FOF #1957 – Is It Too Late to RuPologize?
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People are up in arms over the “Female or She-Male” clocking contest on RuPaul’s Drag Race, where drag queen contestants were shown cropped pictures of body parts and the contestants had to guess if the photos were of a female celebrity or a drag queen.
Today we take a look at the outrage over RuPaul’s tacky puns, and if there’s any gravi-she to people’s complaints.
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Comments
Here’s one for your “Gay” names list: Marsha Gay Harden!
As for the FireFox flap. I look at it this way. The guy donated $1000. That’s it. If he were really behind Prop 8/suppression of gay marriage he would have donate a 5 or 6 figure amount. And Prop 8 was overturned so his money eventually ended up not doing any good. But the LGBT public is aware of his actions now and his decisions at work (including who he donates to) will be watched closely. I know there is the story of the gay couple & software developers who have sworn off FireFox but I honestly think this story, while newsworthy, is just small potatoes in the fight for LGBT rights. I use both FireFox and Chrome (I keep both up grouping certain types of pages on each one instead of twice as many tabs on just one browser) and I like the add-ons found in FireFox. What this man did is not yet enough to make me drop them.
I knew I forgot one! So that’s
Mitch Gaylord
Marsha Gay Harden
Marvin Gaye
Tyson Gay
Any other celebrities with the word gay in their name?
What about Rebecca Gayheart?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_Perry
Baseball hall-of-famer Gaylord Perry!
Sometimes I wonder, if the whole concept of drag queens were invented today (instead of decades ago), would anybody allow it? Or would it just be roundly condemned as a mockery of women and trans people?
Ruepaul is right to use the word Tranny, Drag is about changing stereotypes for the better. Could it be possible that Ruepaul identifies as a Shemale, or even a Transsexual its part of who she is. Remember Transsexuals and Drag Queens sheared one identity in the 1980’s.
My Problem is with out of touch gay organizations like GLAD who want to take the sexuality out of the LGBT experience. Many trans people and lesbians aren’t sex positive. Lets face it Trans people tend not to understand were they fit in as sexual creatures and are still in a process of discovering who and what they like as far as sex. They tend to avoid sexuality, and I don’t blame them.
Shemale is a term that could be owned by the Trans community. How come we never see a trans-women who is proud of what she does in the bedroom? Its time to take the word Shemale back! Remember GLAD is the organization most responsible for making the sexual revolution of Gay Rights, a conservative campaign for Equality. We used to march to keep places like bath houses open.
As far as Michigan Marriage Equality we don’t have it, people got married in a four hour time frame on Saturday in 4 counties across the state. In total 325 people paid a free and were issued marriage licenses. By 12:00 a stay was issued and the Attorney General of Michigan said the state wold not honer the licenses. On Wednesday the stay was upheld by the Six circuit. Will this take us to the Supreme court again? This case dealt with Two Parent adoption unlike Utah, so we could get a decision on adoption and marriage at the same time. Stay tuned for more information.
Should we make a bet as to when this case will end up before the supreme court? SCOUTS have a full docket in June and Aug of 2014, we may not be before the Supreme Court until June of 2016.
Will we be able to raise the money we need now that New York, California and Chicago have marriage? Maybe this isn’t the year of the trans after all.
Ruepaul? LOL so true. Rue the day RuPaul!
for me, it’s all about context when using certain words, I don’t watch Ru Paul’s Drag Race (despite how much this show focuses on it but that’s Ok) this show is pretty over the top and ridiculous right? I mean it’s about drag queens competing against one another, I don’t see harm in using these words in the context of this show. To me, it be like the people who got offended by the portrayal of Italian-heritage people of The Jersey Shore. It just seems like a waste of energy to get offended by these things when there are better battles to fight. NOW, if “Shemale” was being used in some other popular daytime television talk show or what have you, then yes, I could see how people would be upset there.
as for the Firefox issue, I was using it for quite sometime before I finally switched to Chrome, I intended to never go back to Firefox, hell, I even uninstalled it on my computer, but, then the adblock extension I have on Chrome wouldn’t block ads on Youtube anymore, and when adblock does not work on Youtube, holy shit, you basically get an ad on every video you try to watch, it’s gotten ridiculous. YET, for whatever reason adblock WILL block Youtube ads if you use Firefox. So now I use Firefox to JUST watch Youtube videos which it’s kinda silly
One of Ru Paul’s quotes that I absolutely love is “Ego loves identity, drag mocks identity, ego hates drag”. The part of this whole “tranny” word controversy that really bugs me is this really is an ego issue on the part of these handful of people who are offended and that’s the big thing that no one is really getting. People that are gay, transsexual, bisexual, whatever name you give it, are all on the fringe of society. Instead of pulling together as a community and focusing on the love and positive action that RuPaul has put into the gay community people are choosing to look for issues to create drama to feed their confused ego. Instead of looking inward to decide why this word causes so much internal strife they are looking outward expecting others to help them come to peace with why this word offends them. Words have power when you give them power. And making jest of a word is the best way to take away its negative intention and power. To me there is a better time spent focusing on eduction of the issue then going after people in the community that are clearly forces of nature for change. The work that Drag Race has done to bring a global understanding of our changing social climate to the masses is absolutely astronomical. I only wish society spent more time focusing on the positives then the negatives.
Bitch flattened it, ironed it, creased and pleated it. Nikki, gurl, thank you for putting words to my feels about all this myopic focus on “tranny.”
Hum for me I do identify as trans, however I also identify as GenderQueer… “Queer” is in some older circles of the gay community is still a word as bad as the F word… How this relates is when im around that older community I show some respect and don’t use the word.
I’ve been called the F word and never liked it though I have heard gay guys refer to each other IE “Whats up F’s!”
I’m not typing the word out because when I’ve been called it it was by haters usually beeting me up… I think it’s as bad a word as the N word and both N and F words should just go away.
Now tranny and shemale in are words that have different meaning in different communities. I have friends in the drag community and some who found the where trans and have transitioned and some still preform in the drag community. I personally don’t care too much about tranny because it’s it’s used primarily within the gay community and as I like to see it, where all in the family.
Why shemale to me is as bad a word as the N or F word is because even though it is used in the gay community it is also used in the pornography. I’m not against trans people in the pornography in fact I’m rather quit for it as long as they are portrayed not as a kind of fetish, but as just a regular person. Cisgender women in pornography are seen as women preforming a kink where trans people in porn end up being shown as the kink it’s self… I’m not against fetishes, i have some kinks my self but a fetish is usually something one likes for sexual expression. For my girlfriend and I this is PVC or bondage, the difference is that trans people do not transition for someone else’s sex reasons or even for our own sexual needs… We transition because it is in our core identities.
Why I wish shemale would just go away is because in the straight community it’s known by it’s sexual meaning… A trans person can be a trans and identify as LGB but shemale to the straight community the equivalency of a kind of sex worker a kink and not an identity to be respected.
It is hard to embrace a word when I have been kicked out of an apartment, have been fired from jobs, have been sexually assaulted and have been shot at while being called shemale. If bad words are only used as reclaimed words with in that minorities community I don’t think it matters but when haters are using the word and they have the legal powers to rune someones life the word needs to stop being used till it’s just not in the vocabulary to be used against that minority.
By the way, just a side note to another comment above many trans have vary well established sexualities, our fight is about the validity of our identities, much the same as the gay struggles fight for the validity of love. However these are both the same fights over two different things. My identity and my sexual identity are two things, but the fights for validity are the same. We must take the power from the haters anywhere we can.
I always forget that “queer” is a trigger word for some people, especially since academia has pretty much embraced it as a legitimate field of study (Queer Studies)
As an older gay man, I remember walking down the street with my boyfriend and being called fags and queens. So, should I be objecting to the use of the word queen? I am proud to be a fag, queen, queer, homo, whatever. Do you think maybe there’s internal shame that is triggered when hearing these words?
You mean to tell me that Chicago can’t brave the cold for a quick bite from a tasty food truck?? Hell, Buffalo has food trucks year round and people STILL stand in line in the cold. The food is just that good. We are kissing a Great Lake with the lake effect snow, winds, and well shit winters. I do know the food trucks went to court with the city and restaurant industry. Back and forth, but they all came to an agreement. I don’t know the details, but I don’t think they can park with in x number of feet in front of a food establishment or in a parking lot.
I think it’s the restaurant lobby keeping the trucks off the streets. Seriously– there’s really no good reason why we shouldn’t have food trucks all over the city, especially in the summer!
We have doggie biscuit trucks!
Fausto – Thank you for reading my comment about the Cockocracy episode. I feel now like a real “HE” lebrity – something I wrote was actually read on the worlds best and most listened to gay podcast.
I guess I am too new to the LGBT scene to have much opinion on the “shemale” debate. But, I agree that RuPaul knows exactly what she is doing and may have done it on purpose to create publicity.
But shemale, or no shemale, I still love the Drag Race show. I used to think Drag was weird. Drag Queens used to freak me out. But thanks to the Feast of Fun podcast I now “get it”. I understand it better.