Me Talk Pretty One Day And Love You Long Time

[I guess I should put in my two cents about the Abercrombie & Fitch brouhaha. Several episodes from the near and distant past come to mind:]

[About ten years ago, I dated a black guy who had a huge collection of pickaninny/mammy dolls, and fridge magnets made from old melon crate labels with big-lipped, bulging-eyed caricatures of black folks. He loved his collection as kitsch and, for better or worse, as a part of the black experience in America...]

[Many of my Mexican friends in Santa Barbara would be the first to participate in S.B.'s faux-Mexican "Old Spanish Days Fiesta," an extravaganza planned mainly by and for white folks, using warped "romantic" images from the "Days of the Dons." My friends appropriated these images, consciously and unconsciouly, and folded them into their own experience as Mexican-Americans...and, for a while, every hip person I knew had to have those Virgin of Guadalupe candles you can buy a five-and-ten-cent stores...]

[As gay men, we often glorify drag queens, bulldykes, sexual outlaws of all sorts. We swoon when an ABBA or Madonna song shimmers out of an unlikely loudpeaker, and we wink knowingly when "YMCA" gets played at yet another straight wedding reception. We call each other "girl," "Mary, and even "fag." Although we know mainstram gay America largely views us via these narrow (sub)cultural signifiers, we feel drawn to them anyway...]

[San Francisco is full of 20th century Asian kitsch: the gate at Bush and Grant, the dragon streetlights, the roman letters calligraphed to "look Chinese," the pun names for Thai restaurants (Thai Me Up and so on...), some of the design elements of Japantown. (Hmmm...maybe some entrepreneur needs to open a restaurant called Faux Pho on Larkin Street...oh, never mind.)]

[What Abercrombie did is nothing new. I think what is bothering some people is how mainstream and commercially calculated A&F's campaign is/was. If one acquired a similar t-shirt at a thrift store, it would somehow be OK. A&F (and Gap, and Urban Outfitters, and on and on) always make what was sort of edgy mainstream, and this isn't the first time Asian or faux-Asian imagery has been used to make money. (Don't ask me about John's and my Sanrio collection, or how I used to be obsessed with Shonen Knife.)]

[Was the campaign racist? Maybe...in the same way that Sex and the City's Carrie calls her gold jewelry "ghetto fabulous." (Have you seen that a store called Bling Bling has opened on Geary near Fillmore in the Western Addition?) Is it harmful? I don't know...I do know of a few Asian friends who would find the shirts hilarious. I have no answers (I do like what Ernie has to say...note that "Asian stereotype humor," for lack of a better term, is a staple of his site), but I think to put the controversy in black and white (sorry) terms is oversimplification.]

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[Oh, and the Gore Vidal event last night was great. In my alternative timeline, he got elected when he ran for Congress in the early '60s, was elected to the Senate sometime after that, and served Reagan's two terms as president in the '80s. Can you imagine? (Maybe it would be too high a price to pay for a world without Myra Breckinridge...)]