Tyler Anthony Smith

notes on... post-Camp(?)

My favorite Chicago artist—one of my favorite artists anywhere, anytime—is Tyler Anthony Smith, a playwright/actor/drag-performer. Smith specializes in shows where he channels some literary or pop-cultural icon, whom he could be said to parody but also embody with sometimes serious poignancy. Over the past several years, as he’s worked out his shtick, the repertory of personae has ranged from Boo!nadette Peters’ Halloween special, to a one-woman Hedda Gabler, to more recently “Carol” as a Christmas jukebox musical (“We Are Not Ugly People”) and a one-hour adaptation of “The Hours” in which his opening reading of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note had the audience—40 gay guys and my 2 straight friends—melting with laughter (“I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been… Except me, obviously. I could have been happier”).

I was sold on Smith a year and a half ago, at a performance of his “Queen for a Day,” which has a drugged-out Halston visited some night in the 70s by the ghost of Queen Elizabeth I (who wants a new dress and chicken shwarma) and by what may be a vision of Liza Minnelli. Much of the play is terrible, focusing on Halston’s adolescent trauma (snore!!!) but Liza Minnelli has a delirious 10-15 minute monologue describing her concept for a new show in which she’ll play the Statue of Liberty desperately in love with her creator, Frederic Bartholdi. Each sentence was a surprise; I had no idea what would happen next, in that thrill of being compelled into a new more vivid reality made just from the rush of words that is, as Nicole Kidman, says, why “we come to this place,” the theater. It was one of the great experiences of my life—and if you’re in New York this fall, you can see it for yourself!

My friend and collaborator Domenic DeSocio (with whom I’ve chatted about Holleran and Ortleb, and on whose knowledge and criticality and sympathy I continually and utterly rely) is working on a profile of Smith, and I don’t want to eat Domenic’s lunch by saying too much more about Smith here (though I note in passing I was into him first). But his most recent play, along with some events Domenic himself had put in motion, made me think about the question of Camp, and whether we’re not nowadays doing something rather different and, in its very oldness, new.

A few weeks ago Domenic organized a reading of Charles Ludlam’s early 70s play Camille, a parody of the 19th-century weeper “The Lady of the Camelias.” This was in part motivated by Domenic and I rereading, for future podcasting purposes, Andrew Holleran’s brilliant essay on Ludlam and Camp, “Tragic Drag” (which you can find in the essay collection Ground Zero). (A listener of the podcast, by the way, asked recently when David and I would stop talking about Holleran. Stop talking about Holleran! No, [you,] stop[!] [I’m] talking about Holleran. The question is like asking when we’ll stop talking about Shakespeare. You can never finish talking about the great writers; it’s the great writers who are talking. A gay boy opens his mouth, and Holleran speaks. You have not had a thought or word that Holleran didn’t invent (letting Fitzgerald and James and Proust and some other nasty queens converse through him)—even being so over Holleran, so over gay literature, so over Pride, so over everything, was already talked into a more perfect form by Holleran fifty years ago than you could possibly vent now. We’re always warming up the canon’s nachos, most of us badly and without the least suspicion we aren’t the original authors of our own language and nature. No! You did not fall out of the coconut tree; you fell, faggot, out of gay literature, and whatever authenticity and autonomy you ever manage to wrangle together will be from a hard-sweated ascesis of reading and thinking on our classics—Holleran at their summit—until you can earn what Denneny, following Shaftesbury, called the “privilege of yourself.” Confucius sighed despairingly that it had been “so long since he had dreamed of the Duke of Zhou”—how long, illiterate, has it been since you dreamed of Sutherland?)

The Ludlam play is from that era of Camp when—as Holleran writes in his essay, which is better observed than Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”—the task of the gay male artist might have seemed to be finding a way, with a combination of mocking irony and intense, almost absurd sincerity, to refresh our access, in a cynical and culture-stuffed era, to the melodramatic sublime where comedy and tragedy are one, to make us jaded queens capable again of shrieking with laughter and tears.

This is not, although not unrelated to, the kind of tenderqueer Camp that a person practices on the accumulated detritus of popular culture, reading it askance and valorizing its trashiest aspects to make it into something that can accommodate odd forms of life such as oneself—the looking for the flicker of a gay sensibility, or of a real intelligence, in mainstream shlock (say an episode of Bewitched), and perversely prizing this little glimmer-heap, and doing a three-hour video essay on why the movie reviewers from In Living Color or Mr. Ratburn from Arthur were actually vital representation.

For Holleran-on-Ludlam Camp is something more serious, taking on the problem of how to revitalize our relationship to culture (which is always becoming, he warns, stale, studious, disembodied, pleasureless, far from laughter or tears)—Camp is thus a kind of criticism, insofar as criticism, when it does not aim as critique to demystify or to undo error, seeks to re-arrange a classic text (cutting into quotes, adding paraphrase, explanation, judgment, emphasis) so that we can experience anew its power and vast alterity. This is always an exercise touching on parody. Aristophanes’ The Frogs and Longinus’ On the Sublime (and Boileau’s re-working of Longinus, and Pope’s re-working of Boileau) despite one being a comedy and other the origin of Western literary criticism, have in common the Campiness of summoning up literary shades and channeling great authors’ characteristic ways of speaking, so that we can either—or rather simultaneously—feel dazzled hilarity and humbled awe at the bonkers magnificent strangeness of their talk.

Ludlam would serve Camille, the tubercular prostitute torn between her true love and an old guy with money, in non-passing drag (he sported chest hair) that was not by any means all laughs. Holleran insists that when Ludlam coughed dyingly on stage, only half the audience was hooting laughter—the other half wept. That’s also the kind of performance I see in Sandra Bernhard’s classic bits from Without You I’m Nothing (Gary Indiana, although in many ways a loathsome toad, is totally right in his incandescently appreciative essay on her in Vile Days), and in the way Tyler Anthony Smith and friends did “The Hour,” which made an awful movie’s sodden, plodding, overdone monologues suddenly funny and sad (the Meryl Streep character was especially good at taking what had struck me as the corniest lines of the film, and sticking the knife right in them [ever since then I’ve been stuck… with the name, I mean… Mrs. Dalloway]—some laughed, some sighed!).

In a lot of ways, watching Tyler Anthony Smith’s “The Hour” felt like doing the reading of “Camille,” except that Smith’s a genius and we reading the Ludlam play were not even amateur actresses. But the spirit of Camp was presiding the same. Camille orders her servant to throw another “faggot on the fire” and is shocked to hear there are “no faggots in the house” (No faggots in the house?! [looking into audience]), Smith and crew were constantly addressing the “sluts” watching. Smith-as-Nicole-Kidman-as-Virginia-Woolf even captured the real Woolf’s peculiar homophobia (which fellow semi-homophobe and full-time fag-hag Susan Sontag also channeled when she complained of the “pale star of the bugger”), saying to the audience “homosexuality is only acceptable when it’s incestuous!”

At the end of Smith’s play, though, the three characters, now perhaps in their own voices but still in drag, say that the women they’ve been portraying—the characters, the actresses, the archetypes?—were the women they grew up wanting to be, before they realized those “women were gaymen all along,” written by a gay man, Michael Cunningham, out of his own fantasies on women and gay men. Which got me thinking about what, in fact, is importantly different between what Ludlam was doing and what Smith might be up to now, even though—or just because—those two things seem so similar. Ludlam, after all, could be seen, like any drag performance, queer reading, or gay spin on a classic (Holleran updating Gatsby for Dancer, for instance) to be taking for his little minoritarian public something from the big straight world, which perhaps might indeed benefit from our having appropriated it and made it shiny again, just as straight people in the 80s and 90s might buy a nice condo or brownstone refurbished by someone dead of AIDS.

Ludlam’s way of looking into and summoning up the cultural past archivally, critically, Campily, could be imagined to rhyme with what everyone in gay intellectual circles in those days was talking about as the invention of new forms of life, a new culture/sensibility/whatever by gay people. You could plausibly take Ludlam, Holleran, Ed White, Christopher Street, and the whole homo kaboodle to be participating in the creation of a novel distinctly (post)modern culture with no tradition or precedent. Certainly White and Holleran and Denneny etc. themselves often talked in this way—knowingly or unknowingly imitating two centuries of modernist movements in which new men, new women, new Jews, new everybodies were at various moments heralding themselves as the first people in history to experience, without the orienting force of authoritative tradition, the risky excitement of individual and collective self-creation. In retrospective, of course, it seems easy to observe that if modernity is already a few centuries old, then we must have actually quite a well-worn stock of poses, responses, masks, etc. for acting out our roles as People Bereft of Tradition! Camille in her own day was a New Woman (per Lydia Liu, the translation of La Dame aux camélias into Chinese was a critical stage in the invention of the modern woman, as a literary image and livable ideal, there—I imagine the same is true of other places); the new gay man of the 70s is a thawed-out old-New Woman.

The pioneers of gay culture in the 70s and 80s often over-emphasized the novelty of what they were doing, to the extent of burying under a heap of resentment or willed ignorance their debts politically to groups like the Mattachine Society and culturally to the homosexual writers of the generations before—and to the closet cases of their present. Part of what I’ve tried to do writing about Patrick Merla’s epochal special issue of Christopher Street that put established homos and young gays in sometimes funnily uncomfortable juxtapositions, and about the way Richard Howard and Alan Ansen sought to place themselves as descendants of Hart Crane, or about the way Tim Dlugos resisted and finally accepted being a ‘gay writer,’ is to suggest that, after all, the work of that era was not so much about making something absolutely new as about figuring out how to inherit the difficult predecessors and contemporaries who had made possible a gay culture, even if they would not want to be part of it. I stress that a relationship to the pre-gay past, often acted out in bad faith, was crucial to formation of the “gay world,” in part because I’m interested in seeing how much continuity there is between that moment of its invention half-a-century ago and our own belated era, which so many gay commentators today only see in terms of exhaustion, as if we were fin-de-race, last-of-the-line, all the interesting gays (except us personally) having been disappeared by those abstractions, Assimilation, Acceptance, etc.

Still, however much I want to say that there are important continuities (we look back to Howard and Ansen as they looked back to Crane as he looked back to Whitman—which I discuss in my big essay on Crane as read by Harold Bloom) across the decades of gay culture (always historicizing itself, always pinging between postures of radical novelty and a fear of having arrived after the death of gay culture, always struggling to take rightly the truth that Tony Kushner puts in the mouth of vile but correct Roy Cohn: Everyone who makes it in this world makes it because somebody older and more powerful takes an interest. The most precious asset in life, I think, is the ability to be a good son. You have that, Joe. Somebody who can be a good son to a father who pushes them farther than they would otherwise go. I’ve had many fathers, I owe my life to them, powerful, powerful men... Does this embarrass you?—that Cohn-Kushner was right, that being a good gay means being a good son to many powerful, powerful fathers, was the burden of my essay on Faggots), something important has changed, which appears, I think in the difference between Ludlam parodying Dumas and Smith parodying Michael Cunningham and Stephen Daldry. Ludlam is Camping up a straight text; Smith is Camping the work of two gay guys (Daldry is now in a relationship with a woman, but he used to be with a man, identifies as gay, directed Billy Elliot, and the woman he’s with danced at Pyramid Club in the 80s).

Does this difference matter? Back in the day, gay men acted out the roles of ladies written by straight men, or (Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Patrick Dennis) wrote roles for women to act like gay men; Camp had to do with these oblique, circuitous ways of making and speaking and belonging to a community. With many degrees of indirectness, of course—Ludlam being shocked there are, as he looks right at you, “no faggots in the house tonight,” is hardly Albee winking or even Vidal telling interviewer after interviewer there’s no such thing as a homosexual which means he can’t be one. There’s the indirection of self-protection, self-exculpation, self-exception, of self—and there’s the indirection of a joke that defines and identifies oneself in the “we” who are in on it. Even so, the founders of gay literature were not wrong to insist that in writing books about gay men for gay men they were doing something new and different, even if White, Holleran, Ferro etc. were always informed by old queens’ English (and writers like Ackerley and Firbank) and hardly inventing a new idiom.

Anyway, nowadays the texts on which we Camp may well have been written by gay men, in or after that founding generation of gay literature. Camping Dumas seems importantly different in meaning and effect than Camping Cunningham/Daldry insofar as the latter has some additional challenge, not just of skewing, slanting, reconfiguring a tired middlebrow pseudo-classic (which The Hours, like Dumas, definitely is) and making it for a moment seem in truth to be the comically, tragically sublime masterpiece people mistakenly took it to be when it first appeared—but also of reckoning with the author behind it and drawing something out of his botched accomplishment to make a useable gay past.

Cunningham—whose work I don’t know well and perhaps shouldn’t judge but here goes!—is in my mind one of those figures like David Leavitt who, after the first era of gay literature, tried to combine a public gay identity and audience with ‘mainstream’ ‘cross-over’ success in what Courtney Love warned us was the Straight World. Which you can achieve once you stop writing about cock and starting writing about women. Women read and publish books; men, even gay ones, have video games, porn, drugs, and podcasts (not to cast aspersions on men who listen to podcasts! Listen to my podcast, you post-literate gooner dumdums!). It makes sense, the commerce-of-literature-wise, that gays, modifying the stale Williams-Albee routine of transposing their own troubles onto female characters, should write novels in which women have problems that might include a gay man.

In The Hours, it’s (well for one thing Virginia Woolf’s poor husband, but mainly) a poet/novelist with AIDS, whom Meryl Streep, an editor who has been sadly in love with him ever since a teenage kiss on the beach got her “stuck,” nurses while supposedly ignoring her own life which includes a brassy lesbian partner and daughter Julia Stiles. The poet is not taking his meds, even though it’s now the late 90s and the drug cocktail could keep him “living for years like this” (exactly, he responds). He’s convinced that he has just won the most prestigious poetry prize only because straight people feel bad for him (which would explain, say, Mark Doty—but what accounts for Richie Hofmann? what Make-a-Wish,-Cumdump program is giving him a day at the Art Institute?), and that he’s only been staying alive to keep Meryl happy. In the end, he kills himself, leaving another mess for his friend to deal with. Gays! Fun to hang out with in college, sure, but they do get to be a handful.

Cunningham, let’s say (through a hermeneutic method I call ‘unfounded projection’), is through the poet raging against the position he’s created for himself as a kept writer for middlebrow women (he got the Pulitzer for it), turning gay male experience into a background chore or bit of color for women who can contemplate our suffering a moment and then, once cathartically released from it, get on to things that actually matter, like family and eating box. It’s a bit like the voice of Larry Kramer in Leavitt’s roman-a-clef Martin Bauman, raging at the Leavitt-stand-in protagonist for writing novels about straight families with gay sons rather than about the AIDS-imperiled gay world—Kramer’s voice, of course, is much more compelling than all of Leavitt’s other loser characters’. And in Smith’s “The Hour,” one of the few things that flops is his attempt to parody the poet character (hamming up Ed Harris’ facial and verbal tics), whose two monologues remain unregenerated chunks of real discomfort.

Not that gay men crossing-over to straight stories always even works as a means of selling out. Witness Gregg Araki’s interesting but floppy attempts (Splendor, Smiley Face)—or Ira Sachs’. And not that, in order to sell out, you even have to write about women! In fact audiences, readers, women will consume narratives about male-male sex, desire, and relationships—from Brokeback Mountain to Call Me By Your Name to Heated Rivalry to the novels of Garth Greenwell—if they take place in a tragic or idyllic nowhere with no connection to gay culture (Holleran, yes I must talk about him again, or rather let him talk because Mr. Vice President he’s still speaking and do not put a period where Holleran put a comma, has a great peevish review of Call Me By Your Name btw seething that today everyone apparently loves a homo romance in which we can be assured that these guys aren’t gay, won’t become gay, are just doing a beautiful aesthetic thing that won’t lead anyone to circuit parties and douching and, well, reading Holleran), if they’re about yearning, suffering, first love, doomed love, and other Universal Themes [a phrase that always puts me in mind of Dudley Randall’s poem, “Black Poet, White Critic,” A critic advises/ not to write on controversial subjects/ like freedom or murder/ but to treat universal themes/ and timeless symbols/ like the white unicorn./ A white unicorn?]).

We’re living in a moment in which despite whatever political-cultural backlash, there are many successful gay male writers and many books, films, shows etc. with stories about male homosexuals. Somehow, however, we seem, to me anyway, far from having fulfilled the promise or even maintained the level of achievement already reached by the first cohort of gay literature/culture. Part of our getting over and through that inadequacy, I think, would have to be a way of engaging with gay men’s books, movies, etc. to make our pantheons and counter-pantheons (among the praiseworthy, Bernard Welt and Dan Fishback; among my laughables, Dale Peck and Daniel Harris), but also a larger critical task of making sense of texts like The Hours written apparently to appeal to straights, or texts written about gays by straights to appeal to themselves, and to get those texts to somehow speak (to) gay(s) directly. The resources of Camp—our history of reading Straight texts Gayly—may be useful here, but even when we bring them to bear on The Hours in just the way Ludlam brought them to bear on The Lady of the Camelias, it strikes me that what’s happening isn’t at all the same.

I wouldn’t know what to call (post-Camp? Camp II?) the set of operations we perform, or should perform, on works that are for whatever reason not-quite-gay-literature: the straight crossover, the ‘gay’ story written by and for fujos, or just gay guys’ bad boring novels (Vuong, Greenwell, Grattan—a correspondent [hi!], once, meaning to cheer me up about the state of gay male fiction, told me I see Bryan Washington, tenderqueerish as it can occasionally get, to be carrying on a gay-male tradition pretty fidelitously . . . Adam Haslitt, Caleb Crain, Theodore McCombs… . you've scoffed in the past but I think Brontez Purnell's Since I Laid My Burden Down does gay male lit again pretty, like, squarely . . . and southern to boot, I swear you'd like it, maybe! and reader if this is the gay we’ve got, we might well as go straight)—for my part it’s been here mostly vituperation and ‘pointless bitchery’ (as the girls at the about-to-end-forever Datalounge will soon no longer be saying), but perhaps what we ought to do with all the crappy post-AIDS not-quite-gay-literature from The Hours on down is indeed to be Camping-and-vamping, to put on the Nicole Kidman Virginia Woolf clown nose and in doing so find a way to re-read it and receive it as if it had been all along a message meant for us.