By
Jennie Gruber
“To be able to blend – that’s what
realness is.”
– Dorian Corey, in Paris is Burning
“Drag... describes discontinuities between gender and sex or
appearance and reality but refuses to allow this discontinuity to represent
dysfunction. In a drag performance, rather, incongruence becomes the site of
gender creativity.”
– Judith Halberstam, Female
Masculinities
“On a stage, the laws of fantasy are
meant to be broken, but I have always found it difficult to bring my real pussy
out there with me.”
– Lady Gaga, from her November 2011
“Memorandum” in V Magazine
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“HEY!”
The
2011 Music Television Video Music Awards[i] open with this antagonizing roar, which
emanates from an unfamiliar silhouette cloaked in smoke and spotlight.
Emerging
onto the stage with an almost limping gait, the figure’s features become clear.
A greasy pompadour and sideburns frame a small pretty face and sunken eyes.
The
figure introduces and explains itself:
“My
name is Jo Calderone. And I was an asshole.”
The
live audience and those of us watching on televisions and streaming video are
rushing to understand. Wasn’t the opening act of this show hyped as Lady...
“Gaga?”
As
if he read our minds, Calderone spits out the nonsense words that have been
imbued with so much new cultural significance in the past few years.
“Yeah,
her!”
The
audience starts to put two and two together, realizing that the Guido-accented
Calderone is, actually, Gaga herself in very understated drag.
At
this point in history, Lady Gaga is known for many things, and understatement
is not one of them. Though her outfit is shockingly minimalist, her
presentation is bold and dynamic. She has the audacity to filter drag as a
performance concept into a mainstream idiom without ever pandering to the
inevitable discomfort this elicits from the MTV cameras.
“She
left me!”
Calderone,
it would seem from his ranting, is not just another Gaga costume, but a fully
developed persona. His presence is one of exaggerated and deliberately staged
masculinity. His body language has a method. Elbows cocked, he holds a
cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the other three fingers fanned out. He
gesticulates like a man who has been using a cigarette to make a point since he
was 14 years old. His posture is slouched forward into his black, loosely
fitting Brooks Brothers suit, shoulders shaking his jacket with the muscle
memory of someone who wears it everyday.
“But
she’s fuckin’ crazy too right?”
Egging
on the live crowd by variably charging downstage at them, he reiterates:
“I
mean, she’s ... fuckin’ ... crazy!”
Describing
a bedroom scene in which Gaga flaunts the ultimate femme refusal to take off
her stilettos (even in the shower), Calderone himself is wearing boots with
three some odd inches subtly wedged into the heels. This is perhaps the only
clue in his entire ensemble that his costume is an androgynously stylized one;
and his acknowledgement of Gaga’s usual hyper-feminine presentation subtly
reveals that she knows exactly what she’s doing.
The
MTV house cameras (who also know exactly what they’re doing) cut to the
cartoonishly girlie pop starlet of the hour Katy Perry doing her best with
raised eyebrows and open-mouth smile to convincingly look shocked yet delighted
at what she’s witnessing.
Calderone
continues to rail against Gaga – on the subject of her wild hair, her love of
the spotlight, and perhaps in anticipation of the public’s reaction to this
performance: “At first it was sexy but now I’m just confused.”
Britney
Spears is revealed by the probing cameras, mouth agape, indeed looking
predictably dumbfounded.
“And
I think it’s great, you know, I think it’s really fucking great that she’s such a stah. A big, beautiful stah in the sky.”
The
crowd starts to cheer intermittently, drowning some of Calderone’s punch lines.
It’s almost as if they’re attempting to throw off his timing. More likely MTV’s
teleprompts are begging them to act as if they understand and approve of what’s
happening.
“But
how am I supposed to shine?”
The
powers-at-be at MTV understand that they have to fabricate reactions, like a
nervous hostess frantically keeping drinks filled and hors d’oeuvres
circulating. Their audience is getting awkward. This, as it turns out, ain’t no
female pop star in a fashionable suit. This is a drag king show; easily the
highest concept drag king show ever to be performed by a high-femme-identified
pop star on mainstream television. It’s undoubtedly the first time such a pop
star has asked her audience, with very little warning, to accept her as not
only an unfamiliar character but as another gender for the duration of an entire media
spectacle.
“I’m
startin’ to think that’s who she is. I mean maybe that’s just who. she. is.”
Tomorrow
and for the next few months, distressed online media reportage will sneer
headlines along the lines of: “Was it too much?” and, “Brilliant or creepy?”
and, “Did Lady Gaga just end her career with this embarrassing Jo Calderone?”
It seems that even artists with reputations for defying expectations will be
called to task for attempting something, well, unexpected- in this case,
something that not only revels in its queerness but spits its high concept
pretensions in its audience’s face. Though his speech is haunted by the
audience’s thwarted expectations of Gaga’s femininity, Calderone is unfaltering in the face of
the their unease.
“I
gotta get in thea.”
A
pregnant pause with cigarette outstretched, palm turned up and shaking.
“When
she cums,[ii]
she covers her face, like she can’t stand to have one honest moment whea nobody’s watching!”
The
audience has come to expect Gaga in particular and MTV in general to be both
entertainment and provocation, but they are also desensitized to contrived
shocks well within their comfort zone. This digestible outrageousness has
become the bread and butter of the mainstream music industry. Gaga bursts
through these boundaries, playing deliberately with discomfort. Her artistic
agency is all too rare in the pantheon of female pop star into which she has
launched herself; almost as rare as, say, talking about their orgasms onstage.
“I
want her to be real. But she says, ‘Jo...’”
A
suck of the cigarette for dramatic effect.
“I’m
not real. I’m
theatah. And ‘you and
I’...”
As
these last three words are the name of Gaga’s most recent single, the crowd’s
enthusiasm sounds significantly more genuine. A bone has been thrown. This is a
joke they get, one they can participate in.
Their
encouraging cheer all but drowns the speech’s deliberate conclusion:
You
and I (meaning Gaga and
Calderone, meaning Stephanie Germanotta[iii]
and her audience)...
“...This
is just rehearsal. I
gotta get in theah.”
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If
you take an elevator ride in the Imperial Palace on the Las Vegas strip, you
will hardly be able to ignore the television advertising the hotel’s main
attraction: Frank Marino’s Divas,
a celebrity female impersonation extravaganza. Following a rapid-fire series of
clips showcasing an assortment of drag queens doing Britney, Madonna, and other
glamour standards, the leering mug of the blonde bejeweled queen persona of
Marino materializes. The voice-over blares: “You won’t believe your eyes...”
and the queen morphs into a head-shot of an out-of-drag, decidedly masculine
Frank, accompanied by the assurance that: “...these gals are really guys!”
This
“revelation” will be jarring to anyone who has ever frequented drag shows in
dingy dives, where kings and queens immerse themselves in the attire, body
language, and pronoun of a gender other than the one they were assigned at
birth. The purpose of this facade is to be at once exaggerated and convincing
in the chosen gender, as is the case with the dramatically campy but believably
macho Calderone. The joy of being on a drag stage is weaving a collective
fantasy, regardless of the degree to which the gender being depicted is a part
of the performer’s identity when they peel off the spirit gum mustache or
unhook their girdle.
When
the Imperial Palace marketers literalize the “impersonation” aspect of Marino’s
act, they undermine the central mystique of drag. In Vegas, a heterocentric
territory of comfortable sensationalism not unlike the aforementioned
digestible shock value of MTV, drag can profit so long as it panders to
anticipated queer anxiety of its audience. “These girls are really guys” is a
reassurance that the queerness inherent in drag doesn’t carry over into “real
life.” Gender inversion is marketable entertainment provided it is clearly
delineated within the confines of theatricality, and doesn’t spill over into
identity, desire, or what the performer wears on their day off.
Gaga,
in contrast, revels in the gender ambiguity implied by a drag act that never
lets on that an offstage life exists. She may even achieve what the voguing
queens of Jennie Livington’s 1990 documentary of underground Harlem drag balls Paris
is Burning call
“realness”: complete embodiment of an archetype in a performance.
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Jo
Calderone’s significance is even more notable when considered alongside other
instances of female pop stars in some semblance of drag.
Eleven
VMAs ago Britney Spears appeared onstage in a baggy suit to sing possibly the
most neutered-ever rendition of the covered-to-death Stones classic
“Satisfaction”[iv]. One minute
into the song the suit was ripped off to reveal a body stocking, transparent
except for glittering sequins, and Spears proceeded through the motions of her
standard routine of stiffly suggestive dancing. Her allure is more stripper
kitsch than personal sexual expression.
R&B
Singers Beyonce, Mariah Carey, Ciara, and Mya have all appeared in their own
music videos[v] wearing
masculine costumes, either to highlight sexist double standards or parody their
male celebrity counterparts. In each case, the masculine incarnation dances
alongside or otherwise transforms into her typical public imagine, writhing in
stunningly feminine glamour. Though they might slip into baggy pants or
fashionable blazers, any butch identification is quickly glossed over with
mini-dresses and enormous diamonds.
Annie
Lennox pulled her own drag stunt at the 1984 Grammys. Like Calderone, the
Eurythmics frontwoman sported sideburns, pompadour and simple black suit.
Lennox’s signature androgyny made this a convincing fashion statement, but she
was less embodying a fully realized character than doing a superficial, if
convincing, Elvis impression. In the Eurythmics’ “Who’s that Girl” video,
Lennox plays the double role of “Elvis” and a blonde-bombshell in pink
lipstick. Dated CGI allows the male and female Lennox to make out at the clip’s
conclusion, unifying Lennox’s dual personas in androgynous lust.
Each
of these flirtations with masculinity are accompanied by a “these guys are
really gals” reveal, distinguishing them from drag kings as what Judith Halberstam
calls “femme pretenders.” With the same queer-anxiety soothing disclaimer as
the Vegas show, each of these artists shows “how thoroughly her femininity
saturates her performance – she performs the failure of her masculinity as a
spectacle.” (Halberstam 250) Any exploration of masculinity only serves to
reinforce the feminine, a disclaimer that renders it commercially comfortable.
Calderone, in contrast, never tears off his suit, or even acknowledges that he
is being personified by Gaga, eliciting discomfort that is in and of itself
revealing. He remains firmly committed to his character, and gender, even when
he sings Gaga’s song...
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His
well-rehearsed speech completed, Calderone dashes to an upright piano to launch
into a barroom version of the foreshadowed “You and I.” A hidden band kicks in,
and the camera cuts to cartoonishly boyish pop star of the hour Justin Bieber
looking more hostile than confused, like no one told him rocknroll was gonna be
gay.
The
singer tears off his jacket, does another verse with Calderone-clone back-up
dancers,[vi]
announces the onstage arrival of Brian May[vii]
on lead guitar and closes the act by hurling himself atop and off the piano,
spraying beer into the bewildered crowd, and posing next to May with the
enthusiasm of a very confident and clearly wasted karaoke contestant.
The
relative banality of this song’s lyrics (“taste like whiskey/when you kiss me”
etc) and chord progression (which it must be noted May could wail on with his
hands tied behind his back) is drowned by the display of utter showmanship from
Gaga, for whom the margin between inventiveness in image and originality in
music has always been so suspiciously wide as to almost seem intentional.
The
performance doesn’t stop with the song. When he joins the audience to watch the
rest of the show, returns to the stage as an award presenter, and schmoozes
backstage, Calderone remains in character with an Andy Kauffman-like
commitment. Hardly a mention of the event will neglect to make particular note
of him using the men’s bathroom.
He has a back-story, corroborated in the Autumn/Winter 2010 Vogue Homme Japan:
origin (Palermo by way of Jersey) occupation (Mechanic), and identity in
relation to Gaga herself (erstwhile lover). At the post-show press conference,
Calderone responds to a reporter’s query, “What can you express as Calderone
that you can’t express as Gaga?” with a blank look and mumbled; “I don’t
undahstand the question.”[viii]
Extraordinarily,
Gaga plays the whole thing straight. She never gives an ironic wink, never
points to the Lady behind the curtain. She allows her audience to squirm, and
revels in the blurred boundaries of man/woman, costumed character/authentic
person, fantasy/reality. Calderone’s speech, with its exploration of
on-and-off-stage existence, and the 4th wall-breaking execution of the
character himself, illustrates Gaga’s comfort in ambiguity. The entire stunt is
a daring critique of cultural strictness, not only with regards to gender, but
to the authenticity of fame culture as well.
+ + +
At
the center of this frenzy of theatrics is Germanotta herself, a multiplicity of
“threats”: singer, dancer, writer, entrepreneur, media manipulator, sexual
provocateur. The audience wants, like Calderone wants of the woman he embodies
and desires, to get in thea,
inside that frenzy to understand what Gaga is really all about and why she does
the sensational things she does. Is this guy really a gal? What kind of
glittering underwear has he got on? Gaga resistance to a reveal not only
preserves the integrity of her invented character, but also transmits the
message that onstage or off, every person performs their gender and persona.
Uncompromising, she offers herself as an example. The roles she plays are as
real as the person creating them; her streamlined masculine persona is as real
as her hyper-feminine fashion statements or abject alter-egos. Maybe the “real”
Lady Gaga is the monstrous, the theatrical, the outsized, her characters, her
dopplegangers.
Maybe
that’s just who she is.
[i] hereafter MTV VMAs, an event whose name,
once charmingly redundant, is by now just short of being a total contradiction
in terms
[ii] “cums” is bleeped out by the MTV cameras
along with the numerous “fuckin’”s
[iv] rock’s most shameless expression of
heterosexual male lust and frustration, containing a significant consciousness
of attire which the Spears version changes from “how white my shirts can be” to
“how short my skirts can be”
[v] “Upgrade U” (‘07), “Obsessed” (‘09),
“Like a Boy” (‘07) and “My Love is Like..Wo” (‘03), respectively
[vi] None of whom appear to be women in drag,
but who can be sure?
[vii] of the incomparable 70’s rock band
Queen, and thus no stranger to shredding alongside a flamboyant frontman
[viii] along with untoward soundbites such as;
“Didn’t you jerk off to Britney when you were a kid?” and, “It’s fuckin’ bright
in heah!” and, in a response to an accusation of Guido-ness, “You got a problem
with Italians? Wassamatter wichyoo?” – all departures from Gaga’s typically
demure attitude with the press
Author
Bio:
Jennie Gruber is a Creative Non-Fiction Writing MFA
student at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also an award-winning
documentary filmmaker, zine-maker, and face-melting rocknroller. Her work has
been published in Whore! magazine, AORTA magazine, Mcsweeney’s The Believer,
and numerous Cleis Press anthologies. She has performed at San Francisco’s
Litquake along with a multitude of other reading series, academic panels, and
community educational events. Her preoccupations include shameless expressions
of transgressive sexual identities, the para-literary, and punk communities.
She lives in Brooklyn. imnotayoungmananymore.tumblr.com
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