Glitter in the Rough

Glitter in the Rough

At this point, anyone who has been reading my posts and pages, ought to have a taste for what I am doing. As I state in my introductory page, Hey SS, Why are Your Sessions So Naughty?, I am not a burlesque performer. Will I do it one day? I think it is almost inevitable. Here is why:

When I began to do my fieldwork about a year and a half ago, I knew nothing. Not one thing. I had barely talked with five performers beyond dishing out standard compliments on their acts. I didn’t have much literature under my belt that directly or indirectly related to the New York burlesque scene. The first “burlesque show” I went to was an accident; I had no intention of observing and learning from this community over the long term, nor would I ever have thought that, just over a year later, I would be applying for and receiving a grant to share the lessons that burlesque can teach with academics, burlesque admirers, my mom, and maybe one day many more people. If you can’t tell, this blog post is about to get into the confessional mode.

I have to admit that I am in love with burlesque.

I love the venues - small and divey where almost anything goes, or large and “upscale” where there are VIP seats and sold out, minimum-service tables. I love the theatricality and the costuming; the way burlesque performers can create and share a fantasy persona. I love the dancing, the choreography, the slow reveal. I love and appreciate a great host. But more than anything else, I love the women on the stage.

Watching burlesque and thinking about its history, about how many performers have and continue to defy and define gender performances, either explicitly or subtly, consciously or not, I continue to gain new insights and ideas. I am constantly meeting up with these along the road to a more comprehensive view of burlesque as I have witnessed it over the months. This past week I (re)learned a very important, timely lesson. It was one that I had admittedly swept aside, suspended in my approach to understanding the culture and community. The lesson was simple: in the verbatim words of my high school U.S. History teacher, “It’s always about money.” I carried that lesson with me. I applied it.  I used it to understand a lot of the “whys” that have come up for me. It was often an easy answer to things that seemed very complex.

What I had failed to do was to apply this lesson to burlesque. Perhaps I was being romantic. In fact, I know that I was. I envisioned burlesque as a fairy tale space; a land inside a snow globe, where everything glitters and looks pretty. I thought, even though it isn’t real, it’s real enough. Certain combinations of glamour and fantasy can take us there, so that even the audience is partaking in this world. I can think of no better example of this than the Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend, which I was lucky enough to visit in the summer of 2011. There we were at the New Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas, stuck in the middle of the desert, a group of devout journalists, photographers, fans and performers dressed up, dressed down, dressed in barely anything at all. Even in Vegas a bunch of burlesque performers get some hard stares: “What are you, what is this?” I remember a time when, after Le Scandal, I was sitting with several performers at a bar when a man approached the table and asked, “Are you in a play?” Madame Rosebud, Bastard Keith, Trixie Little, the Evil Hate Monkey, and Minnie Tonka just about shared the same facial expression – something between pitied amusement and mild annoyance. When the inquirer eventually walked away, Rosebud gave a little grin, “A burlesque play.” In a way, it’s like an elaborate game of dress-up, with roles, directions, costumes, and a plot…

As an audience member, anthropology student, enthusiast, fan, and sometimes friend at a burlesque show, I play a certain role. I am not there to critique an act and pick a performer apart. I am there to interpret what I see with minor and sometimes major clarification from what I am told about what I see. This clarification may come from the performers, from other audience members, from retrospect, and/or from the directly and indirectly relevant texts I read. I, too, am playing a role, and it is one that I fully enjoy. I believe that I was making the mistake of wanting the ideal more than the thing itself; of romanticizing what I had witnessed. Is burlesque romantic? I think yes, and it should be. It would not be burlesque if no one had stage names, elaborate costumes, and choreographed strip-teases; it would be real life. There would be nothing for me to write about here. I maintain that burlesque is a space for imaginations and, more importantly, an agreement between imaginations. A good audience-host-performer relationship is based on the consensual understanding that what is going on is a show, a spectacle, something worth spending twenty bucks on so that everyone can enjoy a little escape from boring, and perhaps even walk away with inspiration.

However, the break from real life is not always clean and pretty and, to re-take up what I learned in high school, money is important. I don’t think that anyone gets into burlesque to make it big; though I could be wrong, and I wouldn’t doubt that the desire for fame and fortune, or at least appreciation and security,  is very real for many a burlesque performer. On an even more basic level, a girl’s gotta eat. That isn’t sexy, that’s real life; and though I’ve had more than one performer tell me that burlesque dancers are chronically broke, the idea of the performers’ daily grind gets swept under a thick rug. This does not make her financial worries, goals, or rent any less real.

Even as burlesque can celebrate femininity, sexuality, and subversion, with performers inviting us into a space where meanings can be construed, flipped, fit, or recrafted, OR where we can go to simply enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of the human form, there are everyday factors in the mix. For a minute, it saddened me to think of the mundane and even bleak aspects of performers’ lives; but I think that now, when I look back on the past week, I appreciate burlesque even more. There is no such thing as a true escape from reality. In one way or another, the everyday must meet with the fantasy. What it will look like, how it will move, and the effects it will have on those who are there to witness – that is where the fun comes in.            

Beach or Bust: Past and Presence on Coney Island

Bushwick Burlesque: Beach or Bust - Past and Presence on Coney Island.

Tags: Body-positivity, burlesque community, booty bounce, subversion

                The room is painted with the kinds of colors that are reminiscent of a bad horror story set at a circus. The staff is friendly and witty and small, with a young dark-haired girl between the diner-style counter and the coolers full of beer. As patrons stroll in gradually, the tables fill up with people who are waiting for the show to begin. It is 8 pm. I am sipping on the world’s best Folger’s coffee, so I am told. 8:30 rolls around and I look curiously at the admission stamp on my hand: A hot dog with a mermaid tail in a bow tie, eating a hot dog. Yes, this is Coney Island, and I wouldn’t ask for anything different. The show is about to begin.

                “Ladies and Gentlemen, please proceed to the back for Bushwick Burlesque: Beach or Bust!” One by one people quickly file into the back auditorium, where a medium-sized stage is lit up in red and blue. Over the course of this show, the crowd will grow to about 30, with a surprising array of demographics represented: black, white, Latin, men and women, young and old, all have come out to see the raunchy, artful spectacle which burlesque veteran Darlinda Just Darlinda co-produces with boyfriend Scary Ben and Heather Loop. The venue, located on Surf Ave. of the historically carnivalesque Coney Island, combined with the experience and audacity of tonight’s performers, promises a show that will speak to burlesque’s roots in the exotic, the side-show-y, the risqué. Booties will bounce. Genitals will show. Cheeks will flush. Check your Sunday School lessons at the door; they are no match for Heather Loop’s ass tassels.

                Scary Ben rolls out the show with a strip from his street clothes and a reverse strip into his hosting gear, giving us a hearty glance of his jockstrap before transforming into a comically stern-faced, 1940s/hipster fusion host. He introduces the first performer, Fancy Feast, who enters the stage wearing full college-graduation attire. The red glitter-encrusted seams and fishnets peeking out from underneath her cape immediately suggest the parodic elements of her act; and sure enough, Fancy Feast strips down out of cape, hat, and red corset to reveal the wrinkled diploma hiding in her bosom, which she proceeds to tear into pieces. Heather Loop gives us a double dose of scrumptious acts – first was her purple bike act, in which she literally rides the thing every which way before finally figuring out that she needs to strip out of her tight purple dress and corset in order to ride the thing properly; but not before she sits on the front tire of and peddles on the bike upside down. “Does anyone think they could do that?” asks Scary Ben afterwards. Nope. Probably wouldn’t know how to wedge myself off the tire.

                The whole act – from her interest in riding the bike, to her struggle to ride it efficiently while still maintaining the garments of a “proper lady”, to her eventual disposal of her clothes in order to get on and ride the bike – were oddly in sync with a segment of ­Pin-up Grrrls I had just read on my way to Coney Island. Maria Elena Buszek relates the ways in which bicycles were a means of literal and figurative mobility for women during first-wave feminism in the late 19^th century: “Bicycling… was a loaded activity clearly associated with feminism at the turn of the century: from the unfussy dress that the sport required… to the sexual connotations of the machine itself, young women riders were seen as advertising their progressivism"(page 103) Shedding the restrictive dress, corset, and garters which were once staples of feminine attire, Heather Loop finds that she is free from the bonds of ideals of the “true” or “proper” woman.

                Her second act- oh, man, her second act. Heather Loop comes out in Daisy Dukes-type garb, complete with a plaid button up top, exposed mid-section, and ultra-short jean shorts. I don’t know about you, but I had to take a deep breath when I realized that shorts cut so that your ass-crease shows were an actual thing, and not just a “mistake” that girl made when she bought a size down. They’ve even got a name- Cheeky Shorts. Cheeky Shorts! Okay, fine, a little crease peek never got anyone killed – maybe. But I appreciated Heather’s hyper-exaggerated version of the Cheeky Short. They were so short they seemed parodic. The most impressive part was that the more booty bouncing she accomplished, the more the shorts began to resemble Brazilian-cut underwear more than anything else. How’s that for a version of the Cheeky Short? Did I mention she was also wearing ass tassels? For those of you are   burly-q newbies, ass tassels are a version of nipple pasties which are placed on the butt cheeks and have fringy tassels that swirl around, and around, and around. And up and down. And whichever way Heather Loop’s booty bouncing takes us.

                Darlinda and Scary Ben are lovers. Burlesque lovers. Burlesque lovers are of a different breed. And since this is their show – well, you better expect something as off-color as the color combinations here. After Ben relays his feelings of sadness, loneliness, and horniness during the many times when Darlinda has been out and about doing cool burlesque things all over the planet, the two reenact their passionate reuniting. The several-minute long skit is meant to be hilarious, but I think that a lot of people laughed out of comic relief, if they laughed at all. I personally got a kick out of Darlinda’s rainbow g-string which matched Scary Ben’s rainbow jockstrap . But as all good things must come to an end, these accouterments also had to go. Thus we have a totally nude couple on the stage. I think only the older couple next to me left – I was too busy laughing to pay much attention.

                Darlinda Just Darlinda stuns the crowd with the first of two brilliant acts: her lotion ritual. She comes out in a baby girl pink towel, her face poised with the kind of virginal innocence we know from Sandy of Grease – before her much more exciting turn into America’s baddest high school chick. Darlinda removes the pink towels, first from her head to let down a shock of wavy red hair, then from her body to reveal the kind of curves which sculptors, painters, and figure drawers  have long attempted to describe. The easy strip down to nothing shows us more than just a stunning figure – Darlinda radiates the kind of confidence and body-positivity which turns so many women onto burlesque.

                Her second act presents us with a more provocative, political message. A blonde-wigged Darlinda enters the stage, dresses in a sparkling red dress and a huge, over-enthusiastic smile, holding an American flag in each hand. She throws off the blonde wig to let down her wild red locks, loses the flags, and appears a freer, less patriotic, sexier woman. But the transformation comes to a halt as she strips down and pulls out a piece of paper that was tucked between her legs. She pulls it out slowly, expression slowly erupting into horror as she unravels the paper to reveal: the Republican elephant. The meaning of this act is made more explicit later on; as Scary Ben told me, "It is about expelling the painful and sickening propaganda of patriotism and politics from the body. She is commenting on the Republican party's current war on women and controversy about vaginal reproduction." At the end of the act, Darlinda tears the paper to shreds.

                When asking new performers what got them into burlesque, the number one reason is to increase confidence and body-positive sentiments. This is a way for women of every shape, size, and shade to regain a hold over her body image, which we know extends deep into the human psyche. A healthy body image creates positive sentiments towards oneself and towards others; rejecting the tyranny of a narrowly defined range of beauty allows women to define an image of beauty that works for them. They can then project this image into the world by the way they dress and comport themselves. Burlesque dancers do this every time they step on the stage. Best of all, each of these images is a welcome part of the community; indeed, the “identity” of the NYC community itself, if there ever could be a such a clean way to describe it, would be a group of men and women who welcome the exploration and manifestation of various sexualities.

                Fem Appeal does an act in which she pays tribute to Pam Grier's Foxy Brown and Coffy. Fem fills the role of a strong, literally kick-ass woman from the blaxploitation era.  I had seen her perform some time ago doing her act “Spooky,” in which she juxtaposes a silky white dress with her face painted to look like she’s going to eat yours. (Not that that happens in real life… Well, her act was before the incident, anyway.) I truly enjoy almost anything that happens on the stage, but I have to say that I really appreciate it when burlesque gets subversive, edgy, challenging, relevant. Along with variety, these are the links between burlesque of today with burlesque that date back to Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes.*

                The array of performers here tonight is evidence of the fact that burlesque – especially New York City burlesque, with its Do-It-Yourself feel – is an all-bodies space, with types ranging from androgynous to curvy. Miss Fem Appeal, with her androgynous looks and comical inversion of gender roles, performs in tandem with Diety Delgado, whose make-up and costuming render her almost extraterrestrial, beyond gender. Both of these performers work along the similar thread of challenging the audience with unfamiliar performances of femininity and masculinity. Deity’s white-painted face appears stoic as she pulls on a cigarette; her robotic movements hardly rustle her paper dress. Comparing this to the super-dynamo quality of Heather Loop’s booty-bouncing, or to Darlinda Just Darlinda’s symbolic triumph over the Republicans' War Against Women, and we see how the tradition of variety endures on the burlesque stage, both in the types of bodies and the tone of acts on the stage.

                In addition, all of the acts were, at least one point, downright hilarious. There are so many ways that burlesque performers make us laugh. Whether people in the audience realized it or not, often what they were laughing were the everyday elements of femininity which the dancers have appropriated for use in their acts: a woman wearing make-up that does not match the rest of her skin (Deity Delgado), a girl wearing shorts so short that almost her entire butt shows, ass tassels and all (Heather Loop),  a woman who sheds her Miss American appeal (literally and figuratively letting her hair down) only to find that an outside entity (the Republican party) is attempting to regulate and legislate her body and what she does with it. When the performers are on the stage, these motifs are rendered comical and entertaining. This does not mean that they are not real, not serious, or not painful.

                I was really excited to meet up with Darlinda, Scary Ben, and Fem Appeal after the show. More to come on that soon! Darlinda Just Darlinda, Scary Ben, and Heather Loop put on Bushwick Burlesque every other Tuesday at The Morgan. I look forward to seeing and learning from these veteran performers in the future. I’m especially excited to meet with Fem Appeal before her Monday show at Bar A. Come back for more show-write ups, which I’ll be cranking out like baby mice from the nest under my fridge (I swear the exterminator actually wants these things to breed).  I know what I’ll be dreaming of tonight: Heather Loop’s booty bounce. You’d have to see it to understand. Happy Summer Solstice!

* For more on this segment of burlesque history, Robert Allen’s Horrible Prettiness is a very worthwhile read.  

Burlesque Then and Now – A Lesson on Anatomy and Agency

Burlesque Then and Now – A Lesson on Anatomy and Agency

                Robert C. Allen’s Horrible Prettiness serves as a comprehensive record of the history of burlesque in America. Like many, he attributes Lydia Thompson’s landing in the U.S. in the mid-19^th century to the beginnings of American burlesque, replete with all the uproar, critique, and confusion which a radical feminine display seems always certain to arouse. Please know that I do choose my words carefully. Arousal was, and continues to be, a big part of the perceived “problem” with burlesque. Of course, Thompson and her troupe, the British Blondes, did not remove a morsel of clothing on the stage, and though their performances are today understood as being burlesque (indeed they share some elements with contemporary burlesque performances), our understanding of the art form is drastically different.        

                Today when we walk into a venue looking to see a burlesque show, what are we really asking for? A few basics are almost always present: there will be costuming, movements, and striptease. Usually, but not always, there will be choreography, concept, and pasties. Now compare this to Lydia Thompson’s burlesque or, for that matter, American burlesque from the time of her landing until the turn of the 20^th century. There was scripting and singing like in a parodic play. There was bizarre-for-the-time costuming and women playing men’s roles. There was no stripping. This is especially remarkable, as what many conceptualize as one of the cornerstones of American neo-burlesque was then absent.

                However, Thompsonian burlesque and neo-burlesque share the name of an art form, a mode of expression that, somehow, has survived so many reinterpretations, appropriations, shut-downs, start-ups, and triumphs. It seems to me that some of the most recognizable threads woven into the fabric of burlesque, from Thompson to Trixie Little, are surprise, sexuality, and feminine display. The fact that burlesque persists and, indeed, thrives through the centuries is because of these three elements, at the very least. In New York in the 1860s, Thompson and her troupe occupied male roles in plays, dressing and “acting like” men – somewhat. Thompson paired tighter-than-average pants with a shortened dress, and the resulting effect was something like magnificent horror bound up in fascination and repulsion simultaneously. Here is this woman in the 1860s who, at a time when women were largely deprived of their sexuality, not only exuded femininity (Thompson and her troupe members were considered very beautiful by many at the time), but masculinity. Whoa. Reflecting on this odd and enthralling dichotomy which burlesque performers brought to the stage, William Dean Howells writes in an essay dated from 1869: “[T]hough they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of an alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame” (Quoted from an essay dated 1869. In Allen, page 25). Yes indeed: When life gives you lemons that are like oranges and limes, your taste buds say “extraterrestrial.”

                “Othering” is a word I am going to use to describe the process of rendering a person or group of persons strange, exotic, and different. It’s a useful process for deeming someone or something inferior. Allen descriptively illustrates how burlesque and its performers have historically battled against systematic subjugation. The bourgeoisie tried to deem burlesque a “low art”, something only the lower classes would see and enjoy. Mayor LaGguardia outlawed burlesque in New York in 1937, in an attempt not so unlike Mayor Giuliani’s efforts to “clean up the city” by removing any “polluting”, “amoral” and, surprise surprise, sexual influence from Times Square. When Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes landed in New York, critics used the language of a contagious foreign disease to denounce it.

                Yet repulsion and fascination often go hand in hand. Indeed, some of the same reporters who outwardly denounced burlesque, both during and long after Thompson’s time in the States, could scarcely mask their inability to look away. The “horrible prettiness” was captivating for many even as their ingrained moralities told them it was wrong, that it was subversive, and thus dangerous. This is all part of the process of othering. Think of the sideshow, in which people pay money to marvel at the Elephant Man, the pinheads, the Siamese Twins. Not surprisingly, foreign and “exotic” women from Algeria, Japan, Persia, India, and Java doing the “cooch dance” were a major attraction at the Midway Fair.  Allen bluntly states that “The cooch dancer is not like a freak, she is one” (235). A woman’s display of her sexuality was something just as foreign, exotic, alluring, and simultaneously repulsive as a blue person, or a supposed human-animal hybrid. Anthropologists who were trying to introduce the American public to the science of ethnology and ethnography (and legitimize their work) defended the presence of these strange, enticing performers as good “subjects” for study. They also offered to measure fairgoers’ heads so that they could know their place on the Social Darwinian scale. Sigh. I am not always so proud of my predecessors.

                Nonetheless, early anthropologists defended these “others” in a way, by legitimizing their presence and keeping the authorities from shutting it down. After a white fairgoer found out that his head circumference made him superior to people from every other part of the world, he could bound along down the Midway Plaisance stretch of the Chicago fair, marveling in delighted disgust (or disgusted delight) at the exotic dancers (pun intended). As long as these “attractions” were just kept plenty far away from the more “respectable” Anglo-Saxon-sanctioned exhibitions at White City, even people from the upper tiers of society, or evolution, or whatever, could feel good about coming to see them.

                This is quite similar to what happened to burlesque after the infamous Astor Place Riots, which Allen is not alone in identifying as one of the most important factors in changing the way in which theater was perceived, advertised, and attended. The intermingling of audiences, with rich and poor on different tiers of the same venue, would quickly diminish. The Riots, taking place in the middle of the 19^th century, were a manifestation of the inherently chaotic make-up of the theater: men and women (who were actually or imaginably always prostitutes*) from all levels of society mixed at the same theater, with the unruly and highly entitled “pit” composed of mostly lower class individuals. A lesson was learned: “rich” entertainment was forever separated from “poor” entertainment.

                Guess which side burlesque fell on? Possessing the very same sort of wonderful exoticism and “otherness” as some of the side-show acts at the fair, burlesque became associated with pollution, sex, fascination, and, most unfortunately, inferiority. This was especially true as the act of striptease was increasingly introduced into burlesque acts. Women who exhibited their bodies, were aware of them, and used the images which they created were quite alien to many. I would go so far as to posit that the type of fear they instilled in their onlookers – mixed in with admiration and fascination and even desire - was enough to cause many to want to subjugate burlesque and its performers. But there is good news, because not only have burlesque and burlesque dancers survived the waves of critical backlash, conservatism, patriarchy, and subjugation which have been cast their way since the 19^th century, but as Bonnie Dunn insightfully points out, burlesque is increasingly becoming a part of the theater world. Indeed, all sorts of people go to burlesque shows, sometimes paying for a pre-sale ticket and a minimum-service table. Bonnie’s weekly cabaret variety production Le Scandal is one such show, which incorporates burlesque acts by well-known New York-based performers and sells out week-after week with a lot of overflowing demand.   

                Even irresponsibility must be taken and understood in context. The objectification and commodification of a sexualized, exoticized other, paired with the literal loss of the performers’ voices, is what Allen signifies as a supposed “demise” of burlesque. He marks the turn of and progression into the 20^th century as a timeline on which burlesque de-graduates into something subjugated, something marginalized, something disempowering for those on stage. A complex interplay of causes, which Allen details quite well, had turned burlesque into a wordless art form. This transformation is only literal. He jumps into a figurative understanding of this development without looking at the other ways in which burlesque performers use choreography, costuming, and concept to communicate with the audience. He attributes the loss of the performer’s voice to the loss of her agency. This, to me, is a serious irresponsibility, but one that should not be taken offensively. To Allen’s credit, he does write Horrible Prettiness is the 80s, when no one really knew what burlesque “was”. It had become sort of marginalized, sort of lost. I remember Tigger! telling me after a show at the Museum of Sex, that he was doing burlesque before anyone even called it that. In our interview on Tuesday, Bonnie Dunn corroborated that there was this sort of lapse in the public understanding of burlesque.

                 Anyone who has given any thought to what burlesque “really is” should know that it is a tough concept to pin down, as it is inherently fluid. Many acts reflect a current state of affairs; or rather, offer parodies of current affairs, from world politics to pop culture, from local news pieces to gender roles. Burlesque can and does take many forms, and I believe that the continued interest in this art form depends on its variety, its edginess, its spunk. In line with the term “horrible prettiness,” burlesque performers and performances are often so admired for their dual nature: they are often larger than life, yet they are part of it; they rely on the everyday in order to draw out the exaggeration, the parody, or the act of it. They are surreal in their expression of reality.

                All of this is done without what Robert Allen identifies as the key tool of individual agency: a woman’s voice. In Dr. Lucky’s History of American Burlesque course this past Tuesday, one student pointed out the possibility that Allen could have been trying to represent himself as a feminist. She suggested that, by denouncing the loss of the performer’s voice and linking that to the so-called “demise” of American burlesque, Allen may have been trying to express his advocacy for women, for female performers, and for burlesque in general. But come on, there are a million ways the modern burlesque dancer can, and does, express herself, a point, and/or a motif, which include movement, facial and bodily gestures, costuming, disrobing, and music choice. Bonnie Dunn says that burlesque is so much fun because every last part of an act is customizable to a performer’s own needs and desires: “You can make your own music, your own costume, your own choreography.” All of these elements (and more) must come together well in order to execute a poignant, sexy, memorable act. And that, my friends, takes talent. That, my friends, is what makes burlesque a living, breathing, surreal art form which has and will continue to thrive through the centuries.

                                                                                        

*On page 139, Allen offers some thought-provoking insight on the idea of the prostitute: “The prostitute…was not defined in any narrow legalistic sense…but rather and more loosely included any working-class woman whose dress, demeanor, or actions transgressed bourgeois notions of feminine propriety and respectability… The prostitute constituted, in Lydia Nead’s words, ‘an agent of chaos bringing with her disruption and social decay.’”Horrible Prettiness H

Girls Who Think Like Boys Who Act Like Girls

                Girls Who Think Like Boys Who Act Like Girls

                Tags: Male Drag History, FTF, gender performance

                It was Valentine’s Day at the Highline Ballroom, exactly one year after my debut as an aspiring anthropologist on the New York burlesque scene. Didn’t I feel so cool, drink in one hand, notebook in the other, talking to other people in the full audience at Filthy Gorgeous Burlesque and explaining what I was doing there that night. I could go on and on about the show, which I want to say was one of the great ones I have seen through and through. Madame Rosebud was kind enough to invite me out to see all the goodies that night. From the opening “hot jazz, dixieland, French chanson and gutbucket blues” numbers belted out by the beautiful 5 man, 1 woman band The Hot Sardines, to BB Heart’s hilariously sexy rabbit mask number, to GoGo Harder’s tireless performance of “Cherry Bomb,” this most pseudo-romantic holiday night was made sexy through and through. Hosting that evening was none other than the World Famous *BOB*, as wonderfully unapologetic as ever. One thing she said particularly caught my ears. She was introducing Madame Rosebud to the stage, who she called her “gaybie,” her gay baby drag queen. I couldn’t help but smile, thinking that surely few if anyone in the audience would get it. Clearly Madame Rosebud and World Famous *BOB* are women, how could they be in drag?

                The lack of understanding shines an immediate light on the state of gender notions in contemporary society. Men can be in drag as women, check. Women can be in drag as men, check. But the idea of a woman in drag as a woman, falls on deaf if not skeptical if not scornful ears. A coworker of mine expressed this view quite clearly. When I explained my project to her and mentioned FTF, she frowned and said, “I don’t buy it.” She then added, “I like me some Judith Butler (a pioneering champion of the theory of gender performativity and basic read for anyone in the field of gender studies), but [she] just sounds kinky.” That isn’t to say that identifying as an MTF or FTM transperson, or dressing as a member of the opposite sex is all fair game and totally acceptable. Even though gay bar raids are largely a thing of the past around here, there is still plenty of old-fashioned hate and ignorance to go around; but certainly there are a great deal of people in New York who recognize that, yes, these things are real, and they happen, and they’re alright, especially when we compare the populace of today to that of the 1960s and ‘70s, the period which Esther Newton documents in Mother Camp. Her book serves as an important documentation of male drag subculture in American cities during that time, when gay men in drag began asserting themselves as a group which, contrary to being some sort of moral aberration to be suppressed, beat down, and arrested, could and would fight back, and would lead their lives as they saw fit. The men and the culture she documents serve as an interesting contrast to what appears today to be a new wave of hyper-masculine gay men, with their bulging biceps and crew cuts, looking nothing like the “fairies” who were instrumental in sparking the LGBT movements which as a concomitant effect of Stonewall. These were the men who, skinny, wigged, and probably in heels, finally stood up for their way of life.  

                What is also important is that they played a game with society every time they got into drag. With every make-up application, with every cross outfit, with every wig, there was a sort of dare: I bet you you’ll see a woman.

                To this day there remains a majority of people who aren’t ready for the idea that everyday gender is indeed performed, albeit in the mode of contrivances which are so deeply and widely ingrained in us that we never think about them. (Even Newton mentions female performances of femininity in a mere footnote [Mother Camp]). That does not make them passive, nor does it make them natural; it just makes them semi-automatic. As women, we go through the motions with our daily beauty rituals, fixing this, covering that, making these perky, making that smaller. And hey, why not? My point is not that we should not make our skin dewy, or flawless, or whatever; or that we shouldn’t go to great lengths to make our legs look long and lean. But the power to dazzle is not wholly invested in us from some divine and faceless source; we learn it from our mothers, from our girlfriends, from magazines, from good old-fashioned trial and error, from that drop-dead gorgeous girl who everyone stares at on the subway. In response to her statement, I had asked my coworker that night, sort of provocatively, “So you think the fact that we are wearing heels is somehow natural?” “Yeah, sort of,” she said with moderate confidence, suggesting that some female fashion sensibility is a manifestation of something innate. A woman I know cannot leave the house without putting on lipstick. Yet she, in contrast to my coworker, kind of laughed at herself for this. “...then I feel like ‘now I’m okay with myself, and I’m ready to go out into the world as a woman.”

                We could sit around debating the timeless, tiresome questions: Who’s responsible for ideals of femininity, is the female form to be covered or displayed, are heels and mascara oppressing women, is the naked female form a cause for shame or admiration, will women ever escape the objectifying (?) effects of the male gaze, and so on, and so on. My guess is that your convictions will probably reveal more about the way of life you have or wish to adopt, than it will about some sort of absolute and universal truth.

                Nonetheless, my conviction is that gender is itself a performance, the world a stage (I think somebody important said that before ;)). Be it on the street, on the subway, at a drag ball or on the burlesque stage, we all put on a show. What we are trying to say – with our bodies, our movements, our clothes, postures, make-up, mannerisms – is as varied as our imaginations can carry us, such that the very idea of “being female” or “being male” is rendered quite meaningless.

                Of course, certain environments allow for different appropriations of what it means to “be” a gender. New York City is going to have more to show in terms of variations on gender and sexuality than, say, a small mid-Western town or a posh suburb. That is not to say that these variations exist more in one and less in another; I want to suggest that variations abound everywhere, but their actual manifestation becomes repressed and they often slip into the darker spaces of the human imagination, in that fancy little region which people call “taboo” at best, “deviance” or even “illness” at worst. These “places” in which stigma is generated and systematically applied to those activities which, for whatever reason, do not fit into the majority* ideal of what is good and acceptable, exist primarily in the collective mind, are circulated and upheld by individuals who become, for lack of a better term, infected by tyrannical morality. If the categories of taboo, deviance, and aberration are created and upheld socially, so, too, are their counterparts. Those activities, behaviors, and mannerisms which are deemed acceptable, good, right, and/or healthy, though they appear to be enacted and embodied on an individual level, are made meaningful in a social setting. Gender is a performance, with actors, actresses, and a scrutinizing audience ever-present, constantly negotiating meaning.

                Burlesque makes this process very apparent. That night at the Highline Ballroom, Madame Rosebud and World Famous *BOB* did something that, I believe, would not make sense to a lot of people. They made a familiar bet with the audience: I bet you you’ll see a woman. They, like men in drag, are acutely aware of the fact that they are putting on a show just by doing those things which are often just regarded as “female.” The response is something like confusion, dismissal: Well, duh, you are women. This represents a failure to recognize that gender is itself a performance.