemistry and geography teachers, also straight men. My eyes bugged with admiration as they drank themselves silly backstage, howling with laughter while they stuffed balloons into white camisoles, in preparation for the getting-dressed-for-the-ball scene. Mr. Looney scrawled an L and an R in lipstick over the chemistry teacher’s left and right boob-balloons; they could barely pick themselves up off the floor and get on stage from laughing — the scene was a total mess that left the audience wanting more. “We all love a good cozzie and a bit of lippy,” an English production designer I was working with in London once said.
The following year Mr. Looney staged a panto he’d written himself; mashups of panto characters, tropes and plots were also part of the tradition. It was a surreal, terrible concoction that offended a few parents. A popular older boy named Marco played the Wicked Stepmother as a version of Mae West. I signed up to play the lone Ugly Stepsister; if Mr. Looney — a man whom I both admired and had a puppy crush on — could cross-dress on stage, so could I.
In 2021, completely hijacked by Woke, Sony pandered to Hollywood’s cowardly Stockholm Syndrome, a.k.a. inverted McCarthyism 2.0, and dabbled in a bit of shameless appropriation from panto by casting the obnoxious “nonbinary” transvestite and red-carpet-radical Billy Porter as the “Fabulous Godmother,” in director Kay Cannon’s version of the Charles Perault classic. Presumably “fairy” was replaced because it’s a classic slur about gays — so is “queer,” but never mind them quibbles — even though nobody has used it since my parents’ generation.
What are the Seven Words of Wisdom, children? “There is no such thing as nonbinary!”
Porter is the type of attention-seeking Woke narcissist who is dragging the original LGBT movement back decades; in my view, we’re entering a danger zone, but that might just be sense memory from living half my life in fear of the wrong people finding out I was a faggot. Thanks to the egotistical, misguided “activism” of Selfie Era attention-seekers like Porter, as well as gender affirmation, pubescents on puberty blockers, and drag queens reading fairy tales to small children, gays and the original transsexuals have slid from acceptance back to being the corrupting, degenerate abominations who deserve to be put to death, just as the Bible instructs.
The fact that the vast majority of Americans are deeply religious seems to have escaped the attention of these “activists,” whom most of us never asked for because they are completely unnecessary.
The Cuban actress who played Cinderella in the 2021 version, Camilla Cabello, is beautiful and can certainly sing. My question is, why set it in a Frenchified Europe? Why not Havanna, which would also put Billy Porter’s race in context? Did nobody watch Carmen Jones, the brilliant reinterpretation of Bizet’s Carmen, with an all-Black cast headed by Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte? That’s a rhetorical question; they clearly haven’t, or they would know that Western society has already been through this Woke-schmoke, DEI thing, starting in the 50s with projects like Carmen Jones. They were truly groundbreaking; Billy Porter and his kind are merely tiresome.
Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella for Disney in 2015 made over half a billion at the box office. Kay Cannon’s Cinderella was such a disaster that its theatrical releases were canceled altogether after Sony dumped the film on Amazon. As I’ve been saying for a while now, “Go woke, go broke.” Except I recently found out that other Hollywood observers coined the same phrase at the same time I did — great minds, and all that.
I was bullied quite a bit my freshman year at St. Stephen’s, the American high school in Rome that I switched to after I dropped out of the English school — yes, I dropped out of junior high. I was thrown in the fountain in the central courtyard nine times the first semester, more than any other kid. I was overly extroverted and too well-liked by the girls for the boys’ taste; Americans are far more macho and aggressive than their British cousins, even posh Americans living in Italy. I rolled with it, turned it into a joke, and easily survived; I loved the school, the teachers and students too much to be bothered by an occasional dunk. I kept a dry set of clothing in my locker. Again, easy.
Honestly, I didn’t even realize it was bullying until awareness of bullied gay kids began a decade ago. There’s a lot you assume you deserve after you realize you’re attracted to your own sex and that you’ve slid to the lowest rung of every social ladder in the world.
The drama teacher, Miss Peebles, was English. That meant her first Christmas play was panto, Winnie the Pooh creator AA Milne’s The Ugly Ducking. Miss Peebles knew I was game for it, understanding panto tradition as I did. I was cast as the Queen, gussied up as an insane Nazi Dolly Parton with torpedo boobs. I can still feel the tsunami of laughter and admiration from the moment I threw open the curtains and stepped on that stage. The dunking stopped.
The following year, Miss Peebles put on her version of Cinderella. I was cast as the lead, and a goofy Israeli boy played the skateboarding Fairy Godmother. It wasn’t as successful as the year before: Having a bona fide gay boy up on stage singing Ella Fitzgerald’s “The Man I Love” made the audience uncomfortable. The year after that, when I was in the Advanced Theater Program at Trinity School in New York, I was the only guy willing to play Alfred in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the young man who plays the female roles in The Tragedians, the traveling theatrical troop hired by Hamlet to mess with his uncles head.
While I don’t believe he ever performed in drag, Dad was a member of Hasty Pudding at Harvard, the oldest theatrical organization in America, the third-oldest in the world, after the Comédie-Française and the Obermannergau Passion Play. Hasty Pudding only began allowing women to perform in 2018.
All of this is to say that cross-dressing in theatrical productions has always been an integral part of English and Anglo-American Yankee culture. I can’t speak for Scottish traditions, but their idea of entertainment is tossing entire trees across a field in skirts — oh, shut it, Angus: a kilt is a feckin’ skirt — and dancing over swords, which is actually something I know how to do, having once been in the Scottish Dancing Club at the English school.
Give me a stage, baby, and it’s mine.
THE OTHER GAY PRONOUN PROBLEM
Five years ago, my boyfriend Wes and I were on Gay Spring Break with a group of other middle-aged “masc” gay men in the Philippines. A former construction worker, raised in cowboy culture on a ranch outside Calgary, Wes is the epitome of North American masculinity, what is known in gay culture as “straight-acting,” a typically bitchy-queen put-down that implies he’s faking it. If he is, he hasn’t broken character since I first met him; it would be a depth of immersive Method acting that Christian Bale couldn’t sustain.
We were seated in a restaurant by the sea. Wes had left the table to bounce around the bar chatting up strangers; when he drinks, he becomes a blond Labrador on crack: everyone needs to share his euphoria and know how special, fun and loved they are. Now that we were a few days into the trip, that Labrador charm had worn off for the other guys — it was a little too Florida spring-break-bro behavior for those queens.
“Do you know what she wants to eat?” the guy sitting across from me asked when the server came to take our order.
“Did he give you permission to feminize him?” I snapped back, making sure the rest of the group heard; I actually liked this guy a lot, but having been on another Gay Spring Break to Bali the year before with the same group, when I was still single, I was familiar with the feminizing and needed to establish boundaries. By the way he recoiled slightly and his eyes bugged, my admonition landed like a slap; feminization is so common in gay culture that I can’t remember ever hearing another gay man object to it, not out loud. I imagine it was the same for him.
Gay men feminizing each other is a far more pernicious pronoun issue than most people outside the gay conversation understand: It’s a way of putting other gay men in their place, of subjugating them, in the way all men do with each other, regardless of sexuality. Is there a basic-training or locker-room-pep-talk scene in any American movie that doesn’t include the drill sergeant/coach denigrating recruits by calling them “ladies”?
The banter between contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race while they’re competing with each other is an example of how prevalent the habit is within gay culture, especially among “queens,” or fem-presenting men.
The reason this is an issue is because of what it says about how gay men perceive women: as inferior. What does that say about how a substantial majority of gays — and straight drill sergeants and coaches — really perceive women? Add to that the fact gays aren’t physically attracted to them, but worship masculinity, and the result is evidence of intrinsic communal misogyny.
TOXIC FEMININITY
As we can see from the show’s backstage footage, most Drag Race contestants aren’t full-time transvestites, a word coined in 1910 by Magnus Hirschfield that means cross- (trans) dressed (vestitus); in other words, they are not men who feel more comfortable in feminine clothing, like self-described “executive transvestite” Eddie Izzard, who was recently forced by gender-queer activists to choose her pronouns — guess what she chose. In an interview with The New York Times, Izzard stated that she was fine with either he or she, but insinuated that she didn’t have much choice in the matter: it was activists — a.k.a. “the world” with hand indicating an explosion — who forced the change.
Even though in theory they are both cross-dressers, I distinguish drag queens from transvestites because when the latter perform — and not all of them do —they’re merely changing into a costume the way any actress would. It’s when Izzard, who’s been an executive transvestite for close to 40 years, performs as a man that she’s in drag.
I’ve never seen English transvestite David Hoyle, who is within my social circle as a good friend of my ex, the queer theorist and author Jonathan Kemp, out of drag. There are pictures of him on Google as a “normal man.” I regard him as a performance artist, not a drag queen: he’s not lip-syncing to Lady Gaga in a gay bar; rather, his shows are blazingly clever and smart, as he is — RuPaul is a blond bubblehead compared to Hoyle. He also identifies as an artist, not a drag queen, which fits my perception of where he sits in the professional creative and performance clouds.
I would also argue that Christeene Vale, a Southern White trash character of indeterminate sex created by Paul Soileau, is more of a performance artist than a drag queen; his commentary about White trash America is profound, subversive, and highly disturbing for a staunch Yankee like me — all hallmarks of good art.
However, Soileau is part of the extended family of cult designer Rick Owens, to whom I’m attached as an afterthought behind the caboose of Owens’ mighty Goth bullet train: both my creative partner, Rain Li, and I have separately collaborated with Owen’s step-daughter, Scarlett Rouge, and her mother, uber-muse Michele “Hun” Lamy. Regardless of how tenuous my relationship is, I still recuse myself from judging whether Christeene gets a VIP pass to the fine artists’ club at the Venice Berlinale, or whether he should be thrown on the glitter-kindled bonfire with other, far-less disruptive, bog-standard drag queens.
I see RuPaul out of drag all the time around West Hollywood. He’s a tall, supremely confident, somewhat effete man, by no means a “screaming queen,” meaning a man whose feminine mannerisms either cannot be hidden, like a form of Tourette's, or he chooses to present that way because his unthreatening clownishness endears him to others, and helps him survive and succeed socially, often protected by women. The fem-presenting man also stands a better chance of getting laid by straight men, who find his femininity more alluring and permissible than sleeping with someone like me, which would make him gayer than Tom of Finland vodka.
Feminine performativities also allow men like him to borrow the protective deference that the vast majority of men automatically accord women, regardless of sexuality. It’s a reflex that is at the heart of most social constraints that have limited women’s behavior and expectations about them throughout history — women ensure the survival of the species; men are dispensable. So they must be locked away.
RuPaul is neither the Tourette’s nor the social-survivalist fem-presenting queen. He isn’t gender dysphoric, so not a trans man. The same goes for most of the contestants on his show. They’re female impersonators, performers; everything about the way they present, their speech, their reactions and expectations is learned, not who they are naturally. Unlike sexuality, they choose to be who they are.
How dare I make such a blasphemous statement that flies in the face of everything Judith! Butler and her surly band of critical theorists have so successfully preached to the Western world? For a start, these performativities — that’s Butler’s word, one of many willfully obfuscatory terms she’s cooked up in her cauldron of specious nonsense — are only observed in men in Western society. As such, they aren’t human nature.
I also know that they are learned mannerisms from my own experience when I was a fledgling, impressionable young gay. I had two groomers: one when I was in high school — a gay man whose own performative femininity he dropped after a few years in favor of a shaved head, butch behavior, and a girlfriend; the other when I was in my early 20s, this one a Tourette’s type fem gay who couldn’t help it. Both served as my gurus, a typical situation for young gays. The first taught me upper-class refinements and socialite etiquette; art history and architecture; fashion, film history, and so forth. The second taught me to appreciate modern art, immersively, by dunking me into the center of the much-storied Downtown New York art scene of the 80s.
It was fun to camp it up. Hilarious. Frat jocks who dress in drag for Halloween know how much fun it is. I kept it going for a year or so, before donning a Valentino plaid suit and sashaying down the halls of advertising and publishing, voguing butch realness, of a sort: posh men are usually more effete than those outside our world; or rather, we don’t need to perform American machismo if it’s not natural, which it is for my brother, for instance. In my mid-30s, I became a man. Who I am now is my natural behavior; I’m considered just about as authentic as a person can be — I mimic nobody. You might say my entire existence disproves Judith!’s claptrap about how we create our gender, how “male” and “female” are constructs.
Damn, but she’s full of shit — hits me every time I think or write about her.
BORN THIS WAY, NOT THAT WAY
GLAAD and the HRC have abdicated their original mandates to fight for proper LGBT representation in the media and for equal rights, respectively, in favor of supporting the horrors being perpetuated by gender-queer activists. Perhaps sensing their ship is going down, drag queens have jumped on the bandwagon to plant false flags in the form of reading fairy tales to children in the Heartland. As we’ve been told over and again, if they aren’t accepted, “at-risk teens in the Midwest” will kill themselves.
As the HRC knows very well, the LGBT argument for equal rights is that we are born this way; that nobody would choose to be thrown down and crushed at the bottom of every social ladder on the planet if they could avoid it; that we have as much right to the pursuit of happiness and equal protections as any other group. Sexuality is human nature, not a choice; unless you’re a lesbian Marxist-feminist desperate to magic your fictions about gender into nonfiction.
In no sane argument is someone born with a natural compulsion to perform a grotesque parody of an entire sex on stage at Mickey's on Santa Monica Boulevard.
I’m not the first to point out that drag is a form of blackface. Gay marriage pioneer Mary Cheney — daughter of the former vice president, sister of the newly minted hero Liz — called it out on Facebook in January 2015. She rather humbly phrased it as a question, after seeing a promo for RuPaul’s Drag Race and correctly assuming that this was about to break into the mainstream. 2015 is also the year we accorded a measure of equal rights with the overturning of DOMA:
Why is it socially acceptable—as a form of entertainment—for men to put on dresses, make up and high heels and act out every offensive stereotype of women (bitchy, catty, dumb, slutty, etc.)—but it is not socially acceptable—as a form of entertainment—for a white person to put on blackface and act out offensive stereotypes of African Americans? Shouldn’t both be OK or neither? Why does society treat these activities differently?
RuPaul savaged her on Twitter, shutting down a perfectly legitimate conversation, saying that Cheney needed to “educate” herself. RuPaul brought up the “long history” of men performing as women, as well as participating in the fight for equal rights.
Let me reeducate RuPaul on that last point because I was there in New York City at ground zero of the fight for equal rights: Performing at fundraisers for GLAAD, the HRC, ActUp, AmFar, and the rest, doesn’t justify drag, or make it any less blackface; it just means they had an opportunity to perform in front of an uncritical, adoring audience, and raise their profiles a millimeter more. Hiding under the expansive halo of the equal rights fight and AIDS crisis to justify your performance of misogyny is like gender-queer activists stealing the halo of the LGBT movement to shine their crap about 37 genders and puberty blockers for kids; it just makes it all the more despicable, in my view.
In a classic bit of historian’s fallacy in HuffPo, Domenick Scudera, a theater historian at Ursinus College, and a drag queen — so no bias there — schooled Mary Cheney on RuPaul’s behalf:
Men dressing in female garb have been integral to the performing arts for thousands of years in a myriad of cultures. Medea was originally played by a man in ancient Greece. All of Shakespeare's greatest female protagonists -- Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, Beatrice and so on -- all were created by male actors. The Japanese Onnagata is a beautiful idealization of womanhood. The Tan (or Dan) actors of the Beijing Opera, such as the great Mei Lan-fang, are skilled, graceful performers unlike any other. The English Panto Dame has entertained families at Christmastime since her introduction in the 19th century.
That is a casebook example of false equivalency. As I wrote at the start of this piece, these traditions came about because it was unacceptable, often illegal, for women to perform in public. They weren’t monstrous parodies of male stereotypes about women. Men playing Ophelia weren’t throwing themselves across the stage lip-syncing ‘I Will Survive’ or ‘Don’t Cry for Me Denmark’; they were playing women as the female characters were written in the literary classics they were performing. They weren’t bawdy characterizations playing for laughs in front of a crowd full of men so gender euphoric that they can only have sex with each other, coming onstage after the go-go dancers in dollar-stuffed, cockring-fluffed jockstraps have hopped off for a cigarette break and a bump of coke.
If drag-queen shows were considered the performing arts, they would be playing Lincoln Center, not calling out bingo numbers for tourists slurping all-you-can-drink-mimosas at Hamburger Mary’s $19 Sunday brunch. If Drag Race-style drag is performance art, then go-go dancing is ballet/modern dance; it’s not, although there are a few male ballet and modern dancers who have supplemented their incomes gyrating in thongs at The Abbey — my friend Quinn Jaxon is one of them.
On behalf of my people, I reject the appropriation of Anglo culture and history to justify this carnage of misogyny. And they’re demanding we respect their pronouns and other mashings of the English language. Yeah, no: Show even a modicum of respect, first, and stop lying to make yourselves right at the cost of the truth and all human decency.
“Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!”
— Pink Floyd, ‘The Wall’
Those who maintain that drag queens were instrumental in Stonewall and in securing gay rights is another historian’s fallacy. Marsha P. Johnson, the trans woman who is credited with starting the riots, identified as a transvestite and a West Village “street queen” of the kind glossfied and sanitized in Ryan Murphy’s Pose, a show so unrealistic and misrepresentative of how dark that lifestyle was that it’s downright disrespectful of the LGBT experience in that era. For a start, Manhattan looked like Joker, not riverfront condos in Williamsburg, especially the Christopher Street piers and environs.
The modern drag queen, this blackface version, emerged from La Cage aux Folles-style burlesque revues in Europe, which mainly featured drag queens impersonating famous women. Then it became edgy and somewhat cool in the downtown club scene in the mid-80s; but never for me — it was too loud, desperate and tacky, although occasionally hilarious. Then they broke out with Lady Bunny’s Wigstock, and finally with RuPaul himself in the 1990s.
I was hovering around in RuPaul’s orbit back then. As far as I know, he was the first gay Star Is Born-style manufactured-and-managed entertainer, an attempt to capitalize on the Wigstock phenomenon, but most importantly with the breakout success in 1994 of the Australian film about drag queens and transvestites, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. RuPaul took far longer to break out than his management anticipated, by about 20 years.
I give credit where it’s due: nobody followed the chorus of his club hit ‘Supermodel,’ “You’d better work!” more strictly than RuPaul. But he’s made his millions, as did famous blackface performers of the kind portrayed by Al Jolson in the first synced sound film, The Jazz Singer, before society woke up — for real woke — to the realities of what it represented. And now blackface is an astounding collection of artifacts in Whoopi Goldberg’s house, where it belongs.
When the Mary Cheney pile-on happened, Slate assigned Miz Cracker, a drag queen — no bias there, either — to investigate whether it might be true:
That said, just because some drag queens partake in misogyny individually does not make the entire art form inherently misogynistic—and this is where the blackface comparison breaks down. For some perspective on this controversy, I spoke with W. Fitzhugh Brundage, chair of the Department of History at UNC-Chapel Hill, and editor of a fascinating book on black representation in American pop culture, Beyond Blackface.
“My immediate response,” Brundage said, “is that Cheney’s comments show very little understanding of blackface as a historical phenomenon.” One major problem with Cheney’s comparison, he explained, was the yawning gap between the immense cultural influence of blackface at its height and the comparatively low visibility of drag, even in its present RuPaul-sponsored golden age. “In the 1840s, anyone in even a moderate-sized American city had access to minstrelsy, and the rest had access to it through sheet music,” Brundage said. “It was an incredibly pervasive cultural phenomenon. Drag has never enjoyed that cultural weight.”
“Partake in misogyny”? Sounds like an ayahuasca ceremony. Still, thank you for the admission, Miz Cracker; also, it’s many more than “some,” so siddown.
To Brundage’s credit, he’s speaking in 2015. Only hyperbolic, sycophantic CAA agents and TV producers at World of Wonder anticipated the prestigious, Emmy-winning juggernaut that Drag Race would become, that “even a moderate-sized American city” would have drag queens literally educating children, not just using the word “educate” as a way of throwing bitchy-queen shade at the lesbian daughter of the Republican establishment by portraying her as being ignorant, when the reality is that Mary Cheney was like so many of us who are pushing back at Woke Cerberus: The little girl pointing out that the emperor only thinks he’s wearing the empress’ new clothes, when he’s really naked, old, and so very, very tired.
NEVER FEAR: THE END IS NIGH
I cannot deny that drag queens have helped heterosexuals accept us, but so have Queer Eye, Call Me By Your Name, Brokeback Mountain, Pete Buttigieg and much more. Clothes might make the man a drag queen, but what makes a man a grownup is being a parent: your focus is diverted from your selfhood; your ego, the source of most personal and social strife, is sublimated in service of your kids. You grow up.
Because few of us opt to become parents, gay men are often likened to Peter Pan. This is where I stand up, raise both hands, and own that about myself, and where I say that we need to stop selfishly provoking people who think and believe differently, who are struggling through life just like the rest of us, to stop suing Christian bakers and website designers. We need to be better Americans and put the rest humanity before our personal needs and desires.
If that mythic “at-risk trans kid in the Midwest” kills himself, it’s not because a “gender-fluid” drag queen using they/them pronouns couldn’t read Cinderella to seven-year-olds; there is nothing you could’ve done about it, as with most suicides. Stop throwing everything you and your friends have at straight people just to win an argument that you are destined to lose. You’re being emotionally manipulative — it’s unseemly.
But it is boosting Tucker’s ratings like nobody’s business, so congrats on that. As of right now, my guess is that what didn’t happen for Republicans in 2022 is going to happen big time in 2024, mostly because of Wokeness, “gender affirmation” and the menace of drag queens in classrooms.
Women haven’t needed men to represent them on stage for generations now, one of many reasons that historian’s fallacies about traditions of men performing as women are pure crap. Comedians like Lucille Ball, Maya Rudolph and Kirsten Bell are the only ones who are entitled to mock women, not men who are physically and emotionally repulsed by them.
One of the tricks of Wokeism is to strong-arm historical narratives and realities about oppression to make them seem relevant and occurring in the present. Appropriate to the beginning of this essay about Christmas panto, I call this tactic a ‘glass-slipper fallacy’ which, according to my personal lexicon, is “a form of cognitive dissonance that tries to force Cinderella's deceptively delicate glass slipper of objective truth onto the Ugly Stepsister's misshapen foot, bunioned with fake news, mendacity, communal narcissism, and vested interest, in an attempt to magic a false, subjective viewpoint into the truth.”
Now that I’ve owned this mess on behalf of my own, let’s talk about why feminists haven’t taken up the fight against this mischaracterization of women by misogynistic “cocks in frocks,” to borrow a line from Priscilla. At first I thought it was because they were oppressed into silence by the ferocity of men like RuPaul — he is formidable, and he’s not going down without a fight. So what.
The reality is that Gloria Allred and MeToo have reduced the fight for women’s rights to what I call he-pinched-my-bottom feminism. But it’s really far more complicated than that: Once again, we come around to Judith Butler, the wee, wizened, lesbian Marxist-feminist Wizard of Oz behind all of Wokeism; the woman who turned a single, ambiguous sentence by a French fiction writer — Simone de Beauvoir’s breezy quip-cum-Maybelline-ad-copy, “One is not born a woman; rather, one becomes one” — into the basis for all of gender-queer activism, the center head guiding all the heads of Woke Cerberus. As the ultimate gender-queer constructs, as walking Pringles cans of crispy cultural commentary providing endless blockchains of dissertation subjects, drag queens have modern feminists by the ovaries. How can they condemn the Golem they helped create?
There’s only one kind of feminist with the chutzpah to end this form of blackface. She’s the kind that doesn’t need “glass ceilings” or “I’m With Her!” and all the rest of that victimarian jargon fraught with assumptions and signals about women being irredeemably weak and powerless. She’s the kind that shudders at calling herself “feminist” in the first instance: Conservative women.
Over to you Mary Cheney, Nikki Haley, Candace Owens, and Ann Coulter.
As for you, RuPaul: it’s time to pack up your millions, your 26 Emmys — careful, the gold plating peels — and sashay away into the sunset. We thank you for your service.
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FURTHER READING
I cover Wokeism and other sociopolitical issues using the same constructs, tropes and opinion-based, experiential commentary that critical theorists deploy to create their version of reality, which is nothing more than an endless, constantly changing maze of warped mirrors.
I urge everyone to read more expert, evidence-based exposés about gender-queer/trans activism and other Woke make-believe by doing a search for “gender” and other relevant terms at Quillette, and by following gay evolutionary biologist Colin Wright at Reality’s Last Stand, whose diagram showing how Progressives have pushed rational Liberals to the Right was retweeted by Elon Musk, elevating Colin to star status.
MY POLITICAL VIEWS
I am apartisan, a step further than nonpartisan. I have not been pushed to the right by Progressives, much less Wokeism. In my native Yankeedom, the foundational culture of America and liberal democracy, we stand with what is right, rational, manifest, and for the greater good of mankind, not political parties. If I praise Conservatives, it means Hell has frozen over so deeply they have the Zamboni out, doing figure-eights — people should take what I’m saying even more seriously than I’m expressing it.