Celebrity Treasure Island is a New Zealand reality show that is a direct ripoff of the top-rating reality show Survivor. Actually, not quite: imagine if Survivor were the Mona Lisa. Now imagine a 10-year-old painting a copy with a few different shades here and there. That would be Celebrity Treasure Island.
Anyway, as the title of the show says, the show features what could loosely be described as ‘celebrities’. This season one of the ‘celebrities’ was a middle-aged gay man, Blair Macbeth. Blair Macbeth is a drag queen performer who uses the stage name Spankie Jackzon. Don’t worry – I had never heard of him before either.
Macbeth was forced to leave the show due to injury. Here’s a link to an article by RNZ journalist Nick Park, team leader (what else!) of entertainment and lifestyle, on how it all went down.
New Zealand drag queen Spankie Jackzon had a real flash of mortality as she lay on the sand, surrounded by the Celebrity Treasure Island crew as she clutched her heart.
“I can’t breathe,” she panted, as medics ran in. Grabbing her heart, she keels over and gasps: “Am I dying?”
The nearly 40-year-old collapsed in the Coromandel on the set of the reality TV show back in March – the event aired on TVNZ this week. She made the tough call to quit the competition in its second week. Jackzon wept as she watched the episode from her home in Feilding.
I asked myself, what kind of journalist would write such tosh? So I got into detective mode and checked out her Facebook page. If you’re thinking stereotypical privileged left-wing Remuera-ite who loves chardonnay and jet setting around the place and voted for Jacinda Ardern, you’d be 100 per cent correct. Oh, and if you check out her Facebook page, which I strongly suggest you don’t, all her friends are white, with plenty of cash to splash around. Shock, horror, I know.
Anyway, if you look at the article it’s clearly Blair in the photos and not his alter-ego Spankie. He’s not transexual. He doesn’t believe he’s actually a woman. He even says so in the article.
“I might be a 6ft 4 man but like, I’m a delicate peach.”
From what I’ve seen of the show, he’s actually quite a nice guy.
So to recap.
It was Blair, a gay man, who was in the show, not his alter-ego, Spankie Jackzon. Blair, as I’ve said, is a man, ergo he is ‘he’, not ‘she’. There is nothing to say that ‘he’ wants to be called ‘she’. And yes, I tried looking him up on X to check.
And they have the gall to tell us off for being presumptuous.
