Stephen Ira pointed out something we’ve all known for a while now, namely that John Mulaney has a lot of FTM energy and I think it’s time for him to knock it off (Mulaney, not Ira). Bill Hader, too; both of them with their wide-set temples and their Cary Grant swimming-pool hairlines and their marquise-cut cheekbones and their reinvented mid-Atlantic accents and their anxious, elegant Peter Lorre hands need to quit it with their midcentury gay-adjacent nervousness, because I’m already jealous of enough of it. What are they doing, these dressing-gown boys with their velvet-slipper hearts and their afternoon-tennis arms, besides trying to destroy me? This goes for all of you – quit it out with your young-Bogart necks and your broad Hitchcock-boy eyebrows, croquet forearms and 6’1 in socks.
Hand over those midcentury bodies, those fourteen-pullups-every-morning-and-a-poached-egg shoulders, those Kirk Douglas wrists and fingertips used to switching records and honesty. You with your David Hyde Pierce chins and everything else you can carry. I’m trying to have gender dysphoria quietly in the corner and then along comes a couple of celebrities getting to be what I’m trying to be about, namely C-3PO with skin on, lanky, fussy, and detailed, and I have to unbook my whole afternoon just to be furious about your dynamic and elbow-to-shoulder measurements. You’ve got the kind of mannerisms where you can say “chums” and get away with it and I want my mouth to make the shapes your mouth makes, but I want my mouth to have done it first. You can be the shitty self-conscious copy for a change. Your face is arranged like a settee, and I don’t even know what a settee is, just that I want one and I don’t have it. Face designed by William Haines, and living right next door to patter. You foundling of Randolph Scott, you legacy-holder of American suavity and neckcloths. What am I supposed to do with you? Remake Patricia Highsmith novels and dress you up in tennis whites and put you on genteel trains? Invite you to late-morning sport and early-evening murder and a lot of heavy oak furniture? Take that wristwatch off, it’s cutting off my circulation, you Dorothy Parker cup of coffee, I’m so in need and you’re so flush it’s ruining the poker party.
This is exactly how I feel about Hale Appleman (Eliot on "The Magicians").
And yet Mulaney hates his feminine hips, and his high waist, and his "swinging log" arms - in his eyes, he's a scrawny nonsense, Ichabod Crane's maiden aunty, a creature of no particular gender, race, or purpose. "Whatever it is you are, we don't need any of you," he tells himself in an SNL sketch. He is turning, he says, into his mom instead of his dad as he ages. The only thing he clings to is being a six-footer. He mentions it so often that one wonders if that's all he thinks he has going for him, the poor chap.