Why Are So Many of Our Queer Icons Straight?

by Sabrina Ellis

In a Vogue article, Madonna is credited with bringing queer culture into the American mainstream media through her 1990’s music video Vogue. Despite being straight, Madonna is seen as a “gay icon” and a “pioneering ally,” having built much of her career on queer culture. However, the actual queer people who created these aesthetics that Madonna profited from are pushed to the background and never given the credit they deserve. Her music video Vogue was heavily influenced by queer ballroom culture and even included Willi Ninja, a Black choreographer in the ballroom scene who is known as the “Grandfather of Vogue.” Ballroom culture is an underground LGBTQ subculture created by queer and trans people of color around the 60s and that rose to popularity in the 70s. Community was vital in the ballroom scene. Crystal LaBeija created the ball “House of LaBeija,” so that people of color could compete in their own drag pageants instead of going to those dominated by white cis people. At these pageants (which the community termed as balls), different Houses would compete in a variety of categories. Houses were meant to serve as families, and experienced members in the scene led the houses as “mothers” or “fathers,” guiding and supporting new members who were not accepted by their biological families. Madonna’s inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community in her music video was revolutionary, as most mainstream artists shied away from queer people during the AIDS crisis occurring in the U.S. around the 80s. Still, Madonna’s video ignores the entire history and community aspect of ballroom culture, only introducing its aesthetics into the mainstream. Ninja died of an AIDS-related illness without ever getting a fraction of the recognition or fame that Madonna received for her Vogue video. Unfortunately, the case of Madonna is not an exception. Queer people, especially in communities of color, almost never get to be the icons for their own aesthetics and cultures. Instead, their creations are stolen from them and given to white cishet people, who are seen as more valuable in the public eye. Queer aesthetics cannot be given a simple definition, but a few common threads tie the idea together. Queer style has always challenged cisheteronormative standards, whether it be men trying traditionally “feminine” things such as dresses or makeup, or women who refuse the roles set upon them. It is not possible to define the roles set upon women like it is for men; while men generally must avoid the “feminine” in our patriarchal society, race impacts how people challenge gender standards, especially for women. White women might feel more empowered by dressing more “masculine,” since it rejects the subservient femininity they are expected to represent. However, one part of the misogynoir that Black women face is the attempt to remove their femininity; Black women are stereotyped as “aggressive” and their features are seen as “more masculine” as they don’t fall into the Eurocentric beauty standard. Black women’s distance to whiteness is what excludes them from the concept of femininity as defined by men– docile, innocent, quiet, and pure. A 2007 study found that “Black women were more interested in traditionally feminine behav-

iors such as wearing attractive clothing than their white counterparts, and also were more likely to describe themselves as feminists,” showing that playing into conventional feminine standards can be a challenge to the norms in itself.

Trans people also defy cisheteronormativity simply by existing; their queerness, in the eyes of many, make their styles queer by default even if they are adhering to gender norms. Society expects transgender folks to “pass” for a cis person, making it clear that the only way they can assimilate into a cishet world is by suppressing their queerness so as to make it imperceptible. While cis people are allowed to subvert gender roles and be seen as alternative and cool, trans people are held to strict rules as to how they can perform their gender and still be valid. A cis man putting on a dress is quirky, but a trans man putting on a dress makes people delegitimize their identity. Cishet people are safest when performing queer aesthetics; queer people have to consider the threats of violence that come with expressing themselves. This violence is systemic: there is a long history of laws that specifically target trans people for simply existing. Black and Brown trans women especially are heavily policed, and more likely to be murdered than white cishet and white queer people. When queer people of color decide to openly express their gender and/or sexuality, they are aware of the huge risk that entails. White cishet people don’t even have to think about violence towards them and expect name-calling to be the worst case scenario.

Straight, white, cis people are usually the ones that come out on top, getting visibility and credit for any queer-coded gesture. Harry Styles was congratulated for being the first man in a dress on the cover of Vogue and marked as revolutionary, for daring to open a new conversation about masculinity. Harry Styles has never publicly declared his sexuality as either gay or straight, but it does not change the fact that his assumed straightness for the whole start of his career allowed him get as far as he did. Styles’ start in the boyband One Direction was very much catered to a female audience; at the age of 16, he was the right candidate for all young girls to pine after. Choosing to remain unlabeled is justified on a personal level– no one owes anyone information about their sexual orientation, but it still separates them from the queer community and a queer identity. Harry Styles did not have to

go through any of the struggles a queer artist has to go through in the start of their career, but he can dabble in queer fashion now that he is well established in the industry. He is often considered groundbreaking by many, ignoring countless openly queer people that came before him and that have already made powerful statements in the public eye. Billy Porter’s tuxedo dress at the 2019 Oscars did not make headlines like Harry Styles’ Vogue cover did. It could be argued that the difference is because a Vogue cover is more likely to garner publicity, but why did Vogue give that opportunity to Harry Styles and not a queer artist of color instead? As Billy Porter themself put it: “I’m not dragging Harry Styles, but he is the one you’re going to try and use to represent this new conversation? He doesn’t care, he’s just doing it because it’s the thing to do. This is politics for me. This is my life. I had to fight my entire life to get to the place where I could wear a dress to the Oscars and not be gunned now. All he has to do is be white and straight.” Why are people who distance themselves from queerness the ones given the platforms they need to become icons? Why do queer people influence pop culture so drastically with their iconic styles but can’t be icons themselves?

As author, performer and public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon put it in an interview for New York Fashion Week: “Gender non-conforming people have always been the heart of creation and innovation. It’s just that our aesthetics make it into the runways but never our bodies. We’re always the mood boards and never the models.” This appropriation of queerness intends to erase queer people from their own culture. Queer people are reduced to “moodboards,” into passive objects that can be “mined for inspiration,” as Vaid-Menon puts it, and discarded. Straight artists copy queer people (most of whom are also people of color) to further their own careers and become icons, since they are an acceptable vehicle for queerness in the eyes of the media. When cishet people become queer icons, they represent queerness in a sanitized way, separate from queer sexuality. The queer styles that heteronormative people wear in the media are completely separate from their own personhood. These influential straight celebrities are able to remove queer history from the garments they put on; they simply turn it into another aesthetic and not an expression of identity. An openly queer person does not have the same benefit, since they cannot distance themselves from the community, politics, culture and the threats and policing that come with portraying a queer aesthetic. The public does not have to accept queer identities when straight people are the models: they can simply enjoy the aesthetic without having to work through their homophobia and transphobia, and without having to think about the community and culture it originated from. That is doubly the case when it comes to queer people of color, the pioneers of queer aesthetics, who are rarely given the credit they are due.

Lil Nas X is a prime example of how actual queer people are received by the media. Lil Nas X leaned into his sexuality in his first album MONTERO, sparking outrage with the music video for his song Montero

(Call Me By Your Name). In the video, the artist works with religious imagery and sexual undertones, culminating in him giving the Devil a lap dance and killing him. Alongside the music video, Lil Nas X posted a note to his fourteen year old self, acknowledging the struggle of being queer and admitting he was scared, since he knew people would be angry. Though a good quantity of his fans praised him for Montero (Call Me By Your Name), many other people took to Twitter as Lil Nas X predicted, calling him “a bad influence for children.” Even though most of the people who harass Lil Nas X don’t see a problem with straight men who sing about their sexuality, to them queerness (especially in combination with Blackness) is inherently seen as sinful. The framing of Lil Nas X as “demonic” or “perverted” perpetuates common homophobic and racist stereotypes. While stereotypes of Black men as ‘hypermasculine’ and ‘dangerous’ might seem at odds with the stereotypes of gay people as ‘weak’ and ‘effeminate,’ they actually feed into each other. Black men are portrayed as aggressive especially when it comes to sexuality: the harmful myth of the ‘Black rapist’ reflects the fear that Black men will “sexually corrupt pure and innocent white women.” However, even though gay men are portrayed as frailer than straight men, they are attributed hypersexual behavior, which often equates queerness with sex. Queer sexuality is seen as ‘deviant,’ and cishet people accuse queer people of corrupting children or pushing their sexuality onto straight people in order to “convert” them. Lil Nas X ends up facing both of these harmful stereotypes, reconstructing his expression of sexuality and love as ‘aggressive,’ ‘sexually deviant,’ and most of all, capable of ‘corrupting’ the “innocent” white cishet people in our society. This backlash towards any display of Black queer love shows that his haters think Black love and joy is inherently immoral, setting it in opposition to “pure” white love. These racist and homophobic viewpoints that bring in a binary of right/ wrong, good/evil, pure/sinful makes queer people of color believe their very existence is wicked. As Lil Nas X wrote in the note to his past self: “I know we promised to never come out publicly, I know we promised to never be ‘that’ type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist.” Lil Nas X felt like he was not allowed to take up space in this world– he hid his queerness for many years and vowed to never come out because he was taught his existence was wrong or bad. Once he did come out and stopped suppressing his identity, he was still faced with major backlash. Unlike Harry Styles, whose identity did not go into the dress stunt and who got support from major media companies, Lil Nas X’s expression of his identity is used as justification for disrespecting or harassing him. The queer aesthetics that the artist uses in his Montero (Call me By Your Name) video are representative of his religious trauma and his struggle with his sexuality, and therefore not clean and appropriate as conventional society expects it to be. In order to enjoy his presentation of queerness, people would also have to accept his identity as a gay Black man and all that comes with it—sex, struggle, religious trauma, and other themes. It is a lot easier to accept a queer

gesture from Harry Styles because it is doesn’t make the viewer grapple with queerness and Blackness as Lil Nas X does. A lot of homophobia is systematically entangled with the patriarchy as well. Cisheteronormative standards include a deep rooted hatred for women and feminine expression. In general, women who have more a masculine gender expression are less frowned upon than men who dabble in femininity. Women can be written off as “tomboys” who might outgrow that phase, while feminine men always get “accused” of queerness. While women also get backlash for challenging the standards, they still can wear masculinity as a style, however, men who enjoy femininity are immediately assumed to be driven by an identity that makes them deviate from those norms. When men emphasize their femininity, they are letting go of some of their inherent privileges, seemingly “devaluing” themselves in the eyes of the patriarchy. The construction of the feminine/ masculine binary has existed for hundreds of years– white society deems femininity as weak and shallow, while masculinity is seen as strong, willful, virtuous and rational. Even Mary Wollestonecraft’s classic feminist text from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, perpetuates the idea that femininity is a problem, and that women should empower themselves by becoming more masculine. Femininity was used to separate the “Western” world and the “Eastern” world, ascribing the positive traits, like rationality and virtue, to the “West” and feminine traits, such as being driven by the body instead of mind, to the “East,” feeding into an colonial and Oriental fantasy. Femininity has been used to devalue anything that isn’t compatible with white supremacist patriarchal ideals. In the process, femininity itself became completely disparaged in our society, and violently policed to make sure all the societal conventions are being followed. Women can’t be ‘too masculine,’ but they also can’t be ‘too feminine.’ Men must not be feminine at all. When a queer Black man expresses femininity more openly, such as in the case of Lil Nas X, he is met with more disapproval than when a white cishet man does the same. While Harry Styles is able to present his femininity mostly without being accused of ulterior motives, Lil Nas X’s femininity is perceived as an agenda being pushed onto the public.

However, Lil Nas X’s vulnerability and openness about his queerness did help him build a supportive fanbase with people who may have struggled with similar issues. Some part of his success is due to how he managed to market his queerness towards the right audience; his queerness became a selling point, as well as an identity. As media companies start to include more representation in order to remain relevant and to bring in a larger audience, queer people might change the way they express their sexuality and gender in order to match the companies’ requirements. Queer people who hope to make their sexuality work for them in the industry might end up presenting queerness as the only facet of their identity, or they might conceal it completely depending on what kind of gay person the industry needs to fill the role. Even when queer people do everything ‘right,’ only a few are granted platforms. Cishet white people remain the most common representation of queerness in the media, since their identities are easier to accept than queer ones. The removal of identity from queerness in the mainstream is dangerous because it can turn into another trend that goes in and out of fashion. In the same way that some African American Vernacular English (AAVE) terms are now seen as “cringe” because they were only known as “Internet slang” (despite being a part of Black cultures and an actual dialect), if these aspects of queerness in mainstream media are not seen as connected to the community that created them, they will soon wash out of the trend cycles. As soon as queer aesthetics are no longer profitable, they will simply be tossed in the trash. Since these aesthetics have been re-

moved from the culture, history, and people that created them, there are no deep ties nor pertinent reasons to stop them from being discarded. The commodification of queerness by mainstream media does not only risk queerness being thrown away, but it also represents queerness very narrowly, in order to control it. People in the industry are able make that specific image of queerness marketable, even when it is not an accurate representation of the community, to continue upholding white supremacist and patriarchal societal systems. Their image of a queer person has to be as palatable to their audiences as possible, in order to make that image as profitable as possible. However, queer people are not limited to this digitalized world of media– they exist in the real world too. The slight acceptance of queer people in mainstream media does not apply to the majority of the community and does not translate to acceptance in real life. The only reason queerness is performed at all (by cishet and queer people) in the media is for the profit it generates. The industry does not care about dismantling harmful systems and stereotypes or helping queer people, they simply care about how much money they can make off of their images.

Recognizing someone as an icon also means recognizing their personhood. If the mainstream media addressed queer people as icons, they would have to acknowledge everything else that comes with that identity. The seeming application of queer aesthetics into the mainstream through cishet people ends up feeding into a performance of “wokeness” that makes people think queer people are fully accepted in our society. However, these representations that lack history, community, and context depoliticize the queer community and ignores the struggles that come with being queer. Even as the public starts to see more queer people representing these aesthetics in the media, they are, for the most part, white and wealthy. The media industry picks queer people that are palatable enough to their audience to check off the diversity requirement for their projects. Working class queer people of color who were and continue to be vital to the creation of queer culture are still fighting to be heard, as media companies continue to grant platforms to mostly cishet white people. The public should see queerness on queer bodies, so that they can realize that identity is inseparable from the work created by LGBTQ folks. Our history, community, and politics are inextricably tied to our aesthetics, and just as iconic.