sex (and death) in public: adieu, dearest bettie (1923-2008)

Music: Rosewater Elizabeth: Faint (1994) I had been meaning to post for some days about the death of Bettie Page, which was both a surprise (I didn’t know she was alive) and saddening. Administrative demands interfered, but now with my grades turned in I wanted to rehearse what I have been thinking about her. Bettie's passing is a significant event, mournful to be certain, but also a kind of memorial to the unquestionable arrival of a certain viral intimacy made possible by the circulatory successes of popular counter-cultures.

My thinking yokes two recent memories. First was the recognition that not three weeks ago I purchased a series of Bettie Page thank-you note cards to send to friends who would enjoy such a thing. It's perhaps a pointless and obvious confession that I have always had a "thing" for Bettie Page (what former goth kid, straight, gay, or in-between doesn't?). I was surprised to see the set promptly displayed on a shelf in Half-Price books because of the way such a display normalizes the fetish (particularly Bettie's bangs and classic shoes; as everyone knows, her breasts and ass are incidental). Part of the appeal of Bettie Page as an icon is the connotation of secrecy; although lingerie clad hotties are the norm on prime time television today---not to mention the mainstreaming of the titty bar as a "family restaurant" with Hooters---I still was a little surprised to spy Bettie's crotch in a white bread bookstore.

Second, a few days ago I watched Sean Penn metamorphose into Harvey Milk in what will probably be regarded as Gus Van Sant's best film (I'm partial to Drugstore Cowboy). I thought the movie helped to capture the public difficulties of gay men in the 1970s in a way that no textual account can capture. I was particularly struck with how our openness toward discussions of sex and sexuality in the academic humanities functions as a kind of amnesia to affective history, that palpable "archive of feeling" that Milk effectively mines for a comfortable affective buffer (that is to say, if the film was about gayness today it would not have been embraced as it has been). Nevertheless, I found myself emotionally torn between the critiques of "coming out" and gay liberation and the practical necessities of having as many people "out" as possible to combat the accusation of public deviance. Perhaps our (seemingly) contemporary embrace of multiple sexualities in the mass media (sometimes good, often bad) is a profound testament to Milk's public circulation?

Bettie Page figures in these memories as a symptom of "sex in public," and how sexual identity is mediated. While ostensibly a signifier of heternomativity (and particularly the privacy of intimacy), there's something about her acceptance today---her normalization---that is queer. I am having difficulty putting my finger on that "something," which is perhaps my problem: queerness is not a something, but a cultural form of being, and somehow the figure of Bettie Page is caught up in that form. Yes, I think kitsch (and thus camp) is part of the answer, but there's more to it---something much more Foucauldian and much less Freudian. This got me to thinking about Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's fascinating essay, "Sex in Public," which was published in Critical Inquiry in 1998. Post Nine-eleven, publicity has radically changed, as have public intimacies. It might be interesting to think about how. So, here's a working-through.

A TROPISM TOWARD THE TOILET

In "Sex in Public," Berlant and Warner argue for a "queer culture building" though the critique of a "national heterosexuality," a mechanism "by which a core culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship." National heterosexuality is achieved through processes of cultural amnesia and "a privatization of citizenship and sex." The former, of course, is what "mainstream" films like Milk help to recover (however problematic we might argue that recovery is; the movie certainly downplays his radical spectacularity). The latter is achieved more or less though various tactics of censorship and displacement that continuously locate "intimate life" as the "elsewhere of political public discourse."

The authors also argue that privatization of intimacy central to heternomativity is achieved not simply on the bodies of queers, but also in the increasing public dissatisfaction with heternomativity itself:

Intimacy . . . has a whole public environment of therapeutic genres dedicated to witnessing the constant failure of heterosexual ideologies and institutions. . . . We can learn a lot from listening to the increasing demands of love to deliver the good life it promises. . . . Recently, the proliferation of evidence for heterosexuality's failings has produced a backlash against talk-show therapy. It has even brought William Bennett to the podium; but rather than confessing his transgressions . . . we find him calling for boycotts and for the suppression of heterosexual therapy culture altogether. Recognition of heterosexuality's daily failures agitates him as much as queerness. "We've forgotten that civilization depends on keeping some of this stuff under wraps," he said. "This is a tropism toward the toilet."

Divorce Court, in other words, is part of the hegemonic cycling of heteronormative tactics of privacy.

This is where Berlant and Warner leave us in the article---or rather, they abruptly shift to an account of two straight friends discussing their anal explorations and catalog ordering habits, and then a description of "erotic vomiting" in a gay bar. These practices refuse the "redemptive pastoralism of sex" and to "pretend privacy was their ground," instead creating queer-counterpublics that utilize sex to explode normative privacy. (Queer) sex in public, in other words---group sex, to be more precise---is subversive. It is not, however, radical.

I've rehearsed Berlant and Warner's argument because I like the way in which it stages publicity as a necessity, but not in a way that attaches itself to gay liberation. Or to put this differently, I like their have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach. The distinction between gay liberation ("I have an inner gay essence that needs to be unleashed!") and "sex in public" is the abandonment of individualism and the embrace of collective desiring, a position that is similar to the one Grindstaff advances in Rhetorical Secrets and that Morris and Sloop advocate in their essay on queer kissing.

I'm thinking this relates to Bettie Page in a number of ways, some that are complicit with heteronormal hegemony, and some which are not. That I purchased the mainstreamed cards of Bettie's fetishized body does sort-of lock me into the individualism of consumerism, but that I bought them to share---that I would be disclosing some degree of my sexual enjoyment to another in gratitude---at least gets me somewhere beyond narcissism in the gesture's tacit request for an audience. That what was once very hush-hush in the 1950s can now be circulated somewhat freely (not on my office door, mind you, but certainly through the privatized sanction of personal mail) also indexes a newer, more permissible public. In light of the relatively rapid ascent of public sex in the token of the presumably private "sex tape" deliberately made public, I do think we're living in a time that is very different from when Berlant and Warner were writing: there is a new enjoyment, a new permissibility, in the tropism toward the toilet. Many months ago Kim Kardashian appeared on Regis and Kelly to promote a new line of clothing. Regis kept asking, over and over, "why are you a celebrity?" in different ways. He knew the answer. So did the studio audience.

PUBLIC SEX POST NINE-ELEVEN, OR, QUEER MOURNING

Really, I've just been thinking aloud here, as I don't think I have anything close to a coherent argument. I'm just happy I could make some time to blog and share some of the things I think about in my free time (I don't think this thinking is trending toward an article or scholarship). I've been suggesting that Bettie Page as a permissible public figure today is symptomatic of a different "National heterosexuality" that is more inclusive of queerness. I'm also suggesting the logics of privitization discussed by Berlant and Warner have changed and that new, public intimacies are permissible. I think I would agree that queer public intimacies still carry the "mark" Chuck and Sloop discuss---they still harbor the threat, otherwise, why the need for the film Milk and its Oscar-buzz impact? And I've suggested there's something about Bettie that's queer. What is that?

I hazard the that is dying or death and a form of sexual melancholy or a kind of queer mourning. I mentioned I thought Page was already dead, and was somewhat surprised to learn last Thursday she was still alive, living a quiet and reclusive life (apparently hard-won but happy) somewhere in Florida. At some level Bettie Page is associated with death---that is, assumed to be dead, now dead/undead undead undead---and her erotic images were consequently linked to a kind of mournfulness. Personally, I was introduced to her growing up as a goth-loving club kid; her images circulated in S&M clubs and gay bars, on t-shirts, as tattoos, and many "goth" and "rockabilly" teen women adopted her bangs and black-clad look. My individual association of Page with mournfulness is primarily and personally contextual, then, but it is also by extension formal: While Page admitted to finding the S&M poses she did laughable and "ridiculous," these are the images that we remember---the spanking at the top of this post, for example---and these images are the ones that make the "death drive" associated with the libido quite obvious. She started as a pin-up girl, but as she become more buxom-ish and full figured she also started donning a whip, a tropism toward the dominatrix . . . wielding the threat of castration, the threat of a certain death.

What is queer about the intimacies associated with the figure of Page, then, is not so much the sex as it is the death, that the threat of her sexual imagery was the locus of her titillation, not so much her body, that she dared to publicize private perversities. Similarly, the film Milk is a staged as a tragedy, not a comedy (though we have to admit Milk would prefer the latter, right?), and its appeal is resolutely humanist-liberal in the sense that queer desire, while present, takes a backseat to death. Milk, after all, is a sad film and the vehicle of its liberal politics is mourning. Look, I wept like a baby at the end---and the crying makes you forget the queer kissing earlier in the film (not to mention the complete lack of any gay sex). Don't get me wrong: I really enjoyed the film; I'm saying its deadliness is doing some political work.

So is that politics progressive (in the sense of getting queer desire on the screen) or regressive (in the sense that it encourages an amnesia to the queer desire underwriting the mourning). Well, damn: I'm not sure. Perhaps the point I’m making (I admit I'm not sure) is that after Nine-eleven, the new permissibility of affect is mourning, feelings of loss. The politics of closeting is thus battled through the vehicle of mourning, through the staging of feelings of loss, and hitching those to queer desire. I'm just confused as to the decency of this politics.

In a sense, I really want my optimism: I want to suggest that post-nine eleven it is easier to hijack if not invert and queer the Christian narrative of sacrifice, something that started with horrific murdering of Matthew Shepard, continued among the LGBT community in response to the AIDS epidemic (e.g., the AIDS quilt), and that is now fully mainstreamed in Milk and the embrace of Betty Paige. Mournfulness has become a vehicle for queer---non-individualized and public---desiring. If this is the case, what do we do with it?