Camera Obscura
Tom Hanks as Andy Beckett in Philadelphia
(dir. Jonathan Demme, US, 1993)
Published by Duke University Press
Camera Obscura
The Fabulous Sublimity of
Gay Diva Worship
Brett Farmer
At the beginning of his collection of essays in queer studies,
Jeffrey Escoffier makes the at once portentous and banal assertion that “the moment of acknowledging to oneself homosexual
desires and feelings . . . and then licensing oneself to act . . . is
the central drama of the homosexual self.” That “moment of selfclassification,” he explains, “is an emergency—sublime, horrible,
wonderful—in the life of anyone who must confront it.”1 In the
theater of my own biography, I am unsure how or when I first
played out this epiphanic drama of queer self-acknowledgment,
but I can vividly recall the first time someone else enacted it for
me. In elementary school, at the age of ten, a fellow pupil cornered me in the school playground and announced with calculated precocity to anyone who cared to listen that I was, as he put
it, “a homo.” Unlike some of my congregated peers whose chorus
of “what’s a homo?” provoked a dizzying exchange of infantile
misinformation, I was only too well aware of the term’s meaning
and, shocked that my queerness should not only be revealed but
be so transparently legible that even a boorish bully might detect
it, I slid away in fearful embarrassment. What proved most unsetCopyright © 2005 by Camera Obscura
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tling to me, however, was that my nascent homosexuality should
have been evidenced in this playground spectacle of queer exposure not on the basis of same-sex desire but on the basis rather of
passionate devotion to a woman.
Earlier that day, our schoolteacher had directed us to write
and then read aloud to the class a composition titled “My Hero.”
Where most of my classmates wrote predictable tributes to normative role models of the time like Neil Armstrong, Greg Chappell,
Muhammad Ali, and even Jesus Christ, I penned an effusive homage to what I described in the essay as that “radiant star of stage
and screen, Miss Julie Andrews.” It was this profession of ardent
admiration for a female film star that led directly to my schoolyard outing. As my accuser put it when explicating the deductive
rationale behind his sexual detection, “Only a homo would love
Julie Andrews!” Even at age ten, the paradoxical (il)logic of this
formulation was so glaring as to all but slap me hard across the
face—an action transposed from the metaphoric to the literal
by my playground adversary who, not content to let “the homo”
escape too readily or lightly, pursued me across the schoolyard
and pushed me face-first into the asphalt. How could my declaration of desire for a female star—which in strictly definitional
terms should have seemed, if anything, eminently heterosexual—
be taken so assuredly as a marker of homosexuality? Why and how
could my loving Julie Andrews provoke such an explosive manifestation of juvenile homophobia? The answers to these questions
were already known, if only intuitively and, thus, only partially, to
the ten-year-old me. Like many other elements of my childhood,
my love for Julie Andrews formed part of what I was fast recognizing was an ever-expanding and ever-consolidating category of bad
object-choices: a diverse array of cultural and social cathexes variously abjected, proscribed, or deemed otherwise inconsonant with
dominant modes of sexual selfhood. Redefined as an indexical
symptom of sexual dissonance, my devotion to Andrews suddenly
became a catalytic signifier of shame, a palpable marker of my
failure to achieve heteronormality and, thus, another attachment
to cache away in the cavernous closet of protogay childhood.
That this scenario will sound instantly familiar to many is
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evidence of the extent to which a politics of shame is routinely
mobilized—most potently, though by no means exclusively, in
childhood—to stigmatize and thus discipline queer subjectivities.
Much of the breathtaking success with which mainstream culture is able to install and mandate a heteronormative economy
depends directly on its ability to foster a correlative economy of
queer shame through which to disgrace and thus delegitimate all
that falls outside the narrow purview of straight sexualities. Not
that such processes of juridical stigmatization are necessarily successful. Shameful and shameless are, after all, but a suffix apart, and
a good deal of the productivity of queer cultures—as of queer
lives—resides precisely in the extraordinary capacity they obtain
for not only clinging stubbornly and defiantly to the outlawed
objects of their desire but also investing these objects with a nearinexhaustible source of vitalizing energy. The scene of my schoolyard shaming may have effected a public occlusion of my love for
Julie Andrews, but it in no way quelled or attenuated that love.
Indeed, transformed into a sign of my developing homosexuality,
my attachment to Andrews became more than ever an integral
component of my subjectivity and an indefatigable resource for
survival in the face of what I perceived to be an unaccommodating social world.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dubs these survivalist dynamics of
queer culture “reparative” in the sense given the term by objectrelations theory as an affirmative impulse to repair or make good
the losses of subjective constitution. Unlike the competing paranoid positionality, which in object-relations theory is understood
to fracture the world into colliding part-objects and is marked
by “hatred, envy, and anxiety,” the reparative dynamic is marked
by love and seeks to reassemble or repair the subject’s world into
“something like a whole” that is “available both to be identified
with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.” 2 For
Sedgwick, this idea of a reparative impulse speaks powerfully to
the inventive and obstinate ways in which queer subjects negotiate spaces of self-affirmation in the face of a hostile environment,
or, as she evocatively puts it, the ways in which queer “selves and
communities succeed in extracting sustenance from . . . a culture
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whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (35). As
a paradigmatic example of and governing trope for this reparative tradition of queer survivalism, Sedgwick offers, significantly
for my purposes, the image of the protoqueer child or adolescent
ardently (over)attached to a cultural text or object, passionately
investing that text or object with almost talismanic properties to
repair or make good a damaged socius. “Such a child,” she writes,
“is reading for important news about herself, [even] without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer” (2–3).
This characterization of a reparatively positioned protoqueer reader resonates profoundly with my own fiercely loving
attachments to Julie Andrews. Much of the energy of these attachments—certainly in childhood and, perhaps less urgently but no
less decisively, in adulthood—springs directly from the reparative
performances to which this particular star has been cast in the
playhouse of my own imaginary. To wit: a cherished ritual from
childhood. In the days when I was growing up, the days before
VCRs and cable television, my Andrews fandom was of necessity
organized less around her films than around her recordings.
While I had of course seen her films, and these were vital, generative sites for my fan passions, the primary focus for those passions—where they were practiced, indulged, nurtured—was her
vocal recordings. On long, listless afternoons, returned home
from school, I would rush to the living room, position myself
squarely in front of the family hi-fi and blissfully listen my way
through my expansive collection of Julie Andrews LPs. My favorite, without doubt, was the soundtrack recording for The Sound of
Music, which I would play and replay for hours. I can still recall the
palpable sense of breathless anticipation when, unsheathed from
its cover and reverently placed on the turntable, the disc would
crackle to life. A whispering breath of wind, an echo of birdsong,
a rapid swell of violins, and Julie’s inimitable voice would break
forth in fortissimo triumph, leaping through the speakers and
enveloping the room with melodic abundance. To augment the
sense of excitement, I would, while listening, gaze intently at the
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record cover with its celebrated image of Julie leaping in midflight
like a preternatural oread, skirt billowing up with carefree delight,
arms swinging open in joyous welcome, effortlessly holding aloft
a guitar case and a traveling bag, twin symbols of musical expressivity and liberating escape. Projecting myself into the scene, I
would twirl with Julie in imaginary freedom, riding the crest of
her crystalline voice in rapturous transport from the suburban
mundanities of family, school, and straightness. Invested with
the attentive love and astonishing creativity of juvenile fandom,
Andrews provided not just the promissory vision of a life different
from and infinitely freer than the one I knew, but the phantasmatic means through which to achieve and sustain this process of
transcendence. If I adored Julie Andrews as a child, it was because
that adoration functioned as a process through which to resist
and transfigure the oppressive banalities of the heteronormative
everyday.
Though unaware of it at the time, my childhood mobilization of a female star as a vehicle of and for quotidian transcendence
has a long and rich pedigree in queer cultures, especially male
homosexual cultures. From the enthusiasms of the nineteenthcentury dandies for operatic prime donne and the fervent gay cult
followings in the mid-twentieth century of Hollywood stars such
as Judy Garland and Bette Davis, to contemporary queer celebrations of pop goddesses like Madonna, Cher, Kylie Minogue, and
Jennifer Lopez, female star adoration or, as it is more commonly
known in queer contexts, “diva worship” has been a vital staple of
gay male cultural production, where it has sustained a spectacularly diverse array of insistently queer pleasures.3 While loath to
generalize its heterogeneous functions and values, I submit that
much of the enduring vitality of diva worship in gay male cultures
resides in the commodious scope it affords for reparative cultural
labor. Most critical discussions of gay diva worship posit in some
fashion that gay men engage divas as imaginary figures of therapeutic escapism. “At the very heart of gay diva worship,” opines
Daniel Harris, is “the almost universal homosexual experience
of ostracism and insecurity” and the desire to “elevate [one]self
above [one’s] antagonistic surroundings.”4 Wayne Koestenbaum
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similarly claims that “gay culture has perfected the art of mimicking a diva—of pretending, inside, to be divine—to help the stigmatized self imagine it is received, believed, and adored.”5 Tuned to
the chord of reparative amelioration, diva worship emerges here
as a practice of resistant queer utopianism, or what might be more
suggestively termed queer sublimity: the transcendence of a limiting
heteronormative materiality and the sublime reconstruction, at
least in fantasy, of a more capacious, kinder, queerer world.
Significantly, the category of the sublime has fundamental and enduring associations with queerness. One could even go
so far as to suggest that queerness is the sublime within a different nomenclature and critical idiom. In its traditional Romantic
form, the sublime nominates the delirious feeling of metaphysical
ecstasy that is evoked by certain unlimited, immense, or incomprehensible phenomena: “a quality of overwhelming power which, in
a flash of intensity could ravish the soul with a sudden transport of
thought or feeling.”6 Conventionally associated with the awesome
power of nature, the sublime is frequently cast in this classic tradition as a mode of religious transcendence, an apprehension of the
divine through an encounter with that which exceeds the limits
of everyday experience and cognition. In contemporary critical
theory, the concept of the sublime has been inevitably revised
and updated. Congruent with the increased secularization of the
modern age, it has lost much of its overt religious significance,
and the range of objects potentially evocative of sublimity has
broadened to include not just natural but artistic, architectural,
and even—following David E. Nye’s influential claims—technological, electrical, and consumerist phenomena.7 Yet the dynamic
structure of the sublime as a radical discontinuity in sensory experience through which the quotidian is ruptured and transposed
remains essentially the same. Jean François Lyotard, for example,
defines the contemporary, or what he terms postmodern, sublime
as “that which . . . puts forward the unpresentable in presentation
itself” and, by so doing, enables “new presentations” of identity
and thought.8
It is in this context that sublimity assumes its queer correspondences, for like queerness it is effectively a project of cat-
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egorical rupture, a breaching of conventional subjective boundaries that encounters and imagines the obscene or excluded
otherness of discursive normativity. Etymologically derived from
the Latin sub-limen, meaning to move up or through a threshold, the sublime enacts a constitutive process of border crossing,
a breaching and renegotiation of the definitional divisions that
order hegemonic taxonomies, or what Michael Warner memorably terms “regimes of the normal.”9 Frequently allied to notions of
sexual dissidence and transgression, even within its conventional
form—Warren Stevenson, for example, argues that a discourse of
psychic androgyny, “a transcendence of self and sex,” is integral to
the Romantic sublime—the border crossings of sublimity obtain
immediate and wide-ranging queer import.10
Without doubt, it is the enormous potential of diva worship
for the transgression and disorganization of various categorical
boundaries that marks much of its transcendent sublime effect.
The categorical binarism of sexual difference, of male/female, is
the most obvious casualty of gay diva worship—grounded as it is
in a sustained male identificatory cathexis of the feminine—but
it is merely one of many. Other cherished cultural distinctions,
including those of generation, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality, are equally disrupted in practices of diva worship, as are the
even more vital ontological binarisms of self/other, subject/object,
image/reality, and identification/desire. Indeed, the categorical
crisscrossings of gay diva worship are so multiple and insistent as
to destabilize that which they would seem ostensibly to articulate:
the distinction homosexual/heterosexual. While many commentators assert that gay men’s interest in divas is essentially platonic,
functioning in the register of what Stephen Maddison terms
“heterosocial bonding,” the overwhelming intensity of affect and
obsessive passion at the heart of diva worship problematize any
simple attempt to void it entirely of heteroeroticism.11 Diva worship may be a central forum for the production of identitarian
discourses of gayness, but its constitutive predication upon a hetero-oriented desire introduces a fundamental excess into those
discourses that undercuts any notion of an essential, stable male
homosexuality. It is a process of radical discursive rupture that
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importantly if paradoxically invests gay diva worship with its wideranging scope for sublime transcendence and utopian queer
reconstruction.
To anchor gay diva worship to the transcendent operations
of sublimity in this way risks courting arguments, popularized
in some recent gay commentaries, that it has become an increasingly outdated practice because it is invested in social and affective conditions that no longer prevail. In his summarily titled The
Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, Daniel Harris claims that diva worship
has declined in contemporary gay culture to the point of virtual
obsolescence because the oppressive social and political environments of disenfranchisement and alienation that once made it a
vital practice of utopian escapism for gay men have ceded to a
new liberal era of acceptance and assimilation. It is a heroic narrative of Darwinian supersession that Harris pegs quite specifically
to the historical watershed of Stonewall as symbolic index of gay
liberation. “Before Stonewall,” he writes, gay men turned to divas
as “a therapeutic corrective” with which “to counteract their own
sense of powerlessness as a vilified minority” and “triumph . . .
over the daily indignities of being gay,” but the increasing social
tolerance of the post-Stonewall era and the development of more
open, assertive gay male identities and cultures have attenuated
the oppressive conditions that traditionally inspired and governed
diva worship, making the latter ever more irrelevant to the needs
of contemporary queer life.12 “For gay men under the age of 40,”
he writes, the diva “has become the symbolic icon of an oppressed
early stage in gay culture,” “the politically repugnant fantasy of
the self-loathing pansy whose dependence on the escapism of cinema [or opera, theater, music, etc.] must be ritually purged from
his system.”13
There can be little argument that the advent of gay liberation has had wide-ranging, radical impacts on queer identities
and cultures, and I do not doubt that practices of diva worship
have changed as a result, but it would be wrong, or at the very
least unhelpful, to consign gay diva worship to the historical dustbin of pre-Stonewall obsolescence. Not only does it disregard the
presence of diva worship in contemporary queer cultural produc-
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tions—in which, contrary to Harris’s sweeping claims, female stars
continue to function as significant, highly visible foci of investment and are often openly styled and marketed as such14 —it also
enforces a reductive reading of gay cultures that ignores—indeed
does not even allow for—historical persistences and continuities.
Though hardly the first to do so, Harris works with an artificially
rigid, homogenizing division of queer history into mutually exclusive, self-contained categories of pre- and post-Stonewall, in which
the former is freighted with all the negative signs of queer experience—oppression, marginalization, shame: in short, the tropology of the closet—and the latter emerges as its sunny, rainbow
flag–waving antithesis. Within such a representational schema,
diva worship, in its traditional capacity as practice of transcendent
queer utopianism, can be understood only as an outmoded anachronism with no place in, let alone relevance for, the liberated cultural economies of post-Stonewall gay pride. Again, I would not
want to diminish the important social and political advances that
have been realized in the wake of gay liberation, but just as preStonewall homosexual cultures were hardly absolute wells of loneliness devoid of any sense of empowerment, self-worth, and joy,
contemporary post-Stonewall gay cultures are certainly not quit
of those painful experiences of exclusion and oppression that
continue to be structural features of queer selfhood in a heteronormative world.15 Further, as I hope my discussion will by this
stage at least have signaled, gay diva worship may take much of
its initial affective drive from the emotional vicissitudes of queer
pathos, but its operative value, that which assures and sustains its
continued vitality as a productive practice of queer cultural life, is
precisely the transcendence of those oppressive deformations, the
social exclusions and impossibilities, that occasion queer pathos in
the first place. It is in essence an exercise in queer empowerment,
a restorative amendment in which the aberrant excesses and lifeaffirming energies of divadom are harnessed to variable projects
of queer authorization and becoming: something that remains
pressingly relevant, even indispensable.16
The transcendent dynamics evoked by what I am calling
the queer sublimity of diva reception form a standard, if variably
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articulated, element of many textual representations of gay diva
worship. A particularly celebrated example, and one that offers
a crystalline illustration of the sorts of issues outlined here, is the
“Mamma morta” sequence—or what Roy Grundmann and Peter
Sacks dub the “infamous opera scene”—in Jonathan Demme’s
earnest 1993 social message film, Philadelphia (US).17 A hybrid
deathbed melodrama cum social realist film cum courtroom
drama, Philadelphia is widely considered a historical landmark as
the first mainstream Hollywood film to deal centrally and openly
with the AIDS crisis. Andy Beckett (Tom Hanks) is a gay PWA who
has been fired from his position at a high-profile Philadelphia
law firm after his HIV status is discovered. Facing discrimination
at every turn, Andy decides to file a lawsuit for unfair dismissal
against his former employers and enlists the professional help of
a straight attorney, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington). True to his
name, Joe functions in Philadelphia as the textual embodiment of
mainstream normativity, the everyman through which the film
articulates and peddles its liberal message of tolerance. Indeed
more than one critic has claimed that, despite its ostensible focus
on the plight of gay Andy, Philadelphia is effectively the story of
straight Joe, who is at once the agent of narrative action and the
lodestone of audience identification. Initially reluctant to take
Andy on as a client, Joe is progressively forced in the film to confront and reassess his own prejudiced views of both gay men and
PWAs, thus as Dennis Allen notes, “playing out, on the level of the
individual, the larger abstract narrative of social acceptance” that
is foundational to the film’s generic and ideological profile.18
Situated halfway through the film’s 120-minute running
time and thus literally at its heart, the “Mamma morta” sequence
is vital to Philadelphia’s diegetic and rhetorical economies. Joe is
in Andy’s apartment to finish details before the start of court proceedings the following day. Having just spent the evening with
Andy and his partner at “a gay party,” Joe is evidently unsettled
and, in an effort to regain some measure of experiential equilibrium, is keen to get back to the familiar stability of work. Sitting across the table from Andy, he repeatedly attempts to focus
attention on the pending court case but is consistently foiled as
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Andy steers the conversation into ever more abstract, metaphysical directions before finally launching into an ecstatic reverie
inspired by Maria Callas’s performance of “La mamma morta,”
an aria from Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, which is playing in the background as diegetic music through the apartment’s
stereo system. Rising from his chair, Andy turns up the volume
and, to Joe’s obvious consternation, becomes transported by the
music, surrendering himself entirely to the rapturous lure of Callas’s voice, waltzing across the floor in a burnished red glow, tears
streaming down his face.
In his review of the film, Andrew Sullivan calls Philadelphia
“a work of translation” because its function is, as he sees it, to translate between divergent cultural registers: most notably, between
homosexual and heterosexual as the film strives to reframe and
interpret gay experiences and dynamics for the straight audiences that are its intended addressees.19 This is why Philadelphia
is so “unsettling,” he suggests, and why it seems to fail on so many
critical fronts because it must speak with translation’s in-between
voice. Certainly the “Mamma morta” sequence enshrines an obvious logic of translation: quite literally, as Andy interprets the Italian lyrics of the Callas aria into English, but also more abstractly,
as he seeks to paraphrase and explain to Joe both his operatic
and, by metonymic index, his sexual desires. In fact, the scene
assumes something of a pedagogic structure with Andy an impassioned if histrionic teacher to Joe’s curious if reluctant pupil. It is
a structure that has raised the ire of several commentators. John
Simon of the National Review, for example, lambastes the scene
as “tasteless, patronizing and offensive” because it implies that
“homosexuals . . . have something wonderful to impart to the rest
of us ignorant slobs.”20 At the other end of the spectrum, gay critics Roy Grundmann and Peter Sacks attack the scene for what they
see as its “misappropriation of gay culture” in the service of an
“ethnographic perspective” that objectifies Andy as a sort of gay
“noble savage” displayed for the instruction or simple entertainment of a straight spectatorship.21 More recently, Charles I. Nero
mounts a revealing critique of what he terms the trope of “operatic tutelage” in Philadelphia, as well as a number of other films of
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the mid-nineties, for its investment in a sexist and racist structure
of Eurocentric male homosociality.22 As he reads it, Andy’s “gift”
of opera to Joe functions ostensibly as a symbolic contract—a
male traffic in opera divas—whereby a culturally superior white
man uses the recorded voice of the female soprano to enlighten
and forge friendship with a socially subordinate man of color.
I would not want to discount the legitimacy and insight
of these critiques, but there is another—and to my mind more
interesting—process of translation at work in the scene than the
nominally liberal, educative, homosocial one between Andy and
Joe, and that is the translation that takes place between Andy and
the diva. Pace a reading like Nero’s, for example, which apprehends the voice of the diva as a subsidiary vehicle of exchange
within the primary medium of male bonding, I would suggest that
Andy’s relationship to the diva is a crucial medium of exchange in
its own right. In many ways, the latter relationship is the focus of
the sequence—certainly its primary source of semiotic power—
and it is one that quickly moves to marginalize if not displace all
other relational networks. Entering deeper into his reverie, Andy
increasingly diminishes his external engagement with Joe and his
surroundings—turning away, closing his eyes—while correspondingly expanding and intensifying his engagement with the vocal
presence of the diva. It is a movement that is signaled quite openly
at the level of speech by a marked grammatical transition from an
initial structure of standard interpersonal dialogue and secondperson narration (“This is Maddalena. Do you hear the heartache
in her voice? . . . Can you feel it, Joe?”) to a much more fluid syntax where Andy assumes and speaks in the first-person subjective
of, variously, Callas, the diegetic subject of the aria, Maddalena,
and even Maddalena’s dead mother: a syntactic slide of mobile
identifications that culminates in a final audacious embodiment
of divinity itself. “I am divine, I am oblivion,” Andy cries through
the ventriloquial agency of the diva’s voice before finally reaching for and, in frenetic mime, nailing the piercing high note that
marks both the aria’s and the sequence’s emotional crescendo.
Descending from the climax, his body quivering in metaphoric
glissando, Andy weeps the closing doublet of the aria, “I am love,
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I am love,” a deep sob swallowing the last word, so that all that
comes out is an open-ended “I am . . .” A more forceful articulation of the sublime effects of gay diva worship could scarcely be
imagined. His ferociously loving engagement with the diva produces for Andy not just an overwhelming transport of feeling, but
also a delirious transcendence of embodied identity itself. Moving blithely across the multiple positions of the diva’s fluid performativity, Andy enacts what Dennis Allen terms an “osmosis of
the self,” a rupturing of the boundaries that frame and constitute
identity and a radical dispersal of the self across the differential
field of alterity.23
It is a movement of structural rupture and dissolution that
is equally and openly replicated in the sequence at the level of
textual form, with the carefully composed two-shots, measured
continuity editing, and general classical realism that mark the
opening scenes of the sequence ceding to a high expressionist
aesthetic of canted angles, colored gels, and chiaroscuro lighting.
The overall effect is an intensely melodramatic articulation of
the transcendent sublimity of diva worship where the passionate
encounter between the diva and her gay male devotee is signaled
as and through a rapturous breakdown of conventional systems of
textuality, meaning, and representation. As this aesthetic excess
might indicate, the operations of melodrama are crucial to the
sequence’s staging of the disorganizational impulses of queer diva
worship. Indeed, the sequence is so heavily invested in a melodramatic formal economy—featuring many of its generic elements,
from overwrought emotionalism and histrionic mise-en-scène to a
pathos-filled scenario focused on moral injustice and suffering—
that it effectively functions as what Lea Jacobs terms a “situation,”
a high moment of spectacular arrest that serves to crystallize the
melodramatic text’s foundational emotional dilemmas.24 Literalized in the Delsartean tableaux of classical stage melodramas, the
convention of the situation—which Jacobs posits as a core element
of the mode—continues in film melodrama as a localized instance
of affective crescendo where action is arrested and the protagonists’ and narrative’s desires are expressed in essential form.
Though Jacobs doesn’t make the claim, the situation might be
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taken to enshrine the psychoanalytic logic of “acting out” that has
been claimed by a long line of critics as foundational to the melodramatic imagination. As Peter Brooks writes in a seminal argument: “Melodrama handles its feelings and ideas virtually as plastic identities, visual and tactile models held out for all to see and
to handle. Emotions are given a full acting-out, a full representation before our eyes. We come to expect and to await the moment
at which characters will name the wellsprings of their being. . . .
They proffer to one another, and to us, a clear figuration of their
souls, they name without embarrassment eternal verities.”25 That
this acting out should occur in Philadelphia through the excessive
affect of an operatic aria doubles its impact and significance. In
a recent meditation on the close affinities between melodrama
and opera, Brooks argues for the operatic aria as the correspondent of the melodramatic situation—or in his broadly analogous
term, “set piece”—for both operate through a shared dynamic
of spectacular hystericization.26 Like the hysteric who articulates
repressed desire through the body, melodrama and opera, especially in the privileged moments of situation and aria, speak their
“unspeakable” meanings through a weighted somaticism. Where
the hysterical somaticization of melodrama has traditionally been
focused on the physical body—“distorting it and arresting it in
postures and gestures that speak symbolically of powerful affects”
(122)—opera extends its hysterical ambit to the realm of vocality:
“The hystericized voice of the operatic aria . . . become[s], in the
manner of the melodramatic body, symptomatic of an extreme
situation, an emotional impasse . . . [and] works it through in an
internal dialogue of passion and measure, that of song” (126).
With its combined accent on the visual spectacle of Hanks’s
bravura performance, which works through a veritable canonical repertoire of hysterical gestures—what might be described
through Didi Huberman’s striking turn-of-phrase as “the postures of delirium”: “attacks, cries, attitudes passionelles, crucifixion,
ecstasy”27—and the aural spectacle of Callas’s histrionic bel canto
vocals, Philadelphia conjoins both modes of hysterical spectacularization—body and voice—to its melodramatic economy of acting
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out. The result is a scenarization that is almost overwhelming in
its hysterical intensity: the body and the voice are both gripped
by affective representation, yoked inexorably to the demands of
psychic and cultural conversion to the point where they cease to
perform their traditional semiotic functions, becoming instead
overdetermined texts of densely symbolic meanings.
Typically, of course, the hystericized body of melodrama
and the hystericized voice of opera are female. The profane collocation in Philadelphia of a male body and a female voice as
coupled subjects of hysterical acting out complicates these normative gendered codings, even as it depends on them to produce its perverse effects, thereby intensifying the text’s capacity for both disruptive hystericization and sublimity. Much of
the fascination of the sequence—its lure of uncanny, dare we
say queer, captivation—stems precisely from its willful staging
of transgendered, transsexual mutability: its multiple movements across various representational registers traditionally
understood as gender and sexual exclusive. These movements
are arguably central to hysteria as a condition, which, as Claire
Kahane details, has been profitably understood in feminist psychoanalytic theories as a resistant questioning of sexual difference and identity: “Am I a man? Am I a woman? How is sexual
identity assumed? How represented?”28 They are also arguably
central to the functions of diva worship, as evidenced by the constitutive indexing of hysteria, qua disruptive sexual lability, in
discourses of gay diva fandom. The gay diva devotee (the opera
queen or any of his multiple “sisters”—the show queen, Hollywood queen, disco queen) is routinely envisioned as male hysteric: excessive, irrational, feminized. While the reading formations of gay diva worship habitually focus on moments and figures
of hysterical eruption: the “mad scenes” of opera; the “eleven
o’clock” showstoppers of musical theater; the scenery-chewing
grande damerie of the woman’s film; the vocal gymnastics of the
dance-floor diva. These moments of hysterical excess, of extreme
passions and outrageousness, so integral to cultural definitions—
and receptions, good and bad—of the diva, constitute powerful
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points of transcendence where the constraints of sexual, social,
and textual normativity are refused and space is opened, however
partially, for alternative visions and structures of meaning.29
This capacity for transcendent reimagining fuels and
frames the hysterical energies of diva worship in Philadelphia, in
which the inflated extravagance of Callas’s aria furnishes Andy
with a means through which to exceed the juridical binds of normative disciplinarity and stage a resistant performance of queer
self-expression. Forbidden by the homophobic discourses of mainstream culture and cinematic textuality to speak his queer desire
directly, or at the very least forbidden by those discourses to give
adequate value to his desire, Andy “acts out” through the hysterical authority of the diva. It is not a displacement or substitution
of his queer desire. As Brooks reminds us, acting out, for Freud,
constitutes a reproduction, and not just an imitation, of affect, a
“reproduction that abolishes the distance between mental ideation and physical action.”30 Andy’s delirious performance of
diva-oriented desire, like performance of gay diva worship more
generally, thus signals not some second-order index of queerness
but, to rephrase an earlier quote from Brooks, its “full acting-out,
[its] full representation before our eyes.”
The imaging of gay diva worship as excessive, disruptive
sublimity constructed in Philadelphia clearly admits competing
evaluations. In his essay “Homosexuality and Narrative,” Dennis Allen is highly critical of the “Mamma morta” sequence for
instating what he claims is a homophobic representation of homosexuality as “an indeterminate locus of shifting identifications.”31
Drawing from Lee Edelman’s concept of “homographesis,” which
he defines as “the heterosexual fantasy of the inevitable visibility of homosexuality,” Allen contends that the sequence works
entirely to ensure heterosexual privilege “by projecting unstable,
incoherent or multiple identity onto the homosexual so that the
heterosexual can stand, in contrast, as internally coherent” (625).
There can be little argument that this sort of depreciatory counterpoint is an operative element in the “Mamma morta” sequence
and its visualization of homosexual difference through the sublime spectacle of diva worship. Indeed it is revealing, and more
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than a little ironic, that the litany of homophobic myths recited
by Joe at the start of the sequence as the popularly held representational face of “homosexuality”—placed by Denzel Washington’s
emphatic performance in demonstrative scare quotes lest these
misinformed views be somehow confused with the enlightened
liberalism of the film’s own enunciative regime—provides the
very tropological script enacted in the ensuing floorshow where,
wandering around like a demented oracle in the grips of spiritual
possession, Andy furnishes visible and quite literal confirmation
that “queers are funny, queers are weird” and, in acoustic terms at
least, “queers dress up like their mothers.” As irascible playwright
and AIDS activist Larry Kramer quips in a polemic summarily
titled “Why I Hate Philadelphia,” “even I’d be afraid of someone
who—out of the blue—behaved like this.”32
Fear is, however, a standard—some would even claim
definitionally requisite—response to sublimity, in which the rupture of categorical divisions and the consequent encounter with
otherness that mark the sublime experience fill the observer with
an awe and wonder so extreme as to be potentially terrifying. It
is a response that importantly need not be disabling; it may in
fact prove empowering, even liberatory. As the sensorial registration of transfixing awe, the “terror of ecstasy,” as Burke famously
described the emotional impact of sublimity, is arguably a prime
affective mechanism through which the sublime provokes its transcendent (re)visions. To admit therefore that the awful sublimity
of diva worship may be explicitly yoked in Philadelphia to a project
of visibilizing homosexual difference as abject and terrifying does
not cancel nor deplete the broad range of competing significances
to which this formation, once articulated, gives rise. Following an
earlier cue, the inscription of homosexuality in the field of the visible is always and inevitably the site of what Lee Edelman claims
is “a double operation: one serving the ideological purposes of a
conservative social order intent on codifying identities in its labor
of disciplinary inscription, and the other resistant to that categorization, intent on describing the identities that order has so oppressively inscribed.”33
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Certainly the fearsome spectacle of diva worship unfurled
in Philadelphia functions on many levels to upset and complicate
the sort of banal disciplinary operations of sexual classification
to which many critics seem driven—obsessively and perhaps
symptomatically—to reduce it. Far from enacting an untroubled
inscription of normalizing sexual binarisms, the “Mamma morta”
sequence arguably stages the scene for their delirious breakdown.
Consider, for instance, the simple—or, as it happens, not so simple—question of erotic relationality in Andy’s literally obscene
performance. That the performance obtains a profoundly erotic
gravitas is undoubtable. The interdependent registers of dramaturgy, narrative thematics, and cinematographic style conspire to
give it the decided look and feel of a slightly arty sex scene, complete with appropriately scarlet camera gels, tumescent accelerative montage, and heaving postcoital breathlessness. At the same
time, the increasingly frozen gawp of wide-eyed shock on Joe’s face
in the reaction shots leaves little doubt that he—and we—are witnessing an act of monumental gross indecency. But just what precise form that indecency takes and how it can be read and made
sense of is another matter altogether. Neither evidently nor coherently heterosexual or homosexual; solipsistic or intersubjective;
unitary, dyadic, or triangular: the erotic relations in the sequence
are simply so variable and shifting and contain so many permutations between and across the multiple players and positions in the
scene as to defy basic interpretability let alone classificatory regulation. Perhaps, then, the truly terrifying aspect of the sublime
spectacle of gay diva worship as envisioned in Philadelphia, what
sends the otherwise stouthearted Joe running anxiously from
the apartment, is not its display of a homosexuality demonized as
the other of a stable heterosexual norm but its display rather of
a (homo)sexuality run amok, one that refuses to remain within
the categorical divisions that regulate the scripts and legibilities
of hegemonic sexuality and that thus problematizes the possibility
of any stable term of erotic reference: hetero or homo.34
As suggested, it is this structural predilection to categorical transgression and rupture, portrayed so evocatively in Philadelphia, that furnishes gay subcultural practices of diva recep-
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tion with much of their dazzling capacity for sublime effect. The
erotic and discursive indeterminacies at the heart of diva worship
offer a rich and ready-made framework for the transcendence
of heteronormative boundaries and the cathexis of those conditions of alterity that Lyotard claims as the signs of true sublimity: “heterogeneity, . . . optimal dissensus and radical openness.”35
It would be wrong, however, to assume this emphasis on rupture
and dissolution as the ultimate logic of gay diva worship or of the
affective economies of queer sublimity within which it operates.
A central condition of the sublime—and I would contend that
this holds especially true of the sublime dynamics operative in
gay diva worship—is that it moves simultaneously and paradoxically toward both subjective fracture and subjective restoration.
In his canonical philosophical treatise on the subject, Immanuel
Kant describes the sublime experience as a movement through
self-erasing awe to a heightened awareness of subjective reason.
This developmental reading of the sublime is explicated further
by Thomas Weiskel, who posits a tripartite process of sublimity
from an initial stage of habitual complacency through an intermediate stage of momentary rupture and subjective indeterminacy
to a final “reactive” stage of rebalance and transcendent bliss.36
While I am uncomfortable with its rather static temporal linearity—surely any sublimity worth its rapturous salt holds stages two
and three, indeterminacy and masterful transcendence, in constant, irresolvable tension—this account nevertheless highlights
the central movement of the sublime toward both a disintegration
and a reintegration of self, or to put it another way, toward both
subjective incoherency and (transformed) subjective meaning.
Gay diva worship’s blatant disorganization, if not dissolution, of orthodox subjective boundaries undoubtedly instates a
rapturous jouissance in which the coherency of self is shattered,
but through that process it also enables the production of new
modes of subjectivity that are receptive of queer possibilities precisely because of their antinormative incoherency. Queerness is
after all a supreme paradigm of identificatory transformation, an
opening out from the limiting scripts of subjective normativity to
other forms of sexual and social selfhood. José Muñoz has sugges-
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tively deployed the term disidentification to describe the “nonlinear and nonnormative modes of identification with which queers
predicate their self-fashioning.”37 He argues that, unlike majoritarian subjects who access with relative ease dominant fictions
of coherent, masterful identity, queers and other minoritarian
subjects must “activate their own senses of self ” by engaging
“multiple and sometimes conflicting sites of identification” and
“interfac[ing] with different subcultural fields” (5). It is a complex
and fraught process of (dis)identificatory production that ensures
queer identity is always in a condition of constant becoming and
hybridized difference, always “a point of departure, a process,
a building” (200). Gay diva worship, I submit, is a vital cultural
forum for the enactment of just such processes of queer becoming.38 Through the perverse practices, the aberrant cathexes and
desires, of diva worship, gay cultures have fashioned a unique and
insistently affirmative cultural space within which to produce and
experience shifting and multiple forms of queer subjecthood.39
To return one last time to Philadelphia, if, as I have detailed,
Andy’s rapturous engagement of the diva stages a hysterical
breakdown of normative discourses of identity, it equally and
simultaneously stages a restorative production of renewed subjective meaning and queer empowerment. His passionate encounter
with Callas propels Andy to a delirious transport that breaches
the categorical borders—male/female, hetero/homo, self/other,
identification/desire—that bound and give orthodox form to subjectivity and its cultural locations, provoking him, quite literally,
to fall apart; but at the same time, and as part of the same process,
it clears the way for a virtuoso performance of subjective authorization. It is an ambivalent process of transcendent rupture and
counterassertive renewal that can be neatly traced through the
film’s allegorical correspondence of diva worship to something
about which I have till now kept strategically silent but that is so
crucial as to be all-pervasive: a thematics of death. Philadelphia is
after all a deathbed melodrama, and by the point of the “Mamma
morta” scene, Andy is evidently in the terminal stages of AIDS,
a fact given visual underscoring through the simulated cadaverousness of Hanks’s cosmeticized face and the intravenous drip
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that hangs off him throughout the sequence like a ghostly paramour in a danse macabre. Should these visual cues go unheeded,
the script spells it out, with Andy commenting to Joe in solemn
resignation at the outset of the sequence, “There’s a possibility I
won’t be around to see the end of this trial.” Significantly, it is this
recognition of impending death that initiates Andy’s diva-fueled
delirium: no sooner does he make the comment than the background music suddenly, and conveniently, amplifies before segueing into Callas’s, and Andy’s, big number. It hardly needs mention
that the choice of aria here is richly pointed. As made plain by its
title, “La mamma morta” (“The Dead Mother”) is a song all about
death. In its original context in Andrea Chénier, Umberto Giordano’s opera about a pair of doomed aristocratic lovers during the
French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the aria is sung as a plea for
clemency by the female protagonist, Maddalena. In a bid to save
the life of Andrea, her imprisoned lover, Maddalena entreats the
sympathies of Gérard, the revolutionary who had Andrea jailed on
trumped-up charges of treason because he secretly desires Maddalena, by narrating her tragic tale of bereavement. To the rich
strains of Giordano’s high romantic melody, she relates how her
mother was killed while protecting her from mobs that burned
her family home to the ground, and how afterward her life, and
that of those she loved, plunged into an inexorable downward spiral. Though the finer points of the opera’s admittedly circuitous
narrative don’t quite make the translation to screen in Philadelphia, the film is careful to explicate the fundamental scenario of
death and loss, with Andy setting the scene through general synopsis and select quotations from the libretto. “Look, the place that
cradled me is burning,” he sings in echo of Maddalena’s lament.
That the voice expressing this tale of tragic demise is none other
than that of Maria Callas augments the significances. Not only is
Callas “the operatic diva most closely (if only tacitly) associated
with gay fandom,” as Wayne Koestenbaum notes, but her troubled life and premature death have inexorably anchored her star
image to a semiotics of fatality, securing her legend as what Sam
Abel terms “the goddess of opera’s gay cult of death.”40 As such,
Andy’s identificatory assumption of Callas and the multiple posi-
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tionalities signaled through her performance of “La mamma
morta” assimilates him, unavoidably and emphatically, to a discourse of death.
On one level, the thematic parallels between Andy and
death serve a fairly straightforward process of narrative foreshadowing, prefiguring a fatal closure that the film has already set up
and that the genre of the deathbed melodrama has effectively
prescribed. However, in the immediate context of the sequence
and its articulation of queer desire through the sublime spectacle
of diva worship, they assume a slightly more symbolic cast. As the
extinction of human life, the end of known existence, death is
a—if not the —primordial categorical limit, that which marks the
bounds of lived identity and the interface with absolute alterity.
This is why death evokes such enduring fascination for most, and
enduring fear for many. It is also why death serves as such a powerful source of sublimity. As Jahan Ramazani notes, although they
“often refer to it by other names . . . : castration, physical destruction, semiotic collapse, defeat by a precursor, and annihilation
of the ego,” theories of the sublime are traditionally obsessed
with death and “from the eighteenth century on, they increasingly pair the sublime with death, as death seems to become ever
more solitary, final, and secular.”41 Taking a cue from Burke,
who famously claimed the sublime to be occasioned by “ideas of
pain, and above all death,” Ramazani posits death as the supreme
inspirator of sublimity, arguing that the sublime is, at heart, “a
staged confrontation with death” (110). Certainly much of the
sublime energy at play in the “Mamma morta” sequence may be
seen to spring directly from its presentation of an encounter with
death. Drawn to confront mortality face on, both at the narrative
level of his lived situation and the phantasmatic level of his diva
identification, Andy cathects the most radical form of dissolution
imaginable, the final extinction of selfhood, and experiences the
full force of emotional intensity thus engendered. Through the
doubled conduit of Callas/Maddalena, he not only imagines but
acts out his own annihilation: “I am oblivion,” “I bring sorrow to
those that love me,” he cries in imitation of the diva’s song. Importantly, however, neither the diva’s song nor Andy’s reiterative performance of it stops here. Circling dazedly around the floor, eyes
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closed in ecstatic meditation on some imagined internal focus,
Andy underlines through his fractured commentary an all-important shift in the tenor and import of the aria. “In come the strings
and it changes everything,” he murmurs, “The music fills with a
hope.” It is a shift equally underlined through formal mise-enscène, with the lighting of the scene dropping suddenly into dramatic chiaroscuro and the color tone balance turning noticeably
red. What follows is an extended passage by Andy of direct citation from the aria that is worth quoting here at length:
It was during this sorrow that love came to me,
A voice filled with harmony,
It said, “Live still, I am life,
Heaven is in your eyes.
Is everything around you just the blood and the mud?
I am divine, I am oblivion.
I am the god that comes down from the heavens,
And makes of the earth a heaven.
I am love, I am love!”
In a fascinating study on the intersections between opera and
shifting cultural discourses of death, Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue for opera as the closest modern equivalent to the medieval contemplatio mortis, a form of ars moriendi, or “the art of dying,”
that “dramatized and ‘performed’ imaginatively the experience of
dying.”42 As they detail, the principal aim of the contemplatio mortis
was to give meaning and positive value to the concept and experience of death through a process of meditation and narrativization
that enabled the subject to prepare, spiritually and emotionally,
for death, but also, through the fact of “awakening” from the contemplation and returning to worldly activity, “to appreciate life
more fully by contrast” (25). In a culture such as ours that obsessively denies death and fosters a generalized social phantasm of
technomedical-driven immortality, the idea of a positive valorization of death can seem flatly counterintuitive, but forms of contemplatio mortis continue, it is suggested, in a range of arts, most notably in opera, where death is a veritable thematic stock in trade and
where the distinctive combination of emotive music and drama
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with highly stylized presentation offers the perfect environment
for the sort of ritualized “working through” of death described via
the practice of contemplatio mortis.
Whether or not this reading constitutes a legitimate account
of opera as a generalized cultural practice I cannot say, but it certainly provides a resonant take on “La mamma morta” and Andy’s
intense reception of it. His staged confrontation with death via the
heightened affective economy of a Callas aria seems quite openly
to offer Andy a potent form of “ritual bereavement” and “working through,” where he “imaginatively experienc[es] the emotions
associated with dying” in order to “find not only consolation but
also meaning in death and, indeed, in life” (185). The latter point
is vital and helps link this reading to the overarching argument
about sublimity and the move toward transcendent meaning and
renewed subjective value. The central effect of the contemplatio mortis, as of the broader formations of sublimity it arguably indexes, is
not a melancholic embrace of self-annihilation, a total triumph of
the death drive, but rather a positive processing of death, a direct
engagement and transcendence of it as categorical limit, that, as
paradoxical as it may seem, affirms and gives renewed value to
life through its emotive and experiential structure of momentary
death and reawakening, of dissolution and resolution, self-shattering and transcendent bliss. Like Callas/Maddalena—indeed, as
Callas/Maddalena—Andy passes through the terrifying boundary of death and accedes to an enlarged vision and an ecstatic
counterassertion of life, a reparative revisioning that “makes of
[his] earth a heaven” imbued with love.
To conclude in this way is not to give death the final word,
as it were, on gay diva worship, and it certainly is not to continue
the deformational stereotype of the opera queen—or queer diva
fan, more generally—as tragi-pathetic figure of moribund selfloathing. There is nothing remotely pathetic or tragic in Andy’s
sublime adoration of Callas; indeed, it is the very means through
which he transcends the tragic and reinvests his life with value.
Through the queer sublimity of diva devotion, Andy is able to confront and move beyond the ultimate abjection of death to a trium-
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phal affirmation of empowered and expanded selfhood. As such
the “Mamma morta” sequence signals a sort of extreme narrativization of the logic of reparative survivalism that I have suggested
subtends and works through formations of diva worship in gay
male cultures. In a passage that, with happy pertinence to Philadelphia, comments on the gay reception of Maria Callas but that as
readily speaks to the practice of gay diva worship at large, Wayne
Koestenbaum writes: “Callas was a refuge, where a forbidden
sexuality, a forbidden alienation from masculinity, could spread
its wings. Listening to Callas, I acquire spaciousness. If consciousness, as determined by gender and sexuality, has certain limits, a
voice like Callas’s has the power to turn the mind’s closed room
into an immensity: she bestows the illusion that the view continues
endlessly on the other side of the mirror, and that wherever you
expected to find limits, instead you find continuations.”43
In many respects, it makes perfect sense that gay male
cultures should have mobilized and privileged the figure of the
diva for such processes of sublime queer transcendence and
expanded self-creation. Born out of nineteenth-century traditions
of operatic spectacle and melodramatic theatricality and bred
throughout the twentieth century in the auratic grandiloquence
of mediatized glamour, the diva is nothing if not a consummate
figure of self-authorization, a magisterial image of triumphant
identificatory production. Blazing her way across the cultural
landscape in defiant disregard of orthodox conventions of social
discipline and patriarchal injunctions against feminine potency,
the diva offers a lesson to all who care to attend in the resistant
production of aberrant subjectivity. Put simply, the diva is a figure
that is “fabulous” in both senses of the term, as “marvelous and
astonishing” but also “fable-like, fictitious, and invented” and, in
her fabulousness, the diva extends to her devotees untold possibilities for the production of equally fabulous modes of empowered
selfhood. Therein lies perhaps the primary source of the diva’s
enduring appeal for queer cultures and her inexhaustible productivity as a sublime site of reparative gay labor.
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Notes
1.
Jeffrey Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1.
2.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative
Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This
Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings
in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997), 8.
3.
Originally coined in the nineteenth century as an aggrandizing
honorific for principal operatic sopranos, the term diva, from
the Latin for goddess, has been consistently broadened in use
and meaning in gay cultures to refer to an expansive range
of female performers across genres and strata of popular
culture whose spectacular, strong personae and performative
extravagance inspire various forms of queer popularization and
devotion.
4.
Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York:
Hyperion, 1997), 10.
5.
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality,
and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon, 1993), 133.
6.
D. B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical
Tradition (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), 1.
7.
David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1994).
8.
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s
Critique of Judgment, Sections 23–29, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).
9.
Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer
Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi.
10. Warren Stevenson, Romanticism and the Androgynous Sublime
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1996), 10.
11. Stephen Maddison, Fags, Hags, and Queer Sisters: Gender Dissent
and Heterosocial Bonds in Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s,
2000).
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12. Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, 13. It is an argument
that has been made by others. In a recent op-ed piece, online
journalist Damien Cave asserts, “with the new millennium
upon us, diva worship is dying in the gay community. With
extended life spans for HIV sufferers becoming reality, a
booming economy and the increasing ease of assimilation, divas
are no longer needed as a unifying force against oppression
and discrimination in the gay community” (“The Descent of
the Divas,” Salon.com, 10 January 2000, salon.com/people/
feature/2000/01/10/divas).
13. Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, 22.
14. Indeed, the effective pith of Harris’s argument seems less that
contemporary gay cultures have abandoned diva worship than
that they don’t worship the same divas as earlier generations.
“Many homosexuals under the age of 30 have never even seen a
film starring Joan Crawford,” he laments, “let alone relished the
magnificent biographical ironies of A Star Is Born or seen Bette
Davis’s hair fall out in Mrs. Skeffington or Rita Hayworth dance
in Gilda” (32). Possibly true, but many of them will have thrilled
to Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, and Janet Jackson in concert;
danced with wild abandon at an all-night rave to Kylie Minogue,
Christina Aguilera, and Gwen Stefani; wept to the heartfelt
ballads of Tori Amos and Celine Dion; delighted at the resistant
femininities of Christina Ricci, Margaret Cho, Absolutely Fabulous
(1992–96, 2001, 2003), and Sex and the City (1998–2004); or
reveled in any of the other queer cult figures and texts that form
the basis for contemporary practices of diva worship among
many young gay and queer men. Harris just needs to get out
more.
15. In a typically insightful essay, David Halperin suggests that, for
all its benefits and gains, gay liberation has equally produced
its own constraints, one of the more problematic being what
he terms the refusal of “the life of queer affect and feeling.” He
writes: “The problem, it turns out, is that instead of ending up
in triumphant possession of a gay pride and freedom we can
wholeheartedly call our own, we have constructed a gay identity
that actively represses both the pathos and the pleasure of those
residual queer affects that we prefer to think we have liberated
ourselves from and that we claim have simply vanished from
our consciousness” (David Halperin, “Homosexuality’s Closet,”
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Michigan Quarterly Review 41 [2002]: 24). See also Heather
Love, “Spoiled Identity: Stephen Gordon’s Loneliness and the
Difficulties of Queer History,” GLQ 7 (2001): 487–519.
16. A further argument might be made that the unapologetic
queerness of diva worship—its relentless perversity, about
which I have more to say later—offers a thrilling alternative, if
not corrective, to the antiseptic, normalizing neoliberalism of
assimilationist gay culture, giving it renewed significance and
appeal.
17.
Roy Grundmann and Peter Sacks, “Philadelphia,” Cineaste,
Summer 1993, 53.
18. Dennis W. Allen, “Homosexuality and Narrative,” Modern Fiction
Studies 41 (1995): 623.
19. Andrew Sullivan, “Wouldn’t Normally Do,” New Republic, 21
February 1994, 42.
20. John Simon, “Philadelphia,” National Review, 7 February 1994, 68.
21. Grundmann and Sacks, “Philadelphia,” 53.
22. Charles I. Nero, “Diva Traffic and Male Bonding in Film:
Teaching Opera, Learning Gender, Race, and Nation,” Camera
Obscura, no. 56 (2004): 48.
23. Allen, “Homosexuality and Narrative,” 625.
24. Lea Jacobs, “The Woman’s Picture and the Poetics of
Melodrama,” Camera Obscura, no. 31 (1993): 121–47.
25. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1976, rev. ed. 1995), 41.
26. Peter Brooks, “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” in
Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed.
Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000).
27. Didi Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), xi.
28. Claire Kahane, “Introduction: Part Two,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud,
Hysteria, Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 22.
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29. While Philadelphia, and perforce my analysis, focuses primarily
around the operatic diva, the diversity of cultural figures and
genres feted in gay diva worship should affirm that the operatic
prima donna is hardly unique as agent of queer transcendence.
The Hollywood, Broadway, pop, disco, or television diva can
and does work in similar fashion. That the operatic diva is still
routinely privileged in popular representations—if not always
popular practices—of queer diva worship is due to a raft of
interacting factors, not the least of which is the enduringly
persistent cultural associations of opera, and in particular the
operatic soprano, with sublimity and sacralization. See Felicia
Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial
in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995).
30. Brooks, “Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera,” 123.
31. Allen, “Homosexuality and Narrative,” 624–25.
32. Larry Kramer, “Why I Hate Philadelphia,” Films about AIDS,
newton.uor.edu/AIDS/Kramer.htm (accessed 27 November
2004).
33. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural
Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10, emphasis original.
34. Undoubtedly it is the unbridled sexual and semiotic excess,
the patent perversity of the sequence, that endows it with queer
fascination and that allows it to break, however momentarily,
from the textual straitjacket of earnest social realism and
anodyne bourgeois liberalism that constrains much of the rest
of Philadelphia. As self-confessed opera queen and diva devotee
Sam Abel dryly notes, “It is, unfortunately, the only truly electric
scene in the entire film” (Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic
Performance [Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996], 203n10).
35. Lyotard quoted in Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern:
A History (London: Routledge, 1995), 133.
36. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and
Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), 23–24.
37. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), 33.
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38. Although he focuses his readings primarily around
contemporary practices of performance art, especially those
produced by queers of color, Muñoz actually nominates diva
worship as a classic practice of queer disidentification. In a brief
discussion of Wayne Koestenbaum’s personalized account of
gay male opera culture, Muñoz argues that “Koestenbaum’s
disidentification with the opera diva . . . fuels his identity-making
machinery.” He writes, “A diva’s strategies of self-creation
and self-defense, through the criss-crossed circuitry of crossidentification, do the work of enacting self for the gay male
opera queen” (30).
39. That the forms of queer selfhood enabled by diva worship are
indeed shifting and multiple is a point worth underscoring. Diva
worship may be an insistently visible and enduring practice of
modern metropolitan queer cultures, but its operations and
effects are far from singular. In particular, the modes of queer
self-actualization and becoming facilitated by diva worship shift,
often radically, from one context to the next, animated by the
manifold contingencies of time and place.
40. Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, 133; Abel, Opera in the Flesh, 56.
41. Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and
the Sublime (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 109.
42. Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: The Art of Dying
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 11.
43. Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat, 153.
Brett Farmer is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University
of Melbourne. He is the author of Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy,
Gay Male Spectatorships (Duke University Press, 2000) and is currently
writing a new book on gay diva worship.
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