Tag Archives: bullying

Posted on by

Big boys in big girls’ shoes: the significance of Sharon Needles & RuPaul’s Drag Race

It’s not easy to explain how RuPaul’s Drag Race – especially season 4 – is more than just a bunch of big boys in big girls’ heels, to paraphrase contestant Willam Belli.

On one level, the appeal of Drag Race is simply that it’s a really entertaining reality show, smart enough to adopt the good bits of shows like America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway but with a wink-wink cleverness that stays just this side of satire. (It’s Drag Show’s surreal spin-off, Drag U, that is the truly devastating parody. Also, unicorns.) There are winners and losers, heroines and villains, twists and turns, fashion and theatre.

For the gay community, Drag Race offers something special: a show about real gay people like us who, unlike us, get the chance to be famous in a way that seems almost attainable. Even the show’s arch-villains – Rebecca Glasscock, Tatianna, Shangela, and Phi Phi O’Hara – have their fans and, significantly, their fans’ approval.

It’s not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the first three seasons, and each has shown a progression in quality and aesthetic. In hindsight the winners were perfection even if I was rooting for someone else (say, Pandora Boxx over Tyra Sanchez). But that perfection meant that the winners were less relatable; BeBe Zahara Benet – Cameroon! – was exotic, Tyra was like some sort of sickening robotic doll, and Raja‘s artistry and self-confidence were more than slightly intimidating. Still, they were the right winners.

If you’ll indulge my hyperbole for a moment, season 4 was different: a full-on cultural clash within not only drag but the gay community as a whole. Sure, Drag Race always hinted at cultural clashes – country versus city, New York versus L.A., drag as lifestyle versus drag as performance, Heathers versus Boogers – but it was the appearance, and ultimately the victory, of the iconoclastic Sharon Needles that elevated the most recent season.

I declared during the first episode that Sharon had to win; it seemed obvious and necessary. I didn’t expect many others to share that opinion, yet Sharon had a massive, dedicated, positively rabid fan base from her first, ideal, RuPocalyptic appearance on the runway. It’s worth considering why.

It’s not that I didn’t have other favourites. Of course Chad Michaels should have come second and, after Willam’s disqualification, I’d have picked Latrice Royale for third as well as Miss Congeniality, which she did win. But it was Sharon, and her conflict with Phi Phi O’Hara, that defined the season, and underlined a real evolution in how the gay community represents itself.

We have that luxury now. We see ourselves in the media, on television, in movies, treated more and more like actual human beings, yet what we see is still mostly an idealistic pinnacle of gayness. Our media image is that of well-off, overwhelmingly white, absolutely fabulous individuals who struggle comically with gripping issues like how best to spoil our adopted children. Don’t get me wrong, Modern Family is a funny show, but I’ll never be Cameron or Mitchell.

Similarly, I didn’t see myself in any of the winners of Drag Race until Sharon Needles came along. Sharon Needles must have terrified her competitors, and I don’t mean due to her “spooky” persona or even because she was a formidable opponent, though she was; I mean that some of the queens seemed genuinely unable to understand what Sharon was doing.

All due respect to Latrice, but her comment after the Fabulous Bitch Ball episode epitomized this lack of comprehension; to paraphrase, “Week after week, Sharon is imperfect and the judges let it slide.” Let’s put to one side the ludicrousness of Latrice criticizing Sharon as flawed, because I do know what Latrice means by imperfection. In fact, the judges didn’t just let it slide; they recognized the transformational nature of Sharon’s drag.

Let me be blunt: any pretty boy can pluck and shave and squeeze his squat little body into a circus costume, but Aaron Coady (aka Sharon) isn’t a “tired-ass showgirl.” He’s scrawny and self-deprecating and he clearly knows what it’s like to be rejected, both by society at large and by our own community for being “imperfect.”

In other words, Sharon Needles gave many of us, well, a heroine, if in the form of an anti-hero – not only gay but gay and weird. Thank God for that, because I’m sure there are more gay freaks and geeks out there like Sharon, like me, than there are fishy pretty boys, and I prefer a community in which we praise uniqueness, clever humour, and self-aware wit over the temerity to just flat-out steal Kenya Michaels‘ look, to give a completely random example.

We wouldn’t have a Sharon Needles without RuPaul, of course. I give Ru a lot of credit for using Drag Race for good. The meme of Drag Race “bringing families together” isn’t a joke. Those moments of high melodrama – about dead parents, Christian families, bullying, AIDS, and so on – are real, and speak to a real process: how gays reconcile the traditional concept of “family” with our own histories of disappointment and rejection.

Gays lack guidance in defining our identities; that’s just a fact. We lack immediate role models for the gay aspect of who we are, and those we have are so often larger than life, from female divas to the gay lawyers of TV. The sheer variety of Drag Race queens automatically gives the show credence.

What’s more, many of us spend half our lives in drag even if we never wear women’s clothes. Often we feel that we have to hide, sometimes to the extent of staying in the closet, but even those of us who have been out forever hide in another way, by presenting the world – gay and straight – with personae that we feel are more acceptable (more straight-acting, more fabulous, more together, sexier, wittier, fitter, happier) than just being ourselves. We identify with the queens of Drag Race, and we appreciate how these lady-boys turn it on its ear, transforming our disguises into an expression of the creative self.

As for Needles, she took it that one step further, and it actually meant something to me, however strange that is to contemplate. I don’t believe that we, as gay people, should adhere any more to a set gay standard than to the implied demands of society at large, and Sharon proved to me that we don’t have to conform to win. That, for me, is the true significance of Sharon Needles and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Now sashay…away.

 

Share via email
Posted on by

The personal and the political

I’ve been thinking a lot today about Jamie Hubley’s suicide, following Heather Mallick’s touching article in The Star and the boy’s father’s heartbreaking statement on his website.

Suicides of LGBT teens lately have been reported much more frequently than in the past, and Jamie Hubley, the focus of our thoughts today, is destined to be a sad statistic tomorrow, and while we applaud efforts like the It Gets Better Project – see the Canadian video here – obviously it isn’t enough to have famous people reaching out to gay teens, because that’s not real life…but it is a well-meant, mainstream start at removing some of the stigma attached to being a gay teen.

But it’s not enough – not nearly.

When I first read about Jamie Hubley, I was shocked. I admit that I was naïve: I am a reasonably privileged white Canadian male; my friends are small-L liberal types whose lack of prejudice I take for granted; and I live in Ottawa, which isn’t some hick Christian Republican city in the States (think Matthew Shepard and Laramie, Wyoming). My MPP and mayor are Liberals, my MP is a New Democrat, and I expect them to support and participate in Capital Pride (and they all do). How can it be so bad for a gay kid from an Ottawa suburb?

There was, perhaps, more press about Jamie Hubley because his father Allan is an Ottawa city councillor – by all accounts a good man, a recipient of the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award for his volunteerism.

It was only when I read Cllr. Hubley’s statement today on the death of his son that I realized how foolish I was to think one teen’s personal situation would be automatically better than another’s because of geography or even having a loving, supportive family.

And I realized this because, for once, I stepped back from my usual chosen role online as a commentator and made it personal. Reading what Cllr. Hubley wrote, I realized this, too: I could have been Jamie Hubley.

I am so bloody fortunate. I am openly gay, and take it for granted that no one has an issue with it. I have a partner with whom I’ve lived now for over a year. I have stepkids and no one’s ever suggested we aren’t fit parents because we’re two gay men. I didn’t even feel disadvantaged by being gay and living in a town of 4,000, though until I met R it was rather lonely.

How quickly I forgot that, even if it did get better, it used to be much, much worse.

Like Jamie Hubley, I grew up in suburbia – Unionville, Ontario to be precise – and while my parents split up when I was a baby, I was raised by a loving mother, did well in school, and had friends…until I became a gay teen.

Like Jamie Hubley, even before I really knew what “gay” meant, I was teased and bullied for a lack of athletic aptitude (in Jamie’s case, as his father wrote, he preferred figure skating to hockey). Somehow, despite not being particularly “girly” or “sissy,” the other kids knew I was different, and they knew the difference was bad, and that they could get away with hurting me because – as my teachers often lamented – I made little effort to fit in.

It was tantamount to their saying that if only I weren’t gay, I wouldn’t be bullied for being gay.

I hit puberty early, in grade 5, and from that point on my school life fell apart. Having been the top student in every class up to that point, identified as gifted, blah blah blah, I suddenly started shuttling from school to school as I and my mother tried to find the magic solution – that didn’t exist – to keep me out of harm’s way.

It’s been reported that kids on Jamie Hubley’s school bus tried to shove batteries in his mouth for not liking hockey. In my case, I was socially shunned, beaten up, shoved into lockers – you name it. And it went on for years and years and yes, it did damage to me: to my self-esteem, to my mental health, to my view of the world.

We’ve all heard right-wing commentators associate us with all those sad statistics – higher rate of suicides, addictions, mental health issues – as if they were inherent to the fact of being gay instead of being a result of how often we are treated at a young age, then go out into the world with no guidebook, few role models…not a clue, really.

By the time I was seventeen only my parents, two or three friends, and a few teachers knew I was gay. I hadn’t told most of my family, and for that matter, I still haven’t. I am ashamed to admit that it was only this year that I told my favourite cousin, and I didn’t really tell her so much as I simply introduced her to my boyfriend.

That year – in 1992 – my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. She wasn’t expected to live through the operation. (Happily, she did, and because she was determined and had excellent doctors, she survived for another fourteen years.)

Meanwhile, I was left alone at home. I wasn’t on speaking terms with my father and stepmother, who lived 200 kms away, and my mother’s family for some unknown reason thought it appropriate to let an only child, a teenager, a mama’s boy at that, stay alone at home caring for two dogs and two cats for a month while his mother was in Intensive Care.

This was when the bullying at high school was at its worst. My mother and I thought we had solved the problem by switching me to an alternative school, AISP, in North York, but shortly before Mom’s diagnosis I was attacked by a fellow student on a class trip. He called me “faggot” and kicked me in the chest, as I vividly recall, for which he was given a three-day suspension.

And so, I stopped going to school, even though I was an A+ student, liked by his teachers, liked even by many of his peers (mostly the female ones), all because some fucking delinquent asshole named Eric was somehow threatened by this studious, meek, gay suburban kid.

After three weeks alone, terrified to go to school, scared that my mother was dying, I tried to kill myself. To this day I don’t know why I changed my mind and called a family friend who took me to the hospital, but I did.

It did get better…in time, and after I switched to another alternative school called Subway Academy Two that offered individual learning with three teachers, all of whom encouraged me and made me feel like I belonged. Still, essentially I traded all peer socialization except for one single, solitary friend for the safety that Subway provided.

Why am I sharing my story? It is with great reluctance that I do. There are parts of this story unknown to even my partner, and I want to be taken seriously. This is not a gay blog, or a mental illness blog, though I am willing to admit that my youthful troubles led to anxiety and depression. Primarily, I’m known for politics, and this is more personal.

But it is political too, because if you’re reading this, you probably know me – in real life, or through social media, perhaps – and it’s just wrong wrong wrong for me to go on blithely retweeting and reposting stuff about Jamie Hubley if I’m not even willing to be honest about my own path.

When one is young, one lives in a bubble, really. When teenagers talk about their problems, it’s as if they don’t realize that anyone else has ever had the same issues.

I don’t know how else to let gay teens know that a lot of us went through the same shit except if we reach some sort of critical mass of personal stories. It’s all very nice that Dan Savage is doing something, but most gay kids won’t turn out to be Dan Savage. They’ll be more like, well, me, trying to be happy, trying to live a “normal” life, finding love and friendship, bettering oneself, helping to improve one’s community.

And even then, the cynic in me whispers in my ear that we haven’t – yet – changed society, that it is still an inevitable struggle for almost all LGBT youth, and there will be more Jamie Hubleys over which we share a link and shed a tear.

But maybe telling our stories is a start, and of course we should support local charitable and social services that can make a difference.

You can make a donation, as per Cllr. Allan Hubley’s request, in Jamie Hubley’s memory to the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa’s Youth Mental Health Walk-In Clinic. It’s too little, too late, I know…but it’s something.

Share via email