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Men in Frocks by Kris Kirk and Ed Heath – a gay book review by Stella Mahon

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Men in FrocksThe title says it all, really,  Men in Frocks.  A frock, as any woman will tell you, is quite different from a dress.  Drags of any kind wear frocks, the women of the western world, for the most part, wear dresses if they wear dresses at all.

The authors of this book are aware of this distinction.  When talking of two male-to-female transexuals they freely admit that Roz and Tish ‘do not sit comfortably in a book with (this) title’.  But they are included in a brief chapter on TV/TS, where I read something which was the exact opposite to my own feelings. 

…’TSs also are often accused of perpetuating fantasy female stereotypes and some people see them as Fifth Columnists who seek to undermine the struggle of women to right the imbalance of power between sexes.’ …

I had to check it – did the authors write TSs or TVs at the beginning of that sentence?  For they were actually saying something I had always felt about transvestites (AND most drag artists).  There were the men who projecting the image of women as sexual objects, who wanted to pass for women, be whistled at.  Who negated in a way that your ordinary straightforward hetman did not, the whole challenge that women have been flinging in society’s face for years.  In a way that challenge which I offer to a society which would put me in a particular niche (comfortable for it), and which I offer with my mind and lifestyle, a transexual is offering with his or her body also.

But the debate about TV/TS forms only part of this book.  Much of it, indeed most of it, is a history of the drag scene, whether on stage or off, complete with photos of this one and that one doing his drag thing.  As such it occasionally bored me a little bit. but as it moved away from the post-war years and the big drag shows, through individuals and into more modern times my interest picked up.  The chapter on ‘The Red Drag Queen’ is a case in point.  Back in 1970, when their story began as it were, I knew nothing of any gay scene, was still married and only vaguely aware of my own sexual make-up, slightly more aware of me as a woman.  So the history of that period – albeit from a ‘drag ‘ angle – caught my attention more than any other with the notion that many men – gay men, for the most part, if not the whole part – used drag as a political statement.  With their dress, used on particular occasions, not simply as a fun activity, they were ‘showing solidarity with women by ridiculing the idea of beauty objects.  It e3xpanded to a political statement on their own behalf, within GLF in London when they as well as the women members felt intimidated by the men who did most of the talking – gay men, who, ‘although prepared to pay lip-service to anti-sexism, were as dominating and aggressive as the archetypal heterosexual men’.  They became the Radical Feminists – Rad Fems for short – of GLF, would you believe.  Some had come to realise that ‘women were right about drag.  They never put down drag per se, but they put down the men who got into low cut dresses (Frocks, surely?) false books, the fantasy Hollywood stereotype’.  But we began to realise that there were ways of using drag … it’s a way of giving up the male power role … Oh yes, Kirk and Heath are correct in assuming as they do in this chapter, that such activity would today be criticized for ridiculing women,  You want to reject male power, give up that role?  So what’s the best way of doing that?  Live it in your life?  Preach it?  Oh no, as the outward sign of self-denial, you, as a man, take on the trappings of the one group of people who are universally at the receiving end of male power.  Instead of standing up and hitting out in your own right you tacitly acknowledge, by using a female image, the position of women, using the image of the so-called ‘weaker sex’ to say ‘up yours’ to the ones who parade the power.  If that is not perpetuating the rolebase of our lives, I don’t know what is.  Still, Kirk and Heath do say that ‘the Rad Fems’, like many others from GLF have come out of the experience older and wiser.

It has begun to change, hasn’t it?  I have no doubt that drag in all its old-fashioned (in more ways than one) sense continues.  Danny La Rue is still inexplicably, popular and that mostly with women.  but, as the book points ut Boy George is doing in the eighties what David Bowie did in the seventies – clothing himself how he pleases, and that becomes his dress.  Not male, not female, ut indivual.  It is also what women have been doing for quite a time, women of feminist persuasion.  We don’t, as some of the press hacks would have it (and haven’t they had a field day with the garb of the women at Greenham) insist on ‘wearing the trousers’, for it is only to them that trousers whether of cord, denim, or worsted, are a sexual symbol of power.

The book is OK.  You’ll enjoy reading it.  but keep your political eyes open while you do so.

 

Reviewer -Stella Mahone

Original review held in Gay Start  No 16 lodged in the Linenhall Library

 

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ GMP Publishers Ltd; First Edition (31 Oct. 1984)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages

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ROCK AGAINST BOWIE

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David Bowie (né Jones) died a short time ago, as ever on such occasions, tributes ‘poured in’, and there is no doubt that Bowie was an artist who could produce very interesting material. He could also, it should be said, produce whole albums-worth of dreck. The person who first broke ranks on the adulation was the comedian (and sharp investigative television reporter), Mark Thomas.

He noted Bowie (“the Thin White Duke”)’s Hitlerian salutes and straightforward racism, shouting “Keep Britain White”, and “Get the foreigners out” in the course of early 1970s gigs. Such people don’t ‘do’ irony, the fact that he was using African-American music crudified for honkie consumption never seems to have ‘fizzed’ on him.

He was, admittedly, one of the few people who composed ‘concept albums’ worth listening to – one on the theme of travelling from Vladivostok to Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway. That’s the sort of thing ‘Rock Stars’ did in those days, when not molesting under-age girls or chucking televisions out of hotel windows. Bowie was a quite inconsistent artist and some of his stuff is worthless. The guitarist Eric Clapton, of the band Cream, joined in the racist fun at his own gigs.

A result of this dangerous nonsense was the founding of Rock Against Racism, at the instigation of a professional photographer ‘Red’ Saunders, in a letter to the ‘music press’, presumably mainly NME (New Musical Express) a mass-circulation journal at the time. There already was a group called Rock Against Racism an arm of the SWP (still the International Socialists, becoming a ‘party’ in 1976). The SWP was very gratified at a sudden huge extension of its youth base.

It was less enthralled to learn that the great majority of the base thought their particular analysis of society was surplus to requirements. The SWP personnel were voted out of office in RAR, though the IS / SWP were allowed to sell their wares at RAR gigs – some of which were enormous. The racist Right found that “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack” stirred most teenagers to thump them rather than nod in agreement. Ska and reggae bands were ever-present at RAR gigs and rallies. RAR’s magazine Temporary Hoarding was first published on May Day 1977.

Despite that, the racist Right looked as if it was going to make inroads in electoralist politics, it got 10% of the vote in the 1974 London’s local elections. It certainly seemed to be making determined efforts to monopolise the streets. Kevin Gateley was killed in Notting Hill in the Summer of 1976, prior to that Enoch Powell, in April claimed that ‘Britain’ was being “hollowed from within…” a portentous remark, if not a particularly clear one. England, or at least London, experienced a number of long, hot summers. In August 1977 the National Front staged an “anti-mugging” march through Lewisham. It left the south London, largely plebeian borough in a mess, but did very little to wipe out ‘mugging’ (street theft of purses and money off isolated, working class people) mostly women out shopping.

There can be little doubt that the rank and file of the police were sympathetic to the NF. The ‘blacks’ had suddenly become a majority, allegedly, in some London boroughs and parts of other cities and towns. The ‘Asians’ were a slightly more ambiguous matter, they didn’t look all that out of the ordinary, at least when they didn’t wear ‘Asian’ clothes. And they had the proper attitude to women, they should be seen and not heard, and stay in the kitchen. The ‘Blacks’ largely of West Indian origin have now become observably English. Some third, and forth generation ‘Asians’ have reverted to wearing the sort of clothes worn in the Indian subcontinent. Given that even liberals can use phrases like “fourth generation immigrants” possibly this is not too blameworthy.

Rock Against Racism rather fizzled out in the course of the 1980s mainly because groups like the National Front did, there was nothing like an invasion (you’ll recalled Mrs Thatcher used similar language in the 1990s, when she was Prime MInister) or a ‘deluge’. It was for most towns and cities more of a trickle of immigrants. The people coming into the economy proved useful, – most of the Asians were middle class and educated. They were somewhat similar to the Poles of the ‘noughties’, nearly all of whom had skills. Despite which, the Daily Mail attempted to work up grievances against them – then they all went home.

It is worth mentioning that Blair Peach, a New Zealander was killed opposing a National Front celebration of St George’s Day (April 23rd) in Southall. It is in (far) west London, and was heavily populated by Indians – the biggest Hindu temple on the planet is in the area. Peach was part of a crowd of about 3,000 – they were managed by an astonishing number of police, about 2,500. Peach was killed some streets away clearly obviously trying to get away from a baton charge.

He didn’t manage to escape, and died next day of a physical trauma – a huge injury to the back of his head. The London Metropolitan Police took years to admit that they did it. And that they had been very heavy handed dealing with a crowd that was not being physically aggressive and was not much bigger than their own body of men. This was the socio-political ambience that Bowie and Clapton decided to throw their tuppence worth of racist bilge around.