![]() ![]() No, the real reasons to read the “Ken Comes Out” piece today are the hilarity of watching Savage question a Mattel rep about the doll (she clearly thinks he’s just messing with her), and the revelations about how neatly Earring Magic Ken’s design captures an inflection point of change around queer voices in mainstream America.Īmerica vilifying its queer citizens and hanging on to laws criminalizing them (which the Supreme Court had upheld as recently as 1986) while also appropriating from them was nothing new. (See, he has a dog named Sugar, and he’s the dog’s “daddy.” Even in this age of people treating their pets as kids, it’s still hard to buy that no one involved with that doll’s design intended any double entendre.) Thirty years later, Savage’s column is well worth revisiting - and not just to get the gag in Barbie about why Earring Magic Ken was a questionable design choice, alongside Sugar Daddy Ken, a 2009 “adult collector line” doll whose suggestive name seems more deliberate than Cock Ring Ken’s apparel. “hese cock rings were often pressed into service later in the evening, to help totally tweaked ravers keep up what the X was pulling down.” “For about a year every gay boy at a rave was wearing at least one,” Savage wrote. And he describes chrome cock ring necklaces - which is to say, necklaces exactly like the one on Earring Magic Ken - as “de rigueur rave wear” for the era. “On closer inspection, Ken’s entire Earring Magic outfit turns out to be three-year-old rave wear,” he wrote. ![]() ![]() Savage certainly doesn’t think Mattel set out to equip Ken with a cock ring: He initially suggests that in the quest for a fashionable party outfit, Mattel designers took pictures of people at nightclubs and translated their outfits into a doll design. “anging around Ken’s neck, on a metallic silver thread, is what ten out of ten people in the know will tell you at a glance is a cock ring.” “But Earring Magic Ken is sporting another accoutrement that’s been largely overlooked,” Savage wrote. He also came with a pair of shiny plastic earrings for his owner to wear. “ Earring Magic Ken” (who doesn’t get his own credit in Barbie, alas) sported a sheer and revealing purple mesh shirt, a purple vinyl vest, two-tone hair, a single silver earring, and a gold band around one elbow. Savage’s 1993 column “ Ken Comes Out” lays out the specifics. And given the satirical, knowing tone of the film - and the scene where he appears, in a nod to some of the most regrettable and hilarious choices in the Barbie toy line over the years - there’s no question that Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach know the name people have had for that Ken doll since 1993: “Cock Ring Ken.” That queer Ken is in Greta Gerwig’s movie Barbie, in a brief, winking cameo. One such article submitted was ‘A Queen Is a Person Really’, a personal account of feeling excluded, as a drag queen, from movements like the GLF which seemed increasingly to dismiss the values of camp and effeminacy in gay men.Float into our DreamHouse: Barbie World is Polygon’s dive into everything Barbie, from her legacy as an iconic toy to her presence in games and movies. Come Together also welcomed reader contributions as a means of including more marginalised voices. Established in 1945, by the early 1970s The Gateways’ promotion of the Butch/Femme dynamic was seen as out of step and as a reinforcement of the patriarchy by others in the LGBTQ+ community. Never shy of controversy, Come Together reported on the GLF’s campaign against the banning of ‘politics’ by one of the oldest lesbian bars in London, The Gateways. Work on Come Together was a collective experience and everyone who attended the Media Workshop had an equal say in what went in. Early editions were put together in members’ flats and assembled using collaging techniques, often combined with hand-drawn artwork, cartoons and sketches. Throughout its brief history Come Together charted the efforts of the GLF to raise awareness not just of LGBTQ+ issues but of many social justice movements. ![]() In the words of Come Together, the GLF were ‘seething with anger at this, the latest amongst hundreds of crimes committed against gay people by the police and the establishment’. One of its first issues covered the demonstration organised by the GLF in response to the treatment of the Young Liberal politician Louis Eaks, arrested for gross indecency for the ‘crime’ of approaching men on Highbury Fields to ask for a light. From its earliest beginnings the magazine reflected the key concerns of the LGBTQ+ community of the time. The newspaper of the Gay Liberation Front, Come Together, was formed by the GLF’s Media Workshop in 1970. ![]()
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