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Schtick

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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?

13 thoughts on Schtick

  1. What a sad, sad story.

    I am not sure, but I don’t think he will make it to LA and become a star. I think I would like him to, if he would get his ass into some classes with an emhasis on race relations, but I doubt he’ll make it for the reasons stated- not necessarily willing to bend to the rules of Hollywood, and not easy to cast for a specific role.

    Also, I wonder if this artcle will be the “outing” of him, so to speak, as an internet star- ala when Lonelygirl15 was outed as an act rather than a person, and everyone lost interest. The article makes it clear there is less mystery even if he’s 100% real, and that makes people lose interest.

    I wish him luck though. Its heartbreaking to see someone trapped like that.

  2. Meh. Its two of my least favorite schticks combined: the rich white person acting ghetto and the “I’m more flaming than you” homosexual.

    I’m sorry that he’s in a town filled with homobigots, but I don’t appreciate his art; it grates on my nerves like a million fingernails on blackboards.

  3. 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.

    Yep. Hard to know on that one–“you’re fucking awesome!” can mean a lot of things on the internet.

  4. I agree that the best word for this is sad. I’m not saying it’s not racist, but I’ll save my anger for someone less pathetic than this kid – especially since I think there’s probably more ignorance than malice behind it.

  5. I read the article and I get the larger points, but the writer lost a lot of my concern when toward the end, he describes the tank-top men’s undershirt as ‘wife-beater’. Not once, but twice.

    I don’t know, but it seems there was quite a big stink about how offensive that is a while back, how classist and mysognist it really is.

    Oh I know, I know. They’re gay men and their oppression is so much more important, they don’t have time to check their sensitivity to women.

  6. Yeah, his schtick is kind of tired, it’s been done a million times. The kid has talent and flair, and I hope he gets out of his town and to a big city, like thousands of gender-different queers before him, before someone smashes his head in, but I don’t think he has enough unique talent to be a celeb. Like everyone else who’s posted I’m kind of sick of “I can be totally racist and offensive because I’m gay and drawing on the legacy of black women and drag queens!”

    I mean, to some extent… I know a lot of feminine guys as well as trans women who were mentored or just plain “oh it’s ok to be who I am” messaged by really fierce drag performers, often black ones. It’s not like there are that many other people out there who can take care of that shit, you know? So in some ways I think of it as analogous to poor white kids who grow up in communities that have a lot of cultural expression around hip-hop and rap music; they may not be black but it makes sense that they grew up and learned how to survive from that culture and it’s part of them. On the other hand, there’s clearly a line that you ought not cross, and I don’t think the boundaries are as well defined in the queer world — which among other things, is marginalized and tiny and spread out all over the place, connected by internet and chat lines… sigh.

    Incidentally, the author of this piece was one year behind me in high school and we were editors on the school paper together 😀

  7. Racist and sad indeed. But nobody’s mentioning this:

    “To the bitches that wanna fight me! To the bitches that wanna fight me! Girl, look at this, bitch” (et cetera).

    What girl? I know he’s assuming a persona, but I doubt the majority of people who give this kid a hard time are female. In a patriarchal society, the best way to insult a boy or man is to call him a girl. Or a bitch. Or a pussy. The message would seem to be, “So I’m gay. At least I’m not female like you homophobes.”

    Am I reading too much into this? Seems to me he’s internalized this hatred that says “You’re a girl, you faggot” and his defense is to turn it outward.

    I call my white sleeveless undershirts Manslappers. Not very mature, I know. (-:

  8. The alt weekly that published the article also has a blog, and they posted this entry (a transcription of a voice mail the author received in response to his article):

    “Voice Mail of the Day
    Posted by Eli Sanders on June 1 at 11:10 AM

    I’m responding to the article today in the paper about Chris Crocker. It’s called Excape from Real Bitch Island.

    Um, the writer talks about Chris imitating, quote, ghetto black women. And I just want to clarify that he’s not imitating ghetto black women. He’s imitating ghetto black drag queens and trannies and gay men who are hatefully imitating ghetto black women. So, that “tea” and “shade” and that other little bullshit that they published supposedly being ghetto black women. It’s not. It’s just black, gay, trans, and drag queen men pretending that they are ghetto black women.

    Ghetto black women, of which I am one, don’t necessarily use those words. They’re old and tired. So, Eli, get it right.”

  9. Thanks! I need to re-read the article. Sanders talks about Chris’ sources:

    It turned out it was a party line that he’d found through the website talkee.com, which compiles lists of free phone party lines around the country. This particular line is run out of Los Angeles and is filled with flaming black men, black drag queens, and trannies from Compton. They take on names like Candy Cane and Chocolate and Charmane (“She’s like my muse,” Chris says), and they dial in to the party line to berate each other about their breath, their weight, and so on. Chris likes to call in under the guise of an alter ego, Penelope. Lately, however, people have caught on and have taken to calling him Cracker. To ask “What’s your tea?” on the party line, Chris explained, is to ask, “What’s your problem?”

    …So I thought–probably because, again, Crocker’s not the first–that Sanders makes the distinction in the article. I need to read it again. Just on the early-morning skim, there are a few places where he doesn’t, so much.

  11. Oh Eli. I thought we got over that being cool in back in the dawghouse.

    Uh, the part about black trans women (which includes many drag performers) “hatefully imitating” black women? Fuck that transphobic shit, seriously.

  12. Uh, the part about black trans women (which includes many drag performers) “hatefully imitating” black women? Fuck that transphobic shit, seriously.

    It’s not exactly a new assertion about -feminine people, is it?

    Although I wonder how it’s working for Chris and for his audience: how does he see the people on the party line? It’s so hard to sort out the threads of parody and appropriation in this whole thing.

  13. There is such a hazy area here that I am reluctant to judge too quickly. I mean, I know strong, feminist women who would havwe been pretty indistinguishable from Chris in a lot of people’s eyes when they were his age, and although it doesn’t seem like Chris is trans, I’m not going to pretend like there are oceans separating him and a lot of trans women I’ve known who have grown up with similar role models and weird cultural melange in the absence of anyone else in the universe giving a shit about them, or separating him and me, for that matter.

    I don’t believe Chris has any business appropriating black culture; I also don’t think he’s necessarily “mocking” the few role models he’s been able to find, or putting people down by calling them girls or bitches — if that’s what you see in this kind of gender presentation then you’re missing a big chunk of the picture. You’re right that I don’t know if Chris sees his friends on the party line as role models or just sources for more cyncially viewed “material.” But I just have to say, from personal experience and from the experience of close friends, Chris is far from the only poor white kid stuck in the middle of nowhere who’s been partially “adopted” by black drag/trans culture, which is accepting of “feminine trash,” you know? And a good thing too, because pretty much NOBODY else is. We can wish all we want that there were better feminine role models, of either gender, who a teen like Chris could identify with, that race wasn’t mixed up in it, etc. but that’s what the world is like. Well, either that or if you’re a slightly richer kid who can spend a lot of time on the internet, you can appropriate anime instead. OK, so yeah, there is a lot of problematic race stuff going on w/ the white isolated feminine male-assigned kids, yes. Sigh.

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