This is the video for the 1982 Eurythmics song Love is a Stranger. It became a hit on MTV in the US in 1983--and then got pulled by the station.
The video starts out with Lennox in this classic femme "blond bombshell" look, but a minute into the video, she pulls off the blond wig, revealing slicked-back short red hair. By the end of the video, she is also sans lipstick and wearing butch mirrored sunglasses and a suit and tie.
It's a gender-queering video. That was true of a lot of the other British synthpop videos that were in heavy rotation in the early 80s on MTV, from bands like Culture Club and Adam and the Ants. But the wig-removing reveal had been a classic of "female impersonator" drag shows intended for mainstream audience consumption since the 1920s. And leaders of American conservative evangelical Christian congregations gave sermons about the evil of MTV destroying teens' morals that used the Eurythmics' video as key evidence of depravity. They presumed Annie Lennox was a man in drag, called this degeneracy, and generated outraged letter-writing campaigns from congregants to MTV.
So the station pulled the video, bowing to this pressure and announcing the decision that "crossdressing men" were not suitable material for their programming, which children could view.
Residents of Britain thought this was hilarious: proof both of Americans' backward religious prudery, and ignorance, since Annie Lennox was assigned female at birth.
The Eurythmics' response was initial disbelief, followed by Lennox publicly stating that she was not in fact a man, though it shouldn't matter. But MTV agents said she needed to prove it. Lennox was rightly affronted (were they implying she should undress for them?). Eventually she had a certified copy of her birth certificate mailed to MTV, and after more internal debates among corporate staff, the Love is a Stranger video was put back into the broadcasting rotation.
The thing is, while the outraged evangelicals of 1983 were incorrect about Annie Lennox's birth-assigned sex, they were not wrong about her being in drag. The entire video is an exploration of femme drag and masculine drag.
And here we are, 40 years later, with US state legislatures in red states enacting laws against drag, because minors might see it, and that would supposedly be intolerable "grooming" activity, "sexualizing innocent children."
What I'd point out is that the whole MTV fracas just made the video more popular. The irony is that people shouting "don't say gay!" all the time are saying "gay" all the time, leading kids to have schoolyard conversations about what it is that these adults say they shouldn't hear about. All the public discussion about not letting minors gender transition means that more young people than ever are aware that this is a possibility, giving them tools to articulate their own gender identities.
Let's be clear: it also terrifies kids to see the rage and hate on adult faces aimed at people like them. It is very scary to come out as a youth, with adults screaming that they will not allow you rights.
And it's pretty depressing that gender-policing bigots on the political right are not only engaging in the same activities they were 40 years ago, but now they are spewing hundreds of state bills and laws banning books, forcing teachers to misgender their students, banning trans kids from participating in healthy athletics, etc. etc. etc.
This is driving a whole lot of people, whether young or adults, into the closet. But that closet is now huge! A third of the students at my midwestern university identify as something other than a cis straight person, even if many of them are only out about that in private spaces and trusted social circles.
And in those secure spaces they are doing what Lennox did in this video of 40 years ago: defying the gender police.
No comments:
Post a Comment