Speaking of black drag queens, Salon.com has just posted an article analyzing the recent trend in black movies to feature male actors doing.... drag? Well, it's not quite drag, really. It's something much more tricky and complicated and problematic. The author cites critics who call this trend nothing more than an updated minstrel show:

Like Chappelle, blogger Darryl James sees the phenomenon as part of an effort to neutralize black masculinity. For him and a lot of other straight black men, gender-bending comedians are "castrated clowns," whose emasculation makes them palatable to white people and man-hating black women alike. "The black man in drag is one of the new coons," he writes. Never mind that he's also one of the old coons -- according to Marjorie Garber's 1999 book, "Vested Interests," the men who played women in minstrel shows were "the best-paid performers in the minstrel company."

Her analysis in the rest of the article I find a bit weak, but it's worth reading. I think this trend is something that we -- we being people concerned about representations of race, gender, and sexuality -- should certainly be thinking critically about!

Wish I could write more, but I'm off to lunch with my friend Ethan and then hopping in a car with my friend Bill, whose giving me a lift to Guerneville!