The Third in our on-going Series on: “The End of Heterosexuality?”

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by Michael Angelo Tata 

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For Dixon Miller: Bless His Heart    

For the history of metrosexuality — and yes, it is strange yet important to provide some kind of forward-oriented chronology for even a metaphysical entity like the Metro, despite the fact that, being metaphysical, there will necessarily be resistance to containment, overflow of boundaries and an almost total refusal of vitrinization — the fantastic but very real story of the death of Gianni Versace functioned as a morality tale casting an unflattering light on an unruly and overgrown homosexual narcissism. This glamorously ludicrous stance seemed to beg for its own eradication as it articulated its visual, behavioral and ethical excesses so vividly in the language of a mass producibility that magically retained reference to the exclusive despite the tacit, blasé populism underwriting its existence. As with Freud, a primary, post-autoerotic attachment to the self seemed to lead straight to the necropolis when that love was tested in that realtime which transcends the solipsism of minutes spent gazing into a mirror whose tain holds the secret to that fixation. This creature’s disappearance freed up the domain of self-beautification for a metrosexual culture which would never know these particular consolidated energies and indulgences of the flesh, because, not being homosexual, their drive or pulsation was always directed toward an alternate biological organization of physiological surfaces different from theirs: this tale is one version of what happened to make way for a straight takeover of the scene of a sartorial display into which the corporeal factored in equally, body and garment conversing with one another loudly, and in public, the two engaged in an endless dialogue, each blocking the other’s claims to primacy through friendly semiotic horseplay. In this version or fashion genealogy, the metrosexual was an aftereffect of the Chelsea Boy’s deterioration, a degradation marked by a fatal unidimensionality which no molt or pair of alligator loafers or iced double mocha sipped by the shores of a restless South Atlantic lost in the pondering of its own turquoise splendor could have saved: the ecstasy of communication, Baudrillard’s vision of what happens when semantic channels collapse into the singularity of one neon tube abuzz with residues of lost dimensionalities, took this uniquely Mediterranean historical superficiality as a victim, Grimm’s Fairy Tale meets Movie of the Week.

Being one myself — what a crime, to admit it, even all these years later — and totally devoted to the cause, I penned a gossip column by the title Chelsea Boy for New York City newspaper LGNY in 1997, finally posing for a strange and tasteless advertisement in which I took responsibility for Gianni’s shooting before Cunanan had emerged as a suspect: the perfect swan song. In general, I took the concept and pushed it up against it structural limits, making it performative, a mobile site where surface and depth came into controversy without it being clear who won or could win the skirmish, sublation alluded to, yet never completed as a process, Deleuze’s CSO (Corps Sans Organes) popping by the mall for a ride on the merry-go-round, round and round and round, all those Holden Caulfield circles masquerading as motion (yes: Post-structuralists kept feeding the machine quarters). And because it all came so naturally to me, I continued to espouse the aesthetic long after it ceased being acceptable to do so, driven by my own sumptuary demons — right up until the present moment (and every act of écriture has its unique present, as Barthes’ punctum grounds itself in the spaciotempral banalities of a studium it is loathe to admit it needs). Walking the streets of Miami in a circus of citrus colors and animal prints, I still cannot help but flinch at the memory of what it felt like to live through the aftermath of Cunanan’s bullet striking the fleshy target of an icon reminded he was after all only a man. This bullet was so clearly my Chicxulub, affording me the vista of witnessing an entire way of life follow the precepts of Charles Darwin, only becoming extinct before it was ever endangered and there was time for postage stamps or Warhols to be generated as equal parts warning and testament.

Furthermore, and most likely a reaction to all that unseemly opulence, by the beginning of the 21^st century, the rich patterns and see-through fabrics of Gianni Versace had long given way to the cool and sterile cotton of American Apparel and the self-consciously faux excesses of Juicy Couture, which recast Goth as Emo and brought the sartorial geographies of Los Angeles and Orange County, California, to the fore, places where to be open is to be unemployed, yet where male display does not immediately sync one up with homosexuality, creating a novel space for masculine performance — the place where denial displaces homosexuality endlessly and the Metro becomes a way of articulating “the downlow” for a suburban audience.[1] In addition, post-911 American culture has continued to exhibit all around diminished tolerance for the foreign, the exotic or the excrescent, making the faux-Euro Chelsea Boy a ridiculous creature even within homosexual culture itself, which has almost entirely dropped the Chelsea Boy façade in favor of a more proletarian look ruled on a good day by the fragmentary Armanis: Emporio to keep it classy, the more American Armani Exchange to go full-on Jersey Shore, GTL on a loop of white suds and orange guns. In this community, the fabulous becomes downgraded to historical fable, the tale an older relative shares at a holiday party between bites of stuffing while the rapt youth composing a captive audience marvel at the fact that the present— this present, theirs, the only one it is possible to know, really — has any anterior, or exterior, or ant/exterior. For there have been other presents: imagine.

Walking the finest line between twink and bear, and of course invoking the famous gay taxonomy at the same time that it subverted it, the Chelsea Boy had finally lost his hold, either falling into the unstylish curvaceousness of the otter/cub/bear spectrum, or collapsing into the chic but flat trappings of flaming twinkdom. In the wake of the Chelsea Boy’s demise, the gay hierarchy returned to its normal equivalences between stylish and waify/oblivious and juicy, and the metrosexual absolutely swooped, taking over his aesthetic mission in a swoon, retaining his visual and performative dimensions while leaving behind the drug-fueled hedonism of “the circuit” and the exotic sexual practices of the dungeon. Tired of losing his women to the perennial gay BFF, one who is motorboated frequently and in general monopolizes the surrogacy of love objects, an ideal ever a at remove from consummation, and hence motorized by it à la Will and Grace, the Metro learned to emulate the appearance of her darling sidekick, able to give her the one thing his gay counterpart could never bring to the table: an orgasm. Responding to yet ironically constructed by films like Amy Heckerling’s playfully excoriating Clueless and foreshadowed by novels like Bret Easton Ellis’ visionary American Psycho, the metrosexual, an ideal and idealized invert, if we are to manipulate the Freudian lexicon, which I always advise, dispenses with the sick frivolity of high camp in favor of a redefined virility that is not campy at all — and hence campy beyond its wildest dreams, as the essence of camp is nothing more than cluelessness.[2]

Various famous Metros continue to surface within contemporary televisuality, the metrosexual’s primary medium: Heat and 12 Pack from VH1’s I Love New York and I Love Money 1 and 2, the character Conrad Gates on BBC soap opera Footballers’ Wives, bodybuilding icon and consort of party maven Suzanne Bartsche, David Barton, and the most famous metrosexual of all, soccer star and fashion icon David Beckham, who asks nothing of us but that we bend our will to his vestimentary and physical domination. What they have to say to which ever “us” this us is can only be revealed by the unfolding of a sumptuary history — a history for which body is vestment, underwear becomes outerwear (thanks, Marky Mark!) and the duty to refashion oneself as eye candy bears the weight of Kantian obligation, so heavy and inevitable, a categorical imperative concealing a secret core of adiaphora mobilizing a current at once repressive and expressive.[3]

What this paradoxical obligation brings, though, is equally objective reality and subjective mirage: or, to put it another way, the reality of the metrosexual is the site of mirage, the illusion of the straight gay man, one who adopts the trappings associated with men of a certain homosexual niche without taking away anything of an Ars Erotica, in essence stripping away the dangers of the gay lifestyle to which the clothing corresponds and presenting it in a tamed form, much as for Romantic aesthetics, the picturesque emerged as the category which framed the sublime and made it palatable through decontextualization, When he appeared in the late 90s, the Metro did so brilliantly and with the air of scandal, publicly cropping up first on the eponymous stage of talk show luminary Ricki Lake where, along with the various other subcultures, types and trends that were his kin, he entered into public consciousness along with the Hoochie, the Baby Mama, and the Club Kid, new terms studding the Ricktionary of postmodern life and giving it metaphysical substance.[4]

Even when he appeared stable in his metrosexuality, and the alliance between the metropolis and the heterosexual was secure, he was always the locus of disbelief and speculation, the knot where sexuality and aesthetics ran into one another to create a mess of ripples sending a shiver through society, which trembled slightly as the non-confusion of the metrosexual became the consternation of those who could not help but attribute a projected form of non-innocent ambiguity to him. For while people could believe in the existence of a Hoochie Mama, welfare queen or fat transvestite with dubious Karaoke skills in advance of the #RATCHET, which was yet to emerge, although it existed primordially (and un-hashtagged) under the banner of Kristevan abjection, it found itself thrown into a befuddlement fueled by jealousy at the notion that one for whom sex could be procreative and based upon a union of biological opposites yet who was beautiful and hence an aesthetic mutant had actualized his possibilities and burst forth on the scene.

And so, on and off Ricki’s set, there were debates about gay men sexing up Metros, about the rituals giving the metrosexual his distinctive beauty, and about the ever elusive boundary separating the effeminate gay man from the straight flamer.[5] In the final wash, no one ever believes the metrosexual, now or anytime, except the metrosexual himself, making him the type of failed ideal whose very failure can derive only from his success: in short, he does his job too well, better than distant relatives the disco stud, glamrocker or 80s genderbender and thus causes us to doubt the veracity of what he has to say about his poses and attitudes, this while he remains calm, composed and at home with the resplendent shimmer of his surfaces. A victim of his own perfection, he persists as queen protesting too much, as idealized homosexual, as gay man whose inversions have been twisted in the right direction, miraculously maintaining his narcissism intact despite the fact that a topography has fundamentally changed. Perhaps this fact is why we do not lend credence to anything he says or does, and why he will be the focus of an endless sexual interrogation taking place in the magazines, blogs, vlogs and YouTube videos that pack the screens of global consumerism with manly yet unmanning e-jects generating heat and melodrama: if we believe him, if we accept his beliefs and take his self-image as it is presented to us, then what are we do with our own self-love? Have we loved ourselves enough?

To believe him, we must disbelieve ourselves, and here lies the difference between the inquisition of the dandy, disco stud or genderbender and that faced by the Metro: secretly, no matter what our sexual preference, we want to be him or to have him, he who disrupts our own narcissism, he who gives legendary psychasthenia, that famed condition purported by sociologist Roger Caillois to give the creature practicing animal mimicry its sense of anomie and disassociation, he who taunts me to no end, this other idealized, stylized me[6] And so we must disprove him, or expire trying, all while we acquiesce to his dominion of the food chain, an alpha-male’s alpha male.

For these men, the inversion without which Narcissus would merely be yet another creature lost in the game of reflection reverses itself such that the narcissist e-verts, or dis-inverts, however we describe the motion opposite to that inversion foundational to the narcissistic experience (words for motion leave us dizzy, fizzy, like a shaken can of Diet Cola). It may even be said that the Metro creates a libidinal knot that he first turns upon himself before riding this circuit back outside himself, leaving the residue of an inversion at the same time that he is able to transcend it by passing beyond it via the logic of a sublation interrupting the digital series: perhaps he helps the CSO might evolve (or is an evolved CSO). Taking Freud literally, the Metro in its hematophagy lives “on” narcissism, coming to rest on the pulse of self-love and gorging himself rapaciously on its contents. Feeding on narcissism, he takes it as his substratum, putting its nutritional value to work in the erection of a new center where autoerotism blossoms into a full-fledged adoration and adulation of a self who is able to take itself as erotic object without the intrusions of the abject marring that love: it’s almost a secondary narcissism, as the first M in the M-2-M (Man-to-Man) formula takes the second as external presence and a pure love takes root, one built to inhabit the multifarious screens lighting up the global village.

Having reversed its polarity and hence flowing in a new direction, the libido of the metrosexual supports a love affair between self and self at the same time that it manages to cathect the world, which, in the grandest act of megalomania, is lovable because it can presumably take the Metro as its ideal object without much convincing or fears of rejection and abjection. That love’s simplest articulation would be: I love the world because the world finds me loveable. Here, the “lovence” of narcissism performs the paradoxical feat of permitting the self-loving Metro to become the world which loves him, gratifying his narcissism through the warm embrace of an envy emptied of all invidiousness.[7] A metropolis unto itself, the metrosexual is a port city where bodybuilding, tanning, depilation, coiffure and couture come together in a rogue wave whose summed amplitudes cause it to soar above the social ocean, swamping everything with glamorous quantum excesses. Smooth, he is no Studio 54 reveler, all surfaces trimmed, plucked and manscaped, so that they may be consumed without the intrusiveness of follicles trapped between teeth. Bending genderbending, he becomes the ultimate transsexual: the M-to-M, an epitome of manhood sharing in the tradition of conquest endemic to that philanderer the 18^th century known lovingly as the rake — only this wanton rakes up everything he can with little critique and few objections, even from his gay brethren, who ogle him mercilessly, yet can never quite figure out what it would take to become him.

To reform him would be to deform him, and who would want him to disappear from the urban peepshow? Without him around, what would we look at? Through him, the fabulous, itself an epicenter of fables and confabulation, reveals itself to be a philosophical problem in the truest sense: he wants it all, and will get it, but not without the remainder of doubt he inspires in those who simply do not believe in perfectibility, since they would necessarily lose faith in themselves, they, who have achieved so much less. That he does not doubt himself in his accession to a type of beauty even more aerodynamic and puffy than the Greek ideal to whom he does not even obliquely refer because for the most part he has not had time for books keeps him in play, and guarantees that we will play along: this engine is fueled by egotism alone, its race car speeding around and around a NASCAR track surrounded by mullets and t-shirts that bear the logos of domestic beers. His beauty knows no pederasty, nor does it truck with those exchanges of knowledge marking philosophy as amorous. Yet he does teach us something, as it is always possible to learn from ignorance (and what is narcissism but the most supreme form of ignorance?): through him, we learn that the fabulous life cannot quite belong to his homosexual brother, that, in the end, straight men are better gay men than gay men, just as transvestites are more ideal women that any biological woman could ever be, the only exception being rare moments of Bio Queendom (for example Marilyn Monroe, Cookie Mueller, or, more recently, World Famous *BOB*) [8]

The ideal can never belong to the real: has psychoanalysis taught us nothing? What use would there ever be for an Imaginary or a Social-symbolic if it were that easy to live thoughtfully? As ever, display is the purview and provenance of men, a joust between and among men, for the benefit of men, whose manly code of behavior mandates an identification with the surface perhaps hardwired into his circuitry via an animal and instinctual attachment to a physical display merging sex, appearance, and, ultimately, the death it vociferously summons, taunts and works so hard to dispel with a combination of body language, visual presentation and that type of poignant verbalization involving only the eyes. In this schema, women emerge only as false screens for display while the real action happens in a luxe elsewhere to whose parties she is never invited – not that she would notice, the mauvaise foi of female display totally absorbing her efforts at social dominion. The peahen laughs: metrosexuality is no mystery to her, but what are cities of birds?

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Threads

Print

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard.

……….New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

Baudrilard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.

Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Trans. Claudine

……….Frank and Camille Naish. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 

Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Trans George Bull. New York: Penguin

……….Classics, 1976.

Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso,

____. The Work of Mourning. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault. Chicago: The University

……….of Chicago Press, 2001.

____. The Gift of Death. Trans. Davis Wills. Chicago: The University of

……….Chicago Press, 1996.

Easton Ellis, Bret. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991.

Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction. Ed. Joseph Sandler. New Haven:

……….Yale University Press, 1991.

Indiana, Gary. Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story. New York: Harper

……….Perennial, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI. Trans.

Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

____. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,

……….1972-1973, Book XX. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. George Abbeele.

………..Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Orth, Maureen. Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest

……….Failed Manhunt in U.S. History. New York: Dell, 1999.

Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Mental Illenss. Trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard

………A. Hunter; Intro. Rosemary Dinnage. New York: The New York Review of Books,

………2000.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Anchor Books, 1986.

 

Web

Lawanda Jackson’s Queendom. www.lawandajackson.com. Last consulted October 1,

Jonny McGovern. www.gaypimp.com. Last consulted October 1, 2009

Ricki Lake Episode Guide. www.TV.com   Last consulted October 1, 2009.

 

Boob Tube

House of Versace: Lifetime, 2013. 

I Love Money. Chris Abrego and Mark Cronin. VH1: July—October 2008.

I Love Money 2. Chris Abrego and Mark Cronin. VH1: February—May 2009. 

Tool Academy 1. 495 Productions: VH1, January—March 2009.

Tool Academy II. 495 Productions: VH1, August 2009—present.

 

Dish

Tata, Michael Angelo. “l Shot Gianni Versace,” in LGNY. New York City: July 1997.

 

End Notes

[1] RIP, Juicy Men’s! As of 2009, the fashion line has discontinued its menswear line. First called “Juicy Men,” then “Dirty English,” Juicy menswear finally went under in 2009, its signature swags so many wind chimes blowing in a desert monsoon. What does its death mean for the metro, who was so instrumental to its popularity, and to whom its designs implicitly referred in each articulation/event? I wonder: does the death of Juicy mark an important change within metrosexuality itself, or at minimum within what it is willing and able to consume and metabolize in the construction of its surfaces?

[2] For the Susan Sontag of “Notes on Camp,” there is no such thing as self-conscious camp. In order for camp to be possible, there must be a chasm between production and consumption: what makes an artifact campy is that it tries very hard to achieve an end we deem ridiculous or excessive (as in the fabrications of Art Nouveau and Jügendstil), or that its project is a desperate one, and, outsiders, we appreciate its failings and shortfalls with a glee shot through with thanatos or todestrieb. What is important is that production decouples form consumption—in other words, that in making the attribution “camp,” we must view and consume the camp item differently from the way its producers conceived and produced it, our intentionalities bifurcating. The rift between production and consumption fabricates the space of camp.

[3] Here, I think of Lyotard’s early work on uniquenesses among various species of apathy, Derrida discusses these in his farewell to Lyotard in The Work of Mourning, itself alive with the knowledge that it is death alone which makes indifference impossible. Speaking about and to his deceased friend, colleague, Zeitgeist soulmate, Derrida explains: his master’s thesis, “Indifference as an Ethical notion,” examined “various conceptions of indifference, from Epicurian ataraxia, to Stoic apatheia and adiaphora, to Zen “not thinking” and Taoist nothingness” (211). To this incredible list about indifferent differences, I would add only that, from the perspective of FashionTtheory, we must include the Renaissance notion of sprezzatura touted by Castiglione, and from the perspective of psychoanalysis, we must include Judge Schreber’s tormenting “thinking-nothing thought, “or Nichtsdenkungsgedanke, as these are also different indifferences at stake in the thinking of fashion, be it Metrosexuality, the Chelsea Boy phenom or otherwise..

[4] Regarding Ricki Lake’s fundamental engagement of the metrosexual, even self-proclaimed “Gay Pimp” Jonny McGovern was brought onto her stage for the express purpose of “rating metrosexuals”; see his memoirs on his site, http://gaypimp.com/index.php/content/blogcategory/16/28/. Regarding Ricki’s show, see the following episodes: “You’re My Man…Stop Hangin’ with Gay Men” (Season 5, Episode 5102, January 12, 1998), “Stop Saying My Man Is Gay” (Season 6, Episode 6025, September 25, 1998), “Stop Letting Your Man Pretend He’s Gay for the Pay” (Season 6, Episode 6032, October 2, 1998), “Stop Pretending to be Gay” (Season 9, Episode 9170, April 17, 2002), among others. Lawanda Jackson also judged a Metrosexual Trivia Show, but unfortunately the link has been removed from YouTube. Unfortunately, I am relying upon cultural memory, and am unsure of the episode number for this rare treat. See www.lawandajackson.com for more on this performer (her triplet breasts should serve as indication of her stance toward biology and sociology).

[5] If for Ricki there was the metrosexual, then for Oprah, the man living on the down low took center stage: each star had her man of choice, and thus her favorite sexual problematics (for Ricki, the beautiful and chic straight man with an urban flair; for Oprah, the largely black man living the dual lives of public straight man and private homosexual). Do these tastes reflect anxieties about Rob Sussman and Stedman Graham, each host’s respective beau (at least at the time these episodes were filmed)? Sexual types like these filter through mass media, which creates them just as much as it reflects them. They are the superstars of urban sociology and postmodern televisuality, creating the world that contains them as much as that world calls them forth, calling for their call.

[6] Calllois is vital in that it is his version of mimicry as surreal lostness which informs and inspires Jacques Lacan’s notion of an Imaginary founded upon the mirror’s hijinks, meaning that the Mirror Stage is but a human reflection of an entomological sickness, the Imaginary carried on the backs of stick insects so busy convincing themselves that they’re made of wood that they never notice.

[7] In his Politics of Friendship, Derrida coins the term “lovence” to describe the relation of love and loving which unites lover and beloved in their radically dissymmetrical relationship—dissymmetrical within a temps and contretemps which order that one pair of the couple survive the other and hence love him beyond the grave, as well as epistemologically, within the order of knowledges and stupidities which differentiate lover from beloved. The lover knows, but the beloved is devoid of knowledge: hence it is better to be the lover than the beloved, as the Aristotelian logic goes, just as it is better to have fewer than more friends (and, I would argue, lovers) within this philosophy (hence the problem of number plaguing the conjoined histories of friendship and polity).

[8] The trope of stupidity surfaces as homage to Avital Ronell, whose Stupidity truly gives ignorance its due, highlighting the complicated relationship that obtains between presence and lack of knowledge. I define narcissism as Primary Stupidity, just as for Deleue and Guattari, the CSO is counterproductive, stopping up its senses to frustrate empiricism’s efforts to inscribe upon its tabula rasa. Only with the Metro’s narcissism, the CSO has gone glam, triumphantly entering the agora as victor.

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About the Author

 

Michael Angelo Tata is the Executive Editor of the Sydney-based electronic journal of literature, art and new media nebu[lab] and a member of the editorial collectives of the journals Kritikos and rhizomes. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. His lyric essays on poetics, psychoanalysis and philosophy appear most recently in the collections The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein and Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 as well as the British journal Parallax (Routledge). His poetry and graffiti are featured in the British journal Rattle and in the American journal Xanadu. He also writes reviews of contemporary Aesthetics titles for Temple University’s and Mount Holyoke College’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.