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Fuck Politeness

“This is a revolution, not a public relations movement”

February 12, 2009 How *sad* for Elizabeth Farrelly (cos we all know Mardi Gras should be about HER)

Poor old Lizzy-poo is lamenting that ‘Mardi Gras has become too straight for comfort’.

Why? Because there was a discussion that Mardi Gras might consider moving to Homebush. Waving away very real discussions over classism and a consideration of the fact that many participants in Mardi Gras, and many just-as-queer-folk live west of Bankstown, Farrelly instead sees the *consideration* of such an idea as proof positive that the Flaming Queers are no longer Flaming enough for her tastes. Those boys are supposed to squeal in horror and stamp their high heeled shoes over any location not hip enough for their tastes! My STEREOTYPING demands it!!

Oh haha – GLBTQ sounds like a sandwich filling. Oh haha – Queer is vague and nebulous, a ‘catch all’  for non-straight…oh haha…why don’t you go on and ask which *bathroom* a transgendered person should use Farrelly? You’re headed in that direction with your smug condescending mocking.

Direct quote:

And the question? The question is this. What happens when being GLBTQ is no longer queer at all? What happens when gay goes straight?

Well I don’t know. Why don’t you ask that when gay and lesbian folk don’t get bashed or killed for not being straight? Why don’t you ask that again when transgendered persons don’t run such an extraordinarily high risk of being raped or killed? When jokes about ‘which bathroom’ stop sounding hilarious to heteronormative fuckwits? When Ken Starr is NOT trying to anul marriages? When being gay doesn’t make you a paedophile suspect in the eyes of many? When you can marry who you fucking well please? When a transgendered man having a baby doesn’t cause people’s HEADS to nearly EXPLODE with indignation and amazement.

There’s some random story about one guy who suggests that says that identity politics ruined his sex life (am I reading Farrelly or Sam in the City here?).

An offensive point about how straight men *used* to be titillated by the transgressions til the gays went and ruined that fun by coming out and fighting for their rights -damn them.

Farrelly ignores the fact that in the ‘good old days’ they often kicked the shit out of people later…some of those ‘enjoying’ their ‘transgressions’ were also gay-bashers. This is often STILL THE CASE. It would appear that most of the ‘lamentable gentrification’ has happened in Farrelly’s noggin. And what of the similar pattern of ‘straight guys’ being both titillated and repulsed to sex with transgendered men and women? The high levels of murders linked to sexual desire/abjection? To ‘proving’ their heterosexuality?

A couple of digs at ‘celesbianism’ (and jesus, is there anything more telling of white straight priviledge than thinking you’re witty for dropping words like that? Hi, your disrespectful arrogance is showing) and then we’re onto her *point* such as it is:

My purpose, rather, is to wonder what it might mean for Sydney, the world’s runner-up of gay meccas, when queerness is not only legal and accepted but becomes a genuine part of the norm

Well gee, Farrelly, I forgot it might be a struggle for respect, equality and rights. NO! It’s about SYDNEY’S struggle to stay hip, urbane and trendy!

It’s about lamenting that queer culture is no longer interesting when there’s not quite the risk their used to be that coming out meant you were likely to be beaten to death/raped/thrown in jail.

Farrelly is sad that she’s lost that little frisson that came with being so ‘edgy’ that she knew about/watched something that was blanketly despised and mocked in wider society. Poor Farrelly.

This paragraph is particularly bad:

Costumery is fun, and Mardi Gras is making money. But the radical chic that once fitted it to Oxford Street like a hand in, well, a glove has gone. Now both parade and precinct seem somewhat past their best, not so much down at heel as too well-heeled; middle-aged, middle-brow, middle class. And it is impossible not to feel just a little nostalgic for the days when Mardi Gras meant something.

Oh, we GET your inuendo ok?

And it’s a little funny infuriating to hear a well-heeled; middle-aged, middle-brow, middle class white woman talk down about how Mardi Gras doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING ANY MORE!

*rude fingerful of spoof*? Just stop. Every time you make a little ‘gag’ like this it shows your heteronormativity. “Spoof”  you get it??? *Glove*, geddit, geddit? HAHA – QUEER, get it?

So Farrelly is lamenting the vicarious frisson of fear/thrill she got when GLBTQ was (to her) just *poofs* and *dykes*, when Mardi Gras carried an appreciable (to the straight white arbiter) risk of violent disruption.

Now she’d like to *send it West* for that same risk of offence/violence. (Oh she doesn’t SAY she wants the violence, but that’s the upshot of people being ‘offended’ by sexualities and bodies that disturb their world view and their sense of heterosexual superiority.

But k.d lang isn’t the only GLBTQ to have slipped of late from rock ‘n’ raunchy into a schmaltz more comfortable.

No indeed, Elizabeth, it seems you are keeping her company.

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