3 things about Adam Lambert, Part 1: That Out kerfuffle

Oh, Adam.

Wait: No. I will not write an open letter. That would be too obvious, both because of Out editor Aaron Hicklin’s letter to Adam that caused this past week’s kerfuffle and Joe Vogel’s tone-deaf parody of Hicklin’s letter that Adam thought was “hilarious.” Instead, I’ll do this straight, as it were.

Since I was deeply concerned about whether radio would ever get behind Adam Lambert, because of The Gay, I was rather interested in, and rather appalled by, Adam’s Out brouhaha. A lot has been said, though none of it particularly smart, and I may not do any better. (Yes, this is loony fan bait for the comments.)

Here’s a recap for my readers who are not as obsessive about reading the minutiae of gay pop culture:

Out put Adam Lambert on their yearly Out 100 list, and they named him “Breakout Star of the Year.” However, according to Hicklin, Lambert and his image were aggressively handled by his handlers, who were seemed terrified that Out was going to make Lambert appear too gay:

We’re curious whether you know that we made cover offers for you before American Idol was even halfway through its run. Apparently, Out was too gay, even for you. There was the issue of what it would do to your record sales, we were told. Imagine! A gay musician on the cover of a gay magazine. What might the parents think! It’s only because this cover is a group shot that includes a straight woman that your team would allow you to be photographed at all — albeit with the caveat that we must avoid making you look “too gay.” (Is that a medical term? Just curious). Luckily, you seemed unaware that a similar caution was issued to our interviewer.

Hicklin’s open letter is aggressive and it’s snarky, but it was also completely justified. The writer of the Q&A wrote that Adam’s publicist “cautioned against making the interview ‘too gay,’ or, ‘you know, gay-gay.'” As a former writer for both Out and The Advocate, I know how hideous publicists are, especially when it comes to the tinge of The Gay. Lambert is a new challenge to these control-obsessed monsters; he’s actually out, not coy like Ricky Martin and Queen Latifah or dishonest like Kevin Spacey and Wentworth Miller. For these folks, publicists have to work overtime to keep them from being described as or revealed to be gay. For Lambert, his publicists have to make sure his gayness doesn’t get too problematic: Let him be flamboyant in his clothes and makeup and theoretically gay, but don’t show him touching another man or talking about politics or expressing any allegiance to the gay community.

In other words, let him be a fag hag’s dream.

They must have been giving each other high-fives over the reprehensible Details cover story. And nervous as hell about what might happen with Out. So they tried to handle Out. Not smart. Imagine what would happen in Will Smith’s publicist told Essence not to make him seem too “black.” It would have been a lot worse than Hicklin’s letter.

But it turns out it’s more complicated than a few publicists. More on that later.

Lambert’s response to Hicklin’s letter was certainly not handled. No publicist would have allowed Lambert to do what he did or what he’s done. He went on Twitter and had what I perceived as a temper tantrum. He really should have had one of his flacks release a statement to the effect of, “I respect Out, but I disagree with the letter.” Or something like that. Instead, he typed some snark and opened himself up a great deal of criticism from people who actually care about the way that gay artists are marketed and controlled and how those images perpetuate homophobia in American culture. Yeah, he pissed me off. A lot.

So, I’m going to fisk his tweets.

it’s definitely not that deep.

It’s not? Having the publicists for the first-ever out-from-the-sorta-beginning pop singer make attempts to under-gay him in the most important gay publication in the country is very deep — in its cynical, homophobic shallowness. Refusing to do a solo cover, refusing to let him go to the Out 100 party, and telling the magazine what questions not to ask — and the questions were all about teh gay — is cowardly and meaningful to those of us out there who care about the cultural and political importance of a gay pop star. It is deep.

Chill!

This is what convinced me that Lambert simply doesn’t understand what is going on and why all of this — his historical importance for the gay community — matters. Chill? Hicklin shouldn’t care?

Guess ya gotta get attention for the magazine. U too are at the mercy of the marketing machine.

This is rich. He’s trying to spin Hicklin’s letter — an angry, detailed letter about something that, yes, matters — as a simply a publicity stunt, one done because Hicklin is being controlled by the “marketing machine.” Since the letter doesn’t make the magazine look good (or bad, at least to those of us who normally read it — I’d hope) and the magazine already had something easily promotable in the form of the interview with Lambert, the letter-as-stunt idea doesn’t even pass the bullshit test.

(Unless, of course, you’re a loony Lambert fan, many of whom have been leaving comments and tweets about how Hicklin wrote the letter out of jealousy and a desire to sell magazines. Without realizing that the letter was online, for free. And the jealousy argument is as old and dry as these them hills. Entertainment journalists are not all jealous of the people they cover. Really. They’re not. Many of these fans have no ability to see shades of gray, let alone reality.)

Until we have a meaningful conversation, perhaps you should refrain from projecting your publications’ agenda onto my career.

I’m sure there’s some loony fan who read that and said, “Oh, snap!” I said, “Oh, no. Oh, no.” First, the publicists try to prevent a meaningful conversation about these issues from taking place. Second, the publication’s agenda is to cover gay pop culture and maybe, to a secondary degree, to promote gay civil rights. So, Lambert doesn’t agree with that agenda? He doesn’t want to be part of gay pop culture or promote gay civil rights? A number of the loony fans have been whining about how he just wants to be a singer. He’s not a politician! To them I say: If you are an out celebrity, you are automatically a politician. That interview with Rolling Stone was a political act, and so was that hideous Details story. So was the decision to have only one clearly gay lyric on his whole album. So was his decision to make a stink about Hicklin’s letter and then spend all of last week whining about it, spend all of last week distancing himself from the gay community and the gay press that has been working tirelessly for the last 40 years to allow someone like him to exist. So was that performance at the AMAs, which was meant to make people notice — or drive them crazy. It’s all political. Lambert is an out gay man who seems to be rather bright; he knows that his existence is political. He may not want to focus on politics, but he needs to understand that he is politics. Also, on a more banal level, when you do an interview with a gay publication, you’re going to talk about gay stuff. Get over it. Chill.

Then there were two follow-up tweets. Actually, the first one arrived before the two I just fisked.

Planet Fierce responds to A. Hicklin’s “Open Letter to Adam” http://bit.ly/1yTFLP : thank you to the writer! YOU get it.

The link (eventually) led to a loony fan’s attempt to defend Lambert and attack Hicklin. The essay is a based on the central assumption that Hicklin is a lying, bitter bully and that Lambert is an infallible innocent:

You’ve effectively alienated a portion of Adam Lambert’s fan base. You may have lost sales. And you put undo [sic] pressure on a young man that [sic] has said time and again that all he wants to do is make music. All this under the guise of “sacrificing the one for the many.”

This mentality (punish those that don’t conform to a hypothetical “ideal”) is part of why the LGBT struggle is not taken seriously by mainstream America . [sic] You do not need to eat your young nor throw your most visible proponents under the proverbial bus. I hope that your tasteless diatribe serves only to bring your hypocrisy to the forefront – garnering more compassion and support for Adam Lambert than your precious mantle of Gay Rights ever would.

Lordy. The LGBT struggle isn’t taken seriously because some of us punish people who heterosexualize themselves in order to make money? THAT is the reason? The “precious mantle of Gay Rights”? REALLY? Promoting “Gay Rights” is some horrible thing that Hicklin should be embarrassed by? Out should be upset that it alienated Lambert fans? That it put undue (not “undo,” honey) pressure on someone who just wants to sing? Please: He wants to be a superstar. If he just wanted to make music, he wouldn’t have auditioned for American Idol. And this is the guy Lambert thinks “gets it.” Lordy.

Then there was this tweet:

hilarious: http://www.huffingtonpost.c…

Okay, this guy is not as much of an offensive tool as the loony fan. But Joe Vogel seemed to have read Hicklin’s letter as some fascistic demand that Adam be gay in some robotic Out-approved way. I hate to echo the wingnut flame-war mantra of “Read for comprehension!” but: Vogel should read for comprehension. Here is the final paragraph of his “satire” written by “The Gay Thought, Fashion, and Culture Police“:

And finally, as a “gay pioneer,” remember that we are “all counting on you not to mess this up.” No pressure. Gay salvation depends on your career path. As the gay pop culture prophet Perez Hilton warns, you can either be a cog for the mainstream music machine or the gay community. There are no other options. You cannot be complex, you cannot be both masculine and feminine, you cannot resist labels or boxes, you cannot experiment, you cannot form your own identity, you cannot just be. You must always match stereotypes, meet expectations. Of course, if you do slip up and need to come out again as a gay man, Out Magazine would be happy to provide the platform.

Nothing Hicklin said, except for these out-of-context quotes, even remotely states these things. Yeah, he’s putting pressure on Adam to succeed. And why not? As I said above, Adam matters. Hicklin clearly wants Adam to be whoever he wants to be, but does not want him to be forced into a manufactured image created by the record companies, which are much more interested in making money than in doing anything authentic, let alone politically or culturally controversial. Hicklin’s letter was a criticism of the constraints that 19, RCA, and Adam himself were placing on his image in the gay press. If Adam just wants to “be,” then he should just “be.” He shouldn’t be involved in cynical calculations of how gay he can appear to be to still sell a million albums.

But wait: It gets worse!

EW ran Michael Slezak’s contemptible tirade bashing Out for all of the reasons Adam’s favorite loony fan did, though Slezak makes less gramatical mistakes. You know, how dare Out even mention that there are publicists? I mean, how dare Out point out the industry is homophobic and that publicists (even and often especially gay ones) are a party to the homophobia? How dare Out point out that this is all political? How dare Out admit that gay celebrities matter, that they are needed, that they do have a responsibility to their community, especially if they trade on their gayness, as Adam has by using his sexuality in such a marketable and incendiary way? Slezak is so cocooned in his EW office, into which nothing but publicists’ screams can penetrate, that he can’t hear, or see, that gay rights trump publicists and the whines of demi-celebrities. Every. Single. Time.

(Ya know, I bet Mark Harris would have written something very, very different.)

Perhaps because of Slezak’s tone-deaf, faux-outraged whining, Adam agreed to do a Q&A about Hicklin’s letter, in which he said that Hicklin “really crossed a line.” (Has anyone else noticed that Adam and EW are responsible for the vast majority of the publicity Out got for the letter?) Here’s the money quote:

What people don’t realize is, I am managing my image, more than maybe the editor of OUT magazine likes to give anybody credit for. My team is a team. And I really feel fortunate that 19 Management and Simon Fuller said to me, from the get-go, “We want to do what you want to do. You need to tell us how you want to do things, what interests you have,” and they’ve been incredibly supportive of me. I really mean it. I’m not being puppeted around. I didn’t want to jump onto a gay magazine as my first thing, because I feel like that’s putting myself in a box and limiting myself. It was my desire to stay away from talking about certain political and civil rights issues because I’m not a politician. I’m an entertainer. That is not my area of expertise. I can talk about relationships and personal experiences because as an artist those things involve writing lyrics and that part of my process. But I didn’t feel comfortable talking about the March on Washington. I didn’t feel comfortable, so I asked my publicist to ask the interviewer to stay away from the political questions. I take full responsibility for that. I think that the editor has his agenda and has his opinions, which I respect, but they’re not necessarily my opinions. And I wish there was a little respect for that. Not every gay man is the same gay man.

So, he was responsible for the publicist telling Out not to ask about politics. Lovely. And weird. Couldn’t he have just answered the questions, if they were political, by saying, “I don’t know anything about politics”? I guess that it’s more fun to have a flack make you look like a tool. Again: Weird. Also weird that no one has picked up on this: That he didn’t want to be “putting myself in a box and limiting myself” by doing an Out cover, which is the same thing as saying “I don’t want to be seen as really gay by the public because then they won’t buy my albums.” Because it is the same thing.

This not a 19-year-old queer kid who doesn’t like labels or identity politics because they’re scary. This is a seasoned professional who doesn’t want to be lumped into the categories inhabited by Sam Sparrow, Matt Alber, Rufus Wainwright, and latter-career George Michael. Because they’re not selling millions of albums. This is not about Adam’s hurt feelings; it’s about business. It seems Hicklin crossed a line by pointing that out. Sure, Hicklin has an agenda — gay rights and gay visibility. But Adam has an agenda — to be a superstar. Only one of those agendas is laudable.

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Can Adam Lambert succeed? Notes on the ontological homophobia in popular culture

Welcome Lambert fans. Based on some of what I’ve been reading in your comments, I’ve made a few corrections.

Those of you who are interested in Adam Lambert have probably heard his new single, if not seen the video, which is not from his upcoming album, to be called For Your Entertainment, but rather from the soundtrack to 2012, Roland Emmerich’s latest worldwide snuff film.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEcUq0tmg9Y[/embedyt]

The song is getting a lot of attention, not just from the usual suspects, like gay blogs and crazed American Idol fans.. Ann Powers, the highly respected Los Angeles Times music critic raved about the single:

Listen to “Time for Miracles,” the single that begins this fall’s triumphant ascent of “American Idol” finalist and hard rock liberator Adam Lambert with a swoosh and bang that does Freddie and Steven (and Ann and Jon and Axl) proud.

Of course, as with anything Adam Lambert does, there are naysayers. A bunch of folks are just revolted by the song, since it is a rather low-rent Dianne Warren-ish power ballad. It sounds separated at birth from Aerosmith’s Oscar-nominated Dianne Warren power ballad “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” from Michael Bay’s worldwide snuff film Armageddon. This is not an unfair criticism. But I’m a sucker for songs like that, as long as they are sung by someone like Steven Tyler or Adam Lambert, whose voice, for the record, I love. It makes the hair on my arms (and back) stand on end. But some people simply loathe the sound of his voice, and I can see this, since it can go from intense to screechy rather quickly. But it works for me. Because the boy can control it as well as any recording artist working today. When he screeches, he’s doing it deliberately. He’s simply an amazingly gifted vocalist.

However, Adam could sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” without a screech or a flourish, and some people would say it sucks. This guy cannot stand Adam. Since they think he sucks, in more ways than one. Some people just can’t stand they way he moves, or his eyeliner, or his hair, or that he wasn’t spit out by the cloning technology that churned out “masculine” performers like the lead singers of Matchbox 20, Nickelback, The Fray, Coldplay, Kings of Leon, or whatever act you want to list that happens to be led by a straight man. Or supposedly straight. Want to read some hate? Here’s some. Adam Lambert is no less masculine — or more feminine — than David Bowie or Steven Tyler or Axel Rose were at the heights of their popularity, but Adam is actually and openly gay, as opposed to being just ambiguous or faux bisexual like Bowie was back in the day.

And that changes everything. Unlike the guy I linked at the beginning of the previous paragraph, many of the anonymous Lambert haters are not concerned about his supposed pitchiness, but rather that he’s a faggot. A typical string of comments from idol-mania.com:

Coolman // May 24, 2009 at 7:22 pm

Adam is a FAGGOT!!!! He is a “male” Cher. He is the worst contestant EVER. I would rather listen to Sanjia for 10 hours than the FAGGOT adam. He will never be anything
#

156 Anti-Kara // May 24, 2009 at 7:25 pm

Adam is a pillow biter. Isn’t there anyone left in the USA with MORALS???
#

157 AdamsGay // May 24, 2009 at 7:26 pm

Maybe adam should get into gay porn. He’ll never make it as a singer. Just goes to show how many queers there are voting. He sure didn’t make it on his singing!! LOL. HE SUCKS—-Literally!!

Want more? Try this.

(By the way, I love how google searches for “fag,” too, when you search for “faggot.”)

(Also, by the way, a lot of the internet hate concerning Adam Lambert is virtually identical, discourse-wise, to the faggot-bashing-shitstorm-tsunami-flamewar that Perez Hilton experienced after his altercation with the Black Eyed Peas’ entourage. Read the comments. If you don’t act like a “man,” you are always already guilty.)

There has never been an openly gay pop star. The closest we’ve ever had are Elton John, George Michael, KD Lang, and Melissa Etheridge, and all were big stars before they came out. And aside from Elton John — with his Disney work and his Princess-Diana-is-dead song — none of them have had a radio hit in the United States since they came out. In case you haven’t noticed, American radio stations are more homophobic than any other popular media format.

Rob pointed out that there was one exception to this: RuPaul. He was out — way out — when he had a hit with “Supermodel (You Better Work).”
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw9LOrHU8JI[/embedyt]
This is the exception that proved the rule. He didn’t have a hit as a gay man; he had a hit as a drag queen. He was not a man with a slightly ambiguous gender performance, which is threatening to many straight men. RuPaul’s gender was never ambiguous — this was a man pretending, mocking, satirizing, loving the female and feminine. There’s a reason why female impersonation is safe for straight men to watch, love, and participate in: It reestablishes and reifies gender more often than it disrupts and confuses it. (Check out Gender Trouble and Vested Interests for more.) Out gay men who shirk masculinist stereotypes — guys like Adam Lambert — do not do confirm gender; they fuck with it. Which is one the reasons why I love Lambert so much. Also, I fucking love RuPaul. This song led off the dance-party playlist at our wedding. And the video? One of the greatest ever made. Yeah, Kanye. Really. However, it’s also important to note that “Supermodel” wasn’t a major hit, outside of the clubs and MTV. It peaked at 45 on the pop charts. It wasn’t even a Top 40 hit.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfrhCvDLlCg[/embedyt]

While radio only allows gay people to be drag queens or forces them to first pay their dues by pretending to be straight (or both, a la Boy George in the 80s), gay people and gay stories are hugely successful on TV, on Broadway, in bestselling books, and even in Hollywood films. Sure, we complain about homophobia in American films. And we should. Brokeback Mountain lost the Oscar because of homophobia, both the overt “Ugh, fags” stuff from older voters and subtle “Ha, gays are funny! Here’s my Brokeback parody!” stuff from younger voters. Mincing and/or creepy queers are still used for comic relief and/or as easy villains, even after The Celluloid Closet pointed out that it’s damn offensive to do that. The “Gay Steppin’ Fetchits” in He’s Just Not That Into You. Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) in 3:10 to Yuma. Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) in 300. Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker) in The Fifth Element. Albert (Nathan Lane) in The Birdcage. Prince Edward (Peter Hanly) in Braveheart. Scar (Jeremy Irons) in The Lion King. Ra (Jae Davidson) in Stargate. Ted Levine (Jame Gumb) in Silence of the Lambs. Also, everything about Boat Trip and Chuck and Larry.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtfhD70eaS4[/embedyt]

And then there’s Brüno, which was ostensibly a movie mocking gay stereotypes and homophobia, but was so badly conceptualized, marketed, and made that it simply furthered gay stereotypes and homophobia — except in the people who were already aware of the evils of gay stereotypes and homophobia. It was at times hysterically funny, diamond-sharp satire, and at times so offensive-and-not-in-a-good-way that I was aghast. As in, my jaw dropped during some of the scenes focusing on Brüno’s adoption of an African baby. GLAAD rightfully attacked the film, which caused some gays to attack GLAAD. My response to the criticism of GLAAD (written as a comment to a Facebook update) was (with some editing), “I haven’t seen it, though if I had any money I probably would. But I don’t think I need to see it to think that GLAAD’s press release makes sense. Barrios says clearly that he knows the point of the satire and knows that a lot of gay people will find it funny. But he also points out that the movie will do no good in areas of the country where most people aren’t able to find humor in homophobia. Like Arkansas. I think GLAAD actually has perspective here. And honestly, I wouldn’t want GLAAD to have much of a sense of humor. If they found very un-PC humor funny, they’d be rather useless as an anti-defamation group. It’s their job to complain about representation and to question stuff like Brüno. Even if I found Brüno funny, and I bet I would find a lot of it funny (though A.O. Scott, who I agree with 95% of time, wasn’t thrilled with it, so I may react with a “Meh,” like JoeMyGod), I’m sure I would still think GLAAD’s response is appropriate.” Then I saw it, and I really agreed with GLAAD.

Clearly, we’re having growing pains as a movement. In parts of the country, we’re so accepted and embedded in the landscape that the sort of satire found in Brüno is fine, maybe even needed. Many of us have been lulled into a content, fuzzy happiness because our local leaders are so pro-us. So, we’re flummoxed that Obama hasn’t made good on every single one of his promises to us, even though some of those promises are rather radical positions in much of the country. In many parts of the United States, where anti-gay marriage proposals pass with the 90% of the vote, Brüno was going to play like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in 1950s Alabama: Badly. These are the parts of the country — and I’m not talking about fly-over country only, but also Orange County and eastern Washington State and north Florida and Staten Island — where people actually believe the lies of Frank Schubert or Tony Perkins or Glenn Beck. They nod along with So You Think You Can Dance judge and executive producer Nigel Lythgoe when he says he doesn’t like it when men don’t dance like men — on a show full of gay contestants who seem not allowed to say or even imply that they’re gay — if they watch the show at all. They voted for Kris Allen over Adam Lambert on American Idol because Kris is so very straight and manly (in a sweet, farm boy way), and Adam is so very not (in a glam rock, showtune, Lady Gaga back-up dancer way).

It also seems that these are the same people in charge of radio playlists. Notoriously conservative Clear Channel dominates radio in the United States, and aside from their back-of-bus, mostly online Pride channel (which has played just two gay acts among their last 200 songs, when I checked), none of their mainstream rock or Top 40 stations play anything by gay acts, so it doesn’t seem terribly crazy to believe that they are either preventing gay acts from succeeding on the radio or tacitly allowing their failure. As someone pointed out, Clear Channel is nice to its gay employees. Awesome. But that has nothing to do with whether or not they will promote out gay artists on the radio. For example, Fox News gives its gay employees domestic partner benefits, but their shows spew homophobic garbage. Yeah, blaming Clear Channel makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, for sure. But it’s not one that is particularly far-fetched (unlike, say, the theory that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that 9/11 was “an inside job”). Worse, however, is that even independently owned stations don’t have the balls to play any gay artists.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMBlXfpSNA[/embedyt]

In San Diego, where Clear Channel owns seven of the radio stations and more or less controls the radio waves, we have two independently owned alt rock stations. One basically plays the Top 40 hits on the Modern Rock list — it’s pretty corporate. But the other, 94.9, brags incessantly about being “100% Clear Channel-free,” playing only great music, playing music that you haven’t heard of, recommending cool news acts, and having a slogan that claims “It’s all about this music.” It is the best non-satellite radio station I’ve ever listened to, which isn’t saying much but it’s still saying something. They have an irritating habit of playing Alt Rock’s Greatest Hits© over and over and over again. I hear songs from Nirvana and Sublime and the Red Hot Chili Peppers albums from the 90s so often that I actually change the station when I hear songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Not in that rotation? REM and Hüsker Dü. Yep. The two major alt rock groups with out front men. (Yes, REM gets played, but much less than Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Hüsker Dü, never.) But the station introduced me to LCD Soundsystem and MGMT and Metric and Muse and TV on the Radio and Black Joe Lewis and the Honey Bears. And they’ve done such cool things as put Neil Diamond’s excellent last album in heavy rotation. But for a station that plays David Bowie and Queen and Depeche Mode and The Smiths and The Decemberists never to play — not even once — a Scissor Sisters song is bizarre. One of Rufus Wainwright’s rockers? Never. Hercules and Love Affair? Of course not. I wouldn’t expect international-except-for-the-United-States superstar Mika on 94.9, but he’s certainly never going to be played on our local Top 40 station, 93.3, where he belongs. Since it’s owned by Clear Channel. If 94.9 was actually “about the music,” they would have introduced San Diego to Mika’s “Grace Kelly” and Rufus’s “Foolish Love” or the Scissor Sisters’ “Take Your Mama” or Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind.”

When even the rebel radio station is too weak-kneed to play anything remotely threatening to heterosexism’s domination of radio, it’s hard to imagine that Clear Channel will suddenly embrace something as gay as Adam Lambert. Obviously, Adam Lambert is different. He’s already a star. He lost American Idol, but he got the cover of Rolling Stone. And he’s on the cover Details right now. But Details decided the best way to deal with having a gay guy on their cover is make the entire feature about him be about how women want to sleep with him. The photos of him are gorgeous, but they also look like outtakes from the video for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” They heterosexed Adam Lambert. Because gay people are scary! Michael Jensen at AfterElton.com is much less negative than me about this. (They had a lot of fun mocking the spread though.) I’m partial to the view of this blogger:

I don’t have any problem with him being gay, but I still think that Details made the editorial decision to wrap him up in this more hetero-sexualized image of a boob-lovin’ mysterious… bisexual, maybe? And it’s pretty clear he’s just straight-up gay. That I take issue with that, because it’s as if Details thinks their readership won’t respond if they made Adam pose with nude men, you know? Or maybe it was just a way of getting us to talk about their magazine. I don’t know. In Page Six this morning, Details editor-in-chief Dan Peres said: “Women obviously know he’s gay, but they are still crazy about him. He’s no Liberace. To put him with a beautiful female model felt absolutely right.” Uh… no.

Of course, Details has issues with the gays. They have a huge gay readership but they pretend like they don’t. It’s very odd.

I think many people expect Adam Lambert’s album to be a huge hit. It has amazing Amazon pre-sales and lots of buzz. I hope it is a huge. I hope he becomes a massive star. But Amazon pre-sales do not a multi-platinum album make. It’s much more complex than that. To become the hit people expect, singles from For Your Entertainment need radio play, and a lot of it. But I don’t think radio — either Clear Channel or un-Clear Top 40 radio or indy stations or the crass morning DJs — is going to help that happen. I think they’ll chase after the bandwagon when it’s already down the street, but they won’t help grease the wheels.

Oh, and “Time for Miracles” is out and available for purchase and download. Anyone hear it on the radio yet? I haven’t. It’s a serious question — I want to know. It’s only at #28 on the iTunes chart, though it’s at #16 on Amazon.com (as of 12:03pm PST on Saturday, October 24). Hmm. If there’s a god, it will be #1. But I’m worried.

UPDATE:

And this is the cover of the album. Zounds! As Andy Towle wrote, it’s “unabashedly gay.”

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“When he pushes, will you come?”

Donnie Davies is back!

Lawd!

I was kind of sad that he had vanished into the ether from which he came. But he hasn’t! He’s back with a new song and video. While it’s not as good as “The Bible Says” (bottom) which is kind of genius, “Take My Hand” (top now lost to the internet) does have some pretty awesome double entendres, and the video has some choice iconography, like Anderson Cooper and Michael Phelps and the final shot that seems ripped off from a Creed video. Honestly, I’m surprised Donnie Davies didn’t perform at the RNC with San Diego’s gay-basher-in-chief Miles McPherson. Considering how many people seem to think Davies is the real deal — check out the comments on his YouTube page — I do wonder how many times he’s been asked to perform at Christianist anti-gay events.

As I’m sure my readers — at least the ones who actually read the blog, as opposed to the people who show up here because they googled “kneepads costume slut” or “San Francisco street whores” or “cellphone + bible + thesis” — will recall, I wrote a ridiculous paper about the phenomenology of gaydar because of last year’s Donnie Davies brouhaha. Here’s the first paragraph:

Over the last several days, various gay bloggers have been linking to a music video of Donnie Davies and his band Evening Service performing their song “The Bible Says.” Filmed like a cross between a video of a run-of-the-mill country artist and a 1980s arena rock band like Night Ranger, it was full of images of Donnie praying, raising his arms like Jesus, and singing with a little too much gusto to appear to be “cool.” It looks like a Christian rock video. What most bloggers and their readers objected was the song’s refrain: “God hates a fag / God hates fags / God hates fags / So if you’re a fag, He hates you, too.” Before I saw the video, I read a number of posts about how deeply offensive the song and the Donnie were, how this proves how hateful the Religious Right could be. But then someone noticed that it was a little too over-the-top; it seemed like parody. Last night, there were nearly 200 comments on the popular gay blog JoeMyGod debating whether or not it was satire. Joe himself wrote, “I mean, COME ON, take a swishy bear [“bear” is gay slang for a husky, often hairy, gay man] in a PINK shirt and have him sing about fighting homo temptation? It’s GOLD, Jerry! And the line ‘To enter heaven, there’s no backdoor’? Priceless” (2007). For some the hints of satire were in the double entendre of the lyrics, but for others it was the way that Donnie moved, his gestures, his way-of-being that made him seem, well, gay. (Though this latter observance would not necessarily mean that he was joking, considering that he states on his website that he is a “reformed” homosexual.) Because I have been reading feminist theorizing on the body all week, I thought, well, yes, Donnie moves gay-ly; our interpretation, my interpretation that he is gay, that he cannot be anything but gay, arises out of culturally, historically embedded notions of the male and female body, notions that have only somewhat changed (even if they have been complicated) by the feminist intervention.

You can read the whole thing here. As an added bonus, there is a stupid flame war between me and a troll in the comments.

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I’m sure you were wondering how Donnie Davies and Luce Irigaray could be synthesized. Well, wonder no more!

In case you don’t obsessively read all of the professional gay blogs (they’re all listed in my blog roll in the middle of the page as “gay blogs”) then you may not be up on the controversy du jour among the fags online: Donnie Davies and his band Evening Service’s video “The Bible Says” and their ex-gay ministry Love God’s Way. Here’s the Technorati search.

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MRWqlf_8M8[/embedyt]

Before I saw the video, I read a bunch of posts on how horrible and shocking and evil the song was. The refrain: “God hates a fag…” And how it proves how horrible and evil the Christian Right is. Then I saw the video. And the websites. It is so, so, so clearly satire. And brilliant satire at that. The night that I was Donnie Davies-obsessed was also the night that I was reading feminist theorizing on the body for my phenomenological anthropology class. It was sort like that old Reese’s advertisement when the chocolate bar and the peanut jar crash into each other. You got an ex-gay in my phenomenology! And so, I ended up writing my weekly 4 to 5 page paper (ugh) on the phenomenology of gaydar and the use of parody in feminist activist theory. Of course, I have posted the paper after the jump. I’m probably going to some sort of academic hell for writing it. (FYI: I did it very quickly.)

“So if you’re a fag, He hates you, too”:

Donnie Davies, the phenomenology of gaydar, and the feminist call for parody

Over the last several days, various gay bloggers have been linking to a music video of Donnie Davies and his band Evening Service performing their song “The Bible Says.” Filmed like a cross between a video of a run-of-the-mill country artist and a 1980s arena rock band like Night Ranger, it was full of images of Donnie praying, raising his arms like Jesus, and singing with a little too much gusto to appear to be “cool.” It looks like a Christian rock video. What most bloggers and their readers objected was the song’s refrain: “God hates a fag / God hates fags / God hates fags / So if you’re a fag, He hates you, too.” Before I saw the video, I read a number of posts about how deeply offensive the song and the Donnie were, how this proves how hateful the Religious Right could be. But then someone noticed that it was a little too over-the-top; it seemed like parody. Last night, there were nearly 200 comments on the popular gay blog JoeMyGod debating whether or not it was satire. Joe himself wrote, “I mean, COME ON, take a swishy bear [“bear” is gay slang for a husky, often hairy, gay man] in a PINK shirt and have him sing about fighting homo temptation? It’s GOLD, Jerry! And the line ‘To enter heaven, there’s no backdoor’? Priceless” (2007). For some the hints of satire were in the double entendre of the lyrics, but for others it was the way that Donnie moved, his gestures, his way-of-being that made him seem, well, gay. (Though this latter observance would not necessarily mean that he was joking, considering that he states on his website that he is a “reformed” homosexual.) Because I have been reading feminist theorizing on the body all week, I thought, well, yes, Donnie moves gay-ly; our interpretation, my interpretation that he is gay, that he cannot be anything but gay, arises out of culturally, historically embedded notions of the male and female body, notions that have only somewhat changed (even if they have been complicated) by the feminist intervention.

First, let’s look at a possible reason for why so many self-identified gay viewers—gay bloggers and their gay readers—would so readily identify “gay” behavior. If we take for granted Sheets-Johnstone’s belief that “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement” (1999:138, italics in the original) as well as Foucault’s that “Discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile bodies'” (1975:138), then we can theorize that certain behaviors, certain ways-of-being can be unconsciously learned or appropriated before a conscious understanding of the cultural connotations of that behavior. Boys who grow up to self-identify as gay often over-identify with their mothers. (Freud thought that an overbearing mother and a distant father caused a child to become gay, but most psychologists now believe that it is a child’s inherent gayness, whatever that might be, that scares the father into withdrawal; the mother smothers as overcompensation.) Effeminacy, the “feminine” behavior of men, can then be taken as behavior that is appropriated by the child by copying the behavior of his mother. The mother is not deliberately disciplining him to behave as she does, but her constant presence is nevertheless de facto discipline. Sheets-Johnstone says that we move before we think we can move. Effeminacy, then, except when done deliberately as camp, as it often is in Western gay culture, is an unconscious habitus-like movement, mimicry of “feminine” behavior. Once they reach adulthood, most gay men are keenly aware of how their behavior is interpreted. In order to pass, we will consciously sublimate whatever seems to be feminine in our movement and our speech; we become “the I that moves forms movement.” This constant policing of our behavior makes us particularly observant of effeminacy in others. Hence “gaydar.”

One of the projects of the original gay rights movement (not the current, mainstreaming assimilationist movement) was the de-tabooing of effeminacy and the deconstruction of the hostility to the effeminacy of gay men. Effeminacy is upsetting and taboo because it is a merging of female behavior with the male body. As Mary Douglas theorized 40 years ago in Purity and Danger (1966), “uncleanness is matter out of place” (40). Thus: Homosexuality (re: effeminacy) is disgusting. This attitude is based on a highly essentialist view of the innateness of the male and female, a Cartesian dualism embedded in modern philosophy and belief. As Grosz writes, “Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart” (1994:4). Male behavior is considered rational, while female behavior is emotional. Mixing the male body with female behavior is disconcerting. (And as Irigary says in “Any Theory of the ‘Subject,’ it is this disconcerting-ness that can be revolutionary. It is “better to speak only in riddles…” she writes. And she does. (143)) These attitudes are not only used against homosexuals and homosexual behavior but also against men who show themselves as “feminine.” Men who are nurturing (like women), who cry (like women), who react emotionally (like women) are seen a weak, unfit, unmanly. Grosz explains,

Relying on essentialism, naturalism and biologism, misogynist thought confines women to the biological requirements of reproduction…women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men. The coding of femininity with corporeality in effect leaves men free to inhabit what they (falsely) believe is a purely conceptual order while at the same time enabling them to satisfy their (sometimes disavowed) need for corporeal contact through their access to women’s bodies and services. (14)

And from where do our notions of femininity come? Kristeva shows that at least some (if not most) come from the Christian idolatry of Mary, of the belief that women must be Mary, the virgin mother. Maternal behavior is what is correct for women.

Irigaray’s call for an ethics of sexual difference, for a renewed sense of “wonder” of the other sex (“Sexual Difference,” 13), would not solve the problem. It keeps the binary that, as Grosz writes, “hierarchizes and ranks.” As Weiss explains, “What Grosz is calling for… is more of an ethics of sexual differences rather than an Irigarayan ethics of sexual difference. The former suggest that there are an infinite number of ways for sexual difference to be establish and express, the latter invokes (however unintentionally) a more monolithic, binary conception of sexual difference” (1999:84). Weiss later contends that we need “new morphological fantasies in order to combat self-imposed as well as socially imposed limitations on our own body images” (86). This is reminiscent of Judith Butler’s call for making gender trouble (in Gender Trouble), for disrupting notions of gender performance (and therefore gendered being), through drag (1990). It is the disconcerting-ness that causes people to question, to become “the I that moves forms movement.” She advocates parody of gender performance as activism. Donnie Davies is, probably unknowingly, taking up Weiss and Butler’s call. Just this morning, the busy bloggers found a picture of someone who looks exactly like Davies on the website of a talent agency. “Davies” is a professional comedic actor. His parody of a “reformed homosexual” and Christian bigot, possibly unknowingly, does exactly what Weiss and Butler desire: subversion, disruption of performance, a “[recognition and affirmation of] the power of individual agency in the construction of, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the very terms of corporeality” (ibid).

Works cited:

  • Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
  • Davies, Donnie and Evening Standard. 2007. “The Bible Says.” Music video. www.eveningservice.com.
  • Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge.
  • Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.
  • Irigaray, Luce. 1985 (1974). ”Any Theory of the ’Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ’Masculine.’” In Speculum: Of the other woman, trans. Gilllian C. Gill, 133-146. Cornell, NY: Cornell University.
  • Irigaray, Luce. 1991 (1984). ”Sexual Difference.” In The Irigaray Reader, ed. M. Whitford, 165-177. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Jervis, Joe. 2007. “God Hates Fags: The Musical.” Joe. My. God. January 23. http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2007/01/god-hates-fags-musical_23.html.
  • Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1990. The Primacy of Movement. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Weiss, Gail. 1998. Body Images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. New York: Routledge.
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Kiki loves you so much that she came back from the dead

I’m kind of gleeful that this YouTube video of Kiki & Herb doing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” exists. I was afraid I’d never get to see them perform again. (Thanks, Joe!)

Heh, I shoulda known.

Two years ago, I wrote a wistful essay about the post-drag cabaret duo geniuses and their “final” show, “Kiki & Herb Would Die For You.” It was supposed to be their swan song. But they’re back. Or, I should say, Justin Bond, who plays Kiki, finished grad school and needs a chunk of change to get back in the swing of things. They’re doing a month on Broadway. I wish I could see the show, but I won’t.

Anyway, I have reprinted, for your pleasure, my essay on the “end” of Kiki & Herb. I don’t suggest reading it in its original form, because the Maisonneuve site is too slow. So here it is:

The first time I saw Kiki and Herb perform was in the spring of 1999. They had a Wednesday night engagement at Flamingo East, a gay club in the East Village now best known for Pop Rocks, its cotton-candy, 18+ night. Kiki and Herb had the second floor; downstairs, people were drinking $10 martinis and discussing the Columbine massacre. I went with three friends. We were half of the audience. I’m always terrified when I realize a show is empty. If it’s bad, if you get tired, if you’re really gassy, you can’t leave. (Well, you probably can, but I’m too polite, too easily embarrassed.) Even worse, I noticed that one of the guys sitting in front of me was “Clark,” a gay Mormon I’d been disastrously set up with in college. He was drunk.

And so was Kiki. Or so, I should say, was Justin Bond, the thirtysomething man who played Kiki, a seventysomething lounge singer who was a turbulent mix of Rosemary Clooney, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell and Wendy O. Williams. While her accompanist, the long-suffering Herb (played by the long-suffering Kenny Mellman), slammed away at his piano, Kiki scream-sang and told stories. What differentiated Kiki from other drag queens was her song choice (Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film),” Mary J. Blige’s “Deep Inside,” Belle and Sebastian’s “Fox in the Snow” and the like) and her deeply felt, fully constructed, deeply wounded personality.

A quick bio: During the Depression, Kiki’s parents gave her to an orphanage but kept her sister. At the home, Kiki met Herb: “He was a gay Jew ’tard before it was cool to be a gay Jew ’tard.” Eventually, she became a stripper, then a singer, an activist and a drunk. She had three children. One died, one became a mother-hating gay travel agent and one—Miss D—was taken away by social services. Eventually, Kiki and Herb ended up performing on the Love Boat in the 1980s. They were tossed overboard, but then found their way to San Francisco and New York, finding people who loved their music (“tuning into our sound”) along the way. Faced with violence, drugs and rejection, Kiki and Herb were indestructible.

But Kiki wasn’t about cross-dressing and transgression for comic effect. Kiki was post-drag. Like Hedwig and Dame Edna, Kiki was a great dramatic character, and her performances were transcendent. Hedwig was a modern, punk-rock Tiresias. Edna is the extremity of celebrity. And Kiki was rage personified, the ultimate result of twentieth-century oppression transmogrified into scathing humour. It was well within her character to throw a tumbler of Scotch at my disastrous blind date Clark when he talked through one of her songs. It shattered as it struck Clark’s table; glass flew in every direction and Scotch droplets hit my face. Then she declared that it was difficult to care too much about the victims of the war in “Bosnia Herzevagina,” as she called it, “because face it, ladies and gentlemen, they will never be a part of our audience.”

And now, no one will ever again be part of their audience. You’ll notice that I refer to both Hedwig and Kiki in the past tense. Hedwig exists only on film now, and Kiki and Herb are dead. (Edna lives on, of course.) Between that 1999 show and September 19, 2004, Kiki and Herb became the queen and butler of New York edginess. They sold out their weekly engagements at Fez, gave infamous performances at the Knitting Factory, released a demented Christmas album and starred in an off-Broadway show for a year. But then Justin Bond decided to move to London and go to graduate school. So they found some producers to rent out Carnegie Hall and the result was “Kiki and Herb Will Die For You,” which happened once and only once on September 19. The CD will likely come out in December.

It took me weeks to get around to buying tickets for the show. I kept thinking, as a good self-hating hipster homosexual would, “It’ll never sell out. There will be orchestra seats on the day of the show.” Then I discovered, two weeks before, that the only seats available were (yay!) $29 and (boo!) in the rear balcony. When we sat down, we laughed as blood flowed from our noses. It was like seeing a show at Madison Square Garden, except from these seats you could watch thousands of edgy fags kissing each other’s cheeks instead of thousands of forty-year-old guys from Queens in KISS T-shirts spilling beers on their girlfriends. Nevertheless, just as when KISS exploded onto the stage in a ball of fire, when Kiki and Herb entered stage right, they looked like ants. Tiny gay ants. I wished I’d brought binoculars. The guys sitting next to us had a pair, but they didn’t offer to share. Bitches. But I’d seen Kiki and Herb so many times, I knew from the way they jerked their heads, from the songs they screamed, from Kiki gallivanting across the stage, what their faces looked like: contorted, ashen, insane.

The only main differences between Kiki and Herb at, say, Fez and Kiki and Herb at Carnegie Hall were in sizes: a bigger stage, a bigger budget for Kiki’s dresses and a bigger fine if they went past their 11:30 PM curfew. Otherwise, the changes were subtle. They weren’t drunk, for instance. (They were often sloshed during their epically long, chaotic shows. Once, Kiki stormed off-stage because someone was talking and then didn’t come back for twenty minutes. Another time, she threw a beer bottle at a man, hitting him in the head. Once, she crawled on a table, knocked over everyone’s drinks and, writhing, screeched the lyrics to Pulp’s “This is Hardcore.”) Kiki did drink from what looked like a Scotch bottle, but I don’t believe it was anything but water, or maybe apple juice. Perhaps Vitamin Water? Whatever it was, she was in control, and very mindful of her audience.

She sang songs that we wanted to hear. “Flamingo” is one of their signatures, and Kiki sings it so fast (usually with the “go” as an exclamation) that it sounds like lounge speed-metal. When a song gets repetitive, they speed up the refrain. This is sort of their calling card, their “Whatcha talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” They did it on Annie Lennox’s “Why?” and Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” which, along with “Flamingo,” made up part of the opening string of songs. They were all old Kiki faves. Then she stopped the show with a bombastic “Windmills of My Mind,” which I’d never heard her sing before and which she introduced with a long, rambling buildup about her friendship with Grace Kelly. (It was somewhat reminiscent of Elaine Stritch’s long and rambling—and funnier—story about getting drunk with Judy Garland, found on Stritch’s At Liberty.) More than stopping the show, the song knocked Kiki out. As she lay on the stage, Herb belted the Decemberists’ “I Was Meant for the Stage” and, I hope, launched his post-Herb career. In the past, Mellman’s singing has been, to put it bluntly, atonal. I was astonished by this performance, as was the audience. Thrusting us back into ironyland, they then did “The Rainbow Connection” and ended the first act. The audience loved every moment. In fact, the roar from the audience—mostly men without dates, as Kiki mentioned—was eerily, creepily reminiscent of the cheers following every song on Judy at Carnegie Hall. When Kiki pointed out her daughter, Miss D, in the audience, I did my four-finger whistle and hoped against hope that I would be able to hear myself on the recording.

After the intermission, Kiki and Herb did a medley from their (fictional) 1972 spoken-word album, “Whitey on the Moon.” It consisted of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Lose Yourself,” “Once in a Lifetime” and “Release Yo’ Delf.” She mixed in some “Wu, mutherfucka!” and somewhere a hole was ripped in the space-time continuum. Matter. Anti-matter. Boom.

Then there was a singalong (“Dominique”), more irony (“Love Will Tear Us Apart”), a gloriously insane aria (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”) and encores full of special guests (Rufus Wainwright, Jake Shears and Sandra Bernhard helping on “Those Were the Days.”)

Then Kiki and Herb closed with “Running up that Hill.” They do it more slowly than Kate Bush, with a great deal of anguish and devoid of irony. It was one of the saddest moments I’ve ever experienced at the theatre.

You don’t want to hurt me,
But see how deep the bullet lies.
Unaware I’m tearing you asunder.
Oh, there is thunder in our hearts.

Maybe I took the lyrics too seriously, too personally, too politically. They had, understandably, set a different kind of mood for this show. While the songs, the singing, the audience and the jokes were all vintage Kiki and Herb, the banter was not. The stories were more bitter than they’d ever been. I’d never heard her talk about the drowning of her first daughter or being beaten by her first husband. She was much more anguished than I’d even seen her. When she spoke of Reagan’s death, she cackled and told Nancy that she got what she deserved and that the former president really got what he deserved. “What’s Reagan’s legacy?” Kiki asked. “Herb, how many of our friends died of AIDS? Well, that’s Reagan’s legacy.” The bitterness from Kiki is to be expected. The character is an aged, crazed lounge singer. But I felt that Bond’s rage was seeping through. I felt that Kiki and Herb’s death was really Justin Bond giving up on New York, on the revolutionary arts scene of the 1990s, on the war waged by him and John Cameron Mitchell and Tony Kushner and Doug Wright. One of the great ironies of the year is that Angels in America played on TV and didn’t seem at all dated. It must be frustrating. I’m frustrated.

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