It’s Pride Month again, although you wouldn’t know by going into Target.

When I thought about how to talk about Pride this year, I remembered how it felt to publish a piece last year on the very day the Supreme Court granted Donald Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution. Even as we were celebrating, even as I edited together our drunkest thoughts, there was still that storm cloud rolling in. I wrote that

there is still more resisting to do and more liberation to fight for. I’m not naive enough that I didn’t see this coming, but the juxtaposition of the joy that filled this weekend with a very proactive threat to its existence in the form of a second Trump presidency was jarring enough that it makes pieces like today’s feel essential even in its silliness.

While a part of me wants to rise to meet this moment, the storm that’s now upon us, we’ve done so much of that here before. We’ve had hard conversations about attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community, and obviously, we’ll have more of them again. (I mean…have you read E4P?) What I want is to once again find a balance between the hard conversations and the silly ones—to talk about the stuff that matters while also essentially shitposting with my friends online.

Pride is a celebration and a protest, and I’m hoping I can use my little corner of the Internet to serve both purposes.

That is why today, my still wonderfully fashionable friend Emmanuel Llorente returns to talk about fashion once more. This time, we looked at the entwined history of queerness and clothes, why we should let kids be kids (in a liberal way), and which of Emmanuel’s designer bags he would murder.

See? Balance.

Emmanuel is like if your favorite comfort food and your favorite Bravolebrity had a baby, and that baby was your favorite romcom.

Be Gay, Do Crime Look Hot

I wanted to kick off our conversation today by asking the only logical follow-up question to Emmanuel’s last piece here at E4P:

Emily: How many different style iterations have you gone through since we last spoke?

Emmanuel: Since the last time we talked, I feel like I haven’t gone through that many style iterations, but more so different versions of eras that I’ve already been through. I also feel like, because I have been so busy with work and other things in life, I have honestly kind of lost my spark—my passion for dressing to make myself, to make myself feel better, to express myself stylistically. It’s just really not been top of mind, which is so sad, and this question literally makes me want to push myself to express myself more with my clothes.

…Well, this is awkward…because the next question I wanted to ask Emmanuel was:

Emily: Which new style has been your favorite?

Emmanuel: Lately, I’ve really been trying to mix the femme and masc and land somewhere in the middle kind of style within my everyday wear. It is a little bit more difficult because I do wear athleisure on the daily for work, and so trying to still find that realm of somewhere in between and also be stylish has been hard.

I think I have finally found that sweet spot of mixing athletic wear with more leisure or casual wear that I can still wear to work, while also being able to make plans and go out right after as well.

In our last piece, Emmanuel and I looked at why, how, and when clothing became gendered. However, we didn’t spend too long breaking down the intersections between fashion and queerness.

There is a large body of work, scholarly and colloquial, that analyzes that specific relationship, especially as “fashion has been used to communicate people’s identities to the world. Because being LGBTQ+ has historically been unaccepted by mainstream society…the community would use certain accessories or styles of dress to communicate to one another their sexuality without the rest of the world knowing the code” (X).

One of the most fascinating sources I was able to find was A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk which argues that “if we look at the history of fashion through a queer lens, exploring the aesthetic sensibilities and unconventional dress choices made by LGBTQ people, we see how central gay culture has been to the creation of modern fashion.” It laid the groundwork for me to better appreciate José Criales-Unzueta’s 2021 article in them., “What Is Queer Fashion, Anyway?”

Criales-Unzueta writes about

how some fashion historians have interpreted Coco Chanel's revolutionary menswear-inspired womenswear as butch, for example. Though Chanel's work in itself is not necessarily queer, it can be read as such through the symbols it explores and subverts.

Willy Chavarria—a queer Latino designer and [former] Senior Vice President of men’s design at Calvin Klein—takes a parallel approach. His SS22 collection for his own eponymous label approached the Chicano aesthetics that have long inspired his work through a queer, erotic lens; for example, taking a piece like the simple belted chinos Cholo men wear on the streets of Los Angeles and presenting them in ball gown-like silhouettes. As opposed to a designer like Chanel, Chavarria’s work is queer from its inception. But for consumers, both just make clothes; outside the runway, it’s the individual who wears them that imparts their ultimate meaning.

As [designer Aaron] Potts mentions, the beauty of queerness is that it can mean different things for different people. "It can be about gender, sex, artistic expression," he says, adding that all of these things can be infused into the design process and a person's style. It’s the latter that often truly makes fashion queer: A dress can be nothing but a dress when worn on a cishet woman, but on a man or non-binary person, it can be transforming. On the latter, the dress becomes queer itself.

Wanting to bring the discussion back down to earth, I asked Emmanuel:

Emily: In our last conversation, we briefly discussed the relationship between your style, presentation, and queerness. As you've gotten older, do you feel that the relationship has changed? If so, how?

Emmanuel: This is a really difficult question because I feel like, as I’ve grown older, I've started to care less about what people think of me and how I present.

But there is this internal clock of mine that’s ticking, knowing that I have my vision of when I want to start settling down and start a family, etc. That little voice inside my head is telling me, “If you present a little bit more masc, then maybe you’ll find somebody.” It’s something that has been told to me by loved ones and by friends, and as I’ve gotten older, I feel like that voice is growing louder and louder in my head. It’s really hard to ignore that voice and really stick true to who I am and how I want to present for myself.

There are moments of growth that have come with age for me, where I am not really tailoring how I dress based on where I’m going or who I’m going to be around, and I think that is something so beautiful for me. It’s my way of saying, “This is how I want to present and this is how this is what I’m going to wear, and if you don’t like it or if it makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s more on you than it is me.” I think that has also come with age, which is exciting for me.

Right now, I’m planning my outfits for this Italian vacanza that I’m going on. For the first time in my life don’t feel like, “I need to dress this way, I need to dress that way.” I’m just wearing things because I think it’s going to look cute on vacation, and I’m very excited about that.

The biggest driving force in stopping me from wearing what I want to wear right now is not so much my relationship with my queerness or how I’m expressing myself, but my relationship with my body. That’s a whole other mountain that we need to climb, but for now, I do feel really good about where I am with my queerness and how I present.

I would argue that’s a great place to be, especially given what we’re going to talk about next.

And Also With You

I’ve lost count of the number of times since Donald Trump took office again when I’ve referenced that John Mulaney bit from his special, The Comeback Kid. Mulaney goes to church with his parents for the first time in a while, only to learn some of the words in the Catholic mass have been changed. Because, of course, Mulaney jokes:

For instance, on his first day in office, literally hours after being inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order declaring that the United States would only recognize two genders. Because, of course…

I’m not breaking any news here by saying that Trump is a direct threat to the LGBTQIA+ community (I think I literally wrote that before), but I would be remiss not to share that GLAAD has an accountability tracker clocking all of his attacks on the community. They’ve found he has targeted queer people at least 261 times between his two presidencies, with 35 of those incidents taking place in the last five months.

Trump’s reascension is likely the biggest change that has taken place since the last time Emmanuel and I talked about style, presentation, and their intersection with queerness. Given all that we covered then and so far today, I was curious to know:

Emily: What are your thoughts on being expressively queer under this administration?

Emmanuel: I feel extremely lucky that I live in New York City during this administration because, for the most part, I feel safe with the way that I express myself.

But I’m not going to lie: there are many times when, if I’m wearing something where I have my hair done or I have a little bit of makeup on and I’m not familiar with where I’m going or I’m not super sure on the route and the trains, I will Uber just because I do fear for my safety in that sense. People have been emboldened to act upon their weird feelings or obsessions with queer people in a negative way, and you never know how those weirdos are going to react or what they’re going to do.

It is a little bit scary, but if I lived somewhere else, I would feel more scared, so I am super, super grateful for the fact that I live in the city where people are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they choose to. That is something that I am obsessed with and that I love, and a huge reason that whenever I chatted with my mom about potentially moving back home, she’s always said, “You need to be in New York.” She feels safe knowing that I’m here, that I’m safer here versus going back to the Midwest.

Emily: Has this administration impacted how you've chosen to present yourself at all?

Emmanuel: I don’t think that this administration has really affected the way that I’m presenting myself.

By saying that, I want to acknowledge my privilege of being a cis gay man who, on the regular, doesn’t present super hyper-feminine. I have my days where I am a little bit more femme, but on the daily, I feel pretty comfortable walking around, and I don’t feel like I am presenting in a way where my queerness is necessarily like a focal point.

I do believe that maybe I would take more risks in my fashion if I knew that the administration in office was a little bit celebratory or even accepting of people who are different. But again, I think the biggest thing is that we live in New York—and especially New York City—and people just express themselves in so many different ways that if I decided to present a little bit more femme one day, I don’t think that it would be such a shock to people systems. That is the beauty of living in New York City.

Like everyone and their group chat, I recently watched Benito Skinner’s new show, Overcompensating. As a longtime Baronie / Benny Drama stan (clocked!), I also stayed up on the press Skinner did for the show. On Instagram and in interviews, he talked about how when he went to school, he felt like he had to overcompensate—and not be himself anymore.

These things I loved were not received in the same way. A Lizzie McGuire monologue wouldn’t get applause from classmates. The color pink was a non-starter. And I completely lost all sense of who I was. I buried this kid and tried to destroy this footage. It served as a reminder of who I really am.

bennydrama7

A post shared by @bennydrama7

Adults often talk about queer kids in such a twisted way and their shitty beliefs regularly get passed down the bloodline. And yet, as Skinner captures in the rest of his post, queer kids just want to be themselves.

Thinking about this, with Lucky stuck in my head, I wanted to ask Emmanuel:

Emily: What do you think 10-year-old Emmanuel would think of your style today?

Emmanuel: To be honest, 10-year-old Emmanuel was so deep in the closet. I think that 10-year-old Emmanuel wouldn’t even want to be associated with 28-year-old Emmanuel because of the fear of being so close to queerness and the fear of that being brought back onto them.10-year-old Emmanuel would probably be ashamed of the way that I present myself because of how much they were hiding who they were from themselves.

I think that if I were to have a conversation with my 10 year-old self today, he would shy away from having any real connection because he wouldn’t want to connect with somebody who was queer. I hadn’t really figured out or accepted that part of myself, or even figured out how to start a conversation, how to take the steps to become my full self.

I think I could have a real conversation with my 20-year-old self about how I’m presenting, and I think that version of me would be very proud of the progress and everything that I’ve done—I’ve grown out my hair, I’ve had my nails longer than what people might want my nails to be, I have been able to shop at Sephora or shop in the women’s section in stores and not have anxiety about it. And now I’m actually celebrated for my style, my makeup, or my clothing choices.

So I think 20-year-old me, more so than 10-year-old me, would be elated about where I am and how I choose to express myself.

There is so much toxic right-wing rhetoric behind the argument to just let kids be kids. The thought is that by protecting children from indoctrination by drag queens and blue-haired baristas, children will naturally grow up to be red-blooded American conservatives. The people who believe this often say so while wearing Mommy & Me matching MAGA hats and shirts that read “Let’s Go Brandon,” so, you know…the irony.

agirlhasnopresident

A post shared by @agirlhasnopresident

But as noted drag queen Trixie Mattel explained back in 2023,

“We don’t think about your children. We think about: ‘I hope my wig stays on. I hope I know my words. I hope the drunk people in the audience are sober enough to clap and not be asleep.’ We’re more worried about the behavior of drunk adults, those are our children…

We don’t think about your kids…We don’t hope they’re gay. We don’t hope they turn out trans. We don’t hope they become drag queens. What we hope is that, if they are trans or are gay, they find a community faster than many of us did.”

You can’t fearmonger queerness out of your kids any more than you can indoctrinate it into them. Watching RuPaul’s Drag Race is not going to activate a sleeper cell diva, and even if it did, that would be a really fucking cool kid!

But enough from my soapbox. I wanted to know Emmanuel’s thoughts on all of this, so I asked:

Emily: Based on your own experiences, do you think it's important to let children express themselves through hair, clothes, and makeup without facing restraints or ridicule?

Emmanuel: Absolutely. I have many a story of trying to express myself as a child and then being shut down, but the funny thing is it wasn’t even by my parents or people who were super close to me—it was by people who I had really just met and I think that is what made it more hurtful.

I specifically remember a moment with a family member who claimed that I had gone into another family member's blush. They made a huge deal about me using makeup when it literally wasn’t the case. Then, in almost the same breath, they wanted to put lipstick on me because I had the perfect lips for lip liner and lipstick. It was one of the most confusing moments in my adolescence, of realizing people will view what I do as acceptable or unacceptable by their own standards.

That’s just one story that is triggering for me, but I have to say: the women in my life never made me feel that way. Both of my biological grandmothers were extremely, extremely accepting of me. My grandmother on my mother's side hid the fact that I played with Barbies with my cousin Bella, and my grandmother on my father's side also hid the fact that I would wear her wigs and perform concerts for her. They were letting me express myself in ways that you don’t really see in Latin households.

The number one woman in my life forever and always is my mother who is not only my best friend, but somebody who I can go to and literally talk about anything and it’s been that way my entire life and I wouldn’t truly be who I am without her—I mean, for God’s sake, she has gone to two Prides with me because I didn’t have a community of people in Kansas City to go with. She has always encouraged me to live out any dreams I had and to go for literally anything that I have ever set my mind on. She also wants me to get married and have a baby tomorrow with the man of my dreams…because that’s literally what I want.

Emmanuel (cont.): It was mostly the men in my life who always made me feel ashamed for my interests, what I liked and what I didn’t like, and who were always trying to make me someone I wasn’t instead of just celebrating me for who I was. That was such a hard thing for me to deal with, but also why I’m grateful for the relationships I have with my brother, Corey, and my stepdad. Corey has never shown any signs of being embarrassed by the way that I present myself or the way that I act, because he sees me as a fully realized person. He is proud to call himself my younger brother

With my stepdad, he has never shied away from acknowledging all of my wins and has always been Team Emmanuel. When I came out, he said, “This changes nothing. I love you.” There was nothing else that could have been said in that moment that have the weight of the world off of my shoulders.

I don’t like speaking for others and how they feel in their queerness and their relationships with others, but I see firsthand the way that my brother and stepdad interact with me and my other queer family members and it’s exactly how it should be. We are different in a fun, unique, amazing way, but you treat us with kindness. You treat us with respect and love and you make us feel normal.

I think that’s something that a lot of times queer people, when they’re around certain family members, they don’t feel, and I can see my queer family members just feel so relaxed when they’re in my home with my mom, my dad, and my brother because we’re just normal people living normal lives.

If you truly want to let kids be kids, then you need to accept them as they are. Kids are messy, annoying, and genuinely believe that being an actress-equestrian-interior designer triple threat is a feasible career path. And, yes, some of them are queer. If you tell them who they can’t be, if you teach them from a young age that there is a wrong way to be themselves, you are not protecting them from the woke mind virus—you’re not protecting them from anything at all.

Also, fuck you! I don’t even like kids, and you have me defending them like this—on my newsletter!! This is like when I got so mad that I set out to finally understand economics!!! Assholes…

Fashion Flash Forward

I like to think of the structure of today’s piece as my interpretation of the sandwich method: at the top, we talked about fashion, style, taste. In the middle, we sucker punched you with proof that the personal is—and always has been—political. And now, to close out our conversation, I wanted to ask Emmanuel a few more questions about his wardrobe.

Starting with:

Emily: What kind of style do you envision yourself having in 20 years?

Emmanuel: I hope in 20 years, I am just a fabulous almost-50-year-old gay man who is wearing caftans and living my best life. I want to be a mixture of Jennifer Tilly from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Bretman Rock because he’s so hot and I love his style, the way that he blends the femininity and masculinity of himself, his body, and his outfits. Then throw some Sarah Jessica Parker in there, especially from Sex and the City, like please.

I just want to be bold in my stylistic choices, and more Emmanuel—I want to be me. I want to create my own avenues, and I want to be able to express myself exactly how I want to, and I want to have the money to be able to do so.

Emmanuel’s new habit as of late has been expanding his bag collection. In a conversation celebrating his style, it only felt right to ask:

Emily: Marry, fuck, kill: any three of your gorgeous designer bags?

Emmanuel: OK, I’m going to have to marry my denim Swarovski Crystal Balenciaga city bag..like I have to marry that bag. It is a one-of-a-kind. I have never seen another one in person. The only other person I have ever seen with that bag is one of Denise Richards' daughters on her show. She had the mini version, and that’s the only other time I’ve ever seen that bag, so I’m going to have to marry her.

I have to fuck my silver Gucci hobo shoulder bag because she’s just so hot and I love her to death. She’s so versatile—I can wear her as my little shoulder bag on my way to a SoulCycle class, but I can also then wear her to brunch or a fancy dinner because she’s just so gorgeous.

Then I’ll kill my vintage suede Fendi bag because every time I try to wear her, it rains or snows. I feel like it’s bad luck, so I’m going to have to murder her.

We may not yet have a song of the summer (although Mariah’s back, and Addison’s been giving us some very promising teasers…), but that doesn’t mean the season is not suddenly and forcefully upon us.1 To close out today’s piece on the silliest and most lighthearted note I could, I asked Emmanuel:

Emily: What is going to be your style for the summer, and why?

Emmanuel: My style this summer is just hot ass mess ass bitch ass fun funky love…also basic because being basic is okay. Like if I wanna wear a white tank top with lil’ denim shorts and Sambas and I feel hot and confident, then that is iconic and that is a bad ass bitch outfit.

I know that most people will be like, “Oh no, you can’t be basic, being basic is so not cool.” Like no, actually—if I put my own twist on a look and I feel good in it, then I’m gonna rock it and I’m gonna look iconic. My biggest accessory is my personality, and that really will shine through any outfit, no matter how basic or unique you want it to be.

And now, we are sashaying into deals…Happy Pride M’nth.

So much love to Emmanuel, today and always!!! I love getting to do E4P with my friends and showcase how incredible they all are!! Make sure to check out his first solo piece here, and one of my favorite panels he participated in here.

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