Editor’s note:
J. Rudy Flesher is a Philadelphia based actor, blogger and college student. After a three-year detour working in health care he recently returned to The College of New Jersey to complete his B.A. in Women’s and Gender studies. He blogs (sporadically at the moment and daily when school is not in session) at The Pistol in Bed Thirteen.
A while back I invited Rudy to join The New Civil Rights Movement because I was quite impressed with his thoughts, his ideas, his background, his grasp of the issues affecting our community, and his work. Later, via Twitter, I wrote something like, “I am happy today knowing our community’s future is being created by people like Rudy.” I think you will be too. This is Rudy’s first post here.
I have been following the debate surrounding David’s decision to discontinue writing for Bilerico with interest as it has sparked debate here, and around the queer blogosphere. David’s argument hit home for me as I have chosen to stop following blogs precisely because they mixed scantily-clad gym bunnies in with their editorial and news reporting content, though perhaps for different reasons. I believe the images portrayed lack diversity, and therefore under-represent, misrepresent, alienate, and ghettoize many LGBTQ communities and their members.
First, why I stand with David on his decision to step down from Bilerico: My issue with the way they handle this content is that they style themselves as a queer think tank and the goal on their “about us†page is to “foster…conversations in order to strengthen us as individuals and as a community.†To my mind, that means the naked Mormon boys are simply, in corporate parlance, “off mission.†Porn is awesome, but if Judith Butler or Kate Bornstein popped up in the middle of a sex scene to offer a post-modern analysis of gender identity, it too would be “off mission,†and I’d be annoyed. It’s just out of place.
Now, on to my larger issues with this content. Queerty was the blog I chose to unsubscribe from. I consider myself a sex-positive feminist and do believe that our society has a long way to go in terms of maturely integrating sexuality into daily life in a way that is celebratory, healthy, and free of shame and stigma. However, the images portrayed on Queerty and, as far as I’ve observed, other mainstream LGBTQ blogs, including Bilerico, do not achieve this whatsoever.
Instead, these pictures say that, no matter how many letters we add to the LGBTQ alphabet soup, no matter how inclusive the other content becomes, that clearly, it is white, gay, men with single-digit body fat who matter. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Sure, the blogs are writing about lesbian issues, but there never seem to be any photos of hot dykes to oggle. The bodies of trans people certainly aren’t represented. Without a doubt, people of color, the hirsute, the disabled, those older than twenty-seven, and so on clearly need not apply. Men destabilizing gender roles — wearing makeup, “women’s” clothes, nail polish — well, we’ll watch them in drag shows, but Goddess forbid we celebrate their sexuality because then we would be radically dismantling a false gender binary which oppresses all of us. Gosh, who would want that?
Instead, these pictures constantly reinforce that only certain people matter, that they’re all men, and only certain kinds of men. If that’s your type, then by all means, oggle away! But put it on a blog called “Twenty-Something Hairless White Gay Men Who Have the Time to Take Pilates Five Days a Week.” Don’t run a blog that purports to represent a dynamic population and then only represent a historically-privileged demographic.
David is spot on when he notes that blogs offering this type of material as content use it as an easy way to get traffic, but I’d go a step further and say that the incredibly narrow spectrum of men represented in this material speaks to a whole lot of patriarchy and ugly “isms” that pervade our communities today. How quickly we forget history and fail to learn from it.
There was a feminist backlash against the “Lavender Menace” of lesbians, and then against transsexual women who were (and are) portrayed as invading women’s space. All variety of people who were gender rebels were at the forefront of queer liberation, and quickly thrown under the bus for those seen as less threatening to mainstream (read: white patriarchal) society. To turn this tide requires intense, critical introspection, both collectively and communally.
While both mainstream media and queer blogs seem content with appealing to the lowest common denominator (and ignoring the needs and desires of much of their audience), we must be willing to take a principled stand to buck this anti-intellectual trend and have intelligent discourse on the damage done to our communities when so many are excluded. As Judith Butler notes in the preface to the 1999 republication of her landmark “Gender Trouble,”
“…we underestimate the reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated and challenging texts, when the complication is not gratuitous, when the challenge is in the service of calling taken-for granted truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those truths is, indeed, oppressive.”
I could not agree with her more. It is a time to be critical, compassionate, celebratory, and radical. It is time to love and value ourselves and each other.