Panic! at the Met Gala
Media Round-Up:
The Hand (2020) - Very much a film which was made one-handed. Beautiful but also weirdly lacking in some of Wong Kar-Wai’s typical stylistic techniques. Still great though.
James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (edited by Randall Kenan): You know me, I’m an insufferable Baldwin stan. I’m part-way through and really loving both the writing and the insight into his mind that you get - especially in terms of his thoughts on art. It also really shows the persistence of some of his flaws, like his refusal to unshackle himself from Americanness, which is fascinating to a bitch like me.
Chungking Express (1994) - Incredible! Phenomenal This is a Faye Wong and Tony Leung stan page now! The chemistry! The yearning! My new favourite WKW film!
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Like any good overly online entertainment writer, I was looking at all the fits from the Met Gala and wondering how the people with the most could do the absolute least. There were a few things that stuck out to me though, aside from the meh theme and the refusal of rich men to have any imagination. The things I won’t go into here are AOC’s facile dress, or Cara Develigne’s weird bib which managed to combine homophobia, transmisogyny and regular misogyny in one Black-and-Tan founder’s descendant package. I think more than enough people have talked about them and the topic is overwrought. I possibly might come back round to Dan Levy’s outfit if people want me to talk about the place of radical art in the modern-day? But we’ll see.
Elliot Page, his terrible suit and the fantasy of Desirability
There’s not much to analyse in the outfit itself here, it’s just a suit that looks stolen from an older brother with a half-hearted homage to Oscar Wilde attached. I genuinely don’t know why a man with that much money is consistently being styled so terribly by their designers!
You’d expect that the normal procedure would happen in online spaces. A celebrity man wears a shit outfit, gets ribbed for it and we move on. This didn’t happen here.
Instead, people who took the piss were told that they were holding him to a too-high standard of masculinity, or generally being unfair - it almost felt like someone was gonna get called a transmisandrist at any given moment. This on its own is annoying, but not massively interesting, people say stupid shit to defend their favourite celebrities all the time. What I think makes this more interesting is the clear pattern that has formed with Elliot Page and what that says about who does and doesn’t get supported in marginalised communities.
I think the response to him can be divided into two main camps.
The first of these is (predominantly) white cis people. There has been a kind of weird way in which literally anything he does is celebrated as if it’s a tremendous victory in a way that feels a little patronising? Lots of ‘you go king’s and ‘he’s so brave!’ type shit which seems to serve no purpose other than to say: “Look how I support the transsexuals! Isn’t it so great!”
The flip side of the support from cis people is the weird sexual energy directed at him. It is a pretty fun and popular thing to make hyperbolic sexually aggressive statements about celebrities and the violent things you want them to do to you. With Page this feels especially jarring because they are very clearly twink, that man is not breaking your back, he is barely breaking their way out of a cardboard box. There is nothing wrong with Elliot Page living his best twink life by taking low-effort thirst traps and getting lots of praise, but what is weird is how a lot of the reactions from cis people (esp cis women) feel very forced and performative.
I think the thing to recognise here is that in the grand scheme of things, Elliot Page is an incredibly safe trans person to support. He’s rich, white and thin, has a relatively clean public image and doesn’t have an especially radical politic beyond the occasional #SupportTransKids. Again, none of that means they’re a bad person but it does say something about who is allowed to be a publicly supported trans figure and who isn’t. There is not a world in which a Black or TMA person gets the same support that Page has gotten, those cis people are not giving that to anyone whose lives and stories are a little messier.
It’s also crucial to hone in on the desirability politics aspect here. As someone who is white, skinny, has visible abs and no visible disabilities, Page sits very cleanly in the top echelons of desirability politics (aside from their transness). This is notable when you compare him to another trans man in the public eye, Chaz Bono. Much like Page, he is rich, in and around the celebrity sphere and transitioned in the public eye. He has never gotten anything near the positive response Page has gotten from cis people. Now, part of this is a matter of timing, public support for trans people was definitely in a different place in 2010 compared to today, but it is hard to imagine a shirtless selfie from Bono getting written up in Them (for clarity this is written by a white trans woman):
(The piece is very dramatically headlined "Elliot Page’s Shirtless Selfies Are More Than Just Thirst Traps")
“The pic is a simple one, showing the actor chilling at home, smiling gently as he flexes his frankly unfairly sculpted abs in the mirror. (At least, I think he was flexing. Do they just look like that at rest? Jeepers!)”
Once the salivating is over, later in the piece, this point is also made:
"Whereas a decade ago, selfies like Page’s might have been picked up in gossip tabloids and dissected for prominently showing off the actor’s top surgery scars, publications as vanilla and normative as USA Today and Men’s Health ran the story over the weekend with headlines focusing primarily on Page’s “six-pack” washboard abs."
While the writer doesn't engage with the body politics at play here, the subtext becomes text. Page isn’t being put on this pedestal just because everyone loved their performance in Juno more than Bono’s appearances in American Horror Story. Much like many other thin trans people, Page’s size is a key part of what enables him to survive and thrive in cis society the way that he does. That is a clear part of why 'a decade ago' (when Bono was coming out) the focus on his body was very different.
The other camp of response is from white trans people - particularly white transmasculine people. It felt like many of them were taking any ‘insult’ (using that loosely) to Page as a personal attack. Saying Page’s suit was badly fitted was reacted to as if you’d shouted baby trans Alex who lives round the corner for not understanding men’s sizes. Much like other overidentification with a celebrity, it obfuscates how Elliot Page is considerably richer and better connected that the vast majority of trans people ever will be. He does not need defence from light ribs on social media by accounts he will never see.
I think the reason why these people so aggressively identify with and defend Page is that he represents something very specific. He embodies the fantasy of a transition where you don’t have to worry about GoFundMes, where you can actually quit that job with the transphobic boss without worrying about how you’ll pay rent, where your peers will mostly respect your identity. It is also a fantasy grounded in whiteness and thinness because those are the ways through which you are societally understood as a) human and b) male*. To bring Chaz Bono back into the equation that’s why he doesn’t work in the cultural role where Page sits. Most of the other factors (wealth, whiteness etc) are broadly similar - the main difference in this arena is fatness. This is because fatness is seen as emasculating (and thereby not fulfilling manhood) but also to put it more bluntly - Bono is seen as less fuckable and thereby less of a Perfect Man to project onto.
It’s easy to separate this and say, that’s the world of celebrities and social media, who gives a fuck? The reason why it matters is that these ideals, these fantasies and these structures take place on the level of us mere mortals as well.
Life isn't a popularity contest. But when it comes to trans mutual aid it kind of is. The easiest way to demonstrate this is through the GoFundMe/general crowdfunder, which is the only way in which many trans (and otherwise marginalised) people can afford essential gender-affirming healthcare as well as basics like rent.
Who has a big enough platform to have a large swathe of people who care enough about you to donate? White/thin/desirable people.
Who is more likely to be read as human and therefore more pitiable? White/thin/desirable people.
Who has access to the networks and communities through which these crowdfunders could be shared? White/thin/desirable people.
This lens of desirability is crucial for understanding who does and does not have access to particular resources and spaces. More fundamentally, it’s crucial to seeing who we designate humanity to. After all, if you can’t see someone as human then how are you going to act in solidarity with them?
(Shoutouts to Samson, Eli and Jackson, lots of my thoughts here were produced here while bouncing off of them in frantic Whatsapp/Discord conversations)
*When I talk about maleness here I am specifically talking about hegemonic maleness. Imo Black men (cis or trans) don’t actually have access to it because they are automatically hyper gendered (pushed into a bestial hypermasculinity) as opposed to straight-up hegemonic manhood. In that same vein but for varying reasons and to varying degrees, no racialised man can ever truly reach hegemonic manhood.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.