R E C E N T L Y
Male troubles: Bill Clinton, Matt Drudge and Mark McGwire I serviced the president and all I got was this lousy Martha's Vineyard souvenir
Swinging with the sodomites
Why American athletes don't kiss and hug like soccer stars
Linda Tripp, the White House's ghoulish bad conscience
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion Bestseller Hell Left Hook Right On! Lovers and Writers Under the Covers Second Thoughts American Squirm Unzipped |
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Dear Camille:
I have just recently taken up your column online after being entertained and
educated by you on various television programs. I am a pro-life Catholic
conservative Republican who finds your views to be always interesting and
never easily passed over.
Have you ever addressed the issue of "outing"? Specifically, I am outraged at
the continual efforts to "out" historical figures who, being dead, can't
defend themselves. I thought the "gay" (how did they steal this word from the
rest of us?) rights movement believed that what one did in one's bedroom was
no one else's business. Doesn't this hold for historical gays?
-- Traditionalist
Dear Traditionalist:
The fashion for outing has passed in the United States, with the general waning of
radical gay activism. However, outing remains a controversial tactic in
England, where gay activists have named or threatened to expose closeted gays
in the government and church hierarchy.
My attitude is that the outing of living persons, who do not exist in
isolation but belong to a complex web of family, friends and professional
associates, is a fascist practice that belongs to Puritan Salem or Stalinist
Moscow, not to a progressive civil rights movement. On the other hand, outing
may possibly be justified in cases of gross hypocrisy, as when an elected or
appointed official with real power to do harm may be condemning homosexuality
publicly while living a secret gay life.
Outing has now moved, as you indicate, to the library, where historical
vandalism has become business-as-usual among the PC professoriat. The nation
got an eye-opening look at what's going on in a too-brief and somewhat
oversimplified "60 Minutes" segment earlier this year that showed
correspondent Mike Wallace sternly confronting the naively narcissistic George
Chauncey, a prominent, openly gay historian at the University of Chicago, as
the latter simperingly questioned Abraham Lincoln's heterosexuality before the
unsparing CBS camera.
I have been disgusted over the past decade by the clumsy application of the
anachronistic word "gay" to the complex and ambiguous psychological lives of
so many great artists and public figures of the past. For example, my blood
boils when I see gay T-shirts falsely claiming that Emily Dickinson, Virginia
Woolf, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were lesbians.
I have repeatedly argued that "gay" should be reserved for modern individuals
who are exclusively or primarily homosexual in adulthood. "Gay" is an
inadequate term even for Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo or Walt Whitman, who
were certainly erotically and emotionally drawn to young, masculine men but
whose everyday life was probably far more conflicted and abstinent than is
acknowledged by current "queer theory" (that dusty academic warren of wimps,
runts and skunks).
Abuses of history are everywhere in primary and secondary American education
today. Spin the Queer Bottle is just another silly game -- but one with serious
consequences. We need more voices of reform raised from the left, whose
cowardly torpor has ceded the ethical high ground on this issue to the far
right.
Dear Camille:
I recently saw an interesting documentary on Studio 54 in which a clip
was shown of Bianca Jagger in a huge fur walking with Halston through a
crowd of people as she entered the club. I'm madly in love with Bianca
Jagger's and Halston's '70s style and think this image is a beautiful
demonstration of it. From my view of things, this video footage is
second in importance only to that of the Kennedy killing in terms of
documenting a major world event.
I wish I could have gone to Studio 54, but was only a child at the time.
Did you ever make your way past those famous velvet ropes, and if so,
what did you see?
-- Paddock
Dear Paddock:
Yes, recent TV documentaries, including an absorbing profile of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell on A&E's splendid "Biography" series, have vividly
re-created that heady moment in the 1970s when classy celebrities like Bianca
Jagger and Halston ruled. With her svelte androgynous chic and smoldering
Latin intensity, Bianca was a true woman of the world whose sophistication
makes today's pathetic group of "hot" starlets look lumpish and faceless.
(Salon readers will know I mean Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz, but please
add smurfy Renée Zellwegger to the list -- especially after her recent,
revoltingly giggly-cutesey routine on "Oprah," where she did everything to beg
the audience to love her but stick a pacifier in her mouth and a diaper on her
butt.)
The Halston revolution -- turning fashion back to classic simplicity after the
psychedelic freneticism of the 1960s and '70s -- was another Greek revival, like
those in the long history of architecture. Halston was the kind of artistic
gay man whose brilliance seems to appear out of nowhere in small towns and
ordinary families.
No, I never entered Studio 54 or even tried, since I dislike crowded
nightclubs -- one reason I was such a miserable disaster on the lesbian dating
scene, where I batted zero. Not having been a celebrity at the time, I doubt
I could have advanced a millimeter beyond Rubell's Draconian velvet rope,
especially since my personal style was generic shit-kicking Frye-boot dykey.
There is a tragic element for me in the fascinating Studio 54 saga, since late
1970s Manhattan was precisely where my erudite philosopher friend James
Fessenden (whom I've written about) lost his intellectual bearings and
disappeared into the alluringly decadent gay nightworld, with its blatant
promiscuity and drugs. AIDS was identified only a few short years after
Studio 54's meteoric rise and fall -- the grisly disease that killed Rubell,
Halston, Fessenden and so many gifted others, impoverishing arts and letters
for a generation to come.
Dear Camille:
There is a story on the wire today regarding a new computer-generated
version of the "Mona Lisa" that shows how the painting would look without the
dirt that covers it -- and it is very different to the dark picture we all
have tattooed in our mind's eye.
What do you think of the renovation of artworks? Is it always a good thing? Should we allow works to age and enjoy their transformation? Is
this another disguised attempt at the youth worship of our culture -- a form
of artistic face-lifting? Or a valid form of preservation for future
generations?
-- Art Lover
Dear Art Lover:
The "Mona Lisa's" darkness is not wholly due to dirt. Leonardo da Vinci is
renowned in art history for creating the effect of sfumato or "smokiness" in painting, a contour-blurring shadowing that
became the dramatic, starkly stage-lit chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Rembrandt.
Unlike Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," for example, with its dazzling daylight
and crisp details, the "Mona Lisa" is as full of unsettling mysteries as
Leonardo's "The Madonna of the Rocks" (with its sinister cavernous grotto) and
"Virgin and Child with St. Anne" (with its two women tottering on a stony
cliff).
Since my sister is a professional art conservator (she worked, for example, on
a huge painting by Artemisia Gentileschi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), I
am well aware of the controversies in the field, particularly those inspired by
the stringent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which some art
historians think has removed Michelangelo's secondary overpainting.
Conservators must make excruciatingly consequential decisions when cleaning
and restoring paintings, particularly those of the Old Masters, which are
considered world treasures. Carbon has collected from centuries of candle
use; soot remains from the coal-burning industrial era; varnish, once applied
to seal and protect the surface, has darkened and cracked; canvas has unevenly
contracted or torn; makeshift early repairs (with glue or tape) must often be
undone; and overpainting must be evaluated for authenticity and removed if a
later addition.
Because of my early passion for archaeology (a field I dreamed of entering), I
am very drawn to artworks, like the Hellenistic "Belvedere Torso," that have
the debilitating mark of time still on them. I like to see some residual
signs of flaking, discoloration, chipping or fragmentation, even on
buildings. An artwork half in ruins contains much for philosophical
reflection about what used to be called "the vanity of human wishes."
This visual principle applies to other remnants of the past as well. For
summer vacation in 1960, when I was 13, my parents drove from upstate New York
to the North Atlantic seaboard and took the coastal road from Rhode Island to
Maine. I will never forget the amazing spectacle of ancient, half-rotten
buildings and abandoned, broken wharves. All of American history seemed
written in those raw, weathered beams and massive, lashed piers. It was a
scene of piercing desolation and power.
Twenty years later, when I revisited the same coast, I was stunned to find it
nearly completely renovated, its bleak charm quite gone. I realize, in
retrospect, that what I witnessed in 1960 was probably the lingering wreckage
of the 1938 hurricane that slammed into New England with a towering storm
surge that flooded Providence and tore smaller ports apart.
Skip forward to the razzle-dazzle present and behold aggressively pretty
Rockport, Mass., a Disney World fantasy of Old New England buffed to plastic
perfection. What lessons about the gritty past do the young now learn from
their travels? -- aside from how to use a credit card to buy Yankee souvenirs
made in China.
Postscript: The October issue of
Penthouse magazine contains my article "The New Morality," on sexual
harassment policy as it affects sex in the workplace in the wake of the
Clinton scandals. Indiana University Press, the North American distributor
for the British Film Institute, has announced that Sept. 18 is the
official U.S. publication date for my study of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."
My life reached its all-time zenith a week ago when the BFI received a fan
letter about my book from Tippi Hedren herself -- to whom all glory must go!
Adrift in a sea of moral relativism? Let Camille anchor you.
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