#gay cowboy ken

[zenaidamacrouras1]

This was my brother's favorite Ken, his canon name is "Horse Lovin' Ken."

He came to us from a yard sale missing his red checker shirt, grinning proudly with his his jaunty cowboy hat, leather shearling vest loose over his bare chest, and squeezed into those skin tight red leather pants.

It was pretty clear to us even in a conservative rural area in the 80s and 90s that him and Barbie were "just friends." Barbie had her boyfriends, but red leather pants Ken was not among them.

Shirtless under that vest was really a bit obscene, so when we found a red mesh Ken tank top at a yard sale, he got that instead, because it matched the red leather pants. I'm going to tell you something that probably won't surprise you - the addition of the red mesh muscle tank did not make the red leather pants less risqué.

[theloopus]

gay 70s copaganda thesis is actually about the inherent homoeroticism of the western genre and the cultural image of the male cowboy it borrows from. or as Susan Sarandon once put it, "They got their guns out because they couldn't get their dicks out"

[newbuddylove]

[rodrigoincolors]

These Ken are cowboys!

Inspired by a recent twitter interaction between two of my biggest celebrity crushes. So it might as well be a concept art for their next movie. Please, Hollywood, make it happen!

Glen Powell, Ryan Gosling

[manhunter4art]

My cowboy in that one Ken outfit

tryin a different coloring style too :>

[project-sekai-facts]

Wait An/Kohane have outright stated romantic interest?

poor wording on my end bc they never actually say "an and kohane like each other romantically" but the evidence it very much there and it is clearly depicted and phrased in other ways. for example: the shoujo sparkle effect that is used for An from Kohane's POV.

This effect is often used on Haruka in Minori's imagination, which, well, let's just say it doesn't disprove that Kohane is attracted to An. While the effect is also used to show a character being cute or having a strong "idol" aura without any attraction attached, it's prettly clear the intent was to show Kohane's attraction. Also she was blushing.

Bonus points to the fact the wedding event has a underlying message (they say it on screen) about how marriage should be equal regardless of the genders of the couple [because gay marriage currently isn't legal in Japan].

There's also literally everything in Buddy Funny Spend Time. While almost all of the interactions in that event can be read as platonic if you really want to, they're written so you can interpret it as romantic if you choose to. And considering the featured pairs in this event were Minori/Haruka, An/Kohane, and (briefly) Shizuku/Airi, it's not like that reading isn't supported by the writers lol. There's one part where Minori and Kohane get jealous of how close Haruka and An are as childhood friends and aren't sure if they can amount to that, but they want to try. Doesn't necessarily have to be romantic but can be if you choose to read it as such.

When Kohane is visibly attracted to Haruka, An gets slightly jealous and says that her singing should be the only thing that makes Kohane react that way.

Haruka also points out that although An has always been super friendly she's never been like this with anyone until Kohane came into her life, and still keeps this behaviour Kohane-exclusive. An says it's because they're partners, which, kinda friendzones them, but kinda doesn't.

The word for partner used in the story - "aibou" - means, to put it in incredibly basic terms, coworkers. It's like the cowboy or detective word for partner, though I believe it comes up in shounen every so often (the genre vbs story is based on). In itself, aibou has no romantic connotation. But 3 of the partnerships we see in VBS' story have lots of interactions that easily read as having romantic undertones, so basically in the context of VBS story the nature of said partnerships becomes a little more ambiguous. The word is still platonic and that doesn't change, but you get the idea. Oh and VBS has recurring romantic soulmate imagery more on that later.

continuing on BFST, yeah they went on a date. which is strongly suggested to be a romantic date unlike how it's sometimes used platonically. like the other characters say An is "seeing someone", at least in the English translation, which is very much associated with romantic interest. Also the original Japanese for the "do you know who she's going out with" line uses the phrase デートの相手 which is the Japanese equivalent for the word "date" (as in a person/your date), so it's not really any different. they go on another one in Kick it up a notch and An's card story for the event. their relationship is never labelled or anything (probably bc this genre avoids that sorta thing for fan-related reasons) but this very much was a thing that happened.

(also when ken says partner he says aibou. so not partner /r but anyway it does clarify that this date is to do with their relationship on a different level to partners /p. ie: an's going on a date with kohane because she's cute not because she's her partner. language is fun)

Lastly back on that thing I said I'd come back to. The Walk on and on costumes have romantic soulmate symbolism included on them. The wings on the backs of the outfits are based on the mythical hiyoku bird, a one-winged bird that could only fly after meeting its other half. Kohane's costume has pink accents, one of the variants has accents in An's image color and the wings on the backs of those variants match up to each other. The card illstrations themselves also feature crows, which mate for life. While the symbolism is mostly associated with Toya, the Whip the Wimp Girl! cards take place in the same location as the woao cards which is pretty neat, and makes sense given the themes of both events. I've put both their gacha logos above as well. Oh and An's card for wtwg was. Something.

And Kohane got the valentine event this year and it was about her entering a contest to win limited edition chocolates for An I forgot about that until just now.

Have fun with that.

[biohazard-inevitable]

Hair

They say that hair holds stories, that the style is what makes a man.

They say long locks make you a pansy and a real man should have it short lest they be mistaken for a girl.

Where I grew up, every man buzzed their hair down.

It was a shame for it to be long and shaggy, and mothers would fuss over you, insisting upon a haircut.

For girls, it was fine.

They could have hair as long as they wanted or as short as they needed, so long as it wasnt buzzed as short as a man’s.

Being anything else just wasn’t a thing round these parts where churches chimed every sunday, pastors clammoring around resturants and filling their quotas in a single lunch.

So I buzzed mine.

I tried as hard as I could to seem as manly as possible

To appear as bull of a brute as any cowboy should.

I wore all the boy things and had all the short boy hair.

My scalp was sensitive anyways, so I thought it didn’t bother me.

It was better shorter.

Wasnt it?

I still gazed and clammored about the anime boys I saw on screen or in Otome games though.

I gushed about how pretty they were with hair down their backs like a silken curtain, or whipping wild through the air like the mane of a lion.

Legolas was never deemed as not manly enough

Beither was Zen or inuyasha or the undertaker.

A crush, I supposed.

Because of course thats all it was.

I was a gay little boy with gay little crushes and my type was men with long, Beautiful hair.

Right?

My hair was a dull, discolored brown from the shimmering blonde it used to be, the blonde I remember from kindergarten.

I tried to return to that blonde with bleach.

My school didnt allow unnatural colors, so anything was better than that matted, oily brown.

Shaved short and as platinum as a ken doll, I should have been as man as ever.

4 years, I stayed like that, and while the short hair was easy to take care of, I felt as hideous as a pile of sludge.

It didnt matter if I was loved for my looks, I supposed.

Wouldn’t that be too vain of me?

Boys weren’t supposed to care about what they looked like, they werent supposed to coo and admire Beautiful hair or seethe in jealousy that their sister looked so much better and has such long, goregous hair.

It wasn’t until after high school that I began to explore.

Covid let me grow my hair out more, though I still trimmed the sides.

I let my bangs grow long and shaggy over my face, like a veil to hide me from the world.

Eventually I dyed it again, this time going with that green I had always wanted to try, the one I had seen on my favorite youtuber growing up, fluffy and emerald.

Still, for years more, I kept it short. Only allowing that fringe to hover over me as some sort of style.

Recently though, I’ve realized I want that hair that those anime men had.

I want that soft curtain rolling down my back like waves of an ebony river, flecks of mossy green dotting it like a miasma of toxin flowing through the oily black stream.

I want the hair like the ring girl

The people around me are foolish and prudent to think the length of ones hair makes you more or less of a man.

I know that now, and I’m glad I do.

I want to stop pretending not to like things

[xamaxenta]

If Ace is a pink cowboy Barbie, is Marco the Totally Not Going to a Gay Bar (wdym the trendy clubs we referenced were gay bars?!?) pierced ear Ken?

Yes Marco would be his Ken in an equally pink(purple?) denim ensemble

[official-chekov-enjoyer]

Song Tag

Rules: Pick a song for each letter of your URL, then tag as many people as there are letters in your URL

@criticalyaclaimed thanks for the tag :p time to reveal my super monotoned music tastes lol.

We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel

Every Little Thing Thing She Does Is Magic by The Police

Life Is A Highway by Rascal Flatts

One by Metallica

Vienna by Billy Joel

El Condor Pasa (If I Could) by Simon & Garfunkel

Alien Heart by Max Modem and the Mainframes

Get’cha Head In The Game by HSM Cast

All Revved Up With No Place To Go by Meatloaf

You May Be Right by Billy Joel

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen

Oh! Darling by The Beatles

I’m Just Ken by Ryan Gosling

Im starting to think my tastes aren’t as monotoned as I thought but this playlist certainly isn’t a pleasant color scheme. It’s like Chartreuse and brown and like bright read and black and like wood orange and Barbie Pink. But like…if you want the playlist: here it is

@thelichen @ragsy @actingcamplibrarian @kingof-the-crossroads @It-oreilly @barbaratwilightpotter @sad-gay-cowboy @breval @martianspyder @raaorqtpbpdy @retroqueer @theniftycat

[skunkes]

gay little dress up while waiting for rest of cowboy ken outfit

The straight leg pants i ordered got here today but they were too LONG so im gonna try sum others....used my regular facking skinny jeans in da meantime

Also im wondering if I should just break and buy sum (more expensive) white boots instead of these taupe ones....part of me is thinking to keep em since ill only wear em to barbie movie probably, the Right Pants will cover up more of them, and they won't be seen much but the other part of me is like ouhghhhhhhh need to be accurate

[elfhunk]

i really didn't like barbara (2023) but i think the thing making me feel most bonkers is the idea that ken goes outside like this in public:

and all he can remark upon is how respected, cool, and powerful he feels. how everyone likes him, and respects him, and it's nothing at all like how people look at him in barbieland. that he feels, specifically, no violent intentions towards him, while barbie is grappling with the concept of the male gaze for the first time.

and this was a problem for me, and it haunted me for the rest of the movie. because do you know what it actually feels like to be man dressed in public like this? to put on your funny little cowboy outfit and romp around with your gal pal?

you're not nodding to a bro finishing his set at the gym. you're not getting fist bumps and handshakes from random men on the street. you are getting called slurs.

you are getting literally nothing but barely contained homophobic contempt from men who immediately clock you as a gross, weird, queer freak. this is a one way ticket to being called the gay slur of the day, and the movie just sort of hopes you forget homophobia exists and how men enact homophobia onto each other constantly.

i don't know how this happened, but it remains a glaring issue for the rest of the movie. the ken characters dressing in sexual, hyper-masculine archetypes of cowboys and every imaginable type of jock is supposed to be a joke about guys being dudes and how ken dolls used to dress but it just... loops back around to feeling pointedly homophobic, when these are aesthetics that have been 100% adopted by gay men?

like, any salient conversation about the patriarchy doesn't function when your toxic alpha males are dressed to go to a circuit party. this is what i wore to pride.

as a man who does dress like this pretty often, and loves to go to the gym dressed like this to work out and feel sexy and confident... it felt really bad? and really mean for no reason? like, these are aesthetics that gay men adopted because we like being men, and we like playing these male archetypes to such campy extremes precisely because straight men stop finding it appealing and it lets us enjoy all of the fun parts of male identity we didn't get to enjoy when male spaces were toxic cesspools of homophobia that pushed us out.

i accept the possibility that i am being dramatic, but i think it is an issue for me that barbara (2023) thinks its funny and absurd for men to dress like this, and plays the visual of it it so often for comedy while the boys wrestle and grab and tease each other that it begins to make me feel really unwelcome.

making fun of guys being dudes so much that you accidentally become homophobic is not new! and i always hate it! but in this instance, it did really did make me, a doll collector and barbie fan who is also a gay man? a gay man who really loves and has a deep affinity for the idea of being a wonderful supportive ken to all of the wonderful barbies in my life? who also dresses in slutty little neon gym shorts sometimes because it makes him feel confident and sexy in a form of masculinity that has been queered into something empowering?

it made me feel really gross. i did not like it at all.

also i hated allan.

[lily1718]

BARBIE MOVIE SPOILER ALERT

THIS MOVIE HAS EVERYTHING. IT HAS

Barbie, Ken, Allan, plastics, Margot Robbie, existential crisis, Self discovery, Horses, Patriarchy, Feminism, The fucked up world, Ryan Gosling, His absolute banger of songs, Kendom Land , John Cena, META, The cutest outfits ever, Margot Robbie crying every 10 minutes, Ryan gosling crying every 1 hour, Capitalism, Interdimension travel, Roller skating, The godfather, Horses, Pride and Prejudice, More patriarchy, The ghost of Ruth living in the Mattel headquarters, Gays, Old people, Watches (atleast two on both wrist), Billie Eilish's song I thought was very out of context but fit so fucking well that I had to shed a tear or two, Gynecologist, Duolingo, Will Ferrell being wanted to call mother, An intern who is just so soft I wanna give him a hug, Catcallers, Buttslapers, Bullies, Beers, Harrasment and Violations, Pools you can walk on, Extra himbo Ken, Muscles, Sparkles, Glitter, Dance offs, Actual fight, Splits, Depression, Anxiety, Identify crisis, Woman giving a long speech that makes other women sigh in the endless long suffering of being a women, TRUCKS, And finally, COWBOY HATS

[kattahj]

Short Barbie review

Just got back from Barbie. It was silly and kind of fun, packed with Barbie namedropping/product placement, and with a rather simplified feminist message, and I expected all of that.

It also made me cry, more than once. I did NOT expect that, and it's all because of Margot Robbie and America Ferrera. Robbie manages to be both "stereotypical Barbie" to a T and increasingly human as the story progresses, and Ferrera is just wonderfully human the whole time.  (Honestly? I ship it.)

SPOILER:

Also unexpected? That when it comes down to Barbies vs. Kens, Allan and the gay Kens are on the side of the Barbies. I guess guys like that don't fare well in the patriarchy either. :-)

Ken really should get a horse or two. His cowboy yearning cracked me up, as someone who had a cowboy doll instead of a Ken doll as a kid. It was a Lone Ranger Tex Dawson action figure, but I called him Charlie, and I think Charlie could teach Ken a thing or two about nontoxic cowboy masculinity, and also horses.

But I digress.

Anyway, I don't think this is a film for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

[nerdby]

Ok, so I know that making pretentious posts about pop culture is kinda my thing, but I wanted to keep this thought to myself. Cause contrary to popular belief, I don't enjoy being pretentious. Like I don't like that I'm a know-it-all, but when I was a kid I usually only got positive attention from my teachers for being smart cause my parents were assholes and now here we are.

So in the Barbie movie Ken develops an obsession with horses before going back to Barbieland to overthrow the matriarchy and enact a 1950s-esque patriarchal society where all the Barbies were Stepford Wives. The reasoning behind this is because Westerns and cowboys were insanely popular in the US in the 1950s. That's also the same era in which President Dwight D. Eisenhower encountered the founder of The International Christian Leadership Abraham Vereide and decided to turn the US into a Christofascist police state with absolute bullshit like The Lavender Scare and Cointelpro. Though Vereide was kind of a puppy dog compared to his successor, Doug Coe.

These also coincided with a coup against the Iranian government that was carried by the US and UK governments. This coup toppled the Iranian government and in turn led to the 1970s Islamic Revolution which allowed extremist groups like Al Qaeda to rise to power.

If you want to read about these things, I recommend these books--

Also worth looking into is Abbie Hoffman's work as he literally dedicated his life to uncovering the existence of Cointelpro.

There are probably other people I could mention like Malcolm X -- his autobiography is phenomenal, by the way. I have a much longer list on my Goodreads TBR and if I ever figure out how to share that list on my cellphone I will. Bezos seems to have disabled that on the Android app, though that might just be my phone. I traded my iPhone in for a free phone to save money and the one they gave me is not exactly fancy. Currently saving up, so I can get a better model to transfer to the sim card to.

But that's what up with Ken and horses. It's just a reference to 1950s bullshit -- AKA John Wayne.

[long-suffering-little-spoon]

Doodled my Barbie movie outfit! I was in love with Barbie and Ken's cowboy outfits and living a humble life out on a ranch (and being very gay) is sort of a dream of mine lmao.

[ID in alt]

[eddie-enigma]

A belated introduction

This account is, primarily, a college-sanctioned account for journaling my progress through a class called performing gender, drag, and creating a character. The character I have been working with, and titled the blog as, is the beloved Eddie Enigma, "like if a clown and a man had a son."

This class started with a reflection on the character I wanted to develop further, Eddie himself, with a paperbag puppet (as seen in my profile photo) as the main medium for exploring our characters. Years ago, he started as a rather generic "man but sparkly" drag persona, my desire to explore drag artist and masculine performance, but has evolved with me to be a fully fleshed out creation. Notably, Eddie and I are two separate people, I think of him more as a character than of any expression of myself. Part of the paperbag exercise was using a short questionnare to get ideas started, where such descriptors as "ken doll crotch," "combination of a clown and the worst frat boy you have ever met," and "wants to be a cowboy but too gay in the other direction" formed, which have been helpful in developing his stage presence.

Notably, the idea of clowns and cowboys come up often, both of which are my preferred creations when I'm dressing up for Halloween, Rocky Horror, or bored in my room at night. I love the colorful, emotive, silly vibe of clowns, but have a connection to my rural ranching background, which is where I think the cowboy influence comes from. (that and the undeniable homosexual history of cowboys in the US). I think I take a decent amount of inspiration from 80s and goth makeup as well, if his puppet is any indication.

The name "Eddie Enigma" may be going through an evolution as well. Tragically, my creativity cannot be contained, and I donated the name I would go on to prefer for him, "Eddie Audassity," to the house name competition for the class, which won. So for now, it is Eddie Enigma, of the House of Audassity, until I pass this class or leave for good.