Johnny knoxville gay
&#;Jackass&#; Has Always Been Deeply, Deeply Queer
Back in , Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville sat down with Vanity Fair and said the hushed part out loud: Jackass, the pioneering MTV television display that they had spun into a successful show franchise, is gay.
&#;We always thought it was entertaining to force a heterosexual MTV generation to deal with all of our thongs and homoerotic humour,&#; Steve-O told journalist Eric Spitznagel. &#;In many ways, all our gay humour has been a humanitarian attack against homophobia. We’ve been trying to rid the world of homophobia for years, and I think gay people really dig it too.&#;
It was the first time that the stars had ever admitted that their fixation on dicks and the pains and pleasures that can befall them went deeper than mere frat humour. But for astute fans, the writing had been on the walls for years.
John Waters, a longstanding hero of the queer community, had cameoed in Jackass: Part Two, as had a t-shirt worn by Knoxville emblazoned with the tongue-in-cheek words &#;I&#;m Straight&#; and a picture of a unicorn. Hell, the third f
Waters, Knoxville, and the Beauty of Queer Filth
“We must warn others in the community that a chief injury is not an excuse for debauchery!” the prudish, fear-mongering Big Ethel (Suzanne Sheperd) preaches to a terrified group of vanilla heterosexuals midway through the John Waters production A Dirty Shame. A group of concussed niche fetishists are beginning to edge a suburb of Baltimore toward a sexual revolution, and Big Ethel and her nervous friends — known dismissively by the fetishists and sexually liberated as “Neuters” — simply cannot stand for it. A Dirty Shame follows the descent of prudish working-class woman Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) into the midst of a sexual revolution with a group of disciple-like niche fetishists, who all became sexually liberated following radical concussions and chance encounters with the almost Jesus-like “sexual healer” Ray-Ray, played by none other than Jackass’sJohnny Knoxville.
John Waters is a master of the disgusting; his films deal in the shocking, the unclean, the appalling. His protagonists are outsiders wanting to be freaky and
There’s no arguing about how incredibly, wildly, and gleefully queer Jackass is. Even if you wanted to, you’d be staring up the inch shaft of a golden dildo as it flies 25 feet into the air directly into Bam Margera while you did it. This isn’t a particularly new or surprising revelation, and vats of ink have been spilled on the homoeroticism of the Jackass franchise.
Dicks (almost) aside, though, I yearn to dig a little further into why so many queer people adore this beautiful, two-decade-old shitshow. I’d absolutely be lying if I said watching a bunch of guys turn themselves into human Looney Tunes for no other reason than because they can isn’t almost all of the attuned the appeal, but – and bear with me – I think it’s deeper than that.
The kind of crass, violent, playfully toxic bond the men of Jackass divide exemplifies a lot of the traits that define cis-het bro culture as people currently in their 20s and 30s came to understand it growing up on the MTV hangover that was shows enjoy Punk’d and just about any frat comedy that aired this side of American Pie. The
Jackass made me the trans chick I am
*This piece originally ran in Bitch Magazine in I wrote it firmly believing that a trans woman writing about Jackass wasn't going to position the world on fire, and it didn't, but it was nonetheless surprisingly well-received. I will never forget getting a message from a friend saying Johnny Knoxville is talking about you on NPR right now. The filmmaker Lance Bangs had kindly messaged me when this first published to tell me that he had loved it, had sent it to Knoxville and crew and they all were taken aback by it as well. I am still a bit shocked by that note.
In the process of finishing the draft of my first book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, which I have finally submitted and have been feeling a superb deal of relief/stress/reliefstress about, I've been thinking a lot about how I find myself here, in my 40s, building a career I always wanted and never dared dream possible. Writing this piece, as silly as here's my essay about Jackass seems on paper, was the first time I felt I could write about the cultural ephemera that built