RIGHT: "Kirk and Spock at Disney's Gay Day," by FarfallaWhat makes something funny?
There're lots of clever (and even more terrible) photoshops of Kirk/Spock out there, most of which don't move me one way or another, or not enough to bother to share here.
But this one totally cracked me up.
It's not just the goofy incongruity of Kirk and Spock at what is a real event-- Gay Days at Disney is a meet-up sanctioned (!) but not organized by Disney World: people dress in red and meet by the Cinderella castle (below)-- though I find that plenty funny.
And it's not just that Farfalla chose fitting expressions for our boys, though they are comically spot on.
No, what pushed it over the top for me is Kirk's sweatshirt.
With that ridiculous logo "1701" (the registry number of the USS Enterprise, though if you've read this far, you might not need to be told that), it strikes me as exactly the sort of leisure wear a company man would indeed wear on vacation.
It's like the corporate logos some folks who march in gay pride parades display.
To me, they seem to say,
"I may be a sexual minority, but gosh darn it, I want the right to be as average and unimaginative as any square straight person you'll ever meet."
In fact, I don't know why conservatives aren't the biggest champions of same-sex marriage. The best way to deal with something you see as wild and dangerous (such as sexuality) is to domesticate it.
When same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in the United States, gay married couples aren't going to trap neighborhood children and force them to read Verlaine. They'll do what straight married couples do:
don stupid T-shirts and go to Disneyland.
Give people what they need and they'll simmer down. Or, you know, if they go rogue and join Starfleet or write poetry, it'll be because that's who they are, not because oppression drove them to it.
You are very acute.
ReplyDeleteI ran across your blog when looking for a picture of Kirk. This is a great picture, and I love what you have to say. Today Gay Rights is in a Prohibition-like phase. I believe the next generation will be more tolerant. And regarding the last blog, surely the lack of irony is one of the things that make both the Beatles and ST so attractive. Both have an earnestness of spirit that is healing to the soul.
ReplyDeleteKeep on Trekkin'.
This post desperately needs to go viral! Love it!
ReplyDeleteSPARKER: Thanks.
ReplyDeleteDI: Hi! Are you the Di from Australia?
Prohibition... that's kind of a good analogy--something that won't workin the long run.
Oh, yes, not being ironic is indeed a nice thing about Star Trek! We can apply irony to it, if we want, but it was not self-consciously ironic.
RUDY: Ha! YOU are the kind of straight married person conservatives should fear---I KNOW you're going to expose your children and their little friends and neighbors to French symbolist poetry!
Brillius photoshop; the Kirk-smirk is so appropriate.
ReplyDeleteI was arguing with someone at the Trek con. They were trying to tell me you can know if someone is homosexual because "it's in their eyes, their essence, everything. The same gene that makes us gay makes us more intelligent." 3 or 4 times, I told him that was absolute bull, etc. To prove his point, he called someone over - a stranger - and asked them if I seemed like a lesbian, (for he was convinced and wouldn't hear my take on it). They shrugged and said flatly,
"She seems like a person."
I thanked this stranger, who was clearly at the right convention.
I am so pleased and happy and over-the-moon that, from looking at one silly picture, you managed to understand the philosophy that permeates my entire K/S body of work (and that's around 130 pieces of fanfiction!)
ReplyDeleteIn other words, the idea that same-sex love, for those that feel it, is just as normal as the way straight people feel about their own romances. It's not exotic, it's not twisted, etc. This is just who we are. We ARE just as boring as everyone else ;-)
Of course, Kirk and Spock aren't boring, but I really don't think their (hypothetical) nonstraightness is the most interesting factor in either their lives or their relationship. There's a huge cultural divide, for one thing, and their career puts them at risk of death on a daily basis.
Thank you for 'getting' me :-)
MARGARET: That guy's argument is so unintelligent, he can't have been gay!
ReplyDelete"She seems like a person."
That's what I met at the Star Trek con too, more than anywhere else in the USA:
not smarmy "tolerance" or "acceptance", but a kind of blankness toward the issues of identity that scribble all over so much of American culture.
Possibly that blankness comes more easily to a community that has been brushed with a higher-than-average amount of Spock-like Asperger's?
There's a blessing to personalities that see skin color and sexual attraction as incidentals.
FARFALLA: Hey, that's cool! In fact, not having met you and your work until yesterday, I'd worried a bit that you might not like how I interpreted your manip as "Kirk and Spock Are a Normal Couple."
Here's what I think:
I think some people see gay people like "Twilight" sees vampire: as exotic creatures who carry dark, dangerous, and sexy pain.
This makes for super-charged fiction, but it is, I agree, fiction.
Right, what makes Kirk and Spock extraordinary isn't their gender.
Hi again. Not from Australia-from frakking Idaho. Blue girl in red state.
ReplyDeleteDi: NIce to meet you!
ReplyDelete