To celebrate the holidays, Queerty is playing Santa to all your favorite folks and asking what they want under the tree/ next to the menorah/ beside the Saturnalia bonfire this year, no Ms. America answers allowed.
Today’s lucky boy is Project Runway fashion designer Christian Siriano. At 23, Siriano has designed for Puma, started his own line, appeared on Ugly Betty, an Estelle video and has been parodied on SNL. So, what’s the fiercest thing Siriano could hope to get this year?
“A puppy! I have wanted a puppy my whole life and now I’m finally in the position to have one! Even when I am not at home or traveling, there is always someone who works with me to keep an eye out and take care of a puppy, so it would have lots of attention and love. The only problem would be trying to house-train a dog around all these couture gowns… but I think I can handle it!”
Woof
LOVES HER
Leland Frances
Q Honey, congratulations! You’ve struck a Grammatical Double Whammy and betcha didn’t even know it.
1. “Parodied on SNL”ââŹâin Ms. Love Child of Ed Grimley & Kris Kattan’s case, that’s known as a redundant statement. But, gooey oooh, she’s a Certified Fashion Designer. So’s every queer 10-yr. old in the world with a Barbie Doll, some pink Kleenex, and Scotch Tape.
2. “has been”ââŹâjust a matter of time, Freak Fans, just a matter of time. Work it while ya, can, Girlfriend, work it while ya can, but put away something for that rainy day. Monsoon be coming soon.
But it will take longer for people to realize that one of the main reasons we were treated like second class citizens is that we helped make popular walking minstrel shows in lavendar face like Siriano, Carson Kressley, the Sisters of Perpetual Exhibitionism, Appall, er, RuPaul, Ross the Intern, Lady Bunny, Momma Hog, and all the other cocksucking clowns who should never have been let out of class. Act like a joke and the idea of you deserving equal rights will be treated like one, too. “But they’re so funny!” Raise your hand if you’re still laughing over Prop 8.
And now the hissy “How dare you’s” begin….
thebigreddog
@Leland Frances:
Civil rights are for EVERYONE – not just for those that can “pass” for “normal”. You silly boy you.
emb
Leland Frances, you are Utterly Brilliant. Your insight is right on target in your paragraph re “walking minstrel shows in lavendar face”. I’ve long held that we’re totally acceptable to the public at large as long as we prance about like lovable fairies and don’t remind anyone that we have sex and stuff like that. God forbid the No On 8 campaign would’ve shown same-sex couples kissing: that would violate the masses’ “ick factor”. But they loves them their neuter little pocket gays Siriano and Kressley (and goin’ way back to Liberace). Sean Penn kisses some guy in “Milk” and it’s Brave; if Siriano should mention that he likes to suck dick, he’s so over. And until we get around to educating straight folks that we’re flesh and blood humans with real, live emotions and stuff, we’ll still be abstract concepts at best, and abstracts are easier to hate.
ChristopherM
@thebigreddog:
Absolutely. Minstrel shows were a parody of something that did not exist. Some of us are very obviously gay, and don’t appreciate being compared to an offensive stereotype of something that doesn’t exist. Leland and EMB, I got called a faggot the first time when I was six years old. I’ve always been easily identifiable as queer, just like Siriano (without his talent!). It isn’t his lack of talking about sucking dick that makes him likable (and who does that anyway). He is talented and fun, and that seems to make all the Banana Republicans out there freaked out that people pay attention to folks like him instead of their boring asses.
It takes a hell of a lot bigger balls to go around being completely yourself as a sissy gay man than it does to be one of you “real” people who can pass.
ajax
@Leland Frances:
Leland, if you can, walk away from your post and then re-read it with an open, objective mind. Do you see that you wrote exactly the kinds of things we all heard from schoolyard bullies? Is that who you really want to be?
One of the many, many blessings about being gay is that we get to live exactly how we were meant live. We find our own path. We are not necessarily constrained by gender, racial, or economic sterotypes. We can live them or we can transcend them.
While you may be uncomfortable with a gay man who is effeminate, there are probably far more gay men who are uncomfortable spending time with a bully.
Get laid much?
PJR
@ChristopherM: “It takes a hell of a lot bigger balls to go around being completely yourself as a sissy gay man than it does to be one of you “real” people who can pass.” Hear Hear!
Keith
Actually, I think the public is fine with stereotypes of any kind. They’re easier to accept or digest, so to speak.
The truly discomforting (or terrifying) act of LGBTQ folk is when feel good about ourselves, no matter how we express it. That’s when the shit hits the fan for most folks.
Leland Frances
Thanks, EMB. As for others: where the fuck did I say Siriano didn’t deserve “civil rights”.
I’d even add he HAS a “civil right” to play the buffoonââŹâand spare me the crap about him “just being himself.” Because he is consciously PLAYING the fag buffoonââŹâin the way he chooses to dress, the stupid hair, mugging for every camera within a mile, and the queeny not-bon mots. Just like Carson [who was hired over equally “talented” other applicants who were less intentionally flaming].
It’s all a part of his putting on “lavendar face” because it helps him stand out from a crowd already saturated with eccentric looks and, therefore, puts more money in his pocket. Forget Grimley and Kattan, maybe he’s was reared by two drag queens. That’s the only way to explain how comments like “Ferosh” and “I’m gonna die of barfness” could be “natural.”
And, if so much of it isn’t an act, then “being himself must mean being retarted.” As far as being talented, so is an Idiot Savant.
And it’s MY civil right to call him that. To say that I’m tired of gay Media Whores PURPOSELY playing into the stereotypes that shackle all of us.
Raise your hand the last time you saw a drag queen actually pass for a woman rather than a grotesque cartoon of one. With most of them [versus true gifted female impersonators like Charles Pierce, et al.] it’s not about “art” it’s about attention, at ANY cost, and as they noticed audiences yawning at their usual tired schtick they began painting themselves in what we used to call “skag drag” or “fright queens”: overdrawn lipsticked mouths, clown white makeup, bigger and bigger and bigger wigs.
And how many votes against Prop H8TE did CA’s Sister of Perpetual Exhibitionism lose us? Another thing we could learn from the black civil rights movement is that they didn’t put their Stepin’ Fetchits and their Aunt Jeminas at the front of the parade.
Google “Clean for Gene” sometime and you’ll discover a historic nongay version of this debate. In 1968, when long hair on a guy still connoted to most of the country everything from Communist to antiAmerican to homosexuality to drug addict to biological hazard, a group of young people who thought ending the slaughter [and it was slaughter] in Vietnam a higher value than the temporary length of their hair or what kind of clothes they wore for the time they would be canvassing for peace candidate Gene McCarthy for President demonstrated a remarkable amount of political sophistication by getting “clean for Gene.”
Look at old photos or film of Martin Luther King and his aides and, with rare exception, you’ll see them in suit and tie even on the hottest days in circumstances in which they knew they might be clubbed to the ground or those clothes torn from them by the teeth of vicious police dogs.
Did McCarthy’s supporters or King and company think that they had to dress and behave that way all the time, that anything so external defined their actual value? Am I saying that those of us who are innately effeminate are inferior as human beings? That we should not try to eventually get everyone to understand that what one looks like [including being “ugly” or fat] or what one wears should be just as “value neutral” as whom one sleeps with? Of course not.
But they understood that in order for social change to happen, those who determine whether it will happen or not and who fear change as change itself and, therefore, are LOOKING for any excuse to keep their minds closed, their preconceptions safe, need to get a simple message about the focus of THAT change alone.
Ask me to choose between job protection and looking like an idiot protection and I’ll choose the former first, thank you very much.
– Signed, Naturally Nelly Leland.
ChristopherM
Leland, perhaps you should take a gay history course. The people on the front lines of Stonewall were drag queens, big sissies, and bull dykes. And ever since, people like you have been politely asking for your civil rights while telling those of us who can’t pass to hide until the coast is clear.
Some of us simply are who we are. You immediately assume Siriano is putting on some kind of act rather than taking him as who he is. What makes you think anyone who has hatred for someone like him is really going to accept you? I have news for you, Leland: if they hate him, chances are they hate you too.
Leland Frances
You’re the one perpetuating the Stonewall myth, ChristopherM. There wasn’t a single person at Stonewall in full drag. The law in New York at the time specifically required everyone, in public, to wear at least three article of clothing identified with their physical gender.
Yes, there were men there with some makeup on, articles of “women’s clothing,” and some who might have called themselves “drag queens.” And maybe a couple of “bull dykes.” But there was at least one straight guy, folk singer Dave Van Ronk, who was beaten by the cops and arrested.
The larger points are these: no one, including drag/trans icon Sylvia Rivera, who was there has ever been able to identify who threw the first punch against the cops, as it were, that inspired everyone else.
Two, and most important, is that you cannot name a SINGLE legal gay rights advance, e.g., a law repeal or addition, that can be credited to any guy in drag or while uttering, “Faaabulousssssss” or “Fierce!”
JJJJ
Siriano needs a few more male hormones left in his stocking.
ChristopherM
No Leland, the larger point is that those sort of people that you find so shameful were there fighting for our rights, regardless of who threw the first punch. And so often, people like you want to ditch them as if they aren’t as deserving as you.
It has been my experience that people who have such a problem with anyone considered “gay-acting” generally have a serious problem with internalized homophobia. I’m not saying that is you, only you can really answer that. But still, you might want to question why you would automatically assume a silly queeny guy is putting on some sort of minstrel show instead of assuming he is someone who against the odds has the inner strength to be exactly who he knows in his heart he is.
Puddy Katz
Ohhh Leland is the CENTER OF ATTENTION AIN’T E?
TikiHead
Leland reminds me of an ex-friend who used to expound on this issue, that the only way to acceptance is to act ‘more normal’ — he would ay we need a ‘strong gay leader’ to keep the femmes, transexuals and drag queens in line. So very wrong — the whole point is, the consciousness-raising needs to happen on the intolerant side, and ‘straight-acting’ ambassadors won’t help with this. That was the flaw in the Mattachine Society in the 50s and 60s.
Oh, and Leland? Nobody reads ten chapter comments. Nice waste of pixels, there, straight-acting one.
Has anyone yet addressed his fucked-up remark about ‘laughing at Prop 8 passing?’
I dub Leland Douchey McDouchenstein.
TikiHead
By the way, I find Christian adorable, and would totally do him.
brentbent
/me hands Leland the keys to his shackles. Aren’t you happy you don’t have to pick cotton any more?
And just how did an omniscient being like you end up shackled? After all, you can miraculously know the hearts of flamboyant people without knowing much about them other than the fact they offend you.
What’s next?
Giving money to genetic researchers to remove flamboyance genes? Let’s not forget all throughout nature it is the males of countless species who are the flamboyant ones.
Closing down Hot Topic so old people won’t be scared of goths and faux vampires?
Making shopping at The Gap and J. Crew mandatory?
An American dress code implemented by Congress?
Every society has outsiders and rebels and people who think that if the outsiders and rebels were purged or re-educated society would magically be a much better place. I think Hitler and Stalin had such plans and look out how that turned out. And before you say that is a ludicrous hyperbole, you have remember once people start saying one type of person is causing societal problems the dominoes soon start tumbling and before you know it more and more people fall into the undesirables category.
First it was the drag queens and flamboyant faggots that they came for and I remained silent or, worse, cheered them on. Now I am screaming about the Constitution as they drag me away! But, but I look normal! I don’t mention cock sucking! Why are you putting shackles on me?
russell Boyle
It would be such a disappointing world if we woke up tomorrow and found all of the sequence wearing activists transformed into muscle bound, tobacco chewing militants without a fashion sense. Simply being a man in drag could be considered activism at its finest because its still so fucking taboo. This fight has to be done with some men in high heels sucking cock for all the world to see or else it’s just another war with a bunch of emasculated pussy men pretending their put upon machoism is less freakish than a true effeminate queer or stone cold butch hanging out on the corner. We are more than who we have sex with. We are people with opinions, personalities and I believe we have offered society more than the average normal marlboro man riding his pony to church.
if you are going to sit here and post that drag queens, fairies and flamers need to take a back seat while the butch faggots do the fighting for us than you are gravely missing the major point and plugging your nose to the greater stink of mankind.
We are the ones who need the world to change. Those of you who have consigned yourself to some kind of superior, self loathing idea of anti-effeminate manhood (Leland) need to wake up and realize who here is getting jumped at night, who’s rights are being taking for granted and who at the end of the day is being told to go back into the closet.
Harvey Milk said it best. “COME OUT!”
You have to show the world that you are here and ALIVE. If someone from every circle knows a gay person, wether they are a queen or not, the battle gets closer to being won. We must be VISIBLE. Show them who you are.
SILENCE=DEATH.
Mark in Indiana
I like Christian, he actually seems like someone I’d enjoy having dinner with…I wouldn’t “do” him, but I’d do with him.
I think he gains a lot by his cleverness–and though I’m a hot fashion mess myself I could see his talent.
To paraphrase Milton, they also serve who mince and sew.
chuck
@Leland Frances:
“Im gonna die of barfness”???
That’s a new one on me. This TOQ needs to get out more. lol
Wow. This sure is an interesting debate. To be queer, or not to be queer. That is the question?
On the one hand, Leland makes a good point that is hard to ignore. The way we present ourselves to the world, is how the world perceives us. This is something that every good marketing man knows. It’s all about packaging and making the product look good, from all angles…even if the bottom portion facing the cardboard is rotten to the core.
On the other hand, do we really want to “market” ourselves like a product? Do we want people to only see that side of us that we think looks presentable and acceptable? After all, we are human beings, not tomatoes, cucumbers and rutabagas.
I have always been one of the “passables”. No one ever labels me as gay without my telling them so, which I of course do, since I have been totally out since the age of 16. Not that I would dare to compare myself with him regarding handsomeness, but Rock Hudson was also one of the “passables”. Women swooned in theaters over him and even I, with my god-given gaydar, never had a clue about his gayness.
So yeah, it’s been easy for the likes of us who “blend-in”, as it were and don’t stand out like sore thumbs in a carpenter shop.
But, what of the guys who don’t “blend-in”, regardless of how much they might wish they could? I have had any number of friends in my life, including a lover, who couldn’t have hidden their gayness even if they had put a burlap bag over their heads. “Butching it up” just wasn’t in their toolbox and there was no way they could have pulled it off, even if they had given it their best shot.
My Patrick was”fieeerce” and thats a fact. He wasn’t ashamed of it, and neither was I. In fact, I loved him all the more for being “real” instead of trying to play it straight. And so did everyone else that he and I knew. He was loved by everyone and even now, as I write these words, a lump has gathered in my throat and I am tearing up. He was one of the early victims of AIDS.
I think in the final analysis, we all need to be whoever we are, no matter what someone else thinks about it. There are those who would denigrate me and call me a leather queen, leather freak” or a pervert, simply because I operate a leather shop in New York City and used to wear leather from time to time in my younger, slimmer days. It’s their perception and they are seeing what they want to see, just as people hear what they want to hear.
Trying to “make” people like us or behaving in a fashion that will make us more likable, is a total waste of time. That is not to say that politeness, courtesy, consideration and regard for other people’s sensibilities should be thrown out of the window. Thats throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It has been my experience that if we present ourselves in a non-threatening manner,regardless of our appearances or affectations, showing the kindness and consideration that all human beings are deserving of, most will return it in spades.
I am currently experiencing this in a whole new environment. I recently inherited the family house in Queens, NY where I spent the summer of 2007 and six weeks this past summer working on the house. Aside from two older couples on the block who knew my family when they were still alive, everyone else I have met is a new acquaintance.
I have been open and friendly toward everyone I have met on my block including letting them know that I have a partner in the Philippines, where I spend my winters. Mind you, all of these people are straight. Not one person, man nor woman, was shocked, offended or put-off by my honesty and openness.
On the contrary, I have neighborhood women (and men) arriving at my door with food, people inviting me to their house for specially cooked ethnic foods that I’ve mentioned liking and treating me like I am some sort of newly arrived celebrity on the block and it’s a really terrific feeling.
I think what I am saying is, to simply live, love and be yourself and everything will fall into it’s rightful place.
That’s my two-cents worth. đ
ChristopherM
@chuck:
Cheers to you, Chuck.
michael
@Leland Frances: Leland, why don’t you find a woman, get married, have kids and then troll the baths and bathroom stalls for gay sex because then you get to appear
straight as you can appear and get the sex too? Thats really being yourself. Your judgement of gay guys who act femme shows that you have a lot of self hatred. As they say in AA, “you only hate in another what you hate in yourself”. Personally, I have more respect for a gay guy who acts as naturally “femme” as he is than a one who goes the “hyper masculine route” to overcompensate. I just saw the documentary about Harvey Milk made in the 80’s and in it is footage of gay pride marches in the 70’s. To see those
folks dancing in the streets, the drag queens performing on floats and the joy on those folks faces because they had a chance to let loose in public brought tears to my eyes. I also realized that those many of the men in that footage would also be dead in a few years. Life is to short to ridicule people and to live in a straight jacket.
Be who you are and enjoy life, even if that might offend others, because its ultimately their problem not yours anyway.
Jonathan
I think Leland Francis is right-on, to a point. Of course, Christian Siriano, whom I adored for his very outrageousness and talent, is working the “show,” that is, he is the show, his clothes, his personality, the entirety of his “package,” his brand, calculated and executed flawlessly. While some could argue Siriano, Kressly, & others, reinforce gay stereotypes or rather that they themselves bravely confront those stereotypes, ultimately “winning” on the merits of their talent, their own particular genius & appeal. I want Siriano et. al. as a part of my gay world and of the larger world while also recognizing the need for additional leadership that can reach across all rainbows…just like Obama. Siriano enriches all of us, lifts all of us higher, but we still need representatives who can drive the needed legislative and cultural reforms creating real equality for the LGBT community on par with everyone else. While I’m waiting, I welcome the “showmen” like Siriano & friends.
chuck
@ChristopherM:
Thanks, Christopher. I went to your blog and it’s absolutely great.
I am so happy for you that your long time b/f finally proposed to you and that the two of you will be getting married. I think that is wonderful.
My congratulations to you both and all best wishes for many years of happiness together.
We’ll win this fight yet. đ
Webster
Self-Respecting Queens: 20
Self-Loathing Leland: 0
Honesty wins.
Always.
willnyc
Leland, et al.,
Siriano, the Queer Guys, they’re all simply being themselves. That’s the point you’re missing. I’ve worked in entertainment for 20 years and Siriano isn’t a cartoon or a parody – he really is this wonderfully creative, outrageous, and out. That’s just him. How great that our “chew ’em up and spit ’em out” entertainment culture has given him a venue to show who he really is for five minutes! That’s the ultimate statement of being non-judgmental – the fact that’s he’s wildly popular.
In my experience, people who go to the trouble to terrorize feminine guys (straight or gay) are insecure bullies who loathe some part of themselves. That’d be you Leland.
MikeD
Bullshit. Calling Siriano or Kressley effeminate is an insult to women everywhere. Effeminacy is not the issue here. It is the “Look at me, I’m so much better than all of you and I will judge you from my throne” attitude. This is not “being themselves.” There are people just like Siriano and Kressley in the heterosexual world, but there they are just called assholes. Leland is right 100%.
Charles J. Mueller
@MikeD:
> “There are people just like Siriano and Kressley in the heterosexual world, but there they are just called assholes”
After making a remark like that, I suspect that you would welcome censorship and repression with open arms.
Maybe even ban a few books too, while you’re at it.
If you are a hetero trolling on a gay blog, which is what it sounds like, then you too should count yourself as asshole.
Incidentally, Russia, Iran, Turkey and most of the Islamic ruled countries share your viewpoint.
Have you considered moving to any of them? You’d be right at home amongst the other bigots and fag-haters.
Johnny
christian is amazing. the end.
Jason
I think everyone missed Leland’s signature: “Naturally nelly”