Layne Pavoggi and John Duff | Girly / 2018 [music video]

gender defying desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Layne Pavoggi and John Duff (directors), John Duff (performer) Girly / 2018 [4.25 minutes] [music video]

 

In his very first video, Baltimore singer John Duff, dressed in a pink halter and blue jeans, got “girly,” channeling, as Curtis M. Wong described it in an article if HuffPost, Mariah Carey, Madonna, and Britney Spears.

    That’s not to say that this video makes utter sense. It’s hard to know why Duff and his two drag friends Bianca Del Rio and Mariah Balenciaga show up to a theater to sing out about Duff’s gender defying desires. Evidently, as the girls tell him, his man is cheating on him, which perhaps also explains why in the theater bathroom he battles with the drag queen with whom his boyfriend has evidently taken up.

     Maybe that also explains why Duff himself wants to get “girly”:

 

Only get girly on the weekends,

So I’m out til late up til early -

Oh, Just feeling myself

Uh-oh, I feel worldly

 

A little birdy told me

You get flirty, show me

What you do when you're alone.

Dance like no ones home

 

And we say

Hey hater

Why don't you go and hate on it

I already know you're gonna

(Know you're gonna)

Hate on it

Say what you wanna say say

I'm on it

It run it

And I keep doing what I want

 

I wanna get girly

Let's get girly

Flip out hair

We don't care

Let's get girly

Let's get girly

Flip our hair

We don’t care

    If the song itself is hardly memorable, the dances, choreographed by Dexter Mayfield and Duff are effective, while it’s Duff’s good looks and charm that carries the video into the territory of being worth the watch.

    Although Duff’s own background is in musical theater, his experience on X-Factor, where Simon Cowell and others felt he was just a little too “strange,” left him somewhat reeling. He realized that if he produced his own music he would be required to perform “in a polite, heteronormative manner.”

    As HuffPost quotes him: “I was told so many times that being myself wasn’t going to work [and that] I should play into a more masculine, generic vibe. I’m not going to be intimidated into lying about who I am. I’m gay as hell and I love it.”

     As Wong reminds us, not everyone felt that “Girly” totally succeeded in challenging gender norms. Matthew Rodriguez, writing in Grindr’s digital magazine INTO argued that the song ephemerally embraced femininity while putting on display a conventionally attractive male. And Michael Strangeways, writing the Seattle Gay Scene felt that the video’s message felt “odd,” coming as it did from a “Cute yet quite masculine, gym-toned gay hottie.”

      But Duff has become rather fearless, stating, “I don’t take myself that seriously. I’m not afraid to look stupid or ugly ― I kind of like it. Fluidity is ideal [and] rigid things break easily. I’m not going to dumb myself down to help someone else feel comfortable.”

     And he needn’t have worried since the video was a hit and launched Duff’s career.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).