"I'm not a camp, throwaway queen; I'm not in Neverland. I'm not Jennifer Lopez with three people to pluck my eyebrows. I've made myself what I want to be - not everybody's cup of tea. And people wanna have a look at me. I fully accept that. People have always wanted to have a look at me."
"If people don't think I can fall into what the norm is, that's their problem and not mine. I'm not the norm; I'm not deluded."
The late, great, dearly-missed Mr Pete Burns would have been 60 years old today.
He reminded me much of Amanda Lepore in the looks department before his demise.
ReplyDeleteMore like a Cabbage Patch Doll, I thought. Jx
Deletepix #2 - johnny depp
ReplyDeletepix #3 - madonna
those pix reminded me of those people. (sings) you spin me right round baby right round like a record baby right round right round...
Cruel... Jx
DeleteIt just points out that not so long ago, gay men were still outsiders. Now, I feel like we've been sanitized and wrapped up for general consumption. Is this equality? Did we win?
ReplyDeleteIndeed. It's long been a bugbear of mine - who exactly are we supposed to want to be "equal to"? In my case, it is certainly not the "married-with-children-and-a-mortgage" model, and I shudder at the words "straight-acting" [fuck that!]. I found this piece recently that sums it up perfectly:
DeleteDifference is beautiful. Assimilation politics requires us to iron those differences out. If we don’t draw attention to ourselves we’ll be equal. Ultimately equality talk still panders to the root of the problem- white as the default, male as the default. We are still all measured by those yardsticks. Instead of decentring the power, it just hands us a slice of it from the centre in. We deserve more than to be tolerated. We deserve more than a single seat at a table that is not in our best interests. Equality comes with terms and conditions in the form of regressive respectability politics.
We can have rights as long as we’re well behaved and don’t offend the sensibilities of those granting them to us. We can have rights just as long as we don’t express any indication of our difference. Rights just as long as LGB people don’t show affection to their partners in public. As long those who’ve just given birth don’t breastfeed where anyone can see them. As long as people with wombs don’t visibly menstruate. As long as transgender people pass 'convincingly' as cisgender. As long as black people don’t verbalise [their] experiences of racism.
Amen, sister! Jx
PS the full piece is at the "Open Democracy" website. Jx
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