Billy's World, Or Toying with Desire in the Gay 1990S

Billy’s World, or Toying with Desire in the Gay 1990s Brian Eugenio Herrera Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00396 by guest on 01 October 2021 In early 1997, the Billy doll came out at the New York International Gift Fair. A 13-inch plastic “fashion doll,” the Billy doll was blond, blue-eyed, and built, with bulges of various kinds pressing at nearly every seam of each of his several carefully detailed outfits. The doll’s creator, John McKitterick, a British fashion designer, hoped Billy would be the “the first truly gay product” to be “successfully market[ed]” for “the mainstream resulting in further gay visibility.” But even with McKitterick’s bold ambitions and the doll’s $50.00 price tag, Billy’s most sizable attribute, heralded by the prominent “21 and over” sticker on the doll’s package, gave observers the greatest cause for pause. The Billy doll was, in distributor Totem International’s careful phrasing, “anatomically complete,” making him not only the biggest boy on the boy-doll block but one with a mission statement to match: to “celebrate individuality, diversity, and at the same time getting a little bit of gay visibility onto the high street and into the media.”1 As McKitterick hoped, the novelty of an “explicitly” gay doll with a social message hooked media interest immediately. Under the headline “When G.I. Joe Just Won’t Do,” Newsweek ran a photo of Billy (captioned “Sorry, Barbie”) and opined, “There’ve been rumors about Ken for years, but Billy is being billed as the first openly gay doll” Newsweek( 1997). Eddie Dominguez, writing for the Associated Press, took a similar tack, writing “Move over, Ken, there’s a new man on the block. But he’s not going after Barbie” (Dominguez 1997:6). The Knight-Ridder news service article drew a different doll comparison: “Billy is almost giving Tickle Me Elmo a run for the money” (Cedar Rapids Gazette 1997:2A). Still, within weeks of the influential trade show, Billy’s distributor, Totem International, sold the entire initial production run of 5,000 dolls, establishing Billy as not only “The World’s First Out and Proud Gay Doll” but also as the breakout star of the 1997 fair. Totem quickly manufactured another 20,000 Billys for broad dis- tribution. By year’s end, Billy’s sustained sales success stirred another round of hype. “Christmas sales of this sick new doll are already through the roof,” ranted Ed Anger in the reliably sensa- tional tabloid Weekly World News. “Just what America’s children need right now,” Anger raged, “A gay boy doll with an erection” (1997:17). Throughout 1997, John McKitterick promoted Billy both as “a crossover product” and also as “a political tool” that “can say a lot of things that people can’t” (in Barker 1997:59). Over the next four years, between 1997 and 2001, Billy dolls and accessories were available for purchase by or through independent retailers across the United States, and the presence of Billy — along with his “Out and Proud Boyfriend” Carlos (introduced in 1998) and his “Out and Proud Best Friend” Tyson (1999) — appeared on the shelves of gay bookstores, on the pages of gay cata- logs, and even on the covers of academic monographs.2 Presented variously as a gag gift, queer 1. Thislanguage is taken from Totem International’s original BillyWorld.com website (www.billyworld.com/billysez /mystory), the contents of which are now mostly irretrievable. All unattributed quotations draw from a near complete printout produced in April 1998 that remains in the author’s possession. 2. Billy exemplifies “the products that have stood out over the years” in Matt Skallerud’s Gay Market Guide 2005 (2006:92). Two notable academic monographs that feature Billy on their covers are Martin P. Levine, Gay Macho: Figure 1. (facing page) Billy Doll product insert, 1997. (Courtesy of Brian Eugenio Herrera) Brian Eugenio Herrera’s work, both academic and creative, examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. His first book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth Century U.S. Popular Performance (University of Michigan) will be published in 2015. His next book project excavates a scholarly history of casting in American entertainment. Also, Brian’s World Billy’s autobiographical storywork performances have been seen in more than a dozen states since 2010 (as well as Beirut and Abu Dhabi). Brian is Assistant Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 58:4 (T224) Winter 2014. ©2014 Brian Eugenio Herrara 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00396 by guest on 01 October 2021 collectible, or an “adult” novelty (but never quite the “crossover” product he was intended to be), Billy became one of the most visible commercial emblems of gay male desire in the last years of the 20th century. Taking at face value McKitterick’s promotional refrain that Billy was intended to inject “a little bit of humour into the gay debate” (in Barker 1997), I look to these dolls as artifacts documenting a frivolous (and almost already forgotten) episode in the recent gay past. Billy, Carlos, and Tyson were not intended as sex toys, or devices designed and deployed to stimulate actual sexual pleasure. Nor were they sex dolls, or “fornicatory doll[s equipped] with the necessary apertures or attachments to allow for genital penetration” (Ferguson 2010:9). Instead, Billy, Carlos, and Tyson were materially articulated erotic cartoons, objects designed to stimulate both lust and laughter. Indeed, my own desire to look again at these dolls is stimulated not only because I still possess the Billy, Carlos, and Tyson dolls that I acquired a decade and a half ago, but also because these dolls, in their bow-legged way, straddle the often intransigent divide between the hot and hilarious that so typically configures gay male cultural (and subcul- tural) expressions of desire. McKitterick’s desire to use these dolls to get “a little bit of gay visibility onto the high street and into the media” also, however inadvertently, marked tectonic shifts in the mainstream legibility of the eroticized gay male body — as an object of desire — in a single decade. Introduced and circulated in the later 1990s, these dolls were also played with in three very different texts (a pornographic video, a novelty book, and an animated short film) appearing at the turn of this century. These queer little dolls started out as symbols of whim- sical resistance and went mainstream as commodities of conspicuous consumption before finally being interred as debris within the archive of popular culture. In their quick transforma- tion from highly visible objects of gay desire to forgotten detritus of the recent gay past, Billy, Carlos, and Tyson also score the cartoonishly abrupt historical turns in the legibility of gay male desire within mainstream US popular performance during the 1990s. The World That Made Billy In spite of the splash made by his 1997 coming out, Billy was no overnight success. Conceived originally “by chance” in 1992, Billy’s bulging brawn was initially simply a two-dimensional illustration template upon which John McKitterick would sketch various menswear designs. Sometime in 1993, McKitterick sculpted a one-of-a-kind 3D version of his illustrated fashion figure, which he donated to a London AIDS benefit event. In November of 1994, that first Billy prototype was auctioned for the equivalent of several hundred dollars. Early that next year, a group of investors (known as “Friends of Billy”) formed and commissioned a limited run of 12 more Billy dolls, each in its own hand-made ensemble, all of which also quickly sold for hundreds of dollars a piece (Moir 1994). Hoping that a mass-produced version of the doll might “provide a positive example of an out and proud gay man,” Friends of Billy spent 1995 searching for a US toy company able and willing to mass-produce an anatomically complete and gay-identified doll Details( 1995). In 1996, after no stateside manufacturer could be found, a European company capable of both fabricating and hand-finishing the doll was identified. In January of 1997, as they prepared for Billy’s New York debut the following month, McKitterick and his partner Juan Antonio Andres secured copyright for the doll’s design,3 formed a new company called Totem International, and made final preparations for Billy to come out in front of “an unsuspecting but positively receptive American public” at the 1997 New York Inter - national Gift Fair (Barker 1997). The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone (1998) and Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999). 3. Copyright was registered initially in the UK, with John McKitterick credited as “designer” and Juan Andres credited as “collaborator.” Brian Eugenio Herrera 34 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00396 by guest on 01 October 2021 The five years separating McKitterick’s first sketch and Billy’s New York debut might seem a negligible span of time. Still, the cultural distance between 1992 and 1997 should not be under- estimated, especially with regard to the mainstream visibility of gay male desire. In the very early 1990s, in both the US and the UK, a new generation of gay male activists performed, in both their actions and their outfits, an emphatically new mode of gay masculinity. Often steeped in the direct action techniques of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and includ- ing many who came to sexual and political consciousness during the first decade of the AIDS era, these (often but not always) younger gay men wore their sexual politics on their bodies in an idiosyncratic yet identifiable style.

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