#blackqueertings

[blackqueertings]

Connie Fleming AKA Connie Doll

Connie Fleming (she/her) is a trans icon, former model, and venerated door woman who came up in New York nightlife. Fleming was born in Jamaica and immigrated to Flatbush, Brooklyn with her mother at the age of 5. As early as eighteen years old Connie was becoming significant in NYC nightlife. Fleming first began doing drag shows, but in an interview with The Standard, she admits she partook more due to the difficulty for openly transwomen to participate in nightlife, and other gigs. “There are only a few employment options available to trans people,” she told The Standard, “You’re a whore, or you can be on stage and perform. There’s no room in society for us.” But, drag was not just a stepping stone. Connie struggled to to gain acceptance from her family, and drag “... gave me confidence and a voice, and lifted my head up off the ground, but I had to solidify myself within.”. 

In 1992 two major events in Connie’s career occurred. Her iconic moment in Thierry Muger’s Spring/Summer 92′ show, in which she strutted down the catwalk in a red, stoned cowgirl outfit. The look included a cowboy hat, bodice, fingerless gloves, chaps and boots. Adorned with ruby stones, Connie’s presence, beauty and confidence made the moment iconic. Connie represented transness, Blackness and queerness, she represented dark-skinned women and her sexuality and confidence defied hegemonic ideals. Her beauty and grace, was itself, a form of resistance and protest. Her image continues to have power. Months later, RuPaul , another 80s club kid with aspirations, released “Supermodel”, which became a hit. Charles was also Black, but a drag queen. Just as mainstream, cis and heteronormative audiences flattened the nuances between Black queens and trans women in Connie’s at the beginning of Connie’s career “Supermodel” exacerbated this, drag was once again, stifling Connie Doll. 

Later, according to The Standard, when Connie became known as a door girl she used this same confidence and defiance from the runway to construct a new persona; that of the “evil door bitch”. Once again, Connie carved out an alternative way of being seen. By simply owning her identity, and commanding respect Connie was reorganizing the value system of New York nightlife. In her interview with The Standard Connie Girl noted that when she started, a Black dark-skinned trans women working the door was rare. Her status as an icon is further illustrated as she remains a go-to door woman for events throughout New York City. 

Sources

The Untold Story of the Fearless Connie Fleming

James Flemons Breaks Down 7 Iconic Moments in Black Queer Fashion

[blackqueertings]

The ‘Buller Man’ and the ‘Batty Bwoy’

This entry will center on two Caribbean terms used to describe men who have sex with men (MSM). Analysis that is not my own will come from Wesley Crichlow’s  Buller Men and Batty Bwoys : Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities. 

These two terms are commonly used in Jamaican and other Anglophone-Caribbean nations. Curiously, they reinforce a gender binary in dividing MSM into a “masculine” or male role--the Bull or top and a “feminine” role--the ‘batty bwoy’ or bottom. The words masculine and feminine are in quotations to reflect the fallacy of this binary. Obviously, neither of these roles is inherently more masculine or male then the other. This feminization is connected to the shared ‘receiving’ between women and bottoms, by simply accepting a member, one is conceived as therefore subordinate to it’s possessor. Crichlow describes these as ‘dread words’ a term coined by Mikeda Silvera that refers to words that cut deep. That the groups they are targeted at have not yet (and may never) reclaimed, nor softened. 

‘Batty bwoy’ is by far the term I am most familiar with. It still carries shame and judgement to this day. This is likely because unlike ‘Buller Man’, which is still harmful, it targets ones ‘manhood’ and sexuality. Not all gay Black Caribbean’s are ‘batty bwoys’, one must display or be caught expressing so-called feminine behaviors. I posit that one may draw a parallels between this term and the, well-known term ‘fairy’. Both are a term meant to ‘box’ queer men back into a binary understanding of gender expression and sexual intercourse. Not only these but these terms are specifically targeted at ‘feminine’ MSM, they may be weaponized by other, more traditionally masculine or conservative MSM. Interestingly, ‘batty bwoy’ may also be used as a threat. For example, my father asks my brother, as a joke “Are you a batty bwoy?”, the question was said in jest but it is a provocation no less. To suggest this feminization is a call to the subject to reassert their masculinity in a traditional fashion.

The Influence of Black Nationalism 

Regardless of one’s label to be called a ‘buller’ man or ‘batty bwoy’ is in essence a rejection. Black communal solidarity is a major source of joy, stregth, self-worth and resistance. For Black-Canadians, this solidarity is a balm for the exhaustion (racial battle fatigue) and violence that's comes with navigating white spaces in a social structure that works to deny lived experiences of racism and discrimination and minimizes historical antiblackness. But for MSM, this is identification is complicated by pervasive homophobia. Crichlow draws a connection between the hompohbia present in African-Caribbean and African-Canadian families and Black nationalism. Crichlow argues that to be an open MSM is to remove oneself from the communal solidarity of hetero-Blackness because “ Black heterosexist thinking is grounded in very specific gender expectations of masculinity, which the men in this book must live up to; the alternative for them is to suffer the public and communal violence that is associated with being labelled weak, buller man, batty bwoy, feminine, or race traitor” (Emphasis added, 5).