Commentary
About me
DESMOND NAPOLES – https://www.desmondisamazing.com/
Desmond Napoles is a groundbreaking LGBTQ+ advocate, genderfluid model, published author, and public speaker. Desmond has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, NBC News, Teen Vogue, and OUT Magazine for their work as an outspoken activist for LGBTQ+ people everywhere. They have accomplished all of this before they have graduated high school.
As a clothing designer, Desmond creates unisex clothing that helps break down barriers and celebrates diversity.
Desmond not only elevates awareness about HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ youth homelessness, equal rights, diversity in education, and other critical issues for the LGBTQ+ community, but also sustainability in fashion and climate change issues. Desmond aspires to foster a more inclusive society for everyone, empowering LGBTQ+ youth, and restructuring representation of the LGBTQ+ community in the media through speaking engagements, social media posts, and community service.
Desmond’s ultimate goal is to show the world that you can be whoever you want to be and inspire people of all ages to embrace their true selves.
Their motto is “Be yourself, always.”…
Drag kids are the product of a dangerous American delusion
DOUGLAS MURRAY – 8 November 2019 – Unherd
The way the 12-year-old drag act, Desmond is Amazing, has been pushed on the world betrays a worrying tendency
“How sexy is that kid?”
If anyone thinks that such a sentence is unimaginable, unutterable in our concerned, paedophile-aware times, then let me introduce you to the gateway-phrase: “Drag kid.”
This week, the world has become a little more aware of this horrid little phrase because the internet has become a little more aware of it. And that is because of the promotion of a 12-year old ‘drag kid’ known by the name Desmond is Amazing.
Desmond was born in America and claims to have become interested in drag at the age of two, after watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race. He says he started going to drag shows at the age of five, since when he has performed in drag, modelled and carved out a role as an “LGBTQ activist”. The website Mashable (which has almost 10 million followers on Twitter) this week sent out a video about Desmond with the following headline: “Desmond is Amazing is the future and we’re here for it.” As it happens, Mashable put Desmond’s age at 10.
Even writing about this case is difficult because it only furthers the sort of intrusion which those around Desmond — and especially his mother (who also appears in the Mashable video) — have not only permitted but clearly encouraged. Yet once such things are put before us, we cannot all simply accept them, or remain silent. And the case of Desmond is worth noting not because of its oddity — but because it is an especially modern American story.
First and foremost, it is a story of celebrity. A story in which reality and the search for celebrity become so entwined that it is hard to know what is sincere and what is not, what is real and what is not. In his videos, Desmond talks casually and proudly about “fans” coming up to him in the street, doing “videos” and the like. But this story is not about American children — it’s about American adults and their problem with reality.
It’s about the fantastically shallow and ignorant modern American adult delusion that the ‘self’ is a preternatural thing and exists in some orbit of its own. That everybody has a ‘self’ and that this can be ‘known’. That rather than ‘becoming’, a person ‘discovers’ their ‘self’ – a process which is believed to be truer the faster it is arrived at. “Be yourself!” “Don’t let anyone tell you!” and a thousand other sayings from the Hallmarks Cards philosophy of our time all embed this illiterate idea.
The delusion takes no account of the influences affecting us all — influences which profoundly affect every human from birth. American popular culture takes little or no notice of this non-preternatural fact, because if it did, then it would have to do some accounting for its own behaviour, or at least for the diet of entertainment it is willing to pump into the homes and heads of the very young.
The fastest way to avoid any such accounting is to pretend that people just ‘are’, and that if the wider culture has any impact at all, then it is merely in providing affirmatory, confirming visions which the individual recognises as being in line with the self that they have already intuited.
Let me, in that case, put a contrary point of view. Which is that Desmond’s manner, dress and performance style is not the product of some pre-existing instinct but a mere, evident copy. When he moves his arms like Judy Garland there are two possibilities. One is that Desmond emerged from the womb like Judy. The other is that he watched people, and his mother encouraged him to watch people, who were successful and fascinating to a young child, and he chose to imitate them and was told he could ‘be’ them.
When he says at the outset of the Mashable video, “Can you come up here, you look gorgeous”, in an affected, nasally voice, there may be people who say (like Mashable) “Here is the true 10-year old child”. But most others will say: “Here is a child who you can see is doing an impression of a highly sexualised type of American adult celebrity.” A clear indication of this is that after saying “gorgeous”, Desmond looks to the adults in the room for laughter, approval and affirmation. The adults in the room (presumably including Desmond’s mother) oblige, and thus does he receive what he seeks.
Likewise, when he talks about “haters” and the importance of ignoring them in this and other videos, this is not the innate wisdom of a child being imparted to a bigoted, post-lapsarian world. It is merely another person – this time a child – chanting one of the taught mantras of the American pop-cultural age: “Haters gonna hate” etc. There is no insight here. It is merely a copy, as drag is. A copy of a copy of a copy.
Of course Desmond is not the only child to have been presented in such way. The child reality TV star Jazz Jennings grew up in America as a ‘trans’ child with a reality television series. That series made Jennings and her family rich as well as famous. And while still a child (Jennings is now past 18), the male-to-female transsexual was not just celebrated in the same way that Desmond is, but was also asked intrusive and intimate questions. This included – on prime time – questions about who Jazz was attracted to.
None of this is new: many cultures around the world allow for some form of sexualisation of children. But here it is surprising. The modern West has long exercised such a degree of opprobrium towards the taboo that the slightest hint it might be breaking down affects a great pushback. While people feel distinctly unable to make many moral judgements, about the idea of paedophilia — and that an adult might find a child “sexy” — we are very judgemental indeed. It’s a feeling the tabloid press has harnessed to great effect. Even if there is nothing else we know to be wrong, we know this to be wrong.
By insisting that a child like Desmond should not just be allowed to be something, but should perform as a sexualised adult, and that this should in fact be ‘the future’, it would seem that something further is at work. What is it? It’s unlikely that it is an organised push for tolerance or acceptance of paedophilia. But it does feel like an expression of the ‘Fuck you’ politics of our time.
‘Desmond Is Amazing’ Needs Saving
MADELEINE KEARNS – 11 June 2019 – National Review
An eleven-year-old drag performer should inspire fierce protest.
t so happens that the issue that launched the recent fracas on the American Right is in my own dispiriting beat: the effects of gender-identity policies on children. Disputes about “strategy” aside, conservatives can all agree that a culture that permits the sexualization and sterilization of children’s bodies is a rotten one. As I’ve written before, there are plenty of people on the left who think so too.
Take the case of “Desmond is Amazing,” the toxic brand created for eleven-year-old Desmond Napoles: a “drag kid,” a fashion model, and a global LGBT icon. A drag kid, much the same as a drag queen, presents himself as a sexualized caricature of a woman, dressing in bright wigs, flamboyant gowns, high heels, exaggerated makeup, etc. If I were a feminist, I might suspect latent misogyny and find the entire practice odious, but, at any rate, I draw the line at children.
Desmond’s parents draw no such line. Instead, his mother, Wendylou Napoles, justifies “Desmond is Amazing” by insisting, first, that his performances are age-appropriate (we aren’t sexualizing him) and, second, that this is all his idea (we are so supportive).
The facts, however, do not support this account.
In December 2018, Desmond, imitating Gwen Stefani, performed at a Brooklyn gay bar in a wig and crop-top as hooting adult men threw dollar bills. When outraged critics descended, Wendylou accused them of “blatant homophobia.” Her story, well-rehearsed by this point, is that, at the age of two, Desmond was watching RuPaul’s Drag Race with her when he conceived a pre-verbal thought that “the drag queens were so beautiful and amazing” and “I want to do that!”
Wendylou, a former human-resources manager, then began taking her son — who, according to his parents, is on the autism spectrum — to pride marches when he was four years old. This was because, in addition to her discovery of his interest in drag, she had “known for a long time” that he was gay.
For a long time. (Desmond says he “came out as gay” when he was born.)
Here I recall the babble of Diane Ehrensaft, the developmental psychologist and founding member of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center clinic in San Francisco, who maintains that female toddlers can send a “gender message” by tearing bows out of their hair and saying things such as “I. Boy.” And I recall, more seriously, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP): the mental-health disorder created when a caregiver invents a condition in the person he cares for and subsequently distorts, manipulates, or engineers the appearance of symptoms. MSBP is considered a form of child abuse.
Desmond’s new career obviously keeps his mom very busy. She calls herself his “dragager” and runs his Instagram account, which has more than 150,000 followers. She also oversees his busy schedule of media appearances. Sometimes Desmond appears in home videos along with famous figures in adult drag culture. Such figures include Bella Noche, whom Desmond conducted a Facebook livestream with, in which Desmond referenced ketamine and imitated snorting it. Desmond recently told HuffPost that the Club Kids of the early 1990s were his inspiration, making clear to emphasize that he was talking about “their fashion and makeup” and “not the bad things.”
Presumably these “bad things” include the behavior of Michael Alig, a Club Kid and a friend of Desmond’s, who served 17 years in prison for beating his drug dealer to death, soaking his body in acidic liquids for over a week, dismembering the corpse, and dumping it in the Hudson.
When Desmond appeared on Alig’s YouTube channel, along with Alig’s former roommate Ernie Glam, he sat in front of a painting of a girl with the word “Rophypnol” (the date-rape drug) scrawled across it. But judging from Alig’s recent artwork — I am thinking of one painting in particular that combines the artist’s semen with an image of Hitler’s face — he has had no such conversion. In any case: Where did a child born in 2007 get such a love for 1990s club culture?
It’s not just his mother’s influence. Desmond’s dad is on board. As is his progressive Brooklyn school. As are the hosts of Good Morning America, Today, and BBC Minute, as well as countless others who consider it important to celebrate Desmond’s “individuality.” Desmond, we are told, is “the future.” And what a brave new world it is!
Drag Queen Story Hours are now happening in schools and libraries across the United States. In the United Kingdom, Munroe Bergdorf, a male-to-female transgender activist who has modeled for Playboy and who pushes radical gender-identity policies for children at every opportunity, became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s first LGBT+ campaigner.
Last year Bergdorf conducted a celebratory interview with “Desmond is Amazing.” Afterward, the lesbian activist Julia Long attended a meeting and asked Bergdorf a question about Desmond’s safety. Long mentioned his connection with Alig and his performances for adult men. She said: “I wondered what you thought about this normalization of child abuse?” Long was then booed and made to leave the event.
Janice Turner, a columnist for the Times of London who is also on the left, similarly wrote on Twitter: “Hey @NSPCC can you please explain why a children’s safeguarding charity has hired a porn model as a Childline ambassador? It’s an astonishing decision. Is it worth the cancelled direct debits?”
Thankfully, the charity has bowed to such pressure and since cut all ties with Bergdorf.
I will conclude with two final points:…
