Read Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, or Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat.
I won’t even address Spider’s bizarre theory, which couldn’t be more wrong and I hope was entirely tongue-in-cheek: everyone knows that gay men know a lot more about beauty than straight men :D.
I don’t think the age of female gay icons is past. The age of Judy is past, yes; and let’s hope the age of Barbra is passing. But Madonna is just as much a gay icon as either of them. True, she’s an icon who reflects her era, but she’s a descendent of Judy and Barbra in the gay pantheon nonetheless. Judy and Barbra were themselves descended from the great opera divas that came before them.
As far as why gay men feel this need to celebrate exaggerated notions of “femininity,” everyone knows why but no one can really explain it. That’s why Sontag, who set out to write a book on camp, finally gave up and just published a collection of notes: it was impossible to come to any conclusions. Koestenbaum’s book, an examination of gay men and their diva icons, has a similar structure: a series of disparate anecdotes peppered with poetic flights of Freudianesque theory, but again no real thesis and no conclusion.
Surely it’s due to a constellation of quasi reasons:
[ul][li]Gay men, wanting to be loved by another man, have only women as models for this relationship in the culture at large. Maybe this will change as true gay role models grow in cultural prominence.[/li][li]Once we’ve identified with a woman as the object of a man’s love, perhaps we conflate our “oppression” (for lack of a better word) with theirs. We see an image of a strong woman, breaking through the obstacle of the male dominance myth, and we celebrate with them, and like them.[/li][li]We recognize them as fellow oppressed (we with our sexuality closeted, they with their strength disguised) and share a common secret. Consider Samantha Stevens as a gay icon: she has a power, a strength, that society frowns upon. Her husband is willing to love her if she keeps it closeted. Her flamboyant mother (now there’s a drag queen!) and relatives urge her to celebrate her power, to show her true self to the world, but she conforms to the strictures placed upon her by prying neighbors in order keep her husband’s love (not to mention his job). (I don’t mean to suggest that Bewitched was a gay allegory; only that gay men find in it much subtext to identify with. I think it was less a touchstone for women because Samantha chose the low road: Bewitched can be seen to be regressive, in re the feminist movement. But for gay men, Samantha’s situation reflected their reality, and the frustrations of the closeted life. Buffy is something of a gay icon as well, though less so: she’s more clearly gynocentric and less malleable to gay iconography. Let’s hope she’s an indication of gay icons to come: she has a power, a secret from society at large, but she’s “out” to her friends, and together they’re stronger than she’d be alone.)[/li][li]Gay men have traditionally been forced to express themselves in allegory. Even if this is less the case now, for most of us who grew up knowing we were gay as kids, we know what it’s like to be afraid to reveal our true self. We instinctively understand the allegory of the singer or performer: the beautiful and intangible (the self) coming forth from within the body (the concrete projection we construct for the world). If you love someone, you want to “shout it from the rooftops.” Even now, today, to literally do this can be dangerous for a gay man to do; at any rate that’s the learned fear we must overcome. But allegorically we can accomplish this in song.[/ul]So somehow, nonsequentially, nonmathematically, and perhaps even illogically, the diva is where all these fragments of the gay psyche come together.[/li]
My divas:
k.d. lang
Kate Bush
Doris Day
Betty Hutton
Diamanda Galas
P.J. Harvey
After all, we must keep up traditions.