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 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.
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 caused her to be dropped from a “Defenders of the Family” event last week.
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Comments
Doing the right thing is a moral issue not a religious issue
By: Liberal Sista | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 16:33
Although I am a liberal (pro-choice, and an advocate for gay marriages), nevertheless, I have close friends who are social conservatives. We have constructive debates. We have conflicting opinions, but I still think they're very intelligent. Neither of them have posed nude or got breast implants. As an undergraduate, I worked full time, and attended University full time. I did not have time to enjoy the social scene, because I had my priorities in order. I'm not a Chrisitian. I'm not religious. I just made a moral choice to be responsible and act accordingly. Prejean opted not to, which makes her a TOTAL HYPOCRITE!
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Lisa Murkowski
By: xDCx | Mon, 11/16/2009 - 15:18
http://thehill.com/capital-living/24096-understanding-the-beauty-queen-p...
Senator Murkowski was a Cherry Blossom Princess, which is actually not a beauty pageant, but it's close enough to support the thesis of this article.
Sarah and Carrie
By: twinkie1cat | Mon, 11/16/2009 - 14:43
Carrie Prejean is as weird as Sarah Palin and not nearly as cute. She was as out of her league with Larry King as Sarah was with Katy Couric. She needs to go to FOX instead where they can do a talk show together. She needs to learn from another conservative play Christian beauty contest winner who fell, Anita Bryant.
Her claim of religious persecution is ridiculous, but a favorite of talibangelists who think their right is the only right and who avoid questions that are not equipped to answer in a way that flatters them. A real Christian would have stood by her view without regard to the consequences. If God told her to believe that way, then she could say nothing else and would not have whined about it.
Conservatives love Carrie for the same reason they love Sarah, she satisfies their sexual desires in a "clean" way and reinforces their so-called family values of exclusion, pro-life only until the baby is born and costing money, and following only the rules of Christianity, not the walk of Jesus. Plus they don't expect women to be smart, just pretty so the men can manipulate them. John the Baptist called them snakes and vipers. Jesus turned over their tables in the temple.
And why would a conservative Christian be making a sex tape ever, especially for a man she was not married to or get artificial breasts? Why was she even in a beauty contest? 20 was old enough to know better. So was 17. Maybe if she had been 12 she might not have understood the consequences. I am sure she knows what the Bible says about sex outside of marriage. Her faith is shallow and platitudinist nurtured by the right wing evangelists who are little more than front men for the Republican Party. When what they do is scrutinized by a skilled interviewer like Larry King, they fall apart for they are seeds planted on rocky ground and houses built on sand without depth or foundation. Jesus was radical left. His message was inclusive. People like Sarah and Carrie give Christianity a bad name.
Senator Lisa Murkowski
By: sierraseven | Sun, 11/15/2009 - 00:18
I am unable to find any reference to Sen. Murkowski having been a "former beauty queen". And if she had, she still would be a world away from the likes of Palin, Prejean, and Bachmann. Sen. Murkowski is a very smart, very well-informed person who is well-respected for her calm, mature conduct; even those who disagree with her positions will tell you that she does her homework and can discuss any issue on short notice with intelligence and poise. Those who are looking for a conservative who is rational and grounded, and truly concerned more for her constituents than for her own image on TV, can find few better than Sen. Murkowski. Please don't lump her in with the Pit Bull, the Pageant Pornqueen, and the Princess of Paranoia.
Underage?
By: MrJM | Sat, 11/14/2009 - 21:10
There is mounting evidence that Prejean's tape was made when she was 20 and that the claim that is was made when she was 17 was a ploy to keep it under wraps as "child porn."
-- MrJM
http://twitter.com/misterjayem
Prejean retro
By: boredwell | Sat, 11/14/2009 - 17:16
I'm gay. Prejean's response to what's-his-name's gay marriage question was okay. So, she disagrees with him. She's entitled. That should never have become The Issue. Perhaps, lucky for her it did! Otherwise, she would by now have been forgotten (like the current Ms USA). Perjean made the tape and agreed to those topless photos. Yet, like Palin, self-righteously and foolishly persists in vocalizing she's The Victim. And like the former governor, the former beauty queen is playing it for what it's worth.