The Lavender Brick Road: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and the Sissy Bo(d)y

Figure 1.

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Talk of the Town.

Figure 2.

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Talk of the Town.

Figure 3.

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez in Talk of the Town.

I

Yes it’s sad, believe me, missy

When you’re born to be a sissy.

—Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz

When I was in high school, it amazed me that the football players knew I was gay before I did. As I passed them in the hallway, especially in groups and especially on autumn Fridays when they wore their football jerseys to school, one of them would inevitably utter “faggot” under his breath at the precise moment that I cleared their peripheral vision. I soon learned to plan my routes from class to class in order to avoid the most consistent perpetrators. I came to school early and left late, and most important, I told no one. Years later, I discovered that many of the young men who were active with me in theatre (all of whom are now openly gay or dead) were subjected to the same abuse, yet at the time our isolation was all that protected us from our shame. How did the straight-identified football players know I was gay before I’d even had sex with a man? This question tormented me throughout high school, for I resisted with all my might the obvious answer: I was a sissy.

The abusive treatment of proto-queer teenagers in American high schools remains one of the great open secrets of our culture. The sissy body functions as the recognizable signifier of potential male homosexuality, and as such has been positioned as the alien—subversive, disruptive, nonconformist—whose expulsion by any means teenagers and adults alike have widely sanctioned. This is by no means a recent development. Effeminacy has been intertwined with the history of modern male homosexuality since it emerged in the late nineteenth century. In his book Talk on the Wilde Side, Ed Cohen unpacks how “aesthetic” effeminacy first became the marker for homosexuals during the trials of Oscar Wilde:

[Wilde] was often caricatured in contemporary journals as a languorous, long-haired lover of sunflowers or as an “utterly” aestheticized utterer of epigrams, so that the representation of his large, lounging frame became an iconic disparagement of what was deemed to be male “effeminacy.” It is important to note here that the “effeminacy” popularly attributed to the “aesthetic” or “decadent” movement had not yet produced an immediate corollary association with sexual relations between men. In fact, . . . this effeminacy was often seen to align the “aesthetic” male with the domestic realm of the female, making him a more sought after object of female desire, if only because of a perceived commonalty of interests. The supplementing of “aesthetic” effeminacy with connotations of male sexual desire for other men is, I would argue, one of the consequences of the newspaper representations of the Wilde trials. ¹

Although the liberal and mostly assimilationist politics that dominated the post-Stonewall 1970s gay movement attempted to unbind homosexuality from effeminacy (in an attempt to align gay men with “normal” masculinity, and, by extension, “normal” sexuality), real or perceived effeminacy has been shown to be the most common factor in the histories of adult gay men (which I address in greater detail in section II). Despite this fact and the development of a radical queer politics in the late 1980s, an affirmative sissy-boy criticism, which would be uniquely positioned to challenge the category of the “normal,” has been largely absent from queer/gay studies. Correspondingly, the sissy, and his more mature incarnation, the effeminate man or “dandy,” served as the theatrical signifier for homosexuality in English-language plays throughout most of the twentieth century. In his study Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, John M. Clum painstakingly documents the conflation of homosexuality and effeminacy in theatrical representation from Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree (1933), through Mart Crowley...