G O D C L U B

So I was having this interior dialogue with myself about sorting laundry, and I don't want to claim a position that allows me to super impose my interior experience as an over reaching metaphor for queer representation. I, in other words, have no interest in being the token to represent all queer peoples on the plane of ultra-varied experience...HOWEVER, it just came to me in all of my matching of socks and hanging of tees and sweats that within this sort of binary construction of naming one definite group of black Haynes socks to another opposing, or perhaps unseen other, that being of the rest of our more luxury based, thin weight dress socks that there wasn't in fact a place for the decorated, weird and often lone socks in our drawer. There were many undergarments that we threw out today. There were pairs of low rise briefs that had to be thrown out at the expense of expanding waists, and there were other groups of cloth that had just seen their last days. But within sorting these groups I realized that by no means was there a definite strategy that I could formulate for putting away the clothes that both my boyfriend and myself share. There were sleeveless Henley buttoned tee's that compromised passing into the realm of tee shirts, and cut off tees that made it into the tank top drawer, and the margin raised. Sweat shirts intermingled with acrylic cashmere imitators while more expensive wool garments intermixed with acrylic based sweaters that just didn't belong with the others that had been placed on hangers to intermix with the business casual oxfords and underlying tee shirts that populate our closet. There was a PANIC, if you will, of naming these threadbare garments in relation to the other more presentable specimens of cloth, and it ended in a compromise that did NOT upset either one of us. In the end, it seemed, that there had to be a compromise between high and low thread count that I had never before foreseen in my laundry day experience, and it radically informed the way that I will do laundry from now on.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's okay for the flannel plaid shirts to share space with those other shirts that may have more business casual intent, and that the amalgamation of thin weight and heavy sport weight socks is necessary as a regimented and segregated space restricts the potentiality of both of them as being separate. And within this conglomeration of fibers, I have found that a new dialogue seems to be emerging surrounding what clothes the body and how to properly accommodate the individual experience on a day by day basis. It is, I admit, a day by day discourse that has to continue it's shared space to come in to any fruition. However I am wholly hopefully that the decisions I have made tonight, that is to NOT separate my laundry by expected experience, but instead for the anticipated conglomeration of unexpectedly dialectically intermixed outcome, and at times multi closetary fashion option, that will actually present my body as a queer specimen at odds with its immediate surroundings, not to be confused with the many detectable normative substructures which hinder its potency as an active and vocal aid in the attempt to DE-assimilate queer America from the reins of an over arching gay mainstream that would love to subsume, appropriate and rehash and subsequently diminish its potency! WHAT, is the future of the open closet? WHAT is the point of reference for day by day resistive dress, and WHO is the person responsible for maintaining this index aside from all of us? Who can prove we are all in fact still visible as queer except all of us? Who gets to own what garments make us? Who gets to decide what is all of us? Do my leggings with the aforementioned flannel shirt still count as active statement or resistance despite their Mary Kate influence? Can a faggot put on leggings in this world and not be considered much more than a fashion victim? What can we organize, out of our newly liberated closets of discontent, to construct a collective voice to visualize something uniquely queer, uniquely other, uniquely of the sentiment central to our histories that screams glamour and at once decay?
I want to know what it takes to look like a fashionable young beast who is not amalgamated into the hideousness of what popular heterosexual fashion is. There was a time when the fashion world allowed outlet for faggotry and quennyness to reign supreme, and above its heterosexual counterpart as an outlet to express dissent, and now it seems that all of the peers surrounding a fashion conscious group are diluted with het-messes that seek to appropriate and inevitably destroy a visually active queer vernacular which has worked for years to define us as their BEAST, their OTHER: everything that they aim not to be. What is it that is left, I ask, that we as a contemporary eccentric queer fashion community have to employ as our ultimate resistance against this excavation of all things we hold dear? I seek not to don ourselves in tiaras and endless cloaks of metalized pink capes, however, I do seek some sort of solace in a tangible form of dress that cites resistance as its core.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE, FAGGOTS, WHEN LEGGINGS ARE A CONTEMPORARY MENSWEAR STAPLE? WHAT DO I HAVE LEFT TO SHOW UP TO A PARTY IN BUT A DRESS, OUT OF DRAG? There must, indeed be more creative avenues to be explored for genderqueer effeminate male representation. Our culture is too rich and our history too volatile for this to be permissibly acceptable and reasonably just.