One, Two, Three Times a Lady...

It seems that liberals can only go for so long before they have to break out the homophobic insults.  A law professor named Josh Chafetz called foul on it today.

The responses were predictably stupid.  One I hadn't seen before was that "Lady G" is a nickname Graham himself asked the male escorts he uses to call him.  

I don't know whether it's true, but after decades of hearing gossip about possibly gay celebrities and public figures, I figure it's false.  And if it's true, it's irrelevant.

I don't want him to be exempt from name-calling. There are plenty of true and proper names to call Graham for voting against LGBTQ+ rights.  "Bigot," for one.  "Hypocrite" for another.  "Liar."  Even "coward."  Throwing homophobic abuse at him, or any closet case, means you're on the side of the bigots, and that you feel good there.  Isn't it funny, though, that when liberal homophobes get called out, they suddenly claim that calling their targets queer isn't really an insult?

And then there's the claim that it's okay to side with the bigots if we're gay, epitomized here:

I have little respect for George Takei anymore, but here's the thing about this one.  In my day (and though I'm younger than he is, I was out years before Takei crept out of his own closet), we queens called everybody by femme names. Singling out one hypocrite, in a time when every gay celebrity was closeted, would have been absurd (not that that would have stopped us).  We were partly engaged in a repressed form of resistance, but it also involved a lot of self-hatred.

It's one thing to play this gay parlor game among ourselves, but once you post it on social media, you're letting insecure straight boys think that they can get away with it too, like white kids who figure that listening to hiphop gives them a day pass to throw around n****r.  

Then came this familiar move:

I can easily believe that Graham is gay, though as Tallulah Bankhead apocryphally said when asked about someone else, "I don't know, darling -- he never sucked my cock!"  Numerous right-wing figures, including politicians, have come forward to be themselves over the years, and they remained terrible people without exception.  Some, like Andrew Sullivan, were already out when they burst onto the scene; same story.  Being a right-wing scumbag is who Graham is: racist, bigoted, dishonest, hypocritical, beholden to wealthy donors.

There were numerous variations on this:

Equating homosexuality to submissiveness (and vice versa) is the quintessence of homophobia.  In this case it's obviously ridiculous, because Graham is far from the only male Republican pol who has submitted to Trump.  Are they all closet cases?  Not impossible, but not likely either.

Which brings me to a curious paradox: In patriarchy if a male submits -- socially, erotically, whatever -- to another male, he is stigmatized as a faggot. On the other hand, patriarchy requires manly men to submit to the authority of other men.  It's not only acceptable, it's praiseworthy.  Even being penetrated sexually endows the recipient with the masculine power of the penetrator: for example, an ancient Roman dream-interpretation manual had it that a man's dream of being fucked by a social superior was a good omen, despite the normal Roman contempt for sexual passives.  In religion, men prostrate themselves before a male god.

And then there's the military.  Ah, yes.  Men prove their manhood through the trial-by-ordeal of basic training, called "ladies" by their drill sergeants, stripped of their individuality and generally abjected and abused.  I can't think of a better example than this segment from Stephen Colbert's 2009 visit to entertain US troops in Iraq.  Dressed in a camouflage suit, Colbert engaged in scripted banter with a general, who told him that if he really wanted to be a soldier, he would have to cut his hair.  Colbert pretended to demur, until President Obama appeared on a video screen and gave him a direct order.  In front of an audience of cheering grunts, the general administered a military buzz cut, which Colbert sported for the rest of his stay in Iraq. 

The sadomasochistic aspects of this scene are hard to miss; the comedy just enhances them.  Much of S&M is theatrics and ritual anyway.  Colbert was still playing his "conservative" persona at this time, but he still submitted to the authority of a "liberal" president.  That it was in the cause of Supporting the Troops ensured that Colbert wasn't unmanned by his abasement.  Context is very important: in another situation, or merely to hostile eyes, he'd have been feminized by it.  It's the ambiguity, the fact that a man can never be sure whether his submission is safe or not, that fuels male anxiety and homosexual panic.

One last comment in this vein: one guy tweeted "Just maybe, if and when Melanie drops trump, Donald & Lindsey may end up been [sic] a pair".  I noted that his bio IDs him as an ex-marine and retorted, "I bet you have your eye on Lindsey yourself.  But he's [also] a bottom, so you two wouldn't be compatible."  In my day, Marines were notorious among military trade queens -- gay men seeking to be penetrated by manly guys in uniform -- for flinging their legs in the air when one got them into bed.  I don't know how true this gossip is; but stereotypes have a way of backfiring, so I wanted to remind "The Captain" to handle them with care.

Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy, They First Make Mad

"Our old friend Jon Stewart weighs in on the choice America faces at the ballot box this November, pointing out that only one candidate possesses the humility necessary to lead this country out of this moment of great struggle and sadness."  So says the description under the video, and it might even be true, but unfortunately the one candidate capable of leading this country out of the current morass was torpedoed by the DCCC, and now we're stuck with Joe Biden as the alternative to Donald Trump.

I broke my vow never to watch Colbert again to watch this clip. It's painful, much worse than even I expected, to see Stewart contorting himself -- literally! -- to make an absurd argument for Joe Biden's humanity.  Just for comparison, John McCain also suffered pain and loss, but he never stopped being a vicious racist bigot till the day he died.   I've never seen any reason to believe that Biden's personal losses taught him anything. They certainly haven't kept him from lying shamelessly about his political record, or from being truculent and abusive on the campaign trail before the pandemic shut him down.  I think those issues are what matter, not Stewart's febrile fantasies about the inner man.

I was going to say that Stewart is better than this, but he's never been able to hold Democrats to the same standards he applies to Republicans, let alone criticize them with the same conviction and glee.  His protestations that Biden wasn't even his fourth choice ring hollow to me: if Biden really has these well-hidden depths, why didn't Stewart (or anyone else) detect them before?  Once again, though not for the last time, I marvel at Democratic loyalists' irresistible need to convince themselves that a terrible candidate is really an inspiring demigod if you look at him or her with the eyes of the Spirit.  Can't they cast a vote without being drunk on their candidate's grooviness?  It's strange, after (but also before -- they'll play the theme again many times over the next five months) they've lectured critical voters that you shouldn't need to be inspired, just vote strategically, that they simultaneously insist that you adore the nominee without reservation.

One good thing about Biden, if he wins, is that he's not likely to get the indulgence Obama got.  Sure, toadies like Stewart and Colbert will try to attack anyone who criticizes Biden from the left, but I don't think they'll be very effective.  It's far too early to say right now, but it looks like some genuinely leftish candidates beat entrenched Democratic hacks in these primaries.  If they win in November, the voters may have some genuine representation in Congress.  I'm almost hopeful for the first time in years.

He Do the Donald in Different Voices

Okay, I'm having an existential crisis here.

I encountered this clip in a thread on Twitter this morning.



The actor Peter Serafinowicz has done a long series of these videos.  (He's done a few with other voices, like Sophisticated Trump, but there are dozens of Sassy Trumps.)  Part of me loves what he's doing, but most of me was instantly wary, which was confirmed when I found that Stephen "Cockholster" Colbert had Serafinowicz on his show and played this very clip.

I could interpret Serafinowicz' project in ways that wouldn't reflect badly on it, but they're not relevant, because it's a safe bet that most people will read it as a major fag joke, one that liberals can roar over without feeling that debilitating liberal guilt.  They can vent their homophobia on a safe target, a certified Bad Guy.  That's why Colbert picked it up: it's the kind of fag-baiting he likes.  Even if Serafinowicz were gay himself (I have no information one way or the other), he'd be enabling and perpetuating liberal bigotry.

And yet I do find Sassy Trump funny.  Partly because Serafinowicz does it well: he's an experienced voice actor.  Partly because there is an uncanny fit between Trump's facial expressions and body language and the queeny voice Serafinowicz gives him.  My first years in a gay community included the society of many people who sounded just like Sassy Trump.  (It would be an interesting experiment to do the same thing to, say, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, and see if it worked as well.  Or to Hillary Clinton, maybe.)  Partly because I grew up in an antigay society which used gay stereotypes to impugn the masculinity of men it wanted to discredit.  Partly because in the gay community I joined in the early 1970s we did that ourselves, deflating straight men and other gay men whose manly pretensions we wanted to undermine.

If only queens saw these clips, my judgment would be different.  But I don't believe that most viewers will see them as I do, and for young sissies it can't be comfortable to see themselves used as the butt of liberal anti-Trump agitprop.

But Some of My Best Friends Are Cock Holsters!

Just as I was about to let Stephen Colbert's unfortunate "joke" about Trump and Putin sink slowly into the past, various people kept kicking it back to the front of my consciousness.  So, for example, Roy Edroso dismissed US Representative Jason Chaffetz last week as "a little bitch who remained lashed to his great white Hillary whale long after everyone else abandoned ship because pretending to be a tough guy is all he knows how to do."  Edroso got his metaphors a bit mixed up there, but these are troubled times and we've got to do something.  Then, yesterday, Edroso mocked country singer Toby Keith, who performed for an all-male audience in Saudi Arabia during Trump's visit there:

I like to imagine Keith getting a call: "Hey Tobe! It's me, Faisal. How'd you like to pick up a quarter mil easy money? All you have to is change some lyrics -- you know, 'Pellegrino for My Horses, Mango Nectar for My Men.'" Or maybe it's not that kind of relationship, and Keith came wrapped in a rug?

The link goes to a clip from the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster Cleopatra, in which Elizabeth Taylor has herself delivered to Rex Harrison wrapped in a rug, thereby signaling her sexual availability or something.  So Edroso wants us to think of Keith as Faisal's little bitch.

Then this morning liberal tweeter Yes You're Racist invited Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to "eat my entire ass."  YYR is a better person than I am; being rimmed by McConnell would just make me feel dirty.  (Or as the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel had a character say in one of her early strips, "I thought sodomy meant having sex with a Republican.")

These examples, which of course could be multiplied, are useful partly because they disprove the straight-liberal-guy protestation that calling somebody a faggot is not a reference to gay sexual practices, that they are totally cool with gays boning gays, they totally support gay marriage, they just don't like "Servants of power.  You know - faggots."  But as Colbert and Edroso and YYR show, they equate being a servant of power with being penetrated sexually, which they regard with visceral repulsion.  So how do they think of the women in their lives?  I probably shouldn't ask.

Another reason I almost didn't write about all this was that Brandon U. Sutton wrote an excellent piece about the controversy at Progressive Army.  Sutton said most of what I'd intended to say.  For example:

First, and while this may seem churlish, what Colbert said was not even particularly clever or funny. Arguably, it was barely even a joke, since jokes have a certain structure from which they derive some of their humor. Colbert saying that the only thing Donald Trump’s mouth is good for is as a “cock holster” was just an insult that people found funny.

"Funny" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I think he's right.  "Cock holster" is the kind of epithet sixth-grade boys consider hilarious: not because they have any personal experience of fellatio from either end, but because they're extremely anxious about bodies.  Which reminded me of a couple of sketches from Colbert's show during last year's campaign, in which a young boy played Trump's "nickname strategist."  It appears that Colbert took the boy on as one of his writers.

That many conservatives objected to Colbert's insult was unsurprising -- not because it was "homophobic," which they would normally consider a good thing, but because it targeted someone on their side.  If, during the 2008-2016 period, some comic had called Barack Obama a cock holster for Benjamin Netanyahu, would liberal Democrats have considered it just a joke?  For that matter, I recall Colbert himself adopting a stance of unironic submission to then-President Obama, who ordered him to get a military buzz cut to show his solidarity with Our Troops in Iraq. "Servant of power" would have been a perfect characterization for Colbert in those days, and depending on whom he's bending the knee to, it still is.

I don't want Colbert fired.  I just want to name what he's doing.  His liberal defenders have had to resort to right-wing insults against his critics, such as "virtue signalling."  But virtue-signalling is Colbert's stock in trade.  One Colbertista on Twitter responded to me in those terms: "Thanks for another example of our virtue signaling culture where everyone is perpetually offended."  To which I replied, "I'm not 'offended' by his homophobic insults; I'm a faggot, they just roll off. They just undercut his signalled virtue."

But there's another thought: one reason we're not supposed to say such naughty things is that they'll drive gay kids to suicide.  So why does Colbert get a pass on it?  Because he's on Our Side, one of the Good Guys, and anyway, liberals are happy to use homophobic / misogynist rhetoric against their enemies.  (Don't imagine that kids wouldn't hear about what Colbert said, even if it weren't freely available the next day on YouTube.  That's another right-wing fantasy, that children will know nothing of homosexuality if we can just keep Teh Gay out of the media.)  I'm not seriously worried about Colbert affecting youth-suicide rates, of course: I'm just savoring the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.

Apples and Surrogates: The Revolving Door

I don't have regular access to TV, but an Internet-connected Blu-ray player with a Youtube app has been easing me back to the medium.  Last night the CNN celebrity newsperson Anderson Cooper visited Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, and in the course of "hugging it out" together he acknowledged something that in a better universe would have been embarrassing.

To be fair, it looks to me as if Cooper was embarrassed: he almost seemed surprised by what he had just admitted.  Maybe it really had never occurred to him before.  Colbert didn't press him very hard, but I think he knew what a gem he'd just unearthed.

Colbert had asked about various Trump campaign people Cooper had interviewed lately.  Cooper volunteered the name of Trump's former campaign manager Cory Lewandowski.

COLBERT: Who now works at CNN.  [pause while Cooper confirms it with a nod and a gesture] He works for you guys. [pause] Does he still get any money from the Trump people at the same time?

COOPER: I believe -- I read he gets a continuing severance from Trump.

COLBERT: So you all are paying him and Trump is paying him but he's still on your show doing analysis on a man he still gets cash from.

COOPER: Pretty much. I guess that's one way to look at it.

COLBERT: And you still respect his opinion, too?

COOPER: We have people from all the campaigns.  We have campaign surrogates for Hillary Clinton on.

COLBERT: What is a surrogate, by the way?  I have heard that term a lot.

COOPER: It's somebody who represents the campaign.  They're often paid by the campaign.  They just -- I don't know, you know, Katrina Pearson, I think, is one of those people you see on cable news a lot.  She is a surrogate for the Trump campaign.  There are a lot of surrogates. The campaign can't be everywhere so they have people out there speaking for them.

At this point Colbert abruptly changed the subject to Trump's recent "pivot" attempting to present a kinder, gentler image to minorities.  Which, it turns out, Lewandowski has something to say about too, in his capacity as a cable news journalist / commentator.

Cooper was being disingenous here, to put it nicely.  I presume that the various campaign surrogates are not paid by the news programs on which they appear, any more than the candidates themselves are -- though who knows, I could well be wrong about that.  But Lewandowski's role on CNN is not, supposedly, as a campaign surrogate: it's as someone who, as a former insider, should know what hard questions to ask the surrogrates.  Since he's still being paid by the Trump campaign, there's at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in his case, and his defense of Trump's reluctance to campaign in communities of color reinforces the suspicion.

I wonder, too, if Colbert would have brought up the point if a former Clinton campaign manager had been snapped up by CNN after being fired by his boss.  I doubt it, since Colbert has largely followed the Clinton line since before she officially won the nomination.  Also last night he did a segment on "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theories, referring derisively to a couple from the Republican side but neglecting any from the Democrats.  Oh well, maybe it was just time limitations.

Oooohh! I Scared Myself

Colbert's very good at this sort of thing. After a friend linked to this meme today, I was inspired to imagine President Obama's strategy, using the same model.  Something like this:

I promise not to take my turn until after you've taken your turn, if that's all right with you, because no American hates success, so I'll give you an extra turn just to be fair. Are you sure you've had enough turns? I have to stand up to my base here, and not let them push me around. They're just going to whine that I haven't done enough, but look at all the turns I've given you! They won't be satisfied until I've turned this country into socialist Canada. Can I have a turn now? No? Well, I wouldn't want to seem unreasonable. But I'm going to stand firm this time. No More Mister Nice Guy!  If you want to fight over your taking another turn, that's a fight I'm willing to have. Take another turn, or you're going to see me angry.

After I posted a version of this under my friend's link, another friend of hers commented in my direction: "'socialist Canada' - you do know Canada is a capitalist country right?"  Sigh.  Today's youth -- no sense of irony.  [P.S.  Of course I know that Canada is a capitalist country.  Obama seems not to know that.]