Damned if you do....More like damned if you kinda-sorta do, a little bit, and then you constantly go around telling everybody "hey look at me I'm Doing, it's kind of a big deal!"
I know they’re only trying to help, but sometimes the people that irk me most are the comfortably heterosexual, your Kinsey Ones, who’ve had one or two gay experiences and think that they belong to the same discriminated class. You know them, they’re always in a heterosexual union, and are always able to run away to normality, but are the first to point out their apparent bisexuality as if it is some kind of merit badge. As if it’s a privilege entitling them to further outrage at the world! They know discrimination and intolerance and violence and living in fear mostly in the abstract.posted by youarenothere at 10:34 AM on March 3, 2011 [33 favorites]
Lady Gaga is this person to me, right now. I appreciate the sentiment, but it curdles; it cloys.
“Don’t be a drag, just be a queen.”
She hangs out with designers and artists and songwriters, fields with many great gay contributors. But she deigns to write anthems for all of us, but I can’t see anything but gauche wallpapering over our history, our diversity, not separate from the heterosexual history, but intertwined and part of it, that could end up as hurtfulness to the kids in the Bible belt, or in countries where homosexuality is illegal or heavily proscribed by society. What would she know of these people? They weren’t fabulous. Were they… drags? What does she want them to do? Stand up and be stoned to death? I’m sure Gaga wouldn’t volunteer to lead a gay rights parade down the centre of Riyadh. Gaga’s risky move is so _riskless_, because her empowerment message here is so airbrushed, sterile and divorced from reality. Whatever she is, she’s accepted for who she is, so good on her for using that power for campaigning for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but that just means she should know she’s better than something this cheap. Saying that everyone else should be who they are is just so much sexual “Let them eat cake” for my tastes. She is a privileged person wondering why everyone else isn’t acting like she is, as if they could.
You can’t just put out a song that is supposed to be a rallying cry to gay men, and it’s irresponsible to drop one knowing people are going to read it that way. It is, as I said it before, a dog whistle. The connotative of her story is linked so strongly to that of the gay community she can’t claim plausible deniability or anything. But we don’t all march to the same 4/4 beat. Not all gay people want to be queens. We vary, damn it.
It is apparently human nature to see things in terms of dichotomy. Black, white. Night, day. Et cetera. Man, woman. Complementary dichotomies? Straight, gay. Moral opposites? We are taught that men are like this and women are like that, and because society is sometimes bad to us, that gay men and women fall somewhere in between. Sure, they look the same, but, they do THIS! And this. And, can you believe, that? They are not the same. They fall between two stools. We are not real men/women. Gay men are pansies, poofs, queens. Women are butch, bull dykes, tom boys. But we’re not all like that. We are as different as our straight brothers and sisters. Lesbians are reduced to either “ugly dykes” or wank fantasies. Gay men are sitcom comic relief, or hypermasculine.
Judith Butler, of course, argued that the idea of two biological sexes was just as socially constructed as two societally-constructed genders. That’s how we work, we break things into halves so we can understand them sometimes. We define ourselves by what we’re not, as much as what we are. Lady Gaga is yet another in a long line of people who seems to want to break homosexuality into two kinds – fabulous/frumpy? – and this is an anthem seemingly in thrall to this notion. She’d just as soon naturalise us into two sub-genders so she can romance us.
You can’t put a dichotomy like that into a song and expect it not to offend people.
This song isn’t about empowerment. It is just sloganeering and encouraging people to stand behind differences as crutches rather than celebrate what unites us. I was born the way I am, not “this” way (that word might be the most problematic of the whole song), and all I want to do is go about my daily life, dressed as unfashionably as I currently am, dancing as badly as I always have and to one day settle down with a man to call my own some day. Gaga’s utopia doesn’t bring my dream any closer to being. Include me out.”
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posted by suburbanbeatnik at 9:49 AM on March 3, 2011