Callner and Response: A Personal Meditation Upon a Particular Video Clip – and Others of Its Ilk – With a Lot to Answer For

Author’s note: in order to transmit something of the experiential, pseudo-audience-participatory dimensions of this piece’s two public airings to date, I’ve retained in the text that follows frequent moments of address variously to the wider audience and to Dr Stayci Taylor, the MC at both events who was armed, on each occasion, with a clicker to move back and forth, on cue, through an accompanying slideshow.

It further behooves (behoovers?) me to add that, at the inaugural My Formative Queers event – a symposium held at ACMI during 2024’s 34th Melbourne Queer Film Festival – Stayci was masquerading, in moustachioed double-drag, as the Freddie Mercury of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” video clip (David Mallet, 1984); moreover, just prior to throwing to me to come to the lectern to deliver my piece, she had been shunting a vacuum cleaner comedically across the stage…

*

I may have taken a slightly perverse tack with the brief to this, as is my inalienable right as one of the trio who hatched this grand, queer lark. With respect to the music video that I’m going to share with you, and dissertate upon, and relate to personally, mine will be a story of at least equal parts misdirection and bafflement to parts inspiration and queer epiphany.

Weirdly, vacuuming is going to get a mention. That wasn’t something I’d anticipated becoming a motif today… and I’m now going to incorporate that as a little bit of a tease, to see if any of you can twig in advance to the video clip I’ll be talking about.

I’ll begin by giving a bit of background. The director of this memorable clip was someone who, until only very recently, I’d known nothing about.

Peculiarly, with music videos being considered something of a low art form, we often don’t know much about the people who make them, unless they’re a big-name director – or later became one, whereupon we can all marvel that, e.g., it was David Fincher who directed Madonna’s “Vogue” clip (1990). What – David “Fight Club” Fincher?! And yet, it’s true.

So, Marty Callner: not a household name. Folks, have we any name recognition in the room? Nope? Fine – I’d had none either, so that’s not on you. Turns out that Marty’s earlier work included An Evening with Liza Minnelli (1980); loads of TV specials, in fact, like Diana Ross in Concert! (1980) – all sounding very canonically queer so far. He also directed video clips for the likes of Cher, including that one: “If I Could Turn Back Time” (1989), as well as “The Shoop Shoop Song” (1990). He directed videos for Stevie Nicks, too; directed so many clips for women, in fact – nay, divas! – who’ve become iconic in queer culture, despite not necessarily being queer themselves…

Now here’s teasing a curious link. Callner also directed a number of comedy specials for TV, including a Mork & Mindy (1979-1982)-era Robin Williams one, Off the Wall (1978). Hmm… I can sense there’s still not a huge amount of recognition dawning here…

I saw a lot of Callner’s videos growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand on Ready to Roll,¹ including two that 12-year-old me loved for a band called Twisted Sister. I’m sure we all remember them fondly. They were very theatrical and very campy, those two clips: “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”, both from 1984. I adored those videos, loving the extremely childish, cartoonish form of rebellion displayed in them. But these videos still weren’t really singing to me, exactly.

The particular song that I will yet hone in on, and inflict upon you Callner’s clip for later – and I do apologise in advance for this – is emblematic of a period of extremely mixed messaging endemic to a peculiar brand of rock ‘n’ roll, in the songs and in their accompanying videos, that I think, categorically, isn’t good. Objectively, isn’t good, and wasn’t then either; yet, it’s so confused, and so confusing, that it merits being granted some attention. Moreover, I don’t know whether anyone’s much tried to unpack this material before. That reckoning feels very overdue. Do we know what I’m driving at yet? Or are we all still a bit unclear?

Ok. My chosen song and video are emblematic of a period wherein a flamboyant, fiercely androgynous presentation of rock ‘n’ roll was yoked oftentimes, contrarily, to a very aggressive form of misogyny.

I’m talking about all those bizarre, bouffant-butch boy bands that were branded as heavy metal, but really belonged more to a vein of soft rock sometimes called “hair metal”, “glam metal” or “pop metal”. Think meat-and-potatoes stadium rock belted out by men inexplicably dressed like crosses between Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie models and ‘80s aerobics instructors. As well as Liza, Diana, Cher and Stevie, Marty Callner’s CV is full of clips for such bands, for bands with names like Whitesnake – that era was full of Whitesnakes, White Lions and Great Whites, a whole lotta whiteness, itself highly suspect. Anyway… Callner also directed a number of clips for Poison, including for such memorably appalling ditties as “Unskinny Bop” (1990), a bubblegum pop metal anthem to… fat shaming, I guess? But on the flip side, he also made a clip for their timeless, sage, cautionary power ballad, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (1988)…

For so much of this music, there appears to be only text, and no subtext – the double entendres riddling the lyrics being so euphemistically shallow and, typically, so profoundly chauvinistic, that I grapple with whether there’s any depth to any of this material at all.

But then, the mixed messaging in this music’s visual accompaniment is so complex, by dint of being so confused – I mean, how do we reconcile all that preening, pouffy peacockery with so many songs’ vomitously overt, surely overcompensatory claims of conquistadorial cocksmanship?

Let me bring this back to vacuuming a moment. And to Robin Williams… Are we getting any closer to the particular song I’ve almost started banging on about? What if I were to join those dots with a shout out to Chris Columbus’s 1993 drag comedy box-office smash, Mrs. Doubtfire? Aerosmith, anyone? Aerosmith, specifically in combination with Mrs. Doubtfire…?

As a nascent trans person, I’ve gotta say that I think this song and video clip threw me off the scent more than it ever helped really illuminate who I was. Are we any clearer yet on… Yes, that’s right! I’m talkin’ about – we need to talk about – “Dude looks like a” – yes, “Dude…”, open parenthesis, “looks like a lady”, close parenthesis.

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) by Aerosmith

What’s possibly most confusing about this 1987 track is that Steven Tyler, Aerosmith frontperson, wrote it as a kind of diss track about someone else, with what is either a breathtaking absence of self-awareness, or a grasp of irony so much more sophisticated than I think we’ve ever given him credit for.

I cannot, for the life of me, fathom which it is. Could we have that next slide, Stayci?

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) by Aerosmith

So yes, that’s Steven too. In this video, there’re quite a number of nearly-subliminal images, and I can’t tell whether he’s in drag more in this briefly glimpsed moment, perky and oddly demure suggestion of boob ‘n’ all, than on the next slide. It’s all very confusing.

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) by Aerosmith

Now, apparently this song was highly instrumental in the very conception of Mrs. Doubtfire² – it was in the mix well before it was used to soundtrack that film’s housework-centric Robin Williams-in-sexless-grandma-drag montage sequence. So yeah, its legacy’s not super great. More recently, Caitlyn Jenner announced that she considered this song her theme tune,³ which is additionally troubling, on so many levels.

*

I was born in 1971. Music videos were a staple of my media diet growing up, something I digested feverishly long before I knew I was a rock musician, let alone trans. That first realisation took a while, but I did twig to it much sooner than the latter. 

There was a glorious torrent of androgyny that poured, matter-of-factly, into my living room – the family living room – in the 1980s. And I must have absorbed it on some level, assimilated it into my own personal image bank, before fully registering, many years later, that I was fundamentally someone for whom pervasive notions of a gender binary just would not pass muster.

Outside of music videos, I didn’t see people around me, for the longest time, like the person I would later become – I, who had been assigned a boy at birth (no – really!) and who was in no two minds that she was attracted to girls. All very confusing. Was I thinking then that I might grow up to become… well, surely not a woman, for such thoughts were beyond the realm even of ideation for me, at that time – but perhaps… I might, with time, grow up to become… Steven Tyler?

“Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” came out in 1987. I only properly clued on that I was trans – and then fully committed to the bit – many years later: ten or 11, in fact. It wasn’t until my mid- to late-20s that I quit fighting my burgeoning trans consciousness. Previously, shame could reliably be called upon to suppress it, whenever it would dare to rear its pretty head. And all awhile, throughout the late ‘80s and pre-grunge ‘90s of my arrested coming-of-age, I was being confronted – affronted, really – by the music and music videos of countless ghastly glam metal bands, which were simply ubiquitous.

I disliked the hair metal bands intensely, abetted by next to no-one I hung out with liking them either. Nonetheless – and notwithstanding my own internalised homo- and transphobia of that time – I was also intrigued by them. I couldn’t understand why, for example, when I’d catch a Guns N’ Roses clip on TV and see Axl Rose fronting a band for whom he wrote and sang something as horrible and hate-filled as “One in a Million” (1988)⁴ – why, in their videos, was he sporting a biker’s cap, or cavorting about in hot pants or skintight PVC leggings, and slithering around, all snake hip style? Axl, were ye not possessed of any self-awareness? What on earth was going on?

The lyrical and visual imagery in glam metal music videos was, routinely, riddled with rampant sexual objectification of women – and yet it simultaneously presented a highly feminised image of the men in these bands. How very… queer? The mixed messaging is so profound that, I think, rather than seeing myself at all, I was misdirected away from figuring out who I was for quite a long time. I don’t know if any other trans people had a similar experience?

Is there anyone in the room who is, or was, a fan of those bands? (*crickets*) Like Faster Pussycat, led by Taime Downe? (Had he actually seen, let alone understood, Russ Meyer’s film,⁵ prior to settling upon that band name? Who can tell?) Have we any fans in today of Warrant, and of “Cherry Pie” (1990)? What to make of their singer’s chosen name of Jani Lane? Jani’s no longer with us, I should hasten to add. Sorry to introduce a sombre note to proceedings. I mean, to be honest, I don’t care…

“Cherry Pie” – the song and clip both – were utterly, cretinously vile. There were so many offending bands and songs, mind you, that it feels a little mean-spirited picking on any in isolation. However, I certainly don’t feel any sympathy for the repugnant figure of Vince Neil, the fabled lead singer of Mötley Crüe who – so the story goes – was the butt of Steven Tyler’s joke, the dude who appeared to him a lady. If joke – or laughing matter, at all – it was?

Apparently, the songwriter that Aerosmith collaborated with on “Dude”, Desmond Child, was gay. Is gay – is presumably still a practicing gay. Originally, and I’m not making this up, the working title for that song was “Cruisin for the Ladies”⁶ – an objectively terrible title. Child urged Aerosmith to be brave, and to make the song about what they had originally wanted it to relate in the first place – a humorous anecdote concerning Steven Tyler’s failure to recognise his good buddy Vince Neil in a bar, from behind, because he was under the misapprehension that he was, in point of fact, a lady.

Some select lyrics to contemplate…

“Then she whipped out a gun and tried to blow me away.”

Now there’s something that smacks of no small amount of anxiety around your classic phallic woman archetype. It reads as decidedly transphobic which, of course, was all the rage at the time. How far we’ve since come… But then, per that previous slide – if we could have that up again momentarily, Stayci…

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) by Aerosmith

“So never judge a book by its cover
Or who you gonna love by your lover”

Although clumsily phrased, this parses as rather more embracing of a gender non-conforming lover, the narrator having worked through their conflicted feelings around the mixed messages they’d been receiving/misinterpreting. (Never mind the mixed messaging Steven Tyler routinely transmits himself…)

“Love put me wise to her love in disguise”

Well, there’s an ugly, timeworn trope: that trans people are tricksters, given perforce to deceiving good, honest, cis-heteronormative folk. But then…

“She had the body of a Venus
Lord, imagine my surprise”

And now it’s kind of celebratory – I think? There are a couple of weird moments in the clip when we see someone, who I later learnt was John Kalodner, an A&R executive at Aerosmith’s label, dressed in a bridal outfit, their back initially turned to us so that the clip can spring a surprise reveal. And indeed, they do look somewhat triumphal….

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) by Aerosmith

*

Come 2025, I find myself still feeling heartily ambivalent about everything in this music video. Perversely, this makes it of enduring fascination.

That ambivalence has granted it a greater longevity than I think the song ever warranted, but… I don’t know. Before we throw to the video, and I overstay my welcome, I’ll shout out to the talismanic Sparks tour t-shirt I was wearing when I presented this talk previously. My favourite band, I consider Sparks a profoundly queer act, despite neither of the Brothers Mael being same-sex attracted – except perhaps to one another, and/or to themselves… Their queerness – a performance-art, absurdist queering of gender and lyrical and musical generic norms, spanning several decades – is of enduring inspiration to me.

Cover by Eric Blum for Sparks’ 1982 album, Angst in My Pants

There are countless witty passages from their oeuvre that speak – nay, sing! – to me about what’s being presented in this Aerosmith clip, but steeped in a much more agreeable, sophisticated, Weimar Republic-callback-like sensibility. As early as on their second album, 1973’s A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing – itself suggestive of a drag masquerade, of sorts – there’s a wonderfully odd song called “Beaver O’Lindy” in which Russell Mael, in his beautifully androgynous countertenor, warbles “I’m the girl in your head but the boy in your bed”. Now what does that mean? But it’s great – I find that song’s arch playfulness, and that of so many other tracks of theirs, very moving, very sexy, somehow. I think I find their ambiguity, their plurality, stimulating. That’s something I’m still working through – something which may prove to be a life’s work. 

By my reckoning then, I’m not yet fully formed. I think this is part of what’s most interesting about the idea of our speaking to the formative influences upon us. To wit: that, at whatever age we find ourselves at, at any point in time, we’re still works in progress.

There are those cultural touchstones we encounter that sow seeds during those times in childhood and adolescence that are most commonly considered our “formative years”, and then there are those that we discover as an ongoing, lifelong endeavour, through simply being alive and open to discovery and further confusion and intrigue. And I relish living in that confused space, which isn’t necessarily to redeem Aerosmith or the late Marty Callner – he died, aged 78, in March this year, I learnt only this morning⁷ – let alone Mrs. Doubtfire or the frankly irredeemable Caitlyn Jenner. Or countless other problematic legacies that this song and this clip and its ilk surely have. But still… ambivalence, I’ve realised, makes me feel alive. And I think that’s a good note to end on. Let’s all of us, embrace the chaos and the madness and all the confusion. And again, I’m so sorry, everyone, but… we’re gonna do this thing. Play me off, Stayci!

Endnotes