Drunk Girls

Given my penchant for seventies television references, it might not surprise you that I am often a bit out of touch with contemporary popular culture. Still, because my gym pumps in the current top 20 on an endless cycle, I am able to at least identify songs that are circulating widely. Over the past few months, I have come to two conclusions. One, Fox is making a fortune off those Glee kids. Two, this country seems to prefer our young women to be drunk and reckless.

Numerous songs en vogue right now celebrate women consuming alcohol to the point of blacking out, hooking up, or hurling (not always in that order). Hadn’t thought about it? Take just a few examples off the top of my head. Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” opens with lines that would make even the most seasoned AA sponsor grimace: “Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack/’Cause when I leave for the night, I ain’t coming back.” Drinking beer, Ke$ha later sings, gets the “dudes...lining up.” Only police intervention ends that girl’s good times.



One of Lady GaGa’s earliest hits similarly recounts being so bombed that she has little idea of where she even is. In “Just Dance,” GaGa has had so much to drink that she “can’t see straight anymore” and has little idea how her “shirt got turned inside out.” If one of my friends reached this state, my advice would be to return home and sleep it off. GaGa, however, suggests that it might be the perfect time to hook up with somebody dancing in the club “And now there’s no reason at all,” she warbles, “ why you can’t leave here with me.” Well, no reason except that the previous stanzas suggest that she is entirely likely to puke on whatever guy she is taking home. Some people are into that, I suppose.

Not surprisingly, Katy Perry most happily jumps onto this bacchanal bandwagon. After all, her first major hit “I Kissed a Girl” more than foreshadowed this trend. In that song, Perry implied that sexual desire between women need not be taken more seriously than bar flirtations and pillow fights. It was fun, the melody told us, for women to kiss each other as an “experimental game” as long as there was a boyfriend waiting in the wings. Of course, a stiff cocktail got things rolling as the first stanza informs us, “This was never the way I planned/Not my intention/I got so brave, drink in hand/Lost my discretion.”



One of her most recent hits, “Last Friday Night,” ditches the homoerotic themes. In their place are the allegedly fun times that girls can have by drinking to point of serious memory loss. Perry sings about a list of events that would make most people fear for their personal safety. She awakes, hung over, with a stranger in her bed and lewd photos posted on-line. She is uncertain whether she has a hickey or a bruise. If you think that this is going to lead her to the door of Betty Ford, think again. She promises that she will do it all again next Friday.



With all that drinking and amnesia going on, it’s not surprising that P!nk would have a song entitled “Sober” where she contemplates the problems of being a party girl. Now, of all the artists mentioned, I actually like P!nk. To my mind she is one of very few who attempts to put out feminist messages in the mainstream. It’s true that many of P!nk’s other songs celebrate drinking as much as Ke$ha or Perry. At least P!nk most often talks about men as getting in the way of her good times (e.g. “U + Ur Hand”) rather than as being the objective for getting sloshed. “Sober” offers much needed caution to being a party girl. The song opens with the statement that she doesn’t “wanna be the girl who laughs the loudest/Or the girl who never wants to be alone/I don’t wanna be that call at four o’clock in the morning/’Cause I’m the only one you know in the world that won’t be home.” Unlike Perry, P!nk acknowledges that drinking to the point of blacking out will lead to serious regret instead of giggles with your girlfriends.



As far as I can tell, no such genre exists for men on the radio. Of course songs produced by male artists occasionally mention liquor or other drugs, but they are rarely presented as the opening shot to a night of forgotten sex. So what are we to make of all these "drunk girls" on the radio? Songs about women drinking to abandon are part of a larger pattern, it seems to me, in which women’s sexuality/sexualities and agency have been constrained in mainstream popular culture. One need only think of the classless Girls Gone Wild series to see that the media has been conflating drunkenness with sexual availability. If young women must continue to navigate the age-old virgin/whore (“ho” in modern parlance) dichotomy, then the music they listen to today isn’t offering many healthy solutions. These songs suggest that women can have a good time and explore a variety of sexual opportunities, but only if they are not really in control of their faculties. Drinking to the point of being without inhibition isn’t about putting yourself into situations where you might be exploited (or even be in serious danger). Rather, these songs suggest that it is a path to being cool and finding sexual fulfillment. Not only is that absurdly false, I think, but it also undermines women’s real ability to make decisions about sex. Instead it upholds the horrible notion that women are the most desirable when they are almost totally passive (if not passed out entirely).

If By "Gay," You Mean Happy

I have returned again to the Greater Boston Area. Alas, I had to turn down some friends’ offer to join them in P-Town this weekend because of the astounding amount of work that I need to accomplish before moving to Midwestern Funky Town. Have I mentioned previously that moving sucks?

Beyond mourning my departure from Boston and bemoaning my lack of P-Town time, I have also been thinking about a series of comments made by friends while I was in Texas. Who knew that such a short visit to Texas could provide so much blog fodder? Or perhaps I am just obsessed with the Lone Star State in a pathological way. Whichever. . .

From time to time, I heard mention of the local gay bar. One of the nights that I was there, I even suggested to a Sassy friend that perhaps we should check it out. My friend (who, btw, identifies as hetero herself) observed that there was little reason to go that bar as its patrons were almost entirely college-aged heteros, despite its alleged status as the town’s only gay locale.

This got me to thinking about the politics of queer space in a place like a small Eastern-Texas town. Before we start, though, let me make it clear that I am not suggesting that we need to institute “queer-only” spaces. I don’t, for instance, support the Australian guy who wants to ban heteros from his gay bar. Nor am I suggesting that heteros who go to gay bars are somehow out of place or unwelcome.

Queer spaces have usually been created as places that are intentionally open to everybody. It seems to me that trying to exclude people from those spaces would be counter to the notions of sexual freedom for which we fight. I also think that devoting any effort to policing space based on ideas of who “belongs” and those who don’t establishes very bad precedents indeed.

With that acknowledgment, I would suggest that debates about urban space are prevalent both within the queer community and also between the queer community and others. In Los Angeles, for instance, queers are experimenting with claiming allegedly “hetero” places for brief periods. The New York Times featured an article on July 22, 2007 about “flash mobs” of gay men showing up to straight locales, such as bars, and temporarily turning them “gay.”

Yet, the leaders' explanations about these assemblages don’t seem to be about remaking the urban landscape per se. Rather, they argue that their activities are in opposition to already established gay bars and clubs. Matthew Poe, an organizer for the flash mobs, stated that he sees it as a means to break down queer spaces. “There’s a place for gay bars," Poe said, "but we feel gay people have become so segregated that some of them don’t go out into the wider community anymore.”

I confess that I am confused about how taking over a place with hundreds of gay men (who quickly outnumber the hetero population) really places one within a “wider community.” Nor do I like the idea of repudiating other queer spaces as if they exist outside of our society. Right now, though, there is a certain vogue in queers critiquing queer places. This has lead to others hysterically predicting the demise of gay bars as we know them.

As I have mentioned previously, I actually have little fear that queer spaces will simply disappear. Men and women interested in same-sex sex are always going to want a place where they can meet people like themselves for sex and/or relationships. Mixed crowds are too much effort when you want a sure thing.

Still, we are seeing changes as the queer community adjusts to the internet, a renewed emphasis on marriage, and altered attitudes about sexuality. Boston and other major cities are grappling with keeping gay bars viable, but the ones that remain are still largely queer (but welcome most people (assuming one wears the appropriate costume. (As an aside, I so prefer the Boston model of gay bar where the emphasis is on drinking over dancing. Bostonians have the good sense not to be distracted from the real goal of going to a bar (besides sex with men))).



The case of the bar in Texas, however, raises a different set of issues than all of that. This is a question of appropriation in a place where queer civil rights are actively undermined by the majority population. This is not about queers finding new spaces, but rather about one of the few queer spaces being turned into something else.

When I first moved to that Texas town, there was not a single gay meeting spot in the entire community. For a place with a substantial college-aged population, that seemed shocking to me. Then again, it was Texas. They don’t like things that they imagine scare the horses.

After a couple of years, some enterprising fellows from Austin (or was it Dallas?) decided that there were, indeed, queers looking to spend their money on beer and a half-way decent cocktail. To open, though, they had to largely down-play the “gayness” of the bar. The town leaders who issued building permits and licenses preferred that it be called a “video bar.” So, the bar couldn’t advertise directly that it was a gay bar, but could let it be known that it was a gay bar through word of mouth. Yes, Texas still operates as it if is 1966.

To the credit of the owners, when the bar opened its doors, it was probably the nicest one in town. Whereas most of the other local drinking establishments were either covered in sawdust or attached to a chain restaurant, this one actually offered mixed drinks and a functioning dance floor (Which, as I have mentioned, isn’t my preferred style of gay bar, but they didn’t build it for me).

I showed up only a handful of times in my remaining time in Texas. Each time, I observed that it was becoming less and less queer. By my last visit, the hetero couples (most of whom were college students) far outnumbered the queer patrons (perhaps even as much as two to one).

“But, GayProf,” I hear some asking, “How could you have a problem with people just looking for a drink and a good time? What difference does it make? Also, who shot J.R.?” I actually don’t care about people being out looking for a good time. The bar’s niceness makes it easy to understand why people of all sexualities found it appealing. If I were a young[er] hetero or queer living in that town (Thank the goddess, I am not), it would make sense to turn to it. And Kristin Shepard shot J.R.

The problem, it seems to me, is that many heterosexuals have confused their own ability to access queer spaces with queer people having civil rights or social equality. Many imagine that because seeing queer people is no longer taboo for them that this must mean that everything is just fine for the queers.

There is a general conflation of their own “indifference” with real change. Indifference, however, is not the same as equality. Just because these hetero Texans are willing to sip margaritas and share a dance floor with (the rapidly shrinking number of) queer patrons doesn't mean they have struck a blow for social justice.

It is more likely that the hetero Texan patrons of the bar enjoy the space as novel and unique. Queer spaces are still forbidden enough that they are exciting, but made safe through the preponderance of heteros who overtake them. It was always my impression that heteros never appeared in that gay bar alone. Instead, they traveled as either hetero couples or in groups of single women. At all times, their heterosexuality was asserted to avoid any "confusion."

Perhaps there is some historical retribution at play here. Maybe as the gay Carl Van Vechten unabashedly took advantage of African American spaces for his own entertainment and to make himself wealthy, so now heteros are playing out their slumming fantasies amongst the gays. Shall we call this phenomena the Curse of Van Vechten? Can the novel Faggot Heaven be far from hitting the bookshelves? Or, given the digital age, it will probably appear as a miniseries on Bravo Network.



Whatever the case, I am willing to bet that most of the patrons in that bar largely ignore how queer people are actually treated in day-to-day life in the city and state. That is assuming that they are even aware enough to ignore how queer people are treated. If we assume that the hetero bar patrons match the voting patterns of their community, a substantial majority of them are also voting for candidates and parties that are actively hostile to queer people.

The bar patrons conveniently overlook that Texas has passed several laws and a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. They likewise turn a blind eye to hate crimes committed almost daily against queer people in the state. This includes the June 4 murder of Kenneth Cummings Jr., a Southwest flight Attendant, in Houston, Texas. The man who confessed to Cummings’ murder claimed that he was “doing God’s work” when he set out to a local gay bar to find his victim.

Queer spaces are needed in places like Texas because it is still not safe to be queer in the state (or, really, the rest of the nation, either). If hetero Texans want to be our guests in those spaces, it seems reasonable to expect that they commit to fighting for our rights as well. You can have a drink, but it's going to cost you.