Speaking of ninteen-year-old homos, Ilyka linked the story of this kid:
In Chris’s most watched video, This and That, which has been viewed more than 420,000 times on YouTube and nearly 1.6 million times on MySpace, he sits on his grandmother’s couch, knees scrunched to chest, Converse up on the coffee table in front of him. He’s wearing an orange T-shirt, black eyeliner, and two jelly bracelets on his right wrist. The clip is short, only 46 seconds, and it’s a message to his haters, the type of people who go to his MySpace and YouTube pages and post comments similar to this one, posted in late May on YouTube: “Ew. You are the biggest faggot in America. Please, do us all a favor, and throw urself in front of some ongoing traffic.” When I first watched This and That, I saw it as a message from Chris Crocker to these virtual enemies, a fictional character responding to hecklers in his audience.
“Hey what up, everybody?” the video begins. “This is Chris.” His tone is singsong at first, but then it turns serious: “I’m still kinda blowing smoke out my ears because the haters just refuse to give it up, you know?” He shifts his expression from exasperation and disappointment to anger. “And to the people who be saying, you know, this and that: Yo, girl, I don’t understand. Look at this, girl!” He sits back on the couch, crosses his legs, and pulls up his right T-shirt sleeve to reveal a slender shoulder and a skinny upper arm. “To the bitches that wanna fight me! To the bitches that wanna fight me! Girl, look at this, bitch.” He flexes his tiny bicep. “You wanna fight me?” His tone is menacing, but now he’s pulling up his shirt to reveal a scrawny chest. The disjunction between his violent tone and the seriously limited physical firepower that he’s flashing is absurd—as absurd as the idea that anyone would see this waify kid as a threat worthy of violence. “Girl, what is it, girl? What I got to hide, nigga, what I got to hide?” He leans into the camera and starts shouting, rocking his head back and forth in anger, blond highlights flopping this way and that. “Because bitch, you wanna fight somebody, bitch? Let’s go, girl! I’m standing right here; you ain’t sayin’ shit to me, girl. I been standing at the mall; ain’t nobody walking up to me, girl.”
And yeah, my heart bleeds for him, too. I didn’t have to grow up with a fraction of that abuse, and I’m glad he has at least found a coping strategy that isn’t as self-destructive as some of the other options.
But it’s racist, whether he’s trying to draw a little strength from this culture he sees as more fierce and vital, whether he’s trying to use some of that perceived nastiness to highlight his outsider position, or some mixture of both (and it seems to me like both). There’s a huge–and highly offensive–set of queer panic signifiers out there that don’t carry that kind of baggage when they’re used for cheap celebrity by a ninteen-year-old white kid from the South. He’s been using them to great effect, too, if the videos are any indication. This gimmick is different. There’s a long history of racism amongst white gay people, too–as Kevin in comments pointed out, look at the popularity of Shirley Q. Liquor,who’s even less ambiguous and who’s got even more of a fan base. Heck, look at what Chris is doing; he’s not the first white gay man to latch onto the diva avatar. With a track record like that, I’ve gotta err on the side of unironic appreciation from most of his audience.
I wonder, too, how much of the fandom is really from other homos and fellow travelers–that is,whether racism is the only undercurrent elided in transmission. The author of the interview clearly felt a temporal bond with little Chris, and was therefore willing to overlook some of the likely sources of the messages taking umbrage at his persona. But the internet is frequented by a lot of people. Some of this is clearly a freak frantically trying to get attention from other freaks, but I wonder if some of his fond listeners don’t see him as a different kind of drag queen. How many of them think they’re laughing with him? How many of his listeners are using him the same way?