Gay Icons. There’s a lot of them. Every day it seems like there are more and more of them. It seems like any actress who has been in any movie could be a gay icon. But there’s a type of internet gay icon that occupies a space that it is hard to define. They are beloved both for their work but also for the canvas they provide. There’s a lot of them who every time they do something we get memes and sometimes they don’t even have to do anything. Nicki Minaj, Rose McGowan, Sonja Morgan, Countess Luann, and Azealia Banks. All women who could lift a finger and have a meme made about them. But there is one queen to rule them all: Wendy Williams.
Wendy appeals to an old timey gay sensibility. A clever catty gossip. We used to revere gay men who could dress down a female celebrity in mere seconds. We used to have a threshold of allowable meanness in our culture. Of course Perez Hilton came along and ruined the art form. He wasn’t clever, just mean. That gets watered down and we lose what used to be special. Years of cultural change and shift in attitudes has made being mean a cardinal sin. After rewarding being mean without being clever we’ve done away with it all together. Case in point: Queer Eye.
Wendy simply has it. She has stage presence and a magnetism. Some people are special and people love them for no reason. Everyone else is jealous of these people and that’s why inequality exists. Wendy Williams is one of these people. To watch her is to be grabbed by her. You marvel and you try to understand but you can’t. She communicates so much in a single facial expression. She’s a blank canvas for artists. Vern, an oomfie and a person I gave my robe to wear to graduation, has built his success around Wendy edits. She is his muse and from her mind he can create his own art. It is truly a match made in heaven. Vern could not have chosen a better person to make his edits around. We believe Wendy in his edits. She is a performer and takes any role, even ones she isn’t aware she’s been cast in, in stride. Vern’s talent shows in his ability to make funny uncanny edits and Wendy’s talent shows through as the queen of daytime.
I’m not going to pretend that the response to her from the gay community is and always has been good hearted. There’s a long history of gay men, especially white gay men stealing from black women and making a mockery of them. There’s certainly an element of digital black face at play. That problem neither starts nor ends with Wendy. While there are several cases of using her likeness to create an online personality to express oneself, especially in less capable hands, Wendy can transcend this at times. She knows what she does will be met with jokes and memes and she is not afraid of them. It’s the gay cycle. First they make fun of you in a mean way and then they grow to love you as a mainstay and a target, then you embrace it and they love you even more. Then they get tired of you. But we never get tired of Wendy. She just keeps going and going. She’s on TV Every. Single. Day.
No one is fully in charge of their star persona. No one can fully be a mastermind of how they are viewed. You can’t please everyone and the more we see of someone the more likely they are to mess up and get made fun of. You can be Taylor Swift and rotate between hiding or playing victim, depending on what the situation calls for. Or you can be Wendy and give us more and more. She harnesses so much power and she knows it. Could the Masked Singer performance have gone any other way for any other person?
We can study the natural charisma of people like this for years and never know the answer. Obviously gays are drawn to women with big personalities who speak their mind. We love the ability to revere her and also mock her. We may never find a definitive answer as to why Wendy has it but you can’t deny that she does. In all the time spent trying to quantify her appeal, we must admit she is beyond understanding. Let her presence and the memes wash over you.
You should know the score by now, You’re a native New Yorker.