Dumbing down the dykon

by Red Velvet

Just open a tatty tabloid or subscribe to a gay RSS feed, every A, B and D ‘celeb’ has been getting papped. During the Naughties, usually while sharing a same-sex game of tonsil tennis on an exclusive dancefloor, which strangely enough always seemed to exude just the right amount of lesbian chic for male titillation.

The trend first splurged into being with Madonna’s 1990 taboo-shattering Justify My Love video, where she attended a bisexual S & M orgy before finally stumbling out of her hotel suite. However it was actually an audacious move by Maggie Gyllenhal who took part in a spoof lesbian orgy, which repositioned this cultish behavior. As part of a video campaign supporting the Writer’s Guild Association’s strike, the Secretary star turns up to a hotel room to meet a man only to find two other beauties waiting to see the same bloke. Cue mass anti-man ranting, while swigging on champagne and emphatically proclaiming: “We don’t need him. We’ve got everything we need right here! Girls – you want to make an interim agreement?”

But does this “interim agreement” extend to real life dykons who dumb down their homosexuality to play up to male fantasies? Take songstress Toni Braxton. She is openly gay, but her videos read like heterosexual pound shop paperbacks. Am I missing something? Surely if fellow diva Mariah Carey can sue her father and still look syrupy and innocuous on MTV, then a gay female artist can dispense with lesbian chic and still be convincingly sexy?

However, more recently, the cult of the lesbian chic has been given a no-gloss matte finish courtesy of everyone’s favourite American couple Lilo and Sam – Samsay perhaps, alas not quite as catchy as Brangelina! The general public has been subjected to the cult of lesbian drama, and all the blood-curdling, amateur theatricality of it all. It’s been quite some tale, dumping, booze binging, changing of the locks, dad praising and lambasting his daughter’s homosexual relationship in equal measures. Subsequently, the ‘let’s give it another try’ on more occasions than you can anticipate an Obama gay rights reform, the sheen has been indelibly smudged by the rusty dynamics of this globally-splattered liaison.

Still, with Samsay dominating the headlines, has this histrionic melodrama only encouraged Joe Bloggs to go on a one man crusade to cure her of her faux sexuality through a virtual syringe of man lovin’, yes this video game really does exist in cyberspace! Or have they helped make the cult of dykon more ‘real’ in its public perception to prevent Joe Bloggs from having that wank he may have treated himself to over the Madonna Britney snog at the 2004 MTV Awards? Lesbianism is just so passé now you know.