Band of Thebes

Bruce LaBruce's Essay on the Decline, Cooptation of Camp

With the rush to convince straight politicians and judges we're the same as them and worthy of the same institutions and rights, anyone might believe gay people had stopped thinking about the value of difference. Queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce adapts his lecture from last year's Camp/Anti-Camp conference in Berlin for an essay in the new issue of Nat. Brut journal. Rictor Norton says it's "the best analysis of camp since Sontag."

LaBruce begins with fifteen lists of subcategories such as bad gay camp (Will & Grace, Adam Lambert), good straight camp (September, 3 Women), bad straight camp (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Stanley Tucci in Prada, Hunger Games), ultra camp (Wilde), bad ultra camp (Liza in Sex & the City 2), reactionary camp (Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy), subversive camp (Pee Wee Herman), quasi-camp (Midnight Cowboy, Cruising), intentional camp (The Shining, Casino Royale), and unintentional camp (J. Edgar, The Iron Lady), among others.

Realizing, "sadly, most of it falls under the category of 'bad straight camp,'" he traces how we got here and blames the new irony:

"...The net result was that much of the general populous (now roughly equivalent to 'pop culture') had adopted the posture as a given to the extent that people generally lost track of its meaning or purpose: there was a kind of ironic detachment from everything. People started routinely to say the opposite of what they meant, and meant it, failing to understand that their new 'sensibility' had become a betrayal of their actual former set of beliefs or tastes, which they even perhaps once held sacred. So in a sense, irony became a malaise, a kind of generalized disaffection that infected the dominant culture. I surmise that this is what opened up the floodgates for the rise of camp culture, or rather the corruption and misinterpretation of camp culture – a certain detached artificiality and forced excess..."

After a stinging critique of Britney, Gaga, Rihanna, Beyonce, and Nikki ("...hyper-referentiality, extreme hyperbole, a crudely obvious, unnuanced female sexuality, and even a vaguely pornographic sensibility which, unhappily, is post-feminist to the point of misogyny...") he laments:

"This new annexation and corruption of the camp sensibility now exists largely without the qualities of sophistication and secret signification that were developed out of necessity by the underground or outsider gay world, which originally created camp as a kind of gay signifying practice... It was developed as a secret language in order to identify oneself to like-minded or similarly closeted homosexuals, a shorthand of arcane and coded, almost kabbalistic references and practices developed in order to operate safely apart and without fear of detection from a conservative and conventional world that could be aggressively hostile towards homosexuals, particularly effeminate males and masculine females. In the contemporary world, in which gays have largely assimilated into the dominant order, such signifying practices have become somewhat obsolete, and the previous forms of camping and camp identification have long since been emptied of camp or gay significance, rendering them easily co-opted, commercialized, and trivialized."

Beyond the arts, his takedown of political camp is fierce:

"...For what are Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain other than conservative camp icons enacting a kind of reactionary burlesque on the American political stage? Wholly without substance, their views exaggerated and extremely stylized, and evincing a carefully contrived posture of 'compassionate conservatism,' they function merely as a crude spectacle that mocks the unwashed masses by pretending to be one of them while simultaneously offering them policies that are directly antithetical to their authentic needs."

Building to a high point he concludes, 

"The new tendency of conservative camp runs in diametrical opposition to the impulses of classic gay camp, which sought to celebrate, elevate, and even worship the qualities of deviance, difference, and eccentricity that characterized the highly aestheticized homosexual experience of past eras."

Read the full essay and support online journals like Nat. Brut.

Matthew Gallaway Takes on Death, Nightfall, and Fielding

 

Ever since The Gay Recluse's enchanting evisceration of Daniel Kehlmann's uber-bestselling historical novel Measuring the World, I've been enthralled with Matthew Gallaway's examinations of queer characters in literature. (With all that energy and enthusiasm and erudition, he should have his own tv show.) Yesterday he posted an essay on The Millions exploring a trio of novels in which a heretofore straight middle-aged man suddenly becomes infatuated with a young male: This month's The Art of Fielding [[Kindle]] by Chad Harbach, last year's By Nightfall [[Kindle]] by Michael Cunningham, and their great, great forefather Death in Venice [[Kindle]]. 

Matthew is too elegant to say it so bluntly, but apparently Harbach's gay nocturnes hit many false notes. He finds (with added emphasis):

"When Owen sits in the dugout, for example, his contours are “slender-limbed, right knee flipped girlishly over left” and when after Owen’s jaw is shattered, he still looks “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… possessed of an Asian delicacy.” When the relationship becomes sexual, Owen kisses Affenlight “on the tip of the penis in a womanly way.” After they go to a hotel to (vaguely) “make love,” Affenlight “lay on his side…[in a] a quintessentially feminine posture…[as] with his free hand he caressed Owen’s belly, which itself felt almost feminine, not muscled but soft…”

If encoding man on man sex in female terms wasn't enough of a game-ender, Matthew later explains, "There’s an undercurrent of cognitive dissonance in the many scenes in which Affenlight appears," and "Harbach also adorns Owen with an array of pointless clichés that long ago felt more tired than funny in television sit-coms."

His close readings of Mann and Cunningham are just as essential, and more appreciative. I don't quote them because you are far more familiar with those works, and because you must read the entire essay yourself.

[Please enjoy: By Nightfall jacket designer Henry Sene Yee writes on his blog of this rejected version: "Although it connected with the storyline, we didn't want to suggest that this was a gay novel."]

Gay 27 Year-Old Salon Editor Doesn't Get Why Larry Kramer Isn't Chill

 

As eternal as spring blossoms and Cher farewell tours is the pas de deux of youth's self-absorbed apathy and age's righteous anger. This version is called "The Problem With Gay Men Today," performed across the pages of Salon by Deputy Arts Editor Thomas Rogers, a 27 year-old gay Brooklynite who has a way lot of straight friends, and the indomitable, soon to be 76 years old Larry Kramer who is first, last, and always gay. Larry says:

"I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe."

They talk about how gay ghettos are emptying out and gay people are less visible to each other now and whether the internet is to blame. Rogers and a gay bud saw a preview of the revival of Kramer's The Normal Heart opening on Broadway tomorrow and found himself feeling a "perverse nostalgia" for AIDS because there's "something appealing about having this galvanizing issue to unite gay men. We don't have that as much now." Larry, discussing his partner, 64, points out

"I'll obviously die before he does, and the way the laws are written it's very hard to leave him anything of substance compared to what I have to leave. It all goes to taxes because we're not legally federally married and that's not fair, that's just not fair. You don't care about it at your age, but I care about it at mine, and there are a lot of older gays who should care about it as well. That should be a galvanizing issue. Anything that keeps us from being unequal should be galvanizing. I want what they have. I do. And everybody should. But again, people don't think that way."

Rogers does not refute the statement that he doesn't care. Earlier, he said he thought the battles over AIDS "seem very alien to a lot of young people's experiences" and that "many of the ideas in the play will seem exotic and a little dated to a lot of young gay men." He becomes more animated when discussing "the interesting thing about Grindr," which Kramer has never heard of.

Colm Tóibín on the Church, Gays, and Knowing/ Not Knowing

Mandatory reading. Whatever else you do this week, make time for Colm Tóibín's magnificent essay on simultaneously knowing and not knowing something. His topic is ostensibly the Catholic Church, its endemic sexual abuse, its reactions, and its relationship with homosexuality, particularly its gay priests but also its gay faithful. If you ever doubted that the reprehensible could become so atrocious as to break through the space-time continuum and appear almost comic, read the catalog of very recent Church statements spitting blame for the sex abuse scandals on everyone else. Tóibín avoids easy fingerwagging at hypocrisy to consider much deeper issues of what we allow ourselves to know or not know at a particular time. His essay is literature but, published in the London Review of Books, it will be ineligible for next year's Best American anthologies, so this is your chance. And yes, technically the 8,000-word piece is a book review of The Pope Is Not Gay! by Angelo Quattrocchi.

A sample of Tóibín's essay:

"That you were gay was something you managed to know about yourself and not know at the same time. I am almost certain, for example, that when I was warned by a priest at school that a boy who had parted his hair in the middle had by this act given a sign that he was homosexual (the only time the term was mentioned in those years), the priest himself had no clear and open idea that he himself liked teenage boys. (He would spend time in jail more than 20 years later for abusing teenage boys.) He would have had a way, learned for good reasons in adolescence, of keeping some of his actions and desires secret from himself. His sense of power and entitlement would also have meant that such crimes as he committed would most likely not see the light of day. The priesthood had, as far as he was concerned, solved his problems for him.

"This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself, this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth. We knew that the bread and wine, for example, were literally and actually changed into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the priest at Mass, and, at the same time, we must have known that this was not the case, that, really, they remained just bread and wine.

"The shame an adolescent felt about being gay in those years should not be underestimated; the feeling that you were less than worthy, that if people found out the truth about you they would despise you, went deep into your soul. This was another reason to become a priest. You could change your own powerlessness into power. As a priest, you would be admired and looked up to, you would spend your life – as so many Catholic priests have indeed spent their lives – doing good and being good. And being seen to be good, being needed by the sick and the dying, being wanted to officiate at weddings and baptisms and funerals, saying the sacred words which would mean so much to the congregation, all this would offer you a fulfilled and fulfilling life. Becoming a priest solved not only the outward problem of forbidden and unmentionable sexual urges, but, perhaps more important, offered a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self.

"This idea of knowing two things at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that thought otherwise. While the world’s view often ate into the self, there was another part of the self which remained intact, confident, sure. Introspection, the study of the self, for gay people became necessary, fruitful. The struggle between our knowledge and their prejudice often meant that a spiritual element in our being – something private, wounded, solitary and self-aware – had reason to come to the fore and seek nourishment in a close relationship to God. This is another reason so many gay men have become priests."

There's this secular observation, too:

"Before the creation of a post-Stonewall gay identity and the presence of gay role models on television and in the movies, most gay men worked out a strategy, in early adolescence, to do a perfect, lifelong imitation of a straight man, to move around in that gruff, rangy way straight men had invented for themselves. For many homosexuals, the stereotype of the mincing, high-pitched queen was the most frightening idea that ever walked towards them. They hated it and feared it and worked out ways not to look like that themselves, or to be invisible when they did so."

Tóibín also considers the previous pope, the current pope, and the current pope's exquisite private secretary, "Georg Gänswein. Gänswein is remarkably handsome, a cross between George Clooney and Hugh Grant, but, in a way, more beautiful than either." Of Ratzinger's infamous 1986 letter on homosexuality, which "must be seen as an objective disorder," Tóibín notes that the future pope:

"...is thus implying that legislation for gay rights has somehow led to an increase in paedophilia. He is careful, however, not to spell this out. This is an interesting moment, the beginning of a culture of denial, a culture in which someone else, somewhere else, had to be blamed."

He follows that "interesting moment" from 1986 to 1992 to 2005 to this summer. Read it.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe: Finding Myself in Antarctica

(Photo by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Check out her other pics.)

Novelist Lucy Jane Bledsoe has an important new essay Finding Myself in Antarctica in the current Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Nearly every paragraph is worth quoting in full but, short of that, here are a number of sentences to lure you to click through.

I’ve loved and craved wilderness my whole life. And I’ve often struggled with the meaning of that love. Why do we need wilderness?

The hugeness and the extremity of both beauty and risk open me up to my biggest, best stories.

I fear our culture is giving up on imagination, the rich nutrient that drives art and all creative endeavors. People crave the memoir, just the facts, above all else.

Many people read narcissistically, to see themselves and their world reflected back at them, to feel validated.

I’ve always defended the coming out narrative as enduringly important.

Like a character in a novel, I feel that I’ve been put on the edge of my existence. I forget who I am, what I need to do to survive comfortably. I feel like a blank, a middle-aged woman who apparently has no relationship and no work, and that’s how they regard me, too.

There's still time to round out your summer reading queue with Lucy's very entertaining literary-commercial hybrid The Big Bang Symphony. Booklist said, "Bledsoe uses the locale's incredible beauty and high potential for drama, danger, and self-discovery for insights small and great..."