Queer Life: February 2005

Where are all the butches?

February 2005

TV talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres isn't much of a butch. Yet I would never call her a traitor to her people.

Filmmaker Spike Lee made "Bamboozled" in 2000, a fascinating and complex movie that included a look at the shuckin' and jivin' black, the Amos and Andy kind of quisling whose "comedy" is a self-hating parody.

That same year Lee also came out with a movie called "The Original Kings of Comedy," which celebrated the most talented (and straight, from what I could tell) black comics of this generation. Perhaps Lee knew that his previous film had cut a wide swath: he wanted to acknowledge that minorities also use humor to attack the oppressor and to make valid social commentary. To be a comic does not necessarily connote servility.

The two Lee movies made me re-evaluate comics within the ranks of the gay and lesbian community. While Ellen DeGeneres wears pants, she's still an unthreatening, cute and goofy lesbian.

While that might annoy in theory, it doesn't in practice. Ellen DeGeneres is the "kind" of lesbian that she is. She is out and proud, a real role model. And a funny and successful one to boot.

But DeGeneres -- no bull dagger -- seems to be the closest to a tough dyke allowed in the mass media.

Popular culture seems so lesbian-positive these days... but only a certain kind of lesbian, thank you very much. To be a lesbian is to be femme: Hot blonde Serena Southerlyn on "Law & Order," the bi gal on "The OC," even the "The L Word" is all femme.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. "The L Word" is not real. Most TV is fantasy, and I don't expect that fiction will necessarily represent me.

But fact, now that's another story. The teeny tiny bit butch Ellen DeGeneres fits into the fact category (or at least, I hope her talk show does). But real bull daggers exist in the world. Why aren't they on my TV? On reality television?

Every so often, a toughie shows up on Survivor -- but its "stars" are people we love to hate. Those tough dykes (along with all the other contestants) are not picked for their charm, but precisely because they are horrid.

Anyone else? Even singer Queen Latifah gave in and got her girl on.

Remember the fact-based movie Monster? Critics were shocked at actor Charlize Theron's transformation into lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Theron had let herself look hideously ugly for the role, they said.

But lesbians know that Theron didn't look ugly at all. She looked average. She looked normal. She looked, yes, butch.

Critics found a butch woman shocking. Unnatural. Theron's appearance was reluctantly allowed, but only because her supposed ugliness was so incessantly commented upon.

Butch women show up in one other place on North American television: on personal makeover TV shows like the American "What Not To Wear."

The point of this show is that the mark has been nominated by her friends and family -- who don't truly love her they way she is. They want to see a personal transformation.

So do the show's hosts. On "What Not To Wear," butch girls -- gay and straight -- are forced into girl clothes, into girl walks, even into girl mannerisms.

The show's hosts, by the way, present as a straight woman and a gay man. The show reflects the esthetic of high fashion, of Hollywood, of a certain kind of gay man. The type of gay man who rolls his eyes at a dyke's plaid shirt and big biker boots.

The type of gay man who loves nothing better than to erase butch dykes from existence.