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ameryth74 · 7 hours ago

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How Very Dare They: More Thoughts on the Bears

That photo frame, and the various photos in it, has been my favourite thing about the bears since it appeared at the Montreal show. So far we’ve seen: Frank ‘foo-foo’ Lamarr, Larry Grayson (!!!!! still not over it !!!!!!), John Inman, Quentin Crisp, Stella Artois (identifying her was good work), Mado Lamotte, Liberace, Bette Davis, Judy Garland and Ken Dodds.

I’m not really trying to decode the bears (although I got as excited as anyone else with the countdown). As I’ve said before the only message I take from the bears is that they are consistently presented as gay and occasionally presented as Harry and Louis. And everything I want to say about them comes from those two observations. I love the photo frames, because that’s where the bear tableaus engage most with queer history. I think the queer figures appeared in those frames are an exploration of quite a specific theme – and I think that theme is important.

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Frank Lamarr and Larry Grayson both started their working lives as drag acts. There was a demand for that in the 1940s and 1950s, a circuit. Entertainment was a way for working class gay men (boys really Grayson left school at 14 to start work) to earn a living and be around other gay men. Sex between men was still illegal, but queer culture had a place in mainstream entertainment – pantomimes and drag acts in particular, but also highly camp comedic acts. All these acts were connected to much older cultural practices that had developed as part of the marginal lives queer people lived (the history of queer people in the entertainment industry and the cultures that developed is fascinating and goes back well before the twentieth century – polari is a fascinating place to start if you’re interested). By the time Lamarr and Grayson were getting started these sorts of acts were a coded language that everyone understood.

I’ve written a little bit about Frank Lamarr who remained a Manchester drag act his whole life and became a cultural institution. Danny La Rue had a similar career to Lamarr, but was London based and did a lot of work in Pantomine. Larry Grayson and John Inman’s careers went in a different direction from Lamarr’s (John Inman had started as an actor, rather than as a drag act, but operated within the same cultural sphere as Lamarr and Grayson – he worked a lot in Pantomine). In the 1970s, both Inman and Grayson got jobs as highly camp television performers – Grayson presenting game shows and Inman in the sitcom Are You Being Served.

Here they were bringing camp queer characters to a British television audience for pretty much the first time (The Carry On film series started in the 1950s, but the BBC moved much slower). These characters, and the actors who played them, were operating in a new environment – sex between men was legalised in 1967 and obviously the 1960s and 1970s was a time of huge cultural and political upheaval – both of which meant there was a small space for queer representation that hadn’t existed before. Quentin Crisp’s autobiography – The Naked Civil Servant – was turned into a television play in 1975. It was part of the same wave of queer visibility – a visibility limited to very camp characters – but a new visibility nonetheless. But it was a much more high culture version of the story – John Hurt who played Quentin Crisp won a BAFTA (this was appropriate and reflecting the endless importance of class in British society – since Crisp himself was middle-class while Grayson and Inman were working-class).

All the queer figures that have featured in the frames have been part of the coded camp queer culture that Inman and Grayson took to television. In fact for a long time Liberace was most famous in Britain, because of his part in a legal dispute about that code. In 1956, a columnist from The Daily Mirror (Louis’ least favourite tabloid) described Liberace as: “…the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” Liberace sued for libel. In response The Mirror claimed that they hadn’t meant to imply he was gay (they obviously had – pay attention to the phrase ‘mother love’ – it’ll be back) and Liberace testified (untruly) that he was not gay. The Mirror lost and Liberace got awarded reasonably substantial damages. Here queer codes fell apart when exposed to public and legal scrutiny. Everyone was denying that they meant what they very much did mean.

Mado Lamotte and Stella Artois are contemporary drag queens - and they are keeping that much older culture alive. I think this video of Stella Artois, which I found on youtube, is very interesting:

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Two things Steve Phillips says while getting ready to perform as Stella Artois are I think particularly relevant. He talks about performing as a job. All of these figures were working entertainers and all (even Mado Lamotte and Stella Artois) started working at a time where the only way you could be visibly queer and an entertainer was by working as a drag act, or in Pantomine or in other high camp comedy. Then Phillips quotes Barry Humphries who said that if Dame Edna Everage (Humphries drag persona) was punched in the face then Humphries wouldn’t have a bruise. Which is such a powerful statement of both the homophobic violence that these performers faced and the way that the high visibility of drag acted as armour and helped people negotiate violence and oppresion.

The bears have been exploring a very particular of queer entertainment history (Divine fits this same theme – although an American independent film version – very visibly queer, but in the 1970s at least, not out. Although given that Divine was the first such figure it’s possible that he was chosen as part of the queer history of Baltimore and the development of a theme came later). These are performers who were visible through their campness, but often not out, and were consciously part of a long cultural tradition of men who had created very similar spaces in very similar ways. With each additional figure I become convinced that the bears are being curated by at least one person who is actively interested in queer history. These figures are not picked just because they are prominent or famous, they are picked because the people picking them have something to say.

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I say people, I mean Harry and Louis. There were really good reasons, even before Louis began his latest quest to make sure everyone knew his involvement with the bears, to think they were involved. I want to start with 2011 Sugarscape videos (which contain answers to all of the world’s most important questions). Literally 8 million things happen in this 75 second video (and I have so many questions - mostly did Harry really say “that he’s gay”, but also it’s just occurred to me what Louis meant hen he said he’d been teasing Harry loads).

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But most relevant to the bears is Louis’ reaction to his boyfriend mentioning Eleanor and thereby implying he’s straight: “How very dare you”.

Louis’ comment is a reference to a recurring sketch in the Catherine Tate show (you can see every example here). In this sketch, Derek is a highly camp character who hits all the coded ways that Inman and Grayson conveyed to television audience that they were gay, but acts absolutely outraged when a character assumes he’s gay – “how very dare you!” is his response.The sketch itself is referential – contrasting a hyper-stylised, coded, marginalised gay culture with a society that is more open (and I could say a tonne more about it than that, but I want to get this finished – so I’ll leave it for now). And Louis’ use references both the sketches and the culture.

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That’s not the only reference Louis made to camp British culture of the 1970s in November 2011. When they went on Alan Carr (who is a direct descendent of Larry Grayson in particular – camp for a whole new world) – Louis greeted him “Hello Gorgeous” and then told Carr that he would out-camp him during the dance-off. Then there’s the interview where he talks about Harry in a dress (link because I can’t get the embed code to work).Both what he’s saying and how he’s saying it are so much part of that particular camp, coded way of talking.

I think there’s an important distinction to be made between Louis’ very brief, active references to camp culture, and this interview:

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Both are incredibly gay in form and in content, but in different ways. In the sugarscape interview (from January 2011), Louis is describing gay experiences and comes across as quite camp – but neither is particularly deliberate. By November the same year he was consciously adopting coded language that had a long association with gay men in entertainment. (there are other example which are a little more general than those I’ve mentioned - he talks about bringing Mr Camp in another sugarscape interview and described himself as flaboyant in New Zealand in April 2012).

We can’t know why consciously camp Louis shined so briefly (and if anyone has any earlier examples I’d really like to see them). But I believe (I think it’s a reasonably common belief) that somewhere between auditioning on X-factor with a girlfriend and the UK media blitz of autumn 2011, Louis Tomlinson became someone who was quite comfortable with being seen as gay. I’d go further and say that part of this was embracing the conscious, coded, queerness of camp British culture.

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(Every post is improved by a video of this G-A-Y performance, to make the point about how happy Louis was)

But he only got the briefest window to share that part of himself. It was one of the first things that got taken away – it was one of the first thing that got taken for him. There’s a huge sad irony there – that this code that was developed specifically so that gay men could be visible in a time when they were completely marginalised – was taken away from a young gay man, because it was too gay, in a supposedly more liberal time.

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When Frank Pearson’s father first saw him perform in drag as Foo Foo Lamarr he threw a bar stool at him. Larry Grayson and John Inman bought that coded queerness that Lamarr’s father found so threatening straight into people’s living rooms. What I love most about the bears is their exploration of the different way that generations of entertainers have found ways to be openly queer, even though their sexuality was marginalised, criminalised and terrorised.

There is a final layer of queer history to this – history that is being made now. Within the context of a One Direction concert queerness is once again in the margins (albeit also under the spotlight for that one concert in London). The bears elaborate queer codes are tucked away from the stage. Because their owners cannot (yet) be visible in the way that the people they put in frames have been.

#rbb and sbb #i don’t think you can really understand the excitement #each night held #waiting for the reveal #everyone scrambling to decode #everyone feeling like it was leading somewhere

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ameryth74 · 7 hours ago

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Ok breaking containment for this one because I need everyone who will listen to hear this.

Women who suffer bad cramps are told cramps shouldn't affect school/work/etc, but no one ever investigates further because no one can possibly know if what someone experiences is just typical pain or something much worse.

Well after 15 years of stage 4 treatment-resistant endometriosis that came with pain as bad as, if not worse than, actual labor contractions every month, all the while being told I was 'typical' and 'just had bad cramps', I've finally been healed (another post for another time). I have had what everyone describes as the elusive 'normal period pain' for several months now, and I am begging you to look me in the eyes and listen because I need everyone who can hear this to hear this.

I have been on both sides of this. I have the hard-earned knowledge of what a period 'should' feel like.

If you have to put in any effort to hide your cramps, you need to get help.

Even during of the PEAK OF CRAMPING (i.e., as bad as your cramps possibly get), you should still be able to stand, speak, walk, eat, work, and sleep with no problems. These tasks should require very-little-to-no extra effort beyond what you would normally do when you aren't on your period. When you do these things, you should feel grumpy and a little bit icky and maybe a twinge of nerves and NOTHING MORE.

If you have to sit in the corner and hope no one approaches you because you can't speak or stand without showing pain, even slightly, you need to get help. If your pain is showing on your face, you need to get help. And most importantly, IF YOUR PAIN DOES NOT RESPOND TO 1-2 TYLENOL OR IBUPROFEN, YOU NEED TO GET HELP.

Your period cramps should make you grumpy. Your period cramps should make you feel a little icky and tired. Your period cramps should make you feel your insides existing/moving a bit and a twinge of nerves that makes you groan slightly then the "pain" should stop there, NOTHING MORE.

If your cramps put you on the floor but you make believe you're the captain of a ship who has just been stabbed and has to hide it to fight on, and you force yourself to power through the day, please understand: you are not okay, that does not make you okay. Just because you can power through the pain doesn't mean you aren't sick. If you have to force yourself through any basic task beyond the effort it takes you to do when you aren't on your period, and I am holding your face and looking you in the eye as I say this because I need you to hear me: You aren't normal. You don't 'just have bad cramps'. You are sick and you need to get help.

Now most people will tell you if your cramps are beyond a 3 out of 10 on the pain scale, you should see a doctor. While this is usually true, you have to consider chronic pain CAN AND WILL BREAK YOUR PAIN SCALE. Most people will only compare pain they currently feel to pain they may experience one day but probably never will. "Sure these cramps feel bad now, but if I had a leg amputated with no anesthesia, that would hurt WAY worse, so this pain can't be that bad-" No. Your pain is what it is, objectively, full stop. My cramps were at a 10 out of 10 every. Single. Time. And nobody told me claiming they were a 6-8 because I thought to myself 'what if I lose a limb one day?' was completely wrong. 10 pain is 10 pain. And if there's something that hurts worse than that, guess what. The thing you are experiencing right now is still a 10 out of 10 on the pain scale. Just because you experience it every month doesn't mean it's magically not as bad is it is. And if your pain is worse than a 3 out of 10, you need to get help.

Now when I say get help, I mean find the root cause of your pain. You can't just throw drugs and hormones at it without knowing what it causing your pain. Endometriosis, fibroids, pcos, cancer, adenomyosis, polyps, thyroid issues, there is always a cause. And if you leave it untreated, it will grow and get worse to the point where it resists treatment and the drugs and hormones you've been throwing at it for years don't work anymore. You have to find a doctor that will investigate. If your doctor tells you you 'just have bad cramps' get a new doctor. I know you've been told that but please hear me: no one ever just has bad cramps. A healthy human body doesn't spontaneously cause itself pain so bad you can't stand up; there is ALWAYS a cause.

I was sick for more than 15 years. My entire life was put on hold and now I'm in my late 20s trying desperately to play catch up for everything I missed. I want to pick up 12yo me, spin her around, and tell her she doesn't have to die before she finally stops hurting. I don't want anyone to suffer the same fate I did simply because everyone told them they were normal. A little twinge of pain here and there is normal, suffering is not. I promise you your pain is real, it is not normal, and dear heavenly day I am begging you you need to get help now.

TL;DR: There is no such thing as 'just bad cramps.' If you feel anything more than grumpy, icky, and pain greater than a 3 out of 10, you need to find out what's wrong with you before it gets worse.

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