Several of you responded to a frankly pathetic plea for more subscribers
This was admittedly written following seeing someone writing a tribute to David Allan Coe and then them responding to criticism for celebrating a horrible racist.
I really dislike whatever social media psychosis compels people to leave a review of a dead person as if leaving an Amazon rating. But before I go on, I should say that David Allan Coe was a terrible person. However, I'm also not the kind of person that believes that bad people can't make great art. I actually feel stupid even saying that David Allan Coe was a terrible person, because who can claim to be a good person? But certainly, I believe Coe to have made great art in his life.
Case in point, “Fuck Anita Bryant” a superb piece of trolling that inspires me as a transwoman. I don't think know whether Coe wrote this song, although it seems likely, but it was on an album that included many songs commisioned by a biker gang. So it is possible that it was commisioned by a biker.
But let's just look at the beginning of the song:
“Hey, Fuck Anita Bryant!
Who the hell is she?
Telling all them f**^&%ts that they can't be free”
The song goes on to say that we should “throw her ass in prison” but this is not a punishment fantasy. Basically the song then goes on to wish Bryant could see everything that queer men do for their partners in Prison. If the song is autobiographical, its a great portrait of rough trade.
'Wash your clothes
Clean your cell, Help you drain your hose
Give you smokes, Laugh at jokes
Sew up all your clothes
Rub your feet, Beat your meat
Heaven only knows
What I'd do without those homosexuals”
And it also speaks to the diversity of the queer experience:
“Some are big
Some are small
Some are in-between
Some are yellow belly queers
And some of them are mean
Some are killers
Some are thiefs
Some are singers too
In fact Anita Bryant
Some act just like you”
I actually find this so moving. There's not one type of gay man, some of them are singers and killers and some are awful people like Anita Bryant. They're all queer but they're all human. Even Anita Bryant is human.
But it's rather the first stanza I find the most pertinent; the outrage of “who the hell is she?”.
This is exactly what queer people should be saying, instead of the kind of defensiveness that liberals adopt.
Who the hell is JK Rowling to decide what a woman is? Who the fuck is Phyllis Chesler to declare that the Equal Rights act would erase women's rights? Who the hell are JD Vance, Robert Kennedy and all these other losers who spend their one life on earth trying to enrich themselves by taking away the rights of others?
Despite the kind of common-sense pose that bigots adopt, there's an inherent pretense to the idea that you should get to be the last word on someone else's identity. I wish it was a pretense that was uncommon but it is common as dirt. But just because something is common, doesn't mean that we can't point out that it is pretense.
No doubt Vance would call upon God to be the reason; “I'm speaking the word of God, and HE tells me who are valid people” But once again we should ask, who the fuck are you to claim that God is on your side? And who the fuck are you to claim that God isn't on the side of the people you hate?
Of course, Rowling and Chesler will claim that they are on the side of feminism, Well, who the hell made JK Rowling an authority on feminism?
JK Rowling did by buying her way into reactionary second-wave feminist groups.And when she was done with that, she bought the high court's opinion making Trans women second-class citizens in the UK. And a lot of Rowling's new associates were happy to take the money from an unworthy source because they are intellectually lazy has-beens.
But we should ask why being a rich idiot who wrote a bunch of bad YA novels makes you an authority on anything? I certainly haven't heard that Suzanna Collins or Stephanie Meyers became authorities on infrastucture or Human Genome Research. And that’s because they're smart enough to spend their money on themselves instead of trying to harm others.
My point is that we should deflect questions when the question itself has assumptions baked into it. The genius of the Right is to create propaganda so absurd that it saps our energy trying to make sense out of it enough to argue with it. Trans people waste our energy on absurd arguments that our identity itself is “grooming”. Instead of debating these absurd allegations, we should ask instead about the people who throw around baseless accusations.
So make sure you ask the right questions, such as who the fuck are you to argue against the human rights of other humans? You're either nothing special or if you are special, you're equally special to all other people. Rowling, Vance and a basket of deplorables would claim to represent the voice of the common person but they're in fact a twisted limb from the tree of generational privilege.
If they're awful people they're as awful as David Allan Coe was but at least he could sing you “a sad country song.”