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“Enough of Being Basely Tearful”: “Glitter and Be Gay” and the Camp Politics of Queer Resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2016

MATTHEW J. JONES
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Abstract

Upon its publication in 1759, Voltaire's Candide, or The Optimist scandalized Europe. Banned for its blasphemous and politically seditious content, it became a succès de scandale and one of the most widely read books of its time. Leonard Bernstein adapted Voltaire's work for the stage in the 1950s. With its emphasis on the improbable, the artificial, and the insouciant, Candide practically begs for a camp (re)interpretation, and it is just such an analysis I offer here. After outlining camp as social critique, I turn to Cunégonde's aria “Glitter and Be Gay” and trace its path through camp's causeways in two different decades: first, in the United States of the 1950s, a period marked by McCarthy's witch-hunts, Cold War anxieties, intense homophobia, and the composer's personal struggle to accept his homosexuality, and second, in the late 1980s, when singer, songwriter, and AIDS activist Michael Callen (1955–1993) recorded his own camped-up version of “Glitter and Be Gay” for what would become his last musical project, a posthumous double album entitled Legacy (1996). By following Cunégonde's sparkling trail of glitter and gemstones through two historical moments, I demonstrate how camp functions as a tool of queer resistance across the last half of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 422 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2016 

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References

References

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Atkinson, Brooks. “Review of Candide.” New York Times, 3 December 1956.Google Scholar
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McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Meyer, Moe, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
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Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
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Solie, Ruth A., ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” The Partisan Review (Fall 1964): 515–30. Reprinted in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edited by Fabio Cleto, 53–65. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Ware, J. Redding. Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase. London: Routledge & Sons, 1909.Google Scholar
Voltaire. Candide or the Optimist. Translated by Lowell Bair. New York: Bantam Books, 1959.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Collected Oscar Wilde. Edited by Angus, Fletcher. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard. Candide. Vocal score. New York: Schirmer Books, 1976.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard. Candide: Original Broadway Cast Recording (Expanded Edition). Sony Broadway Masterworks, 2003.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. Legacy. Significant Other Records, 1996.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. Purple Heart. Significant Other Records, 1988.Google Scholar
Wasser, Deborah. Legacy. Documentary film, 1993.Google Scholar
Verdi, Giuseppe. La traviata. Vocal score. New York: Dover, 1990.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Richard. Interview with author. 28 February 2012.Google Scholar
Michael Callen Papers, 1971–1996. The LGBT Community Center National History Archive. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center. New York, NY.Google Scholar
Atkinson, Brooks. “Review of Candide.” New York Times, 3 December 1956.Google Scholar
Baskes, Jeremy. Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard and Simeone, Nigel, eds. The Leonard Bernstein Letters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard. “Candide or Omnibus?” New York Times, 11 November 1956.Google Scholar
Burton, Humphrey. Leonard Bernstein. New York: Doubleday, 1994.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. In My Time: Essays on Sex, Science, and Politics, edited by Jeffrey Escoffier. Unpublished Manuscript, 1993.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. Surviving AIDS. New York: Harper-Collins, 1990.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. “Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been?” PWA Newsline Newsletter 40 (January 1989).Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. “AIDS as Identity.” PWA Newsline Newsletter 13 (June/July 1986).Google Scholar
Callen, Michael, Berkowitz, Richard, and Sonnabend, Joseph. “We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity.” The New York Native 50 (8 November 1982), 23–29.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1995.Google Scholar
Cleto, Fabio, ed. Camp Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Crimp, Douglas. “Portraits of People with AIDS.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula, 83–108. New York: Routledge, 1992. Reprinted in Crimp, Moralism and Melancholia: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Crimp, Douglas, and Ralston, Adam. AIDS DEMO GRAPHICS. San Francisco: Bay Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Crist, Elizabeth. “Mutual Responses in the Midst of an Era: Aaron Copland's The Tender Land and Leonard Bernstein's Candide .” Journal of Musicology 24, no. 4 (2004): 485–527.Google Scholar
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Halperin, David. How to Be Gay. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012.Google Scholar
Hughes, Walter. “In the Empire of the Beat.” In Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, edited by Ross, Andrew and Rose, Tricia, 147–57. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Jones, Matthew J. “How to Make Music in an Epidemic: Hearing AIDS, 1981–1996.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2014.Google Scholar
Jones, Matthew J.. “Something Inside So Strong: The Flirtations and the Queer Politics of A Cappella.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 28, no. 2 (2016): 142–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Vintage, 1993.Google Scholar
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York: Theater Communication Group, 2003.Google Scholar
Lassen, Christian. Camp Comforts: Reparative Gay Literature in Times of AIDS. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011.Google Scholar
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Meyer, Moe, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Miller, D. A. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Morris, Mitchell. “Reading as an Opera Queen.” In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Solie, Ruth, 184–200. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Román, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, Rev. ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve K. Touching Feeling: Affect, Feeling, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve K.. The Epistemology of the Closet. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Seldes, Barry. Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Shaw, Allen. Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Solie, Ruth A., ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” The Partisan Review (Fall 1964): 515–30. Reprinted in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Edited by Fabio Cleto, 53–65. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Ware, J. Redding. Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase. London: Routledge & Sons, 1909.Google Scholar
Voltaire. Candide or the Optimist. Translated by Lowell Bair. New York: Bantam Books, 1959.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Collected Oscar Wilde. Edited by Angus, Fletcher. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2007.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard. Candide. Vocal score. New York: Schirmer Books, 1976.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard. Candide: Original Broadway Cast Recording (Expanded Edition). Sony Broadway Masterworks, 2003.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. Legacy. Significant Other Records, 1996.Google Scholar
Callen, Michael. Purple Heart. Significant Other Records, 1988.Google Scholar
Wasser, Deborah. Legacy. Documentary film, 1993.Google Scholar
Verdi, Giuseppe. La traviata. Vocal score. New York: Dover, 1990.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Richard. Interview with author. 28 February 2012.Google Scholar