Take that, anti-gay propaganda laws!
Contents:
GROUNDBREAKG ON-SCREEN GAY KISS THROUGH HISTORY
From TV's first same-sex kiss ever to Disney's first gay kiss on "Star vs. the Forc of Evil," the are the moments that refed televisn and ma history. * gay kiss on stage *
Back 2019, Healy ma out wh a male fan at a ncert Dubai, where homosexualy is illegal and punishable by up to ten years Healy is happy to keep kissg men on stage, he don't intify as gay. His parents are actor Tim Healy and former Coronatn Street star Denise Welch, who had a large group of gay iends. "My mum's crew was kd of the gay 'Illumati' of the Groucho Club.
Through an examatn of stage-gay, the notor practice of queer performativy on stage by straight performers the emo mic subculture, I vtigate how a rtrictive notn of “tth” discsns of queerbag n actually close off the very possibili of transformatn and open-end nfiguratns of sexualy that Alexanr Doty’s formulatn of queerns promised. In the same volume, Emma Nord suggts there are two sis to queerbag—one versn has producers “htg at yet nyg queer ntent, and the other one has producers promisg gay characters yet not liverg proper reprentatn. ”3 Most of the thors Brennan’s book are fairly clear that the liberate tent of media producers is a key part of queerbag, as opposed to viewer terpretatns of queerns or homoeroticism.
4 Obvly this be more plited when we apply to the ncept of stage-gay, which is a term vented by fans of emo and post-punk bands the early 2000s.
Rammste guarists Pl Lanrs and Richard Kspe exchanged a kiss onstage Mosw to prott Rsia's "gay propaganda" ban. * gay kiss on stage *
But jt as wh stage-gay, uld be argued that emo’s genr polics hold out a promise of progrs or egalarianism that they don’t really fulfill. Here we foc specifilly on emo bands’ penchant for stage-gay: that is, monstratns of male/male affectn and eroticism, up to and cludg full kissg and simulatg sex onstage. When nsirg emo bands’ tentns performg stage-gay, we should look to explic statements ma by band members about s purpose: not to take them as transparent statements of fact, but as performative elements the Butlerian/Fouuldian sense, which be wh other visual and dible statements to nstct a disurse of queerns.
10 Fans’ of and rpons to stage-gay also ntribute to the nstctn of s meangs. We should also take to acunt the soc-cultural ntexts which stage-gay first me to public note: two boys kissg onstage at a hard rock ftival 2002 is an entirely different statement than the same gture ma a queer-iendly club 2020.
12 “Queer” is not one si of a bary on which the other si is “hetero-”: the word we would be lookg for that se is “homo-”. Buildg on this ia of persona, I will then briefly outle the theory of performativy through which I tend to analyze the practice of stage-gay. I will discs performers’ paratextual statements on the meangs of stage-gay while suatg agast the background of hardre and punk om which emerged, and go on to discs some of the ag that fans have ma om the texts.