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Tout de Fruity
Jul. 16th, 2008 12:47 pmSome people say I dress too gay,
but every day I feel so gay,
and when I'm gay I dress that way.
Is something wrong with that? Noooo!
-- "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" sung by Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here (1943)
In 1939, producer Lee Schubert spotted Carmen in Rio and signed her for his Broadway show, The Streets of Paris. ... The show, and Carmen, became the biggest sensations of the summer of '39. Immediately, imitators sprang up, and the Carmen Miranda look was adopted by both fashionable society ladies and cutting-edge drag queens.
--Eve Golden, The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat: The Short, Dazzling Career of Carmen Miranda
Miranda was, for all the variety of her cultural cross-dressing, in some sense also and above all a drag queen proper. As slyly sensuous as her movements may have been, there was something markedly unsexy about what she did with her body (even the notorious accidental beaver shot, taken one day on the set of Weekend in Havana when she forgot to wear panties under her skirts and later circulated throughout Hollywood, seems curiously devoid of prurient effect) -- all her florid femininity was displaced instead onto her costume and make-up, the drag queen's tools of first resort. It's no surprise, then, that the rediscovery of Miranda in the North coincided with camp's genderbending moment in the pop sun, the early '70s heyday of glam-rock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and (what do you know) Ken Russell. Miranda's supremely superficial sexuality fit right in with the period's foregrounding of the social construction of gender, joining in what Andrew Ross and other cultural critics have called a premonition of the anti-essentialist sexual politics that have lately become so trendy and so useful.
--Julian Dibbell, Notes on Carmen: A Few Things We Have Yet To Learn From History's Most Incandescent Cross-Dresser
Dibbell's comments (the whole essay is well worth the read) describe how I feel about a number of glamorous stars, such as Mae West, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and even Dolly Parton. It has always seemed to me that they were women in female drag, and I don't find them particularly sexy. Partly it's that they seem to be wearing a mask -- often a mask of heavy make-up (which I'm not a big fan of), but also a mask of iconography. To a certain extent all movie stars have it. They have a Face, and it conceals more than it reveals. Even a beautiful Face is off-putting in that way, and therefore a lot of Hollywood beauty is not beautiful to me.
I'm also reminded of a woman I used to know who, while not uber-feminine at all (although certainly a bit girly), always looked like a drag queen to me, even when dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. There was something masculine about the way she held herself, I think, but I've never been able to pin it down. She had been a fairly butch dyke for a while when she was younger, and it's possible that what I was picking up was that when she returned to playing it straight, as it were, it was something she did consciously, which may have lended an air of artifice to it.
but every day I feel so gay,
and when I'm gay I dress that way.
Is something wrong with that? Noooo!
-- "The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" sung by Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here (1943)
In 1939, producer Lee Schubert spotted Carmen in Rio and signed her for his Broadway show, The Streets of Paris. ... The show, and Carmen, became the biggest sensations of the summer of '39. Immediately, imitators sprang up, and the Carmen Miranda look was adopted by both fashionable society ladies and cutting-edge drag queens.
--Eve Golden, The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat: The Short, Dazzling Career of Carmen Miranda
Miranda was, for all the variety of her cultural cross-dressing, in some sense also and above all a drag queen proper. As slyly sensuous as her movements may have been, there was something markedly unsexy about what she did with her body (even the notorious accidental beaver shot, taken one day on the set of Weekend in Havana when she forgot to wear panties under her skirts and later circulated throughout Hollywood, seems curiously devoid of prurient effect) -- all her florid femininity was displaced instead onto her costume and make-up, the drag queen's tools of first resort. It's no surprise, then, that the rediscovery of Miranda in the North coincided with camp's genderbending moment in the pop sun, the early '70s heyday of glam-rock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and (what do you know) Ken Russell. Miranda's supremely superficial sexuality fit right in with the period's foregrounding of the social construction of gender, joining in what Andrew Ross and other cultural critics have called a premonition of the anti-essentialist sexual politics that have lately become so trendy and so useful.
--Julian Dibbell, Notes on Carmen: A Few Things We Have Yet To Learn From History's Most Incandescent Cross-Dresser
Dibbell's comments (the whole essay is well worth the read) describe how I feel about a number of glamorous stars, such as Mae West, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and even Dolly Parton. It has always seemed to me that they were women in female drag, and I don't find them particularly sexy. Partly it's that they seem to be wearing a mask -- often a mask of heavy make-up (which I'm not a big fan of), but also a mask of iconography. To a certain extent all movie stars have it. They have a Face, and it conceals more than it reveals. Even a beautiful Face is off-putting in that way, and therefore a lot of Hollywood beauty is not beautiful to me.
I'm also reminded of a woman I used to know who, while not uber-feminine at all (although certainly a bit girly), always looked like a drag queen to me, even when dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. There was something masculine about the way she held herself, I think, but I've never been able to pin it down. She had been a fairly butch dyke for a while when she was younger, and it's possible that what I was picking up was that when she returned to playing it straight, as it were, it was something she did consciously, which may have lended an air of artifice to it.
