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Queer Kinship in the New York Underground: On the ‘Life and Legend’ of Jackie Curtis

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10486801.2011.561841

1477-2264

Giulia Palladini,

Social and Cultural Dynamics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The Song of Songs: A New Translation, ed. by Ariel and Chana Bloch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 77. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 87. The picture is in the Jackie Curtis Estate, held by Joe Preston, Jackie Curtis's cousin and the legal executor of his archive. Classical references on the subject include: Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris: Gallimard, 1909); and Claude Lèvi-Strauss, Le Structures élémentaires de la parentèle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique (Droz: Genève, 1972). Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 54. Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory’, in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, ed. by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2007), pp. 295–314 (p. 298). ‘Even the term “belong”, so central to kinship's basic function of determining who is connected to whom, suggests such literal proximity between bodies, for it comes from the Old English gelang, translated in the Oxford English Dictionary as “alongside”, or “at hand”’ (ibid., p. 298). Ibid., p. 299. This particular aspect of the 1960s New York downtown art scene (especially with reference to the major shift in the relation with the home and the family) has been stressed also in Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 33–80. Ellen Stewart was the founder of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, started in 1961 as Café La Mama, and still active today as a venue for international theatre in New York. In its long history, the La Mama theatre has been home to a number of downtown artists, most of whom engaged in a close relationship with Stewart, who was not only the producer of their work, but also a figure of reference and support. Especially in the early years, Stewart's apartment operated as an outgrowth of the theatre space itself, and often she would also nourish her associated artists, who, in addition, spent periods of time living there. For a detailed account on the history of La Mama, see: Stephen J. Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) pp. 83–104; Cindy Rosenthal, ‘La Mama of Us All’, The Drama Review, 50.2 (Summer 2006), 12–51. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Film of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonnè, 1 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 13. On the social relationships entailed (and literally exhibited) in Warhol's movies, see also Marc Siegel's reading of the network of relationships and appearances in the Warhol-based world as forms of ‘cooperation’, in Marc Siegel, ‘Doing it for Andy’, Art Journal, 62 (Spring 2003), 7–13. Freeman, ‘Queer Belongings’, p. 308. Ibid. Jackie Curtis, Glamour, Glory and Gold: The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star, unpublished script, the Jackie Curtis Estate, p. 12. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 26 Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 58. See Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (Phoenix: Associated Professional Service, 1965). See Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars and the Cult of Celebrity (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, ed. by Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1998). First introduced in Edgar Morin, The Stars (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 20–32. Gertrude Stein, Sacred Emily, in Geographies and Plays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 187. Jack Smith, ‘The Perfect Appositeness of Maria Montez’, Film Culture, 27 (Winter 1962–1963), 28–36. Candy Darling – birth name James Lawrence Slattery - was one of the most famous drag queens in the 1960s underground scene, and an outstanding Warhol Superstar. She was one of Jackie's best friends and performed in three of his plays: Glamour, Glory and Gold (1967), Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit (1969) and Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned (1971). Tennesee Williams wrote for her and cast her in the role of Violet in the play Small Craft Warnings, which premiered in April 1972 at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre in New York. Candy was portrayed by several famous photographers, such as Francesco Scavullo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon and Peter Hujar. She died in 1974 of leukaemia (believed to be induced by illegal hormones she had taken for years). Lately director James Rasin realized a documentary film on Candy Darling, which premiered at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival: Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar (JJay Productions, 2010). See also: My Face for the World to See: The Diaries, Letters and Drawings of Candy Darling, ed. by Jeremiah Newton, Francesca Passalacqua and D. E. Hardy (San Francisco: Hardy Marks Publications, 1977). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 137. See, for instance, Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Senelick's book also features a picture of Curtis mis-captioned as ‘Candy Darling’. In Marranca and Dasgupta's introduction to their collection of plays entitled Theatre of the Ridiculous (including works by Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel, Charles Ludlam and Kenneth Bernard), Curtis's name only appears in a list (an arguable one, in fact) of artists to which the editors ascribe the label ‘ridiculous’. See Theatre of the Ridiculous, ed. by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; 1998), p. xiv. It must be acknowledged that lately Craig Highberger (Jackie's long-term friend and associate) has realized a documentary on Curtis's persona, entitled Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (2005). The movie is an important contribution which offers an account of the multifaceted aspects of Curtis's as an artistic figure, and stands as a remarkable archival gesture, in so far as it collects together a number of interviews, footage material from Jackie's plays and from the movies he starred in, and large collections of photographs, most of which were shot by Highberger himself through the years he has known Curtis (some of these photographs also illustrate this article, thanks to the Highbergers permission). Superstar in a Housedress certainly fills a gap in the knowledge and circulation of Jackie Curtis's work and seems to contribute to (and engage in a dialogue with) an overall blossoming of important documentary films released in the last decade, all focusing on more or less marginal figures of the 1960s underground scene, such as the above-mentioned James Raisin's Beautiful Darling, Vincent Fremont and Shelly Dunn's Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story (2000), Mary Jordan's Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2006). Several recollections by Jackie's friends and associates address Jackie's imprecise and idiosyncratic drag style, as well as his periods of scarce personal hygiene - for instance, in the above-mentioned documentary Superstar in a Housedress. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, The Partisan Review, 31 (Fall 1964), 515–531; this article also appears in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966). See Jill Dolan, ‘Women's Theatre Program ATA: Creating a Feminist Forum’, Women and Performance, I.2 (1984), 5–13. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 117–118. On this issue, see Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). On charivari, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 97–123. On the influence of the English mock-weddings tradition on American culture, see Senelick, The Changing Room, pp. 350–359. See also Craig Thompson Friend, ‘The Womanless Wedding: Masculinity, Cross Dressing and Gender Inversions in the Modern South’, in Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction, ed. by Craig T. Friend (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), pp. 219–245. On festivity and ‘state of exception’ in carnivalesque culture (in which the womanless wedding is rooted), see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Stewart, On Longing, p. 119. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, p. 280. Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations’, New Literary History, 3 (2000), 727–744 (p. 728). Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harvest Books, 1977), pp. 54–55. In the pre-release reports, Women in Revolt was referred to under other titles as Sex (a possible homage to Mae West), Andy Warhol's PIGs, and Andy Warhol's Women. Some scholars have detected in the ironic acronyms a reference to the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), the radical feminist organization founded by Valerie Solanas, who had shot Warhol only two years before the movie was released. On Women in Revolt, see Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrisey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 55–61. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10 (1929), 303–313. Judith Butler, ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’, in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 132–166. Ibid. Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 25. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), p. 62. Ibid., p. 62 On Max's Kansas City and the social dynamic of celebrities, see Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin (Ed.), High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max's Kansas City (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1998). Cited by Steven Watson in Highberger, Superstar in a Housedress, p. 39. Dotson Reader, ‘Twilight of a Tribe: The Wedding That Wasn't’, Village Voice, 42 (31 July 1969). José Muñoz, ‘The White to Be Angry’, Social Text, 15.52/53 (Fall-Winter 1997), 80–103. Barthes, Eiffel Tower, p. 25. Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 4–5. Reader, ‘Twilight of a Tribe’. See for instance, Tom E. Brown, ‘The Love Life of Jackie Curtis’, Interview, 4 July 1971, p. 26. See Vichi Richman, ‘An Interview with Jackie Curtis Part I: “Even Garbo Rearranged Her Jewels!”’, Gay Power, 1 May 1972, p. 16; ‘An Interview with Jackie Curtis Part II: I Started as a Baby!’, Gay Power, 15 May 1972, pp. 17–18. Jonathan Rosenbaum, WR, Sex and the Art of Radical Juxtaposition, 18 June 2007, Criterion DVD collection booklet (http://www.criterion.com) [accessed 13 December 2010]. I am here referring mainly to oral accounts of Jackie Curtis's associates whom I had the chance to talk to in New York, such as Ruby Lynn Rayner and Ellen Stewart. I think it is also significant to report the following anecdote provided by Lee Black Childers: ‘Once Jackie was confronted at a party by one of those intense revolutionaries that were so numerous and vociferous in the late sixties. Wild-eyed, frizzy-haired, and with little droplets of California hearty burgundy spraying as she talked, he pulled at her dress, pointed at the glitter on her eyelids, and shouted, “What do you think you're doing? Do you realize there's a revolution on?” Jackie looked at him and replied, “I do more revolution just walking down the street every day than you do with all your leaflets and pamphlets and crap”’ (Lee Black Childers, in Sewall-Ruskin, High on Rebellion, p. 145). Douglas Crimp, ‘Mario Montez, For Shame’, in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. by Stephem Barber and David L. Clark (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 57–70. See also Douglas Crimp, ‘Getting the Warhol We Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture’, Invisible Culture, 1 (1999) (http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/crimp/crimp.html) [accessed 16 March 2009]. Crimp, ‘Mario Montez, For Shame’, p. 58. My reading of Jackie's wedding performances in relation to the 1960s queer culture finds an interesting point of dialogue with the conceptualization of ‘camp effects’ developed by Dominic Johnson in relationship to Jack Smith's work, where Johnson suggests that his argument ‘entails reading camp effects as hieroglyphs’, in order to show how ‘camp practices might retain the thought of some other form of meeting, a precarious speaking, tongues glancing across the surfaces of words, and thoughts, and skins’ (Dominic Johnson, ‘The Wound Kept Open: Jack Smith, Queer Performance and Cultural Failure’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 17.1 (March 2007), 3–18 (p. 6). Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47–64 (p. 50). Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 48. Muñoz, ‘The White to Be Angry’, p. 83. Bourdieu, Equisse d'une theorie de la pratique. Freeman, ‘Queer Belongings’, p. 298. Bourdieu, Le sense pratique, p. 54. Kracauer, ‘Photography’, p. 50. Jackie Curtis, Husband Number Six: Peter Groby, in Jackie Curtis, Wild Orchids (Corte Madera: Accent Editions, 1983). Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 142–148 (p. 147).