So I thought I would write about Scruff. Not the hair, the app. It’s a bit of a problem, although it’s not all bad. Soon after I woke up this morning my phone alerted me to a knee-jerky piece of queeny bitchiness from Scruff’s owner and self-appointed community leader, Johnny. He doesn’t like being criticised. Apparently it amounts to hate. Then again, when you take a critical look at most North American discourse, it becomes apparent that anything disliked is labelled as hate and subsequently bombed to smithereens (because slaughter, as we all know, is the most efficient way to spread “freedom”).
So anyways I’m a hater apparently. Cheers Johnny. You keep raking in the gay dollars, positioning yourself as a community leader, feeding your enormous ego (what IS that compensation for, I wonder?), and acting like a general grade-A douche who can’t keep his shirt on. Sad much? But let’s have a look at your own role in all the hate, too.
Scruff, as we all probably know, is a location-based app that has basically inherited Grindr’s position (because these apps, just like the sites of the 2000’s they superseded) have lifespans of about 2-3 years before something else captures the attention of the Faggotry. So yeah, don’t blow all that cash up your nose or on thirty gym memberships, Johnny; it won’t be around forever.
Scruff is a much more robust app than Grindr. Rarely buggy, with plenty of features, although the price tag is hefty (and unjustifiable IMHO) at $13.99 per month here in Oz. It also insultingly places your account on auto-renew, which no doubt has caught out many people who thought they were buying a subscription for a month. Such underhanded sales tactics unfortunately show a clear contempt for the customers who are paying for Johnny’s lifestyle. No matter how much he might cry “hater”, just remember there’s other forms hatred can take, and deliberately attempting to rip your customers off is one of them. (A quick email to Apple results in a refund of this dishonest fee, FYI).
But let’s look at some positives too. The app does a better job than any other in providing a fairly comfortable space for older gay men, HIV positive men, and transmen. There’s no denying this, it’s obvious and it shouldn’t be ignored for the sake of proving a point. Although this doesn’t do too much to stop the ageism, pozphobia, and transphobia that rears it’s head in user profiles daily.
This leads me to the main issue (as always): the sheer volume of internalised homophobia projected onto other users as effemiphobia. Sure. Johnny “and his crew” didn’t create this problem, nor are they solely responsible for eradicating it. But if you are going to create an app and position yourself as publicly as Mr Scruff so clearly has, then you need to be doing something about the platform you created that encourages said effemiphobia. Hiding behind claims of freedom of speech doesn’t cut it. Sponsoring drag shows isn’t the solution either (unless your aim was to make people like me switch off from RuPaul altogether, in which case, SUCCESS!).
Scruff, it is claimed, was started because Johnny didn’t think there was an online space for mens like him. This idea that there’s no place in the “gay community” for hairy butches is a commonly proclaimed excuse that only thinly veils the contempt so many of these butch queens hold for the rest of the community, based purely on an insecurity surrounding their own sexuality and gender expression. It’s the same sentiment you hear from homophobic gay men who complain that pride parades are just full of glittery half naked twinks that bring shame upon all gays, a claim that is curiously blind to all the other non-twinky non-glittery gay men that ALWAYS make up the majority of a gay pride parade. Well anyway, in order to provide a “safe space” online for all these pride-trauma victims, Scruff was born. And you can’t get past more than three profiles at a time without seeing words like “straight acting”, “masc4masc”, “no femmes”, “real men only”.
It would be fab if Johnny spent a little of his energy on attempting to educate his users AWAY from this hateful discourse (since he has such an issue with hate) instead of spending so much of his time taking off his t-shirt and embarrassing himself with naked grabs for attention anywhere he can get it (seriously I don’t need to see you and your friends professionally photographed topless bodies every time I open your damned app; glad that stopped!). I know it would be too much to place filters on this language within the app, and I would be opposed to that anyway since it doesn’t teach people a thing. But certainly he could talk about the negative impact language such as MASC4MASC has on the community in general. See, he’s created a platform that makes it very easy for homo-on-homo hate to proliferate, so he really is the last person to lecture on the subject of hate himself.
I’d have less of a problem with him personally if he didn’t attach himself to this sort of language so closely. He threw his tantrum at me because I criticised his dance party. Poor baby! But let’s remember this is a dance party that is self-described as a party for “scruffy, hot, sweaty, manly men”. If he can’t see how this language polices gender expression, then he really has no business walking his flashy, give-me-all-your-cash walk. This sort of language sits at the foundation of effemiphobia: the idea that a particular type of man is “manly” instantly creates a category of “unmanly men”, and we all know that being shoved into that category are men who don’t fit the mould Johnny Scruff is so eager to promote.
He probably would disagree with all this. They always do. But I say put down the dumb bells for five minutes and start giving some thought to how what you created is helping to perpetuate the internalised heterosexism and self-hatred our entire community (including me and yourself Johnny) have been made victims of. It isn’t hard to choose language that doesn’t divide. It won’t turn you into an effeminate queen. It won’t mean you will attract any more effeminate men than you already do. It won’t mean that you have to have sex with the types of men you find personally unattractive. All it will mean is that the language you use no longer excludes or denigrates (consciously or not) members of your own community. You know, it will mean we are all treated, by each other, with equal amounts of respect.
Sponsoring a drag show doesn’t cut it, especially when you’re running parties that exclude membership into the “men’s club” based purely on the presence of hair. And that’s coming from a big, hot, sweaty, hairy, muscular man who you’ve woofed at more than once yourself, Mr Scruff.
End Racism and Homophobia in the Gay Community 