I had a really strange reaction to this video.
I certainly wasn’t expecting her to actually come out of drag. There’ve been a couple videos in the past where it was a joke, so I expected it to be Davey or something.
Haley’s clearly an actress, and what I love about her is watching her come alive in the performance. She’s an entertainer. Simultaneously, though, she has this genuineness in the way she approaches her fanbase - she means it when she wishes “peace, love, and cupcakes" on her subscribers, and the simple goodness of her attitude has always brightened my day.
So when someone that we already love for being “the real her," in her own way - for being authentic and funny and relatable - takes off a very “passable" performance face, those qualities are amplified tenfold.
And then the weird thing happened: when Haley Star came out of drag, this gay woman’s first thought was that he was incredibly attractive.
When this kind of thing happens, I like to take a second to try to figure out why it happened, because normally I’m completely blind and deaf to the attractiveness of men. At one time, I concluded that I was attracted to gender variance or queerness in men, but that only holds ground to a certain point. I’ve been playing with the difference between physical and sexual attraction a lot lately, because my experimental hypothesis that I find men physically but not sexually attractive holds ground in the way I relate to the transmasculine community as well as for cisgendered men. It’s almost always the hair, the face, the brightness of the eyes, the warmth or friendliness of a personality - the same things that would draw me to a woman.
Though it was really surprising to experience sudden attraction to a guy, Haley Star’s ability to just go out there and be so simple and sweet - as a man, not using the feminine cover under which it would be more acceptable to do that - is a powerful statement of freedom. And not to sound trite, but freedom is probably one of the most stunningly gorgeous traits on anyone.
To read all the comments and see hordes of gay men, many of which are overflow from DaveyWavey’s channel, comfortably and affectionately mixing pronouns, whole heartedly embracing both genders she presents, almost all commenting along the lines of, “I’d love to see more of both because you’re absolutely beautiful no matter what your gender" is so humanizing that it makes me want to explode into a small flurry of butterflies.
I like Haley Star and her community for the same reason I like My Little Pony and the bronies. Despite what I would’ve ever imagined, they’re comfortably male, masculine communities (whether gay men or bros) often associated with both traditional and oppositional sexism. So often, I see gay guys rejecting trans* men as legitimate men or disgustedly refusing to consider dating them, bringing a lot of the same prejudice they receive from society onto gender-variant people. But in these venues, we get to see men come together in huge numbers and extravagantly, joyfully, authentically celebrate the extremely feminine in ways that in no way aim to escape their masculinity or maleness.
Without so much as a nod to traditional expectations of the kind of oppositional bullshit that often makes me very claustrophobic, they let themselves love, in the simplest, most unironic of ways, exactly what they love. And maybe I connect to that naïve, honest, happy little sparkle in their eyes, because it reminds me of the way it used to dance in mine. Maybe seeing Hayley Star look like a man reminds me that I don’t have to be bound to anything but what makes me comfortable and happy, either.
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