By Peter Lawrence Kane
Gay culture — gay male culture, in particular — loves to mess with gender and all its taboos. From drag shows to recycling yesterday’s pop trash to proudly quoting Lucille Bluth and Dorothy Zbornak, gay culture parodies women even while expressing solidarity with them. Gender is performance, and what makes queer culture so liberating is its way of making fun of the stereotypes of how men or women “are.” An exaggerated representation of femininity or the practice of addressing your male friend as “gurl” fucks with the binaries that fucked with us. We are naughty by nurture.
Yet that same love of violating taboos has made some gay men feel they can throw around the c-word indiscriminately, as if being gay means you don’t need to respect anybody else. In contemporary American English, the c-word is second only to the N-word in its ability to shock and offend, and not just because it shatters grandma’s monocle the way two guys smooching on TV can.
The c-word also pisses off sophisticated, educated women — although by no means all of them, as Katie J.M. Baker argues in her essay on Jezebel. It’s not the same as calling someone a bitch, because bitch doesn’t put all women down. As an analogy to antigay slurs, it falls somewhere between faggot and queer. Faggot still stings. But queer has mostly been taken back, zapping a lot of its power to hurt. The c-word falls somewhere in the middle.
On RuPaul’s Drag Race, the ever-commanding host/mentor advises her girls to embody the virtues of “charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent,” as if the cheeky acronym “C.U.N.T.” were the elite strike team of transgression itself. When a gay man calls another gay man the c-word, it can be a put-down or it can be admiration. For drag queens, exhibiting c-wordiness is basically the same thing as fierceness: fearless, over-the-top femininity. It’s comical, and a little scary. But somehow, the word fierce feels very five-years-ago, while the c-word endures. What makes this all a little troubling is gay men who refuse to consider that they might be taking part in the oppression of women, which is certainly true sometimes (and not just because Karl Lagerfeld called Adele fat). No amount of sincere solidarity can entirely erase the fact that gay men are still men, it’s still a man’s world, and men can still kinda do whatever they want.
The fact that The Golden Girls still resonates with gay men more than 20 years after it went off the air relates to the widespread use of the c-word in a positive sense. The Golden Girls focused on a doubly taboo sexuality – not just the female libido, but old ladies’ libidos — while also spotlighting an unusual family arrangement; the show was as subversive as it was hilarious. And it had gay plotlines that don’t feel embarrassing today.
While it didn’t have a serial plot arc, The Golden Girls was essentially one long fight against the marginalization-unto-invisibility of women over 50. It echoed the loneliness and rejection that stalked almost all gay men until recently and which still finds a foothold in the “No Fats, No Fems” homofascism that prevails on Grindr. Bea Arthur’s Dorothy Zbornak, with her bitter streak and her deep voice and her exquisite comic timing embodies the queer sense of c-wordiness almost perfectly. And with all due respect to any woman who’s been called the c-word, there seems to be a valid overlap between women’s struggle for real equality and the gay male experience, one that finds its home in the word’s casual use.
So while it’s never, ever OK to call someone the c-word in a mean or pejorative way, in some circumstances, there is probably a little wiggle room. There is room for gays to fight the same oppressive cultural attitudes toward women that also give rise to homophobia. So I’m hopping off the c-word train and onto the Seaward– the yacht from Arrested Development. I’m going to give my most withering, Lucille Bluth-esque glare when I hear my fellow gays throwing the c-word around in a context that’s too loose, too uncritical, or too gratuitous. But there are some queens I won’t tell what to do.
