Gay is square and trannies are hip

Spread the love

Originally posted 2017-11-22 21:20:38.

When I was at Art School in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, there was only one place to be: the Hoochie-Koochie Club. Why? Because it was the only gay nightclub. Women liked it because there was an unspoken rule: straights were welcome, but no hitting on the women. Men liked it because we were much less likely to get battered in the face there than in any of the regular meat-markets in the city. There was no pressure; you could just chill, dance, have a drink. And although the hetero was low-key, one could still get lucky. But most of all, back then, gay was hip; now, gay is square.

They were culturally cool. The gays always had the best music. They were the best-dressed cats in town and if somebody said ‘you’re looking a bit gay today’ you knew you had your fashion statement bang on. It was the era of the New Romantics and everybody was wearing eye-liner and bleaching their hair. Gender signals were profoundly mixed. Women wore sports jackets and top hats over jeans and men wore earrings and chiffon. The gay zeitgeist was as hip as it could be.

 

books by rod fleming

Keep an eye on the one on the left

After I graduated I became Sabbatical President of my Alma Mater’s Student Representative Council. One of my responsibilities was to listen to the pleas of destitute and often homeless students who had spent their student support grant, that was meant to last twelve weeks, in four of solid, flat out partying. Having also burnt the £50 overdraft facility that Barclays Bank would give anyone who walked in with a matriculation card, they ended up in front of me, begging for a bail out from the hardship fund; which I always gave them.

I remember one, Alan we shall call her, sitting on my desk, holding one of my hands in his and supplicating me for help, despite the fact that I’d already said ‘yes’. And when she left she flounced out in style, blowing me kisses and wiggling her bum.

Another of my roles was to oversee the opening of the new Student Bar, which had been years in the development. Pulling a political fast one on the hard left, who apparently wanted old bentwood chairs and sacking, I persuaded the other Governors to give me enough money to turn it into the most gay-attractive place in Edinburgh — and so it became, the legendary Wee Red Bar.  (Yup, that was me.) Why did I do this? Because gay was hip. Gay was cool. Gay meant bums on seats and cocktails being drunk, great music, colour, women not being harassed by neds and NO HASSLE.

Everybody interesting was gay. Freddie Mercury was gay, George Michael and Jimmy Somerville were gay, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were gay and Marc Almond was even more dangerously sexy than Debbie Harry. ‘YMCA’, ‘Relax’ and ‘Tainted Love’ were the soundtrack. Gay was the zeitgeist, the iconography to follow. Straights had to infer some sort of a kink just to be taken seriously — just look at Phil Oakey. Gay was hip.

That was before HIV. I remember the tragedy all too clearly. But I could not have foreseen, then, working as a freelance photographer and documenting this horror, through the tears I cried for friends taken — what was to come.

Gay just ain’t cool no more; gay is square.

Remember the one on the left above? This is what she did when she realised that growing up into a New Gay Man was such a ghastly dull idea

Gay isn’t cool any more. Gay isn’t dangerous or cutting edge. Gay is square. Gays lost the zeitgeist. Instead of sparkling young things with multicoloured hair, full make-up and the most provocative clothes anyone approximating masculine gender could possibly wear, we have…two near-identical, balding, inclined to sedentary spread, IT technicians getting married. Did someone say ‘After the Lord Mayor’s Show?’

Now don’t get me wrong. Of course it goes without saying that everyone should be treated equally under the law.

books by rod fleming

But it’s all so godawfully DULL

But you know what? It’s dull. It’s grey. It’s what I never would have believed gays could be, boring and conventional. Square.

What happened to the rampant mĂ©nages a trois, quatre, cinq or more that the Art School models used to tell us about during their tea-breaks? What happened to the flaming boys with their tongues so far down each other’s throats they could have retuned their vocal cords? What happened to the fashion statements? I think Stephen Fry is…kinda creepy but iconic? Are you kidding? Marc Almond was iconic. And she was about the most dangerous gay ‘man’ still left out there, until Milo arrived, bless her. The rest have been swallowed up in a tide of grey, conformist schlock.  What happened to the zeitgeist, dammit?

Gone. All lost. Now gay is square. The leaders of the gay movement today are the New Gay Men and no, it’s not a synth band. They thought that if they conformed to society’s notions of gender, they might sneak under its radar. And they had a great stroke of political fortune when the HIV epidemic wiped out most of the opposition.

Faeries

So they erased and banished the real leaders, like Harry Hay, the ‘Radical Faerie’ a cross-dressing imp who founded the Mattachine Society, the forerunner of the modern gay movement. They erased the drag queens who really led the Stonewall Riots, like Marsha P. King and Sylvia Rivera; so successful were they that the director of the movie ‘Stonewall’, (Roland P. Emmerich, as badly-dressed an accommodationist as one could wish for) actually  wrote them out of the story completely. For shame.

Could I ever have believed, remembering Alan, sitting on my desk in his cowboy boots and hot pants, his hair pink and blue and his nails painted, reeking of patchouli, that such would be the end of something so colourful and provocative — that the face of 21st century gayness would be two middle-aged IT technicians in bad suits taking the  pledge of monogamy?

Gay is square. It’s dull. It’s unattractive. It’s conventional. It’s Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell.  Boring conventionalism has bought it, drawn its teeth and clipped its wings. Face it: you can’t be L or G and be interesting any more. Well, except Milo, maybe. But we all know that she’s really a tranny underneath.

books by rod fleming

Conformity — that sad expression of social conservatism that is nowhere more at home than in the US — has sold out all the individuals in the name of the ghastly Post-modernist orthodoxy of Identity politics.

Square square square.

And then again.

Suddenly smart, stylish, articulate and beautiful trannies are hip and they’re everywhere. Oh my goodness those Latinas. And the Asians…

Amy. You have to admit, this is more like it

Gays gave up the zeitgeist. Now gay is square. They — or at least the mainstream — didn’t really want to be cutting edge, not once they were over thirty-five and got decent jobs anyway.  So they abandoned all the dangerous people and settled for conformity; a safe marriage, a mortgage and maybe kids — adopted. How nice.

femboy
See? What’s worrying is I even know to whom that sweet arse belongs!

One flaming femboy, her bubble-butt stretching the velour of her lethally short pants, her bag slung on her shoulder, mincing along the street in ludicrously high pumps, is more challenging in ten paces than all the clone New Gay  Men will be in their entire lives. Our mincing poppet doesn’t give two hoots for the status the New Gay Man lives to accrue. She throws it back in his face and laughs at him. She just wants to be drop-dead gorgeous and have lots of sex and most of all, she wants it on her terms — just like gays  used to, before they bought into the New Gay Man dogma.

Cataclysm

The effect of that is cataclysmic. Thirty-five years ago, before the onset of the HIV epidemic and the triumph of the NGM, gay men and lesbians stole the initiative; but they sold out. A tide of grey washed over everything.

Now all that is changing. Trannies are appearing everywhere; they’re on catwalks, on television, on magazine covers, all over the Internet.

They have grabbed back the zeitgeist and are running with it. They
have the excitement, the danger and the glamour and they know it; they always knew it, but now they have articulate voices too, voices that are being listened to, voices that won’t be shouted down by don’t-rock-the-boat gays and lesbians, or for that matter, those terminally dull stuffed-shirt men in frocks, the autogynephiles.

Narnia, a random hottie inserted for aesthetic reasons. You can never have too many DDG trannies. Definitely not AGP.

In 2004, Fouratt, in a speech that shocked many, claimed that trans women were ‘crazy queens’ who threatened ‘the way we live our lives’. What he meant was that feminine gay men should stop being feminine, that they should instead assert their masculinity and thus fit into his accommodationist model. This was not how it was read, at least by many trans activists, who threw the kind of storm in a latte cup they are famous for; but these were all  autogynephilic ‘trans women’ (they wish). Fouratt was torpedoed and sank from view.

books by rod fleming

Another type of tranny, and it ain’t Borg-Warner

But there is another type of tranny.  They don’t think they’re ‘real women’ but they damn well know they are girls. They are hot as hell, drop-dead gorgeous, wild in bed (well, so they tell me) and have serious hot pants for straight men.

gay is square
Did someone say ‘hot pants’? Ours are!

They are the ‘early onset androphile’, ‘Blanchard HSTS’, or more informally, ‘transkids’ (because they identify as girls while still children). They are the daughters of a line of trannies reaching back into history, far beyond the invention of writing.

They are cousins to the hijra and thirunangai of India, the kathoey of Thailand, the baklas of the Philippines, the waria of Indonesia, the North American ‘Two Spirit’ people and the travestis of Latin America and Southern Europe, as well as myriad other populations all over the world. Once, they were priestesses to the goddesses Inanna, Ishtar and Astarte.

The Roman writer Livy tells how devotees of Cybele distilled pregnant mare urine to extract the oestrogen, which they used to feminise themselves — and would secretly give to their enemies to emasculate them. In Rome they were the galli, boys who ritually self-castrated to become priestesses — a procedure we might find shocking but which is carried on to this day by the hijra. The ancient Vedic texts, the foundation of Hinduism, describe them in detail. They have always been among us.

Thai transsexual model Nisamanee Lertvorapong in make-up

Thailand is famously trans and gay friendly, but in Malaysia, which is anything but, one study put the prevalence at 1:170. The latest census in India, the first to try to count them, put the numbers of hijra close to half a million, but due to high rates of illiteracy and deep mistrust of  authority, most did not register. Support workers estimate that there may be as many as four million.

books by rod fleming

Continuum

Anyone who has spent time in SE Asia knows that there is a continuum between feminine gay men and trannies. Traditionally, gay men in these societies identify as women ‘on the inside’ and they will express this if the circumstances are right. This depends on the level of social tolerance they experience, the cultural confirmation of their feminine identity — Asian societies have long-established traditions venerating trans people and indeed, may be more tolerant of trans than of gay men — and, bluntly, how beautiful they are.

Naturally feminine boys

This is now happening in the West and oh how the dull grey gays hate it. But if you are a naturally feminine boy attracted to men, would you really want to become the image of the accommodationist gay man, an IT technician in a bad suit? It’s the last thing you’d do, if you could be a DDG tranny instead. This is what actually does happen, in most of the world.

It looks like the New Gay Man may have come to the end of his shelf-life. We should not be sad about this;  all things must pass. There will always be a place for gay men whose masculinity is too central to their personalities to let go of. But at the price of all that dullness.

books by rod fleming

The tranny star is rising. They have taken up the torch that was cast aside by the gays and lesbians — of being stylish, of being shocking, of being iconoclastic, of being dangerously sexy but most of all, of waving the bold red rag of refusal to conform in the face of all the dull, grey people.

Get ready. The zeitgeist is a freight train coming and the trannies have their hands on the loud lever. Best not be in the way.

Why not settle into a nice sexy yarn full of sex, trannies, blackmail, intrigue and political scandal? The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train has it all.

books by rod fleming

I first wrote this article in 2015. I’ve updated and tweaked it, but it’s not much changed and still as apposite. Which I find dryly amusing.

8 Replies to “Gay is square and trannies are hip”

  1. When I was at art school in the late 1950s gay meant ‘happy’ and homosexuality was illegal! Bloody good job that times changed and people can feel relaxed about their sexual nature. Nice to see that transgender folk are (hopefully) no longer sneered at by most.

Leave a Reply