Sir, – Regarding Oliver Callan’s article “Irish feminists should realise how much they need men” (Opinion & Analysis, November 25th), since your postbag will no doubt be full to bursting with angry women understandably complaining, I wish to address Callan’s treatment of gay people.
When I read that “Marriage equality for gay people was only possible through the will of their straight betters”, I did a double-take and read the sentence again.
Surely, I had misread it, but no, Callan refers to straight people as gay people's betters. Is this a point of view that The Irish Times should really be condoning?
Regarding drag, why does Callan assume that drag queens are sexist and making fun of women? It’s important to note that Callan singles out only gay men for this – straight actors, for example, who dress as women for television or film roles, and have arguably been making a living doing so for much longer than gay men, and often with a much more insulting edge, do not draw Callan’s ire.
Ireland’s long-standing drag community is wide and varied but all of its performers celebrate the spectrum of gender, including women and femininity, something that Callan certainly isn’t doing by dismissing women’s complaints as shrill.
He asks, “Where are all the hilarious drag acts where women dress as a stereotypical man and exaggerate their dress, gait and speech?”
These would be performers called drag kings, and Dublin has some excellent ones, including Phil T Gorgeous, Julian Mandrews, Slick’O and Stanley Knife; however, given Callan’s dismissal of drag as “big hair, garish makeup and rib-crunching dresses”, it’s unsurprising that he is unaware of their work.
Callan closes his article by stating that for women “to dismantle chauvinism they must first understand it and take us by the hand”, and that statement perfectly sums up Callan’s attitude – that his opinions are other people’s problems to fix. If that isn’t the height of privilege, I don’t know what is. – Yours, etc,
MARK WARD,
Dublin 8.