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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My essay on “American Idol”

Recently, I was talking with a 17-year-old boy about our mutual desire to front a rock band and our mutual realization that such a fantasy will remain just that. He articulated our problem quite well: “I love to sing, but singing doesn’t seem to love me.”

I had long thought that I’d be a good singer if I just learned how. When Rob and I were preparing to get married, I decided to ignore those who’d told me I was tone deaf (including a Tony-nominated music director) and sing to him at our wedding. I chose “When You Say Nothing At All,” Rob’s favorite love song. It was to be a surprise, and I had a secret lesson with my best friend Curtis, a songwriter and music wunderkind who told me that if I practiced enough, I could get away with the performance. (Obviously, he said I wasn’t tone deaf.) I got into the habit of singing along with Randy Travis’s version on my iPod as I walked to and from the subway every day. I convinced myself that I sounded great—some odd vibration in my jaw and skull led me to believe I was harmonizing with Randy. Of course, I wasn’t, and, thankfully, I chickened out at the wedding; I didn’t need to humiliate myself in front of all of my family and friends. And when I finally sang to Rob in the comfort of our own home, I sounded worse than the worst lambs-to-the-slaughter on “American Idol“.
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