Why Conservatives Love Carrie Prejean

Just when you thought you’d heard the last of disgraced beauty queen Miss California, she’s back, storming off the set of Larry King Live the other night. King tried to ask Carrie Prejean about the details of her legal settlement with the Miss California officials she was suing for religious discrimination. That is, until they found her underage sex tape. Prejean was clearly unwilling to discuss the tape, so King tried to move on by taking a call from a viewer. But Prejean wouldn’t hear of it, electing instead to take off her microphone (but not, weirdly, to leave the camera frame).

Lost in the drama of Prejean’s hissy fit, though, was the first caller’s question, which gets at the broader shift in the pageant culture that made the gay-marriage fracas so captivating in the first place. “I’m a gay man and I love pageants,” the caller said. “I’m sure that you, Carrie, have got great gay friends that possibly helped you win. What would you give them as advice if they wanted to get married?”

The gay guru is by now a familiar enough figure in our culture. But in the pageant world, where women are expected to exhibit only the most dated and conservative notions of gender, pageant kings were always a bit of an awkward fit. So it’s interesting to note that over the years, as the pageant world gets more fringe, it’s also started to look increasingly gay. Before Radar magazine went defunct last year, it ran a long piece detailing the presence of gay men at every level of the Southern pageant circuit. Two recent documentaries, Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen, and Little Beauties: The Ultimate Kiddie Queen Showdown, prominently feature gay men as pageant denizens. And for an even more current example, look no further than TLC’s King of the Crown, which features a delightfully wry Cyrus Frakes as South Carolina’s pageant coach extraordinaire. The irony of Prejean’s answer—told to a gay judge and resulting in the consternation of her pageant directors, one of whom was gay and the other a gay marriage supporter—wasn’t lost on the broader community. “I think it's ridiculous that she got first runner-up,” one pageant attendee told the Associated Press at the competition earlier this year. “That is not the value of 95 percent of the people in this audience. Look around this audience and tell me how many gay men there are.”

That derision was probably one reason why conservatives rallied around Prejean, crowning her a modern day Queen Esther and making her a show-stopper at the Values Voter summit in September. But it can’t be the only reason. The party is packed with former beauty queens—not only Prejean and Sarah Palin but Michele Bachmann, Lisa Murkowski, and Marsha Blackburn. Conservatives love their beauty queens, I think, in part for the obvious reasons—the pageant fetishizes the traditional values conservatives go gaga over—not only strictly prescribed gender roles but also moral rectitude, patriotism, and charity. But there’s a victimization element at work here, too: Prejean is the brave and besieged outsider standing up to the know-it-all elites. It’s an image they see as representative of, and mirrored in, themselves. This was evident in the ad [2] that the National Organization for Marriage cut with Prejean when it tried to portray the controversy as a case of liberal intolerance, as it is portrayed in the title of her book, Still Standing: The Untold Story of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, and Political Attacks [3].

Of course, as John McCain learned the hard way, there are great risks in aligning yourself with the right’s flame-throwing bombshells. Like Palin, Prejean can always be counted on to fire up a crowd, but no one can keep her from going rogue—as evidenced by last night’s tantrum or, more obviously, the sex tape itself, which reportedly [4] caused her to be dropped from a “Defenders of the Family” event last week.