viz. - homophobia

Kiss and Cry: The Problem of Portraying Masculinity in Men’s Figure Skating

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:48:22 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

I’ve loved watching figure skating since I was a kid enjoying the movie The Cutting Edge. This meant that I used my free time last night watching the men’s figure skating short programs. My attention was drawn not only by free time, but also by the extensive press coverage given to the American figure skater Johnny Weir in the last month, especially related to his decision to wear fake fur to the Olympics after PETA threatened to protest him.

Weir’s position within the Olympics and within figure skating discourse is incredibly interesting. While he has a wide and vocal fanbase who enjoy his flashy costumes and artistry, much of the discussions surrounding Weir have to do with how Weir’s flamboyance is either good or bad for men’s skating. (Stephen Colbert, for example, alluded to Weir’s “crippling dependence on fabulousness.”) The commentary provided by Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic over his short program yesterday was fairly coded as they drew attention to his “pink tassel” and how “controversial” he is, but the controversy seems to only be whether or not Weir’s fey appearance makes men’s skating look gay—and thus, bad.

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olympics website

The problem for men’s figure skating in general seem to be one of branding: while certain parts of the populace associate the sport with effeminacy and dismiss its claims to being a sport, the Team USA wants it to be taken seriously as an athletic competition. Magazines like Entertainment Weekly focus on the costumes, as did the New York Times in their discussion of the Swiss Stéphane Lambiel, who

either forgot to remove his vest before competing or wore something with shoulder pads that suggested Robin Hood joining the N.F.L. There was a Seinfeld puffy shirt thrown in for extra effect. One of the inhouse radio announcers thought he looked like Count Chocula.

In contrast, skaters like Weir defend their athleticism: “I like sparkly things. I like the theatre of figure skating. But in no way does that make me less macho than someone in a muscle shirt and tattoos with grease stains or whatever.” Aleksei Mishin, the coach for the defending gold medalist Yevgeny Plushenko, emphasizes the importance of the quadruple jump to the sport: “Skating without quads is a time before Stojko, before Urmanov. Who is not able to jump it, don’t make fake explanations. It is a shame to skate without quads.” His language of “shame” ties atheticism to manliness in skating: a manly good skater can do the physically demanding jumps, and an effeminate bad skater can’t.

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

The rivalry between Weir and his American teammate Evan Lysacek, where the former is considered “artistic” and the latter “athletic,” doubles this fight between figure skating’s claims to being a sport and its associations with homosexuality. Michelle Kwan in one video describes Evan as a “stud” and Johnny as “a cross between Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga” to reinforce Evan’s status as the Team USA champion and the medal threat and Johnny’s status as a less “serious” skater.

Image Credit: Screenshot from ESPN website

Yet Evan’s costumes last night were designed by Vera Wang, and the ESPN front page advertises “drama” by pairing the words with Lysacek’s sparkling, feathered image, insisting on the same effeminate connections that the skaters attempt to fight. Perhaps the problem isn’t Johnny Weir or any effeminancy on the part of the sport, but in the minds of individuals who can’t reconcile sport’s traditional homosociality with the masculinity they project onto such figures. This at least is the conclusion drawn by David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum, in an interview on Olympic art with Stephen Colbert:

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Analyzing the costumes of the men’s figure skaters and comparing the militarist look of Stéphane Lambiel with Johnny Weir’s pink tassel and Plushenko’s sequins might help students unpack binaries of masculine/feminine and straight/gay and consider how those definitions are culturally and rhetorically constructed.

For Your Oral-tainment or Not?: The Politics of Adam Lambert’s AMA Performance

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:39:58 +0000

Image Credit: Towleroad

H/T: Noel Radley

While usually I’m good at keeping up on my pop culture news, I’m grateful to Noel for giving me a tip about American Idol star Adam Lambert’s performance at the American Music Awards of his new song “For Your Entertainment.” As can be seen in the above image, Lambert aggressively performed his homosexuality in the number, including simulated oral sex, men on leashes, and an unplanned make-out session with one of the members of his band.

(I’m including a link to the video, with apologies if it’s pulled from YouTube before you can view it.)

While Lambert denied any explicit political intent in an interview with CNN after the performance, he did describe “a double standard in the entertainment community … I feel like women performers have been pushing the envelope sexually for the past 20 years. And all of the sudden a male does it and everybody goes, ‘Oh, we can't show that on TV.’ For me, that's a form of discrimination and a double standard.” Certainly a brief search on Google provides evidence for this argument: artists like Janet Jackson and Madonna have engaged in sexy performances of the same kind as Lambert’s. While I’m not trying to suggest that the Madonna-Britney kiss wasn’t controversial—far from it—part of the negative reaction surrounding Lambert’s performance is in all likelihood related to the fact that he is a gay man simulating homosexual acts on broadcast television, where Glee’s Kurt hasn’t even managed to get a boyfriend.

Image Credit: Towleroad

What I find particularly interesting about the performance in terms of defining Lambert as sexual is that it occurs within a larger controversy about how Lambert has not represented his homosexuality. The controversy surrounding his recent photo shoot in Details and his inclusion in the OUT100 have both centered around what has been seen as Lambert’s refusal to be “too gay” in the media. Lambert is involved in constructing a sexualized image for himself, but one whose orientation is unclear. However, as a popular media figure and as a gay man, what is Lambert’s responsibility to perform his sexuality in the public sphere? Does he have the right to claim privacy for his sexuality at the same time as he flaunts sex? Perhaps the AMA performance can be read as a rhetorical reaction to OUT Magazine editor Aaron Hicklin who asked Lambert to follow “a path that’s honest and true” as a gay pioneer—or maybe it’s just only for our entertainment.

"That's so gay."

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:51:18 +0000

A recent series of public service announcements sponsored in part by the Ad Council sends the message that using the word "gay" as an insult is, well, insulting.

The video I've posted here features Hillary Duff, but it's just one of three you can see on television (presumably, though I haven't) and at the "Think Before You Speak" campaign's website. What was interesting to me is that in two of the ads, including the one I posted here, only part of the argument is stated explicitly, but what is perhaps the most political aspect of it is left unstated.

In this ad, for instance, Hillary Duff overhears two teenage girls in a tony boutique discussing a blouse. "Do you like this top?" one asks. "That's so gay," her friend answers. Soon after, Hillary Duff steps in and attempts to educate the pair (and here I'm paraphrasing) by telling them that they shouldn't use the word "gay" when what they mean is "bad." The two shoppers stare at the actor, puzzled, and she explains with this: "What if every time somebody wanted to say something was bad, they said, 'that's so girl wearing a skirt as a top.'" The shopper, who is of course wearing a shirt that looks oddly like a skirt, is abashed.

What's the lesson here? It seems to me that the ad, while well-intentioned, equates the category of "girl wearing a skirt as a top" with "gay." Hillary Duff, herself very trendily attired, counters the girl's ignorance with catty commentary about her clothing choice.

While a second ad on the site pretty much replicates this argument, a voice-over at the end of the third ad (which, again, features pretty much the same plot line) injects a necessary corollary to the dramatization. "Imagine if who you are were used as an insult," it demands. I think this gesture toward the general is necessary to make the political point the PSA's seem to be aiming for. Without it the dramatizations are too narrow, too idiosyncratic, too petty. There's a difference between being a fashion victim and being gay. Wearing a skirt as a shirt isn't who the girl is.