Tag: Project Runway

Blame It on the Edit

I love Alyssa Edwards. She’s the perfect reality star; a completely delusional human living in her own reality, yet also funny and witty with a highly expressive and thoroughly meme-able face, and basically harmless. I’ve always meant to catch her reality show on Netflix about her dance studio–which is so fricking cool that she does that–but have never gotten around to it. I was amused by her on her initial season, but really hated her feud with Coco Montrese, and of course that was also the season won by the marvelous Jinkx Monsoon. Alyssa was also terrific on All Stars 2, which made the rigging of the season all that much more disappointing. (We also gave up on Project Runway after one season where it was clear they’d already decided who was going to win at the start of the season. Don’t give me a rigged competition, thank you very much; if I want that, I’ll watch professional wrestling, thank you very much.)

Which makes it interesting for me to write a book about a drag pageant. I already have tons of ideas for the book, and it’s going to be very brutal in how it approaches the homophobes who have wrested control of Florida from the sane people (hey Moms4Liberty, how’d those elections turn out for you, you pathetic soulless pieces of shit? Your tears are as delicious as mimosas at a gay Sunday drag bunch, you miserable fucking bitches.) and have taken the state, once a beautiful place with scenic beaches and lovely weather, on its final steps to a complete and utter hellhole. Bravo, by the way; nicely done.

Anyway, back to drag; sorry about that sidebar. But that kind of shit will always enrage me. Nothing makes me angrier than misplaced self-righteousness. I may no longer be a practicing Christian, but I know that faith far better than many–if not most–of its most ardent public proselytizers and purveyors.

Gender-bending, of course, is nothing new. For centuries, women weren’t allowed on the stage so female roles were always played by men. This was certainly true in Shakespeare’s day, and often he wrote plays with characters pretending to be the other gender. So there’s a long, proud history of men doing drag in theater and performance art. Who decides what is masculine and what is feminine, anyway? As I have said numerous times, I love this new young generation of leading men and actors who are abandoning traditional black-tie male drag for new and inventive outfits that showcase their youth, beauty, creativity, and personal style; there’s nothing quite so stifling as toxic masculinity and it’s regular insistence that there is only one way to be a man–which is not only stultifying but incredibly limiting. Film and television (and theater, to a far lesser degree) have long influenced what is considered masculine in this country–the prototype being, of course, John Wayne. (Probably the funniest scene in both La Cage aux Folles and it’s American version The Birdcage is when the more butch of the gay couple tries to get the more feminine partner to be more masculine–telling him to walk like John Wayne…which was the first time I ever noticed how peculiarly John Wayne walked. Also amusing is that Mr. American Macho Man John Wayne–and Mr. Patriotism Ronald Reagan–didn’t serve in World Was II…but played war heroes in movies about it. Style over substance.)

But the history of the colonizing of this continent is very queer. Do we really believe those frontiersmen, trappers, hunters and explorers simply went for months and even years without having sex? There weren’t enough women to satisfy the need–and cattle drives? Pshaw. In any purely male society like that–the cattle drive, the explorations, etc.–there is always male/male sexual contact; “helping a buddy out.” This has been erased from history as effectively as if it had never happened–as though homosexuality is some modern thing that never existed before.

It’s always struck me as odd that the masculine ideal (as shown to us by Hollywood, at any rate) inevitably is depicted in all male environments–war movies, cattle drive movies, Westerns–with the occasional token female thrown in as a supporting love interest. These women are often set up to be abused–spanking was often popular in these films; how many times did John Wayne spank a woman in a movie?–and mocked and made fun of; if they had any kind of mind of their own, well, they had to be tamed.

Anyway, I digress.

I also know there are women who despise drag, see it as mocking women and misogynistic. I can actually see how they could feel that way, and far be it from me to tell a woman–any woman–how she should or shouldn’t feel about something, particularly when it comes to misogyny. (I sure don’t want anyone telling me what to think is homophobic or not.) I don’t think drag is misogynistic; if anything, it’s critiquing the misogyny of society. Dolly Parton also exaggerates femininity to the point of being a drag queen–she even says it about herself. Mae West was so good at this exaggeration that people believed she was an actual drag queen for years. Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Jane Russell became sex symbols (and stars) by exaggerating their bodies and the way they dressed and their make-up and hair; how is that not female-drag as the converse of over-exaggerated masculinity (John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood); establishing exaggerated norms of masculine and feminine that subconsciously altered what the over-all culture thought in terms of gender roles.

If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to be more manly…

But the reason gender roles exist are because they are more comfortable for most people than thinking about it at any great length. You were born with a penis, so you should be interested in sports and guns and hunting and wear pants; your parents don’t have to think about it and neither do you. But for those of us who weren’t comfortable in those comforting boxes society so gladly constructed for us all to fit into–it’s not quite that easy. I hated having to do “boy” things and hated the expectations that since I was a boy I should like something in particular–and being incredibly stubborn, being told that I should like something was much more likely to make me disdain it. I didn’t want to play sports or even watch them when I was a kid; I just wanted to read. My struggles with wrapping my head around my gender and my sexual identity as a child were difficult, and those scars are still there–some of them are still scabbed over and not healed. All the messages I was being sent through popular culture, school, and society were telling me that something was wrong with me–and you don’t get over that overnight. I’m still unpacking a lot of that to this very day.

Writing Death Drop forced me to start thinking about these things again–gender markers, gender identities, the duality of our natures (no one is 100% one or the other, I think; I will always believe that gender and sexuality are a lot more fluid than anyone thinks)–and what makes one male and what makes one female. I hope, in writing more about Jem in the future, that it will help me understand myself better as well as society.

And what more could a writer ask for?

Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous

As I was saying in my other blatant self-promotional post of today (for Mississippi River Mischief) I rather jokingly mentioned that perhaps my childhood fandom of celebrities like Cher, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck was an early sign of my destiny as a gay man; and yes, I know that’s a stereotype but as I always say, “stereotypes have to start somewhere“–there’s occasionally some kernel of truth in a gay stereotype. (Example: Jack on Will & Grace got some grief for being a stereotype–but I’ve known any number of gay men who were very similar to Jack; imagine being told you’re a stereotype.)

RuPaul’s genius idea to kind of create a Project Runway and American Idol hybrid reality show started out very slow–it was on Logo, I believe, and the budget was incredibly bare bones that first season or two or three; part of the fun of the show was how much it looked like a cable-access do-it-yourself reality show. And as usual with any art form created by gay men, it was popular with gay men and straight women; the show slowly started building an audience and then WHAM! One day it seemed like drag had taken over the world.

Katya from RuPaul’s Drag Race, whom I find hilarious–and beautiful.

Paul and I lost interest in the show after the Bianca-Courtney-Adore season, because that season was so good we both felt that anything after that would be anti-climactic. I know there have been other good seasons and incredibly fierce queens since then, but we came back for All Stars Season 2 (when I became a fan of Katya, actually) and were bitterly disappointed at how scripted, staged, and unfair the entire season was to everyone who wasn’t Alaska, Detox, or Roxxy. And just like with Project Runway, once we saw a season that was clearly predetermined from the start, we stopped watching.

I have zero interest in watching a “competition” with a predetermined winner, which is kind of why I don’t watch WWE much anymore. (it’s also very cartoonish, but that’s a subject for another time.)

I know there are cisgender women who have issues with drag, and I know there are transwomen who do as well; I think the transwomen’s issues primarily have to do with the conflation between the two–which was clearly prescient, given the rise of the raw sewage known as LibsofTikTok and “Moms4Liberty” (how’d that election go for you on Tuesday, you miserable soulless contemptible bigoted shrews? CRY MORE BITCHES, your tears are like Mimosas to us gays), who see no difference (because the harpies are as ignorant and uneducated as they are bitter, soulless, and unChristian). I’ve never seen a lot of criticism for drag from the straight cisgender women as a general rule, but I know there are concerns and critiques from the feminist community, which I do not dismiss or take lightly.

But since the primary straight cisgender woman who used to scream at me about the “misogyny of drag” also has turned out to be a sociopathic TERF who is dead to me (shocker, I know; a feminist who hates drag is a bigoted disgusting piece of shit TERF? Who could have seen that coming?), I don’t necessarily take those feminist critiques as seriously as I used to. If your feminism is about cisgender white women only, go fuck yourself. (This is the same woman who claimed to be a gay ally because she loved going to gay bars where gay men made much of her…the irony that it was primarily because she acted like an over-the-top drag queen completely escaped her–but then, drag queens competed with her for attention in gay bars, and I’ve also come to recognize that the poor bitch is so fucking thirsty for attention that she probably needs intense therapy for at least a decade.)

I’ve always seen drag as a critique of the societal notions of what a woman is supposed to be; drag is that expectation taken over the top to the nth degree. This is why they have the exaggerated everything–from wigs to shoes to gowns to make-up to hip padding and fake boobs. (I also think that the reason drag kings never attained the same level of popularity and mainstreaming as the queens is because it’s harder to over-exaggerate masculinity; it’s not as easy to create the illusion of a thickly muscled body, a super-deep baritone voice, and thick body hair–and besides, who wants to watch women performing toxic masculinity? And as a general rule, men don’t wear make-up when they are cosplaying masculinity.) They’re also loud, funny, and crude–all the things women aren’t supposed to be in proper society–and when they are hyper-sexualized, it’s to make a point about the hyper-sexualizing of women by the dominant culture. Women aren’t supposed to have control of their bodies and sexuality; they aren’t supposed to be crude and crass and vulgar. They aren’t parodying women; they are parodying the cultural expectations (that still exist) for women by over-exaggerating everything and reflecting back to the overall societal culture about how we limit and control women.

I tried explaining this several times to my former friend, but she was also sociopathic in her narcissistic belief that she was never wrong. She was exhausting, frankly, and when I cut her out of my life like the cancerous tumor she was, it was amazing how much better I felt knowing I would never see any of her ignorant bigotry anywhere on my social media ever again, and sorry–you come for transpeople, you’re coming for all of us.

Keep your conditional allyship, bitch.

It’s called intersectionality, use the Google.

And yes, there are misogynistic gay men and drag queens. Some of the common language of drag is misogynist; “fishy” and so forth are questionable–but again, it plays into that critique of societal feminine archetypes; women would never talk about themselves that way and would be furious if a straight man did; so why is it okay for gay men and drag queens to do so? It’s not really; but if you’re going to come for drag with honest concerns about misogynist anti-woman language, that’s one thing; when you come for the entire community because of it, fuck you with a cheese grater.

So, part of the reason I wrote Death Drop was for the same reasons I write y/a about rape culture and homophobia and racism; to put a human face on an issue that might help the reader develop more empathy about the subject than they may have felt before reading my book. Death Drop is not going to convince drag-haters or TERFs that their beliefs and values are trash and they need to rethink and reevaluate; but maybe, just maybe, someone who doesn’t know much about the subject and the issues around it might learn something.

That may be hubris, but you can’t be a writer without some level of hubris in your personality.

So, feel free to click on this link and order several copies! They make great gifts for homophobes, and Christmas is coming!

It Never Rains in Southern California

Less than a week until Royal Street Reveillon is officially out in the world!

And so far, no current labor pains!

But, in fairness, it took me a good long while to write this book. My memory is so bad, and I’m so constantly and regularly busy, that I don’t even remember when I actually wrote it and turned it in to my publisher. I think it was earlier this year? I don’t remember–and that’s kind of sad. This is but one of the many reasons I don’t think I’ll ever write a memoir; my memory lies to me all the time and I never know what I remember correctly, let alone times and timelines and so forth. For example, when I was writing my essay “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” for Love, Bourbon Street, I went into it thinking I spent weeks in Kentucky at my parents’ after the evacuation, when it was actually less than three before I returned to Louisiana. That was a shock, believe me…but it’s true: we evacuated on August 28th, and I returned to New Orleans for good in early October after several weeks on the North Shore at my friend Michael’s. Stress and age and everything else combines to make things seem different in memory; and I’ve also noted, many times, how often people look back through a rosy glow of nostalgia. (I’ve always thought people view the past nostalgically because they aren’t happy, for one reason or another, in the present; they think oh, everything was so much simpler and easier back then. It’s usually not that true.)

So, Gregalicious, why did you decide to write a murder mystery built around a reality television show filming in New Orleans?

I didn’t watch An American Family, the first true reality show, back in the 1970’s on PBS, as the Loud family allowed their lives to be filmed for the entertainment of the masses. The show, which was the baseline for everything that came later, was quite controversial–I remember reading in the newspaper that one of the sons came out as gay on camera, which was kind of a big deal in the 1970’s–but in the 1990’s, I was a big fan of MTV’s sociological experiment, The Real World, and it’s sister-show that came later, Road Rules. But as the shows went on, they went from being a sociological experiment (hey, let’s take a group of seven kids from completely different backgrounds, make them live together and work on a project, and see what, if anything, they learn from each other) to being exploitative (hey, if all of them are young and beautiful and damaged, and we encourage them to drink and hook up, drama will ensue!), which was when I lost interest in watching them anymore. I also watched the game show version–The Challenges–primarily because the young men were always hot, often shirtless, and sometimes even less clad than that, plus watching the competitions was interesting. But it, too, eventually paled in interest to me–they were so repetitive, and the producers never intervened when violence broke out, and that was more often than not–and so I stopped watching.

The Real Housewives was different for me. Back in the day, we used to watch Bravo a lot–Inside the Actor’s Studio, Project Runway, reruns of Law and Order and The West Wing–and when they started promoting a new show they were doing called The Real Housewives of Orange County, I sniffed disdainfully at it. At that time, one of the hottest shows on network television was Desperate Housewives, and this seemed to be a rip-off, an attempt to cash in on the success of another network’s show by copying the title and so forth: “oh, if you like that show, here’s the real women of the area who are housewives, and what there lives are like.” The previews I’d see didn’t really encourage me to watch–the women seemed, for the most part, like horrible people, particularly Vicki Gunvalson–but as the show spawned spin-off shows in other cities and regions, I became more than passingly acquainted with them. They usually ran marathons on Sundays, and when it’s not football season Sunday television was pretty much a wasteland. I’d flip on the marathon for background noise while I read a book and Paul napped on the couch–but I also began to absorb the shows through a kind of osmosis. I knew who the women were and what their lives were like–but still didn’t watch regularly until around 2010, or 2011 or so.

And once I started giving Real Housewives of New York and Beverly Hills my full attention–yeah, I was hooked.

Paul would even watch with me from time to time…and we played a game: if they did a New Orleans version, who would they cast? It was fun, because we also were relatively certain none of the women we thought would kill it on such a show would ever remotely consider doing such a show (Southern Charm New Orleans proved us right), and then I began to think…but such a show here would be absolutely the perfect background for a murder mystery, because of the way everyone here is so connected to everyone else and there would be backstory and history galore.

I always saw it as a Scotty book, but when I turned it into the Paige novella, that changed things. I still wanted to do a Scotty book about a reality show, and I started making notes for one called Reality Show Rhumba. And, if you’re wondering, that’s where the character of Frank’s nephew Taylor Wheeler came from; when I added him to the regular cast of characters for the Scotty series, my intent was to have him eventually be case in a Real World-type show here in New Orleans, and anchor a murder mystery. But then…the Paige novella series went nowhere, and I hated losing such a great idea..so as I went into Garden District Gothic I introduced Serena Castlemaine to the boys, thus planting the seeds for Royal Street Reveillon, knowing I could keep some parts of the story but would have to change others–which was cool, because I always felt that the original novella was kind of rushed, and I didn’t have either the time–or the space (since novellas are by nature shorter)–to make the story what I wanted it to be.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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Tonight She Comes

Reality television.

I started watching in back in the original days of The Real World on MTV; the social experiment of picking vastly different young people from vastly different places with vastly different backgrounds, to see whether or not they can learn from each other and grow; or simply clash and create drama for the cameras. I enjoyed watching, I’m not going to lie–I didn’t lose interest until later seasons, when it became all about the kids getting drunk and hooking up and so forth. But the influence of The Real World–and its sister show, Road Rules–on reality television is unmistakable.

I’ve stuck my toe in the water with several reality shows–I used to be completely addicted to Project Runway, until it left Bravo for Lifetime and I lost interest–and the same with RuPaul’s Drag Race–after the Adore/Bianca/Courtney season I didn’t see how it could be anything other than a disappointment going forward so I stopped (although I did tune in for the glory that was RPD All-Stars Season Two), but I never got into Survivor or The Bachelor or any of the others. But I do watch the Real Housewives–New York is, without question, the gold standard, with Atlanta a close second with Beverly Hills trailing them both substantially; I can’t with Potomac, Orange County, and Dallas. 

I also really enjoyed the first season of Lifetime’ UnReal, but got behind on Season 2, heard bad things, and so never picked it back up again.

My love of (some of) the Housewives shows has resulted in my winding up on two Housewives related panels over the years at Bouchercon (Albany and New Orleans, to be precise), which were enormously fun; and I have also managed to observe what a cultural phenomenon these shows have become. There are recaps everywhere all over the Internet; there’s the Bravo website itself; and these women are often sprawled all over the tabloids I see while in line at the grocery store. (And no, I have only ever watched about twenty minutes of a Kardashian show and it was so horrible I never went back. More power to you if you’re a fan, but they are just not for me.

I even wrote a very short book–which is no longer available anywhere–based on the filming of such a show in New Orleans; it was pulled from availability primarily because I was never truly satisfied or happy with it. I wrote it very quickly in a window between deadlines and never felt I was able to explore all the things, the issues, with reality television that I wanted to with it. And yes, I decided to use that same backstory–a Real Housewives type show filmed in New Orleans–to write the new Scotty book because 1) it’s a great idea and 2) since I am writing off dead-line I can do it the way I want to and hopefully say the things I wanted to say in the first. Some of the original elements of the story I used before still exist in this Scotty book, but there’s a lot of changes I’ve made so it’s not the same story. The draft is very very rough, and since I’ve finished it and put it aside I’ve had a lot of great ideas for it; fixes and changes and so forth.

I think it might be the best Scotty yet, and it’s certainly the most complicated.

I started reading Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister yesterday, and before I knew what happened most of the afternoon was gone and I was about half-way through. Her book is also built around a reality television show, and boy, is this book biting. I loved her debut, Luckiest Girl Alive, and this one is just as good. You’ll get a full report, Constant Reader, when I finish it.

Next up for the Short Story Project: “Don’t Walk in Front of Me” by Sarah Weinman, from Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman:

I wanted honest work and got it at Pern’s. A Jewish bookstore is a strange place to work for a guy like me, but I didn’t have much choice; a month of job hunting left me frustrated and ready to break things, and the ad stuck on the store’s main window was as close to salvation as I could get.

Thus Sam–we were on a first-name basis from the beginning–was very particular about which items I could handle and which I couldn’t (“Anything with God’s name on it, leave it to me”), he left me to my own devices when it came to  handling teh cash register, stocking the books, and helping out customers. I hadn’t know much at all about Judaism, but I sure learned fast.

When I told my mother where I was working, she was understandably confused, but got over it quickly enough. I had a job, and a pretty decent one, and that was what mattered to her most.

“I worried about you, Danny, the whole time you were incarcerated. She articulated each syllable, just as she did every time she used the word. Which was a lot, because my mother adored big words. It was her way of showing how much more educated she was than the rest of the mamas in Little Italy.

Sarah Weinman is a fine short story writer; her stories in Lawrence Block’s stories-inspired-by-art are two of my favorites. Her upcoming study of the kidnapping case that inspired Lolita, The Real Lolita, will be out this fall and I can’t wait to dig into it. This story is another one of her little gems: a guy with a criminal past takes the only job he can get, and slowly but inexorably gets drawn into trying to help his boss solve a personal problem, and how things get out of hand from there. Brava, Sarah! WRITE MORE SHORT STORIES.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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