Drag queens pose in bond age gear for calendar in aid of Mermaids

[JoanSummers]

I'm not sure if this has been posted?

"A local drag community in Newcastle have come together in style to create a one-of-a-kind 2019 calendar, with all proceeds going to charity to support transgender children and young people across the UK."

The February and March photos are attached.

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6577301/Drag-queens-pose-glamorous-calendar.html

I agree FlyingOink that 'Not All Drag Queens Are Like That". I've also been around them via adult circles for decades. BUT - in terms of schools and young children - there is no place for them, now or ever.

'Acceptance with exception' slogan, and how much it reminded me of a religious slogan, actually.

I find that a very helpful observation. You nailed it.

And YES, acceptance without exception is shorthand for 'ignore your personal boundaries'.

I think this confirms one of my many, many concerns about Mermaids - they are essentially clueless while believing that they are experts, and they don't understand that "LGBT" is not a monolith, and that being kinky is not synonymous with being LGBT.

We've just come from a season of events where small children go to see men dressed as cartoonish versions of women, and I'm fine with that. But can you imagine if you took your kid to the panto and Widow Twankey had his balls out and was being whipped by a fishnet-clad Baron Hardup, and you were lectured by Buttons, as he adjusted his strap-on, "hey, don't be bigots, folks! It's great for the kids to see such ~diversity"!

It's so fucking homophobic.

Disclaimer: I may have conflated my panto characters into One Enormous Panto.

BUT - in terms of schools and young children - there is no place for them, now or ever
Agreed, completely. It's just not necessary, as well as being inappropriate. There's no benefit, even if it was done particularly carefully. You could teach primary school kids how to play darts, and you could put in place a raft of safety measures to enable it, but there would be no net benefit because kids don't need to play darts, or know about drag queens, or learn how a cloakroom works at a nightclub. There's no benefit, the motives are questionable, the delivery is open to infiltration by those with malicious intent, it's just a bad idea from start to finish.

Mermaid are not clueless. They may have been infiltrated or have been formed from the very beginning to get at kids. Pie failed back in the day, but do not imagine they ever gave up. With the internet they now have the world and their perverts at their fingertips.

The gay community has been bullied, threatened, by them. They fought the original battles to be accepted, their success has now been grabbed and they are surplus to requirements.

I wonder if the drag scene used to be rather self-regulating in the past since it was often a small number of performers who worked only in the cities. Everybody would know everybody else and if there were rumours of inappropriate behaviour, then the group would shun them immediately. Word would get out to the venues pretty quickly since there were relatively few venues who would host drag in the first place.

Now that LGBT has corporate backers at Pride and other events, drag is much bigger and mainstream due to social media, it becomes attractive to a certain sort of person who seeks to indulge their own fetish. Add the fact that people who identify as transgender are able to hide their pasts quite easily and people moving around a lot, it may be that the drag community has been infiltrated.

I might not be as cool as the queer lot, or as edgy, or push as many boundaries, but I'd quite like to just be able to live my life thanks.

Exactly this. Being gay alone doesn't mean you are a 'boundary pusher' or edgy or flamboyant, it just means you are attracted to people of the same sex. That's it.

With a couple of exceptions (and I guess we are talking stereotypical haircuts and clothes here ) pretty much all of the lesbian women I know, you wouldn't know they were gay until you got to know them and their families. They are just regular women trying to live their lives, raising kids, getting on with their jobs, with the same relationship problems etc as anyone else has.

What the fuck any of that has to do with drag queens I don't know.

Totally agree about the aggressive slogans and messages as well.

Don't forget
'Repeat after us: transwomen are women'.

I was reading the last few pages and remembered this video of Jazz Jennings being taken by their mum to a drag club for their 16th birthday.

The whole clip is so messed up. The dad isn't into it, the grandparents are patronised and bemused throughout, Jazz is given cash by their brothers and stuffs it down their own top (just... wrong), the whole thing is just so awkward and inappropriate and the editing of the footage really can't hide it. There's some really strange moments in the editing.

I can't help but wonder how the older sister and twin brothers celebrated their own sixteenth birthdays. Why does Jeanette think that her 'trans child' should celebrate at a drag club, with their family and a camera crew, rather than doing what Jazz suggests and just having some mates around for popcorn and Netflix?

Anyway I remembered Jazz at the drag club for their 16th and it occurred to me (not for the first time) that Susie Green styles herself as a sort of low budget D-List Jeanette Jennings.

Interesting you cannot comment on the daily mail article. Has pressure been brought to bear, if so, by whom??

Oh God poor Jazz's grandad in that clip! He looks like he just wanted to ground to open and swallow him up!

The thing is, Jazz and her family actually seem like nice people and its obvious that they love Jazz very much and are trying to do the best for her. Whether this road is the right one for Jazz I guess time will tell.

The older Jazz gets the more obvious it becomes that Jazz is male. I guess facial feminisation surgery will be next on the cards.

I get so annoyed with this definition of 'love' though. Not having a pop at you Beer, but while I would agree that there seems to be plenty of affectionate feeling in the family, love as I understand it is always wanting the best for the person loved.
I can't even get close to believing that sterilizing and all the rest because Jazz was a feminine child is the best for Jazz, and I've always thought, that like Susie Green, the decisions taken were bad and in the service of the parent's prejudices, and I don't think that's love at all.

Jeanette doesn't seem like nice people. The rest of the family seem like they're doing their best to keep their heads down and not draw her attention.

I just checked the page on calendar with mermaids logo and it’s full of typos ‘gender disphoria’ and ‘proffessional’ 2 obvious ones. You’d think they would at least do a spell check before putting their name to such a tacky calendar. It then has a line about helping some many people in the LGBTQI+ community but surely if mermaids are dealing with kids that should be the focus rather than the wider community (esp the + which is all about sex/ fetish etc and nothing to do with kids who are confused about gender stereotypes.)

EJennings, I don't disagree, but for sake of rounding out ideas, I might suggest that drag rides on slightly different rails by showing males apeing hyper-sexualized femininity as a means of mocking, not women, but homophobic men.

I don't for a second deny there are misogynistic elements to it, much as there are in the gay male community more widely, but the core target of the joke doesn't seem to be women, but rather men who would scorn homosexuality as deviant and unmanly and then be presented by a fantasy attractive feminine creature that is actually a man.

Now, the fact that these are caricatures and sometimes unpleasant ones is undoubted, but I think women are rather incidental to drag rather than the focus, ironically, although that is fairly misogynistic in itself.

Just rolling some thoughts around.

It then has a line about helping some many people in the LGBTQI+ community but surely if mermaids are dealing with kids that should be the focus rather than the wider community
This is a good point. This is about children rather than about alphabet soup. I don't consider children as LGBTBBQ members, they are children.
Gay kids need to be supported, I was one once, I know there are issues.
But "gay kid" to me means a child who may grow up to be gay. I don't support adults assigning a sexuality to children, ever. The children themselves, they can think of themselves as anything they want to. But we shouldn't reinforce that by giving them alphabet soup "membership".
Sexualities are not for children, kids should enjoy the freedom from sex that childhood offers, and adults looking for personal validation should not compromise that.
I'd have loved to be acknowledged as a fully fledged lesbian when I was 13; I wasn't and I'm fine!
Preventing bullying is worthwhile, maybe the odd youth group. Subsuming children into the alphabet soup is, OTOH, questionable.

FloralBunting
I share your views on drag, I won't quote the whole post but yes, I see it that way too.

Also drag (queens but also kings) is a very knowing and overt way of playing on gender rules, hence why it's a "gay institution".
I don't think drag queens look like actual women, and I don't think they're supposed to. Also there are often in-jokes about the drag queen really being a man.
It's not the same as an AGP insistence on being called a woman, or fetishistic porn sickness etc.
Although as a pp mentioned perhaps there now are drag queens who are exhibitionist transwomen, instead of performing gay men.
I can only go by what I've experienced

Are you saying that dressing as an offensive caricature of women is a form of male bonding by a group who are often discriminated against by other men? Treating negative stereotypes about women as a comedy costume to make other men laugh, in a nutshell? Even if that is true that doesn't make it less misogynist, or acceptable.

In my experience there are quite a few men who do drag who are also heterosexual. Is it worse when they do it?

Drag also often has 'played' with racialised gender stereotypes. This has lessened as it is seen as more and more unacceptably racist. Why has that become more unacceptable but mocking women is still fair game?

People keep saying it's about a form of gay male culture, but doesn't drag performance have origins in critical satire? It seems to have degenerated into fetish, celebration of consumerist excess, and crass entertainment.

I mean where is the satire in this calendar? I just see men performing fetish.

A big problem also with what you are saying, floral and flyingoink, is that culturally the distinction between drag and transsexual has eroded as transgender has taken hold. Hence people who support trans ideology supporting also drag queens in schools and very young kids being invited to drag performances. And LGBT+ orgs including drag under their acceptance without exception banners even though their purpose originally was to support people with marginalised sexualities.

If politicians, charities, schools etc are not making distinctionss between drag and trans then criticism is even more importance imo.

I'm not defending the conflation between trans and drag. Earlier in the thread I pointed out how stupid and contradictory that is, coming from Mermaids.

I'm just trying to head off some of the inevitable homophobic backlash that seems to be building, by pointing out that drag as a gay culture thing isn't automatically associated with every bad thing, and there is a little more nuance to it.

I have these conversations with my eldest kids a lot as they like DragRace, and I spent a lot of time in my youth on the scene and I'm aware of how misogynistic some gay men can be. But I still don't want them to face a right wing backlash because of Susie Green's ego.

JoanSummers
Fair points. We might be talking about different things here, though.
I mean, a fella in a dress and makeup miming to "I Am What I Am" isn't satirising women in a nasty way. You might find it an offensive caricature and I might not. The more risqué outfits - Katie Price made a living out of dressing like that, and I've never seen a drag act that suggested that's how women should look or do look.
However, you might be right about some of this new stuff. I don't know what kind of drag queen is going into schools and reading to kids. Could be some game-for-a-laugh gay bloke who is a popular entertainer in his local bars, or it could be some scary pervert who wants access to children.
A: I don't know enough about who does it to hazard a guess and B: I don't think drag queens should be reading stories to kids anyway.

But I still don't want them to face a right wing backlash because of Susie Green's ego.
Yep, especially as Susie Green won't suffer at all when it happens

But I still don't want them to face a right wing backlash because of Susie Green's ego.

No, I can see both of your concerns about this. Likewise a backlash on the L & G from trans overstretching. But I think it's nearly inevitable now, if LGB orgs don't make a public break with the T. And even then, I don't know. I see feminists getting a lot of blame for TRA craziness in comments sections and forums across the Web and feminists have been almost alone in standing up to it for a long time. The backlash will be on women's rights too. I don't know how to escape it because they have colonised our movements all so thoroughly.