Notes from Who Was that Man?
Epigram:
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city…
…city crowed pushing wrestling shouldering, against the tide face after face, breath of liquor, infidel skin, shouts, threats, greetings, smiles, eyes and breasts of love, breathless, clutches of lust, limbs, bodies, torrents, bursts, savage onslaughts, tears, entreaties, stranglings, suicidal, the sky, the houses, white faces from afar bearing down nearer nearer, almost touching, and glances unforgotten and meant to be unforgotten.
Preface
(in the form of an interview/solo performance)
“I don’t think anybody’s life changes as fast as a gay men’s when he moves to a big city.” Pg xix.
Coming to a city is similar to coming out, a gradual process without a clear-cut healthy/happy narrative.
“Coming to London (and that isn’t something you do just by stepping off the train, it takes years, believe me, it’s taken years), coming to London meant moving into a life that already existed—I started to talk to other people for the first time, to go to places that already had a style, a history, if you like. What I’ve done, I suppose, is to connect my life to other lives, even buildings and streets, that had an existence prior to mine. This is in itself remarkable, because for the longest time imaginable I experienced my gayness in complete isolation, just like any other gay child in a small town. And now, gradually, I’ve come to understand that I’m connected to other men’s lives, men living in London with me, or with other, dad Londoners. That’s the story.” Pg xx.
Erotic charge of the city
Slipping between past and present, collapsing what is and what was
Performance/genre
People/geography
Oscar Wilde obsession→ creates the map of London he knows (his queer London, not just he night life, path between museums and archives, etc.”
“Every boy is looking to find his way around, looking for someone, because you arrive knowing nothing. You fall in love with people you never talk to; that’s a common experience. Men you never really touch or understand can lead you into such a different part of the city. So I’ve “fallen in love” with men I could never actually meet. I’m not embarrassed to say it, to say that I’ve fallen in love with some of those men from the past.” Pg xxii.
“Our story is not yet finished.” Pg 23.
Three ways of telling a story.
1. Coming out story
2. Collective history of homosexuality
3. Combination of 1 and 2, the story of a “great” homosexual
Patron saint
“His words began to ghost my writing.” Pg 26.
“Clearly, as far as I’m concerned, the complete works are not complete.” Pg 27. Wildean-legacy works as revisions to the cannon.
When searching for texts, Bartlett pursued texts with “the dogged energy [he] usually reserves for cruising.” Pg 28.
“I become excited by the smallest hints; I scrutinized every gesture for significance.” Pg 28.
This work, his research, is an erotic experience.
“I hunted out the places where my explorations of London might still coincide with Oscar’s,” Pg 28.
Now Neil Bartlett adopts the ghostly role.
Is there something about this haunted language?
What about all of the trials that come before Oscar?
“I subject the story of my own life as a gay man to constant scrutiny; we all do. We have to because we’re making it up as we go along.” Pg 30.
Later in the book, Neil Bartlett critiques Oscar Wilde’s misogyny several times. Does this criticism from a fellow Oscar Wilde obsessor validate my love for him in some way?
Neil Bartlett utilizes camp as a reading/critical methodology (or strategy) when studying Wilde’s work. Pg 32.
Recognition, “the commonest of gay pleasures.” Pg 35.
“The works of Oscar Wilde, for instance, were written for us and us alone, and only we can truly understand them. We belong together, don’t you think?” Pg 36.
Sprinkles Wildean quotes and witticisms throughout/between paragraphs, interrupting, and often complicating his argument—how does one read queerness into something whose author expressly advises against it?
Chapter 2: Flowers
Among other things, offers close readings of Wilde’s works, particularly with regard to flowers, the green carnation worn by Salome, etc.
Not quite cross-gender identification—somehow link this to musicals/fandom, AMONI
On Salome, “Her anxious desire is suddenly that of an adolescent boy; she is the fourteen-year-old I Once was, the boy waiting for someone to take away the guilty of his desire by seducing him.” Pg 42 (the only way to yield temptation is to yield to it).
Interesting, performance, Salome becomes audience, not the other way around. Reverse identification.
“Desired community” Pg 48.
Direct address to audience/reader:
“Consider, also, how the apparently archaic system of attributes of “the homosexual” to which the princess alludes is till part of your own life.”—Clearly encouraging the reader’s engagement, interactive reading.
“What I am claiming, though, is that some of my most basic ides about myself as a homosexual man were invented for me by other men, in another time, in another city.” Pg 49.
“Some anecdotes claim that he invented and popularized the flower, but it seems more likely that he stole that fashion from Paris, where, it is said, the flower was the insignia of homosexual men.” Pg 50.
In Salome, “The little green flower is not simply a decorative flourish, or a subtle hint of perversity. It is a sign. A promise. The two men understand each other’s intentions, and they share a desire. Salome offers the Syrian a little green flower, and then smiles at him (Look at me) and knows that he will do what she wants.” Pg 52.
“Although neither of the words homosexual or gay can neatly be applied to him, since this is the summer of 1891, the summer of Salome, this man has changed himself from a man with homosexual desires into a gay man.” Pg 53.
“Following a very specific set of signs, the lived in a city within a city, hidden and organized.” Pg 53.
“How is it that we load so much meaning into such delicate signs? Does any of this (1891094) mean anything to me now (1981-88)? But I remember that the signs can’t have been easy for Oscar either. They didn’t come naturally. Like me, he didn’t always live in London. He moved there in 1879, and then he too had to learn how to live there, here, had to learn the signs. So it’s the same story. Perhaps I’ll wear a green flower tonight.” Pg 57.
Wearing green carnations as counterpublic practice?
“Even as we discover the most obscure and outrageous fragments of our history, the more obvious and ordinary sources of information at last.” Pg 59.
Chapter 3: Faces
“I was never content with just words on a page, old books. What I always wanted to see was their faces. When I was a boy, I always wanted to k now what other men looked like, what men looked like, later we use each other.” Pg 61.
As in AMONI, he invokes the use of the mirror
“He was violently if occasionally misogynistic, since all the women of his texts are losers, at a loss when faced by virile men, sentimentally happy to submit, he is in love with the Ideal Woman, ignorant of her struggles but eager to wear her frocks.” Pg 61.
This section is both photo album and guessing game (guess who!)—like memory, a potential list of Who’s Who of Potential Victorian homosexuals.” Rather than captions, each picture features corresponding questions, asking questions that are simultaneously about the reader and the subject, inviting identification
This list contains “proven” homosexuals and men the author simply wishes were…
Chapter 4: Words
Quotes dictionary definitions of love, all of which are completely homosexual
“I have no place in these pages, although I wonder if the editor knew what he was doing when he quoted a citation from AE Houseman.” Pg 77. The irony of reappropriation.
Quotation from “My Secret Life”—“not because of anything I said, but because of the language that is used to say it.” Pg 79.
“I understand what this Soho queen of the 1870s is saying. This fragment of her voice, small as it is, tells me that there was a different world (how sweet it is among ourselves), a different experience of sex (of course being fucked is a pleasure), and best of all, a different language (I did not understand-the tables are turned for once—it is he who is baffled by our words.)” Pg 79.
“When we speak in our own language, we destroy the notion that talking about a gay experience is even worse than doing it” Pg 79.
“Even those whisperings have a history.” Pg 79.
“The need to talk among ourselves has made our language elaborate.” Pg 80.
“He is safe again. Dorian, like his creator, understands the real Importance of Speaking differently.” Pg 80.
“In Wilde’s exotic, allusive vocabulary, high literature aspires to the status of slang.” Pg 80s.
“And I remember that there are passages in Dorian Gray’s story that sound as though they should only be whispered, late at night, by one man to another.” Pg 81.
“Do you recognize any of these words there from your own lexicon of gossip, seduction, or obscenity? Perhaps you also use the words queen, trade, or drag. Does it follow that you would then be able to talk to, understand, even flirt with those men from ninety years ago, if on some extraordinary drugged evening we could all meet? It would be like costume night at the pub; such strangely different styles and voices, but no one a stranger. Since so much of our verbal finery is handed down, we would recognize some of the words and phrases. Would they still describe the same experiences? Would thee be enough for us all to talk to one another?” Pg 82.
“Teleny, published in 1893 and London’s first gay porn novel, is full of gay characters and incidents, and certainly included gay men among its authors. It seems to relate our story, in our language, because it seems that this text—hidden for so long and part of our dark, private world, speaking a pornographic language which seems hardly to have changed at all—this text speaks of how close to our history I am, of how we created our own lives and own desires even then.” Pg 83.
Diary entry? “All the time, I needed to find our own words, even if I spoke the same language as other men. I knew from experience that this speech would be me marred and decorated by resistance and confusion. We have very different things to express. This requires the invention of different mannerisms and inflections to alter the meaning of our city’s language. I listened to my peers, to the continuous gay chatter of the past hundred years, and I learnt how to do it.” Pg 84.
“Our first experience of talking as gay men (which is always different from talking of gay men) is the experience of lying.” Pg 84.
Inviting men from the past to be our witnesses—pg 86. Historical movement goes in multiple directions.
“The existing words can become inadequate, painful. And I love you still seems much harder to say than “I want you to fuck me.” Pg 86.
On Oscar Wilde and Bosie:
“(I could hardly continue reading the letters the night I read. I have no words for how I love you. I have no words for how I love you—in the same letter of July, 1894 as he wrote, I can’t live without you. That he should say that the man who spent his whole life talking, writing words, the man who everybody said could talk so brilliantly, that he of all men could be silent, at a loss for words.) I’ve tried calling him darling. I’ve described him as my lover, my boyfriend (but only in joke), my friend, mate, fuck, trick, man (that’s my man.) He is master, husband, wife, affair, love, himself, the other half the number one. Words fail me.”—somehow, by the end of the paragraph, NB is able to accept when words fail him. Pg. 87
Glosses British gay slang.
Chapter 5: Evidence
“We detect its presence in The Complete Works not so much by the encoded hints of what is lurking beneath the text as by a single obvious sin of its absence.” Pg 93.
Knowing Wilde’s sexuality and the absence of explicit queerness in each of texts encourages queer scavenging of his works.
Review of The Picture of Dorian Gray—“He suggested, cryptically, that it was intended to be read by outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” Pg 94.
This review of The Picture of Dorian Gray leads to the discovery of other queer lives.
“All that is permitted is a suggestion, an ominous possibility, a threat, something to be guessed at or detected. Homosexuality cannot be spoken.” Pg 95.
The amount of suicides related to these trials.
“These scrapbooks draw no conclusions, they only bear witness to the need to collect and keep and compare notes. They amass evidence, reminding us that it is never true that we are silent, or safe, or that our speech is safe from those who would silence or forget us. The scrapbook is the true form of our history, since it records what we remember, and embodies its omissions both how he remember and how we forget our lives. We are always held between ignorance and exposure.” Pg 99.
Eclectic archives, archives as queer
“My contemporary collection is as eclectic as its model. I simply moved from book to book following clues, reading anything and keeping everything. The wall was soon covered in paper. Looking to my history, I am generous. I am fascinated by everyone. I suppose I treat my past lives with indiscriminate respect because I want to know everyone’s story. This behavior is in marked contrast to that determined by our current tastes. Observing our contemporaries, we choose to know nothing of other people’s lives, to remember little of other people’s stories. This city is, after all, big enough and wide enough for us to live happily ignorant, we don’t want o know.” Pg 99.
Oscar Wilde as a man who “lived too many lives.”
“A diary lies if it gives too neat a pattern to its furious assembled histories, if it never surprises you with its events and choices. So why do we keep diaries? So we can look them up later and see what happened and then maybe say what it meant, and to whom.” Pg 101.
Fragments as witness-reciprocal relationship with the texts.
Wilde on Pater—“that book which had such a strange influence over my life.” Pg 101.
Timelines of queer literature and pornography in the 40 years preceding Wilde’s trial—much of which is journalism.
Relationship between Dorian Gray to the Cleveland Street Scandal—“The charges against Dorian are dangerously topical and almost specific. Pg 112.
Weaves Wilde’s works, and Wilde’s imagined reading of other works, amongst the quotations.
When Dorian Gray was published in magazine form, it had more explicitly homosexual content.
1891—“If we cannot alter your laws, we will go on breaking them.” (JA Symmonds) Pg 113.
The Star, 4 March 1882: “Mr. Oscar Wilde and a suite of young gentlemen, all wearing the vivid died carnation.” Pg 115.
“Set free in a luxurious and erotic pseudo-archaeological fantasy, the Victorian homosexual can still only imagine his obscure object of desire as an artwork, or a corpse.” Pg 119.
“The artist”—a forum for Victorian homosexual theories and practice.
An opera featuring a Wildean Dandy named Cyril Vane premiered in 1893.
Two months prior to his fall, “Scandals used to lend charm, or at least interest to a man—now they crush him.” Pg 124.
“Once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties, he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like that. It makes men so very attractive.” Pg 124.
“What this accumulation of details means, most simply, is that the gay culture of London was there. It was organized in a variety of forms, spoke both private and public languages, inhabited both private and public spaces, was both terrified and courageous.” Pg 128.
What is it about translation? Code witching? English/French? Heterosexual/homosexual? Bosie translated Salome….the exotics of translation? Pg 128.
“The discovery of homosexuality in 1895 was a contrived spectacle.” Pg 128.
“The fiction of our invisibility remains influential. Most people, ourselves, included, think we are invisible, both in the contemporary life of the city (as in, I don’t think I know any gay people, only you, or…are there ay gay pubs near here?) and in the history of the city. Even after I moved here in 1981, I moved right into a busy and complex gay scene, anything outside my immediate experience remained invisible.” Pg 128.
“When I find traces of his life, and of other lives, I’m not sure how to react, whether to celebrate, or turn away and look out the window;, like he did, angry, angry that all these stories have been forgotten. This “evidence” raises important questions about my own attitude to our own history. Do we view it with dismay, since it is a record of sorrow, or powerlessness, of lives wrecked? Or is it possible to read these texts, written as they were by journalists, policemen, and court clerks, with delight, as precious traces of dangerous, pleasurable, complicated gay lives?’ Pg 129.
Adore or become? Perform him?
When speaking of Fanny and Stella—“The scale of their activities can be judged by the splendour of their wardrobe.” Pg 132. Relate to Velvet Goldmine?
“They adropted a public style, a style which made public their sexual identity.”
Rather than recognizing the association between drag and homosexuality, courts denied the existence of homosexuality altogether.
“You cannot legislate against a language simply by imprisoning two people who speak that language. Better to deny the existence of the language altogether.” Pg 141.
Link to Velvet Goldmine—the tactic of using the journalistic “scandal” or expose to boost the mass circulation of newspaper was invented in this period.” Pg 143.
“Wilde was not intolerable because he was a homosexual. He was intolerable because he was a public man who was a homosexual.” Pg 148.
“If his example to us was not of how a man can be swiftly and violently silenced, but of how his work can endure, not as evidence of disaster, but as witness, seducer, guide?” Pg 148.
Extremities—invisible or hypervisible
Homosexuality portrayed as something that had “suddenly, shockingly appeared in the form of Oscar Wilde.” Pg 140.
The articulation of desire, not the existence of threat desire, is what is contested.
“The definition of pornography is that we know exactly what the text is going to mean even before we open the book.” Pg 155.
“By playing priest, they make you confess.” Pg 162.
The end of chapter 5…interesting…
Chapter 6: Forgery
Inspired invention
Changed name to Sebastian Melmouth (“call me Sebastian”)
“We are all fakes, all inventions. We are making this up as we go along.”
Chapter 7: Possessions:
“Whenever I imagine him posed, it is not naked or against a bare wall. It is not with other people (other men) but characteristically, as a single man in a room, in an interior. It is not just himself he composes and arranges. In the room of each of my lovers or friends, there is a singular collection of possessions.” Pg 173.
“And each of Wilde’s heroes is a collector, a connoisseur.”—is he collecting us? Pg 173.
“But he does not care what he collects. It is the activity of collecting itself that he enjoys. He will lead me from room to room, each one full.” Pg 174.
“Can a list ever actually give us the pleasures it describes and promises, or can it only ever seek to choke the hunger that gapes beneath it by amassing a junkshop of unconvincing details. All its verbal luxuries actually achieve is to remind us that this is not enough. Living in a city, you are always looking in shop windows, looking in magazines, bring invited to want. Always you want more.” Pg 175.
“The text mimics the movements of Wilde’s prose; the activity of the listing itself is erotic.” Pg 177.
“Think of the sequence of rooms through which your seductions have taken you, the living rooms, the bedrooms, and how their contents have impressed you, how they have been as sensual and as significant for you as their owners themselves.” Pg 178.
Link to Ann—fetishization of objects
“Our pleasures have no lie of their own. They exist to reaffirm the life of their owner.”
Consumption.
“If on a dark night I whispered in your ear the most predictably Wilde of sexual fantasies, if I could show you a shining shop-window full of luxuries; if I could lead you through a silent museum galleried with overwhelming gorgeousness, then your whispered reply to my question would be of course, yes, that is what I really want.” Pg 183.
What do I make of these sections?
“The intoxication of possession, the importance of repeatedly possessing things, is a characteristic pleasure of life in the city.” Pg 183.
Novel: A Rebours
“Now that the reveler (the lover) is stone-cold sober, the vine leaves, the champagne, and the moonstones must be catalogued as all-too-accurate signs of life he has led in this, his chosen city.” Pg 186.
“The strangest thing is that it’s so hard to tell if its true or not. My father always said, if you’re not sure if it’s the real thing, then it isn’t. In ten years time I suppose I’ll be with someone else, or on my own, or I’ll have left the city, and I’ll look back and wonder how I could have believed that what I felt was real. I’ve felt so much for so many men. I look into his eyes and wonder if this is it. That’s why I’m starting to keep this diary, I suppose I just want to write down what is happening, against the time when it isn’t happening, any more and I want to remember how and why I did all this.” Pg 189.
Series of diary entries, some comprising only of TIOBE quotes
Lord Darlington in LWF: “From the moment I met you, I loved you, loved you blindingly, adoringly, madly.” Pg 190.
“But I can’t forget that there was more than one man he sent such letters to. I wonder, would the words become true if I dared to use them myself.” Pg 190.
The repetitious cycle, Wilde of William Shakespeare, us of Wilde
“Shakespeare is to Wilde what Wilde has been to later cultures; the homosexual, our archetype.” Pg 193.
Close reading of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H. “mixing academic and erotic passions” Pg 19203.
Robbie Ross-Wilde’s lover, pre-Bosie. Robbie as a character in AMONI. Link?
“Between them, they spun a whole fantasy of homosexual culture.” Pg 193.
Moves on to close reading of Dorian Gray.
Diary. “Every love affair begins with the certain knowledge that there has never been anything like this before…We dream about men before we ever meet them.” Pg 196—queer temporality, desiring men from the future and the past.
“I knew all the time that like Erskine, like Wilde, I was scrutinizing an imagined historical London to see if it would reveal the face and the ancestry of my own lover. When I sat there with the books, at midnight, I knew what I wanted from them.”
“Wilde’s quote about literary ancestors from TPODG. Requited on Pg 198.
“So I re-read The Complete Works, looking for my ancestors. To a young man alone in a library, all of Wilde’s texts can begin to conspire, to imagine rather than record his life.” Pg 198.
“His crimes seem to have had an important effect on his art.” Pg 198.
“The idea that one man’s experience may be the repetition of another’s.” Pg 199-simultaneously unique→experiencing isolation but knowingly repetitive.
On Maurice—“I bought my copy in 1977. It was the first book I ever bought because I’d heart (at school) that it was by a homosexual.” Pg 201.
“Originality is not a virtue in our culture; the most beautiful and successful men model themselves on other men. I never believe Wilde, not for a minute.” Pg 201.
“Originality is not a virtue in our culture; the most beautiful and successful men model themselves on other men. I never believe Wilde, not for a minute.” Pg 201.
Wilde’s plagaerism—“If the words are so systematically re-used, the value of this currency must lie somewhere apart from ‘originality.” Pg 202.
“Wilde’s repition—“The glittering phrases, which seem an utterance to be true because they are both spontaneous and unique, are reproduced, shifted form mouth to mouth and from text to text.” Pg 203.
On Wilde’s courtroom defense—“If this, the truest of all his speeches, is a quotation, or worse, a quotation from his own work, then what answer can we hope to have to our question the only question we ever want to ask of history, the first question we must ask ourselves, is this true?” Pg 204.
“We grow up invisible and alone, but then we characteristically move from complete isolation into what feels like a complete culture in a very short space of time.” Pg 205.
‘When people ask me why I live in London, I say, I’ve made a life for myself. But I haven’t invented a life, I have moved, made a place for myself in a life that already existed. It’s quite true. I am other people.” Pg 205.
“Our very sense of identity is constructed around the idea of a unique self, and around the act of “finding yourself,” making a practical distinction between our (gay) selves and the (oppressive) society which produced us. We are original.” Pg 206.
“I didn’t’ so much “come out” as “go in,” since at the very moment at which we come out, we declare our difference form the world, we immerse ourselves in a highly stylized, pressured, conventional society; gay society.” Pg 206.
“I have found that it is when we are most like each other when we enter an economy based on the exchange of shared signs, that we have found our greatest strength. True individualists, our enthusiasms are vulgar, our passions commonplace, our venues familiar, our tastes predictable and our faces recognizable.” Pg 207.
“When you are old, who will ghost your memoirs?” Pg 209.
“At the very moment at which, historically, we ban to exist, he created a biography of a homosexual man in which fake and true are quite indistinguishable.” Pg 209.
“Perhaps I like the idea that we’re being watched. I like the idea that he should see us, see how we boys now live in his city.” Pg 209.
Chapter 9—Letters to Oscar
“I suppose it’s gestures like that, public and unremarkable, that you could never enjoy.” Pg 211.
Chapter 10
“We are about to escape. The world is about to change.” Pg 215.
“Even after a night spent in his arms, morning comes. He has to get up and go to work. Even after the darkest sex (darkness of love, darkness of ordinary but well-executed lust.” Pg 215.
“The bland and the awful are harmoniously co-existent.” Pg 216.
“History can be a dark night too. It can move us. From its gallery of ‘characters we choose those heroes who exert the greatest of erotic or intellectual attraction—Saint Oscar, or the hardest, most anonymous boy.” Pg 216.
“…making love after dark just like we do, their lives unbelievably courageous because their lives were like ours, supposed to be impossible.” Pg 217.
“If we were all ever to meet, surely it would be a wonderful party.” Pg 217.
“London is not always recognizable as London.” Pg 217.
“You have always told me you were a homosexual. I have always introduced you to everyone as a homosexual. You look like a homosexual. You are the most homosexual-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd you saying you want to change.” Pg 218.
Gay cultural apocalypse—Pg 220
Wilde/San Francisco/AIDS Pg 221
“For many of us “born” late, the lack of a past, of history, is not felt as a lack. Too eager for the future to look back. I used to think I had no need for a history, no need to look for Wilde’s London for information, for inspiration.” Pg 221—both fact and fantasy.
“I’ve begun to notice other parts of the city, and I realize that he men who live there are no more or less historic, part of history than Oscar Wilde. They are expert in the complications of their own culture. They reassure me that we are not the first to have to fight for our lives.” Pg 221.
“The one duty we owe history is to re-write it.” Oscar Wilde, qtd. Pg 223.
“If you don’t’ know the stories, then how can you cherish your own life, hold it precious.” Pg 223.
“What does he look like, this man you’re dreaming of, this man you want to be.” Pg 224—vampirism, ID/Desire
Mirror imagery—on Dorian Gray. “It comes alive again as I now scrutinize it, read into it and from it, make it give up new meanings as I attempt to use it as a mirror, a dictionary of anatomy of my own, still nameless sin.” Pg 224.
Class and drag Pg. 226
On gay Victorians. “They reduced the rules and models of culture to a fantasy in order to make it malleable to their own commands. They read between the liens of history, stole its best liens for their own use. Thy were magpies, thieves, bricoleus for whom the past could be reassembled, given new and wicked meanings.” Pg 227.
“We now have public languages in which to rewrite ourselves.” Pg 227.
“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” Oscar Wilde, page 229, link to VG
Reconstructing history and geography
Danger of rewriting history
“We are offered a very particular and potent freedom of the city. Sometimes it feels like vertigo. Don’t be scared. We do it all the time.” Pg 230.
Erotic encounters in the city as a young boy-1983
Italics interruption, Pg 234.
“What kind of city is this? Sometimes I sit in my room, after a man has left of I’m walking to meet a friend, or I’m waiting to get on a bus to come and see you, and I wonder, if just once, if just once we tell each other what our lives have been like, what would happen?” Pg 235.
“DG-esque ending—where does that leave us?
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
An Archive of Feelings: Notes
Notes from An Archive of Feelings
Introduction:
• “I want to place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma’s affects are still being felt.” Pg 3.
o Is there a thread here—between the “trauma” of larger events…such as trials about sexuality/cross-dressing/and masculinity, and the everyday quotidian trauma of being out, of having a visibly deviant sexuality (this may link well to Who Was That Man)
• “I wanted the sexual cultures that AIDS threatened to be acknowledged as both an achievement and a potential loss.” Pg 5.
• “Like the dyke sexual cultures I write about the AIDS culture that compels me embraces camp, shame, and the perverse and resists therapeutic models of sickness and health.” Pg 5.
o AIDS and camp, both Who Was That Man and Velvet Goldmine embrace pre-Stonewall/pre-AIDS sexual cultures. Even when covering the AIDS epidemic…AIDS endures a curious silence
• “Idiosyncrasies of emotional life” Pg 7.
• “sites of investigation…are not intended to constitute an exhaustive survey but to represent examples of how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures.” Pg 7.
• The relationship between new genres and trauma—genres that ‘call into being collective witnesses and publics.” Pg 7.
• “Its focus on trauma serves as a point of entry into a vast archive of feelings, the many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more that are part of the vibrancy of queer cultures.” Pg 7.
• “Gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces” Pg 8.
• “Memory becomes a valuable historical resource “Pg 8.
• Is the glitter scene evident in Velvet Goldmine similar to NYC’s lower-East side where “performance cultures and queer publics are mutually constituting.” Pg 9.
• Stress importance not only of performers, but who constitutes the audience? “Creating community.” Pg 9.
• Like Bartlett, Cvetkovich seeks to confront the problem that “gay and lesbian activist histories, which are constantly being erased by resistance and neglect.” Pg 10.
• “It is my hope that making the history of the present more strange will produce a new sense of how to approach the history of the past.” Pg 10. (Making strange—Brechtian influence?)
• “Investigation of the affective life of lesbian cultures is motivated in particular by my dissatisfaction with responses to homophobia that takes the form of demands for equal rights, gay marriage, domestic partnership, and even hate-crimes legislation. Such political agendas assume a gay citizen whose affective fulfillment resides in inclusion, assimilation, and normalcy.” Pg 11.
o Similarly, Velvet Goldmine resists this, as does Who Was That Man’s embrace of effeminacy. How do other texts fit in?
• “These queer lesbian archives and documentaries deserve a place alongside Holocaust and war memorials because they make room for the intimate histories demanded by emotion and sexuality.” Page 14.
• Does my thesis make arguments about affect and the city (London, Dublin)…I am beginning to now realize that my thesis is more about queer public cultures (glitter, theatre communities, everyday performance/visibility)
• What are each of my genres? How do they fit within other traditions?
• What about AIDS/Apocalypse? Does that re-write of Dorian Gay have a place in my thesis?
Chapter 1
• “Trauma and modernity thus can be understood as mutually constitutive categories; trauma is one of the affective experiences, or to use Raymond Williams’ phrase, “structures of feeling,” that characterizes the lived experience of capitalism. Other Marxist theorists, most noticeably Walter Benjamin, have taken up the category of shock as a way of describing modern life, particularly in urban contexts, in an effort to character its effects on the sense.” Pg 17.
• “I’m concerned with trauma as a collective experience that generates collective responses.” Pg 19.
• Borrowed from critical race studies, trauma passed down through generations (how does this work in the geneology of texts generated by Wilde-obsessed writers and artists?) Pg 20.
• “Unpredictable surges of feeling.” Pg 20.
• Is Who Was That Man? Solo-performance-esque? “Forced to draw on memory and personal experience to construct an archive in the wake of a dominant culture that provides either silence of homophobic representations of their lives, queers have used solo-performance as a forum for personal histories that are also social or cultural ones.” Pg 26.
o Of what other genres is this true? Look at Who Was that Man.
• “A notable feature of the project of examining national history as trauma history is the emphasis on the role of personal memory in the construction of public histories and memorials.” Page 37.
• “The turn to memory is also a turn to the affective of felt experience of history as central to the construction of public cultures.” Pg 37.
• Queer performance gives expression to the cultural memory that is otherwise lost to amnesia.” Page 41.
• ‘Even though Butler doesn’t name it as such, the normalization of sex and gender identities can be seen as a form of insidious trauma, which is effective precisely because it often leaves no sign of a problem.” Pg 46.
• “An important agenda for queer studies, then, is an inquiry into the nuances and idiosyncrasies of how people actually live their sexual and emotional lives.” Pg 47.
• “As Sedgwick and others have noted, the reclamation of shame constitutes an alternative to the model of gay pride, carving out new possibilities for claiming, queer, gay, and lesbian identities that don’t involve a repudiation of the affects brought into being by homophobia.” Pg 47.
o I am really interested in this idea…might this relate to all of my texts?
Chapter 2
• Based on Dinshaw: “There are resonant juxtapositions between past and present whose explanatory power is not causal or teleological; instead, the affective charge of investment, of being “touched” brings the past forward into the present.” Pg 49..
• “To be emotionally touched, like being traumatized, is to be affected in a way that feels physical even if it is also a psychic state.” Pg 51.
• Touch, a “breach of bodily boundaries, it creates a continuum between the physical and the psychic, between the sexual and the emotional.” Pg 51.
• “Literary publics.” Pg 52.
• On butch/femme writings, “Without being essentializing, they use the body as a ground for negotiating social relations, finding, for instance, within the sexual intimacy of the couple practices that address the experiences of homophobia, shame, and abjection in the public world.” Pg 56.
• Discussion of receptivity as active, potentially interesting to think of when talking about the gay femme sexualities in my work.
• “If anything is traumatic, it is lack of sexual attention; getting fucked serves as an antidote to fears that one’s sexual desires are perverse or inappropriate.” Pg 59.
o Think about this in relationship to Arthur in Velvet Goldmine, also, Curt Wilde’s response to incest.
• “Distinctions between being opened and being closed are connected to those between feeling and not feeling, and are mapped onto the body by symbolic processes; physical touch becomes emotional touch, but the body also serves as the materialization of social processes.” Pg 70.
• “Emotional style.” Pg 71.
• “Emotional literacy.” Pg 76.
Chapter 3
• “Too often, lesbian subcultures that focus on healing from abuse and those that encourage sexual exploration have been constructed, and constructed themselves, as mutually exclusive, repeating anew the schism between pleasure and danger, and ignoring the fact that one of the most interesting things about sex is it so frequently refuses that distinction.” Pg 88.
• Develops an approach to how queerness may be a positive response to incest/sexual abuse.
• “Breaking the silence” as a queer process. Pg 92.
• “The work of breaking the silence about sexual abuse, like coming out, has to be understood as an ongoing process and performance, not as a punctual event.” Pg 94.
• Relationship between pleasure and power. Pg 103.
• “[Dorothy Allison’s] stories are per formative; they seek to do something, not merely to name or represent, and thus as performances, they are able to enact this necessary transformation.” Pg 110.
• What is queer about sexuality other than the gender of one’s object choice?
Chapter 4
• “The fetishization of objects can be one way of negotiating the cultural dislocation produced by immigration.” Pg 118.
• “Queer sexualities can disrupt cultural and state nationalisms that presume and enforce heteronormativity.” Pg 121.
• “Cultural reception and production as a means of moving beyond “imagined communities.” Pg 121.
• Queer exiles.
• “Like so many minoritarian autobiographies, Claudia’s specific and personal story is also a collective one.” Pg 126.
• “Not only print culture, the medium of the eighteenth century public sphere, but film and video, as well as the internet link people across disparate geographies, histories, and identities”—resulting in cultural visibility. Pg 132.
• “Cultural texts not only represent a transnational queer public life but actually bring it into being.” Pg 133.
• “Cultural texts and their authors provide the foundation for publics, yet they can also be tokenized so that a single work of person substitutes for a range of experiences.” Pg 133. is there a way, especially in Velvet Goldmine, that a single text allows for the expression of a vast range of experiences? Structure? Glam rock juxtaposed against the quotidian interviews of former lovers? A continuum. Furthermore, is it possible that this is what is so brilliant about my Wilde archive? Despite their linkage by Wilde, each of my texts is incredibly different. Is this the location of the “gross discrepancies”
• Ann Cvetkovich writes that the film Kush “seek[s] to be itself erotic, not just to be about the erotic.” Pg 137…
• Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet—something has meaning by virtue of being a secret. Pg 145.
• “The exposure of a sexual secret, whether lesbianism or incest, is connected to trauma.” Pg 146.
• “She emphasizes how Tyler’s queer capacity for identification leads him to elicit Mala’s history and bind it to his own.” Pg 154…. link this to both Who Was That Man and Velvet Goldmine
• “She makes room for an emotional vocabulary that goes far beyond the notion of the happily assimilated or pathologically unassimilated migrant in order to articulate the possibility of cultures that remain livable even when transformed by trauma.” Pg 155.
Chapter 5
• “The AIDS crisis, like other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration.” Pg 156.
• “When is it important to move on and when is it useful, if painful, to return to the past?” Pg 156.
• “Sturken focuses on the Vietnam War and AIDS as defining moments that generate ‘cultural memory,’ a process of politicized history making in which the nation uses representation in order to work through trauma.” Pg 161.
• “It may be a necessity, rather than a luxury to consider trauma’s impact on sexual life or how its effects are mediated through other forms of oppression such as homophobia.” Pg 163.
Chapter 6
• “Memoir has the potential to explore motional terrain that is harder to get at through interviews; the sanctuary of writing, its privacy and deliberateness, potentially offers an arena for emotional honesty that is different from the live performance of an interview.” Pg 210.
• “queer dimension” pg 213.
• Phelan—“the social death of homophobia.” Pg 236
Chapter 7
• “Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love and activism—all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive. Furthermore, gay and lesbian archives address the traumatic loss of history that has accompanied sexual life and the formation of sexual publics, and they assert the role of memory and affect in compensating for institutional neglect.” Pg 241.
• “Central to traumatic memory is what Toni Morrison, in the context of remembering slavery, has called emotional memory, those details of experience that are affective, sensory, often highly specific, and personal.” Pg 242.
• “As another legacy of Stonewall, itself an important and elusive subject for the archive, gay and lesbian archives have sought to preserve not only the record of successful efforts to combat homophobia and create a public gay and lesbian culture, but also the evidence from periods ‘before Stonewall” of many different forms of sexual public cultures.” Pg 242.
• “The archives should share the political and cultural world of its people and not be located in an isolated building that continues to exist while the community dies.” Quoted from Nestle, Pg 250.
• “The archivist of queer culture must proceed like the fan or collector whose attachment to objects is often fetishistic, idiosyncratic, or obsessional.” Pg 253.
• Nexus
• “post-memory” pg 261
• “The importance of fantasy as a way of creating history from absences, so evident in queer documentary and other cultural genres, demands creative and alternative archives. In the case of both traumatic and gay and lesbian histories, grassroots archives and the archives preserved by cultural forms move pas the impossibility of the archive articulated by Derrida toward collections of texts and objects that embody the sentiments and obsessions of archive fever” Pg 271.
Epilogue
• Crossover success of films such as Boys Don’t Cry suggests “when trauma arrives in the national public sphere, it leaves its queer dimensions behind…When the lesbian, queer or transgendered becomes simply the human, something important is lost.” Pg 277
Introduction:
• “I want to place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma’s affects are still being felt.” Pg 3.
o Is there a thread here—between the “trauma” of larger events…such as trials about sexuality/cross-dressing/and masculinity, and the everyday quotidian trauma of being out, of having a visibly deviant sexuality (this may link well to Who Was That Man)
• “I wanted the sexual cultures that AIDS threatened to be acknowledged as both an achievement and a potential loss.” Pg 5.
• “Like the dyke sexual cultures I write about the AIDS culture that compels me embraces camp, shame, and the perverse and resists therapeutic models of sickness and health.” Pg 5.
o AIDS and camp, both Who Was That Man and Velvet Goldmine embrace pre-Stonewall/pre-AIDS sexual cultures. Even when covering the AIDS epidemic…AIDS endures a curious silence
• “Idiosyncrasies of emotional life” Pg 7.
• “sites of investigation…are not intended to constitute an exhaustive survey but to represent examples of how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures.” Pg 7.
• The relationship between new genres and trauma—genres that ‘call into being collective witnesses and publics.” Pg 7.
• “Its focus on trauma serves as a point of entry into a vast archive of feelings, the many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more that are part of the vibrancy of queer cultures.” Pg 7.
• “Gay and lesbian cultures often leave ephemeral and unusual traces” Pg 8.
• “Memory becomes a valuable historical resource “Pg 8.
• Is the glitter scene evident in Velvet Goldmine similar to NYC’s lower-East side where “performance cultures and queer publics are mutually constituting.” Pg 9.
• Stress importance not only of performers, but who constitutes the audience? “Creating community.” Pg 9.
• Like Bartlett, Cvetkovich seeks to confront the problem that “gay and lesbian activist histories, which are constantly being erased by resistance and neglect.” Pg 10.
• “It is my hope that making the history of the present more strange will produce a new sense of how to approach the history of the past.” Pg 10. (Making strange—Brechtian influence?)
• “Investigation of the affective life of lesbian cultures is motivated in particular by my dissatisfaction with responses to homophobia that takes the form of demands for equal rights, gay marriage, domestic partnership, and even hate-crimes legislation. Such political agendas assume a gay citizen whose affective fulfillment resides in inclusion, assimilation, and normalcy.” Pg 11.
o Similarly, Velvet Goldmine resists this, as does Who Was That Man’s embrace of effeminacy. How do other texts fit in?
• “These queer lesbian archives and documentaries deserve a place alongside Holocaust and war memorials because they make room for the intimate histories demanded by emotion and sexuality.” Page 14.
• Does my thesis make arguments about affect and the city (London, Dublin)…I am beginning to now realize that my thesis is more about queer public cultures (glitter, theatre communities, everyday performance/visibility)
• What are each of my genres? How do they fit within other traditions?
• What about AIDS/Apocalypse? Does that re-write of Dorian Gay have a place in my thesis?
Chapter 1
• “Trauma and modernity thus can be understood as mutually constitutive categories; trauma is one of the affective experiences, or to use Raymond Williams’ phrase, “structures of feeling,” that characterizes the lived experience of capitalism. Other Marxist theorists, most noticeably Walter Benjamin, have taken up the category of shock as a way of describing modern life, particularly in urban contexts, in an effort to character its effects on the sense.” Pg 17.
• “I’m concerned with trauma as a collective experience that generates collective responses.” Pg 19.
• Borrowed from critical race studies, trauma passed down through generations (how does this work in the geneology of texts generated by Wilde-obsessed writers and artists?) Pg 20.
• “Unpredictable surges of feeling.” Pg 20.
• Is Who Was That Man? Solo-performance-esque? “Forced to draw on memory and personal experience to construct an archive in the wake of a dominant culture that provides either silence of homophobic representations of their lives, queers have used solo-performance as a forum for personal histories that are also social or cultural ones.” Pg 26.
o Of what other genres is this true? Look at Who Was that Man.
• “A notable feature of the project of examining national history as trauma history is the emphasis on the role of personal memory in the construction of public histories and memorials.” Page 37.
• “The turn to memory is also a turn to the affective of felt experience of history as central to the construction of public cultures.” Pg 37.
• Queer performance gives expression to the cultural memory that is otherwise lost to amnesia.” Page 41.
• ‘Even though Butler doesn’t name it as such, the normalization of sex and gender identities can be seen as a form of insidious trauma, which is effective precisely because it often leaves no sign of a problem.” Pg 46.
• “An important agenda for queer studies, then, is an inquiry into the nuances and idiosyncrasies of how people actually live their sexual and emotional lives.” Pg 47.
• “As Sedgwick and others have noted, the reclamation of shame constitutes an alternative to the model of gay pride, carving out new possibilities for claiming, queer, gay, and lesbian identities that don’t involve a repudiation of the affects brought into being by homophobia.” Pg 47.
o I am really interested in this idea…might this relate to all of my texts?
Chapter 2
• Based on Dinshaw: “There are resonant juxtapositions between past and present whose explanatory power is not causal or teleological; instead, the affective charge of investment, of being “touched” brings the past forward into the present.” Pg 49..
• “To be emotionally touched, like being traumatized, is to be affected in a way that feels physical even if it is also a psychic state.” Pg 51.
• Touch, a “breach of bodily boundaries, it creates a continuum between the physical and the psychic, between the sexual and the emotional.” Pg 51.
• “Literary publics.” Pg 52.
• On butch/femme writings, “Without being essentializing, they use the body as a ground for negotiating social relations, finding, for instance, within the sexual intimacy of the couple practices that address the experiences of homophobia, shame, and abjection in the public world.” Pg 56.
• Discussion of receptivity as active, potentially interesting to think of when talking about the gay femme sexualities in my work.
• “If anything is traumatic, it is lack of sexual attention; getting fucked serves as an antidote to fears that one’s sexual desires are perverse or inappropriate.” Pg 59.
o Think about this in relationship to Arthur in Velvet Goldmine, also, Curt Wilde’s response to incest.
• “Distinctions between being opened and being closed are connected to those between feeling and not feeling, and are mapped onto the body by symbolic processes; physical touch becomes emotional touch, but the body also serves as the materialization of social processes.” Pg 70.
• “Emotional style.” Pg 71.
• “Emotional literacy.” Pg 76.
Chapter 3
• “Too often, lesbian subcultures that focus on healing from abuse and those that encourage sexual exploration have been constructed, and constructed themselves, as mutually exclusive, repeating anew the schism between pleasure and danger, and ignoring the fact that one of the most interesting things about sex is it so frequently refuses that distinction.” Pg 88.
• Develops an approach to how queerness may be a positive response to incest/sexual abuse.
• “Breaking the silence” as a queer process. Pg 92.
• “The work of breaking the silence about sexual abuse, like coming out, has to be understood as an ongoing process and performance, not as a punctual event.” Pg 94.
• Relationship between pleasure and power. Pg 103.
• “[Dorothy Allison’s] stories are per formative; they seek to do something, not merely to name or represent, and thus as performances, they are able to enact this necessary transformation.” Pg 110.
• What is queer about sexuality other than the gender of one’s object choice?
Chapter 4
• “The fetishization of objects can be one way of negotiating the cultural dislocation produced by immigration.” Pg 118.
• “Queer sexualities can disrupt cultural and state nationalisms that presume and enforce heteronormativity.” Pg 121.
• “Cultural reception and production as a means of moving beyond “imagined communities.” Pg 121.
• Queer exiles.
• “Like so many minoritarian autobiographies, Claudia’s specific and personal story is also a collective one.” Pg 126.
• “Not only print culture, the medium of the eighteenth century public sphere, but film and video, as well as the internet link people across disparate geographies, histories, and identities”—resulting in cultural visibility. Pg 132.
• “Cultural texts not only represent a transnational queer public life but actually bring it into being.” Pg 133.
• “Cultural texts and their authors provide the foundation for publics, yet they can also be tokenized so that a single work of person substitutes for a range of experiences.” Pg 133. is there a way, especially in Velvet Goldmine, that a single text allows for the expression of a vast range of experiences? Structure? Glam rock juxtaposed against the quotidian interviews of former lovers? A continuum. Furthermore, is it possible that this is what is so brilliant about my Wilde archive? Despite their linkage by Wilde, each of my texts is incredibly different. Is this the location of the “gross discrepancies”
• Ann Cvetkovich writes that the film Kush “seek[s] to be itself erotic, not just to be about the erotic.” Pg 137…
• Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet—something has meaning by virtue of being a secret. Pg 145.
• “The exposure of a sexual secret, whether lesbianism or incest, is connected to trauma.” Pg 146.
• “She emphasizes how Tyler’s queer capacity for identification leads him to elicit Mala’s history and bind it to his own.” Pg 154…. link this to both Who Was That Man and Velvet Goldmine
• “She makes room for an emotional vocabulary that goes far beyond the notion of the happily assimilated or pathologically unassimilated migrant in order to articulate the possibility of cultures that remain livable even when transformed by trauma.” Pg 155.
Chapter 5
• “The AIDS crisis, like other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration.” Pg 156.
• “When is it important to move on and when is it useful, if painful, to return to the past?” Pg 156.
• “Sturken focuses on the Vietnam War and AIDS as defining moments that generate ‘cultural memory,’ a process of politicized history making in which the nation uses representation in order to work through trauma.” Pg 161.
• “It may be a necessity, rather than a luxury to consider trauma’s impact on sexual life or how its effects are mediated through other forms of oppression such as homophobia.” Pg 163.
Chapter 6
• “Memoir has the potential to explore motional terrain that is harder to get at through interviews; the sanctuary of writing, its privacy and deliberateness, potentially offers an arena for emotional honesty that is different from the live performance of an interview.” Pg 210.
• “queer dimension” pg 213.
• Phelan—“the social death of homophobia.” Pg 236
Chapter 7
• “Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love and activism—all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive. Furthermore, gay and lesbian archives address the traumatic loss of history that has accompanied sexual life and the formation of sexual publics, and they assert the role of memory and affect in compensating for institutional neglect.” Pg 241.
• “Central to traumatic memory is what Toni Morrison, in the context of remembering slavery, has called emotional memory, those details of experience that are affective, sensory, often highly specific, and personal.” Pg 242.
• “As another legacy of Stonewall, itself an important and elusive subject for the archive, gay and lesbian archives have sought to preserve not only the record of successful efforts to combat homophobia and create a public gay and lesbian culture, but also the evidence from periods ‘before Stonewall” of many different forms of sexual public cultures.” Pg 242.
• “The archives should share the political and cultural world of its people and not be located in an isolated building that continues to exist while the community dies.” Quoted from Nestle, Pg 250.
• “The archivist of queer culture must proceed like the fan or collector whose attachment to objects is often fetishistic, idiosyncratic, or obsessional.” Pg 253.
• Nexus
• “post-memory” pg 261
• “The importance of fantasy as a way of creating history from absences, so evident in queer documentary and other cultural genres, demands creative and alternative archives. In the case of both traumatic and gay and lesbian histories, grassroots archives and the archives preserved by cultural forms move pas the impossibility of the archive articulated by Derrida toward collections of texts and objects that embody the sentiments and obsessions of archive fever” Pg 271.
Epilogue
• Crossover success of films such as Boys Don’t Cry suggests “when trauma arrives in the national public sphere, it leaves its queer dimensions behind…When the lesbian, queer or transgendered becomes simply the human, something important is lost.” Pg 277
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Notes from "A Problem Like Maria", Introduction: 06/03/07
Most scholarship about musical theatre and queerness has been dominated by gay men such as D.A. Miller and John Clum. Both writers use tropes of camp, diva worship, and cross-gender identification as means of explaining the proliferation of the “show queen” in cultural imagination. I’m a self-confessed show queen myself, yet I’m of a different generation of musical theatre fans (and scholars) that both Miller and Clum. I entered the world of musicals rather late in life (I didn’t grow up listening to Ethel Merman with my grandmother); I don’t think I’d seen a musical until I saw Rent at age sixteen, a show I saw no less than eleven times over the next two years. While I remember being aware, one some level, of the association of musicals with gay men, I wasn’t familiar with the affinity as written about by Clum and Miller. Nevertheless, my first musical viewing confirmed what I knew to be rumored…of course musicals are gay, for no other reason than they are about gay people! And despite society’s supposed ever0increasing “tolerance” for non-normative sexualities, the genre seemed to be the only genre (with the exception of the tired images recycled by Will and Grace recycled on my television every week), open to the exploration of queer lives. At the age of sixteen, I was a new inductee into the life (both musical and queer—I came out within approximately three hours of seeing Rent for the first time)—I was unaware that what I read as complex, progressive representations of queer-identified characters was startlingly disproportionate to the queers that served as the basis of the industry and some of its most loyal fans. My love for Rent led me to find other musicals—both those which explicitly explored homosexuality (Falsettos, A Chorus Line), and the favorites of Miller, Clum (and Wolf)—the musicals of the Golden Age and Rodger and Hammerstein’s most successful legacy—Stephen Sondheim. Years after first discovering my love for musicals, I now participate, almost unconsciously, in the diva worship and love of camp written about by Clum and Miller. Even though I may drop everything at the sheer mention of “Patti Lupone”—I have questions, interests, and desires that depart greatly from the widely accepted observations made by these two scholars. While musicals provided sustinence to men of Miller’s generation to survive the confines of the closet; they propelled me directly out of it. How might identifacatory practices work different for gay men, such as myself, who came (out) of age amidst a cultural landscape inclusive of musicals with explicitly queer themes, plots, and characters? Even when musicals feature divas (both performers and actresses), how might same-gender identification operate, especially with such queer historical figures as Oscar Wilde (in the musical A Man of No Importance). Miller, Clum, and Wolf all engage in a scholarly labor of queering what seems (on the surface) to be ostensibly conservative and heterosexual; my work on musicals seeks to determine what is queer about the form once a musical is explicitly queer in content.
Wolf’s book, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, examines mid-20th century musicals and their leading ladies from lesbian-feminist perspective. Without ignoring the gender-specificity of Wolf’s work, APLM may prove useful in examining how same-gendered identifacatory practices might work for gay men. APLM also contains useful information on general musical theatre history, examinations of musical structure, and useful tools for understanding how post-Golden age musicals conform to or depart from a particular set of conventions. In conjunction with this work, I plan to use Wolf’s essay from GLQ, “We Will Always be Bosom Buddies,” which examines how certain musicals queer the Broadway musical duet. This article may be particularly useful in examining how the musical adaptation of A Man of No Importance recuperates from the internalized homophobia (and homophobic conclusion), which pervades the non-musical film version.
Notes, Quotes, Etc.
“Attachments to musicals seemed to be generationally and historically specific”—viii
“Think about the structure of song order—do Robbie and Alfie sing right after one another?
Think about songs in terms of statements of desire/statements of identity, “I want” and “I am” songs (2)
Interrelationship between text, context, and spectator
How do contemporary “queer” musicals both maintain and depart from dominant cultural values?
“Most mid-twentieth century musicals do not directly reflect the identities of their makers” (19). Do contemporary ones? What about contemporary queer musicals as queer cultural production? McNally (libretto) and Flaherty (lyrics) are both openly gay.
“[Gay men’s] affection for and support and knowledge of musical theatre, lore, facts, and trivia serve as cultural capital, as community-building practices, and as markers of identity” (21). How might Wildean knowledge/witticisms etc. do this well? Does a musical ABOUT Wilde multiply/explode this effect?
How is this musical different after each song? Pg 29
“Because the musical values song as the most sincere and honest form of expression, it privileges characters who sing and non0singing ones are usually evil, dull, or dispensable.” Pg 30
Question…what is the relationship between the two acts of an explicitly queer musical, in terms of function, length, songs, etc….
Page 36, a star’s history is carried on stage with them, what about a “star” character such as Wilde? Because of the history that comes with embodying such a role, every performance simultaneously contributes to the lore and revises it, re-imagines it, re-constructs it
In AMONI (and in other texts)—what are the aural and visual representations of Oscar Wilde? What does he look like? What does he sound like?
Wolf discusses the ways various (stereo)types such as “butch” and “femme” have become necessary to representation—that hints and gestures toward, if not full embodiments of, these types are necessary for a spectator’s recognition of a character as “lesbian.” So how interesting is it, not only that Wilde’s effeminacy and wit have become such important markers for “how gay men act”, but that Wilde, as an actual character, is so frequently repeated over and over again.
Unmarked characters as potentially queer (characters not marked specifically as heterosexual open themselves up for queer readings)
Wolf’s book, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, examines mid-20th century musicals and their leading ladies from lesbian-feminist perspective. Without ignoring the gender-specificity of Wolf’s work, APLM may prove useful in examining how same-gendered identifacatory practices might work for gay men. APLM also contains useful information on general musical theatre history, examinations of musical structure, and useful tools for understanding how post-Golden age musicals conform to or depart from a particular set of conventions. In conjunction with this work, I plan to use Wolf’s essay from GLQ, “We Will Always be Bosom Buddies,” which examines how certain musicals queer the Broadway musical duet. This article may be particularly useful in examining how the musical adaptation of A Man of No Importance recuperates from the internalized homophobia (and homophobic conclusion), which pervades the non-musical film version.
Notes, Quotes, Etc.
“Attachments to musicals seemed to be generationally and historically specific”—viii
“Think about the structure of song order—do Robbie and Alfie sing right after one another?
Think about songs in terms of statements of desire/statements of identity, “I want” and “I am” songs (2)
Interrelationship between text, context, and spectator
How do contemporary “queer” musicals both maintain and depart from dominant cultural values?
“Most mid-twentieth century musicals do not directly reflect the identities of their makers” (19). Do contemporary ones? What about contemporary queer musicals as queer cultural production? McNally (libretto) and Flaherty (lyrics) are both openly gay.
“[Gay men’s] affection for and support and knowledge of musical theatre, lore, facts, and trivia serve as cultural capital, as community-building practices, and as markers of identity” (21). How might Wildean knowledge/witticisms etc. do this well? Does a musical ABOUT Wilde multiply/explode this effect?
How is this musical different after each song? Pg 29
“Because the musical values song as the most sincere and honest form of expression, it privileges characters who sing and non0singing ones are usually evil, dull, or dispensable.” Pg 30
Question…what is the relationship between the two acts of an explicitly queer musical, in terms of function, length, songs, etc….
Page 36, a star’s history is carried on stage with them, what about a “star” character such as Wilde? Because of the history that comes with embodying such a role, every performance simultaneously contributes to the lore and revises it, re-imagines it, re-constructs it
In AMONI (and in other texts)—what are the aural and visual representations of Oscar Wilde? What does he look like? What does he sound like?
Wolf discusses the ways various (stereo)types such as “butch” and “femme” have become necessary to representation—that hints and gestures toward, if not full embodiments of, these types are necessary for a spectator’s recognition of a character as “lesbian.” So how interesting is it, not only that Wilde’s effeminacy and wit have become such important markers for “how gay men act”, but that Wilde, as an actual character, is so frequently repeated over and over again.
Unmarked characters as potentially queer (characters not marked specifically as heterosexual open themselves up for queer readings)
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Notes from Velvet Goldmine Screening...5/24/2007
Interests:
Use of Wilde for creating a gay male geneology/lineage
Age of aesthetics as apocalyptic (What is that French term for an aesthetic movement that marks the end of an age, an era? Often used to describe the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century? I know Wilde was part of this, but what are the implications of repeating this movement, of making this part of his legacy?
Wilde as alien/outsider/other-worldly…perhaps heaven-sent?
What philosophical arguments does the film make about art?
Opening quote as the movie begins: “Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume.”
Find narrated quote about history, fiction, and empire…”threatening to return”
Observations:
1854 Birthplace in Dublin, green jewel attached to the sweater in which he is swaddled (this green jewel is also the green light that makes him visible as he ascends down upon the earth)
Childhood/adulthood
Finding others, community
Citizen-Kane like structure—we only learn about characters through the lens of other characters (is there something Dorian-esque in this?)
Paying tribute to a patron saint (Brian Slade)—the purpose of this opening concert/performance
Brian Slade’s faking of his own death as vehicle for the entire plot
Glitter is “about nostalgia”
Arthur’s opening encounter with an older gay man
“being gay” isn’t something that can be faked—undeniably performed, yes, but never faked
Arthur is chosen to write about the Slade incident by his boss, “I want you because you remember.”
Scene with Arthur learning Dorian Grey in school—I think the amount of intertextuality, especially with Dorian Gray, will be crucial in this film and the other primary texts. …”Their lives had been his own”
Arthur, closeted, living at home with his parents
Dialogue interspersed with long, beautiful musical montages
Brian at Drag Theatre as a small boy—initiation—does this performance come from somewhere?
“What are you, a mod or a rocker?”
“Style always wins out in the end.”
Genderfuck, breaking gender binaries
Mandy, Brian’s “American wife turned London party girl.”
Song, “Here’s looking at you kid.”
According to his first agent (the first man whom Arthur interviews, the man in the wheelchair), Brian “believes in the future”—sexual revolution, and that his music speaks to “orphans and outcasts.”
Curt Wild (why even bother with dropping the “e”?)—Literally pours glitter all over himself on stage—as a young boy he was sent to electroshock treatment for servicing his older brother
This film very much deals with the way sexuality is continually criminalized/pathologized
The simultaneous desire to become/desire to have (isn’t it Diana Fuss who refers to this as “vampirism”?)
“Maxwell Demon”—another alter ego for Brian Slade
Juxtaposed scenes of glitter against businessman/investor/conservative dress. Jerry Devine intervenes, “I can make you a star!”
Mandy sarcastically refers to Brian Slade’s fake death: “Tricking us all in the end…authentic demise”
The film is multiperspectival—Arthur seeks multiple accounts, including agents, lovers
Clubs, bars, urban areas
Brian Slade uses the jewel first found on Oscar Wilde as a baby to fasten his scarf—how does he obtain this jewel? What does it mean that we don’t see this transaction occur?
Jack Fairy…”the first of his kind”, much like Oscar Wilde was “the first modern man” ?
What is the relationship between the music and the image? Interesting moment where the non-diagetic collides with the diagetic?
Slade seeks out Jack Fairy, kisses him
Mandy talks about art
Camera often focuses on the jewel—asks us to remember. (How else does the film incorporate the viewing audience and implicate us in the narrative? How is our viewing of this film an act of memory?)
Arthur sees Brian Slade on television, screams, “that’s me”—screams to his parents, his way of coming out. Imagined communities?
“Let’s put on a show!”
Brian Slade goes on tour in America—says he’d rather meet Curt Wild than anyone in the world. Does this bear any semblance to/relationship with Oscar Wilde’s own American tour?
Wild to Slade…”you could be my main man”—little cartoon hearts literally materialize in his eyes.
Child playing with Barbie dolls of Slade and Wilde, reenacting love scene. Haynes uses these for his movie about Karen Carpenter. What’s going on here?
Elegance, decadence, excess, camp
“Duty of life is to assume a pose”—is this an Oscar Wilde quote?
Morality and art
Dandy’s and homosexuals…followed by a Wilde quote, the legacy of witticisms! Is this portion Dorian-esque as well?
Rewriting history
Movie’s relationship to the press? The publication of scandal?
Sexual/musical onstage battles
Arthur masturbates to the newspaper—father catches him, is outraged…(he goes to his sons room when he can’t stand the loud Brian Slade music anymore)…”that’s a shameful, nasty thing you’re doing.”
Mandy, “finding two people in bed together doesn’t mean they slept together…it does, however, make for a strong case.”
What is this movie saying about evidence?
Curt…not the real Curt, the “the idea, the image, the fiction”—Mandy
Arthur visited small Cabaret where Slade’s career began
(Interesting scene at 1:25 mark…what is this?)
What are all of Slade’s aphorisms? Are they all Wilde quotes? Revisions of them?
Tribute concert to glam rock/the death of glitter
Notice the object in the sky—does this mark the birth of another aesthetic leader?
Arthur meets Curt Wild in a bar (who is it that he meets in the alley?)
Embodiment as reunion/communion
“We set out to change the world, ended up just changing ourselves.”—Curt Wild
“ A man’s life is his image”—quoted by CW
“the freedom you can allow yourself or not”
Ends with Jack Fairy singing, reprise of “Here’s looking at you kid.” “Fade away never”
In an interview, Todd Haynes: “Back when an unknown identity was attractive.” But know this identity is known…but somehow, continually morphs?
Some Articles for Future Reading:
“Metal Men and Glamour Boys: Gender Performance in Heavy Metal”—Densky, Sholle
“Men Making A Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender”—Sarah Cohen
Garber: “Androgyny.” Also, “Bisexuality and Celebrity.”
Butler, “Critically Queer.”
Pramaggiore, “Bisexual Spectatorship.
The City of Collective Memory—GLQ 2001 Volume 2
Questions:
What is that little girl reading aloud on the train?
Use of Wilde for creating a gay male geneology/lineage
Age of aesthetics as apocalyptic (What is that French term for an aesthetic movement that marks the end of an age, an era? Often used to describe the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century? I know Wilde was part of this, but what are the implications of repeating this movement, of making this part of his legacy?
Wilde as alien/outsider/other-worldly…perhaps heaven-sent?
What philosophical arguments does the film make about art?
Opening quote as the movie begins: “Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume.”
Find narrated quote about history, fiction, and empire…”threatening to return”
Observations:
1854 Birthplace in Dublin, green jewel attached to the sweater in which he is swaddled (this green jewel is also the green light that makes him visible as he ascends down upon the earth)
Childhood/adulthood
Finding others, community
Citizen-Kane like structure—we only learn about characters through the lens of other characters (is there something Dorian-esque in this?)
Paying tribute to a patron saint (Brian Slade)—the purpose of this opening concert/performance
Brian Slade’s faking of his own death as vehicle for the entire plot
Glitter is “about nostalgia”
Arthur’s opening encounter with an older gay man
“being gay” isn’t something that can be faked—undeniably performed, yes, but never faked
Arthur is chosen to write about the Slade incident by his boss, “I want you because you remember.”
Scene with Arthur learning Dorian Grey in school—I think the amount of intertextuality, especially with Dorian Gray, will be crucial in this film and the other primary texts. …”Their lives had been his own”
Arthur, closeted, living at home with his parents
Dialogue interspersed with long, beautiful musical montages
Brian at Drag Theatre as a small boy—initiation—does this performance come from somewhere?
“What are you, a mod or a rocker?”
“Style always wins out in the end.”
Genderfuck, breaking gender binaries
Mandy, Brian’s “American wife turned London party girl.”
Song, “Here’s looking at you kid.”
According to his first agent (the first man whom Arthur interviews, the man in the wheelchair), Brian “believes in the future”—sexual revolution, and that his music speaks to “orphans and outcasts.”
Curt Wild (why even bother with dropping the “e”?)—Literally pours glitter all over himself on stage—as a young boy he was sent to electroshock treatment for servicing his older brother
This film very much deals with the way sexuality is continually criminalized/pathologized
The simultaneous desire to become/desire to have (isn’t it Diana Fuss who refers to this as “vampirism”?)
“Maxwell Demon”—another alter ego for Brian Slade
Juxtaposed scenes of glitter against businessman/investor/conservative dress. Jerry Devine intervenes, “I can make you a star!”
Mandy sarcastically refers to Brian Slade’s fake death: “Tricking us all in the end…authentic demise”
The film is multiperspectival—Arthur seeks multiple accounts, including agents, lovers
Clubs, bars, urban areas
Brian Slade uses the jewel first found on Oscar Wilde as a baby to fasten his scarf—how does he obtain this jewel? What does it mean that we don’t see this transaction occur?
Jack Fairy…”the first of his kind”, much like Oscar Wilde was “the first modern man” ?
What is the relationship between the music and the image? Interesting moment where the non-diagetic collides with the diagetic?
Slade seeks out Jack Fairy, kisses him
Mandy talks about art
Camera often focuses on the jewel—asks us to remember. (How else does the film incorporate the viewing audience and implicate us in the narrative? How is our viewing of this film an act of memory?)
Arthur sees Brian Slade on television, screams, “that’s me”—screams to his parents, his way of coming out. Imagined communities?
“Let’s put on a show!”
Brian Slade goes on tour in America—says he’d rather meet Curt Wild than anyone in the world. Does this bear any semblance to/relationship with Oscar Wilde’s own American tour?
Wild to Slade…”you could be my main man”—little cartoon hearts literally materialize in his eyes.
Child playing with Barbie dolls of Slade and Wilde, reenacting love scene. Haynes uses these for his movie about Karen Carpenter. What’s going on here?
Elegance, decadence, excess, camp
“Duty of life is to assume a pose”—is this an Oscar Wilde quote?
Morality and art
Dandy’s and homosexuals…followed by a Wilde quote, the legacy of witticisms! Is this portion Dorian-esque as well?
Rewriting history
Movie’s relationship to the press? The publication of scandal?
Sexual/musical onstage battles
Arthur masturbates to the newspaper—father catches him, is outraged…(he goes to his sons room when he can’t stand the loud Brian Slade music anymore)…”that’s a shameful, nasty thing you’re doing.”
Mandy, “finding two people in bed together doesn’t mean they slept together…it does, however, make for a strong case.”
What is this movie saying about evidence?
Curt…not the real Curt, the “the idea, the image, the fiction”—Mandy
Arthur visited small Cabaret where Slade’s career began
(Interesting scene at 1:25 mark…what is this?)
What are all of Slade’s aphorisms? Are they all Wilde quotes? Revisions of them?
Tribute concert to glam rock/the death of glitter
Notice the object in the sky—does this mark the birth of another aesthetic leader?
Arthur meets Curt Wild in a bar (who is it that he meets in the alley?)
Embodiment as reunion/communion
“We set out to change the world, ended up just changing ourselves.”—Curt Wild
“ A man’s life is his image”—quoted by CW
“the freedom you can allow yourself or not”
Ends with Jack Fairy singing, reprise of “Here’s looking at you kid.” “Fade away never”
In an interview, Todd Haynes: “Back when an unknown identity was attractive.” But know this identity is known…but somehow, continually morphs?
Some Articles for Future Reading:
“Metal Men and Glamour Boys: Gender Performance in Heavy Metal”—Densky, Sholle
“Men Making A Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender”—Sarah Cohen
Garber: “Androgyny.” Also, “Bisexuality and Celebrity.”
Butler, “Critically Queer.”
Pramaggiore, “Bisexual Spectatorship.
The City of Collective Memory—GLQ 2001 Volume 2
Questions:
What is that little girl reading aloud on the train?
Monday, May 14, 2007
Introduction
This my research journal for my upcoming English Honors thesis which explores the various ways in which theatre and media artists have remembered and re-imagined the life of Oscar Wilde.
I'll be posting notes, ideas, and questions that arise from my daily readings of my primary and secondary source materials.
I'll be posting notes, ideas, and questions that arise from my daily readings of my primary and secondary source materials.
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