Tag Archives: jared leto

When You Defend Terrible Jokes, I Assume You Are Terrible At Jokes.

24 Apr

I’ve had the dubious pleasure the past few weeks of seeing gaybros on social media wail and gnash their teeth about how RuPaul’s drag race is dropping the “You’ve Got Shemail” game and the way they whine about it you’d think a comedy light had been snuffed out forever. And it’s like seriously, bros? IT’S A REFERENCE TO AOL FOR FUCKS SAKE. It was a tired ass reference when it titled a Tom Hanks movie in 1998, it doesn’t suddenly become comedy gold because you throw in a reference to a radical feminist anti-trans manifesto to sound edgy.

I find myself bothered by people over-zealous to defend rape jokes and slurs and all that sort of thing not because I particularly find it offensive, but because the jokes themselves are hamfisted and forced. They’re unfunny because they are actually not well-written jokes.

yousuckatjokes2You wind up looking exactly as queer and transgressive as this douchebag.

Maybe it’s just too much to ask for queer humor to be smart or, y’know, funny. I wonder sometimes.

Despite all the rhetoric going on from the other camp (get it? because… oh never mind), the last thing I am is a prude or whatever. Christ, the first time I stuck a cock in my mouth I was 17 and it was the mid-1990s so you’d be seriously stretching the definition to ever call me a “newly minted queer”. For what it’s worth, there was never a moment in my entire adult life where I was anything close to being a “heterosexual man” despite the stereotypes going around about who is arguing what here. By all means, I’m exactly the type of person Calpernia Addams and Andrea James claim to be speaking for, and I don’t appreciate it. And I’m hardly unaware of drag or camp gay culture-

10Yeah, it’s pretty safe to say I know a few drag queens or whatever.

And like, not sure if the title of the website slipped by ya or something, but I’ve been performing as a noise musician for well over a decade. I’m not too shy to say I’m uncomfortable with all the unchecked white supremacy, misogyny/masculinism, casual racism and homophobia that creeps up in the experimental music scene either. There’s a point where transgressive art ceases to subvert oppressive paradigms and begins to reinforce them. Walking that thin line is the only way to stay interesting. The idea that participation in or even enjoyment of an entertainment medium means that you must consider it above critique is absurd and antithetical to the creative process. I mean yeah, I have a copy of one of GG Allin’s tattoos, but I also have a copy of Kurt Cobain’s only tattoo, and he had no qualms telling his own fans they could go to hell if they were racist, sexist, homophobic boneheads. Punk rock began because a new generation found the old a bunch of pompous blowhards stuck in the past, and then they got old and became tired old irrelevant dinosaurs and 90s punk happened and so on…

yousuckatjokes3Jayne County, making me forget why the hell I idolized her for over 20 years. Bye Felicia.

yousuckatjokes4

Speaking of irrelevant dinosaurs, Jayne County has her panties in a wad because she threw a fit like a 14 year old 4channer and got temporarily banned from Facebook. She claims this ban was over the word “tr*nny” (it wasn’t) and not over her gratuitous use of the word “f*ggot” (it was), in order to make some sort of bonehead point. But then, she also claims the Facebook ban reminds her of the struggle for gay rights somehow. Except somehow our side is the histrionic crybabies. I think it’s pretty blatantly clear why Jayne is so fucking scared of the younger generation and their scary Twitter use-

yousuckatjokes5#ByeFelicia

And then you have Calpernia Addams stepping in yet again, looking like a Dollar Store knockoff Amanda Lepore doll, reminding us that it’s perfectly ok to cruelly mock trans women, as long as you prefer men. Or whatever that paradigm-shifting gibberish was. Anyway, sure thing guuuuuuuuurl. I mean, maybe it’s just me, but I prefer to not weaponize my preference for men against other trans women. But hey if it’s helping push your ridiculous zither music or whatever more power to ya I guess.

yousuckatjokes6Whatever, hippie.

But this conversation seems to be waking up all the ghosts of trans activism past, where you have Andrea James making shitty Silence Of The Lambs jokes at every trans woman that disagrees with her and cuddles up with anti-trans group Gender Identity Watch.

yousuckatjokes7yousuckatjokes8Not even joking with the @jokestress.

Not to mention pushing the absurd idea that Parker Malloy is “homophobic” or somehow resentful/angry at either gay men or trans women that come from/are involved in the gay community like myself. Hell, both Parker and I simultaneously called out Jared Leto’s problematic “no homo” treatment of the character he was obviously playing for Oscar bait. To be fair, my sentiments predated hers by a few days, although I hadn’t had a chance to write my own piece by then. This is actually a pretty serious issue when two heterosexual men star in a movie about the AIDS crisis and are too busy overcompensating heterosexually to even say the word “AIDS” in interviews. But no, to Calpernia Addams and Andrea James, the only reason anyone could find a problem with the movie was because of being a so-called heterosexual “skin transvestite”, which I can only assume looks like this:

leatherfaceindragYou just know I was waiting for an excuse to use this pic in another blog post on here.

Seriously, for a Twitter handle like @jokestress, Andrea James doesn’t seem to know dick about funny.

And Christ do not get me started on this bullshit video that appeared on HuffPost last night:

yousuckatjokes1SSION has sure let himself go…

Like, how narcissistic and self-negating do you have to be to simultaneously portray people that disagree with your language use as both powerless (“I have a Tumblr with 18 followers”) and oppressive? Which is it? You’re either admitting you think that certain people are too small and powerless to care about, or you are literally incapable of handling the slightest bit of criticism. Either way, you are not subversive, and you are not clever. You are literally the Jeff Dunhams and the Larry The Cable Guys of gay culture, and I hope you’re preparing material for when you host dinner theater for the casually racist and homophobic dads of the world, because soon enough that is going to be the only audience for you hacks.

I mean, you know who also makes tired-ass Tumblr jokes? This talentless douchebag-

yousuckatjokes2

Feel free to follow me on Tumblr for more oppressive SJW rhetoric, lol.

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Seriously, I’m #NotYourRayon, And You Can’t Recast Me As One.

12 Mar

In contrast to the “decievers,” who wield their feminine wiles with success, the “pathetic transsexual” characters aren’t deluding anyone. Despite her masculine mannerisms and five-o-clock shadow, the “pathetic transsexual” will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped in a man’s body… Unlike “deceivers” whose ability to “pass” is a serious threat to our culture’s ideas about gender and sexuality, “pathetic transsexuals” -who barely resemble women at all- are generally considered harmless. Perhaps for this reason, some of the most endearing portrayals of trans women fall into the “pathetic” category.  – Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

FULL DISCLOSURE: I still haven’t seen Dallas Buyer’s Club, but I do intend to see it. Truth is, I’ll probably even like it. I have a soft spot in my heart for sad sack “pathetic transsexual” stories. Hell, the Christmas after I began transition my dad made a clumsy shitty joke about a certain character from Priscilla Queen Of The Desert f0r obvious reasons in order to make the most hamfisted shitty jab at me or whatever, so like I know certain stereotypes I may never escape so I might as well sit back and enjoy?

So like in the whole aftermath of Leto winning an Oscar from this whole mess been seeing two common responses that I feel the need to jump in on, and how they curiously intersect in my own experience. The first is the WHARBLGARBL WELL MAYBE RAYON WAS JUST A GAY MALE CROSSDRESSER TRANSVESTITE AND NOT TRANS AT ALL DID YOU THINK OF THAT GOSH THE TRANS UMBRELLA DIDN’T EXIST BACK THEN (The following are assorted responses to Parker Marie Malloy’s recent Advocate articles on the subject)

dallas2Except in the real world:
Heterosexual trans women are heavily impacted by AIDS, frequently due to lack of healthcare and/or discrimination/stigma by healthcare professionals regarding testing and treatment.

dallas3
Except in the real world:
1) Christine Jourgenson, one of the most well known trans women of the past 50 years, frequently referred to herself as “transgender” since the late 1970s.
2) The movie takes place in 1985, the same year Richard Ulster founded the first Transgender Literature Archive at Ulster University. Also at least a year after this 1984 article by sexologist Roger E Peo.
3)Virginia (Charles) Prince didn’t invent the word, but she did help popularize it. The word appears in the psychology reference manual “Sexual Hygiene and Pathology” a full five years before the first issue of Prince’s magazine “Transvestia”.

dallas4
^the above was screencapped from the excellent Trans Hollywood blog, which has been swarmed by persistent assclowns of every flavor over their stance on this issue.

And, like fucking seriously y’all? Gay men don’t get sexual reassignment surgery. That’s like the shittiest laziest most homophobic stereotype out there, and it’s suddenly a better alternative than just saying the character is a sad inaccurate stereotype of a trans woman? The difference between gay men and trans women was already a well-known enough phenomenon in the real world half a decade before this movie takes place that, when the late-70s/early-80s tv show Soap suggested that the gay character would desire a sex change it faced protests from both gay and trans activists for trying to conflate the two. How easy motherfuckers forget history.

I mean, this isn’t 1975, and this isn’t Dog Day Afternoon, even though the scriptwriters (and anti-trans bloggers/commenters) apparently can’t tell the difference.

And it’s like, Rayon was a 100% fictional character unbound by any sort of narrative convention; why exactly does the character seem more and more like one that wouldn’t even fly in the 1990s?

In any case, it’s a game of semantics to pretend that people aren’t going to associate this character with the lived experience of trans women. It straight up says multiple times in the movie (as well as the book) Silence Of The Lambs that Buffalo Bill doesn’t exhibit any of the traits of trans identity, yet he’s a consistent go-to trope, a cognitive bias horror reflection of the insistence that the lived experience of trans women are a figurative/symbolic theft of women’s flesh somehow. Body autonomy? What the fuck is that? And it’s just one of dozens of similar movies pushing the same image.

leatherfaceindragOh hey look, another movie with a timely, sensitive transfeminine portrayal starring Matthew McConaughey

Anyway, enough of that.

The other point being made I take contention with (perhaps even more so) is this assertion Calpernia Adams makes in her recent Advocate piece regarding the controversy.

But I have known people like Rayon. She is not a made-up grab bag of random hateful attributes. She’s a portrayal of an uncomfortable segment of the trans experience that a few TLGB folks would rather be erased rather than discussed. I think many of the haters hate Rayon because she isn’t beautiful, she isn’t passable, she isn’t gender-binary, she isn’t 2014-political. And when I see that elitist hypocrisy, I’m inclined to push back.

It’s hard being trans, even more so in the era and circumstances of Dallas Buyers Club. I’ve known plenty of trans sex workers, self-medicators, wise teachers, hilarious weirdos, and people taken before their time due to violence and lack of health care. I’ve known trans people very much like Rayon, and maybe if some people got up from their remote activism -devices (computer screens and smartphones) and left their ivory towers and privilege bubbles, they’d meet a few people like Rayon face-to-face too.

Excuse the fuck out of me? Where in the actual fuck do you get the gall to recast all concerns about this character into some tired gross archaic “transsexual vs transgender” elitism?

I’m *from* Texas. I’ve self-medicated. I’ve done drugs. Like, a *lot* of drugs. I haven’t done sex work, but I can’t say I haven’t considered it. I’m not HIV+, but I’ve dated people who were. I spent the latter part of the 1990s getting sneered at by older transsexuals in “support” groups during a time when I was young and lost and really could have used some guidance. I frequented gay bars, and often slept with gay men (slept with an awful lot of straight guys too, for the record).

krossover1Me, literally standing in the doorway of the infamous, frequently cop-raided, Harker Heights,Tx gay/drag bar Krossover, in 1999(?).

And being concerned about passability? Christ. I’m the tallest, gangliest, most shittily-tattooed, donkey-faced thing out there. And apparently I dress like a Hot Topic threw up. So lets just say it isn’t high on my concerns.

bangs

So like, when Leto talks about “the Rayons of the world” or whatever, he’s talking about people like me. Except fuck you no he isn’t.

And it’s like, maybe I don’t really want to be spoken for in this gross pandering “No Homo” way and romanticized as some sort of “impossible creature” and yet again have my narrative, a path and experience I’ve fought for and struggled with for a lifetime, repackaged in a cynical fashion by people with no understanding of it.

Not sure what I really expected from a movie that repackages it’s protagonist as a uber-heterosexual and homophobic (yay bisexual erasure) in order to learn some sort of hamfisted lesson, tho.

That said, I still intend to check the movie out. No homo.

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No Homo: On Jared Leto And Destroying A Beautiful Creature.

16 Jan

A lesson I’m learning over and over in life is that pretty boys can’t be trusted. They’ll break your heart as soon as they open their big stupid mouths.

So remember that part in Fight Club where Edward Norton sees Brad Pitt and Jared Leto embrace tenderly and gives them both this look of utter jealousy and betrayal? Remember how the scene immediately shifts to Norton cheap-shotting Leto and pounding him into hamburger meat and later admitting to Pitt that he did so simply because he was beautiful? Remember how technically (spoiler) Edward Norton and Brad Pitt are the same person?

Have you ever *really* thought about that scene? No homo.

nohomo1In case you forgot this part, I’m totally not joking here.

Anyway…

I haven’t seen Dallas Buyer’s Club, but I intend to. I have a soft spot in my heart for what Julia Serano would call “sad trans” movies. So let’s get that out of the way.

And I’m not gonna get into the “should cis actors play trans women” argument in this article because that conversation has been done to death. Smarter people than I have tackled the subject better than I ever will. I am, however, eternally frustrated by how said actors spend their interviews screwing up and misrepresenting our lives even as they try to broadcast us into mainstream visibility out of the supposed goodness of their cis ally hearts. I mused about this frustration on my Facebook page while on the train a couple days ago:

nohomo2

This post inspired my friend Diana Tourjee to do an expanded write-up for Original Plumbing magazine on the subject. She says it with far more nuance than I am willing to.

Cause really, it’s not even the terrible sexualized jokes which are honestly more boring and sadly predictable than offensive. What gets under my skin is Leto not only rhetorically separating himself from the character of Rayon, but also divorcing this character he brought to life from having any sypmathetic reality or social consequence. Referring to her as a “creature” and an “impossible person” at a time when the lives and experiences of actual trans  women are still considered up for debate, for instance.

I think we really get to the root of the problem, however, by noting how neither him or costar McConaughey mention AIDS once regarding their roles in a movie whose entire plot focuses on the AIDS crisis.

See, male privilege is a funny thing, and a lot more nuanced than people allow by simply equating penises with institutional social power. I swear, to hear some people talk you’d think you could post a dick pic on your resume or whatever. So much of it is conditional and hinged on gearing not only your presentation but your narrative towards patriarchal heteronormativity. And it’s not only among cishet dudebros like Leto and McConaughey. See also: LGBT assimilation movements, “straight acting” gay people (whatever the fuck those are), and femmephobia.

Considering how even certain feminists present the idea of masculine presentation as a social default and femininity as this socially constructed demeaning performance, it’s amazing how society treats masculinity as this fragile, breakable thing. Seriously, how many times are people gonna spout that tired idea that allowing boys to enjoy feminine things will “ruin” them with no irony? Yet the idea persists. Think back again to that scene in Fight Club, that paean to toxic masculinity, where the only time a man can tell another man (or really anyone) that they are beautiful is after they’ve destroyed them. Remember that whole story was written by a hypermasculine heavily-closeted gym bunny that frequently looked like he could grace the cover of a 50s gay muscle magazine before he finally got over it and was ok with being out.

nohomo3Totally wasn’t joking about that either.

Tell me again how masculinity isn’t performative.

So really,  it’s transparently obvious why a guylinered prissy metrosexual like Jared Leto would be so prone to blatant overcompensation after playing one of us Super Saiyan transfairy gaymosexuals on the big screen. He’s trying to bounce back, prove he wasn’t ruined by the experience. While Dustin Hoffman could realize women were people, realizing trans women are people is apparently way too much to ask for Leto.

I get it.

So why don’t you just shut the fuck up pretty boy and just admit you’re using us for Oscar bait. No homo.

I’ll go on living my beautiful impossible life and making better music then you ever will. *hair flip*

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