“Muscle and Hate”: Kevin Aviance, Matthew Shepard, and the Embodied Music of Hate, Violence, and Healing

An old essay intended for a publication that never happened. It should live somewhere because I care about it.

 Kevin Schwandt

“Muscle and Hate”:

Kevin Aviance, Matthew Shepard, and the Embodied Music of Hate, Violence, and Healing

This essay is about two men—one living, one dead.  It is about two cultural histories—one fostered in a relatively small community, one active in the most prominent of media.  It is about two acts of violence separated by time and distance.  It is about two kinds of trauma—one personal and physical, one communal and memorial.  It is about two kinds of healing—one psychological, one social.  It depends upon music and imagery created in the “underground” to make sense of memories of a profoundly mainstream, shared cultural moment.  It embraces coincidence and contradiction as means of creating catharsis out of horror.  In forcing these disparities together, it seeks to demonstrate the curative power of the most unlikely of cultural products.  It seeks to find healing in violent rhetoric and community in alienation.

Two Acts of Hate, Two Community Responses

On 12 October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one year-old man living in Laramie, Wyoming, died of massive head trauma in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado.  He had spent five days in a coma, including eighteen hours tied to a fence-post outside of Laramie.  The vicious and gruesome murder of Matthew Shepard constituted the most infamous, most commented-upon, and most divisive anti-gay hate-crime in American history.  Shepard’s killers claimed that he had made sexual advances, triggering in them a “gay panic,” a psychiatric designation dating from 1920 that mutated into a viable, though generally unsuccessful, legal defense linked to “temporary insanity” (Becker 2006).  According to their account, enraged by the perceived threat to their masculinity, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson lured Shepard into their truck, drove to an isolated area, and, shouting anti-gay slurs, tied him to the fence and beat him into unconsciousness.  A passing bicyclist found the unconscious man, at first thinking he was a scarecrow, and Shepard was taken to the Fort Collins hospital, where he died.  Following the murder, the media presented a barrage of images flitting from Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church congregation picketing Shepard’s funeral with signs saying “Matt in Hell” and “God Hates Fags,” to Romaine Patterson’s “Angel Action” response, in which students and community members dressed as angels, their enormous wings designed to block from view a second Phelps demonstration at Henderson’s court hearing.  The position in which Shepard’s attackers had left his unconscious body—arms outstretched to the side, his wrists tied to the fence—invited messianic symbolism.  In his 26 October 1998 Newsweek article, “Echoes of a Murder in Wyoming,” Howard Fineman described Shepard’s body as “like a fallen scarecrow—or savior.”  Indeed, Shepard’s death launched a new phase of public discourse on the role of sexuality and identity-based crimes in American society.  A large protest in New York City, dubbed “Matthew Shepard’s Political Funeral,” drew national media attention as Americans were confronted with the intersections of sexuality, community, and violence in unprecedented ways. A surge of political action advocating federal protection against anti-gay hate crimes led to a Congressional legislative proposal the following year, a proposal repeated unsuccessfully every year until it was finally passed in 2009. One week after the murder, on 19 October 1998, Time closed its article, “That’s Not a Scarecrow,” with the dramatic, if warranted statement, “He wanted to find love. But as he lay near death, Matthew Shepard, through no choice of his own, had found martyrdom.”  A week later, Time’s 26 October 1998 issue featured a cover photograph of the fence where Shepard was found, the tagline “The War Over Gays,” and a series of articles, including the cover story “The New Gay Struggle,” in which the murder framed a larger discussion of hate crimes and gay rights.

Figure 1. Time Magazine (October 26, 1998).

Shepard remains a central figure—indeed martyr—for many gay rights activists. A federal hate crimes bill, initially proposed in 2001, was dubbed The Matthew Shepard Act, demonstrating the ubiquitous cultural association of Shepard with sexual hate crimes in the United States; a version of the bill would finally become law in 2009, under the name The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.  Moisés Kaufman’s 2000 play The Laramie Project still receives numerous performances by both professional theaters and students.  The 2002 film version of the play, directed by Kaufman, received several awards after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.  The Matthew Shepard Foundation actively advocates for inclusivity education and hate crimes laws, even as the Westboro Baptist Church’s website, godhatesfags.com, continues to tally the number of days “Matthew Shepard has been in hell” on their “Perpetual Gospel Memorial to Matthew Shepard.”  If, for those of us who watched, transfixed with terror and sadness, the coverage of the events in Wyoming in late 1998 and 1999, the visceral horror has worn off, the political and personal potency of Shepard as an icon remains.

I want to approach the personal and communal trauma from what might seem an unlikely angle.  It involves the music and image of the victim of another, far less publicized gay-bashing.  Eight years after the Shepard beating, in June of 2006, a week before New York’s Gay Pride Celebration, African American drag artist and underground dance diva Kevin Aviance was attacked in the East Village.  Exiting the gay bar Phoenix, he was accosted by a group of young men shouting gay slurs, who then viciously beat him. The same night, two other gay-bashings were reported in the city. These two moments of extreme violence, one garnering national media attention, the other covered primarily in The Village Voice and The Advocate, are further united through similar community responses.  The New York LGBT community, already mobilized by Pride Month and the impending Pride Celebration, came out a few days after Aviance’s attack in a protest reminiscent of the Shepard demonstration.  This time, however, the victim of the horrific crime was able to attend.  Aviance appeared, clearly shaken and in pain, his broken jaw wired shut, causing him to struggle to enunciate words.  Nevertheless, the icon of the gay club-scene addressed the crowd, delivering what he called a “present to ignorance”: a plush heart, along with a plea to the crowd to fight hate with “love, love, love, love” (two excellent accounts of Aviance’s attack and its aftermath are offered in Steve Weinstein’s 12 June 2007 Village Voice article, “Becoming Kevin Aviance, Again” and Steve Gdula’s “Kevin Aviance Speaks,” in The Advocate, 15 June 2006). 

Figure 2. Kevin Aviance being released from Beth Israel Medical Center.

Aviance and Shepard are not connected only through victimization, however. The incredible trauma of Shepard’s murder came at a critical moment in Aviance’s career.  During the late 1990s, after a series of successful underground dance singles, Aviance was in the midst of preparing his first album Box of Chocolates (1999).  One of the tracks that constitute the album, Aviance’s cover version of Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant,” had been released on vinyl on 8 October 1998, the day after Shepard was beaten by his killers and tied to a fence-post outside of Laramie.  In other words, the Aviance version of “Join in the Chant” first became available to DJs literally as Shepard lay dying, mere hours after his horribly battered body was discovered by a passing cyclist.  Despite his active professional schedule, Aviance participated in “Matthew Shepard’s Political Funeral.”  Indeed, he is prominently shown, though not identified, in the archival footage of the event used in the film version of The Laramie Project.  The video for “Join in the Chant” (at the time of this writing, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rXd8d2Yjvs ) features clips from the demonstration. Images of Aviance, dressed in various fashionable gowns and women’s undergarments, striking anguished and enraged poses around a simple chair on a black set, are juxtaposed with disturbing images of white men in various isolated acts of seeming desperation: emphatic prayer temporally placed next to apparent suicide.  Interspersed among such frightening imagery, footage from the New York demonstration—pained mourners carrying signs saying “Homophobia Killed Again” and “Matthew Shepard, Killed by Homophobia,” police violently engaging with protesters, and shocked, weeping crowds—contextualizes the horrific pseudo-narrative of the video, as well as the American cultural moment accompanying the single’s release date.

 The highly publicized Shepard attack and the less prominent Aviance attack span a decade during which the roles of LGBT individuals and communities within American society changed significantly.  Notably, the 2003 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health declared the denial of marriage to same-sex couples to be unconstitutional, fanning an already smoldering nationwide debate on the issue.  States across the country, as well as the federal government, began pushing constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, effectively placing the gay rights movement in a defensive position and forcing a shift in emphasis from hate-crime protections to marriage.  Ballot initiatives for statewide bans energized many conservative voters who opposed gay rights, effectively creating referenda on civil rights during the 2004 national election.  The political value to conservatives of gay marriage appeared to have dwindled by 2012, when voters in two states (Maryland and Washington), rather than banning gay marriage, legalized it, and Minnesota voters rejected a constitutional ban for the first time in the nation’s history.  In 2013, the United States Supreme Court ruled The Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex married couples, unconstitutional. 

While gay marriage increased in political potency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported a steady rise in the number of anti-gay hate crimes from 1998, the year of Shepard’s murder, to 2006, the year of Aviance’s battering (www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm; notably, hate crimes decreased between 2006 and 2011).  Sexual identity became a “wedge” issue, gays continued to be attacked, even while (or perhaps, in part, because) television shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy placed gay men in the living rooms of “ordinary” Americans, openly gay musicians like Rufus Wainwright and Scissor Sisters cultivated mainstream audiences, and comedians like Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin found they could maintain broad appeal even while delivering gay-targeted material. Between the year Shepard was murdered and the year Aviance was attacked, an apparent surge in the marketability of homosexuality accompanied a marked increase in its polarizing potency in cultural rhetoric, as well as a reported increase in one of the devastating material and physical consequences of such rhetoric: identity-based violent crime.

In highlighting the connections between these two acts of violence, I do not desire simply to lament the relatively slow progress in combating crimes motivated by sexual identity.  Rather, I believe that examining the image and music of Kevin Aviance in relation to hate crimes can serve a productive and healing purpose.  To do so, I must unapologetically place myself at the intersection of Aviance and Shepard because, in part, the observations I make emerge from my initial few encounters with Aviance and my concurrent awakening to that intersection.  Elements of what follows, therefore, exhibit autoethnographic qualities, exposing my predilection for what Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997, 9) calls “a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context.”  Anecdotal feedback from moments when I have talked through these connections with friends and colleagues indicate that, while aspects of these observations are indeed quite personal, their power can be shared, my stories can be incorporated into others’ experiences of trauma, memory and history.  History is malleable and the communal traumas of history are, if anything, vastly more malleable.  Yet, as discussed by the authors of the recent volume Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, the distinction between events and the multiple ways in which events are remembered, reported, and valued through histories too often gets blurred in the frequently futile quest for objectivity.  We seek, sometimes with an almost absurd desperation, for verifiable events and facts, even as most of us know that meaning is not to be found in facts alone.  Meaning is found in the relationships between facts, in the interstitial spaces that constitute knowledge, and within which experience and subjectivity disrupt our capacity to confirm universal values or even truth.  The cultural lens provided by Kevin Aviance has fundamentally altered my personal history of Matthew Shepard in productive and liberating ways.  Concurrently, it has changed some of my musical identifications and perspectives in equally productive ways.  Along the way, I have been struck by how crucial and powerful this link between musical stylistic preferences and a healing revision of historical memory has proven to be.  My ultimate desire, then, is to elucidate that lens so that, on the one hand, it might provide similar healing to others and, on the other, might serve as a model for other activations of intersecting musical and cultural histories.

I view this process as an adaptation of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of “reparative” reading practices.  Sedgwick (2003) draws upon the work of Melanie Klein and Silvan Tompkins to suggest that criticism after the establishment of New Historicism privileges “paranoid” positions—ones dependant upon the exposure of hidden (or not-so-hidden) histories of oppression.  While such practices are crucial, Sedgwick suggests that their centrality to the academy tends to push aside other methodologies, such as those privileging the practice of imaginative close reading, which may be more adaptable to the quest for “reparative” value of products for oppressed populations:

The vocabulary for articulating any reader’s reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it’s no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives.  The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself.  [. . .] What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them (150,151).

Sedgwick does not call for a rejection of contextualization in the analysis of cultural texts—far from it.  Rather, she suggests that allowing “reader-response” perspectives to contribute to, inform, or guide analysis might yield productive, reparative results.  Sedgwick wisely avoids offering a single, unified definition of a reparative reading, but it is clear that such a process rejects any position that dictates certain interpretations.  Instead, she indicates that it is both possible and profitable for any subject to identify with any text, locating interpretive angles and individual characteristics that “provide sustenance,” even if the text’s apparent motive is to exclude or harm or ignore that subject.  This enables a greater interpretive freedom for critics and analysts approaching dominant-culture texts from marginalized subject positions, but also enables a wider range of approaches to texts produced from the margins.  It equally calls for defining “text” in the broadest possible sense.  Likewise, the quest for context must not be a quest for a single context, but must take into account the multiplicity of subjects and contingencies through which culture, art, music, literature, etc. are experienced, even if those contingencies may seem coincidental or circumstantial.

The texts I engage include contexts themselves, the cultural moment at which I have already suggested Shepard and Aviance intersect, the shifting expressions of the gay rights movement, and the social and artistic history from which Aviance’s music and image emerge.  The three remaining sections of this essay are centered (with the occasional deviation) on three American cultural moments separated by two spans of roughly eight years—1990, which I will argue is the general moment when the underground drag culture from which Aviance’s work emerges became marketable fodder for mainstream appropriation; 1998 and 1999, the year of Shepard’s death and the year of Aviance’s first album’s release; and the period of 2006-2008, which spans the year of Aviance’s attack and the year of the tenth anniversary of Shepard’s murder.  As is the case with many underground artists, Aviance has received only the rarest of passing mentions in either scholarly literature or the mainstream print media.  Therefore, I will begin with an examination of what I take to be crucial aspects of the specific cultural milieu and historical lineage from which his music is created.  This section is informed by the implications of the partial mainstreaming of drag culture. Then I will extend these implications into a discussion of anti-gay violence—both as it is inscribed bodily and as it is inscribed culturally—and the ways in which Aviance’s marketed dance music and image mitigates external representation and appropriation.  I consider, along the way, how Aviance’s move from “subcultural” artistic production toward a broader audience interacts with the public emergence of underground drag in the 1990s.  From there, using my personal story as a guide, I will trace the potential for Aviance to activate an embodied pleasure that accesses shifts of historical memory and abuse and the ways these shifts can revise conceptions of community among a devalued population.  Allowing these moments to intersect, rather than enforcing their separations, reveals one aspect of music’s transformative, healing potential for abused populations.

1990: Disseminating Divadom

Kevin Aviance’s artistic production is inextricably linked to New York’s largely African American and Latino drag (or vogue) house culture, a culture highlighted in Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning (1990) and famously thrust into international view by Madonna’s “Vogue” (1990).  Drag house culture centers on the creation of community via public drag balls that foreground gender and sexual performativity by playing with their conventions.  The upsurge of mainstream, marketed representations of drag culture at the time of these products constructs a “sub-subcultural” image that obscures the significance of its cultural history in larger histories of American sexual identities.  I briefly turn to that history first:

As George Chauncey (1994) describes, the sometimes uneasy commingling of sexual and racial minorities in New York’s Greenwich Village and Harlem during the first part of the twentieth century increased the visibility of homosexuals as part of the urban social landscape and fostered gay collective identities.  Central to this development were drag balls and the social and sexual networks they enabled.  In Chauncey’s observation, these events held enormous importance, both material and symbolic, for the progress of gay identity formation in the 1920s: “The balls, the largest and most significant collective events of gay society, were highly representative of the organization of the gay subculture and its relationship to the dominant culture” (291).  As large public events, drag balls functioned at a unique intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality.  Cultural minorities inverted the markings of gender within a collective ritual that duplicated and revised the trappings of white, aristocratic social dance.  Increased visibility, however, was short-lived: “As the onset of the Depression dashed the confidence of the 1920s, gay men and lesbians began to seem less amusing than dangerous.  A powerful campaign to render gay men and lesbians invisible—to exclude them from the public sphere—quickly gained momentum” (Chauncey, 331). 

Still, the New York drag tradition survived underground.  The late Willi Ninja (1994), founder of the House of Ninja, describes the progression of drag balls after World War II, noting how the racial tensions of the era led to a more segregated culture than that of the 1920s, as well as how shifting modes of self-fashioning among gay men led to the development of vogueing:

In the fifties, the drag balls, which were mixed at the time—both white and black—staged competitions for trophies and sometimes cash prizes, where the drag queens competed in categories such as costume, or best body. The black drag queens found that they were not winning, so they took their balls up to Harlem and competed amongst their own, to avoid discrimination.  Up through the end of the sixties, the scene was primarily black, and mostly drag queens, at which point the balls started to include, along with femme drag queens, butch queens, like the everyday boy that passes you on the street. [. . .] Since we couldn’t compete in the so-called “real world,” this was our chance to kind of live out our fantasy for one evening, for real, for us. [. . .] So the butch queens got their categories, and voguing came into being [. . .] No dance form is entirely new, of course.  And they basically came up with the name “vogue” because some of the movements were similar to what you see in the fashion magazines, except exaggerated.  In the seventies, stretch movements, including splits, were added to the posing with hand movements (160, 161).

As a descendent of the drag balls of 1920s New York, contemporary drag house culture maintains its celebration of extravagance and community.  Houses serve as surrogate families for often economically and ethnically disenfranchised LGBT people, providing moments of glamour and accolades for individuals whose life experiences are worlds away from the couture models they emulate. 

Yet while their creation of community continues to center on localized drag balls and competitions, the wider dissemination of cultural production enabled by newer media allows for individuals to distinguish themselves and expand the audience for their particular artistry.  In isolated cases, the increased visibility among fan networks, Internet production and resources, and public events has translated into mainstream media exposure.  VH1’s reality television show America’s Next Top Model, for example, has featured house members—including Benny Ninja, a vogue legend and father of the House of Ninja—as judges and mentors.  In a 2004 episode from the show’s second season, Aviance himself made a guest appearance as a runway coach, using drag queens as exemplars of effective use of the catwalk.  In placing men from drag and vogue communities in such positions of authority over aspiring female models, America’s Next Top Model seems to legitimize their claims to femininity and fashion—the imitators become more “authentically glamorous” than the women they imitate.  On an individual level, appearances of drag performers on the show might be seen as a playing-out in the mass media of Judith Butler’s influential theorization of gender performance, in which drag “reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.  In imitating gender, drag implicitly revels the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (Butler 2006, 187).  By placing the drag queens in the positions of bearers of female knowledge and evaluators of feminine performance, these appearances disrupt notions of authentic gender by revealing the falsity of gender itself.  While such a formulation may demonstrate a transformative potential, especially when displayed on cable television, it depends upon the isolation of individual personalities and images from the specific cultural contexts in which they are developed.  More significantly, while drag culture itself values spectacle, this kind of mediation spectacularizes it in a calculated, scripted manner that removes the representational power of the performer, placing it in the hands of producers. 

Portrayals of the broader drag house culture (with the exception of the preceding narrative from Willi Ninja) have largely fallen to outsiders.  Returning my attention to the period during which the two most famous uses of vogue culture, Livingston’s film and Madonna’s song, can help unpack some of the representational issues confronting Aviance’s move toward the mainstream—or at least a wider public.  1990, the year of the releases of Paris is Burning and “Vogue” also saw the United States release of British director Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), an avant garde filmic celebration of black male homosexuality that Ed Guerrero describes as “boldly address[ing] the omissions of literary history and directly challeng[ing] reductive notions of black male sexuality by exploring poetry, beauty and desire in the black gay world” (399).  I agree with Guerrero’s assessment.  Yet the full impact of the film is not contained within itself, or even in its productive exposure of the historical importance black male homosexuality, but is manifested through consideration of the cultural moment of the film’s release.  Looking for Langston uses archival footage from Harlem Renaissance clubs juxtaposed with scripted fantasy sequences to portray overlooked 1920s sexualities, as well as to ruminate on black sexualities transhistorically. While the film includes seemingly coherent vignettes, its unifying structure derives from a variety of literary texts accompanying the largely nebulous visuals.  Julien’s celebratory and highly erotic presentation of African American male same-sex desire arrived in the United States even as underground black gay cultural formulations were seemingly undergoing a process of mainstreaming.  His complex, artful, and multifaceted work stands in stark contrast to contemporaneous uses of black homosexual cultural expression.

In “Is Paris Burning?” (1992) bell hooks takes issue with the Livingston documentary, particularly in its celebration of spectacle and glossing over of the material hardships of drag ball participants.  In an interview with Julien, hooks (1991) contrasts Livingston’s portrayal of drag houses with the use of eroticism in his film. 

B[ell] H[ooks]: Paris Is Burning—Jenny Livingston’s film about black drag queens—has been incredibly celebrated here.  I think that many people just see black gay subculture and imagine it’s an oppositional film.

I[saac] J[ulien]: I don’t think it’s an oppositional film.

BH: But it was interesting to see that, because of its subject matter, people project onto the film a degree of radicalism that is not really there in the film itself.

IJ: To me, one of the problems in Paris Is Burning, is that the subjects in the film are, to an extent, presented to us as objects of a certain gaze that is, in the end, ethnographic . . .

BH: . . . One thing that struck me about Paris Is Burning is that there is no sexuality in the film.

IJ: Desire is not really at play at all in Paris Is Burning; desire is enacted by the subjects in the film, because their fantasies are about being Vogue models or articulating black style in a hybrid way . . .

I find this interaction to be densely packed with significance regarding the public exposure and marketing of a culture largely united by its members’ sexual, gender, and racial minority status.  Hooks is initially concerned by the disconnect between the radical nature of the portrayed population and the seemingly anaesthetized way in which they are portrayed.  For Julien, this is a matter of objectification.  His description of the film’s “ethnographic” perspective is less a critique of ethnography in general and more a lament over the treatment of the population as an exotic tribe.  He later points to a lack of critical engagement with drag culture, unsure whether this is characteristic of the population itself or a product of Livingston’s portrayal.  The interview’s turn to sexuality implicitly points to the multivalent nature of objectification and the differences between his film and Paris Is Burning.  Looking for Langston prominently displays male bodies in explicitly erotic ways.  Yet the nonlinear narrative of his film renders what might seem clear objectification, in fact, “subjectifying.”  By stripping away referential, historical, and literary logic, it highlights unfettered desire between black men—an expression of desire largely invisible in American culture; he gives voice to a culturally-unintelligible subjectivity.  For Julien, Livingston’s portrayal substitutes the fully comprehensible motivation of materialism and glamour for what he suspects is the true adhesive of the community: desire.

If the exposure of a community made up of identities largely predicated on unconventional frameworks of desire can be made palatable through materialism, how does the Material Girl herself utilize its cultural production?  In her examination of racial imagery in camp art, Pamela Robertson (1999) accurately observes the disingenuous nature of Madonna’s claim in “Vogue” that “it doesn’t matter if you’re black and white, if you’re a boy or a girl,” “all the while obscuring vogueing’s racial and homosexual specificity” (402).  Hooks (1994) has a few words for Madonna, as well. Remarking on Madonna’s apparent abandonment of her “early politicized image of transgressive female artistry,” she critiques her wide-ranging appropriation of sexual and racial minority cultures, particularly in her 1992 coffee table book Sex.  By 1994, hooks observes that:

Increasingly, Madonna occupies the space of the white cultural imperialist, taking on the mantle of the white colonial adventurer moving into the wilderness of black culture (gay and straight), of white gay subculture. Within these new and different realms of experience, she never divests herself of white privilege.  She maintains both the purity of her representation and her dominance (20).

Madonna’s usage and portrayal of African American and gay cultures does, indeed, seem to construe minority production to be a treasure-trove waiting to be plundered.  The video for “Vogue” certainly exemplifies the concern expressed by hooks regarding how Madonna’s early 1990s adoption of a Marilyn Monroe style frequently played upon “the conquest of light over dark [that] replays the drama of white supremacist domination of the Native American, African, and so on” (20).  The black-and-white video masterfully highlights visual contrast, placing stark white next to deep black and downplaying the gray hues in between.  Our first glimpse of Madonna is a blindingly white close-up of her back, magnified by the glamorous jeweled detail of her dress.  As she begins the first verse, she wears a black, translucent blouse, the mesh contrasting suggestively with her white skin and highlighting her breasts, “authenticating” her femaleness by displaying secondary sex characteristics; she later briefly dons one of her trademark “torpedo” bras, predictably black and surrounded by plenty of shockingly white flesh.  It is only at the chorus, as she performs “vogue” choreography with her dancers, that her costuming matches that of the video’s men, her dark suit covering much more of her white skin than did her previous outfits (it should be noted that choreography is essentially antithetical to actual vogueing, which values spontaneous fabulousness).  In order to partake of vogue culture, she is willing to embrace the dancers’ self-styling, but only before establishing both her whiteness and her “real” femininity.  As a result of both Madonna’s and Livingston’s uses of vogue culture, in the words of Judith Halberstam (2006), “ . . . while the queens in Paris Is Burning expressed a desire for precisely the kind of fame and fortune that did eventually accrue to vogueing, the fame went to director Jennie Livingston and the fortune went to Madonna” (7).

Paris is Burning and “Vogue” demonstrate, in different ways, the removal of cultural specificity from the cultural practices of vogue houses.  In no way do I mean to suggest that art and ritual cannot or should not travel across cultures or from subculture to the mainstream—I am, after all, an outsider to drag house culture as well—but rather that such uses and representations can only problematically make claims to authority.  This is particularly true when considering practices that originate in cultural networks whose affective motivations may be reviled or misunderstood by the dominant society.  In order to make its subject palatable, Livingston’s film substitutes the replication of social mobility for the at least equally crucial underlying sexual impulses inherent in the practices of drag house culture.  Madonna appropriates a particular practice, fundamentally altering it and exerting dominance over it.  Providing mainstream society in 1990 with the easiest access to the production of a community whose very existence plays with multiple social taboos, these products walk a dangerous line, divorcing discursive tactics of a culture from the realities of the lived experiences of its participants.  E. Patrick Johnson (2005) critiques such privileging of discourse over material reality in his development of “quare” theory, a racially-mindful alteration of queer theory.  In Johnson’s conceptualization, “‘Quare’ . . . not only speaks across identities, it articulates identities as well.  ‘Quare’ offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges” (127).  In order to bridge constructivist and essentialist approaches to identity, he “wish[es] to ‘quare’ ‘queer’ such that ways of knowing are viewed both as discursively mediated and as historically situated and materially conditioned” (127).  For Johnson, in other words, the semantic and referential slipperiness of “queer” knowledge and subjectivity—what David Halperin (1995, 63) calls “identity without an essence”—must be tempered by the everyday lived realities of those it encompasses, in order not to lift irresponsibly from their contexts culturally-specific practices.  Combining the tangible and the theoretical, the historical and the transhistorical, helps avoid washing-over differences among members of identity groups, while nonetheless enabling useful observations about the formation and characteristics of such groups.  I believe Segwick’s “reparative reading” provides a powerful complement.  While it might seem to suggest an ahistorical bent antithetical to Johnson’s call, its privileging of individual affective responses, in fact, localizes analysis in a way I believe partially satisfies his criteria. 

I will return to Livingston and Madonna in my consideration of Aviance’s changing music career.  As I now turn my attention back to the time of Matthew Shepard’s death and Kevin Aviance’s first album, I remind myself that these events are both “queer” and “quare.”  They are broadly significant to the formation of American sexual and racial identities; they are equally individually experienced moments.  As Shepard’s material life ends and gives way to a symbolic one, Aviance emerges from the House of Aviance, marketing his art and image to the broader social world of queer dance clubs and disseminating them to individuals through albums and videos.  Together, through a reparative lens, they alter my perceptions of anti-gay trauma, musical identity, and the ways one might inform the other.

1998, 1999: Bodies, Appropriations

Fineman opens his Newsweek article about Matthew Shepard’s murder with the description of a weak boy trounced in a hard-knock world:

From his first breath, life was a struggle for Matthew Shepard. He was a preemie at birth—a tiny slip of a kid who would grow up to be barely five feet tall. He was shy and gentle in a place where it wasn't common for a young man to be either: in Casper, a rough-and-tumble oil town, in Wyoming, a state that features a broncobuster on its license plate.

This characterization exemplifies one of the primary narratives told in the media in the weeks following Shepard’s death.  The tale of a kind, unassuming, non-threatening youth just barely getting by in an intolerant society—only to be savaged by a pair of brutish men motivated by blind bigotry—proved intoxicating after a decade in which multiculturalism and social justice seemed to be thrust upon the American public as essential structural principles of progress.  It was, however, not the only story told.  Shepard’s past was investigated.  People speculated on his social behavior, suggesting that he had a habit of making inappropriate sexual advances.  Rumors circulated that he used crystal methamphetamine, even that the crime was drug-related.  Ten years after the murder, The Laramie Project’s playwright returned to the town only to find that “some in Laramie were no longer speaking of Mr. Shepard’s death as a hate crime but rather as a drug-fueled robbery gone wrong” (“Laramie Killing Given Epilogue a Decade Later,” The New York Times, 16 September 2008).  This section begins with a consideration of some implications of the postmortem cultural life of Shepard before examining how the strategies employed by Aviance in his fostering of a public image might be seen as revisionary.

Matthew Shepard’s murder demonstrates some unique ways in which the public mediation of a personal, identity-based trauma can both resonate with communal traumas and revictimize the victim.  In describing the rhetorical efficacy of the “gay panic” argument, Ron Becker notes:

It shouldn’t be surprising that defense lawyers would revise the clinical concept [of gay panic] in such significant ways.  In appropriating the term, defense attorneys have tried to capitalize on the authority of medical science.  In modifying it, they have tried to tailor the concept to fit the crimes and the homophobic attitudes of jurors and judges.  Shifting the cause of homosexual panic from a conflict between homosexual desires and heterosexual identity within the patient to the aggressive, “perverse cravings” of the gay victim, for example, enables the defense to use the homophobic sentiments in the courtroom to its advantage rather than its detriment (Becker 2006, 19).

Similar to arguments made in rape cases, this line of defense depends upon the shifting of the onus for the crime from the perpetrator to the victim.  An action on the part of the assailed, whether it is an expression of romantic interest or simply the revelation of his/her sexual orientation, directly incites an uncontrollable action on the part of the assailant.  For Becker, the cultural activation of the “gay panic” defense through its public airing following Shepard’s murder highlighted a growing anxiety surrounding the steadily increasing portrayal of gays and lesbians in the media.  Becker’s study of homosexual imagery on network television in the 1990s points to a conflicted attitude among much of the mainstream American public.  He theorizes a broader cultural concept of “straight panic:” “the social anxieties that played out in the mainstream media and American culture more generally at a time when the relationship between the majority and its minorities, the center and the margins, the normal and the abnormal were drawn into question” (36).  Media attention to Shepard’s murder placed these anxieties at the nexus of questions regarding community, violence, and identity in a society highly reliant on behavioral norms.  In highlighting and potentially legitimizing a fear of gayness, the public airing of these anxieties as an actually workable legal defense has profound implications for how—or if—LGBT people feel valued by their broader community.  In effect, even while showing the social deviancy of Henderson and McKinney’s violent actions, the defense suggests the deviancy of—to be charitable—Shepard’s private sexual actions or desires, or—in the extreme—an aspect of his very identity.

Public speculations upon Shepard’s potential culpability in his own murder, both at the time and in subsequent years, have powerful implications, not only for the mainstream public’s perception of the event, but for how it is remembered within LGBT communities.  In her discussion of recovered memory, Marita Sturken (1998) notes “the profound ways in which memory is perceived to be fundamental to identity and social process.  While the instability of memory, its constant reconstruction, and its integration with fantasy have been widely discussed, memory is still popularly conceived as a sacred and pure text” (106).  As both a collective and an individual memory, Shepard is, indeed, considered sacrosanct among many in the wider LGBT community.  Yet the focus on Shepard’s murder as central to queer histories or identities—of which this paper is unapologetically a part—runs the risk of constructing those histories or identities as primarily constituted by victimization.  Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (2004) explain that:

Assaults on gay memory in particular have been virulent in recent years, abetting the forces that would render us sexually anxious, isolated in dynamics of shame and guilt. [. . .] Even the not-overtly-homophobic media rehearse versions of gay history as victims’ tales, in which sexual and political self-assertion leads to violent assault.  While the murders of Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepard are important to gay history, we lose something when these become the primary paradigms of the gay past, of cultural memory.  The mainstream’s focus on gay martyrs, moreover, follows two decades of stories featuring the doomed homosexual victimized by an immature culture that in the 1970s promoted the “promiscuity” that led to AIDS.  In this view, the solution to the “problem” of memory is a willed amnesia, in which gay men forget our past in order to assimilate to purportedly healthier mainstream norms (158, 159). 

Castiglia and Reed raise the crucial observation that the sense of mutually experienced and recalled tragedy is insufficient for the production of an affirmative community.  Nevertheless, as is the case with all minority groups, the reclamation of structures of abuse is an important tool in the mediation of trauma.  In his ethnography of the Radical Faeries, a “countercultural,” activist, and spiritual community largely made up of queer men, Peter Hennon (2008) observes the productive potential the group finds in their channeling and revision of tropes of effeminacy.  While Hennon ultimately finds the Faeries to be apolitical, they nevertheless construct a caring community largely defined by “an active embrace and satire of the historically sedimented associations between same-sex orientation and effeminacy, which is most apparent in the way the community deploys drag” (59).  In the Faeries’ case, a self-conscious antiessentialism centering on playful critiques of the gendered rhetoric historically activated to ridicule gay men informs social, sexual, and spiritual communion.  More concrete examples of historical trauma also provide material for prominent tools of LGBT community-building.  In his study of the cultural history of the pink triangle, the reclaimed symbol of the torture and extermination of gays in the Holocaust, Erik N. Jensen notes how discussions about its appropriateness have:

both shaped and reflected a larger tension in the gay community over what to remember and how to remember it. [. . .]  To those invested in the memory of persecution, the pink triangle has served multiple functions: it has united a diverse population of gay men and women, mobilized political action, and provided an interpretive framework for contemporary experiences (346).

The pink triangle’s symbolic significance as a rallying image for LGBT communities is inextricably linked to its history of terror and death and depends upon revising its semantic meaning.

Shepard is remembered, as he should be.  It is absolutely essential to recall that he is but one of countless other victims of homophobic violence, but as the memory of his particular death maintains a unique cultural potency, the ways that memory is framed and the uses to which it is put have substantive implications for the repudiation of victimization and the fostering of communal and individual well-being in LGBT populations.  In the days and weeks following Shepard’s death, competing forces vied for the power to shape his memory.  His death having denied his self-representation, he was transformed into an object for political and emotional controversy.  As I have suggested, his “martyrdom” was confronted and challenged by rumors and investigations into his personal life.  The tragedy of his death and ruminations on the physical and psychological torment he faced in his last hours of consciousness were countered with the fire and brimstone proclamations of Fred Phelps, whose congregation’s demonstrations stood—at least in their media portrayal (the congregation, in fact, was made up of a handful of people, many of whom were members of his family)—in direct opposition to the political energy exemplified by the New York protest.  While the personal stories of his mother Judy Shepard, who channeled her loss into an active advocacy career, and his close friend Romaine Patterson, who also became an LGBT rights advocate and chronicled the events in her 2005 book The Whole World Was Watching: Living in the Light of Matthew Shepard, helped place Matthew-the-man back in the story, these debates and representational struggles took place in Shepard’s absence.  The Time cover (26 October 1998) featured an image of the fence outside of Laramie where Shepard was found.  Jagged, harsh, like an instrument of torture, the photograph at once dramatized pain and death and equally drew attention to what was missing from the image: Shepard himself, his portrait displayed in a small box to the side.  It powerfully drove home the individual tragedy while concurrently seeming to comment upon the absence of the man at the center of the frantic, anxious cultural debate active in American society.  Henderson and McKinney, in destroying Shepard’s body, had triggered a volatile public discourse while removing the physical and material locus of that discourse.  They had elevated him to the realm of the symbolic by literally beating him out of existence.

The ability of Kevin Aviance to shape his own public image following his attack eight years later is, therefore, deeply significant.  His material presence enables a symbolic revisioning of the kind of hate-driven obliteration represented by Shepard’s murder. It is, perhaps, perversely fitting that Aviance’s trauma occurred on a night when he had visited a bar called the Phoenix. His image—flamboyant, energetic, and self-constructed—stands in stark contrast to the externally fostered images of Matthew Shepard as either a weak victim of a heartless world or a troubled youth seeking sexual gratification.  Aviance’s appearance at the demonstration following his attack was striking, not only because it displayed his poise during a truly horrific personal moment and enabled a kind of redemption denied in the case of Shepard, but because it encapsulated the unique combination of power, physicality, and compassion that constitutes what I view to be his transformative force. Aviance’s image, both musical and physical, in spite of  (or more likely, because of) his public drag-persona, is distinctly imposing.  His stature of over six feet, a height rendered immeasurable by his habitual use of high-heeled shoes, is matched by his intimidating musculature, clearly displayed by his typical adornment in “high-fashion” women’s clothing.  Likewise, enduring American racist stereotypes cast his African American heritage as a visual marker of threat, particularly to some segments of white America.  His embodied power (both physical and culturally-constructed) is reflected (again, culturally) by his deep bass voice, which, in his music, ranges from smooth lyricism to intimidating growls.  Aviance highlights his sexuality in his music, but also in the physical presence of his public persona.  His body, the site on which his trauma is inscribed, serves as a canvas for his self-fashioning as fluidly gendered but, more importantly, fabulous. 

In fostering a career in gay club culture, he presents an image that is, on the one hand, celebratory and fun, and on the other, deeply challenging to some of the orthodoxies of gay male culture.  While his capacity for self-fashioning may be redemptive, it is not without its unique difficulties.  Middle class, white, gay men have a long and troubling history of both fetishizing black bodies and appropriating selectively from African American culture without consideration or even awareness of the social contingencies that shape the various practices and discursive formulations they cherish.  In their reading of the Logo Network’s Noah’s Arc—at the time of this writing, the only American television show foregrounding black male homosexuality—Gust A. Yep and John P. Elia (2007) draw upon Cornell West (2001) to observe that “the current obsession with sex and the U. S. American fear of black sexuality have had profound effects on interracial relations and black individuals’ perceptions of their own bodies.  Fueled by sexual myths of black women and men, this fear distorts, dehumanizes, and pathologizes black bodies and desires” (30). By publicly negotiating a queer cultural terrain greatly concerned with desire, bodies, and sexual expectation, Aviance is implicitly confronted with a host of preconceptions.  Referencing the representation of black men in the artwork of Tom of Finland, Micha Ramakers (2000) comments on the “tradition of images that reduces black men to their sexuality, or at least to the (contradictory) stereotypical sexual connotations the term black man conjures up in the mind of a white viewer.  A leading mode of representation, into which most porn willingly falls, strongly emphasizes the size of black men’s genitals and a connected ‘insatiable, bestial sexuality’” (90, 91).  If Livingston’s portrayal of drag house culture substitutes socioeconomic longing for black homosexual longing, what Dwight A. McBride (2005) calls “the gay marketplace of desire” fundamentally conflates them.  In his exploration of images in the gay porn industry and internet personals ads, he perpetually finds that black male sexuality is a valued commodity for the dominant white gay culture.  Black bodies carry with them expectations for both specific physical characteristics and particular, generally aggressive, sexual proclivities, black male sexuality, “ever in the process of being both reduced and exaggerated to its central signifier—the big black phallus” (110). 

Concurrent with the commoditization of black male bodies, many cherished modes of white gay male interaction and cultural production depend upon appropriating practices and discourses fostered in black cultures.  Indeed, it is utterly common, particularly in racially homogenous social situations, to hear white gay men speak with stereotyped inflections exaggeratedly referencing black female vernaculars. Robertson (1999), using her aforementioned critique of “Vogue” as one example, suggests how some white queer practices and representations “are constituted, in large part, by their constant coupling with, and contrast to, images and sounds of blackness” (402).  Within the realm of underground queer dance music, the stylistic and material genre of which Aviance is a part, the relationships between white gay masculinity and black straight femininity play out historically.  Walter Hughes (1994) suggests the importance of links between African American women and gay men in the development of disco, while observing the culturally-fraught implications of such links:

Implicit in early disco is the assumption that only a black woman can openly vocalize her sexuality, and that only a gay man would join her in a free-fall from rational self-mastery.  But the evolution of disco is one of both appropriation and integration, both exploitation and empathy; the negotiation between usually straight black women and usually white gay men seemed to open up and make visible all the various subject positions between these previously polarized identities (153).

As Kai Fikentscher (2000) argues, disco—and its dance music progeny—constitutes a continuation of the intersecting cultural histories that created underground drag culture in 1920s.  The connections between black women and gay men in underground dance culture create a delicate mixture of opposition and collaboration.  Self-described “diva” Aviance, then, negotiates a dense complex of racial and sexual histories and expectations in his creation of musical commodities for queer dance clubs.

The ubiquity of such appropriations and expectations was driven home to me during my first exposure to Aviance, through one of the many interviews he gave for the podcast “Gay Pimpin’ with Jonny McGovern” (www.gaypimp.com).  It was the first time I had ever heard the podcast and I was immediately set off-kilter by the show’s opening theme music, sung by McGovern himself.  McGovern initiates the song with an a cappella call of “are you feeling really faggoty?” A chordal, rhythmic organ doubles the subsequent choral response of “faggoty as can be.”  The call-and-response introduction closes with McGovern shouting, “sing it, Jesus!” before the song bursts into a full-fledged, exuberant gospel texture. The white McGovern initiates his lengthy podcast, a comedic stream-of-consciousness conversation about the “mainstream” of the New York gay party scene, by channeling a common gay male trope: he impersonates a black, female gospel singer, “signifyin’” to her/his congregation.  Aviance and McGovern are friends, collaborators, and prominent fixtures in the New York gay clubbing scene.  The highly racialized relationship between their public personas is far too complex to explore fully in this paper, though I think even this brief example of McGovern’s musical self-fashioning speaks volumes.  In conversation, McGovern frequently transfers the racially-saturated musical signification of the podcast theme into a self-consciously campy, racialized rhetorical style, while it strikes me that Aviance often engages McGovern and his co-hosts (who include his fellow house-member Erika Toure Aviance), from what José Esteban Muñoz (1999) might describe as a “disidentificatory” position. 

Muñoz conceptualizes a tactic used by queers of color to negotiate the intersections of racism and homophobia, “one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology” (11).  This theory, on the one hand, embraces the everyday lived experience of difference while, on the other, claiming the discursive terms of oppression in order to shift their emphasis—“to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject” (12).  In this way, it is situated at the intersection of Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and Johnson’s call for “quare” theoretical perspectives, taking as its object any text or practice, even those created from perspectives that are hostile or disinterested, and placing oneself within it to account for material experience.  Aviance’s interactions with McGovern and company can be seen as such tactics made manifest.  He “camps” right along with them, while subtly “working on and against” the rhetoric by claiming authority and correcting misuse of terminology or humorously critiquing others’ less-than-“fierce” moments.  The problematic appropriation of blackness becomes highlighted when the diva, never directly criticizing the trope, undermines any claims to authenticity made by McGovern.

            The remaining section of this essay might be understood as my own process of “disidentification”—or “reparative reading” of, or attempt to “quare” the music of Kevin Aviance.  As a white man, my use of theoretical principles intended to account for minority racial experiences may seem odd.  Yet I position myself in this way, not simply because they seem appropriate lenses for Aviance, but because I believe his music self-consciously invites such perspectives.  This may, in fact, stem from the cultural histories he engages, but regardless, in the process of speaking to a broader queer audience, he constructs an oeuvre that encourages the shifting of contexts and readings to account for individually-experienced subjectivities.  While much contemporary dance/house music, with its dependence on “beats” and repetitive rhythmic foundations with little harmonic or melodic detail, may appear homogenous or formulaic, surface-level alterations and textual allusions often carry significant meaning.  Aviance’s music often opens itself up for “disidentificatory” or “reparative” perspectives by exposing interpretive fissures in the community ethos of queer dance clubs, social and aesthetic cohesions which, as I will discuss, have been understood as reflected in the structural foundations of dance music.  While Aviance is a powerful presence in club culture, he is not uncritical of it.  Yet, as is suggested by Muñoz’s theory, he does not eschew his social position within the culture, but rather celebrates it while working “on and against” it.  Inherent in Aviance’s musical production is the transference of violent physicality to a physicality producing healing.  Aviance’s musical production during the period between Shepard’s murder and Aviance’s battering, then, now becomes my subject of inquiry.

2006, 2008: Suffering Beatings While Feeling the Beat

To begin exploring the healing processes I have suggested as present in Kevin Aviance’s music, I’d like to return to his most direct artistic treatment of Matthew Shepard: the video for his version of “Join in the Chant.”  Nitzer Ebb’s original “Join in the Chant,” released on the album That Total Age of 1987, used a heavy, punk-inflected, synth-dance aesthetic to present a generalized and vague critique of mass consciousness, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, militarism, and the violence that is so often their result.  Repeated calls including “lies, lies,” “guns, guns” and “muscle and hate,” seem to invite a wide range of interpretations focusing on power, coercion, and social upheaval.  In covering the song, Aviance, because of the nature of his public persona, focuses the critique on violence linked to race and sexual identity.  Yet, by foregrounding the community response to Shepard’s murder—again, an event perfectly coinciding with the single’s release—the video further focuses the musical and rhetorical signification on the physical and temporal consequences of the broad social forces it scrutinizes.  To draw upon Johnson, it can be understood as “quaring” both the event and a pre-existing musical rhetoric, combining the discursive (repetitive and vague lyrics referencing generalized violence and injustice as well as images of generic trauma) and the material (the real-life “political funeral” of a man who suffered a specific trauma).  While foregrounding the New York demonstration, the video’s separate narrative of Aviance weeping alone against a dark backdrop and spare set equally places him within the visual realization of the song.  Despite his clear anguish, Aviance maintains a spectacular and dramatic self-presentation.  His mourning clothes, including a tight black dress with full arm-length gloves and a black corset accompanied by a thick metallic choker-necklace, are extravagant.  His movements, while clearly signifying grief and anger, are graceful, elegant, and extremely theatrical.  He is later joined by backup dancers whose movements mirror his own, but only generally, their own embodied expression deviating from the kind of lock-step present Madonna’s video.  In short, even in mourning, Aviance is utterly fabulous.

This juxtaposition of tragedy and self-stylization is more than a visual aesthetic.  In her ethnographic study of queer club culture in New York, Fiona Buckland (2002) discusses what she calls “the currency of fabulousness.”  She observes how clothing, style, and self-presentation on the dance floor contribute to the creation of affirmative experiences within the protected “queer” spaces separated from the harsh and often oppressive realities of sexual politics outside in the “real” world.  Considering one of her interviewees, she notes how attending a club:

was in fact more empowering for him than going to a march or political meeting for gay and lesbian rights.  A space in which to be fabulous produced him as a gay subject: ‘I get my gayness.’  It also produced the meaning of ‘gayness’ for him through the pleasure of the grind on the dance floor, rather than the grind of going to meetings and talking about oppression” (37). 

For Buckland, these kinds of stories reflect ways that a devalued population might rewrite the terms by which value is conferred.  Fabulousness is embodied, demonstrated by self-presentation and, above all, movement on the dance floor.  Aviance’s unique mourning for Shepard does not minimize the tragedy but, rather, refuses to allow the destruction of Shepard’s body to diminish the fabulousness of his own, just as his appearance at the demonstration eight years later—offering “love” as a “present to ignorance”—refused to allow hate to stop the unique fabulousness of queer community.

Yet unpacking some of the ways such embodied affirmations might function more generally requires exploring how music and movement can formulate subject positions in opposition to an often abusive dominant ideology, how the “currency” gets its value, and for whom.  For Buckland, individual improvised dancing allows participants to fashion themselves through the channeling of pleasure, the combination of individuals on the dance floor creating a community working in tandem, while maintaining control of their own individual embodied experiences: “Choreographing interrelations between the self and the other and the individual and the mass in the club devise[s] a queer lifeworld, which inform[s] its imagination and realization outside of the club.  Both spaces [are] political in this sense at least.  What participants [can] dance [has] the real power of gravity wherever their feet carr[y] them” (110).  Hughes takes a slightly different, though related approach, locating the impact of dance on gay male subjectivity in a matrix of discipline and pleasure:

One significant moment of gay identification might therefore be the realization that the policing and regulation to which homosexuality is subject in our society are themselves erotic practices, practices that may be claimed for one’s own pleasure rather than being left to parents, policemen, psychiatrists, fagbashers, priests and senators from North Carolina.  This moment, when one seizes from these others the power of constructing homosexuality, and usurps the pleasure attendant on this exercise of power, is a moment staged in the disco nightly.  By submitting to its insistent, disciplinary beat, one learns from disco how to be one kind of gay man; one accepts, with pleasure rather than suffering, the imposition of a version of gay identity (148).

Buckland and Hughes differ on how discipline should be understood in relation to the dance floor.  Buckland finds the notion of “submission” troubling, arguing instead that the musical framework of the beat enables improvisatory empowerment.  For Hughes, the beat creates a disciplinary regime that functions in opposition to that of the broader culture.  Stephen Amico (2001) extends this approach to discipline on the dance floor.  Rightly noting that the term “queer” can be misused to signify a unified community, washing over the myriad of different ways non-heterosexual individuals experience and express their sexualities, Amico explores the dancing manifestation of a “version of gay identity” that celebrates idealized images of masculinity.  In his example, the disciplinary regime of the dance floor can be related to that of the gym, whose final goal is physical “perfection.”  Ultimately, though Buckland critiques Hughes, and Amico’s conception implicitly suggests an overgeneralization on the part of Buckland, the three essentially agree on the fundamental structural principles of clubs.  Amico’s localized study enables him to foreground the celebration of the body that is, in fact, one of the primary ways Buckland’s “currency of fabulousness” establishes its value. Buckland, in my view mistakenly, describes Hughes’s Foucauldian conception of “discipline” as an internalization of “the same oppressive capitalist reading of gay male clubbers that he identifies in reproducing an image of the clubber as surrendering agency to a reified external force” (78).  Yet Hughes, it seems to me, is in fact suggesting that dance enables a productive kind of discipline, one chosen for its emphasis on pleasure rather than on pain. 

All three of these perspectives are operative in the social environments where Aviance’s music is played and danced to, and by extension, constructs disciplinary frameworks through which the embodiment of fabulousness contributes to affirmative self-fashioning.  It is at this point that I must fully insert myself into the narrative.  Aviance’s capacity to move me—my capacity to experience healing through his music—is truly surprising.  While I have a great deal of respect for the cultural histories that produced gay clubs, I myself am far from a clubber.  Indeed, I find dance clubs disquieting for precisely the reasons that I believe Amico, Buckland, and Hughes seem to run into interpretive conflicts with each other, particularly in the valuing of physical conformity and materialist display.  I am well aware that my level of fabulousness in these contexts provides me with little currency to buy social standing or an affirmative subject creation.  In a paper presented at the 2008 meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-U.S. Branch, Alexander M. Cannon reflected upon how the disciplinary regimes of clubs are mapped onto space, the dance floor representing the highest level in a hierarchical configuration that is policed by social interactions.  Typically choosing to be a wallflower, my access to that space and the kinetic creation of fabulousness enabled there is limited.  My relationship to these environments and their art is, therefore, one of “disidentification,” requiring “reparative” interpretation in order to “find sustenance” in them.  The centrality of bodies to frameworks of valuation strikes me as troubling among communities whose histories of oppression have included physical violence of the most horrific kind, ranging from bashings to the gruesome human experiments of the Holocaust.  The added cultural signification of Aviance’s African American body would seem to further problematize the productivity of the rhetoric of “perfection.”  Yet these same frameworks allow Aviance to play with tropes of discipline, pleasure, and power in ways that construe physicality as more than a site of social capital, but as a pivot point between trauma and healing.

I find it striking, for example, that even while embracing his musical authoritative role, his music resonates with the Marxist critiques of mass consciousness alluded to in Buckland’s conflict with Hughes.  The track “Robots” highlights the homogeneity of club culture, without lodging a direct critique.  The song begins with a gradual build-up of industrial sounds, radio frequencies, metallic clanks, etc., as Aviance begins a spoken list of definitions of “robot,” starting with “a machine . . . able to perform simple manual tasks when directed” and ending with “a person who seems to act like a machine.”  Interspersed between his statements, a chorus of digitized voices chant “we are the robots,” their inflection and timbre referencing Kraftwerk’s 1977 “The Robots.”  The chant continues as more sounds emerge to create the thick rhythmic house texture characteristic of Aviance’s aesthetic.  When the melodic bassline enters, it is accompanied by a low, steady, human grunting sound, its depth and resonance clearly marking it as Aviance.  This low human sound contrasts with the robotic chant both in register and in timbre.  As Aviance returns to his litany of definitions, repetitions of the word “machine” emphasize the performative nature of “robot,” which his definitions stipulate involves directed action as well as mechanical imitation.  By focusing on both the submissive nature of robots, highlighted by his “human” grunting musical separation from the chanting mass, and the implication that robots are people, Aviance illustrates the mass consciousness of the dance floor, as well as his authoritative role, his capacity to label the behavior of others, while never engaging in a direct critique of its implications.  This is, to a large degree, a “disidentificatory” move in which musical rhetoric is used to expose ethical complications without employing a direct rejection of them.  He creates a meaningful challenge to the very material and social environment of his aural art while never impeding the pure physical pleasure of his dancing “robots.”

But most of his music eschews even this type of political commentary in favor of shaping physical and sensual experiences in liberating ways.  On Box of Chocolates, the previously released “Join in the Chant” seemlessly combines with the following track, “Rhythm is my Bitch.”  The second of these two tracks presents a sadomasochistic message mitigated by Aviance’s own relationship to the musical language through which he expresses himself.  The song begins with a spare backing track against which Aviance authoritatively demands that the listener, “relinquish control.  Give me your body.  Surrender your soul.”  While he declares, “I am the dominator; you are the servant,” the tool of his domination is clarified as the primary musical parameter of his aural language—“the rhythm is my bitch.”  As campily as Aviance delivers such proclamations, they constitute a crucial explication of his own music.  The dance music he produces primarily serves to stimulate bodies, not ears.  While Aviance’s fans undoubtedly listen to his music in a variety of contexts, its sonic presence remains closely and inextricably tied to physical environments—dance clubs—and one of the most essential appeals of listening to such music out of these contexts is the bodily remembrance of dance and the specific acts of socialization it enables.  Aviance’s use of sadomasochistic imagery in his description of his role as, not so much creator, but controller, of music at once eroticizes it and highlights the physicality of his particular music’s social function. 

Michel Foucault (1995, 1997) understood sadomasochism as a means to produce multiple sites of physical pleasure, and not simply as an expression of latent violent tendencies.  Rather, he viewed it as “a process of invention.  S/M is the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure” (“Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” 170).  If the standard narrative of heterosexuality involves gendered power structures constituting a framework leading to sexual activity, sadomasochism places the negotiation of those structures in the act itself, enabling “extraordinarily polymorphous pleasures, pleasures that at the same time are detached from the valorization of the genitals and especially of the male genitals” (“Le Gai Savoir,” 89, 90).  In a famous passage, Suzanne Cusick (2006) describes the musical implications of removing genital and reproductive imperatives from sexual pleasure:

If sex is free of the association with reproduction enforced by the so-called phallic economy (and it is, remember, exactly so for people called homosexual, as it has become in the last thirty years for people called heterosexual who practice contraception), if it is then only (only!) a means of negotiating power and intimacy through the circulation of pleasure, what’s to prevent music from being sex, and thus an ancient, half-sanctioned form of escape from the constraints of the phallic economy? (76)

Along a similar vein, Judith Peraino (2006) explicitly extends Foucault’s conception into a specifically musical context, describing his formulation as “a redistribution of bodily pleasure from the genitals to any location—even the ears” (243).  The removal of a phallic-centered conception of sex has liberating potential for queer populations through its de-naturalization of heterosexual intercourse.  The observations of Cusick and Peraino suggest that this potential can be manifested musically by foregrounding the pleasure of music as a physical experience.  Listening to music itself might be understood as a queer-positive sexual experience, allowing pleasure while denying heterosexist configurations of pleasure.  Such theorizations may seem to be a lifting into discourse of a material occurrence, thereby violating Johnson’s “quare” call.  However, rather than a severing of the material, in the context of queer dance music, it strikes me that such a process is a re-inscription of the discursive qualities of sadomasochism onto a different material reality, dance substituted for sex.  Dance music is intended to stimulate bodies.  In the kinds of music present in gay clubs, Amico explains that:

The beat is representative of masculinity in its potency; that the beat is positioned as paramount, that it is unremitting, and “dominant” in a visceral form unmediated by thought—pure power as opposed to a lyric representation of such.  This masculinised representation is more than aural signification, however.  By impelling the participants to physical action—dancing which can go on for hours—the beat also engenders a performance of the construction of masculinity through a physical response (362).

While Amico, perhaps problematically, insists that such aural domination is masculine, the addition of sadomasochistic “lyric representation” to the dominance of the beat has several material implications.  First, it ensures that this masculinity need not be understood as phallic.  Second, it enables someone like Aviance, a figure associated with vogue house culture, to exercise this musical power by channeling a dominance divorced from the stereotypical associations of black men with phallic prowess in the sexual marketplace.  Third, it means that dominance can be enacted aurally and contextualized lyrically, thereby providing interpretive freedom in how domination is experienced.

The unique potential of rhythm to combine the explicitly sexual with aggression is a fundamental lyrical and textural aspect of Aviance’s music.   “The Beats” contains a trope similar to that of “Robots,” with Aviance speaking a definition: “a regular repeated stroke.”  A unison chorus of male voices singing on an “O” vowel provides the song’s primary melodic material, foregrounding homosociality.  Near the middle of the song, “a regular repeated stroke” becomes “repeated strokes,” accompanied by a rhythmic panting.  He continues his spoken-word definition, locating the “strokes” “on a drum,” “on a table,” and finally, after a prominent entrance of the male chorus, “on the floor,” enunciated suggestively.  The unexpected entrance of an improvisatory saxophone seems to signify a different sexually-charged night club environment, perhaps originating in another era and a historically related cultural practice.  Indeed, the use of saxophone on the track is reminiscent of Looking for Langston’s use of eros to comment on transhistorical contexts.  Aviance speaks over the sax, demanding: “Don’t forget about those beats,” redirecting the erotic sax to the gay dance club environment.  Shifting the connotation of “stroke” from a musical to a sexual activity lyrically dramatizes the embodied sexuality of rhythmically driven dance, while his claim of dominance over the “undisciplined” improvisatory sensuality of the saxophone reifies his power and legitimizes the eroticism of his musical style.

Dominance and sexuality are central to this music.  Consider the track “Give it Up,” from his 2003 album Entity, in which he explicitly construes drumming as an integral part of a sex act: “bang on the drum while I am riding you.” While this may seem merely a clever—or perhaps crass—lyrical paralleling of his musical style with his sexuality, the prominence of toms in the musical texture draws the connection to the forefront of the song.  The toms, themselves, become excessively sexualized and their sonic presence becomes almost obtrusively present.  It is as if Aviance is, in fact, aurally “riding” the listener, the sexual content of the song moving from discursive representation to a physically present experience.  His enormously popular cover of George Kranz’s “Din Da Da,” in which he vocalizes percussion sounds, represented in the video by striking gigantic drums, takes on greater meaning when heard or viewed from this perspective.  Aviance symbolically commands all aspects of his musical language in the service of sexuality, specifically a sexuality manifested through domination and violence.  Yet such expressions of power in Aviance’s oeuvre consistently occur within contexts of community: “Din Da Da,” for example, begins with Aviance’s plea: “Can we all come together?  Can we all come together?”  In the case of Aviance’s music, then, the Foucauldian production of pleasure entails both the physical pleasure of movement and the creation of multiple sites of social experience framed by a general call to unity. 

Unity ultimately typifies Aviance’s approach.  In these examples, I finally find a meaningful manifestation of Madonna’s vacuous “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl.”  Aviance does not uncritically claim his place in the hierarchy of the gay club scene.  Rather, he uses it to command an embodied pleasure.  All of the moments of cultural history, strange intersections, and troubling memories I have discussed are unified by the necessity of acknowledging and activating desire among minority populations whose sexual difference has historically been either denied or reviled.  By musically placing sexuality in the bodies of individuals in a collective social environment, Aviance enacts a healing of psychological and physical trauma directly resulting from a hostile society.  During a time when American gay rights struggles have largely shifted from hate crimes protections to the right-wing driven marriage debate, even as hate crimes are on the rise, this embodied musical healing continues to have an important role. 

I still dislike dancing at clubs.  The explanation for my ambivalent response to Aviance’s work clearly lies somewhere within the matrix of memories, coincidences, and cultural priorities that have indelibly linked Aviance to Shepard in my mind.  Yet even in listening, the physicality and embodied motivations underlying this music moves me.  Listening to “Join in the Chant,” I experience pleasure in allowing Aviance to dominate my body musically, even as my experience of that domination is divorced from the social contexts, and indeed physical movement, through which it typically gains meaning.  As he shouts, “Muscle and hate!” he aurally transfers the physicality of violence to a healing embodied via music, one which reclaims the body for pleasure from its abuse in the service of hate.  It both provides a musical salve to the bodily fear and psychological trauma that accompanied my personal experience of Shepard’s death, and enables me to experience, in some form, the cathartic joy it creates in members of a musical and social community from which I feel isolated.  In enacting such reclamation of the body as a site of pleasure, rather than one of trauma, Aviance’s music facilitates an embodied affirmation of an abused community, transforming physical and psychological scars into a positive bodily experience and a form of social cohesion predicated on pleasure, not pain.

On Entity, “Give it Up” is immediately followed by a spoken-word “Interlube Chant,” “Love:” “Love will find our truth.  It will make it right.  Can you feel the beat?  Pumping up our lives.  Watch the magic flow [. . .].”  Here, “feeling the beat” is both physical and magical, as well as the means of accessing love, construed as the bearer of truth. While Aviance’s consistent assertions that hate can be countered with love may seem simplistic or trite, they take on much greater meaning when viewed through the aggressive musical power he commands.  Rhythm may well be his bitch, but his musical sadism, employed by making others “feel the beat,” ultimately serves to heal through compassion, a capacity evidenced in those moments when he relinquishes rhythmic power in favor of a softer—indeed highly domestic—musical and lyrical expression.  Box of Chocolates ends with the smooth R&B ballad “Home,” in which—accompanied by a floaty, synthesized instrumental track, reminiscent, perhaps, of early Whitney Houston—Aviance sings of alienation and danger (“Sometimes when I feel like I’m not of this world/ People, they stare like I was a little girl”) mitigated by monogamous love and domestic security (“This little girl’s got a man inside her/ That only needs one man to be there when I come home”).  In the song’s chorus, he channels the verbal component of Dorothy’s magical means of transportation, “there’s no place like home.”  While this may be an unconscious or simplistic lyrical choice, my reparative position hears in it a revelation of the reality outside of the Oz-like dance club, one which resonates with my fantasy experience of “embodied” music, an emotional physicality countering physical violence. 

I have sought to show how allowing multiple histories to intersect might change understandings of those histories.  I have sought to show how these intersections might have healing potential, and how the bodily experience of music might mitigate the bodily experience of trauma.  Given its unlikely but transformative impact on my life, I think it fitting to allow house culture to close my ruminations.  The devaluing of queer populations by dominant ideologies, the devaluing that enabled Henderson and McKinney to attempt to justify the destruction of Matthew Shepard’s life with claims of “gay panic,” finds a response in a passage from the Creed of the House of Aviance, Max Ehrmann’s 1927 “Desiderata”: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

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Discography

Aviance, Kevin. 1999. Box of Chocolates. Wave Music.

_____. 2005. Entity. Emerge Records.

Ciccone, Madonna. 1990. Vogue. Sire Records.

Nitzer Ebb. 1987. That Total Age. Geffen Records.

Videography

Julien, Isaac. 1989. Looking for Langston. DVD. Strand Releasing.

Kaufman, Moisés. 2003. The Laramie Project. DVD. HBO.

Livingston, Jennie. 1990. Paris is Burning. DVD. Miramax Home Entertainment.