A Very Queer Inauguration: Notes on Camp Redux, post-Trump

 

I didn’t watch the inauguration. It is not that I have grown cynical about politics; rather, the cynicism of too many others had me feeling too angry to invest the time to get up and spend a day watching it. It is also not that I was afraid of possible violence, though that possibility was distinctly real. I watched 9/11 unfold live and, not even a month ago, the live coverage of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6. I have found that I prefer to wake up to read news that is already over than watch it happen live. But I also suspected that the actual ceremony would be okay given the extraordinary measures taken to defend the grounds around the Capitol for this event. In any case, I just slept all day. It felt wiser than expending the energy for riveted attention after four such terrible years of non-stop disaster unmitigated by the extreme apoplexy of Trump supporters anytime anyone would dare hold him accountable or ask for mere decency to prevail.

 So, I only caught the highlights on YouTube and Facebook. Those highlights included a woman of color sworn in as Vice President, replacing a man so white his every appearance on TV was a screaming reminder of the constructedness of whiteness as a concept. I watched Amanda Gorman’s spoken-word masterpiece. I have no words for Gorman’s brilliance beyond offering my profound respect and my emotional response that I can’t quite articulate yet. Well, beyond the obvious—what a world where art is part of public life again. Thank God.

 After I saw a meme on Facebook from a gay friend wishing he could go grab an overpriced vodka drink while watching a JLo queen perform the soon-to-be smash hit crossover “This Land Is Your Land”/”Let’s Get Loud” I watched that video, too, to see what all the fuss was about. I heard Jennifer Lopez not only ad lib a classic of the American musical canon to include her own mega-hit; I also heard her speak Spanish from the dais at which would be sworn in the next president of the United States.

 Then, of course, I watched a video of Lady Gaga performing the National Anthem.

 If the safe response to the inauguration has been a proliferation of a meme of an old white man in a coat and mittens sitting a little too grumpily for my taste on the stage—and I admit, I’ve traded more than one Bernie meme since Wednesday—then the heart of the ceremony that will actually last beyond tomorrow is the cipher for the lived experience of America I just documented above:

 A woman (of color) sworn in as Vice President—joined on the stage by a Latina superstar who spoke the most widely used language in the Americas, a young black girl who put words to the promise of an America still becoming great, and a queer icon giving voice to the old song we hang the hat of our identity on.

 Lady Gaga stole the show for me—because I was watching from queer America. Worn out and late to the party but connected to the world through vicious memes that amount to present-day reading, we queers in queer America have had some bad years.

 The moment that has stayed most heavily with me since the night of the 2016 election was an interrupted moment in the coverage on MSNBC. As the pundits were starting to grasp that the results were not going to turn in Clinton’s favor, they began to speak bluntly about the forces in America that were speaking back to the last eight years. One pundit, a man whose name I can’t remember but whose words I won’t forget, began explaining, “I don’t think liberals realize how angry conservatives are. People in these states are still very upset over gay marriage.” At this moment, another pundit weighed in, not to cut off the first speaker but to riff for a while on their opinions about the shocking turn of events. The original pundit never came back to his comments—as if he were done speaking. As if, fundamentally, the progress too far for Trump voters was not just the black president or healthcare, but LGBTQ+ rights, which saw an expansion under Obama’s tenure unprecedented in history and with relatively little even recent history to foreshadow the sea-change of the Obama years.

 In fact, Obama ran in 2008 as a vocal opponent of gay marriage. He would end his time in office having seen gay marriage come to fruition and the dawn of a new political visibility—trans rights. Don’t get me wrong, trans rights and other matters relevant to queer identities have long been on the forefront of the movement sometimes blandly labeled “gay liberation,” but same-sex marriage had, for at least 20 years, used up all the oxygen in the room. Its attainment via the Obergefell v. Hodges decision simply let other, well-established activism breathe.

 Then we elected a man who held a Pride flag upside down at a rally (it was also defaced with a marker) after an election-cycle that included the Pulse massacre and beside a vice presidential candidate who was 1) rabidly anti-gay, 2) had ignored an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was governor (it was related to drugs use, but its dimensions were eerily similar to the Reagan administrations playbook that led to the deaths of many queer men), and 3) had overseen the debate on limiting trans rights in Indiana, which he declined to endorse for fear of angering business leaders. He doesn’t get credit for actually giving a shit.

 The first day in office, that new president’s goblins scrubbed LGBTQ+ data from the White House website. They would later implement a ban on trans troops in the military. They ordered all embassies to remove Pride flags—both in countries where they were completely acceptable and in countries where their visible presence is the city-on-a-hill for so many queer people living in fear. They elected three justices to the Supreme Court who all signal a deeply conservative turn—just before the final of those three justices was installed on the bench, two sitting conservative justices bluntly said in public they thought gay marriage was wrongly decided by the courts.

 In the stories and commentaries trying to make sense of the attempted coup on January 6, all the oxygen in the room has been swallowed up by admitting the violence of white supremacy as if white supremacy is only a measure of racial division, not also indicative of hatred directed towards LGBTQ+ people and strictly defined limits on gender roles. Only a handful of news outlets mentioned how Don, Jr., to stir the pot, also warned the crowds about how the Democrats supported trans rights before those crowds went on to storm Congress.

 Enter Lady Gaga. Though Gaga is not, herself, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, since at least 2011, she has been THE icon of queer pop culture thanks to her hit “Born This Way” but also her overall approach to art. In fact, in 2013, trans theorist J. Jack Halberstam singled out Gaga’s exceptional artistic vision in the title of his book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. And if Lady Gaga has produced fewer megahits since “Telephone” and “Applause,” she has stayed active in the spotlight by speaking about against sexual violence.

 She also once wore a dress to an awards show made entirely of meat. She also made that video for “Bad Romance,” the best example of camp visual rhetoric in my lifetime, maybe since camp even began!

 I don’t much abide by Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” as the best touchstone for understanding this distinctly queer form of art. Sontag ultimately disdains a camp aesthetic from the position of someone outside of it. In LGBTQ+ communities, camp is not a theory; it is a practice. The best notes on its definition are performances of it. As a mode of expression that is endlessly subversive, it simply cannot be defined from the perspective of any academic nor other critical discourse, which always already originate in a rejection of queer aesthetics as, at best, low-class or uneducated; as, at worst, unnatural or fake.

 Sontag was, however, sometimes at least a little right about it. Camp is over-the-top. It appears gaudy to the untrained eye (divine and luscious to the eye that knows it). It is so bad it is good; it is also so good it is bad!! It is not kitsch—and to this end, I would offer a comparison. Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations were kitsch; the stop-motion Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer is camp; buying factory-made Christmas ornaments based on the film is “taste”; and if you disagree with me, you just don’t get it.

 Camp is the absolute rejection of the serious, the important, the sacred, the monumental; and yet its aims are deadly serious, its topics of immense importance, its visual imagery Baroque if not Rococo, and its monuments might look like dildos—and all these elements exist together because, it turns out, that is real life.

 Camp is Lady Gaga singing the national anthem at the Inauguration of Joseph R. Biden on January 20, 2021.

 First, let’s set the stage—the west side of the capitol building, a building partly constructed by slaves and which contains statuary to any number of sketchy historical figures and which was also, as was the entire city, supposedly designed to impress and intimidate foreign dignitaries with American might. The particular stage in question was built on this edifice for the pomp and ceremony of the inauguration. The stage for Gaga’s performance actually faces the Washington Monument, which could reasonably be seen as a giant white dick (blank, vaguely classical, a codex with no cipher on land that was once a swamp).

 Gaga emerged on the arm of a soldier—Sol Pendarvis is somewhere in New York right now saying, “I wore it better,” and more than a few realness queens from Paris’s ball probably shouted down from heaven to Gaga as she came into the pale sunlight, “You bitch, you stole my dress.”

 Her dress was the one Scarlett O’Hara would have made from the curtains in that window if she wasn’t, you know, a goddamn Confederate sympathizer and all (but, still, didn’t Vivian Leigh look divine with Tara in the background while in her overwrought accent she declared God would be her witness and she’d never go hungry again? That set designer, those costume designers—tell me at least a few weren’t fabulously subversive gay men). The dress had the circumference of an old tree in a big forest. It was as red as the blood colors on our national flag. Her top was a stately navy blue, more midshipman than business school graduate. She was wearing a gold bird pendant that, were it real, was large enough to actually carry her away. Her hair-so-blonde-it-could-be-white was back in a long ponytail but part of it was braided with brown and wrapped around her head, vaguely reminiscent of a St. Lucia celebration. Her microphone was almost an afterthought, but it was also painted gold.

 She sang the National Anthem well if a bit loudly. Lady Gaga is not Whitney Houston nor Beyonce, but she can still hit a solid note. She syncopated the time of the song, enough to make it her own and draw away from comparisons to other divas who have performed it at Super Bowls before.

 It was the campiest thing I have seen in America in at least 4 years, y’all, and here’s the thing—Gaga absolutely knew what she was doing and she absolutely nailed it in terms of living up to the enormous seriousness of the moment—we are in mourning in a pandemic while we fear our former president will still plot a coup, so signing the National Anthem to honor the swearing in of the new president is not just a parlor trick on a dark and boring night with friends. And yet it was always right on the edge of unseriousness—because it was campy and askew from expectations. It was a performance! As if maybe the entire ceremony was a performance, the great drag show of America that, if we could just imitate it, we too could be as fabulous as all that.

 Fitting, of course, for the America that could emerge from this moment. After all, it was Joe Biden who “accidentally” let slip in 2012 that the Obama administration was changing its tune on gay marriage in advance of the series of court cases that would legalize it nationwide. I am of the camp who believes that the notoriously gaffe-worthy Biden did not misspeak that day; he was assigned the task of testing the waters and softening the ground for President Obama to “clarify” his position a few days later.

 Joe Biden is the first president to have officiated a same-sex wedding, which makes sense when you realize that, prior to his term as vice president, same-sex marriage was not legal in many places. After his term, the next president and vice president, I don’t know, I guess just never got around to officiating one themselves.

 Biden was sworn in beside the former Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris, who not only performed same-sex weddings in the state house in California but also was the AG who helped dismantle the legacy of Prop. 8 in California, that disingenuous attempt to stall California’s legalization of same-sex marriages after they had begun.

 Harris also was the AG who was given a petition from a man in California that he wanted as a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution. The petition called for executing gays in the streets.

 Kamala Harris is the first vice president to have officiated a same-sex wedding, a side note in history that is, to me anyway, about the size of the world.

 These approximately 2700 words are the second thing that sprang into my head while I was watching Lady Gaga sing my National Anthem. The first thing that popped into my head was a story related by Michael Sherry in his book Gay Artists in Modern American Culture, a thoughtful history of how the paranoias of the Cold War were responsible for rooting out the gaudy excess of early Hollywood and even up to the 1940s. For Sherry, it wasn’t just the Hayes Code that prevented depictions of homosexuality that would diminish queer visibility in the arts. It was also an active rejection of the ostentatiousness of the queer aesthetic conservatives were convinced they saw in the arts and determined to root out in the name of vulgar American capitalism and might. This led to the closeting of queer expression for artists who wanted to be mainstream and a smothering of avante-garde art, fashion, music, and film that maintained the more visible emblems of an aesthetic that can only be described as camp.

 Sherry relates a joke—Question: Is there such thing as a queer aesthetic and does it have an influence on American culture? Answer: No, there is no such thing as a queer aesthetic, and it has an enormous influence on American culture.

 Well, I think there is a queer aesthetic, but I also think it isn’t what most people think it is. It definitely isn’t Modern Family or Transparent or Macklemore rapping about same love or even early Sam Smith wearing three different expensive, fashionable peacoats in one music video (though, admittedly, this last example gets pretty close). It is not something you see only as queer, queer adjacent, progressive, or inclusive, nor trashy kitsch meant to signify on camp but that is not, itself, the real thing.

 Camp is Lady Gaga singing our National Anthem at the Inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, right there on the most important stage in America on its most importantly ceremonial day. It made for a very queer inauguration. It was luscious! It was divine!

 And she stole my dress, y’all. Gaga! That Künstler! That Bitch!