The news about Kristi Noem broke today (Tuesday, March 31) and I have some initial thoughts on this breaking story.
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The latest news to emerge from the current administration is that Kristi Noem’s husband Byron Noem has been a part of online fetish communities. The news first appeared — exploded, rather — on the pages of the British tabloid the Daily Mail. You can read the original report on its site, but given how crudely and unkindly that publication treats anything and anyone that even remotely deviates from perceived norms, it seems best to quote People instead:
A Daily Mail investigation published on Tuesday, March 31, reportedly uncovered online messages and photos of Bryon, 56, participating in online fetish forums. The photos, some of which include Bryon’s face, show the former first gentleman of South Dakota dressed in pink hot pants and massive fake breasts apparently made of balloons.
He also reportedly paid at least $25,000 to chat with online fetish models in the “bimbofication scene,” which fetishizes performers who turn themselves into real-life dolls by using silicone injections and surgical enhancements.
Already, of course, headlines are exploding with the word “cross-dressing”— while this is not inaccurate as a description of what Byron Noem appears to have been doing for an unspecified period of time (possibly a long while), Daily Mail and others are of course emphasising the “secret double life” they assume he has been leading. Historically, cross-dressing — often referred to as transvestism — has been maligned and stigmatised, even within a broader LGBTQ community, with segments of the transgender community concerned that its existence takes away from the seriousness of trans rights for people who want to undergo more what might be considered more permanent changes.1 Added a few hours after publication: I do want to acknowledge that these ideas of permanence and change are very thorny ones — language has yet to match the complexity of the issues. Many thanks to S. In popular culture and in general discourse, the figure of the transvestite has been both liberatory (Rocky Horror Picture Show) and shadowy, to the point of being murderous. (Psycho).2This is by no means a full history of the concept or the practice.
In this context, it is unsurprising that the headlines so far have dwelt on the secrecy of Byron Noem’s supposed “double life.” Lending to the salacious nature of all the inevitably gossipy coverage is the fact Kristi Noem has long been rumoured to be, ah, secretly lovers with her “special adviser” Corey Lewandowski, who enjoyed unparalleled benefits of being in her orbit despite having no qualifications for any government job and a complete lack of clarity as to what his actual function might have been.
Secrets, they abound.
Recent reports state that Kristi Noem is “devastated” by the news and that the family has asked for privacy. As Homeland Security Secretary, she presided over months of barbaric public humiliations, arrests, and murders. Under her, men in masks were commanded to tear lives apart by stampeding into people’s homes, to rappel from helicopters into buildings occupied by the poorest and most vulnerable, including children, and effectively given the authority to kill people in public.
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So, please pardon those of us who don’t respect this new-found wish for “privacy” or feel any sympathy for a woman who has caused so much death and, yes, devastation in the lives of tens of thousands of people. Byron Noem, who appears to have been separated from his wife for a while — even though he sat stone-faced behind her during the hearings that effectively ended her tenure at the Department of Homeland Security — was clearly aware of her policies and the effects they continue to have on so many.
And yet.
There are signs of cracks in a life — the Daily Mail reports that Noem admitted to some of the women he met online that he knew of his wife’s alleged affair with Lewandowski, and was unruffled when some of his online contacts realised who he was.
Doubtless, more details will emerge in the next few days and months, and I suspect this is definitely the end of Kristi Noem’s political career — not for the right reasons (a reign of murderous terror and general, utter incompetence) but because when it comes to matters of family life, sex, infidelity, and fetishes, every administration — whether Democrat or Republican — time-travels back to the McCarthy era: every sexual deviation is seen as a possibility for blackmail, and anyone whose family does not hew to a mythical All-American ideal is immediately excised.
I have no sympathy for Byron Noem as a person, just as I have never cared what Eva Braun’s last thoughts might have been. But I look at the photos of a man with a fetish he had to keep closeted for a variety of reasons, and I read of how careless he got. In moments like these, and they come about very often, I often wonder, with more than a little sadness, if someone didn’t throw caution to the winds because they were secretly tired of not being in the open.
I hope Byron Noem pays in some way for having supported his wife’s political career, one that has ruined the lives of thousands. I also hope he gets to live the life he wants, as fully and as openly as possible.
We have to work for a world where no one is killed or imprisoned for any reason, and a world where everyone gets to be whomever they want to be, as openly as they wish.
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See also:
Missing: On Terror and Kidnappings
Image: Vasily Kandinsky, Black Lines, 1913
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