What’s interesting to me about queer culture in general is that is really doesn’t produce anything for itself. It is, by and large, a culture of appropriation, absorbing into itself elements of the dominant culture that then become “queered” by their association with queer culture.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything that queer people produce solely for other queer people. I guess you could consider porn to be in this category, but you run into the trouble of porn stars who are gay-for-pay, which dequeers it a bit. Is there a “For Us, By Us” presence for queer people?

Let’s see if I can try to break this down a little bit.

Queer culture seems especially attracted to the following heterosexually produced cultural isotopes:

1. Decadence. Queer culture loves a good example of heterosexual decay. Who is more loved: Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz, or Judy Garland as the boozy, sleepy-eyed, fuzzy-lipsticked chanteuse she was before her death? Heterosexual culture seems to devalue this kind of personal decay, expelling it from the culture proper and relegating it to the margins. Queer culture, though, is a culture of rescue in terms of the decadent. We pick them up, dust them off, and provide a new life down the street—our street.

Consider also: Valley of the Dolls, novel of four actresses’ descent into the ultimate forms of decadence: moral decay (drugs, unwed pregnancy, occupational ambition, loveless marriages, female pattern baldness, etc).

The decadent aren’t devalued in queer culture. In most cases, the decadence itself is what appeals to queer culture.

2. Camp. We’d be nothing without our drag queens. Drag (literally an acronym for Dressed As a Girl) provides a critique of dominant culture by demonstrating the conventions of gender roles through their extrapolation. That is, drag queens comment on femininity by being at once OVERLY-feminine (big hair, big boobs, big makeup, flashy dresses, etc) and ultimately masculine—we’ve all seen the drag queen with the enormous biceps or linebacker shoulders. And, once the dress is off…well, you get the picture.

A teacher once explained the notion of camp to my by saying “Camp is the lie that reveals the truth.”

Camp and decadence often go hand in hand, as ultimately decadence reduces a cultural product to its most important, most revealing conventions. Poetically, consider Frank O’Hara’s revisioning of the Romantic mode of writing in a queer, urban, context: comments on the immense drama in that mode by overly-dramatizing emotion and experience.

3. Kitsch. I’d say kitsch is less universally loved as camp and decadence, but important nevertheless. If camp is “the lie that tells the truth,” kitsch is “the lie that masquerades as the truth.” To paraphrase, anything kitsch is a copy of something genuine in culture. Ace of Base provided a compelling kitsch of ABBA, which itself was pure kitsch of typical American pop music. I’m sure we all recognize that the quality of copies becomes reduced as we make copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies….Ace of Base, etc.

I’d actually hazard to say that enjoyment of kitsch products is actually a more heterosexual impulse. However, adoring kitsch for BEING kitsch is queer. In this way, it’s very much like camp and decadence: it’s not necessarily the cultural object that is valued, but the history of the object.

The difference between camp and kitsch is that camp wants you to recognize its campiness, while kitsch wants to fool you into believing it’s the real deal. Since queer culture loves kitsch AS kitsch, only the most faulty, devalued, and repulsive forms of kitsch are absorbed. Anything mass produced is kitsch. Anything poorly mass produced is queer kitsch.

4. The Inane or Avant-Garde. Literally meaning “forward-looking,” avant-garde culture is often rejected by dominant culture because it appears non-sensical or culturally incongruous with current values and mores or culturally-enforced modes of production. Dominant culture rejects the avant-garde as inane. However, eventually everything that began as avant-garde becomes conventional or outmoded over time.

Non-narrative, avant-garde film of the 50s and 60s—such as Yoko Ono’s “The Fly” or Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon”—is probably the largest cultural force behind the advent of music videos, our most inane, non-narrative form of visual culture. Videos may have revolutionized meaning-making for the dominant culture, but before that, Yoko and Maya were making people scratch heads for decades.

Male grooming used to be avant-garde as well. Only queer culture was recognized for a meticulous form male grooming, which provided an overlap between modes of production of femininity and modes of production of masculinity. In fact, this trait alone was oftentimes enough evidence to evaluate a given man’s sexual orientation. However, the rise of metrosexuality has normalized these practices, which, read backwards, identify these grooming practices as formerly avant garde.

More as I continue to collect thoughts…