Generic White Men: Gay Halloween party edition
to distract from whatever today's news cycle is already: G.W.M Award for November is here!
Oh hey folks,
I hope y’all are busy voting if you’re reading this from the U.S. Today, I’ve got a good distraction from our collective subconscious dread over democracy for you.
It’s that time of the month again… the Generic White Man Award drops today.
With election season and Musk’s brave new world on Twitter, this month’s G.W.M. awards had a very competitive applicant pool of utterly mediocre men up to no good.
With so many big name contenders, I thought I’d take a more local, and dare I say it, personal approach to this month’s prestigious award.
Trump Gays and Jafar: November’s G.W.M. Award goes to…
The white-dude dressed as Jafar who white-splained Hebrew pronunciation to my half-Israeli full-New Yorker girlfriend at a gay house party this past Halloween.
Allow me to explain…
This past halloween, my girlfriend, Nat, and I found ourselves heading to a Halloween party thrown by friends of our new friends in Chicago, as in, we knew absolutely no one there. As five of us squeeze into a two-door car to head to the party after a comedy show that half of us had just performed in, we’re told: don’t make a big deal of it but… one of the people throwing this party’s husband voted for Trump.
A silence fell upon the tiny clown car. A woman dressed as a witch starts mumbling to herself about how she doesn’t even want to hear that name uttered. Our designated driver sighed and clutched their steering wheel harder. Another queer asks for political decorum, saying he won’t identify the person in question, perhaps sensing that the witch and I were already brewing a confrontation.
To cut the tension, the topic of Israel versus Palestine is brought up. The witch to my left is Jewish, and my girlfriend sitting in the front seat is also Jewish. If you, or someone you know, is Jewish, you know just what a recipe for disaster that is. Especially to the gentiles in the car clutching at our pearls trying not to make waves.
The witch comes in with a pro-Israeli argument that decolonize movements lead to anti-semitism, and my half-Haitian, half-Israeli by way of New York City hearthrob of a girlfriend dives in with a few well-chosen facts about the forced occupation. The car falls into what seems like, to gentiles, as an awkward silence. Then, the witch cackles in solidarity and the spell is broken. Or rather, we arrive at our destination.
We enter the party that’s well underway, perhaps even winding down, but for a recent infusion of newcomers that doubles the party’s size. As I meet new people, if I like them, I confess the dirty secret: there’s a traitor among us… a real live Trump gay.* Quelle surprise!
A white lesbian (not me, another one) says of course there would be one among us, white gay men are the worst, and now that they have gay marriage, why would they not vote Republican? I wholeheartedly agree, but in the spirit of bridging the socially-constructed gender divide, throw white women under that bus too. The other lesbian and I brood. Another queer, sensing drama, joins the conversation. We become emboldened, talking louder and louder about how just because log cabin Republicans wave pride flags and love glitter now, doesn’t mean they’re not going to ruin it for the rest of us.
When the Trump Gay doesn’t turn around and out himself, infuriated at our drunken, half-mumbled insults, we start scanning the room. Where was he? Was it the Joker? Dressed in a cheap, shiny emerald green suit plastered with black question marks, he certainly seemed sleazy enough to be a Trump Gay. My eyes fall on a young, thin gay man dressed as a slutty French maid. Et tu?
Or was it the grown-ass man dressed up in fake lederhosen? It certainly could be, anyone harboring too much enthusiasm for vintage Germany can’t be good. We keep looking around the room, instinctively we dismiss a Black dude clad in military gear, can’t be him, I say. Another queer says: But what about Kanye? My eyes narrow, surely not.
That’s when I see, across the room, a white man dressed as Jafar gesticulating wildly to none other than my girlfriend. Bold costume sir, I think. Maybe he is Persian? Would that make it OK? I decide to go investigate.
His face comes into full view. Pasty pale with a dark blond beard. Uh-oh. I feel like we all got the memo about cultural appropriation and Halloween costumes, but as my mother would say, with lips pursed: I just don’t know how these people here in do.*
I edge in closer, a grin like the cheshire cat spreading across my face as I see Nat begin to gesticulate wildly in response to what is turning into a shouting match of the Hebrew alphabet. I pause to process what I’m seeing: a white man dressed as a caricature of evil Middle Eastern villain fighting with Nat about some guttural pronunciation of a syllable.
It turns out, the dude wasn’t even Jewish, had never been to Israel, and yet nonetheless had plunged head-first into a hybrid man-white-splaining on an assorted variety of topics about Israel and Hebrew pronunciation. I hover long enough to hear her retort, “You don’t know what you’re even talking about, look at you, dressed up as a racist caricature of a Middle Eastern man!”
Of course, he had to have the last word, which was: “But it’s Disneeeyyyyyy.”
The trump among us had indeed reared his ugly head. It had always been Jafar, all along.
*Listen, to be real, I don’t know what is appropriate or not when it comes to cultural appropriation. I hear the fictional Disney character/Gay icon side of it (I guess). After all, my ultimate favorite movie growing up was Aladdin, and I went as Jasmine not once, but twice, for Halloween as a kid (see photographic evidence below).
Would I dress as Jasmine (or Aladdin!) now, as an adult? No. It’s because I carry enough self-awareness to understand that the color of my skin, whether I want it to or not, means something, and carries weight. I also understand the power of images. I understand that we are all subject to live in a world that Ijeoma Oluo describes as: “Ours is a society where white culture is normalized and universalized, while cultures of color are demonized, exotified, or erased.”
This is also the same reason that two Jewish people discussing anti-semitism and the modern-day conflict in Israel is always a very different conversation than of a Jewish person talking to a gentile about the same thing. You gotta stay in your lane, and stay humble.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t lecture a biracial Jewish woman on how to pronounce words in a language you don’t even speak. Common, at least aim for the bare minimum here, folks.
Until next time,
Allison
Aka Jasmine Enthusiast since age 6