BlackmanVision Film Production

Vanity Fair - kd lang and Cindy Crawford

Stealing Beauty was a panel discussion chaired by Diva magazine Editor Jane Czyzselska. I was on the panel with Artist, DJ and performer Sadie Lee and fashion historian and cultural critic Elizabeth Wilson.

The event explored how LGBT culture plunders dominant straight culture and uses it to create something new and vibrant.

In my presentation I brought up three concepts. And here is a sample of my talk.

• The Guerilla Gaze
• Analog Duplication of Dominance
• Dominant Dilution

The Guerilla Gaze
My definition of The Guerilla Gaze is the ability of LGBT people to derive pleasure from images not intended for us. We queer the

Grace Jones - still looking fabulous

images in our imagination subverting the inherent (hetero)sexuality of the dominant narratives presented in movies, music videos, adverts and TV shows. In movies highly femininised women become objects of desire for women, as well as objects of identification. Butch lesbians may model their image according to the “thug style” as seen by hip hop stars like Fifty Cents or Flo Rida. They sometimes mimic the pose presented by the brute force of masculinity of Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire usually in a vest.

The Guerilla Gaze also throws light on people within film or TV narratives or within culture who are not considered objects of desire by mainstream heterosexual commodified desire. Our eyes are drawn to men and women who are “othered”. We elevate women in particular who defy the odds – who are older yet fierce, who bend gender, who are rebels. Do we do this because we feel they are the “Ugly Ducklings” of mainstream culture, and in our eyes they are transformed into Swans as we would hope to be perceived?

Analog Duplication of Dominance
The definition of analog duplication of dominance is that oppressed peoples often steal traditions from dominant cultures and with time the original meaning often changes or is subverted. I say this because with each generation our memories become increasingly more faint to the point that contemporary people often do not know the origins of particular behaviours, images, styles and traditions.  Our collective memories are thus analog.  If our memories were digital we would remember everything accurately all the time.

In the USA the system of the Houses eulogised in the movie Paris is Burning, recreates the notion of nuclear family with House Mothers and Fathers and children. Houses are made up of queer African American and Latina Americans rejected by mainstream LGBT cultures or their own bio-families. The Houses host balls in which people parody or mimic images of (WASP) power in the USA. For example one of the categories is Executive Realness. The participants perform “Business man” but always with flair. They cannot resist that extra flourish and transpose beauty and colour over the drabness of a grey suit. Popular gay slang now refers to LGBT people being “one of the children” or “family” possibly not realising their origins in Houses in the ghettos of the USA in the 1980s.

Fem - Eve relishes the apple

My work especially Fem is about stealing iconic images of femininity from dominant culture including fairy tales, religion, movies, fashion. I queer them with a particular lesbian sensibility – Eve does regret eating the apple and will not be punished. Eve is also a Black woman, reminding us that we all came from Africa and subverting the dominant Eurocentric Biblical image of Eve.

Dominant Dilution
Mainstream straight culture sucks off cultures of marginalised peoples, and regurgitates it back to everyone bleached and ironed out for mass capitalistic consumption.

August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair with k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford

Words like naff whose original meaning was dull, heterosexual, mundane or trade meaning same sex partner were from Polari the language spoken by LGBT people and people in the underworld in the past. Prince gained major popularity in the 1980s but how many people know that his style was very similar to Little Richard from the 1960s who sang songs with coded queer lyrics. Madonna appropriated vogueing a dance style created by queer African American and Latina Americans for her video Vogue, while not mentioning anyone of colour in her homage list.

Sometimes, very rarely, a queer image, created by a queer person, with a queer sensibility is used by a mainstream company to sell their product. This happened once with the Vanity Fair which had on their 1993 cover, kd lang and Cindy Crawford photographed by Annie Liebovitz. If you can think of any others please let me know. The image is particularly interesting because it is gender queer, and kd lang a butch woman is also being used to sell glamour to a straight audience.

Kobena Mercer in Welcome to the Jungle introduced the notion of ethnic androgyny to describe Michael Jackson’s paling of his skin and re-shaping his nose. Mercer explores the idea that Michael Jackson changed his skin colour not to be white, but to be a light-skinned Black man. Jackson’s whole remodelling of his hair, face and skin was to make him more lovable and marketable to a wider audience.  Did Jackson believe it was easier to sell himself more successfully as ethnically androgynous than ethnically unambiguous to a  global pop audience? The pop charts are not usually dominated by dark skinned Black men.

People who say he was trying to be white are missing the point entirely and have very little understanding of African descent cultures and the complex relationship to pigmentocracy in the New World. Within African American and Caribbean cultures what is often valued and considered attractive is never white skin but light skin, and hair with the African kink taken out. The so-called desire for people of colour to be white remains a white pre-occupation.

In addition Michael Jackson looked increasingly more gender androgynous as time went by. His maleness disappearing underneath wigs, red lipstick and a made up face. His eyes more wide open and doe like through surgery. He began to look like a mutant version of Diana Ross on whom it was rumoured he modelled his look. This “look” did not and does not hamper record sales. However had he been a hip hop star his career would have sank without a trace.

It has been reported that Joe Jackson, Michael’s father repeatedly told Michael he was ugly, his nose was too big. In addition Michael reported that his brothers also teased him. This form of abuse on top of the physical punishment Michael experienced must have had an effect on Michael’s psyche. So in addition to being incredible driven, he must have also been full of self loathing and doubts about his own enormous talents. It is interesting that the entire family has changed their noses through surgery.

Michael also looked and acted like an effeminate boy and and later man. I am almost certain that this was unsettling to his apparently seeming macho father and teenage brothers.

The tragedy of Michael Jackson to me represents a failure of some African Caribbean/American parents to accept a different kind of masculinity in their sons, other than the posturing posing plastic hypermasculinity now almost compulsory and ubiquitous in African descent culture.

Would Michael Jackson still be alive if he had the strength to be like Prince or Little Richard and just accept who he was – a wonderful effeminate, made-up dandy boy?

Melvin van Peebles who is an artist, writer and composer has been honoured by the African-American Film Critics Association with its Special Achievement Award. He made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song 1971 an example of guerilla filmmaking long before the term was invented. He recounts having to pretend he was making a pornographic film to get around the Unions. He also used the music from Earth Wind and Fire, then an unknown group. And in clasic lo-budget style used his whole family in the cast and crew. He owns all the rights to this clasic film. All indie filmmakers can still learn alot from this man. There is an interview with him below.