There’s a brouhaha brewing on some sites because TONY reporter Smith Galtney asked Christian Siriano for our feature on gay culture:
"Drag has always been part of our experience and always will be. What is its everlasting appeal? Why won’t it ever die?"
And he responded with:
"If you think of heterosexuals, they have white-trash women and trailer parks, and we have drag queens and trannies. I don’t know if I’m the one who can explain it. It’s, like, drag queens are just there. These answers are hard!"
Look, we stand by the quote and its context. Was Siriano—the guy who popularized the phrase hot trannie mess—really that out of line?
And what’s everyone got against white trash and trailer parks? Who doesn’t love John Waters?
inarticulate? yes.
but not particularly out of line, i don’t think.
he seemed to be talking through his idea, and he acknowledged that the question was a hard one to answer. i don’t think he’s a bad guy cause he said this.
that said, i do think his understanding of drag and trans-flavored lifestyles as equivalent to ‘white trash women and trailer parks’ is rather inept. first of all, there’s an interesting class distinction he’s making. what about rich, refined trannies? his comments deny their existence (and yes, they DO exist). his comment also betrays his lack of knowledge of the history of queer folks, which is so sad. that’s like being a black person who’s got no clue who martin luther king, jr. is. tell the poor guy to google the word ‘berdache’.
In many respects, drag culture has become cliched. There’s no doubting that there is an artistry to it (on some level) but there is also an artistry to NASCAR. It’s just that it’s not exactly the most representative of the majority concerns of gay culture. It has become pastiche and it is the one thing that that straight culture will often latch onto when they think of the gay community because it is the seemingly most exotic facet of the culture to the outside world. Like rednecks to working class whites, drag queens can be seen as celebrating the most stereotypically base qualities of a gay community when many young gay men and women are looking to support issues that call for inclusion (like marriage, anti-discrimination laws) into the greater culture and highlight uniqueness as an off-spring of their own personality not what the straight world has decided makes them “unique”. A drag queen to many younger gay men and women in the 2000’s is about as silly as a leather boy to gay men in the 90’s– a cliche that has worn thin.
If anyone is upset by this statment they are being to sensitive.
I read this quote in the issue, and thought it captured the zeitgeist perfectly. Is it offensive? Probably. But I love it all the same — it was a fresh perspective, and that’s what I rely on TONY for.
Rock on with your bad selves, Siriano and Galtney.