just two or three questions about (my) gender
This was originally meant to be a bit tidier, perhaps even a mini issue, until my partner asked me mid-conversation to rattle off the twenty most important moments in television history for my sense of self. For reasons I am beginning to understand in therapy, I took this request literally. Neither of us are fans of listicles, particularly a rapidly decaying millennial like myself, but it is fun to chart one’s own orientation. This is perhaps the closest I will get to being cozy or nostalgic, and there’s no better week for that type of indulgence.
I’ve kept this basic: little to no gravitas, because this is about my own emergent degeneracy and not some television retrospective about the year that was. (If you do want to feel geriatric, consider that the spate of VH1 programming about decades is now itself a quaint retro relic.) Nothing before my time, unless watching an older thing was truly formative to my sense of self. Nothing overthought, because again this is a zine and not a treatise. Some statements pieces are garbage I’ve glued to myself.
This is the list, in whatever order feels correct:
The episode of Top Model where Tyra pretends to faint and then says that she was acting all along—ACTING GUYS ACTING ACTING ACTING—and then she sends the modeltestants to an improv class because of course Tyra had taken three Groundlings classes by that point, so she was basically a Drama Desk nominee, and Jade was so bad at understanding the mechanics of human interaction, let alone introspection, let alone knock-knock level humor, that she flunks the teaching session and subsequent challenge on the set of Wild n Out, featuring a pre-12-kids Nick Cannon, and then the girls all have to improvise a commercial for Cover Girl cosmetics, which is basically a chapter from a de Sade novel because Tyra knows good and goddamn well you do not pay models to make up copy on the spot, not when you have a 28-year-old homosexual who is barely paid enough to afford the monthly payment on their 2012 Sonata to crap that out in ten minutes, and Jade, beautiful self-proclaimed biracial butterfly Jade, Jade cannot understand the idea of making up dialogue, because why should she, so she clops around the set exclaiming WONDERFUL FABULOUS and twirling before tailspinning to remember anything, simply anything about Cover Girl cosmetics, and then Tyra STILL KEEPS JADE in the competition because Tyra Banks is a sociopath, a clever one, but a sociopath all the same.
When Kerri Strug stuck the landing of the vault at the 96 Olympics and I began considering whether I, too, could have a sensible short haircut like hers, only realizing in retrospect that John Tesh and whoever else did commentary that night talked about the US Team like they were all 36-year-old Career Women and not, like, literal teenage girls, one now with a broken ankle.
“DAVID’S DEAD??!??!?” — I know that many people would say that Tiffany “New York” Pollard’s rant against “fat cunt” Gemma Collins and her “old maiden” shoes is a more iconic monologue—and for once I think that “iconic” is suitable and not a moment of American hyperbole, but it is ultimately a monologue, delivered in a closed interview room, and as such, it doesn’t carry the same dramaturgical brilliance as when New York mistakenly believes that her fellow housemate David Gest has died instead of the former husband of housemate Angie Bowie, David Bowie. The scene contains layers that stretch decades beyond the moment at hand: Angie Bowie still affecting her neither-nor accent and almost-human personality (something Toni Colette never received enough praise for when playing a thinly veiled version of Angie in Velvet Goldmine); David Gest being an oddity of human life who would quite conceivably wait until he was on a television show to die (he wouldn’t for another several weeks, offscreen); New York maybe not even knowing who David Bowie is; the openly gay and lantern-jawed actor John Partridge emerging in a towel to deflate the misunderstanding; Gemma being, well, a cunt. David Bowie’s death devastated me and countless others, especially as many of us had barely lifted the needle from our first spin of Blackstar when we learned the news, but this offered some cross-eyed levity for an otherwise disorienting rupture in our collective pop culture.
When Dr. Kimberly Shaw blew up Melrose Place on Melrose Place, not least of which because it raises the question “What do you do when you’ve written the best possible ending to a television show but then there’s another four seasons?” Season 3 Kimberly Shaw is the woman of my dreams.
I’m going to lump these together: the first time I saw a Bjork music video as a child / every time Alex Bornstein imitated Bjork on MadTV (this might involve some sketches that are false memories) / the time Bjork performed at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics and sang beautiful gibberish lyrics that I later danced around to over and over when my older girlfriend ripped me a copy of Medulla.
I know that Gianni Versace’s murder and Elian Gonzalez were like two years apart, but this all feels like one blur that spanned my time in middle school in which my part of the country was in the news all of the time, heightened by the fact that Channel 7 had its own program just for Miami-area gossip and celebrity stories that aired after the evening news. It probably did not help that Janet Reno was Floridian, too.
The 1988 Eurovision Song Contest - I was a precocious youth, but even I did not scheme to get European satellite broadcasts into my home as a toddler. I got into Eurovision as an adult—not due to the music, which often spans from “cloying” to “actively harmful,” but because the contest is such a fascinating element of geopolitics. In recent years, we’ve seen the extent to which the contest serves as a whitewashing for war and genocide, and in some cases a whitewashing of entire nations in the service of centuries-old tropes about European whiteness and civilization, thus adding distance from any accusations of inhumanity or barbarity. (This is about Israel, obviously, but also the broader postcolonial “oh gosh, silly little us couldn’t do that, we just play footie and sing songs” element of the contest.) The 1988 contest remains my favorite because it involves a young Celine Dion, the Canadian wunderkind who had barely started to cross over into English-language material, basically serving as a mercenary hire by Switzerland. Her talent is obvious, even amid the dreck—but the most important aspect is the actual voting. Decades before Eurovision viewers were allotted a proportional share of votes via a dial-in scheme (Americans, just recall early American Idol), the final points were strictly the domain of judges, each set perched in broadcast hubs across Europe, ready to announce after the performances their calculus for balancing merit and geopolitical quid pro quo. Often, it’s a done deal, the winner known about five countries in. But in 1988, the results were unclear until the final country on the list, Yugoslavia, announced its results—and I won’t spoil the thrill of those scores, but there are twists even in that last tally. Switzerland wins by one point, and Dion is catapulted into international renown.
1998 Grammys—Even if they can’t place the year, most people my age will remember “Wu Tang is for the Children” (there are enough reasons to acknowledge Sean Combs is a lifelong monster and degenerate loser, nearly all more serious than this, but this isn’t nothing in terms of cultural politics). What trueheads and oldheads will recall is that this gave us at least two more gems: “SOY BOMB,” which frankly is the most alive Bob Dylan had looked in a decade, and the dueling versions of “How Do I Live” competing for the same Grammy, leading Trisha Yearwood to prove triumphant over the precocious caterwauling of LeAnn Rimes. (I have nothing against LeAnn Rimes, vaguely; I just do not understand how fucked up we were to think collectively ‘this song performed by Grown Ass Woman Trisha Yearwood is also suitable for a teenaged yodeler.’ I also feel like Trisha is savoring the award doubly, having lost to LeAnn the previous year in the same category for the xerox-of-a-xerox-of-a-xerox zombie Patsy Cline ripoff “Blue.” Who knows: having your best record lose during Mary Chapin Carpenter’s imperial phase may also do something to you.) OH! Also this is when Aretha Franklin also did a pinch-hit performance of “Nessun Dorma.” And Lilith content everywhere, armpit hair galore.
The Blossom theme song, mainly because it prompted a game my brother and I would play when we were young, in which we would secretly try on hats while my mother was combing through yet another clearance rack at the discount store, exclaiming every time, “Look! I’m Blossom!” In retrospect, I think my first childhood crush was Blossom’s oldest brother—no, not Joey Lawrence, the other one. The cute one.
Coming home after spending all evening on one of the jetties at Hollywood Beach fishing with my aunt and uncle to learn that Princess Diana was dead.
The OJ Trail, mainly because at that age, it just felt like another one of the soap operas my mother would watch every day. It’s at least where I learned what the word “sustained” meant, even if I understood little to nothing else.
Being inside a dusty and dark Miami apartment while my mother took care of my grandmother, her mother-in-law, dodging copious insults and accusations in between doses of insulin, curtains drawn while my brother and I entertained ourselves with whichever game we made up using whatever fit inside an old tool case, wondering how life could be so long while the nth episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks (both the original and the reboot) droned on after my mother’s midday soaps. I don’t know how long this lasted, but it was enough to get sick of Alvin and his goober ass brothers.
Being inside another Miami-area apartment, this time my other grandmother, my mother’s mother, packed to the brim with everything you would expect in a hoarder’s hut, paperbacks about fasting diets and tabloids reducing rooms to crawlspaces, tables with no discernible surfaces, refrigerator shelves filled with cream cheese and meat from the beginning of the previous presidency, air reeking of moth balls, dozens and dozens of pesticide boxes steeping in the Floridian heat. I focused on the tennis match on the tiny color set, the first time I saw Venus Williams play.
This moment on the Jenny Jones show where Jenny was having her usual cavalcade of child talent show performers for one of the episodes in between the typical wet turd topics she relished. (I think Jenny Jones is a dogshit human, mostly because she was so bad at her job.) Anyway, one of these children does some stupid dance routine, and then Jenny asks in that laughing-through-a-ham-sandwich voice of hers “so, huh, uhhh what is your GPA in school?” And the girl, who is maybe 6 or 8, so why does it even matter, says “four point oh,” and the crowd cheers like an elementary-school student is going to end up with the nuclear codes. (Actually, given the state of the country, this isn’t off the betting market.)
When I was in fifth grade, my mother and teachers decided that I needed to both be more social and spread my knowledge to the greater community of elementary school students. It was settled: I would go to the media center every morning and be part of the morning announcements team. Instead of talking about lunch items and leading the youths in a moment of gratitude, however, I was deemed Professor Math; donning a lab coat and prop glasses, I would lead students through sort sort of math problem that a teacher wrote, sometimes with an answer, and sometimes without. (These would be the same teachers that would call me over from the other side of a school to ask a question about computers when I didn’t even have one at home yet.) I would go in a fugue state, and I have no idea what I looked like on the TV, except that I would prematurely try to remove this schmatta of a coat while the camera was still on me. Throughout my childhood, adults had always assumed I would just figure out stuff—bouncing between classes in different grades when I was young, being told to teach myself entire courses just by reading the textbook so I could take an exam, allowing me to hop over to a community college based program after grade ten instead of finishing normal high school. That said, I have always felt really stupid because, again, who doesn’t think basic things like “you should not remove your clothing the second you’re done talking just because the fabric makes you want to scream inside.”
I FEEL LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT! LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT! LIKE CHICKEN TO-NIGHT!!!!
Learning from Linda Ellerbee that I could not get AIDS from holding hands or sharing food or even kissing someone, vital information for my five-year-old brain as I was convinced I would get AIDS somehow, complicated by my inability to tell the difference between AIDS and “aides,” which made eavesdropping on teachers’ conversations horrifying. Years later, I’d have relatives who did not want to live next door to people because they heard they had AIDS—which doesn’t make them unique in their bigotry but feels rich considering the alleged felonies they were maybe allegedly committing. Or maybe not ironic: shit tends to float.
That all-too-slight moment between social media feeling everywhere and social media feeling genuinely inescapable, when one could still truly log off, or never even sign up, where cable television was still an apartment complex amenity, allowing me to watch season 3 of Drag Race and the first three seasons of Beverly Hills, 90210 roughly 8,000 times, two slices of television history that have proven valuable to friendships and relationships and my sense of self, however silly and faggy that may be, for the better part of two decades even as we’re now all logged on all the time, however silly and faggy that may be.
Honorable mentions: Mother May I Sleep with Danger; Degrassi’s deeply morbid series finale telemovie School’s Out; Absolutely Fabulous; the moment I realized the Lysistrata was just an episode of Cybill; every time Cybill Shepherd attempted to do Martha Stewart in a TV movie; the tradition of year-end quizzes on British TV (I have little use for British culture in general, but they did invent the pub quiz); Tonya Harding landing the triple axel; Pop Up Video; Top of the Pops; Grover from Sesame Street teaching everyone the difference between “near” and “far”; when Bravo would play Inside the Actors Studio and that Leigh Bowery documentary; when All My Children balanced a lesbian Bianca with the alien rock star Zarf; every time Cher called C-SPAN; when Nellie Furtado performed “Maneater” at the club on One Life to Live and then club blew up; Kellie Martin in general.
Dishonorable mentions: “Numberwang” (one of them has turned out to be a transphobe, straight in the bin of former beloveds along with Roisín Murphy); every clip of Grey’s Anatomy I have seen via YouTube; the host from Press Your Luck; HGTV in theory and practice
So that’s twenty. The mixed media set and a poem are below. If you like this, consider being a paying supporter. Happy New Year: we all need it. —KJ
just two or three questions about (my) gender
the internet is dying—
—and of course we’re all dying, we are, whoop de doo but also I’m sorry, i am, and of course everything is an ad, it is, even this thing, stay tuned for how you can save twenty percent off of a vpn license telegraphy boner pill food slop box subscription plan, but even the lying is not fun anymore, who am I even supposed to lie to on twitter anymore, Laura loomer doesn’t even look like a human anymore, let alone an actual robot, did you know that if you feed it enough rope ChatGPT will write you scat porn, not that I like that but on principle I like to make it spew out shit, did you know a lot of people who used to call people like me faggots but now pretend that they have a sense of humor are saying it’s okay to call ai slurs, which only make seems to make sense if you think ai can hear you, then again the internet is dying and if it’s dying can it also be offended when you call its grandchildren something that’s actually about Black people, when I went to reddit under my latest fake account to find the same pictures of a man that I used to jerk off to, pictures from a group where everyone posted photos of themselves in their showers drinking beer, he was using the account for the first time in years but the photos were gone, not just the ones where he was fully on display, half-hard from the thrill of taking a full-body photo, but the ones from the waist up showing his home brew, too tall for his own shower, still commenting on the speed of home built computers, are we all dying?, enter MAXINE30 for your discount today
You made it. We all did. Hope you liked this. If you like it enough, consider being a paid subscriber so I can make more of these more often. See you next year. —KJ