I was re-watching the brilliant documentary "The Celluloid Closet" (1995) and one character got my attention: the sissy. How he was constructed by Hollywood as "the funny gay guy" and adopted by gay men as the only way to perform gayness, how all gay men were constructed as effeminate and how there was a constant move away from that place. What I remembered from my readings was how the effeminate man was immediately diagnosed as homosexual by the clinical discourse and practice for decades and how the sissy is the main way to play gay and get instant laughs in theatre nowadays. Performing femininity as male brings hate and mockery together with the immediate homophobic connection with a bodily mapped gayness. This is the place where the male hysteric stands nowadays through his confusion of masculinity and femininity. Is it so impossible nowadays to acknowledge the sissy as equally human and not as a hated caricature? It makes me sick to my stomach to see all these macho actors performing the sissy for sure laughs on stage (and they start early with it, I remember this high school theatre festival in Brasov, Romania where playing the sissy was the main way to produce comic effects. These guys were 15-16 and the adults in the jury/public were laughing hard and applauding their openly homophobic humor. Such a nice unity/continuity…)
At the "Creating Change 2010: 40 Years After Stonewall" conference there was an interesting panel called "40 Years After Stonewall: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Activist Timeline," with Jim Fouratt, Roger Goodman, Carmen Vasquez, Ellen Ensig-Brodsky, Phil Johnson. Feministing wrote about it here. The debates brought the sissy back into discussion. Jim Fouratt was saying: "We're all fags at the end of the day to the homophobes. But in our own community there's this demonizing of the sissy, the effeminate male", while Roger Goodman remembered " The effeminist movement - It was men in the 1970s who took feminism on as our politic. We called gay men on their shit. Effeminism is gay men whose fundamental politics is feminism. And that we're not afraid to feel the feminine in us and express that." These new re-discoveries of the effeminate male and the critique/action against the huge discrimination that he faces today at a transnational level are crucial. Join the effeminist movement right now! It will change your life!
Photo from here
