the gays are coming!
It's been a tiring week and i'm not sure why. Yeah, it's end of the quarter. Yeah, we had a product release and even working as an internal-focused team there are some trickle-down effects on our stuff. But... i dunno, it's something else. Maybe i'm just on one of my bipolar down-swings? I felt exhausted and run down for most of the week.
So one of the best antidotes for feeling blah is watching a light, silly television show, and for this, Netflix timed their release of Glamorous perfectly. Glamorous is a low budget retelling of Ugly Betty (aka Betty la fea), but with almost every character switched out to be an over-the-top gay stereotype, which is - of course - fabulous.
It's interesting because Ugly Betty is one of my favorite television shows that isn't sci-fi. I'm not sure why it worked so well for me. I'm not into the family themes, which were a big part of the show. I'm not much into romance storylines, and there were plenty of those too. But i do have an interest in fashion. Not because i'm fashionable myself - i dress like a hobo and have done pretty much my entire adult life - but i used to buy stacks of Vogue magazines and i adored the tremendous fantasy of these impossibly-posed figures with the most meticulous artwork painted on their faces and draped off their bodies. I absolutely fucking hate ready-to-wear, "fast fashion" and the modern trend of using plus-size models and "real" women. That shit completely misses the point of fashion to me. It's supposed to be unattainable. It's supposed to be majestic and spectacular and avant garde. Haute couture is not about dressing the girl next door.
But Ugly Betty was a show about exactly the girl next door falling into the fashion world. The way it was filmed created this colorful, bombastic, vibrant version of New York (which is absolutely nothing like real-life New York) and told a classic Cinderella story, emphasizing the main character's competency and careerism over fairy godmothers or "true love". It helped that it also didn't take itself seriously in the slightest, allowing villains to become heroes and vice versa. Each plot twist was more hilarious and outrageous than the last one, but somehow nobody ever really got hurt, and it all turned out okay in the end.
It also was one of the first mainstream shows to feature an out, trans main character. Of course she was played by Rebecca Romijn, so by modern standards it probably wouldn't count as representation, but to me it felt like someone was playing me on TV, and that meant something! Weirdly, Rebecca Romijn also played Mystique in X-Men, who - being a shapeshifter - is at least a bisexual or non-binary character if not trans, and in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds she plays a character who has undergone a controversial surgery that results in her being broadly discriminated against. Accidental trans icon? Well, probably not for the kids of today. She is an old, straight white lady, after all.
So Glamorous is kind of the modern gay take on Ugly Betty. One in which there is only one old, straight white lady and she's the boss of a fantastical make-up company which is otherwise entirely filled with young, beautiful gay people. It leans hard into the new generation lingo, in a way that would come across as cringingly inauthentic if we didn't have YouTube right there showing that, yes, young gays actually do talk like that. I know we had our own form of drag-inspired lingo in my day, and that the gay scene has a long history of this stuff going back at least century, but it feels weird to see it front and center on a TV show. I mean, obviously it's a very niche TV show - it's clearly a "by and for the gays" show, much like Heartstopper, Rūrangi and so on. Even still, i can't help but feel like this is what happens when you get a whole generation of kids who grew up watching RuPaul's Drag Race or Project Runway and then constructing their identity around that brand. It is the total middle-classification and suburbanization of a previously ghettoized subculture.
And yes, i suppose that means we "won". When old, straight white ladies are regularly trying (and failing) to use the term "shade" properly, i guess gay culture finally went mainstream.
Well, sort of. Because ever since the right wing nutjobs of America managed to shut down abortion in half the country, now they've set their sights back on gay people. Again. Because they're literally recycling the exact same arguments that were busted 30 years ago - all those ones about how gay people are pedophiles and sexual predators - except they just crossed out the "gay" and put "trans" instead. But the insidious twist is that to prove how Definitely Not Homophobic they are this time around, they can now point to whatever white bread mainstream safe version of gayness made it onto network television, and claim they're totally fine with that, because it's only really the "bad" gays they're talking about.
Which is obviously nonsense, since the imagined "bad" gays who are allegedly trying to brainwash children actually don't have any power, whereas the people allegedly trying to protect the children are the ones who are getting real, concrete laws passed to restrict children's healthcare and education. It's so transparently a manufactured moral panic, it's just bananas to me that so many people (including a sad bunch of conservative gays who are pulling up the ladder after them) are sagely nodding as if there's really something there. "No, but really, i don't have a problem with gays who keep their lifestyles private, it's simply that i don't believe it's appropriate for their sexual deviancy and radical gender theory to be exposed to young children. I mean, we can't have the gays in schools, or in public libraries, or in medical clinics, or in sports teams, or..." Yeah, you can stop there because clearly you do have a problem with gay people. Just own it. I'd respect that more.
Anyway, in the world of Glamorous, none of these people exist, and that's why it's a wonderfully comforting show. Everybody is gay. There is the effeminate main character gay. The nerdy, D&D gamer gay. The straight-acting gay. The jock gay. The circuit gays. The drag gays. The non-binary gay. There's even a couple of dykes. Plus Nicole Power essentially reprising her role from Kim's Convenience as the awkward and out-of-touch but unexpectedly competent straight white woman, so all the suburban mom fans of Drag Race can enjoy a self-insert, if imagining themselves as Kim Cattrall was too much of a reach. Of course it's a soap so everybody betrays everybody else, but like Ugly Betty it doesn't take itself seriously and nothing truly bad ever happens, so it doesn't quite meet my threshold for the glorification of shitty people being shitty to each other that i railed about in my last post. It's just... nice. And i needed some nice.
(Incidentally, while i'm talking about spiritual successors to Ugly Betty, i should also mention Acapulco which is definitely a better TV show than Glamorous, although it's more just campy and telenovela-ish than outright gay. The Spanish-language cover versions of classic 80s hits are absolutely worth the price of admission, which - for those of you not sailing the high seas - is an AppleTV subscription.)
So Glamorous was nice. And now it's over. And i ran out of nice. Here is a song i heard on the show that made me happy, though. It's a total YouTube/TikTok era bop, barely even 2 minutes long, which probably works in its favor. Little electro-swing loop, pretty young girl being sassy, autotuned vocals, perfectly balanced and produced. First pop song i've dug in quite a while.
Emeline - Strut
Switching it up to more serious music, there's a DJ down from Japan playing in town tonight who seems to be into that kind of slow ass techno featuring latin/world music samples, which was one of my favorite "bummeltechno"/slow house vibes of Berlin. It's rare to see it in the wild because that sort of music tends to be more associated with chill out rooms or sunrise sets, which don't really exist in cities where there aren't many clubs and they only open for a handful of hours overnight. I'm still debating whether to give it a go. I'm normally asleep by the time the clubs open here.
We'll see. I need something to make me happy.
I lined up my holiday for last two weeks of July. The hottest, and probably wettest, weeks of the year. It will be a sweaty, humid slog through the jungles and the paddies, but it will be two weeks off work and a chance to just go and do my own thing without worrying for a bit. Not sure i'll meet any gays out there, but who knows? Might meet other interesting people just the same. And i'll do my part for normalizing gay/trans/immigrant identities out in the countryside. Really, folks, we're just like you.
So one of the best antidotes for feeling blah is watching a light, silly television show, and for this, Netflix timed their release of Glamorous perfectly. Glamorous is a low budget retelling of Ugly Betty (aka Betty la fea), but with almost every character switched out to be an over-the-top gay stereotype, which is - of course - fabulous.
It's interesting because Ugly Betty is one of my favorite television shows that isn't sci-fi. I'm not sure why it worked so well for me. I'm not into the family themes, which were a big part of the show. I'm not much into romance storylines, and there were plenty of those too. But i do have an interest in fashion. Not because i'm fashionable myself - i dress like a hobo and have done pretty much my entire adult life - but i used to buy stacks of Vogue magazines and i adored the tremendous fantasy of these impossibly-posed figures with the most meticulous artwork painted on their faces and draped off their bodies. I absolutely fucking hate ready-to-wear, "fast fashion" and the modern trend of using plus-size models and "real" women. That shit completely misses the point of fashion to me. It's supposed to be unattainable. It's supposed to be majestic and spectacular and avant garde. Haute couture is not about dressing the girl next door.
But Ugly Betty was a show about exactly the girl next door falling into the fashion world. The way it was filmed created this colorful, bombastic, vibrant version of New York (which is absolutely nothing like real-life New York) and told a classic Cinderella story, emphasizing the main character's competency and careerism over fairy godmothers or "true love". It helped that it also didn't take itself seriously in the slightest, allowing villains to become heroes and vice versa. Each plot twist was more hilarious and outrageous than the last one, but somehow nobody ever really got hurt, and it all turned out okay in the end.
It also was one of the first mainstream shows to feature an out, trans main character. Of course she was played by Rebecca Romijn, so by modern standards it probably wouldn't count as representation, but to me it felt like someone was playing me on TV, and that meant something! Weirdly, Rebecca Romijn also played Mystique in X-Men, who - being a shapeshifter - is at least a bisexual or non-binary character if not trans, and in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds she plays a character who has undergone a controversial surgery that results in her being broadly discriminated against. Accidental trans icon? Well, probably not for the kids of today. She is an old, straight white lady, after all.
So Glamorous is kind of the modern gay take on Ugly Betty. One in which there is only one old, straight white lady and she's the boss of a fantastical make-up company which is otherwise entirely filled with young, beautiful gay people. It leans hard into the new generation lingo, in a way that would come across as cringingly inauthentic if we didn't have YouTube right there showing that, yes, young gays actually do talk like that. I know we had our own form of drag-inspired lingo in my day, and that the gay scene has a long history of this stuff going back at least century, but it feels weird to see it front and center on a TV show. I mean, obviously it's a very niche TV show - it's clearly a "by and for the gays" show, much like Heartstopper, Rūrangi and so on. Even still, i can't help but feel like this is what happens when you get a whole generation of kids who grew up watching RuPaul's Drag Race or Project Runway and then constructing their identity around that brand. It is the total middle-classification and suburbanization of a previously ghettoized subculture.
And yes, i suppose that means we "won". When old, straight white ladies are regularly trying (and failing) to use the term "shade" properly, i guess gay culture finally went mainstream.
Well, sort of. Because ever since the right wing nutjobs of America managed to shut down abortion in half the country, now they've set their sights back on gay people. Again. Because they're literally recycling the exact same arguments that were busted 30 years ago - all those ones about how gay people are pedophiles and sexual predators - except they just crossed out the "gay" and put "trans" instead. But the insidious twist is that to prove how Definitely Not Homophobic they are this time around, they can now point to whatever white bread mainstream safe version of gayness made it onto network television, and claim they're totally fine with that, because it's only really the "bad" gays they're talking about.
Which is obviously nonsense, since the imagined "bad" gays who are allegedly trying to brainwash children actually don't have any power, whereas the people allegedly trying to protect the children are the ones who are getting real, concrete laws passed to restrict children's healthcare and education. It's so transparently a manufactured moral panic, it's just bananas to me that so many people (including a sad bunch of conservative gays who are pulling up the ladder after them) are sagely nodding as if there's really something there. "No, but really, i don't have a problem with gays who keep their lifestyles private, it's simply that i don't believe it's appropriate for their sexual deviancy and radical gender theory to be exposed to young children. I mean, we can't have the gays in schools, or in public libraries, or in medical clinics, or in sports teams, or..." Yeah, you can stop there because clearly you do have a problem with gay people. Just own it. I'd respect that more.
Anyway, in the world of Glamorous, none of these people exist, and that's why it's a wonderfully comforting show. Everybody is gay. There is the effeminate main character gay. The nerdy, D&D gamer gay. The straight-acting gay. The jock gay. The circuit gays. The drag gays. The non-binary gay. There's even a couple of dykes. Plus Nicole Power essentially reprising her role from Kim's Convenience as the awkward and out-of-touch but unexpectedly competent straight white woman, so all the suburban mom fans of Drag Race can enjoy a self-insert, if imagining themselves as Kim Cattrall was too much of a reach. Of course it's a soap so everybody betrays everybody else, but like Ugly Betty it doesn't take itself seriously and nothing truly bad ever happens, so it doesn't quite meet my threshold for the glorification of shitty people being shitty to each other that i railed about in my last post. It's just... nice. And i needed some nice.
(Incidentally, while i'm talking about spiritual successors to Ugly Betty, i should also mention Acapulco which is definitely a better TV show than Glamorous, although it's more just campy and telenovela-ish than outright gay. The Spanish-language cover versions of classic 80s hits are absolutely worth the price of admission, which - for those of you not sailing the high seas - is an AppleTV subscription.)
So Glamorous was nice. And now it's over. And i ran out of nice. Here is a song i heard on the show that made me happy, though. It's a total YouTube/TikTok era bop, barely even 2 minutes long, which probably works in its favor. Little electro-swing loop, pretty young girl being sassy, autotuned vocals, perfectly balanced and produced. First pop song i've dug in quite a while.
Click to viewEmeline - Strut
Switching it up to more serious music, there's a DJ down from Japan playing in town tonight who seems to be into that kind of slow ass techno featuring latin/world music samples, which was one of my favorite "bummeltechno"/slow house vibes of Berlin. It's rare to see it in the wild because that sort of music tends to be more associated with chill out rooms or sunrise sets, which don't really exist in cities where there aren't many clubs and they only open for a handful of hours overnight. I'm still debating whether to give it a go. I'm normally asleep by the time the clubs open here.
We'll see. I need something to make me happy.
I lined up my holiday for last two weeks of July. The hottest, and probably wettest, weeks of the year. It will be a sweaty, humid slog through the jungles and the paddies, but it will be two weeks off work and a chance to just go and do my own thing without worrying for a bit. Not sure i'll meet any gays out there, but who knows? Might meet other interesting people just the same. And i'll do my part for normalizing gay/trans/immigrant identities out in the countryside. Really, folks, we're just like you.