So, being a girl and everything, I can be either annoyed or flattered at the way gay men sometimes use feminine terms. One day it’s all “You go, girl” and the next it’s “Oh, her!” But while gay male culture might give me whiplash on the girly man thing, I like it a lot better than the way mainstream culture uses it.
I recently blogged about a Seattle radio station gay-baiting American Idol contestant Sanjaya Malakar, a 17-year-old singer with long hair, a sweet smile, an interesting sense of style, and let’s just say not as much as might have been hoped for in the way of talent.
That’s not why people had a problem with him, though, and his talent – or lack of it—was not the subject of all the catty comments on YouTube and other Internet hotspots for the cultural intelligentsia Idol fans. They were way too busy calling Malakar a sissy – that is, when they weren’t taking a page from self-described “queen” of all media Perez Hilton and calling him “Sangina.”
Like probably forty million other queers reflecting on this issue and unlike Jimmy Kimmel, I sincerely don’t know or care if Malakar is gay. He has a loyal fandom of screaming teenaged girls, and he says he’s straight. But I do know one thing for sure: that boy’s a sissy. And I say that in the most positive way.
One compelling argument in favor of sissydom is that it can extend your lifespan. “The rules are simple, and stretch back to the first backlot MGM ever built,” said Johann Hari in an article about the popularity of Brokeback Mountain. “There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive – in which case, you will die.”
On the other hand, it apparently wasn’t that much of a leap for Don Imus’ producer to go from calling Malakar “sissy Sanjaya” to saying that he should be the victim of a hate crime, so the lifespan argument might not hold up to much scrutiny.
So let’s just put it this way: being told you throw like a girl probably doesn’t hurt too much if the girl in question is Sheryl Swoopes. And as gay authors as otherwise disparate as Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan have pointed out, being a sissy in today’s world isn’t a job for the faint of heart.
Just ask Sanjaya, who has handled insults, ridicule, and mockery with grace and humor. As Kenneth Hill at QueerSighted said, “Call me crazy, but I actually love this kid. Why? Well, there's no real polite way to say this: he's got balls. He's a sissy with the hugest testicles ever -- as most sissies are. If you think sissies are cowards, you're mistaken, very mistaken.”
You go, girl.
Sanjaya