Culture Slut: Gender Play in the 90s and 00s
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Growing up as a queer child in the 1990s, finding any kind of alternative gender presentation was limited only to what they could get away with on television. Lucy Lawless as Xena: Warrior Princess, was my absolute hero and holds up today as many Sapphics’ queer awakening, yet her subversiveness was subtextual. The writers flirted with lesbianism, but kept it deniable enough in order to appease the TV censors and keep their prime-time slots - all glory to capitalism over art.
But still, Xena sent shivers down my spine. Not only was she beautiful, she was the strongest fighter on screen, man or woman. She was clever, she was angry, she was powerful, but most importantly, she was butch.
She had all the masculine qualities of any other action hero, but was decidedly and pointedly a woman. So many episode plots revolved around her pretending to be an “ordinary woman” in order to seduce a man, infiltrate a palace, go unnoticed by enemy soldiers, and only then did she reveal herself as this unstoppable tower of vengeance, a Muscle Mommy full of manic power. This duality was so fascinating to me as a kid, and I became obsessed with people who lived within this kind of middle-ground between masculine and feminine, exhibiting the extremes of both.
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The muscle queen I was in utter awe of was the famous professional wrestler Chyna, the alter ego of Joanie Lauer, who sadly died in 2016. Billed as The Ninth Wonder of The World, she had the hulking mass of a body builder and the strength of ten men, making her easily the most dominant female wrestler television had ever seen, regularly competing with (and beating) the top male stars of the 90s. Her body was so fascinating to me because it was constantly changing. At the beginning of her run, she was very solid, very square and mannish, a result of an excessive use of steroids, but as she became more popular and more famous, and thus more highly paid, she started a cosmetic surgery journey to blend out some of the steroids' less flattering side effects. Her facial surgery trimmed her jaw and plumped her lips, and she had the most fabulous breast implants installed so that she still had a prominent bust on top of her rippling pectorals. Unfortunately, one of them ruptured during a match and she had to go in for emergency surgery. A new kind of implant was created just for her, with an emphasis on size and durability, named the Chyna 2000, which remains the most popular model for large framed women and female body builders.
Chyna posed for Playboy centrefolds twice, and each time, those issues became the highest selling copies of their year. People were desperate to see her remarkable body, her huge and powerful muscles, but also her aggressively stylised sexuality, a nude form writhing around in leather and wielding fantasy weapons. Chyna’s pictures were almost entirely masculine, muscles and swords and dragons, but with the shocking revelation of a rose pink pussy and matching nipples on perky tits, He-Man at the gynaecologist.
I think it would be very remiss of me not to take this moment to talk about Loren Cameron here. Cameron was an incredible artist and trans-activist whose compelling portraits of trans men across America in the mid 90s earned him high praise and the opportunity to lecture at many high end colleges, whilst also bringing trans men to the forefront of public consciousness. I remember coming across his book Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits in my local library (remember those) and being so enraptured with it that I soon managed to get my own copy, which I treasure to this day. Cameron’s self portraits show his beautiful muscled body in classic beefcake poses with his vagina proudly on show. He holds the camera’s shutter release in his hand, caressing it tenderly, the same way a cis model might handle his cock, and showing the viewer that Cameron is in full ownership of this image, of how and why we can gaze at him. He is inviting us to look at his body with admiration, with desire, with curiosity. Part of Body Alchemy shows how some trans-mascs masculinise their genitals with piercings so that the skin drapes in certain ways, how the clit is worn, for want of a better phrase. His work de-medicalises trans bodies, especially trans male bodies, in a way that was completely ground-breaking at the time. Cameron died at the end of last year, after a series of health problems, but his output is as powerful today as it was then, particularly when in the world of trans-regulating politics, trans men are so frequently forgotten about.
Jumping to the flip side of this gender spectrum, there is a figure that inspired so many queer people growing up in the 90s and 00s who is one of my all time heroes; Pete Burns, from the band Dead or Alive. My first pop culture encounter with him was on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, with his fur coats, array of glamorous wigs, outrageous clothes and totally unique appearance. I will never forget the excitement of seeing this totally alien looking person with porcelain doll skin, giant lips, high heels and skimpy dresses open their mouth and speak in the guttural voice of a Liverpudlian dock worker. His appearance was feminine, and his voice masculine, in the simplest terms, but when you actually look at every aspect in and of itself, it’s all both and neither of those things, it’s entirely unique. Non binary, some might say.
“Pete Burns’ appearance was feminine, and his voice masculine, in the simplest terms, but when you actually look at every aspect in and of itself, it’s all both and neither of those things, it’s entirely unique. Non binary, some might say.”
Burns’ appeal was not only visual, but aural too. His command of language was unparalleled, an Oscar Wildean goddess birthed from the piss drenched gutters of punk, able to decapitate anyone with a flick of his wet, pink tongue. “You’re insincere to the point of nausea” remains locked and loaded in my mental chamber at all times, alongside his perfect read of Big Brother nemesis Jodie Marsh - “You can take a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” It’s transcendent. Burns mastery in the art of insult speaks to a whole vein of gay culture that is worthy of its own deep dive.
We all know what reading is thanks to Drag Race, and those more inquisitive followed it back to its definitions in the seminal documentary Paris is Burning, but of course it has been around much longer than that. In 1980, master of British camp and the double entendre Kenneth Williams released a book called Acid Drops, a collection of pithy put downs and guttersnipe insults designed to puncture any ego and amuse any friend-of-dorothy. The 1968 documentary The Queen gives us a glimpse into the drag pageants of New York and the cut throat camaraderie of the contestants as they dog each other out over wigs, gowns and make up. “I’m not saying she’s not beautiful, just that she wasn’t looking beautiful tonight! Look at her makeup! It’s terrible!” Wilde himself was clearly also a master of shade, full of eviscerating epigrams and withering witticisms. “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
Burns’ anarchic and unflinching personality was spellbinding, and my fascination with him lasted long after his Big Brother run. 2006 brought us Pete Burns - Unspun, a documentary series following Burns after his release from prison on bail for an assault charge, where for some reason known only to TV producers, a condition of his bail agreement was that he had to live with an obsessive fan for a short period. One memorable scene involved this fan reading reams of his own poetry to Burns, and once he’s finished, Burns slowly turns to the camera and says “I feel like I’ve just watched someone disembowel themselves.” Another transcendent TV moment.
The peak of Burns’ public acceptance of his outrageous gender play was his fantastic 2007 appearance on Channel Four’s Celebrity Wife Swap, which saw him and his assistant stylist boyfriend get mixed up with football hooligan Neil Ruddock and his page three glamour model girlfriend. Incredibly, Burns comes out as one of the clear heroes of the episode, putting the positively Neanderthal Ruddock in his place, forcing him to help care for his own child and focus on being a better romantic partner to his girlfriend. The outrageous stylised femininity of Burns triumphs over the brutish masculinity and it happened in front of a whole nation. TV studios would be burned to the ground for this attack on traditional family values if this happened today. The very idea that someone who is neither male nor female could have a healthier perspective on heterosexual family relationships than those participating in them scares some people to their very core.
Like Chyna, Burns also died in 2016, she of a drug overdose, he of a cardiac arrest. Both had fallen far from their 90’s and 00’s television stardom, and both were pushing themselves to the visual limits. Chyna left the WWE after a very contentious break up with The Powers That Be behind the scenes and focused more on adult work. She appeared on a sex tape called 1 Night In China with Sean Waltman (fellow wrestler X-Pac), and then transitioned into studio porn, performing in several films as the iconic She-Hulk.
After her death, her adult films became a sore spot and currently remain the only reason that Chyna hasn’t posthumously been inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame, an accolade she completely deserves. Chyna changed the face of women’s wrestling, taking them from sports model arm candy to aggressive, powerful athletes in their own right and deserving of respect, but this apparently doesn’t count for the bosses at WWE today.
Burns died botched and bankrupt: Unlike Chyna, people took his passing as a time to reflect on the highest highs of his career, his 80s hits, his ground-breaking persona and his magnetic personality. Boy George, a sometimes-rival who received more than one tongue lashing from Burns called him “one of our great true eccentrics.” Marc Almond of Soft Cell deemed him a “one off creation, a fantastic, fabulous, brilliant creature…” And one of the most astute observations came from fellow Big Brother contestant socialist MP George Galoway, who said Burns was “a cross between Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker… you don’t get more brilliant than that.”
All of us owe so much to the people who shaped us in youth, whether that is friends, family, TV stars, musicians, actors, celebrities, any person who helped us to see ourselves is worthy of remembrance. Whether or not stars like that could or should translate to current day is almost irrelevant, because on a personal level, they were who they needed to be then for us to become who we are now. I would never have known how beautiful I could be, how I could embrace masculine appeal and stylised femininity if it weren’t for Chyna and Pete Burns. I would never have known I could be strong in so many ways without them, strong in body, strong in convictions, strong in aesthetic, strong in wit, strong in self belief. In beauty, we are slaves to the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity, are you strong, or are you pretty? Are you a submissive femme or a masculine top? Are you a man or a woman? In the words of Pete Burns paraphrasing Gone With The Wind in the way only he can, “frankly my dear, I don’t give a fuck.”
Words: Misha MN