AMERICAN ZEITGEIST, 2004

From Merriam-Webster Online:

zeitgeist : the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

And I would say that the reigning sense of zeitgeist at this very moment is gay anxiety. Check this story out from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Texas school district nixes 'cross-dressing day'

A parent's concerns prompted the district 150 miles northeast of Houston to scrap its annual "TWIRP Day" -- when boys dress like girls and girls dress like boys-- in favor of "Camo Day."

TWIRP stands for "The Woman Is Requested to Pay," and for years Spurger schools hosted the day during Homecoming Week to give boys and girls a chance to reverse social roles and let older girls invite boys on dates, open doors and pay for sodas.

Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute issued a news release Tuesday reporting that it "came to the aid of a concerned parent requesting an excused absence for her children on official cross-dressing day in her children's elementary school."

"It is outrageous that a school in a small town in East Texas would encourage their 4-year-olds to be cross-dressers," Liberty Legal Institute attorney Hiram Sasser said in the release.

Click here for the rest.

It is important to note that this "TWIRP Day" sounds a whole lot less like some glam-rock, bisexual, androgeny thing and a whole lot more like Milton Berle or Flip Wilson dolling themselves up for cheap laughs. Indeed, the high school "powder puff football game," where cheerleaders and drill team girls take to the gridiron for four quarters of manly head bashing while the real football players cross-dress and do cheer routines on the sidelines, is a time honored tradition in the great state of Texas--the awful drag is generally pretty funny.

Of course, it's now 2004, and everybody's scared shitless of being or being perceived as gay: if you dress like a girl, you damn well better mean it.

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