On the Hellfire Gala and the Erasure of Queer & Trans BIPOC Histories
It’s not that Bobby Drake, or any other queer, straight, trans, or cis man shouldn’t wear a dress. Anybody and any body, can and should wear any garment. What many are feeling towards this reveal is a discomforting tension regarding the specific contexts of this reveal. First, it is clearly appropriative of drag aesthetic, and drag has a storied history of racism and erasure of it BIPOC pioneers. Immediately, an affluent cis white middle class mutant appropriating these aesthetics becomes problematic. This is compounded by the lack of visible trans characters and visible queer & trans BIPOC characters, who could represent the culture and experiences that Bobby is appropriating.
Bobby’s look is an embodiment of the ways that Marvel’s homonormative queer representation simultaneously erases and commodifies trans and BIPOC experiences.
Some caveats: This isn’t about anything the x-office intentionally did, or a condemnation of the Hellfire Gala as a storyline. This is a labor of love and attempt to use the break-down of the mutant-metaphor here to articulate an often overlooked aspect of “haute” fashion, or white-bourgeoisie high-fashion. I’m also white, and while I’m trans, I’m not impacted in the same ways as my BIPOC kin are by this legacy of appropriation. My goal is to do my best to advocate for these community and to show the way this legacy of appropriation has harmed them.
We saw the Hellfire Looks, and we all shouted our “YAASSS QUEEN” and talked about all the “LEWKS”. Folks talked about people “serving” and called outfits “sickening”. It was so impactful, that we didn’t pause to constructively reflect on the acts we were engaged in. It’s not surprising though, because so much of the cultures that we’re appropriating have been so occluded, erased, and painted over that we don’t even realize we didn’t build this house. House & Ballroom Culture did.
We’re used to seeing spectacle like the Hellfire Gala in shows like notable transphobe Ru Paul’s Fracking Race, and maybe more in the mainstream consciousness through the Met Gala. It’s clear that the X-Office is most intentionally looking at the Met Gala as an aspect of the pastiche it’s constructing, but even the Met Gala is irrevocably tied to this legacy of co-opting and appropriation.
The Hellfire Gala borrows & appropriates (intentionally or not) from House & Ball-Room culture. This is unambiguous, it is a specific event, rooted around extravagant outfits, it is located within a space established as a haven from a hostile and bigoted world, and it is intended to celebrate their culture, within that environment. Structurally it has the same abstract pillars as Ballroom culture. There are entire “houses” of families, by blood or found alike, and as the recent Hellfire Gala covers point out, each house, each book stands on their own within this larger community. In truth, the Hellfire Gala has more in common with Ballroom culture than it does the Met Gala.
And yet, the in referencing and invoking the Met Gala, it becomes tied to a long legacy of commodification of BIPOC queer & trans culture. This not unique to the Hellfire Gala, but it’s one of the times where the X-line has more explicitly dipped into this history. This is where the mutant metaphor breaks down in really interesting ways, and unearths something really complex about the ways marginalized communities carve out their own spaces. At the same time the X-books lack stronger representation for queer and trans people, specifically BIPOC queer and trans people, making the sting of this appropriative legacy even more complex and biting. There are so few trans X-men, and only one canonically Black trans man, Jacob Williams, a background character from Vita Ayala’s Prisoner X and New Mutants. This lack of visible representation is a place where the mutant metaphor and this appropriation intersect in a really specific way. The erasure is compounded twice-fold, lacking awareness of what’s being borrowed in the real world, and not making visible, the people it was borrow from.
As I’ve said though, this isn’t just about the Hellfire Gala or the Met Gala, this is a systemic issue in the capitalist high-fashion world, functioning within a white-supremacist society. The world of bourgeoisie fashion & cosmetics has always been borrowing from the cultures of BIPOC, most specifically Black, Latinx, & Afro-Latinx. The co-opting of the culture of BIPOC que& trans folks is all the more problematized by the fact that the ones stealing from Ball Culture are the very folks whose discrimination forced BIPOC to need to carve out their own spaces in the first place. The very oppressor of these communities is quite literally reaching into the safe spaces constructed by these communities, to steal from them. Perhaps one of the easiest mainstream examples of this is Madonna’s 1990’s hit, Vogue. The song largely pays homage to white celebrities in its lyrics, erasing the BIPOC queer & trans folks who birthed voguing. You see, voguing was an art-form all its own. It was a specific style of dance that incorporate fast & practices transitions from and to dramatic, striking poses, used on the runways of Ballroom events.
Suddenly, this art-form, created by queer & trans BIPOC people, was being distorted in the mainstream, through Madonna’s work, and ultimately was shrugged off as a “trend” when the hype surrounding her hit-single subsided. But Ball culture continued on. And this pattern continues, as middle-class to wealthy [mostly white] cis women and white cis gay men continue to to reach into these spaces to commodify the styles, the terminology, the aesthetics, and the material of Black trans culture. As Jen Richards describes it the Netflix documentary: “…one woman’s armor becomes another woman’s adornment.” And this is the truth. Jen goes on from there to articulate how overtime, the gay men who populate the beauty and fashion industries are borrowing from as Jen Richards calls them “street queens”. Jen’s attempting to point out how cis gay men often utilize the aesthetics they see being used by drag queens, sex workers, and trans women from their community, in the designs and aesthetics that they adorne cis white women in. This is how overtime, the aesthetics and experiences of a marginalized community become a commodity for the bourgeoisie.
Appropriation of any form is defined by power dynamics. The white upper-class oppressors have the power to oppress and marginalize and to simultaneous profit of what is created in the spaces carved-out by the oppressed. This is pervasive is the fashion and Beauty industries, which continuously market the aesthetics pioneered by BIPOC queer & trans folks and sex-workers. This essay is not even close to fully uncovering the depth of this history of oppression & appropriation. That project is something I’m not qualified for. What I am qualified to do, is to say that you an trace this history through the history of of haute fashion and avante-garde fashion that is on display in Met Gala, which persisted largely ignorant of the origins these aesthetics have in queer & trans BIPOC spaces.
For the Hellfire Gala to borrow from the Met Gala, it becomes locked into the sins of its parents. As I’ve pointed out earlier, this is compounded with the staggering lack of inclusion for the real world identities being victimized through this history of appropriation. Of all the many mutants, we only got 2 cover drops with BIPOC characters, both cis and neither explicitly queer in the text of the comics. Let it sink in that Emma Frost, the whitest WASP of the X-Men, got three separate covers. The character possibly most embodies the oppressing class got three covers alone, when non-white characters altogether didn’t even add up to that. Considering Storm is specifically known for her taste in and affinity for fashion, I would expect if any character got multiple covers, Storm would be the one to give them too.
I also immediately though about who is missing from the Gala, and what that says about Krakoa. We know that there are no pre-cogs allowed on Krakoa, so we can assume they’re not allowed into the Gala as well. So, who else isn’t allowed to enter. What about the mutants that have been forgotten and let behind like Jessie Drake, one of the very few trans women in Marvel. The mutant gala both references and enacts systemic erasures, both fictional and those of our own world. Simultaneously, I’m compelled to see see the Gala as a milestone for mutant-kind, who have had so little time to rest within a world that hates and fears them. To see this Gala taking shape, shows us how far the mutants have come, it shows the power of that community. These things live side-by-side. It’s a terrible wonder. It’s empowerment and erasure. It’s another situation where the mutant metaphor continues to borrow from marginalized communities and at the same time speaking to the power of communities built by them.
I really hope to see this arc digging into the complexity of these questions. I want the Hellfire Gala to be more self-aware than Krakoa has been up to this point. I’m eager to see the decadence of the gala dissected and undermined by the many sins Krakoa has stacked up since it’s founding as a mutant nation.
