On the subject of stagegay
So you may have heard that some people disapprove of stagegay in bandom. I do not! Let me tell you why.
For the purposes of this argument, let's just talk about Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, because they are the most prominent and longest-running proponents of the stagegay among bandom bands, and because they developed in parallel ways although they were part of two entirely different scenes.
When FOB and MCR started playing music, they were both involved in scenes - Chicago hardcore and New Jersey punk - where there was rampant homophobia, misogyny, and a lot of hyper-masculine posturing. They both drifted away from these scenes. Both of them have expressed, in interviews, that the intolerance they encountered was one of the major reasons they decided to distance themselves from the bands and music they had been involved with. Each band independently decided to get together and do something that was not that. They started playing with each other on stage, wearing make-up, and aggressively embracing the things they saw other people being intolerant of.
Then, each band got famous.
It's very important to keep these steps in order, because it has everything to do with why I will never, ever see FOB and MCR's stagegay as being in any way cultural appropriation. When members of a dominant culture appropriate aspects of an oppressed culture for entertainment, they characteristically do two things: first, they take stereotypical characteristics and exaggerate them for comedic effect, for people to laugh at, and secondly, they distance themselves personally from identifying with the group in question. They get the audience laughing at the characters, while making sure that offstage, they are not subjected to any of the hate or bigotry that goes along with that. They say "this is entertaining" and "this is not me" with the same breath. That is what blackface entails, and that is, to me, the most hateful thing about it.
When FOB and MCR began their flirtations with gender and sexuality, they were literally doing the exact opposite of what I have described above. They were deliberately taking on the degradation, the hatred, the inflammatory remarks. And they didn't use stereotypes to do so, they used behavior. They encouraged their audience to cheer for men physically expressing affection and sexual interest in each other - not for lisps and rainbow tuxedos.
It wasn't all political, either. The stagegay not only comes from the boys themselves, it comes from the boys' close, affectionate, genuinely loving relationships with one another. They are really, really good friends, and their bands were patched together with sweat and road trips and friendship, not with producers and marketing agencies. The kissing and groping don't come from two actors in a staged scene, they come from people who have been having fun with and sharing space with each other for years. Even if the emotion motivating them to grope each other isn't pure physical homosexual lust, it's still completely genuine, it's still real. These are staged displays of real relationships, regardless of whether those relationships are sexual.
And they could not possibly have expected the positive response they got. Now, when Pete flirts with Patrick on stage, a whole roomful of their fans will cheer - but with the exception of the twelve of us who come from media slash fandom, very very few of those people came to that concert primarily for the homoeroticism. It may well be the case that right now, the mainstream opinion among twelve-year-old girls is that boys kissing is hot. This was categorically not the case ten years ago. If there is a market for stagegay, it is not one that these bands could possibly have been expecting to tap into when they started out. Personally? I think that the fact that middle schoolers will look at a picture of two boys kissing and say "hot!" instead of "eww!" is fucking amazing. That is awesome. And MCR and FOB didn't come around to take advantage of that - they created that.
Even with all those screaming fans, though, our band boys constantly get shit for acting "gay." Constantly! Magazines, TV shows, smug radio hosts, guys in bars, people on the street, bloggers, all of them smirk and call these guys big queers. There are many, many men and boys who will not get into their music because those bands are so fucking gay. Recently, at Download, MCR were getting heavily bottled by angry metal fans, and someone up front yelled, "Faggots!" In response to which Frank Iero stalked up to Gerard Way, grabbed his hair, and stuck his tongue down his throat while he was trying to sing. (This is not an exaggeration.) Consistently, over and over again, My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy have responded to "fags!" with "hell yeah, motherfucker, now deal with it." They don't say, "No, but we're really straight!"
And that's another thing. The frontmen of these bands have been asked both insinuating and straight-forward questions about their sexuality in interviews over and over and over again. Show me one clip, just one, of Gerard or Pete saying, "I am completely 100% straight." Some of them use non-gender-specific pronouns to talk about significant others. I don't know if that's because they aren't straight, and frankly, I don't care. What I care about is that given the opportunity to deny those "insults," none of them will take the easy way out. Instead, they want people to think about whether they can still be into this guy if he's gay. If that makes you uncomfortable, they don't need you to buy their records. Seriously. Go home. They don't need that kind of fan, and they have said so flat-out.
The members of Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance frequently, vocally, and enthusiastically express support for anyone who feels different and alienated, who feels like they don't belong, who feels queer. It's the audience they seek out, the audience they want to speak to. They wear homemade shirts saying "Homophobia is gay." They say, "I admire my gay fans for being brave and strong enough to come out," and, "Homophobia. I'll never understand it." All of this may well be politically correct to say in today's atmosphere, but there is absolutely nothing that should make them say it so loudly or so often. It's activism, and it's sincere.
All of this means that no matter what's going on in their personal lives - no matter who they're sleeping with, or what their sexual identity may be - the members of these two bands have chosen to say, "Whether or not I'm gay, I want you to treat me like I am, and I'm going to push you to wonder if I am, and I'm not going to back away from that if I get shit for it. Queer people are my people." Because these bands exist, you can be a 14 year old gay kid growing up in some small town, and you can go to your first concert and watch your idols make out on stage while a thousand people cheer, and then one of them picks up the microphone and says, this is a song for anyone who has ever felt alone.
That's not blackface.
For the purposes of this argument, let's just talk about Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, because they are the most prominent and longest-running proponents of the stagegay among bandom bands, and because they developed in parallel ways although they were part of two entirely different scenes.
When FOB and MCR started playing music, they were both involved in scenes - Chicago hardcore and New Jersey punk - where there was rampant homophobia, misogyny, and a lot of hyper-masculine posturing. They both drifted away from these scenes. Both of them have expressed, in interviews, that the intolerance they encountered was one of the major reasons they decided to distance themselves from the bands and music they had been involved with. Each band independently decided to get together and do something that was not that. They started playing with each other on stage, wearing make-up, and aggressively embracing the things they saw other people being intolerant of.
Then, each band got famous.
It's very important to keep these steps in order, because it has everything to do with why I will never, ever see FOB and MCR's stagegay as being in any way cultural appropriation. When members of a dominant culture appropriate aspects of an oppressed culture for entertainment, they characteristically do two things: first, they take stereotypical characteristics and exaggerate them for comedic effect, for people to laugh at, and secondly, they distance themselves personally from identifying with the group in question. They get the audience laughing at the characters, while making sure that offstage, they are not subjected to any of the hate or bigotry that goes along with that. They say "this is entertaining" and "this is not me" with the same breath. That is what blackface entails, and that is, to me, the most hateful thing about it.
When FOB and MCR began their flirtations with gender and sexuality, they were literally doing the exact opposite of what I have described above. They were deliberately taking on the degradation, the hatred, the inflammatory remarks. And they didn't use stereotypes to do so, they used behavior. They encouraged their audience to cheer for men physically expressing affection and sexual interest in each other - not for lisps and rainbow tuxedos.
It wasn't all political, either. The stagegay not only comes from the boys themselves, it comes from the boys' close, affectionate, genuinely loving relationships with one another. They are really, really good friends, and their bands were patched together with sweat and road trips and friendship, not with producers and marketing agencies. The kissing and groping don't come from two actors in a staged scene, they come from people who have been having fun with and sharing space with each other for years. Even if the emotion motivating them to grope each other isn't pure physical homosexual lust, it's still completely genuine, it's still real. These are staged displays of real relationships, regardless of whether those relationships are sexual.
And they could not possibly have expected the positive response they got. Now, when Pete flirts with Patrick on stage, a whole roomful of their fans will cheer - but with the exception of the twelve of us who come from media slash fandom, very very few of those people came to that concert primarily for the homoeroticism. It may well be the case that right now, the mainstream opinion among twelve-year-old girls is that boys kissing is hot. This was categorically not the case ten years ago. If there is a market for stagegay, it is not one that these bands could possibly have been expecting to tap into when they started out. Personally? I think that the fact that middle schoolers will look at a picture of two boys kissing and say "hot!" instead of "eww!" is fucking amazing. That is awesome. And MCR and FOB didn't come around to take advantage of that - they created that.
Even with all those screaming fans, though, our band boys constantly get shit for acting "gay." Constantly! Magazines, TV shows, smug radio hosts, guys in bars, people on the street, bloggers, all of them smirk and call these guys big queers. There are many, many men and boys who will not get into their music because those bands are so fucking gay. Recently, at Download, MCR were getting heavily bottled by angry metal fans, and someone up front yelled, "Faggots!" In response to which Frank Iero stalked up to Gerard Way, grabbed his hair, and stuck his tongue down his throat while he was trying to sing. (This is not an exaggeration.) Consistently, over and over again, My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy have responded to "fags!" with "hell yeah, motherfucker, now deal with it." They don't say, "No, but we're really straight!"
And that's another thing. The frontmen of these bands have been asked both insinuating and straight-forward questions about their sexuality in interviews over and over and over again. Show me one clip, just one, of Gerard or Pete saying, "I am completely 100% straight." Some of them use non-gender-specific pronouns to talk about significant others. I don't know if that's because they aren't straight, and frankly, I don't care. What I care about is that given the opportunity to deny those "insults," none of them will take the easy way out. Instead, they want people to think about whether they can still be into this guy if he's gay. If that makes you uncomfortable, they don't need you to buy their records. Seriously. Go home. They don't need that kind of fan, and they have said so flat-out.
The members of Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance frequently, vocally, and enthusiastically express support for anyone who feels different and alienated, who feels like they don't belong, who feels queer. It's the audience they seek out, the audience they want to speak to. They wear homemade shirts saying "Homophobia is gay." They say, "I admire my gay fans for being brave and strong enough to come out," and, "Homophobia. I'll never understand it." All of this may well be politically correct to say in today's atmosphere, but there is absolutely nothing that should make them say it so loudly or so often. It's activism, and it's sincere.
All of this means that no matter what's going on in their personal lives - no matter who they're sleeping with, or what their sexual identity may be - the members of these two bands have chosen to say, "Whether or not I'm gay, I want you to treat me like I am, and I'm going to push you to wonder if I am, and I'm not going to back away from that if I get shit for it. Queer people are my people." Because these bands exist, you can be a 14 year old gay kid growing up in some small town, and you can go to your first concert and watch your idols make out on stage while a thousand people cheer, and then one of them picks up the microphone and says, this is a song for anyone who has ever felt alone.
That's not blackface.