CHRIS CROCKER, BRITNEY SPEARS FAN: THE CRUEL LIFE OF BUBBLE GUMMERS

Adults watching Chris Crocker's fan videos on behalf of Britney Spears are never quite sure whether they're watching "the real thing" or a parody of one. We often forget what it's like to be a bubble gummer, when everything done tends to be a parody, when subtetly has yet to be learned, and we pick out only the most exaggerated characteristics of what we see and want to be like, because... well, just because:

"Chris and I are sitting at Shoney's, where the silverware comes wrapped in a plastic sleeve, airplane-style. He's wearing better makeup than most of the waitresses. He orders biscuits and gravy and a glass of sweet tea. Across the street is a Kmart and, near that Kmart, the beauty-supply store where Chris buys his mascara (Max Factor Lash Protection) and eyeliner (Palladio). Later he will demonstrate for me, on the inside of his wrist, how Palladio goes on like a juicy pen and doesn't smudge. For now, we're talking about his life growing up in a place where his presence can stir up so much anger.In kindergarten, Chris brought Barbie dolls to school for show and tell. At home, when he was allowed, he wore dresses made for him by an indulgent relative. In fourth grade, a fascination with Aaron Carter, the little brother of one of the Backstreet Boys, led him to get his first blond highlights. A later fascination with Avril Lavigne led him to start dressing like her—"You know, jelly bracelets stacked up my arms, kinda faux punk." He always loved to dance and perform. He entered talent shows at the local YMCA and took clogging classes. In seventh grade, he tried, without success, to start a gay-straight alliance at his middle school. Around the same time he started an e-zine that encouraged young gay kids to come out. It quickly drew 3,000 subscriptions. "I've always been very active in the gay community online," he tells me. However, offline, at school, where there was no gay community save for himself, Chris got called all the standard names. "I was so used to being harassed, I didn't even keep track of who didn't like me," he says. One day in the locker room a guy picked him up by his neck and held him against a locker until he turned blue in the face. The gym teacher watched and didn't intervene. That was toward the end of his last year of middle school. Not long after, he went to a fair designed to help students pick the local high school that was best for them. As he sat by himself, listening, he began to hear taunts, and then noticed that people in the room were pointing at him and snickering. He took a Sharpie and wrote "keep staring" on the back of his hand. He made a fist, rested his chin on it so those taunting him could see what he had written, and kept listening to the presentations. But Chris realized that high school, as he put it, "wasn't going to work out." His grandparents seem to have reached the same conclusion. He's lived with them since he was 4, when they took over caring for him because his father and mother weren't in a position to do so. I wasn't allowed inside the home of Chris's grandparents, and I wasn't allowed to talk to his grandfather, who doesn't know much about Chris's internet fame. But I was allowed to talk to his grandmother on the phone after agreeing not to ask her directly about Chris's homosexuality. I started with a question that I thought might force us to talk about homosexuality anyway, without breaking my ground rules. I asked his grandmother, a 60-year-old manager for a janitorial maintenance company, why she'd decided to pull Chris out of public high school and teach him herself. She didn't bite. "There was a lot of people he didn't like," she told me. "And a lot of people didn't like him, either." She added: "Chris is not really a rough and tough person." Chris was homeschooled for high school, taught by his grandmother after she got off work. He spent much of the rest of his days online or watching TV. One of his favorite shows is The View—"all my girls" is how he describes the show's female hosts. Chris doesn't look up to gay male icons at all. When I ask, he can't think of one he admires. "I'm not really inspired by many men, even if they're gay," he tells me. "I'm more inspired by women who are accepting of gay men than gay men." I can't help but think of his grandmother when he says this. It's clear from the videos in which she appears that Chris and his grandmother enjoy a complicated relationship, loving but testy, in which Chris's homosexuality is always the subtext, but is rarely addressed directly and never completely accepted. "She's so in denial she thinks it's not obvious that I'm gay," he told me at one point during the two days I spent with him. At another point he told me that when his grandmother found out he was gay, "she told me I needed an exorcism, and was dead serious."Most young men like Chris, at loggerheads with their families and unwelcome in their communities, quickly give up. They either adapt to a closeted lifestyle or they run off to a big city, locate that city's gay neighborhood, take a job in a coffeeshop or bar or theater, and start anew. Chris may still do that. He's given himself until mid-June, the anniversary of his first internet video, to leverage enough money and opportunity out of his internet fame to escape his small town. If that doesn't work, he says, he'll consider doing something more old-fashioned, like buying a bus ticket. Ironically, the internet is the reason he didn't run away long ago. It's been a salve for his isolation, and improving communication technologies (the cell phone, the digital camera, the text message) have helped Chris thwart, at every turn, his grandparents' attempts to keep him distant from a gay life. The best example: Around age 13, despite the disapproval of his grandmother, Chris had his first boyfriend. The boyfriend lived in New York. His name was Angel. The two met online because they were both young, gay, out, and publishing e-zines. They were together five years. Chris describes it as the most serious relationship of his life, even though the two never met in person. Instead, they chatted incessantly online, and had a florid phone sex life. When, one day, Chris's grandmother overheard them having phone sex and blocked Angel's number in an attempt to break them up, Chris quickly found a fix: He offered to have regular chats with a pedophile he met online in exchange for prepaid phone cards, which he then used to call Angel. Another example of how the web made him more than his town and family ever could have: the way that Chris, a white Southern kid in an almost all-white Southern town, learned to talk like a ghetto black woman. In his This and That video, Chris closes with a line that seems to have confounded most of his YouTube imitators, and certainly confused me. He is saying, "What's your tea like that?" When I asked him what this phrase is all about, he told me that he'd picked it up on the party line. "What party line?" I asked. It turned out it was a party line that he'd found through the website talkee.com, which compiles lists of free phone party lines around the country. This particular line is run out of Los Angeles and is filled with flaming black men, black drag queens, and trannies from Compton. They take on names like Candy Cane and Chocolate and Charmane ("She's like my muse," Chris says), and they dial in to the party line to berate each other about their breath, their weight, and so on. Chris likes to call in under the guise of an alter ego, Penelope. Lately, however, people have caught on and have taken to calling him Cracker. To ask "What's your tea?" on the party line, Chris explained, is to ask, "What's your problem?"One of the characters Chris plays in his online videos is Earl Annie Edna, a Bible-believing older woman who seems a thinly veiled parody of his grandmother. Earl Annie has a television show, and Chris's grandmother is the only guest, ever. One episode begins with Chris, wearing a shiny purple dress and Tammy Faye–caliber makeup, speaking into the camera: Chris: Hi everybody! This is Earl Annie once again. I'm out here putting out a message once again that we gotta get rid of Chris. And right now I'm sitting here with one of my biggest supporters. Hi! (He pans the camera to his grandmother, seated on the brown living-room couch.) Grandmother: Hello. Chris: How you doin'? Grandmother: Not good. (She looks unhappy to be there, but willing to play along. After some more banter...) Chris: You don't like Chris, do you? Grandmother: Chris who? Chris: Bitch, why you on my show? Grandmother: I don't know. Chris: I thought I was here to interview someone against Chris. (Shouts offstage...) Get in the people who don't like him! What's this bitch doing here? Grandmother: I like him. Chris: You like him? Grandmother: Uh-huh. Chris: Do you know what he stands for? Tarnation!... Get off my show!

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