Too Many Word, Too Few Panel

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

but i know calls to action without any kind of instruction aren't very helpful so here are some tips that i think you can easily do yourself with your own circles:

1) Staring off simple: Look around. Are there any BIPOC girls in your friend group, or are all of you white? Why? Do you often joke about everyone in your friend group being white? Why is that funny?

What to do: Examine why there are no people of color in your group. Examine why people of color may not be comfortable enough to hang out with you & your friends. Correct these, where possible. Do some reading on anti-racism. Talk to more people.

2) Examine how you talk about people of color & racism. Are you downplaying racism in your community? Are you treating women of color as dramatic or unreasonable for bringing it up? Do you find yourself only defending white dolls, always defending them from claims of racism, but never defending BIPOC dolls? Why?

What to do: Think about why you care more about accusations of racism than protecting the women of color in your community. Make sure you're making your space safe for BIPOC girls. Speak openly and loudly about anti-racism. Hold your sisters accountable- they should be apologizing when they say or do something wrong.

3) This one might sound silly, but as we often meet each other over fandom and roleplay- how are nonwhite characters treated in your circle? Are they always aggressive, angry, or antagonistic? Do you find yourself putting nonwhite characters in more roles like cops, dictators, sex pests, etc?

Additionally: If your circle shares sexual content, is there a lot of art where there's a pale/blonde character on the bottom, and a darker character on top? Are you and your friends always drawing darker characters as more dominant, more sexually aggressive, or promiscuous, while the white/pale characters are more innocent, submissive, modest, or clueless?

What to do: Examine how the way your group approaches fandom & art with nonwhite characters in it may make people of color uncomfortable. Examine why your art may make people of color feel unsafe or awkward hanging out with you. It's not wrong to have the occasional character of color be more antagonistic or dominant, but it's a problem when this is a pattern. If it's happening All The Time, question why!

4) Be honest with yourself: Did this post make you feel defensive? Does it make you feel defensive when people say something you did was racist? Why?

If a person of color tells you your actions were racist, they trust you to improve. I don't tell people they're being racist if i think they're going to hurt me for bringing it up. I know many like me. Don't prove us wrong- take these criticisms into account and work on it. You aren't cursed to be some kind of terrible bigot forever because you messed up- panicking without action is useless. Just be sure you examine the behavior in question and work to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Okay?

It’s intended as ironic of course, as deliberate camp. The musical is intended as a parody of old sci-fi and horror movies, mixed with a camp drag aesthetic inspired by the contemporary glam rock movement. The mad scientist villains in the movies being parodied were often queer-coded, and vaguely effeminate.

So to parody that, Frank-n-Furter goes far beyond the queer-coding, and is outrageously effeminate and evil. He rapes people, kills them with an axe and serves them for dinner and force-fems them to take part in his climactic stage show. He is a Frankenstein parody, who literally makes an artificial man in order to fuck him (a joke about Frankenstein I’ve seen on tumblr). And does it all while wearing stockings, a bustier and heavy make-up. He is deliberately the ultimate evil man in a dress trope, referencing Psycho and all effeminate mad scientists in media.

That Frank-N-Furter isn’t explicitly a trans woman doesn’t matter. The musical deliberately blurs the line. The line “I’m just a sweet transvestite, from Transsexual, Transylvania” is like a perfect encapsulation of how horror movies treat transfemininity. “Men in dresses” (transvestites) trans women (transsexual) and a symbol of predatory horror movie villainy (Transylvania) are all conflated, making a pun of out how they all begin with “trans”.

Of course, it’s intended to be ironic. It’s a parody of queer-coded villainy in old horror movies by turning it up to eleven, so that you can’t take it seriously. The whole movie has this drag show camp aesthetic that it celebrates, and the supposed representatives of heteronormativity, Brad and Janet are turned in the end. Frank-N-Furter becomes a symbol of a hedonistic queer liberation “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure.. Don’t dream it, be it.”

This is the clear intent of Rocky Horror, and it’s how it became a “queer classic”. Does it work? I’ll admit that I enjoy the movie version. The glam rock aesthetic is fun, the songs are catchy, and they keep coming at a quick pace. A lot of it is admittedly that I love the old horror and sci-fi movies it’s parodying, so my cultural touchstones are similar. I’m the kind of person to get a thrill out of knowing that Frank-N-Furter at one point uses the exact same prop that Peter Cushing used in the second Hammer Frankenstein movie.

That is a different question however from how well it succeeds at subverting the transmisogynistic tropes it handles. Even in the most sympathetic possible account of the musical, it’s doing the equivalent of handling live grenades. Is it the creators tropes to subvert in the first place? Is it the fans?

Let’s talk about Rocky Horror’s creator, Richard O’Brien. He is certainly a weird and contradictory person, he identifies as a third gender and “70% male and 30% female“, and is using estrogen. So arguably he is a transfem enby and thus transmisogyny-affected. But he’s also a transmisogynist who doesn’t believe trans women are “real women”.( I would like to know what exact percentage of “female” as a transfem person turns you into a bad fake trans woman.)

Of course the important thing about O’Brien is that he is rich. He is in a vastly different class position than the majority of transfems. So while he may be taking estrogen and living as a third gender, he is simultaneously isolated by his own wealth from the effects of the transmisogyny he bolsters in the media (see Caitlyn Jenner for another example of a wealthy transfem doing the same thing).

And O’Brien is rich because Rocky Horror is a huge success. The stage show has seen tons of productions, the original ran for 7 years in the West End, and the movie is a slow but certain money maker, with probably the longest theatrical run out of any movie in history. He is swimming in residuals.

This raises the more interesting question of Rocky Horror’s position in the wider culture, and it’s status as “queer media”. It’s a movie which is just not passively watched but celebrated and performed by its fandom. People show up in cosplay to showings, “shadow casts” perform while the movie plays. And of course the original stage musical is still performed.

So we have to ask ourselves, what are people performing? And who is performing it? And I’ve already answered the former question earlier. Rocky Horror is largely an ironic performance of transmisogyny. And the fact is, the majority of people doing that performance are not the main targets of transmisogyny. They are largely TME cishet, queer and trans people. It’s “ironic” transmisogyny to be sure, I think most fans of Rocky Horror who have any understanding of what it is doing view Frank-N-Furter as the true hero of the show. But is it really their thing to be ironic about? Are transmisogyny-exempt people really the people who should reclaim with irony and camp transmisogynistic tropes in horror media? I don’t think so, and that’s why there is so much resentment about Rocky Horror from transfems. And it’s creator doesn’t help, because while he’s arguably transfem, he also spreads transmisogyny in the media.

It illustrates a lot of things, for example how imprecise “queer” is as a description of people. It’s an umbrella term, and does group together people who have much in common. But it also erases the material differences within the community. Queer people aren’t all equally oppressed.

So Rocky Horror status as queer media, as a campy celebration of queerness and parody of anti-queer tropes in genre films is kinda grating. Because it enables TME queer people to perform and celebrate Rocky Horror, because they are queer and it’s about “queerness”, when there are specifically transmisogynistic tropes parodied in the musical. It isn’t really their place to do so.

It appropriates specific transmisogynistic tropes in the media by thoughtlessly subsuming it into the general anti-queerness which it is part of.

Of course there are transfems who got to explore their gender at Rocky Horror showings. But I think the reason they did that is because mtf crossdressing is accepted as part of a camp ironic performance in such a context. It makes it feel safer to perform femininity in public, because you can backtrack and say it’s purely ironic. That’s no different from the comedy crossdressing in American Halloween parties, and I think we can all agree those are often transmisogynistic.

And of course, Rocky Horror is an example of how cis men can perform femininity, and get celebrated for it in mainstream society, while escaping the effects of transmisogyny that transfems experience, and in fact often furthering that transmisogyny. It’s often a (negative) performance of transfemininity, in which actual transfems play no part and are mocked.

Tim Curry is a very good example. He made his career from playing Frank-N-Furter, and he probably couldn’t have done that if he was actually transfem, and not just crossdressing for an ironic performance on stage and screen. Like I don’t have anything against him in particular, quite the opposite, he’s one of my favourite actors, love him in everything from Clue to Muppet Treasure Island to Gabriel Knight. My objection is to the patriarchal and transmisogynistic system that favors cishet men like him.

Speaking of crossdressing on stage, the drag culture which Rocky Horror is inspired by of course has a complex history. It’s deeply rooted in both African-American and queer culture, and transfems have played major roles in drag. But Rocky Horror is if anything even an appropriation of drag culture. It represents drag’s commercialization and recuperation into the mainstream. It took drag out of the gay bars being raided by the police and onto the more respectable West End stage, making a lot of money in the process.

Rocky Horror beyond any qualities it has as a stage and film musical, due to its popularity represents a lot of complex issues. It’s important to queer culture, but it also represents the commercialization and recuperation of queer drag into the cishet mainstream. And within the queer community, it is a shining example of how TME queers can appropriate specifically transfem struggles as their own. It shows how cis men can gain wealth and fame performing transmisogynistic caricatures (even if they are ironic and don’t mean it).