PART ONE

X.

I am invisible to myself because I do not have cable in the woods. I am the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards. I am Courtney Love’s makeup compact flying over a balcony, interrupting Kurt Loder’s interview with Madonna. I am Madonna’s discontent, her pursed, prude lips. I am a prude. I am Loder’s petrified congeniality when he shouts, “HI COURTNEY!” down the couple of stories from which Love has impressively (for both her strength and gall) launched her shit at the queen of pop. Madonna (naturally wired for provocation, but insincere): “Should we let her come up?” Loder (The purest yes man. Tone deaf to sarcasm): “Yeah!” Madonna (now sincere): “No, don’t. Please.” Loder to Love: “Come on up!” Love ascends.

Satin is in this year. Madonna wears it in the shape of a turquoise Gucci dress shirt, unbuttoned down the length of her sternum. Her black bra is visible over each perfect mound of breast. This is the image of a shirt torn open in anticipation of other forms of opening and entry, paused and prolonged. Her black cigarette pants are satin too — a soft barrier to the diamond-hard dancer’s musculature underneath. Courtney wears a black satin skirt so short and twirly that it exposes the high curve of her ass. Her matching satin shirt has lacy princess sleeves, and big, pastel violet bows in front. Madonna corrupts the masculine, and brings sex into view. Courtney subverts the feminine through its exaggeration and constant juxtaposition with her unpredictable, violent, compact-throwing-at-the-queen-of-pop body. The two speak in competitive insults, which Courtney acknowledges after several rounds by kneeling on the ground. She could never win, because she is indeed the more insultable, if not genuinely worse person, so she dramatizes her inevitable loss with the silent question: “Is this what you want?” The two briefly discuss their shoes at Madonna’s suggestion, then Madonna leaves. Love is the brash instigator, and stubborn survivor of their encounter, but Madge gets some fair jabs in before she walks off set like a quitter.

It would have been hard to say who won this competition of “most intimidating woman in music” had Love not proceeded to fall face-first off her chair as she recounted her early sexual history with Ted Nugent. The failure was too human. I am Madonna’s splayed gem-tone satin, and Courtney’s satin-covered ass. I am Courtney’s thrash and Madonna’s sobriety. For a brief moment in 1995, oil met fire. Captured in the same space was Madonna’s control, and the destruction of Love.

X.

I have translated this encounter through the obsession I have with these women, as they were then, which has never been sated by passive admiration. As a teenager, I undertook the project of understanding my unbidden ardor by trying to do what they did. It lead to this.

The title of this book was initially chosen as an ode to the Madonna song and video of same name. Though the question of how love is justified, explained, expressed, or earned, came to re-frame my approach to this narrative. What started as a book on subversive performances of gender in music video — an exploration of their aesthetics, justifications for their value and power — now marries that research with the lived experiences — the obsessions, the true love, the secrets, the sex — that informed it. I am going to begin by weaving between the two because many of the authors, theories, and questions explored here have been with me for a long time. I have thought about how they operate within and outside of conventional performance contexts. They have been applicable to how I have performed and observed performances of gender, sex, sexuality in real life. The occasional collapse of time for the sake of pace is the main liberty I have knowingly taken with the verity of these memories. The second and third sections of this book are the outgrowth of the personal narrative that precedes them.

Courtney first. I was at the intersection of Sleater-Kinney Road and Pacific Ave., a passenger in my mom’s car, when the new Hole single was introduced on the radio — Seattle’s 107.7, The End. I would turn thirteen in ten days. This is an ironic, and indeed embarrassing place for Courtney Love to have invoked the immediate and rabid compulsion to be her. Part of the job was already done because I was a singer, a certainty I arrived at really early, and that my mother responded to by sending me to singing lessons. Realistically, this was likely from a combination of genuine support and an astute anticipation of her own need to self-preserve. I’d been under the instruction of a man since I was eight who brought the strongest, most gorgeous voices out of young women by screaming hideous things at them. I learned to sing big, and loud, and impressively, because I was afraid of him. But abiding by fear produced results, and it is a strategy whose effectiveness has been difficult to abandon for healthier, if, truly, less dependable modes of productivity. I knew I was a singer, but I wanted blonde beautiful widow screamer. I wanted pain and glamor and volume.

The aforementioned embarrassment and irony of this experience derives from two main factors. First, it is embarrassing to admit that the Love I loved was the post-Hollywood, and if not quite post-, then certainly less rock version that emerged in 1998 with the album Celebrity Skin; the vain, yet bereaved, yet catchy follow-up to 1994’s Live Through This, the vicious, maternal, grotesque bodily-reference-laden, but still tender as a bruise, and by all accounts superior predecessor, all the more appreciable for its refusal to be eclipsed by the suicide of Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, which happened a week before the album’s release. There was no polish to Live Through This-era Love. The aesthetic was ultra-feminine, but budget and broken: vintage velvet baby-doll dresses with fraying hems and lace collars, messy red lipstick, Mary Jane flats, cheap tiaras, and her original nose. Sometimes an old satin slip. If there was glamor, it was decayed. By 1998 she had become the pristine excess that Live Through This had suggested the feminine didn’t need to be. Celebrity Skin-era Courtney wasn’t cool. She name-dropped (she name-dropped before too, but now she dropped Hollywood names), and talked about how great pilates is for your abs, and did pre-shows on MTV where she tried on dresses by Versace and Roberto Cavalli that she might wear to the music video awards. All her clothes were new. I couldn’t see this then; what I saw was a rockstar that dressed like a movie star. And growing up in a small town, to a working-class, single mom, this was a glamor that precluded and seduced me. She had not completely lost her bite, it just all felt a little more bratty than commendably, genuinely driven by rage. You can see the shift in strange documents like the ads she did for Versace in 1998. There’s a dash of fear in those pictures that asks if it’s OK that she’s there, or if she’s doing it right. There’s a first time-ness to her beauty, like she can’t believe clothes that perfect even fit her. They were shot by Richard Avedon, whose famous images of Marilyn Monroe, blanked out in a sparkling evening gown, give away an exhaustion with the very performance of sex appeal and magnetism that Courtney is striving for in those 1998 portraits.

The second factor is that the all-female, feminist rock band Sleater-Kinney named themselves after the very road that I was driving on when Courtney got me. I’m from Olympia, Washington, the epicenter of the Riot Grrrl movement, branded as such in the 1990s with the emergence of feminist rock bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Huggy Bear, many of whom released albums on Olympia labels like Kill Rock Stars and K Records. I did arrive at these bands, this feminism, other feminisms, other women in rock music, but Love was my gateway drug. I found 1994 Courtney through 1998 Courtney, which lead to early 1990s Courtney, Babes in Toyland, L7, PJ Harvey, then back down the Riot Grrrl rabbit hole, and further back into the recesses of feminist punk: X-Ray Spex, the Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Raincoats, Blondie, Patti Smith.

So, in order to become Courtney Love, I started taking guitar lessons, bought cheap versions of clothes that looked like hers, and bleached my hair. My dark auburn locks begged “Why” through the persistent shade of goldfish yellow that took several months to lift out. It looked dry and terrible, and I frequently glued craft store gems in my hair like Courtney had (probably by some more sophisticated means) in the Celebrity Skin video, which also didn’t help. I spent a lot of time “practicing” in the mirror, rather than on my instrument. A year after discovering Hole, I arrived on my first day of high school a full-on clone, now verbalizing my intention to “BE-A-ROCK-STAR” as a way of normalizing and actualizing it. I told people I knew her, because it felt like I did, or could, and because teenagers lie. I hadn’t previously considered where famous musicians came from. It was like they hatched out of an egg, or could be accepted as a fabricated invention because I mostly saw them on TV, like other fake things. The decision to try to be one, to assemble a band, write songs, was revelatory. My ambition was abject.

I was writing lyrics and vocal melodies, and my guitar teacher would help me with guitar parts and tab out chords for what I had written. He introduced me to some girls to play music with, but when the boy I’d had a year-long crush on — a fellow student council member, the person who introduced me to, and educated me about the (male) canon of punk rock, and took me to my first punk show at a divey Seattle all-ages club called the RKCNDY — asked me to sing for his band, I jumped ship.

Unlike other characters in this book, the memories I have of him could not capture who he is now because I have not known him in any significant capacity for over a decade. I am suspicious of the very anxious inclination I feel to protect him, but also feel it fair to acknowledge that these are the memories of, and about children.

X.

I forged my role as rock singer through a desire to live my idol’s life. I was learning and developing through imitation. This left me susceptible to doubt, and the possibility that others might know better than me about how to do my rock self on, or off stage. I was fourteen when I started singing in the band, and fifteen when I finally got my band-mate Aaron to consider himself my boyfriend, even if that remained a fact socially unacknowledged for several years. He was older than me, and I thought he knew more about music, and everything else in the world than me. He is still the funniest person I have ever known, which derived in part from his gregarious presence and his extreme intelligence. Parlayed through willful exaggerations of sound and physicality, his comedic specialties were re-tellings of his absurd family dynamics, or teenage catastrophes that befell other teenagers: the time a round ball of shit fell from a basketball player’s shorts during a layup, which he concealed by faking an injury, and smashing the shit into his knee as he clenched the joint in a performance of physical pain, OR the time his great grandmother willingly waited, trapped beneath a heavy table that she had assured her son (Aaron’s grandfather) was unstable, so that he could see the result of his negligence for himself. The punchline was that she asked a young Isaac (Aaron’s dad) to get her a piece of pickled herring while she waited. His humor and intelligence made it easier to forgive, or even rationalize the cruelty he was capable of. Like the man that taught me how to sing, I was also afraid of my first love and new teacher. I felt watched by him on stage, for all the mistakes I might make, for any mistakes I had made previously, that he didn’t want me to make again. I recognize, but don’t care, that he induced a paranoia disproportionate to real consequences. I know that on nights when I disappointed him, he was vocal about it, and that these criticisms destroyed me emotionally because I wanted him to think I was perfect. I developed a fear of him like the fear of being hit, something I would flinch against, or raise my hands to protect myself from. He never hit me, he was never going to hit me; but I perceived his disappointment as life-threatening. He was the main songwriter in the band. He wrote most of my words, and he demanded a certain kind of performance: “go apeshit.” I never confronted him because I was afraid of being kicked out, first, and, a close second, I was afraid of us breaking up. I had no idea what I was worth to the band, or him, and this was reinforced by him telling me verbatim that I was replaceable. Actually, his words were, “Never forget how replaceable you are.” I was encouraged to carry my insecurity around with me forever, checking in with it occasionally to prevent the unwarranted experience of self-worth.

I recently noticed on our first record that more lyrics than I remembered, though admittedly still very few, were mine. I would give him sheets of lyrics, and he would come back with some amalgamation of both of our words. I stopped giving him lyrics because, like live shows, it just felt like another creative space to leave wide open and vulnerable. On a rare occasion much later in our career, when I did attempt to contribute, the fear of rejection was actualized in sections of my notebook crossed out by him in a giant X so aggressively that he tore the page. Instead, I trusted my fear, and him. Aaron didn’t know how to love me, and I didn’t know how to maintain our relationship, or our band, other than by doing what he wanted.

When Aaron told me how he wanted me to perform it was simultaneously a permission and a challenge. Another performer through whom I had come to understand the allure of the seemingly possessed body — one that I thought Aaron was asking me to emulate — was Spencer Moody, who sang in the Seattle band the Murder City Devils. They played every few months, which made Spencer a more accessible object of study than Courtney in a pre-YouTube world. He put me in a hyper-vigilant state. Spencer pushed all his sweat and rage to the surface, then seemed to hold it, pressurize it with closed eyes and a fist clenched around a microphone, until he released his moxie, and sometimes his whole body into the audience. Those in attendance mimicked their leader. Limbs flew and surprised. We danced so hard. We left looking just-bathed. Once I saw him shimmy into the ceiling of a venue then called Graceland, and hang upside down from loose pipes, with the entire dirty, silver head of an SM58 microphone shoved into his mouth, screaming. Blood moved to the new base of his body, swelling his face into a wailing American Beauty. Sweat flooded his eyes like tears in reverse. A performer whose moves cannot be predicted by the audience, however, is different than a performer that is out of control of their body. And I started in the latter category. Originally I just spasmed. It was pure, though hollow experimentation that simply knew it could not be accused of lacking in effort. It was sexually useless.

X.

Antonin Artaud endowed the notion of “cruelty” with a romantic, transformative power historically reserved for love. He said it could devour darkness. He wrote that, “Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt.”¹ Artaud promoted aggressive performances that shook their viewer from the complacent acceptance of the fictitious reality presented to them. Susan Sontag explained that Artaud conceived of performance as “an ordeal,”² and noted that members of the audience were not meant to “leave the theater ‘intact’ morally or emotionally.”³ Her words highlight that Artaud did not suggest physical, but rather psychological, or intellectual violence. He saw shock as a tool for cultural change, change in thought. The aesthetics used to employ those attacks might be unnatural, surreal, opulent, or even grotesque. This intention to provoke thought through radical invention and displacement is the backbone of subversion. It manifests in a myriad of visual ways.

Sexual subversion, however, was not one of Artaud’s concerns. David A. Shafer, author of Antonin Artaud observes, “Artaud obsessed over sex. He suffered an almost pathological fear of sex.”⁴ Sontag affirms this:

Artaud regarded eroticism as something threatening, demonic. In “Art and Death” he describes “this preoccupation with sex which petrifies me and rips out my blood.” Sexual organs multiply on a monstrous, Brobdingnagian scale and in menacingly hermaphrodite shapes in many of his writings; virginity is treated as a state of grace […]⁵

This obsessive fear of sex and eroticism noted by Shafer and Sontag draws significantly from Artaud’s misogyny. Shafer points to the following excerpt from Artaud’s collection of poems, Nerve Scales, as an example of his contempt for female sexuality:

Just like all women, you judge with your clitoris, not with your mind […] Besides you have only ever judged me by my external appearance, like all women, like all idiots do, while my inner soul is the most damaged, the most ruined.⁶

His reference to women’s judgement being sourced from their clitorides (yeah, that’s the plural of clitoris — who knew), rather than their minds, both denigrates their sexuality and positions that sexuality as a threat to their intelligence. Two considerations must be drawn from Artaud’s fearful relationship with sex, and the misogynistic attitude expressed above. First, though Artaud condemns sex, there is an irony at play in his promotion of provocative work that has the potential to produce feelings of discomfort that mirror his feelings toward sex. Given his own affected response to sexuality, sexual imagery would seem to represent the visual material most valuable to his approach. Second, sexually provocative feminist work should, by his own rationale, beat him at his own game — converting his misogyny to philogyny in some forced theatrical reckoning.

X.

I believe that the insecurities that were introduced to me through my creative and romantic partnership collected inside me in literal pools of thick black oil. When I was able to connect with this pain live, my performance changed. Burning through the horrible poison produced an ecstatic body more naturally, and without intellectual premeditation.

All of my love and all of my anger about not being loved moved my blood into shape. I spilled my guts. At our shows, I wept and wailed, and reached for the bodies that came to reach back at me. Eventually more bodies came, and more bodies came.

 

And this justified my love.

 

I found my space, my safety, my happiness, my power, through performance, effectively in that order. As I became sensitive to what felt good, and so good, and necessary, I learned control. I cannot separate, too, how the interior changes were mapped onto my exterior — how I tried to take ownership of myself from the outside in. I used surface to convey new security. I traded my jeans and band t-shirts for formal vintage dresses that I shredded up to the middle of my thigh. My hair was in a constant cycle of being bleached, dyed, or chopped into some new asymmetrical shape. When fans started to arrive at shows dressed like me, I questioned whether the traditional appeal of my decidedly feminine aesthetics of heavy makeup and costume dresses played into a regression, or at least an unprogressive stasis of women, by repeating trodden territory aligned with antiquated expectations of the female role (to be sweet, submissive, obedient, passive, demure, etc.). But, when this aesthetic was paired with our aggressive, angular music, and the confrontational and sexual performance it inspired from me — screaming, touching myself, often sweating my makeup into a mess, smearing it intentionally, writhing on the ground, or tearing parts of my dresses to allow for the types of movement on stage that might leave me bruised and sore — I found power in the destructive sacrifice of beauty and femininity. The actions and performance subverted the image. I would later contextualize the acting out of this refusal and the appropriation of these aesthetics through the work of performance theorists and queer and feminist discourse. This experience provided the most fundamental base upon which I built the research that appears later in this book. Though I had a confidence at my core that was produced by my mother’s love and support, that confidence was tested by moving out of the predominantly male-less, small world in which I was raised. Performance renewed my access to self-possession, despite being utilized at a comparatively slower rate in my off-stage life.

X.

I broke up with Aaron just before my twentieth birthday, while we were on tour. The way I ended things was shitty and irresponsible, and I’m still sorry. I had fallen in love with our tour manager because he was kind and romantic. Owen. He got a tattoo of two red chairs I drew that were part of a set of flash cards I made to help him learn French. He held my hand when we walked down the street, which was new to me. He made me art things — sketches and collages and poems. It was a short-lived, if still extremely significant relationship. He was the first man to tell me I was beautiful, and the first, and only person to say to Aaron, “Don’t talk to her like that.” I know there’s some precarity in here — that being told that you’re beautiful isn’t being told you’re smart (which he did tell me also, all the time), and that women don’t need men to rescue them. I know this now, and I knew this then, but I think my insecurity about coming off as needy — that adjective aligned by sexism with women whose totally rational needs are deemed irrational —prevented me from communicating when I wanted attention, or sex, or needed to have a conversation about why we loved each other, how we wanted to be treated, and other things we expected from our relationship. I had distilled these things down to unsophisticated sap, and it was a mistake highlighted to me by these first acts of praise and defense.

Ultimately we had to fire Owen because he got blotto in Toronto, and upon arriving at the hotel in Montreal around 3am, threw a suitcase full of our money and three of our passports into the woods. This was how he handled his feelings of jealousy after seeing me fix Aaron’s hair. Our band-mate David had duct taped his passport to the interior of his suitcase per the advice of his girlfriend Esthere. They’re married now.

X.

I wish I had learned the following things from my first relationship:

The love you have for someone must be separate and justified for different reasons than the reasons you may have for loving someone’s art. Love for someone, and love for someone’s art, are different.

When you collaborate with someone you love, do not mistake the love they give to your collaboration, what you make together, for love given only to you, in appreciation of what you are independently of your work.

You are not your work and must also love yourself independently of your work.

I have never again been afraid of a lover like I was of Aaron, but I did not continue to prioritize the kindness in my relationships that Owen had introduced to me in ours. My next big love was founded on chemical instinct, and it compounded what gratified me about performance with sex and video. Art again justified bad love.

X.

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes says that, “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”⁷

Georges Bataille offers that, “subversion seeks immediately to create its own values in order to oppose established values.”⁸ As Barthes and Bataille suggest, subversion is an oppositional replacement of some traditionally established entity. Acts of subversion encourage us to think about the confines of what we know, and challenge those restrictions. As a mode of opposition and critique, I see subversion — by conventional definition, and as explored in the above quotes — as having a specifically generative or productive quality.

It is not the project of subversion to protest a problem through its direct enunciation or denunciation. Subversive images replace problematic ones gracefully and silently. They show the ease of dispelling traditional scripts and creating new roles. They demonstrate how quickly the repetition of the act can be interrupted. The power of what is being replaced is also effectively denied in this respect through its lack of acknowledgement.

X.

The first time I felt this thing is perhaps still the most staggering in my memory because it was so physical, and despite its abstract presentation, I was acutely aware of what it forecast. It was later though, when I met Ian, that it was most powerful, most crooked (unbelievable, impossible), instantaneously devoted.

It’s a feeling as immediately and uniquely identifiable as getting a papercut, or being in water. In preparing this book, I found it described in similar ways throughout old diaries. My vision goes weird — like a dolly zoom shot in a movie. My whole body flashes into numbness. I feel too light. Sounds are muted, or sometimes tinnitus sets in. It tells me we will have sex, have complicated love, look at each other real close up. It only lasts a few seconds, but it produces a certainty despite how absurd the meeting circumstances might be. I have been with people despite their presence not eliciting this feeling, and I have been really confused when the feeling comes on, and my sentiments for the person are not in line with where it’s telling me they will be. It’s not an instant love; it’s just instant confirmation that there will be love. And historically, a lot of pain. I wish it had happened with women, but it hasn’t. I love women.

I once asked him over email if he remembered when we met, and his account had similar weight to it. He said,

“There was immediate non-verbal communication between us. It was intense and we didn’t blink. But also felt like we could maybe start laughing hysterically at any point. It was intense and from that point on it felt like we couldn’t stop staring. Does that sound about right?” I confirmed that it did, and that it was overwhelming. Then he asked me if I thought we had telepathy. I said, “Yeah.”

X.

After seven years together our band got signed. Nabil Ayers put out our first two albums on his independent label, the Control Group, then took over managerial duties alongside Christian McKnight, who had more experience and connections with agents and promoters. We had slowly developed a devoted, mostly Seattle- and other small-towns-in-Washington-state-based following. During a tour for our second album, one of the openers had brought their friend along, a journalist from Spin magazine, Sarah “Ultragrrrl” Lewitinn. We stayed in touch with her after the tour ended because she had been releasing singles for bands with homemade packaging and wanted to put out one with us. I also just liked her. She was bright, funny, and brash without trying too hard. We had bonded over our love of Hole. She read my “Olympia” tattoo as a Hole reference, which it partly is. We didn’t follow up with the initial request because Aaron and I were still dealing with the aftershocks of our breakup and he kept threatening to quit the band. We didn’t know that she was putting a label together with Rob Stevenson, the A&R guy that signed the Killers, and that the label would be an imprint of the major label Island Def Jam. We were properly introduced to the new label, Stolen Transmission, at that year’s South by Southwest festival (SXSW), where Rob and Sarah did a big showcase to launch it.

Following Sarah’s introduction to him, we ended up on the packed patio of the launch party talking to Rob. He liked what he had heard, but alluded to us working with songwriters in the future and asked us if we were “in.” Aaron wasn’t into this, but navigated the whole thing with adequate tact. I think Aaron felt excited by the challenge of proving to Rob that we could make a record he wanted to sign without the help of his writing goons. We continued to tour throughout that summer, and the boys started writing the new record. Things between Aaron and I remained difficult and painful. I studied art history in college. “You know you’re paying for that, right?” Aaron would ask whenever it came up. By autumn the record was done, and Aaron and I went to New York and took meetings with labels and Christian to “shop” the album. This is an awkward experience of watching someone with power listen to your music, and decide whether they are going to put some of that power at risk toward the possibility of gaining more power by making you successful. We had a couple of good meetings, including one with Rob and Sarah, but pressed on to SXSW again that year without a firm commitment from anyone to put the album out.

SXSW is a shitshow. There are too many people. It’s too hot. Dusty. For those not at all prone to the subtle exercises of masochism which often signify devotion, it’s an illogical misery. I am not that. I am still fairly unsure how to be proud of myself if there is not pain involved. I need receipts. In this regard, SXSW was my rapture. We played two or three shows a day, for several days. Remember the heat. Remember the thousands of bodies. Remember the booze, the ominous, confusing noise, the palpable industry bullshit, the sexism, the competition, and the expectations. Test me, please, so that I may relish in my validation through the observation of my own complicit, exhausted repetition. Believe me.

I was there to convince one person, and I did. I saw the very moment it happened, and this is the only moment from any show we played at the festival that has been recorded to memory.

My dress was a violet, 1950s evening gown that I had cut short. It was strapless, save a wide but delicate piece of tulle that ran over my right shoulder and diagonally across my back. At this show, there was a small, only slightly raised stage with a bannister around it. It was the kind where I had to pay additional attention to Aaron’s instrument, lest he hit me in the head with it (as he had before (and as no one else in the band ever had)). During the slow buildup of one our song’s bridges I climbed onto the railing, already blissfully flooded with adrenaline, and realized our low position had obscured how packed the bar’s recesses were, how far back the bodies went, how many of them there were. I saw industry people scattered throughout the crowd. Now towering over everyone, and with the most hideous and certain grin, I looked down at Rob right as the chorus crashed down, and knew, “I got you.”

That night another A&R guy from Epic, Pete Giberga, was desperately trying to get in touch with Nabil. He had taken one of the meetings with us in New York, but the live show freaked him out. It was 2am, and we were with Nabil when he answered Pete’s call, and told him where we were. Not only did the guy track us down in the night, but when he turned up he could barely speak. He had lost his voice, and was imploring us through barely vibrating vocal chords to get in touch on Monday.

We eventually signed with Stolen Transmission about a month later, but the fact that Pete posed some competition gave us leverage, and the fact that he knew we were signing with Rob reverberated throughout the industry. All of a sudden we had buzz.

X.

We signed at the Universal offices in New York, then Rob took us out for fancy Korean barbecue.

There was no disappointment to my dream coming true. It was entirely perfect, and I felt overjoyed and sincerely thankful at all times.

Enter: Ian.

X.

Just three months after SXSW, we were interviewing music video directors, and heading out on a tour with our new label-mates the Horrors. The tour started in Brooklyn, followed by a show in Manhattan, and a day off in the city before the next show in Boston. This gave us a couple days to come to the office and sort out promotion for the new record, which was due out three months later.

The Horrors had a very different kind of buzz than we did. Industry people thought teenagers would buy our music. Enough. The Horrors had a cult of Cool building around them that brought out beautiful young famous people, whose interest in the music was definitely secondary to the project of being in the orbit of its makers. Agyness Deyn was at the first show, which flipped my wig. She was a white-hot British model being touted as “the new Kate Moss.” She was sat on some railing in the venue surrounded by a semi-circle of tall, thin people I attempted to recognize, and that I wondered how the hell I was going to impress. But I told myself I had to, that’s what I was there for, that I had earned my place on that stage, and it wasn’t time to be afraid of long legs. I considered who I might be in the relationship between mouse and elephant. Even the fame cloud that emanated off the Horrors directly was pretty intimidating. They felt unlike any of the bands we’d toured with before. Their aesthetic was deviant for the time, and bulletproof. They married prim tailoring and exaggerated accessories, derivative of 1960s English rock groups — blazers, waistcoats, trousers (all tight), oversized belt buckles, ostentatious bowed neck scarves, cravats — with a black-and-white palette, the occasional leather jacket, and the pointiest of leather boots with all manner of buckles on them that read of Sid Vicious or Lux Interior: Punk. Each of their hairstyles was its own defined shape. Tom, Reese, and Joe had sleek, short, Vidal Sassoon classics, and Faris and Josh ratted theirs up in big nests. They dressed like this off stage as well. They were committed, and like any good gang of icons (the Beatles, Spice Girls, Wu-Tang Clan), they each had their own identifiable brand within the brand. We had some nice moments with them over the course of the tour, and Tom and I would later end up being flatmates in London. But that first night they seemed evasive; subscribed to the Andy Warhol school of the bored and unimpressed. Their bodies hung inward, and their hair obscured their eyes, which made the simple assertion: Closed.

After the show I was taken around and introduced to label people as a new signee. The venue was packed, and I sank in amongst the bodies with my head down as we moved through to each introduction. Lauren Schneider, our publicist, kissed me on both cheeks with a, “Mwah! Mwah!,” through which I could still detect the angle of a New York accent. She told me I was gonna be a star. She would. And yet despite its intense level of cliché this still does something seductive and hypnotic. Time freezes and you imagine a blue spotlight coming down on your smiling face, surrounded by glitter or rose petals. Head down, and we shuffled through the crowd again. We stopped at two sets of men’s black shoes. I was wearing a short black shift dress with capped sleeves, and strappy, black vintage sandals with a low heel. I noticed my toes were turned in before raising my head, creating to me the image of a small child, ready to deliver its shame over a broken window or dead pet. I looked up and was introduced to two men that looked like twins; about the same height, both in all black. I still felt beneath a surface, looked at from above. Their faces seemed far away, without any light on them. I felt like prey, but of monetary rather than sexual, or other such value. They were music video directors, and we would have a meeting with them the following day at the office.

Going to the office was exciting because it confirmed “making it” as a rock band in a way that piss stops on tour in Montana and our still very low bank account balances really didn’t. The day before the tour started we saw Usher arrive at the office just before we did, and met L.A. Reid, the chairman of the Island Def Jam Music Group. Reid remembered us as the band from the previous week’s meeting about new artists. He liked the song that mentioned the devil. He pointed to us with an unlit cigar, a lascivious grin, and eyes wide open, and welcomed us to the label. He left to smoke that cigar with Usher, who Reid signed when Usher was fourteen.

When we came back the following day we were also introduced to the President of the label at the time, Jay-Z. His assistant let him know we were there, and showed us in. Two of the Horrors boys were with us, and took Polaroids with him. He was quiet, but pleasant, more attractive, and seemingly also thinner in real life. I try not to wash the dress I met him in very often. I thought about the hand I shook having been inside Beyoncé.

Back at the Island office, the first couple of directors we met with weren’t interesting to me. Our lyrics described images appropriate for horror movies, and I knew we presented like gothy, punk kids, but these guys missed all the genuine malaise, all the noir aesthetic, anything potentially lurid and nuanced, and skipped straight to comic book sci-fi aesthetics: green neon lights and ray guns and shit. At some point, I believe there was also a pitch involving some kind of sexy anarchist nurse. It was like I was invisible, and nobody filled these dudes in that our fans were a lot of young women and punked-out queer kids that wouldn’t be seduced by some heteronormative cum shot in PVC. For me, there was no beauty, no intimacy, no art, no grace.

X.

Found: Actual, if edited (not changed, just reduced), original pitches written by people other than myself, printed without permission.

Treatment 1:

In an effort to eradicate their music forever, the authorities have been sent out on a “musical cleansing mission.” The authorities will stop at nothing to exterminate all listeners. They must catch the band and give them shock treatments and a mental cleansing in an effort to go out and be poster children against their own music.

The band performs a regular concert. Suddenly, a group of doctors wearing masks and full scrubs walk into the audience, surrounding them. They take out chainsaws, weed whackers, hedge cutters, knives, and several other objects. Methodically, they travel through the audience, murdering everyone. Arms, skin, eyeballs, and body parts are seen tumbling amongst the crowd. Eventually, the doctors, whose suits are completely covered in blood, appear from both sides of the stage. They slowly walk towards the band. The doctors surround the band, gag them, and push them off the stage in stretchers.

Treatment 2:

Band is shot playing on the same stage as blood flies everywhere. Make it more PC, showing less of the visually appalling shots of the audience.

Ryann undergoes surgery. Ryann struggles to break free until she is heavily sedated. The Doctors are all wearing blonde Archie comic wigs with cut off sweaters. The nurses are all dressed like Betty with blonde wigs in pony tails. They give Ryann shock treatments and then undergo surgery involving small electric saws, giant scissors, and an assortment of anesthetics and cutting tools.

Eventually they remove the bandages, and Ryann is wearing a blonde wig and dressed exactly like the nurse (Betty). She has successfully been conformed to the authorities’ look. They cart her off to a recovery room. Meanwhile, the dead fans at the concert start to rise. They get up and walk outside en route to the hospital. The gruesome fans bust into the hospital. They swarm the doctors in a feeding frenzy. Ryann rips her wig off, jumps out of the stretcher joining the band and finishes the song as her normal self, surrounded by blood-drenched fans.

Treatment 3:

Ryann, dressed in a 1950s-style dress, cowers in a corner. Three demonic human heads float around her (classic horror-movie-style). She closes her eyes, cries, and puts her hands over her ears trying to shut them out. Ryann wakes up on a floor. Suddenly, she is picked up and carried off by a shirtless, broad-chested giant with an evil grin on his face. She screams and beats him, trying to free herself from his grip. Her arms and legs are both tied with old rope. She looks up, and in terror she screams.

A nice man wearing a suit is arrives. He picks her off the table and comforts her. She is so glad to see him. She hugs him. The camera is tight on her face. We see the man’s arms slowly pushing her down into a chair. The camera slowly pulls back. Clasps and arm restraints are put on her. A nurse puts her into her padded room. Ryann is living in a nightmare of insanity and delusions of grandeur.

X.

The meeting with Ian was different because he saw me. He knew me.

Now over ten years later I am plagued by the certainty and tenderness of our first meeting. I might translate these feelings as a commitment to forgive before anything bad happened. I could have been told then, that first hour, all the worst things he would do, and said OK. As they happened in real time they produced wounds and trauma that remained separate from the reserves of love I had for him. Love and pain were kept in their own accounts. Over time, each has been drained for want of deposits; sums effectively reduced by their own maintenance costs, and interest too weak to make the original investment grow.

The numbness set in. I felt possessed, and recognized these feelings mirrored in him across from me. As we spoke, I tried to ignore the slow and whispering, but insistent and incessant voice inside questioning whether I was going to marry this person.

We felt entirely separate from everyone in the room, to the extent that I remember turning away from him slowly, while he was still speaking to me, to see if what I was perceiving as so absurd, so inappropriate, could be confirmed by a look of obvious disapproval on anyone’s face. It couldn’t, which I laughed at, gently but audibly. I was forced back into the vacuous space to stare, and be stared at, and talk about music videos.

We discussed minimal, dark, feminine images. There was nothing else about his character that initially compelled me to him. He then suggested that perhaps his fiancé, an actress, could play one of the roles.

X.

We had spent the summer sending ideas back and forth for the video. It seemed to take trust to express what we hoped the other would agree was a strong image or scene. It was a forum for elaborating on what we found sexually compelling, attractive, beautiful; it was stimulating to explore what these things symbolized and meant to us. Aaron and I had been connected by the band that we loved, which heightened the intensity and stakes of our relationship, but what developed between Ian and I was a new experience of more evenly shared authorship and ownership. I felt that my creativity and perspectives were respected, and even enticing. Phone conversations lasted several hours. Part of the reason for this, however, was due to the pace at which he spoke. He has a strange, affected way. At several times during the conversations he would pause for five–nine whole seconds, before he continued his phrase with some completely unrevelatory word: “There was really something 1- 2- 3- 4- 5- 6-7- 8-9 NICE about the second Cure record 1-2-3-4-5 I mean the bass tones…” He would speak with abject sincerity about uncomplicated things. It’s annoying. At the time I was mesmerized by trying to figure him out, but also sometimes found this absurd lack of self-awareness to its social deviance turn genuinely, impossibly hilarious. I thought there was more going on; that he was thoughtful, and that something about the slow approach made for a more nuanced reading. This is just one of the ways that I was wrong.

These conversations naturally expanded into discussions of our visual and sonic references which were inherent reflections of who we were. We were similar. Talking about Fellini, the Misfits, Sonic Youth, and RZA also helped obscure our age difference, and maintained the guise of a professional barrier as feasibly related to the project at hand. He was thirty-four, I was twenty-one. It is hard for me to reconcile the fact that I am still younger than he was when we met, and that I know that twenty-one-year-olds look to me like children, because it is the average age of my students. The connection I still remember as having a romantic and fated feeling to it, I have to recognize now as irresponsible at best, and more realistically, vaguely predatory. Even as I write this, as I wallow in its recollection, I must remind myself that this initial collaborative production of images that established how we would continue to communicate, to express desire for one another, and to know one another, has been my grossest misappraisal of what constitutes intimacy, trust, respect, and appreciation in a relationship. I clung to the feelings of validation and invention that were important to our working partnership, but these made opaque the project of identifying how recklessly I, and other women, were treated outside of it.

X.

Ian’s fiancé was not cast in the video. I remember delicately suggesting that the inclusion of other actors might make it confusing for viewers to identify with band members. Really, the thought of not being the one in the front in our own music video felt like an unfathomable injustice, which is as mature of a way as I can find to translate the sound of a child’s tantrum in my head, which more accurately captures what I recognize as my own sniveling vanity and entitlement. Or, maybe I am still really bad at conflating needs, wants, and earned rewards with shame.

The video originally centered around a large house with wild children, and a collection of strange objects that should present like those in the Mütter Museum — a medical museum in Philadelphia known for its array of beautifully displayed oddities, under glass, and in amongst red carpeting and golden banisters. Because the logistics of working with children were complicated, and because this idea bore noticeable similarities to the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Y Control video, it was changed. The new narrative revolved around a female cult, and a protagonist who sacrifices her tongue as initiation by cutting it out herself on the bank of a river. This was derived from one of Jonah’s lyrics: “Take off your skin and dance with me. Cut out your tongue and sing for me.”

Ian sometimes referred to the moment he first saw me in Seattle after a whole summer of calls and emails as our first kiss. This annoyed me, because I thought it was lazy, too cute. We filmed at Magnusson Park on Elliot Bay, a body of water that presents like a large, calm lake without much commercial traffic. Nuclear submarine fins, painted black, have been installed in an area of grass to look like an approaching pod of killer whales. Ian had gotten a bulky, industrial cart with equipment on it stuck in a narrow, grassy ditch with a well-camouflaged stream running at a shallow depth within it. He was awkwardly trying to undo the error of this move when I came down from the base area to say hi. While speaking, greeting me, he looked up and down, at me and the cart and back, without removing his hands from it, then scissored his legs wide across the ditch with sun in his eyes, seemingly compromising the strategic position that anchoring himself to either side might have afforded him. If this was our first kiss, then actually, it was fair presage of his ineptitudes with more advanced intimacies.

I was though, admittedly, so excited to see him. And to introduce him to Seattle, and to realize the project. The band posted a message online, and all our fans came out in black party clothes. They did interviews with Sarah about why they were there, and it was edited to seem like they were all running away with us. We all ate pizza together, and stayed late, getting cold, waiting for the right light, and thrashing around to the same backing track. The footage looked great, but there wasn’t much else to it other than us bopping around in the dark. Ian suggested that I film additional scenes with him in Pennsylvania. The rationale was that he was from there, and knew where to shoot. The woods near his parents’ house looked right — eerie, wiry, and strange — like Andrew Wyeth paintings, because Wyeth was born and died in the same area, Chadds Ford. We already had the performance footage with the whole band, so it would be cheaper just to send the singer to pick up shots of the narrative. I also think he wanted to see me again.

X.

I was experiencing a mental ricochet as the burning taste of artificial peppermint, the sensation of syrup dripping from my entire chin and neck, and the inability to feel my legs from the knee down competed for urgent resolution. There seemed to be less I could do about the curtain of gnats that had surrounded my face, because in the end I was still on their turf. Sometimes fake blood is given a flavor so that you know you can put it in your mouth. I was filling my mouth with it, and letting it drain out at a pace dictated by the relationship of its viscous, sticky composition with gravity. I was covered in this fake blood and real dirt, and the smell of the Brandywine Creek, a wide, swimmable tributary of the Christina River, where we had been filming for fourteen hours, for the second consecutive day. The smell was that of wet earth, with notes of the dead leaves or dead fish whose presence doesn’t reveal itself until their micro particles are transported out of the water on your skin. We had collected scenes in the woods the night before, with altars made of wooden boxes, old black-and-white photographs, and candles. Women weaved slowly, threaten-ingly, through the trees with full-length, burgundy and dark brown linen capes on, and stood in a circle as if preparing for a ritual. My cape was made of a simple, off-white net lace. I was filmed under fallen trees, or from behind spider webs, holding a bouquet of long, oily black feathers. These feathers also lined the simple rectangular box into which I was placed to float down the creek before arriving at a large group of boulders along the river’s edge, where we were now filming the final scene. It had turned cold by the water, and I was wet, and shivering, and my legs had gone numb, which all helped inform the state of someone ready to cut out their tongue as a token of devotion.

I want to be clear that I never touched a camera in this process, but that these were the images — the minimal, dark, feminine images — whose design and meaning connected me to Ian, and whose continual creation I credit with sustaining that connection.

X.

He put ice cubes in white wine. Pennsylvania is hot in the summer. I watched his family, and don’t remember saying much, but wanting to, wanting them to like me. His dad was cool and his mom was not; she had a shrill voice, and seemed uptight. Whenever I am in the presence of a couple who have been together for more than twenty years I imagine how they confronted their first infidelities. Was it explosive? Easy, and with tender resolve? I wonder. His parents’ home was a place to leave equipment that had been driven in from New York. It was big, and had one of those too-nice living rooms that people only use on Christmas and Thanksgiving because they are otherwise afraid of ruining them, i.e. living. His youngest brother secretly grew pot in the backyard, which suggested to me that there were other familial things that were also hidden or unknown. I was offered a shower there while the crew unpacked, rather than waiting until I was back at my inn. He drove me home barefoot.

The Pennsbury Inn was typical of any East Coast country retreat, with a sweet, domestic interior, small rooms with quilts and fireplaces, and lush surroundings. He got out of the car to see the garden, which was lit by a huge moon as if it were day. A pale blue light hung above the black ground that stretched downhill toward a vanishing point, disappearing under trellises of roses that could be made out by their backlit, dark shapes, and their scent trapped in the unmoving summer air. I don’t remember if he asked if he could see the room, or if I asked if he wanted to see the room. When we got upstairs we pressed our foreheads together, pausing to acknowledge and negotiate the collapse of several boundaries — to decide. I was laid out under white netting hung from a four-poster bed, and we kissed in a way that balanced the hyperbolic romance of the Inn, the garden, the moon, and the four months leading up to that moment, with the clear understanding that we were doing something wrong. We kissed only.

X.

The next day, Ian and I drove back to New York alone together in his car. We stopped in Philadelphia for cheesesteaks and sodas, which we ate while sat on the trunk.

He played Swervedriver and Ride. We talked about Twin Peaks, which I had not ever seen.

When we got back to the studio we kissed, and I hung on his body while we watched the footage, like he was my boyfriend. It was easy.

X.

What happened was that the distance between us produced conditions of extreme longing and extreme lust, to which I responded by producing — in collaboration with him, as directed by his desires, and by what I knew attracted him — images and videos of myself that a relationship with more readily available access to one another might not have inspired. I started making videos for my video director. I felt I had to offer something more, or entirely different than what a conventional relationship would. We reverted back to the creative dynamic we developed over the course of the video’s production. What I made and what he directed was not your average pornography. These were performances, and they were accommodated by some of the still fairly new technologies that made them fast and feasible. Thank you, internet; thank you, camera phone; thank you, sexting.

Video: Necklaces

Five necklaces are tried on in succession. Clasps are opened gently for the camera, then re-joined carefully, behind the neck. The shot is tight, and close. Eyes go hard right, as if this helps to see the base of the neck. The camera is used as a mirror. Hair is pulled away from the collar area, and the necklace touched, grazed, or re-positioned. When hands are raised to remove the necklace the breast comes briefly into the frame. Editing is rapid, sometimes fixing on the eyes, blinking, the clavicle, the mouth, the fingers against metal, or pearl.

Video: Legs

The face is seen in three-quarter profile, backlit in front of a large industrial window. The view shifts to the front; the collar of a tight navy blue dress is being put in place. Hands smooth out creases in the dress, running down either side of the body, along the ribcage, hips, and outer thighs. A belt is cinched around the midline. Thigh-high net stockings are pulled over the knee in a rhythm dictated by the undulation of the wrists on either side of the leg. The shot returns to the face in profile, now nearly obscured by low light.

Photo Series: Ribbons

Eight images. A black satin dress is cut into long, wide ribbons, which are wrapped around a naked body in water. Three distinct lines are created across the breast, torso, and above the knees. The eyes are covered, and wrists are bound together. Exterior light cuts through a dark room in hazy panels that mirror the sections of fabric.

It would have been rational to think that I would never see him again after I left New York, and that I shouldn’t, because he was engaged. He drove me to Penn Station where I took a train to the airport. As I got out of the car, the thought of never seeing him again smacked me in the chest and took my breath away. But, the certainty of that stupid, numb feeling I got when we met was still stuck in me like the stinger of a bee — itching, distracting, painful. I returned to Seattle at the end of August, and our band headed immediately back out on tour in the lead up to our album release, just a couple of weeks away. We would play New York twice before the end of the year. Ian and I became tethered by text messages, and sex messages, and tried to speak every day between soundcheck and the show.

When Ian and I saw each other we operated on a level of intimacy established by our correspondence and prolonged state of erotic tension. There was never an understanding of how we would function without the distance. The band passed through New York that winter, and seeing him produced scenes of a similarly cinematic, or unlikely, narrative quality as the videos I sent him because they were informed by limits. I was on tour, and shared hotel rooms with my bandmates. He lived with her. We were still operating under the pretense of sweetness, and uncertainty; a hotel room for the afternoon would have blemished all this. Our situation required greater creativity to navigate a lack of private space in which to fuck until we cried tears of cum. We made better use of touching and kissing than we might otherwise have had the patience for, given the option of penetration. We did this where two people who are more willing to compromise their dignity than their aesthetic sensibilities reasonably could. You start checking unalarmed doors in art museums and restaurants. You nearly fuck in the street. You discover that if you take the elevator to the top floor of the Bowery Hotel, then walk up the service stairs, there’s an unlocked staff door to an unused part of the roof. There, on a cold night in autumn, you get pressed against the brick balcony that comes up to your chest, and your tits are splayed out on the rampart that scrapes your nipples before your face is pressed down ahead of them, and you watch your cold breath run sideways like cigarette smoke blurring out the tilted city. You feel a dripping wet mouth angle up the side of your throat and bite too hard on your earlobe while a hand presses hard against the inside of your thigh to spread your legs. You feel constantly watched because you are vigilant of being discovered, and this is as good as being in any performance. You want it to look right. You want to re-watch it on a loop. You cum on his hands.

Ian told me that he broke his engagement on an evening in January, not long after our affair had started. It didn’t feel like a quick process at the time. The band was on tour, still, and had a night off. Ian and I met at Smith & Mills in Tribeca. It was new then, but I imagine it is still a cozy, dark, small room with scissor arm lamps and vintage prints around. There is a red globe light at the entrance in lieu of a sign.

I tried not to reveal my elation. He did not cast our relationship as cause, nor did he articulate plans for our future that might now be possible. Ian visited me in Seattle the next month, and we made love for the first time. He taught me to fuck slow, but couldn’t be held at night. He had to fall asleep with the TV on, which I hated.

The fiancé never seemed real. Her existence created a constant, ominous, weight, threatening to remove him from my life. I had no animosity towards her, but could not access empathy for her either. I couldn’t see her; I didn’t know her name. I never once encouraged him to leave her, or used any verbiage about choice. I would imagine them tasting wedding cake samples together on a weekend when I didn’t hear from him, and had resigned to the fact that we were temporary, and they were permanent. When I wasn’t thinking about the engagement, I could remember that we didn’t even live in the same place, and couldn’t. The band was in Seattle, his studio was in New York. This began a practice that has become a compulsive habit, a useless ghost that wasn’t threatening enough to exorcise. I process time according to my distance from New York City. We each had our own clock. If I was in Seattle I would count to myself, 10 (11, 12, 1). If in Chicago, 10 (11). The only time I tried to break things off though, was out of fear, not because of the logistics of space or time. I secluded myself in the women’s bathroom at The Diamond Ballroom in Oklahoma City, and called to tell him I couldn’t do it. I was surrounded by wall-to-wall 1950s sea-foam green tile. The cockroach slowly moving across the floor made me feel low and degenerate. I convinced myself his fiancé was a better woman than I was, and that I was making the right decision by forfeiting the relationship he’d eventually realize I wasn’t good enough for. I called and initiated the process, which he rebuked. He said that the night before he’d had a dream that we were in the hospital, and I had just had our daughter. He said she had thick curls and was beautiful. I thought saying this to someone you didn’t love was too sick. I thought he was telling me that this was what he wanted. He spoke with a gravity that contradicted the statement’s recklessness, its tackiness, and my initial assumption that this was a sentiment recycled for its effective manipulation. I thought lying about something like this should make your teeth fall out and turn to ash. So it didn’t end.

I would hope that the references I have hereto made about how wrong I was in my valuation of certain aspects of my relationship with Ian have conveyed regret, and in this way also served as apology (to her). And believe me, reader, you do not know from sorry just yet.

X.

A moment. This part doesn’t belong to him.

Late August:

I returned from Pennsylvania.

September 1:

At a festival in our hometown we played a stadium, which held thousands of people.

I climbed high up the scaffolding at the side of the stage.

I stood along the crowd barricade.

This felt like my wedding and my funeral.

Then another tour.

September 16:

At the end of that small run, we flew from Salt Lake City to Seattle. Our tour manager drove across the country with our gear to meet us for the start of another tour on the East Coast, which would begin in four days.

September 17:

We went to a beach house in West Seattle rented by the radio station as a summer novelty. We talked about the record, and how we’d just flown in, and would soon be flying out, and when the video would be released, and how happy we were, and it was heaven. We played an acoustic set at the record shop that Nabil owned. I was nervous about forgetting the words to one of the new songs, and cached some of the lyrics on the new releases board. The crowd was filled with people that had supported us for eight years, many of whom we had some singular significance to. We knew this because they would tell us, or write to us, or get tattoos of our lyrics, signatures, or album art, or cry with us. They made us real.

September 18:

Our third album was released on Stolen Transmission, a subsidiary of Island Def Jam. We played a sold-out release party at home.

November 30:

We were on tour, and had some time to kill before our evening show in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We decided to spend our afternoon in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where Hershey’s Chocolate is made. We’d heard the town smelled of chocolate, and it did. We drove down the main street, and all the lamp posts had on them large metal versions of Hershey’s Kisses — the company’s signature sweet — tilted at angles that suggested they were windblown and fancy-free. Kisses are bite-sized pieces of chocolate wrapped in silver foil with a thin ribbon of paper, labeled KISSES® in blue lettering protruding from their top. They are shaped like a tear drop with a flat bottom.

We arrived at the factory, and the factory had a ride. We were the only ones there. The ride involved a slow-moving cart that took us around a dark interior where animatronic cows and pastoral cartoon backdrops spelled out the story of Hershey’s beginnings as a dairy farmer, and reinforced the secret of the chocolate’s quality multiple times, in an over-excited voice: “It’s all about the MILK!” I fact-checked this in my review of a YouTube video posted by a Hershey’s enthusiast in 2010. The names, Olympia, Harmony, and Gabby were posted above fake stable stalls where we saw cow tails swaying joyously in unison. These cows then sang a jazzy number about “tasty treats” in a style akin to Tina Turner’s rendition of “Proud Mary.” Things got a bit dry during the unnecessarily methodical explanations of the factory processes, but soon we were spat out into a wonderland of conveyor belts, overloaded with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, York Peppermint Patties, Almond Joys, Kit Kats, and the like. The ride’s narrator concluded by saying, “Our goal at Hershey’s is to keep you smiling. Because bringing happiness to you is what we’re all about.”

As we left the ride we were given promotional packets of a new candy-coated miniature Kiss. We joked about the ride as we exited down a long ramp, and Aaron answered a call from Nabil. He began chewing on his hair, which he did when he was nervous or thinking. He asked flatly, “What does that mean?” Rob, the man that signed us and ran our label, had been fired. No one knew what it meant.

X.

We weren’t given answers. Sarah had been fired too, and Stolen Transmission no longer existed. We were owed nothing by our parent label.

We kept touring on an album whose promotion had been abandoned. We didn’t have other contacts at the label. We didn’t know who to call. We kept being re-assured by Rob that everything was going to be “OK,” and for him only, it was. He got another high-level A&R job. He is currently the Executive Vice President of Republic Records, another division of Universal. He said he would re-sign us and never did. Contact dissipated over a year of waiting.

Our bandmates Scott and David both had partners that they had been with for several years — exceptional women — from whom they were perpetually separated by tour, and to whom, luckily, they are now married, probably because for the first time they chose these women over the band, at times that represented their last chance to do so.

After several label-less tours that were not bad, but pointed to no clear advance in our careers, Scott called a band meeting in a badly-decorated hotel room in Dallas, Texas, with baby blue shag carpeting, and quit. David eventually followed.

X.

When I visited Ian in New York we stayed at hotels, and he paid in cash.

He said she still had things at the apartment they had shared and was worried about her coming over when I was there. She still had a key.

Doesn’t explain the cash, does it.

A suitcase full of black lingerie, and heels that never leave the room. Spit. Consensual force. Swollen lips. Marks made on the skin. You come into me, and you stay. The weight of you, and the size of you press me into silence, and submission, and forgiveness; and you fill me up with a poisonous gift that feels like trust. You put this in me. So now what, so now what?

X.

Through music video, Madonna put dark sex and dark love into pop music and the popular landscape at large. She was one of the first. And whereas something like the early erotic masochism of Nine Inch Nails’ Happiness in Slavery might have been expected from them, because their music was also dark, Madonna’s aesthetics permanently changed pop. She explored music video’s ability to shock, not just through enticing, accepted sexual imagery, but also through unexpected iterations of unconventional sexual representations that challenged heteronormative standards — S&M, queer love, pain.

I have chosen to consider Madonna’s videos for Vogue, Justify My Love, and Erotica as a connected series — a triptych — produced during her most controversial period. The videos share a dramatic black-and-white aesthetic, queer and sexual themes, and become progressively more explicit.

The first of the series to be released in 1990, Vogue, directed by David Fincher, envelops Madonna in a queer world marked by rampant Voguing, ostentatious glamor, androgyny, and women, including Madonna, appropriating traditionally male dress. Reinforcing this queerness are the aesthetic similarities to a Robert Mapplethorpe series — the high contrast and classical handling of idealized bodies that might be found in his X Portfolio. In the opening sequence, men and women in suits are positioned next to sculptures and paintings, suggesting their parity — hardness, beauty, mastery — untouchable. The figures are put in motion by a pulsing beat. Madonna whips out her black, velvet-covered cone tits, and by the end dress shirts are turned into white flashing spirals with the aid of an intense wind fan. It’s not without its humor, or its acknowledgements of these absurd exaggerations of the power of the exterior. But the characters drip with a confidence, justified in each delicate, gliding, committed motion, that tells us they know they are beautiful. And whether they are or not, or always were or not, this conviction, this decision to know, has made them free. Madonna calls us superstars, it does something to us, and we are offered that same freedom, “black or white,” “boy or girl,” on the dancefloor. You HAVE to Vogue.

Before I proceed, let’s acknowledge that Madonna has been heavily critiqued as having appropriated Voguing from the New York ballroom scene. In her chapter in The Madonna Connection, Lisa Henderson implies that Madonna’s appropriations are beneficial to her in terms of aligning herself with queer culture, but that this may only be legible to those in said culture.⁹ For those in her audience unfamiliar with the gay ballroom cultures Madonna is referencing, or arguably elevating to mainstream visibility, the queer elements of her work go unannounced, presumably to avoid evasion of her heterosexual fan base. Though a fair argument, I do not read Madonna’s actions as Henderon does. Henderson suggests that Voguing has been incorporated as queer novelty, when in fact much of Madonna’s career has been marked, not just by queer aesthetics, but by queer acts, language, and activism. This is evidenced by the queer world Madonna continues to build throughout the triptych.

Justify My Love, also released in 1990, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, depicts dream-like sexual encounters in a hotel. It was shot at the Hotel Royal Monceau in Paris. Mondino has said, “I did an experience. The whole idea was to lock ourselves into this hotel for three days and two nights. Without any rules […] Nobody was allowed to go out.”¹⁰ He shot without a script, and said by the end of it he was unable to differentiate the real from the performed. In the video, Madonna stumbles through the bleached halls of the hotel, holding the back of her hand to her head, exhausted. She carries an old-fashioned suitcase. Its weight tilts her frame. She wears a black trench-coat and heels. She passes an androgynous figure who waits in an open doorway, topless, with breasts covered by a decorative 1920s sheath and several long strands of pearls. The camera quickly passes a splintered view of a wiry, shirtless man looking down, as if observing himself being blown. Madonna drops the suitcase, leans against the wall, and runs her hands up her temples, and down the length of her body, before kneeling to the floor. The trench-coat falls back, showing the garter belts running up the length of her uncovered thighs. The camera moves low, at the level of her knees, which are bent, splayed in opposite directions. Her hands grope at her black underwear, and our view moves within her legs, then in tandem with her body — up toward the man that has arrived in the hall, watching her. Figures in lingerie, a dancer in a black bodysuit with claws obscure gender identities in the wash of fantasy and eroticism. We are returned to Madonna, who is now in a bedroom, slowly removing her clothes, displaying herself on the white bed. The man that lays on her is not the figure we see kissing her as the shot pulls away. The sex of the new character is at first indeterminable. They have eyeshadow on, sharp features, a feminine face. They, and Madonna, are watched by a male voyeur at the side of the bed. As the camera scrolls down the length of their bodies pressed together, the figure is revealed to be a woman. The character is played by a model, Amanda Cazalet, who was courted by Madonna off set, through love letters that were eventually sold at auction in 2018. Two trans-women caress each other’s faces tenderly, while observing themselves in a mirror.

This scene is followed by, what is beyond a doubt, the representation of penetrative fucking. You may think there’s a lot of fucking in music videos, but really, there’s not. There are sexualized bodies, but they don’t fuck. This is a radical moment Madge is pulling off. Marilyn Manson includes fucking in his videos, but he doesn’t get there until 2004, in the Asia Argento-directed video, (s)Aint, later followed by fucking in 2007’s Heart Shaped Glasses, and 2017’s Kill4You. Fucking is included in Flying Lotus’ Parisian Goldfish, in 2008, and there is digitized, faceless fucking in Björk’s Pagan Poetry, released in 2001. The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up is perhaps Justify’s closest competitor, which includes an excellent lesbian fucking scene — excellent for its certainty rather than suggestion — though this is released seven years after Madonna first fucks on camera. Other queer figures appear, including a butch woman in a cop hat, whose suspenders cover her nipples. She taunts one of Madonna’s lovers, who has been put in a latticed leather harness, with his hands tied behind him. Women in drag draw thin mustaches on each other and gaze into the camera. Madonna leaves the hotel hurriedly, with suitcase back in hand, and her lover still reaching out for her to return. She throws her head back as she laughs, with mouth open wide, then bites her knuckle. The video fades to black, and a quote appears against the screen: “Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.”

Despite how the video translates in the above formal analysis, another of Lisa Henderson’s criticisms is that the queerness of the sex scenes in Justify My Love is too ambiguous to be effectively confrontational.¹¹ Rather than any ambiguity in its depiction of queerness, how I interpret the restraint Henderson identifies is more as a strategy to build eroticism throughout the triptych — naturally peaking in Erotica. She also compromises the strength of her argument somewhat by considering the absence of any queer representation in the vast majority of music videos at the time. She says, “Justify My Love defies some of music video’s worst clichés and opens up an aesthetic and political corner for other ways of envisioning sex in popular culture.”¹² In this way, Henderson asserts that Madonna sanctifies new visions of sexuality by pushing the standards of the music video genre.

There is further contradiction in Henderson’s argument, as she proceeds to criticize Madonna’s construction of an environment where that sexual agency is explored. Henderson negatively describes the hotel where the video takes place as a venue where the sale of sexual services has long benefitted men and subjugated women as sexual and economic property.¹³ This quote is somewhat troubling for its totalizing condemnation of female sex work, without even the interrogation of possible agency. Also, this assessment is predicated upon a fictional narrative, where Madonna plays a character — a prostitute, by Henderson’s reading. I would like to suggest the alternate reading that Madonna Louise Ciccone is playing Madonna — developing the provocative persona used to market herself, and servicing a queer feminist politics at risk during the conservative climate at the time of the video’s release. This reading positions Madonna as the one in control and reveals her agency, rather than reading her performance as a submission to the desires of the man that Henderson suggests has hired her character.

Madonna’s Erotica, directed by Fabien Baron and released in 1992, expands and proliferates the queer and explicit images in Justify My Love. We see Madonna in the opening shot, masked, behind a shimmering, metallic curtain. The following shot shows Madonna in lingerie, straddling a male figure, seated in a chair in a masculine study. The two kiss, and disrobe each other, before the scene fades back again to the shimmering curtain where the word “Erotica” scrolls across the screen. A full body shot of Madonna shows her, still masked, wearing a man’s tie, with a whip in hand. Her short blond hair is slicked back, and she appears as an androgynous dominatrix. Within the first seconds of the video, Madonna has destabilized gender norms, adopted a masculine dress while dominating her male lovers, and established an intensely theatrical sexual landscape. She renders us creeps and voyeurs (inclusionary and accepted roles in the already scandalous world in which we are immersed), compelled to watch the taboo scenes for their inherent eroticism and rich images.

The dark aesthetic of the video reflects the stereotypically “bad” or “sinful” connotation of sexual fantasy, and queer sex, more pointedly. The consistent glamorization of the characters, however, subverts those negative connotations, while acknowledging a separation from convention through lurid imagery. Madonna theatricalizes something of the totality of sexuality, including drag, bondage, role-play, homosexual, and group sexual encounters. Though the scenes and aesthetics signal the deviant nature of her subjects, Madonna unveils honest facets of sexuality, rarely seen in mainstream media. She elevates and legitimizes these truths and fantasies through her extreme visibility and success.

Images flash of Madonna with a whip in her mouth, smiling subversively into the camera, implying that she will derive pleasure from its sadistic use. A feminine, muscular male dancer is shown pressing himself up against a mirror with cigarette in hand — his masculine appearance subverted by his unexpected vanity and grace. A couple in formal dress watch the male dancer, whose movement is sped up and distorted, before they kiss in the audience. Madonna is shown kissing the model Isabella Rossellini, the male figure from the opening scene, and a butch woman with a shaved head. Another supermodel, Naomi Campbell, appears behind Madonna, grabbing her body while looking into the camera in a provocative motion of sexual possession. Madonna reaches her arm behind her, grabbing Campbell around the neck, as we see her twist her head and push her tongue out toward Campbell’s mouth. These exchanges with Rossellini and Campbell again reinforce the queer current of the video, particularly subversive given that, as models, these women represent classic objects of desire for heterosexual men.

In the following scenes, Madonna is shown pouring hot wax over the chest of a man, whose arms have been tied above his head. The woman with the shaved head is shown with a doppelgänger and Madonna on a mattress, with rope lying next to it. The woman is shown again, standing over a kneeling Madonna, prying Madonna’s jaw open in front of her pelvis. Madonna puts on a leather mask, and kneels on her hands and knees in a bondage apparatus that allows a man to bridle her like a horse, hold the reigns attached to its metal loops, and straddle her back

The muscular male figure also wears a leather bondage harness. The scene changes, presenting her in an evening gown, assuming the dominant role, again with the whip, holding reigns linked to what appears to be a dozen nude male bodies. Madonna changes into yet another S&M-style costume with a leather biking cap and chaps. She dons a punk-style, spiked collar, held to the wall behind her with heavy metal chains. In a frontal shot she looks directly into the camera from her restricted position, rolling her tongue around the edge of her mouth, as if declaring her ability to sexually provoke despite having assumed a submissive position.

Another subversive pairing Madonna includes is a scene in her evening gown where she sits on the lap of man, presumably in his seventies, who touches her body and face. She has assumed the position of a call girl, although given the various positions of power she has adopted throughout the video, it is unclear to what extent she is truly at the man’s service, or simply playing yet another role wherein sexual power is exchanged and explored. The words “I’ll teach you how to” are shown on screen, concluding with an image of Madonna waving her finger in denial at the camera, as the word “Sex” appears. The video concludes with a shot of Madonna hitchhiking naked in Miami, Florida.

Madonna elicits shock and sexual arousal by exposing and relishing in the proclivities usually kept hidden, or secret, for their deviations from heteronormative desire, for their very expression of a love and fascination with sex; its physical and aesthetic limits. She exposes the performative nature of sex: the numerous costumes — leather masks, whips, chains, etc., as well as choreographed exchanges of dominant and submissive roles, which in turn highlights the agency offered by performance to subvert normative standards.

Erotica delivers the affirmation of same-sex encounters, which Henderson critiques Justify My Love for representing less explicitly. The various issues of queer representation that Henderson delves into are the same sites I recognize as valuable subversions of gender norms inserted in the landscape of the popular. I find this achieved not just through the sexually provocative nature of Madonna’s own identity, but through the complex performances she stages in video, where queer culture is elevated and sanctified, and binaries destroyed through same-sex encounters and experiments in subcultural role play. Rather than attempts at queer appropriation, these videos operate more ostensibly as Madonna’s own self-exposure as queer.

X.

Not long after Scott quit the band, I was at a party with my best friend Caitlin. We had been introduced to Mark Gajadhar, the drummer for Seattle band the Blood Brothers. They were a frenetic post-hardcore group, with two singers and a bombastic live show that seemed to be a precedent for northwest bands at the time. They had a cult-like local following, but they had also established a sturdy national and international fan-base. They were a big deal. Mark was/is an incredible drummer, and had started making beats for a hip-hop project on the side called Champagne Champagne. Caitlin and I were joking to him about our new synth-pop band, where we sang about bicycles and the library. Thinking we were serious, he offered to make us beats if we ever needed any. This was the first time I had ever thought about working with anyone other than my bandmates, or about making pop music. It was the first time I even considered how pop music was made. Of course — beats. I confessed to Mark that my project with Caitlin was not real, but that if he wanted to work on something together, we could.

We started meeting weekly. Mark would send me several tracks, and

I COULD DO WHAT EVER THE FUCK I WANTED TO WITH THEM.

X.

Mark gave me total freedom. He trusted me. I played his tracks on repeat and wrote to them by silently committing vocal melodies to memory while sitting for hours at the Herkimer coffee shop in Seattle’s U-District. I had mostly sent him Madonna references from Confessions on a Dance Floor and Hard Candy. I know these aren’t her best jams, but I liked the disco sounds, the minor liberties taken against her more classic pop structures, and the unexpected palette of overly bubbly, happy synth sounds that were used when the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Justin Timberlake produced her. Say what you will, it’s no Like a Prayer, but I also liked the very human sentiments of insecurity that are all over Hard Candy, and that spoke to my particular concerns around the production of longing from a distance: “She’s not me,” “You always love me more, miles away,” “I need to go back there before it’s too late.” Mark had complimented this by sending me Glass Candy and Chromatics tracks, both produced by Johnny Jewel. It all worked. Our choruses repeated, and were catchy, but were set within electronic textures that were dissonant to commercial pop sounds. Sometimes they were dark and sinister, sometimes dancy, warmer. Sometimes I screamed. One song was a waltz, with me singing in French to an organ. I was never told that anything was bad, or that I was bad, or that I should do something differently. I also never, ever, not once, got the impression that Mark was interested in me sexually. He had a girlfriend, they had a cat and dog, and we could collaborate, bringing both of our talents to share, without this having any bearing on our hearts.

Aaron identified the threat in this, and tried to render the situation by expressing his own desire to make pop music together. He immediately made all the wrong moves. We had one practice. He spoke authoritatively about how often we should meet, and that we should complete one song every practice. His words were choppy and intimidating, accentuated by a chopping motion with one hand landing into the flattened palm of the other. I hated all of this. It made me as sick and scared as it ever had.

The other value of working with Mark was that he didn’t care that I wrote about Ian. Aaron was still sensitive about our breakup, three years after it happened. I’m not degrading this by the way. The whole thing was terrible and confusing for a long time. I missed him as my boyfriend, frequently. I didn’t feel comfortable with him knowing I was seeing anyone, let alone our video director, and certainly didn’t want to share my lyrics about it with him. Ian’s contact had been decreasing at what was first an imperceptible rate. I missed him all the time, and writing about it when the other great love of my life, our band, was also in a state of uncertainty, felt urgently necessary. We weren’t performing much, and I had no way of exercising my congestions of panic and fear. By the time I recognized Ian’s retreat, I was too proud to fight for him.

My experience working with Mark destroyed all my paradigms. It turned out, given a completely basic level of autonomy, I could write, make, feel, be, and that this was not contingent upon sharing love and sex. Not only would I write songs then, but I would make videos and images that weren’t for Ian, and begin the process of cultivating in myself the knowledge of film that was also a significant aspect of what attracted me to him. Mark and I called our project WEEKEND, after the Jean-Luc Godard movie. When Champagne Champagne started doing well, and he needed to turn focus to it, he said I was welcome to have, release, and perform the songs, as long as he was credited, which he always was. From this point, I started performing as Ryann.

X.

Bertolt Brecht’s signature “epic theater” was, above all, aware of itself as theater. He maintained, “It is most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from [epic theater]; the engendering of illusion.”¹⁴ His aim was to acknowledge and expose the construction of a performance, without sacrificing intellectual engagement and meaning. Rather than identifying with characters through a fictional narrative, performers could be used to communicate abstract ideas or social commentary through bodily sign and symbol. Many of the videos in this book expose gender as performance through their extreme and unconventional gendered representations. By exposing the manipulation of gender at an extreme level, common iterations of gender performance also come into view. Walter Benjamin echoes how Brecht’s strategy might be applied to this effect in Understanding Brecht. He says, “Epic theatre, then, does not reproduce conditions but, rather, reveals them. This uncovering of conditions is brought about through processes being interrupted.”¹⁵ In the context of these videos, what is interrupted is the “stylized repetition of acts” — to draw from Judith Butler — which conventionally establish gender identities.

The modes of interruption performed in the videos explored in this book also frequently produce critical distance — a strategy written into the epic theater. While Artaud focused on shock and spectacle to awaken his viewer and produce thought, Brecht’s strategy toward similar aims proposed a loss of empathy. Originally adapted from Chinese theater, the “alienation effect” or “distancing effect” — “Verfremdungseffekt” in Brecht’s tongue — prevents the viewer from submitting to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play. Brecht’s productions put their subject matter through a process of alienation — “the alienation that is necessary to all understanding” — as Benjamin put it.¹⁶ Through an independence from empathy, he sought to develop an audience’s consciousness.

X.

Music Video: All Yours

The word “Sound” is embossed in a brass plate below an elevator call button. The hand that reaches out to press it is wearing black, leather, fingerless gloves. The music begins and we watch the numbered floors pass from inside the vintage elevator — 2, 3, 4 — our view blocked by its large metal gate, which secures us inside. A close-up of a woman’s face, with black makeup smeared across her eyes like a mask. Two people, seen in profile, face each other. The shot is tight, from cheek to neck; their proportions, the curves of their features nearly identical. Their lips are parted slightly. Images shift on the beat. An androgynous figure leans in to kiss the first woman seen. She is gently bitten, and her lower lip pulled away in the teeth of the figure that has been revealed to be a woman with short hair. Images of the women from their waists down, holding each other’s thighs, shift to the view of floors still ascending through the gate of the elevator. The elevator stops, the women kiss. In strobing light, a surreal sequence begins. A woman licks the length of her wrist and hand, which is covered in glitter, penetrating her mouth with her metallic-coated fingers. The glitter left in her mouth is dragged down her tongue and the length of her neck, which sticks with saliva. The camera disappears into her dark, sparkling mouth, and the footage is edited to flash with the beat before the music softens at the bridge.

X.

Our band didn’t recover. We lost our label, then Scott, then David, and couldn’t recoup on morale. We decided to end it with the intention of Aaron and I continuing with new members under a new name after the breakup. Scott and David returned for the last show. I started having panic attacks in my car in the month leading up to it. They began with delicate tears, usually while paused at red lights, but within moments possessed my respiratory system, and I hyperventilated, too fast, too heavy, a failing machine. Death was coming. For our funeral, I chose a pristine 1950s evening gown, made of heavy ocean blue satin with slivers of metallic stitching across the chest in an abstract floral pattern. It hung from a hangar on the outside of my closet for weeks, and I stared at it from bed, trying to fully grasp the end of things. If I woke briefly in the night, I would be alarmed into an upright position, having mistaken its dark shape against the white door for a ghost. I didn’t move it. I accepted that, in a little while, it would essentially be one.

X.

The last show was a purity.

It was all for you.

X.

I was at first excited to start afresh with the new lineup, the new band, but old dynamics revealed themselves that I was not prepared to commit another decade to navigating. I hate that I don’t remember the details of what it was about at that particular time, but since Aaron only ever made me cry by telling me how disappointing I was to him, we can assume that waiting in the vocal booth for the muscles in my throat to relax and my sinuses to clear so that I could record vocals on the new band’s demos had been initiated by some critique of my vocal delivery, or timing, that would also have been very deftly linked by him to flaws of my person — selfishness, laziness — that might have been the real source of these musical errors… “If you had practiced more,” “If you cared,” “If you weren’t so busy with your other projects,” etc. I took my headphones off and tried to gather myself to avoid one of these new, unpredictable invasions to my lungs that I was only considering a detriment in terms of what other insults they would arm Aaron with (“Don’t be so dramatic.” “Do you know how much time this is wasting?” “Do you know what this costs us?”). I asked myself why I was doing this. Standing there after the death of our band, without any obligations or reinforcements, the fair question arose.

It was not rhetorical; I demanded an answer from myself. I felt the most blissful, calming, relief when I heard the truth, still there after over ten years: I am doing this for Jonah, because I love him.

The fact that I could separate my own self-interest, in fact that I could see that there was no self-interest there, gave me some ability to consciously give myself to him in spite of his cruelty, and to enjoy it, rather than feeling, as I had the entire time, that I should be grateful to him for allowing me to be there — replaceable as I was. I loved him because we had made a thing together that had defined my adult life, and that I loved most. I loved him because he showed me things that shaped my identity and brought me immense joy. But it also became clear to me that my love need not be expressed as his instrument. A month later I told him that I was going to move to New York for my master’s degree. I offered to fly back and forth. Classes would be in session for less than nine months, and there were significant breaks for holidays. He didn’t go for it. In ten years, I hadn’t been away from him for more than two weeks. When I left, he scrapped all the songs we had been working on rather than getting someone new to sing them.

Distance and lies were what dissolved my romantic relationship with Ian. There was nothing that my erotic homemade cinema could do about it. It ended on a work trip to New York I took with my boss — a bar and restaurant owner I’d had to start assisting when we stopped touring to write new songs. He said he was in Pennsylvania filming, and would return the morning my flight left. He suggested I meet him at his studio at 4am. I was hauling an impractical, cherry red 1960s Samsonite suitcase around by hand because I loved it. I remember literally muttering to myself how stupid this all was — the meeting, the suitcase, the time — as I marched out to get a taxi, hands cramped and body off-kilter. I justified my decision with the idea of breaking up in person.

He met me outside and escorted me up, which meant we had to be in the elevator together. The elevator was so beautiful. Square. Enticing geometry. Industrial size, eleven feet or more in each direction. Metal. He pulled the emergency stop. I saw the blurred reflection of my red case in the ceiling and thought of the red globe light outside Smith & Mills. I wondered what other benign and unrelated objects would remind me of him for the rest of my life. In the elevator we remembered our love through the attachment of our mouths to other wet parts of our bodies. We forgot the traumatic mourning rituals that had come with every other one of our separations since the first. We fed.

We eventually made an awkward move to the studio, having already exercised our communion, but feeling the irony of needing to speak about the silence established in recent months. The sun hadn’t yet come up. The space was dark, with one warm frosted light glowing in the corner. I spilled a glass of red wine, which made me feel like a child; dumb and messy. I was placed at the edge of a chair, told to hold its outer back edges, and spread my legs wide. I watched hands disappear under my skirt and felt them inside of me. I felt dizzy and sad, and closed my legs gently around his face causing him to reverse. I used language learned from films. I can’t do this. What’s going on. Say it. And then he said he couldn’t be in a relationship, with me, right now. He called me a taxi, and before I got in he told me to call when I arrived. I exploded, yelling that I would never call him.

X.

I moved to New York that summer. I was going to start classes in the autumn. I was going to take the songs I had made with Mark and become Madonna while I still could. I admit that part of me was also there to get him back. To try.

I was allowed to stay at my Seattle boss’ studio apartment in London Terrace, one of the oldest, grandest apartment blocks in New York City, and at the time, and probably still, the home of Debbie Harry. I saw her once; she still wears leather and sunglasses. I lived on toast with peanut butter, coffee, and the staff meals provided at the Ace Hotel, where I got a job. I had to figure out how to get first, last, and deposit for a room of my own.

I accepted a job as a dominatrix at a place that was conveyed to me as actually having quite a boring, older, conservative clientele of mid-town business men. I never started because I couldn’t afford the costumes and the hours conflicted with my two-week training doing the overnights at the hotel. I also cleaned some creep’s apartment dressed like a French maid for $40 an hour. I felt sorry for myself, and collapsed punishment of those feelings with the comforting position re-assuming the sexual gaze of easy targets.

X.

Judith Butler maintains that gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.¹⁷ Our big mistake then, is thinking that our sex is supposed to dictate our gender identity. According to her, the act of gender is what produces its meaning.

Butler thereby argues that gender is performative. She differentiates this from gender’s theatricality by saying, “Performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”¹⁸ This quote from Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex clarifies that gender is constituted in its very determination, before its performance begins. Just by calling someone a girl over and over, the label itself does something to the person. The naming, and the acceptance that we are what we are being called informs our understanding of how we are expected to act.

Like gender, she also says sexuality is unstable, and that heterosexuality is repeated out of compulsion, and the necessity to confirm that it is the natural standard (when it’s totally not).

Butler attributes the production of the gender binary to a normalization of heterosexuality. She says, “the heterosexualisation of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine,’ where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female.’”¹⁹ These “expressive attributes” of masculinity and femininity perpetuate a heterosexual model that procreation has been falsely framed as relying on (procreation has proven entirely sustainable, even when desire between those procreating is absent, i.e. artificial insemination). This hetero-sexist structure reaffirms itself through gender’s performative effect, which Butler describes as a repeated ritual; a culturally sustained temporal duration that we call “body.”²⁰

She also questions how this system may be destabilized; how to fabricate gender in terms which reveal every claim to the origin, the inner, the true, and the real as nothing other than the effects of drag.²¹ Like Artaud (but without the misogyny) and Brecht she seeks to reveal the theatrical frameworks which have perpetuated a static acceptance of a fictional performance. Butler calls the fabrication of gender “inevitable,” but suggests that gender’s fabrication must reveal the construction of masculinity and femininity, and corrupt the notion that these attributes have a sexed origin from which they are naturally produced. As with much of the work explored in this book, she suggests “playing,” and “replaying” subversive possibilities.²²

Butler lays out the restrictive frameworks of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the acts of imitation which ironically fortify those frameworks through the familiarity of the performance. If normative practices of gender and sexuality have been established through repeated performance, then I propose that queer and feminist gender performances offer the alternative identities and desires that reject those normative limitations.

Jennifer Blessing, curator of the Guggenheim exhibition Rrose is Rrose is a Rose: Gender Performance in Photography, echoes this. She approaches gender performance as its own mode of defense against the cyclic restriction considered by Butler. She identifies the subjects she included in the exhibition (the performers of gender) as being in control and void of self-doubt.²³ She frames performance as the source of this power.

I’m interested in how new performances can fuck up and expose old performances. Gender need not reenact meanings that are socially established, nor can representations of sexuality and desire reflect the same stasis. Queerness responds to the perpetuation of heterosexuality as the standard that Butler maintains is at the root of our most detrimental gender norms. Jodie Taylor, author of Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity, and Queer World Making, qualifies queerness as “resistance imbued with anti-assimilationist and de-constructionist rhetoric that aggressively opposes hegemonic identificatory and behavioural norms, including liberal lesbian and gay identity politics.”²⁴ This summarizes a theoretical intention of queerness, with which I agree — a sort of constructive dissonance — though she maintains that queerness can take many tangible and intangible forms: “a political or ethical approach, an aesthetic quality, a mode of interpretation or way of seeing, a perspective or orientation, or a way of desiring, identifying or dis-identifying.”²⁵ From her list, I’m particularly concerned with the power of queer aesthetics. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Muñoz says that, “Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.”²⁶ Muñoz’s attention to the future derives from his claim that “Queerness is not yet here.”²⁷ He envisions a queerness necessarily, permanently, on a horizon toward which we must continue to advance. However, the scope of this book is such that queer aesthetics explored in seminal works do forecast the even more saturated queer worlds explored in contemporary media. The queer aesthetics we will explore resist the common framework of gender, but also offer and affirm the queer possibility proposed by Muñoz.

Other feminist and queer literature which has been most crucial to this book focuses less on the historic subordination of women and the queer community, than on cultivating agency through sexual provocation and self-possession, and disrupting hetero-sexist paradigms through queer sexual representation. There’s a classic quote in Right-Wing Women, where radical, anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin says, “No woman needs intercourse; few can escape it.”²⁸ Dworkin describes sex as an oppressive practice. She only considers sex in a heterosexual context. Let’s compare this to the sentiments of Paul B. Preciado in Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics. Preciado draws from feminist music critic Ellen Willis, summarizing that feminists who seek to abolish pornography, and other forms of female sexual representation make themselves complicit to the patriarchal structures in a heterosexual society that represses and controls women’s bodies.²⁹ Rather than participating in this historical policing of female bodies and sexuality, I support the expression of a sexuality whose explicitness is interpreted as defiant, rather than complicit.

Though in this instance Preciado’s point, like Dworkin’s text, derives from a heterosexual, cisgender model, Testo Junkie also functions in a queer feminist capacity. In the text Preciado documents their illegal consumption of testosterone as a sexed female before transitioning. They describe filmed performances of drag and masturbation. What is described is a queer sexuality: forms of pleasure, desire, and performance that combat heteronormative models organized according to heterosexual male desire. In this book, I operate from a pro-sex feminist view, according to a reevaluation of the agency available in sexual representation, and further highlight the importance of queer sexual representation to destabilizing the hetero-sexist frameworks which inform Dworkin’s thinking.

This book explores both the erotic sexual representations explored by Preciado, and representations of sex which unhinge gendered aesthetics from the sex historically perceived as their origin. Use of various forms of sexual representation, however, is not the only means of creating queer and feminist work. Jack Halberstam, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway have all approached feminism via a notion of the posthuman, which also proposes an alternative to the binary model of gender.

In her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature Haraway positions her feminist perspective in relation to the figure of the cyborg. She thinks that, in causal terms, if we can make robots we should be able to re-make ourselves. The implications are big. She wants a whole new social reality. She wants liberation, consciousness, the end of oppression.³⁰ She calls the cyborg, “a creature in a post-gender world.”³¹ She suggests that our proven ability to construct the future can be geared toward the production of alternative gender possibilities. As a non-human creation, the cyborg subverts sex and destabilizes sexual norms.

However, Haraway also uses the cyborg to approach feminism in a way that questions the movement’s capacity to unify. Because the cyborg calls taxonomic categorization into question (no more men, no more women (only Zuul)), Haraway calls for unity based on, “affinity, conscious coalition, and political kinship,”³² rather than identity. This book will try to reinforce this project by including a scope of subjectivities whose identification as queer and feminist is signified by a shared resistance to further marginalization. But that said, the intersectional approaches of some authors have also served to provide more nuanced interpretations of various objects of study.

Examples of such authors include Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, who explains in the introduction to Queer Black Studies: A Critical Anthology that:

[…] as some theorists have noted, the deconstruction of binaries and the explicit “unmarking” of difference (e.g., gender, race, class, region, able-bodiedness, etc.) has serious implications for those for whom these other differences “matter” […] To ignore the multiple subjectivities of the minoritarian subject within and without political movements and theoretical paradigms is not only politically and theoretically naive, but also potentially dangerous.³³

This passage highlights that, although queer and feminist projects can be constructed around the inclusionary approach explored by Haraway, this does not preclude attending to, or making visible, the differences among subjects and their lived experiences within those projects.

Gender performance can establish new meanings of gender through subversive acts. And though this text focuses on some particularly theatrical and commercial performances of gender, I’d like to clarify that their subversive power does not rely on documentation or audience. Compelling visual strategies are worthy of close analysis, but gender subversion is not uniquely anchored to any medium or context.

X.

The strings held two short strands of dark green glass beads, one lying above the other, drawn into silver clasps, and exited to be strung as a single strand. The silver clasp on the left was in the shape of a leaf, adorned at its edges with emerald gemstones. In the middle, to accentuate the points of the leaf, were three pearls, one at each point. The clasp on the right was O-shaped. There were dark green gemstones on it as well.

The image of me wearing this necklace, of the space from above my breasts, my shoulders, my mouth, with a sheen of perspiration from July’s heat, is the earliest one I have found that was sent to him after I moved to New York. What began with panic attacks and feelings of self-pity plummeted, as if from the edge of a cliff, at a terminal velocity into a morbid abyss, a hell, a cold, an erasure, a paralysis. This depression had physical symptoms. I had gotten used to the hyperventilation. I had lived through each episode without collapse or loss of consciousness, which would have suggested to me that I needed to tell someone, which was my real concern when they began. Tears would come without any trigger at all, my throat would close, and my left arm would seize and left hand clench. The attacks frustrated me, and even the tiniest bit of resistance intensified them disproportionately. I treated this malfunction of chemistry with therapy and prescribed drugs, but also wrongfully used sex with, and performances for, this man to self-medicate. At the time I did think I was in love with him. Deconstructed, it was the being seen and being fucked by him that temporarily lifted the feeling of death, which was invisibility. Like a drug, I selfishly consumed him to relieve pain, or to feel anything. Relapse was cyclical, exhausting, pathetic, and from a purely aesthetic standpoint, gorgeous.

He came over and pulled that necklace off my throat. He pulled gently until one strand broke, then the other, and was able to drag the beads down the front of my body. One of the strands left intact I wrapped around his dick when I blew him, and let press into my labia when we fucked.

We returned to a collaborative dynamic that obscured the lines of what was real and performed. Like the necklace there was always an object around which we worked, or, as we had become accustomed to in the early phases of our courtship, a place we chose to be that framed and intensified us.

Ribbons: I had several yards of long black satin ribbon, from which I would cut smaller swatches to tie into my hair — long languid ones, nothing too sweet or bow-like. As I had done for him in the images I sent years earlier, he would wrap me up in this ribbon until it produced its own tangled knots. When he would lay on top of me, nearly motionless, letting me open and soften, he would pull, gently, from anywhere, and the subtle restriction around my neck, or between my fingers, or that wrapped around the inside of my thigh, would make me pour for him. Everything was impossibly slow. Intentionally, impossibly slow. He would reach his hand into my hair, pull it back until my jaw dropped and lick the roof of my mouth. He pressed his teeth against mine until I thought they would break.

Whiskey: Objects might be dictated by obvious changes around us. When it got cold we fetishized whiskey and dark bars, and fucking drunk. What started with warming glasses of whiskey neat at the candlelit Bowery Hotel bar disintegrated at home, pressed against the wall, passing burning mouthfuls of Jameson between our lips, letting it run down our necks and soak into our clothes. As we drank we clawed and bit, and laughed our fucking heads off. I grabbed his face with both hands and inhaled his tongue. We didn’t stop until the bottle was empty.

The intensity of these encounters was predicated on an established history, but I didn’t see him often. He had been busy with work and vague about the status of any relationship. To be clear, it had become painful again when he went silent. I was still just too proud to demand some sort of consistency, or even definition in our relationship. I hadn’t heard from him in over two weeks when he suggested that we have drinks at the Bowery. It was a cool night, but we were sat outside under the heating lamps on the red garden chairs that overlook a small old cemetery trapped between buildings on Second Ave. I confessed that I thought we’d still end up together because we were the only ones terrible enough for each other. I was referring to our shared culpabilities in the affair previously, and the torrid nature of our physical connection. He said that wasn’t going to happen, which did not phase me. It felt more like he was dismissing the idea of us being terrible, and had just delivered the wrong organization of words to form his rebuttal. I began on another unrelated point. He interrupted me gently, but physically, by placing his hand on my thigh, and said again, slowly, that it was not going to happen. He was telling me something else, but I was not ready to know it yet. And when I did know it, I could not speak it. My eyes flooded but my years of denying Aaron the satisfaction of verifying his wounds with my tears had prepared me well for a moment such as this. A scene wasn’t going to be of any use at this point. There was a bit more calm, but brief discussion, and eventually we got the bill, paid, exited, he kissed me on the cheek, and we moved in opposite directions. I turned around and called to him, because in a movie the better girl would. I could do it, and deliver it with earnest, because I knew it was right, even if it was not sourced from a genuine emotion: Ian… congratulations.

X.

I released the songs I made with Mark as my first solo EP that summer, and in the winter started working with a producer, Ryan Kelly, who I was introduced to by way of mutual friends from Seattle. Ryan was familiar with the band and completely on board. I went into overdrive, trying to shake the grief for our band and my lover that had turned into a gray existence. I went to classes from 8:30am–3:30pm, worked at the hotel 4:00pm–12:30am, and would then often meet Ryan at the studio where he was a staff engineer after his sessions ended, from 1–3am, to record our stuff. I also interned at a gallery on weekends. I never called in sick and I never took drugs to make me go faster.

Ryan then introduced me to a keyboard player and writing partner, Ashley Jurgemeyer, based in Los Angeles. We holed up together in her apartment in LA, and wrote most of the record in a week. Like me, she had been in aggressive bands with men for most of her adolescence and early adulthood. She had been in relationships with collaborators, and other musicians, and expressed the traumas of being treated as disposable. Like Mark, Ryan and Ashley highlighted the dysfunction of previous collaborations, and that they were not unique to my experience. I still felt mostly blank despite knowing what I wanted and taking steps to get it. Confrontational female pop stars were proliferating around me, and I wanted to be among them.

X.

Lady Gaga’s Alejandro video was directed by fashion photographer Steven Klein, who has said that the video explores, “The pain of living without your true love.”³⁴ This theme is dramatized through the narrative of death and desire. Lady Gaga leads the funeral procession of her dead lover, then becomes a nun, signifying her commitment to a life of celibacy in their absence. Images of fire and violence run throughout the video, reinforcing the sense of profound loss through their suggestion of destruction. Lady Gaga represents herself as sexually unavailable, but includes a plethora of queer male icons, who seem to serve as the prostheses for her sexuality. Her homoerotic fantasies allow her to dramatize her desire outside a heteronormative framework. The individual figures also seem to express specific meanings, which further confuse historical boundaries of gender identity and sexuality.

The first shot of the video pans away from a man in a leather, police-style, biker cap, who sleeps slumped in a chair with his legs crossed, wearing fishnet tights and black stiletto heels. His chest is bare. In front of him is an AK-47 rifle and an ashtray full of cigarettes [Figure 1].

Figure 1: Lady Gaga, Alejandro, 2010

As the camera pulls away we see him in the company of several other men dressed in a similar sexual, biker uniform. There are several attacks on gender in just this opening shot. The characters in the video are modeled after police officers or other militant figures. Rather than being at attention, expressing authority, responsibility, and control, they rest, even sleep, with their bodies languidly draped amongst club chairs, denouncing the expectations of their masculinity. The expected attitude of these gendered subjects has been corrupted by their poses, despite their being equipped with weapons. Their fishnets and heels marry a sexy and feminine drag aesthetic to that of the queer “daddy,” “leatherman,” and “clone” stereotypes. While the characters are portrayed as lazy and unthreatening, it is implied that violence may be imminent. These characters simultaneously subvert classic hetero-male masculinity, while lending potentially violent authority to both the feminine drag character and the queer stereotypes.

The next sequence shows a different group of similarly militant-looking men in a fashionable, minimalist uniform. The characters arguably seem to reference the aesthetic of popular New York DJs, the Misshapes, who have been closely aligned with queer nightlife and high fashion [Figure 2]. They wear black shorts and boots, with their hair either cropped into a precision Vidal Sassoon-style bowl cut or covered by ominous masks.

Figure 2: The Misshapes, 2008

The group marches down a ramp, eventually dispersing into the darkness, as the first shot of Lady Gaga is revealed. Her lips are an intense red, though the rest of her face is obscured by an elaborate, bionic-looking headdress. The thick, glass lenses of the seemingly masculine, industrial-looking apparatus are covered by a feminine, black lace. Lady Gaga is shown leading a funeral procession dressed in a couture variation of a widow’s ensemble [Figure 3]. The male characters’ hypersexual representations are offset by suggestions that she may be asexual — either because she is in mourning or part machine. She reinforces this by later costuming herself in a nun’s habit made of oxblood PVC material. She lays in a bed of black satin sheets and pillows, surrounded by a pile of jeweled rosaries. Around the time of the video’s production, she had claimed to be celibate — that her career was preventing her from meeting people.³⁵ This suggests that Lady Gaga represents her own sexuality through the nun character. She controls the male figures, drawing on them to express the erotic masculine desire that presently eludes her.

Figure 3: Lady Gaga, Alejandro, 2010

Gaga’s control is reinforced by another homoerotic idol shown sitting on a bed surrounded by puppet-like strings, which perhaps she operates. He holds a gold gun as a kind of phallic symbol of his masculinity and virility. In the dance sequences that follow, she observes from a detached position of authority above.

The camera moves to full shots of the dancers, who perform in front of a projection of raging flames. Their movements are intensely masculine and sexual: they flex their muscles, throw themselves to the concrete floor, thrust their pelvises into the air with arched backs, and gather in a circular huddle. The men ultimately separate into pairs, where the homoerotic themes become more explicit and the dance moves more intimately aggressive. Choreography transgresses into physical entanglements reminiscent of sport wrestling. One couple engages in a stylized choking scene where one partner grabs the other’s neck before rolling his body back, diffusing the violence through the erotic motion. Still in pairs, one of the partners grabs the other by the waist and throws them in a plank position to the concrete floor while mounted above him [Figure 4]. The masculinity of wrestling and sports huddles has been appropriated into a highly choreographed homoerotic display, subverting the hetero-sexist paradigms of fraternity and violence.

Figure 4: Lady Gaga, Alejandro, directed by Steven Klein, (2010)

In the next montage, Lady Gaga engages with the dancers, theatricalizing a sexual exchange of dominant roles. She straddles a man in heels who lays face down on a bed, then simulates sex beneath one of her male counterparts. She is picked up from behind with her legs wrapped around the man’s body, while he places his hand around her throat. In this sequence, the position of dominance and masculinity is repeatedly exchanged in a kind of choreographed battle, perhaps bringing us to question how these factors impact our desire for the subject that displays them.

After the funeral procession, Lady Gaga appears in a bra with a gun attached to each breast. Usually associated with sustaining life, her breast becomes a threatening weapon. Neither her body, nor her sexuality is available, but protected and fortified. The video returns to the group of young male dancers who throw Lady Gaga’s body amongst them, while violently groping and kissing her. Images of fire, riots, and war continue to be intercut in a montage mirroring the provocative sexual images. These shots are then spliced with images of Lady Gaga in her nun costume, lying in bed, suggesting these are images she has fantasized. Widowed, she manifests her desire into a homoerotic fantasy that will not be consummated, protecting her vow of celibacy. The video concludes with Lady Gaga in bed in her oxblood nun’s habit as her face disintegrates into burning circles of white light, conflating purity and destruction.

X.

In the video Bad Girls, M.I.A. uses her immediate critique of the Saudi Arabian laws that prohibited women from driving as a focal point to expose and confront broader sexisms and gender norms. She approaches this in two main ways: by re-stylizing traditional feminine dress and upending restrictive female norms through illegal and dangerous car stunts performed by women.

After sweeping shots of an empty desert, a tableau of Arab women is shown. They are fully covered, but wear dark sunglasses and silky layers with clashing, ostentatious prints: oversized cheetah spots, tiger stripes on gold, red paisley with swirling linked chains. Rejecting objectification of the gaze, they look directly into the camera, standing next to a silver BMW. Some slouch against the car, staring down the viewer. A woman at the front crosses her arms with head tilted threateningly down [Figure 5]. Their authoritative, unfazed air is shared by M.I.A., shown in the desert with hands on hips, as a fire burns in the distance, billowing smoke.

The shot changes to the interior of the car, where a woman grips and releases the wheel with her arm outstretched over the top of it as a physical cue for authority and anticipation. The slowed footage gives the scene an entirely self-serving sensuality, compounded by the woman’s turn away from the camera. She wears black leather gloves, with metallic, brooch-like embellishments up the length of her wrist that catch the light, and full makeup, with a heavily pencilled, angular brow, thick eyeliner, and dark lips. These extreme feminine aesthetics read as a practice of adornment, whose subversion is established through their placement within historically prohibited male spaces. In Women Driving: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth Century America, Deborah Clarke says that, “in providing access to the public sphere — to work, to escape — the car transformed women’s lives as profoundly as suffrage.”³⁶ She speaks about American culture, but describes the sense of freedom and choice that the subjects in M.I.A.’s video seek to access with the illegal stunts that follow.

Figure 5: M.I.A., Bad Girls, (2012)

By performing various car stunts, the female figures in Bad Girls not only defy the sexist, ideological authority that would reserve driving rights for men, but express further agency over their own bodies by placing them in vulnerable, dangerous physical situations. Two women lean out from each window of a moving car. The driver watches the road with her head out the window, her fist raised and clenched in the air in a gesture of empowerment. A mix of sped up and slowed down clips creates a jarring, anxious montage where cars spin out on the edges of their tires or race in a team at full speed. Exhaust billows, and the sound of screeching breaks is left in to cut through the track.

The crew of drivers, cars, and spectators grows, creating an entourage that feels like something between a gang and a parade. Two cars roll down the road on just their two side wheels, with a woman standing atop the leading car with arms outstretched. M.I.A. is shown perched on the side of another tilted vehicle, filing her nails nonchalantly in a nod to her femininity. As the scene turns to night, the women move into another dance scene in metallic and Day-Glo jumpsuits. The group of drivers and spectators move as a collective, led by M.I.A., with more stunts and images of the audience cheering them on. Subsequently, the driver of the car that M.I.A. was riding on leans their arm out their window and drags a knife along the road.

M.I.A. makes a direct attack on the particular driving restriction on women in Saudi Arabia at the time of filming, though the video’s collapse of extreme feminine aesthetics with anti-authoritarian themes has a broader subversive reach. She uses a specific cultural context from which to position an appropriation of the historically male-aligned obsession with muscle cars’ danger, speed, and power.

X

Brooke Candy’s Opulence video begins with her attacking a man in a bathroom. Their quarrel over money leaves the man dead. Candy has twisted his neck between her stiletto heels. Though the Theater of Cruelty does not rely on the display of literal cruelty, it also does not exclude violence as a means of achieving its aims. In order to restore to the theater a passionate and convulsive conception of life, Artaud says that his theatrical cruelty will be bloody when necessary, but not systematically so.37 This is perhaps the same credo Candy’s character holds in relation to her survival. This opening act of literal violence can be seen as both a subversion of classic standards of femininity and exemplary of the kind of jarring action aligned with the Theater of Cruelty.

The next shot shows Candy behind a transparent bathroom cabinet, showing its contents and acting as a mirror for her. On the shelf of the cabinet is a glass cross standing upright, bottles of perfume, and a filled wine glass. In these shots, femininity is treated as having its own kind of artillery, used to weaponize the cisgender female body.

Candy is shown in various shots playing with feminine constructions of her identity. One shot shows her in a mask of diamonds, crafted to look like a skull, with wide, sunken eye-holes, and a broad, vacant mouth region. In another shot, she wears white contacts with oval pupils and has a line of rhinestones running down her face, with her lips covered in glitter [Figure 6].

Figure 6: Brooke Candy, Opulence, 2014

Over the course of the video, Candy assumes seven additional costumes. All are glamorous and complicated; layers of rhinestones, facemasks, and wigs or headdresses. Candy suggests that identity is not only unfixed, but potentially even disposable. Gender representation is subsumed by an array of full-body veneers.

We see Candy arrive at a party where the attendants are dressed in bondage and fetish gear, including a pair of French maids with nipple pasties and latex uniforms, who are later shown kissing. Candy lays down on a table at the party, where she spreads her legs and touches herself in front of the camera. Candy expresses agency and self-possession through explicit public view of her sexuality. She is both publicly on view as the center of the party and on view for the video’s audience. She confronts the gaze of the camera, reminding us that despite this view, her body and self are ultimately unavailable to us. Candy echoes this power of withholding sex in an interview where she claims, “Pussy is a weapon […] Women are so fucking powerful. Pussy is where life comes from […] If we withheld sex, women would have all the power and that is why it is a weapon.”38

Candy expresses the power of sexuality: its necessity for procreation and the power of women to control it. Germaine Greer echoes the power of the authoritative and possessive stance Candy takes, claiming that rather than sex being inherently oppressive to women, it is the historical insistence that women adopt a passive sexual role that must be dismantled.³⁹ As shown by her aggressive quotes and overt displays of sexuality, Candy is anything but passive.

The video concludes in a rapid succession of images of Candy, followed by her logo at the end of the video: two hands linked by a loose chain, presenting middle fingers, which are crossed over one another, underscored by the words, “FAG MOB,” the name of Candy’s creative team. It is of note that Fag Mob is here inclusive of the director, Steven Klein, who also directed Lady Gaga’s Alejandro video, and Lady Gaga’s former stylist, Nichola Formichetti. The relationship between the reoccurring themes of gender, and the creative pair stands to question the extent of Lady Gaga’s or Brooke Candy’s responsibility for crafting the subversive images with which they are so closely aligned. Throughout the video, gender is all but obscured, as the song suggests, through the opulence of costume. What remains is an aggressive sexual agency, put forth in a public space as self-possessed confrontation.

X.

I told him I was his girl. I pulled him aside and said I knew I didn’t look like it in my hotel unfiorm, but I was. I could prove it. All I needed was his email. Just give me your email, I said. Trust me.

I was asked to print out their concert tickets at the hotel desk. His friend hung an arm around him, swaying a bit, imposing playfully with his much larger body, and said, “See this guy right here?! This guy just got promoted to A&R at Epic Records! I’m takin’ him out to celebrate!” The new hire was smiling with an appreciable humility, with his head tucked down toward his phone. I printed the tickets, set them on the desk, and held my fingertips on them. Extending out toward his space, he naturally followed my arm with his gaze back toward its base, then met my eyes. This is when I told him what I could make true if I said it like it already was. I am your girl. I had no inclination whatsoever that this was a wrong, or embarrassing, or ridiculous thing to do. It was the only thing to do. It was true.

I got his business card, embossed, proved, with the Epic label, and retreated to the back office to email him. I apologized to my co-workers, panicked and dismissive, abandoning the cool confidence that the previous two minutes might have indicated was sourced from a me-shaped glacier under my skin. I left them to the wolves. I couldn’t give a fuck: I needed to use the fucking internet.

Within minutes I had put together a makeshift press kit full of images, references, a rollout plan, three of the demos I had been working on with Ryan Kelly, and promises — that I was the best performer EVER, that I would blow his MIND. I concluded: All I want is music. Fuck love, fuck money, fuck life. Let me play you some songs.

The man got back quickly. He was impressed, and wanted to meet. He had listened to every track and found the singles I had put out the previous summer. He had feedback and questions on all of them:

I love your voice/sound, and your energy comes across vividly on the two records. ladies and gentlemen is cool-- seems like it would sound/feel incredible live? I really like marrying kind, you definitely have a very unique sound. As far as your image do you have any other pictures? I like tazers and blazers track, is that you screaming on buffalo? This track is really sultry, a bit bizarre at points but its interesting. French waltz is pretty creepy but would love to hear at a vampire’s funeral, if vampires had funerals. Big black is one of my most favorite of all your music. I like laser eyes too — think it would be a strong record for licensing (tv or film).

I’d definitely like to hear more about your story, your vision and where you are with your career/music, etc.

Where are you from originally? Do you speak french fluently? do you have footage of you performing?

Todd went by his initials, “TG.” Such is the music industry. He was a sweetheart and a hustler, and he wanted to prove himself in his promotion as much as I did in music in general. Because my schedule was insane he met me frequently during my lunch breaks at the hotel, which happened in the evening and were only thirty minutes long. I never ever wanted him to see me as anything other than God, so I’d have him let me know when he was close by, change into something completely outrageous, and meet him on the stoop at the apartments next door to the hotel. Lady Gaga was in full swing, so fashion-wise, all bets were off. I liked to change into full skirts and crop tops with a bit of sparkle or other minimal embellishments on them. On the occasion that I forgot my change of clothes, though, it had been perfectly appropriate to the moment to wrap myself in one of the hotel’s flat sheets, bound by a couple of black satin hair ribbons that had been floating around my bag. Heavy, dark eye-makeup and crimson lips were always applied, and subsequently removed, before getting back into the white dress shirt, tie, and jeans that comprised my hotel uniform. TG got me on a showcase, and I flew my writing partner, Ashley, out to play with me. Again, I did what I was supposed to do. I relished in its ease. I had adapted my trademark chaos to pop, and still had it. I convinced him. He was excited, and got me more shows in New York and Philadelphia.

I rounded the edge of my second autumn in New York and was finishing a thesis on Helmut Newton for my degree. I wanted to deconstruct his approach and understand why I felt so compelled by the women in his work. I learned to read the feminism in his hyper-sexual images. In a Newton image, there is always a subtle play with props, or angles, or costume, that puts the woman in control. This deeply informed my visual work, and was, at that point, my deepest immersion in queer and feminist literature. I wanted to ensure that I could always explain the power and logic of the image.

Classes had ended, so I spent my newly-free daytime hours interning at Christie’s auction house Monday to Wednesday and at David Zwirner Gallery Thursday and Friday. I was still working at the hotel in the evenings. On the weekend, I worked reception at Paul Kasmin’s second, smaller gallery space on 28^th Street. I was aware that even if I did “make it,” commercial careers don’t always last long. All of this was for plan-B, but I also valued my investment in the art world for what it returned in visual direction. The record was nearly there. Much of its sound had been dictated by TG. He wanted the rock single, the pop single, the ballad. I gave them to him. I was willing to simplify my music if it meant I could take greater liberties with the images. Madonna, Lady Gaga, M.I.A. (and soon Beyoncé) had all proved that this was the contract: the bigger the hit, the weirder it can look. L.A. Reid had moved from Island Def Jam to Epic Records, and TG wanted me to play for Reid when he returned after the holidays from being a judge on The X Factor in Los Angeles. It struck me that the band’s history had come full circle, and I was going to be back in front of L.A. I couldn’t wait. I was going to the gym, plotting out the launch of the album, the videos. I figured I would get one chance, and visualized that moment on repeat.

In the meantime, TG asked if I wanted to try writing for Avril Lavigne, who they were having a hard time re-branding. What? Ridiculous, but of course I did. This was another new level I hadn’t prepared myself for by wanting it for years. To write for an established pop star — however outside my personal arena of taste — was an entirely unexpected gift and challenge.

Dudes — people like to write pop songs LATE. I did two sessions at Quad studios, where in 1994 Tupac Shakur had been shot five times in the lobby and survived. Both of these sessions started after midnight. The studio was in Times Square, and TURBO. There were blue neon tubes surrounding the ceiling perimeter of the lobby, a pool table, and bar area. It was a bottle of Hpnotiq manifested into a habitable interior. Again, I showed up dressing the part. I wore a white mini dress, unzipped down its back, so that the bodice could be completely folded over; its boning turned out against my leg. On top I wore a black lace bra and covered my neck with a fox fur. I wore gold sunglasses and leather driving gloves. I was paired with a producer who went by the name “Deputy.” A Google search out of curiosity would later prove that despite the ridiculous moniker, he had gone on to turn out hits that double as personal faves, such as Rhianna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.” Deputy had an overwhelming library of tracks. Scrolling through their titles, nicknames such as “Ideas for JT” and “Hov demo,” did not end. He asked me what I wanted, but didn’t know my references. I thought a mildly electronic version of the Breeders might be a comeback recipe for Avril. He was impatient and disinterested from the beginning, but not rude. He knew, but I did not, that he would put the track on a loop and leave the room until I was done writing to it. Every night he still had to be there to cruise his own library so some ding-dong could write while he waited. He would drink and play pool. I was left alone, and drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup and hoped that this would be my life. I could not silence the interior audio reminding me not to blow it. Two or so hours later we recorded my vocal and melody. Oddly, the strangers around the lobby invited themselves to this part of the session. They filled the leather couch in the room and nodded in approval without lifting their heads from their phones. The song was sent to TG, who said he liked it, but that it sounded too much like me. He sent me back. I had another stab, sent the new track and waited. I didn’t hear anything. I had been texting him and the messages weren’t going through. Same with emails. I felt like I could not do a single thing until I knew what was going on. Was it really that bad? Had this failed attempt at pop gold for Avril erased his excitement over the tracks of mine which had been tailor-made for him? I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize and answered it. It was TG. I expressed my concern and asked if everything was ok. Was the song OK, was he OK, when was L.A. coming back to New York?

He apologized that I hadn’t been able to get ahold of him. The label had disconnected his work phone when they laid him off two days before. He really liked the song.

X.

This is a common fate in the music industry. But that didn’t change the way it felt.

X.

TG was let go right before Christmas, which I was meant to spend with one of my best friends from high school and his wife. The bad news hadn’t come with adequate time to get myself home to Seattle for some greater sense of safety, or at least physical distance from it. Flights were now prohibitively expensive. I was angry and impatient with strangers, but I displayed this in a blank, disassociated way. I gave single-word answers and responses could take several seconds. Every single thing, from brushing my teeth, to crossing the street, eating to sleeping, hurt, because none of it was the thing that had been taken away, in the same way, again.

I received two messages at the same time on Christmas morning. Because of the time difference my mother’s would come later. One was from my friend, Gary, telling me that his wife, a dancer, Jessi, had thrown her back out, and they couldn’t join me. They had to go to ER. The other was from Ian, wishing me Merry Christmas. I told Gary I totally understood, and sent love. I told Ian, fuck you, and went to see the new Tarantino movie alone. Regrettably, this was not actually a refusal of his return.

X.

He opened every part of me, and this was the only thing I could feel. When he came into me from behind, he seemed to pass gently though consecutive rings, each gripping around him with varying intensities until terminating at a soft bay that was wired to my spine. When he held me here I could feel him in my throat, and my stomach, my clitoris, and my eyes. To relax my neck, I laid down when he fucked my mouth. His shins either side of my trunk, knees nestled up toward my armpits, his body up and folded over me, nearly in a prayer position. He ran his dick along the edges of my teeth, over and over in a circular motion. For months, he came over and laid on me, and in me, and his guilt and my pain made for durational orgasms. Because when you lack the entitlement and the ambition for celebratory friction, for fucking, the most sensitive recesses of your interior unfold under sustained, motionless, pressure like a sea anemone. The images we used to operate around went away and we had nothing to speak about. I wasn’t under any illusion that this meant anything, but I was grateful for some respite from despair, even if the replacement with sensation was also accompanied by shame.

X.

A few directionless months passed. It was spring. I didn’t hear from him for a few days and turned to the internet. There wasn’t much there. He didn’t post much, but through .jpegs labelled by year I tried to manifest his presence and the honest reasons why he didn’t want me right that second. I found his youngest brother’s feed on Twitter. He was a musician. I was familiar with him from my time spent with his family in Pennsylvania. Maybe there could be a lead. At the top of the page there was an exchange between him and someone wanting to record. Ian’s brother said he’d love to, but that he’d have to wait a bit because his brother’s wife was due to give birth that week and he wanted to be there.

He said his brother’s wife was due to give birth that week and he wanted to be there.

He said his brother’s wife was due to give birth that week and he wanted to be there.

There are three brothers. The third brother is also married.

But.

 

Did you know that if you type your lover’s name into that tiny Google box, followed by the word “baby,” you may find his and his wife’s baby registry? Surely I’m not the only one that has found this out the worst way.

X.

Whereas marriage is known to fail, and can be undone, children are irreversible. The child had been born the week that Ian absented himself from my bed without reason. He had nine months to tell me, and didn’t. When I emailed to tell him I was done now and that he should have told me, he had the audacity to write back, “tell you what?” The obscene, genuine bluff was followed with the pledge to call in a half hour. I told him that he was not to call me then, or ever. If I got one call or text or email — it would be hideous. He left me alone. I said earlier that I would be sorry. I was, I am sorry. Consequences born of deplorable decisions do not warrant sympathy. This is a cautionary tale.

The mess coincided with my friend Sam’s visit from Seattle. He had tickets to see Pulp’s reunion show at Radio City Music Hall and took me. Pulp weren’t big in America like they were in the UK. I only knew their single from the Great Expectations soundtrack. Watching them, I was filled with joy for the first time since TG sent me to the recording studio five months earlier. Jarvis scaled various platforms that flanked the stage. He wiggled and shimmied. He entertained. He soaked up our adoration and recycled it back into us. In that moment Pulp reminded me of the way back to myself — music, performance, dancing, sex.

That summer, I took on an internship at Interview Magazine that would turn into several years of freelance writing for them. For months, while updating the exhibition calendar or unassumingly making photocopies of the archive for my own pleasure, I only listened to Pulp. Their songs are great, but it was the performative aspect of this that was probably more gratifying — a durational work that signified an attention to the parts of my identity that I honored, but was not quite ready to re-engage with. Pulp could be my surrogate. I wore them like a cast. When taken to their conceptual extremes, performances with the lowest stakes can become remarkable. If the gravity isn’t there, this can still produce humor. I took this performance to the n^th degree because I could and because I thought it was funny: I decided to move to London to study at an arts college like the girl in “Common People” that Jarvis thinks is so alluring. I know the song is based on its criticality of her character, but it was a way of romanticizing an exit from New York that was fundamentally necessary.

On my last night in New York, I went with Nabil to the Roseland Ballroom to see Ian Astbury perform his Cult album, Electric. This had been a record on heavy rotation during overnight drives on tour. It was nostalgic, but it was also an attempt to mark my departure in some relatively fun way in hopes of making it memorable.

Nabil and I separated after the show to use the bathrooms and met back up outside. He said that he had just received an email from the wine shop across from his office announcing a secret Prince show that would take place that night. I wasn’t sure why Prince was playing a wine shop, but I told Nabil to please buy the tickets, and even if they were $500, do it, I would pay him back. We took a cab to Tribeca from 52^nd Street, which you wouldn’t normally do if you lived in New York. We arrived to find a queue of people around the block, with the following notice posted to the building:

Purple Rules

***No PHOTOGRAPHY

***No VIDEO recording

***No Cell Phones

These rules will be strictly enforced and Violators will be asked to access another experience

It was happening. The venue was City Winery, a large chain wine shop with a small stage that Nabil said typically hosted acoustic sets for tastings and other small events. Prince came on at 1:30am. In front of him there was a speaker, in front of that there was a man, and behind him was me. His set included a mix of New Power Generation songs and songs with his new project at the time, a band comprised of him and three women, 3RDEYEGIRL. When he heard something he liked, he scrunched his face up like he’d just smelled a foot. My chemistry felt re-set. I had arrived at the oracle, and could be transported safely into my next life, a new dimension (I mean, I think this is how the person that would make you “access another experience” for having used a camera phone would put it).

The show let out about 3am, and I walked home slowly through Soho and the Lower East Side. There was a blue glow from the street lamps, and I looked up at the fire escapes and industrial windows that I loved. The sun started coming up in the last few blocks of my walk. I had given up my apartment a week before my departure and was staying with a friend for a few days, Lapshan. Before I left for the Cult show he told me that the woman he had been seeing, that he was certain he was in love with, had broken things off. I arrived home to find that he had painted a full-sized splitting axe black. He had leant it against the cupboards below the sink to dry. Love can justify anything.

X.

As in Erotica, Nine Inch Nails’ (NIN) video, Happiness in Slavery incorporates similar dark, sexual imagery based on power dynamics and the inter-play of pleasure and pain. In the work of NIN, however, the focus is on pain as the sexual experience rather than part of it — part of the kissing, touching, dancing, and scenes in bed that are included in Madonna’s work. It should be noted that the title of NIN’s song is taken from a chapter of the classic erotic novel published under the pseudonym Pauline Réage, The Story of O; about a woman who commits herself to a submissive sexual lifestyle, only to realize her control in being the object of her lovers’ desire and devotion. Also of note is the video’s star, Bob Flanagan, a performance artist known for his masochistic work, which he felt mirrored the pain caused by his struggle with cystic fibrosis.

The video begins with the lead singer, Trent Reznor, in a cell. Black-and-white floral imagery precedes onanistic industrial gears grinding and pumping, creating a subversive juxtaposition of natural and mechanical symbols of fertility and production. We see Flanagan’s character enter a deteriorated, windowless room in a suit. In the center of the room is an antique medical examination table — an indication that the character is somehow “sick.” Flanagan places a dark rose at an altar where he lights a candle, then removes his clothes. As if purifying himself, he washes his body before a mirror, where his image recedes into the distance, ultimately disappearing, foreshadowing his death. Extremely rare is the exposure of Flanagan’s full-frontal nudity, which, in addition to the video’s extreme violence, contributed to the video being banned by MTV upon its release.

Flanagan lies down on the table, which suddenly turns mechanical. His body is tilted upright, and he is locked in at his wrists. A close-up shot of his hand shows metal carpenter’s nails slowly driving into his flesh. Flanagan’s face cringes, communicating the ecstatic pain, which he has knowingly committed himself to. A metal claw is positioned over Flanagan, gripping parts of his chest. Another metal grip pulls at his testicles. The claw makes another motion, diving into his chest, drawing blood, and pulling away part of his flesh. Blood drips into the pile of dead flowers around the table. Worms flash before the screen alluding to Flanagan’s death and burial. The machine’s attack continues until we are shown an overhead shot of Flanagan’s splayed body. The metal sides of the machine fold over the corpse. The body is then presumably ground within the makeshift coffin before the remnants exit the machine, again into the pile of worms and flowers. Reznor is shown entering the room and beginning the same ritual placement of the rose and candle completed by Flanagan, suggesting that the cycle will begin again.

The aesthetics employed by NIN are grotesque, shocking, and subversively interlaced with masochistic eroticism. Authors who have explored and reinforced Artaud’s cruelty in other mediums, but through similar lenses, are noteworthy here: these include Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty and Kathy O’Dell’s Contract with the Skin. Nelson uses Artaud’s manifesto, “The Theater of Cruelty,” as her lens. She identifies work of a literally violent nature, exemplifying Artaud’s attention to shaking his audience. In a discussion of Francis Bacon, Nelson makes a point about Artaudian works:

Welcome to Bacon’s bracing allure (which resembles that of Artaud, and of Nietzsche) which posits this “violent return to life” as a way to restore us, or deliver us anew, to an un-alienated, unmediated flow of existence characterized by a more authentic relation to the so-called real. Unlike so many avant-gardists and revolutionaries, however, Bacon does not think or hope that this restored vitality will bring about the subsequent waning of inequalities, injustices or radical forms of suffering.⁴⁰

What Nelson explains is that the reality exposed by these works of art may not necessarily be an easier one in which to exist. Bringing awareness to “inequalities, injustices, and suffering” does not make them less problematic, but rather — through their visibility and acknowledgement — more present than before. In the following passage, the same issue of unveiling reality is taken up by O’Dell, whose book explores masochism in the performance work of Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and the collaborations of Marina Abramovic and Ulay:

Masochism blows the whistle on institutional frameworks that trigger it and within which it is practiced. Given the historical contexts of these performances, then, artists such as Burden seemed to be urging their viewers to pay attention to these facts: battles cannot be waged without sadists and masochists; soldiers at war in Vietnam are merely sadists and masochists by other names and the military is an institution established to train, sanction, and glorify sadists and masochists.⁴¹

This passage echoes Nelson’s by asserting that masochistic art only lifts the veil on masochism within our culture and its institutions. In this regard, these works are unified not in solving a problem, but in exposing it through a coded visual vernacular. I suggest that Nine Inch Nails and Bob Flanagan also speak through this vernacular. On the surface, they expose subversive, sexual acts of masochism into the mainstream, but also make the pointed attempt at signifying the “institutional framework” which pathologizes and condemns sex.

Similar artistic tactics were used by playwright and performance theorist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who is known for the term “Theater of the Grotesque.” One of the major tenets of his work was “paradox,” which we see mirrored in the pairing of pleasure and pain in Happiness in Slavery. Dürrenmatt elaborates on his idea of paradox, saying that our world has led us to the grotesque just as to the atomic bomb; that the grotesque is the only ostensible expression of dark, formless things.⁴²

For Dürrenmatt, and I argue for NIN, performance of the grotesque gives shape and symbol to intangible destruction and horror. Dürrenmatt notes the creative property of art as paradoxical to this particular task, though comparing it to of our creation of the atomic bomb, which is antithetical to our very existence. In this capacity the grotesque images in Happiness in Slavery capture and mirror an already abject world, but in some way stall, or perhaps even reverse, that abjection through what are ultimately still generative creative acts.

X.

I am telling you all this to give it shape. This is not an absolution. It undoes nothing. How I chose to justify this love was to adapt and extend what I once shared with only one person. In this way, it is no longer just his. It is no longer for him.

I went to England and completed a practice-based PhD in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. I appropriated the visual practice that had been cultivated as a way of communicating love and desire. The videos I continued to make were used as music videos or as projections during live shows. I still perform. My thesis located queer and feminist agency in music videos’ sexually subversive performances. It responded to the subjugation of women and questioned heteronormative practices and binaries. Through a broader social interrogation, I admit, I tried to reconcile aspects of my history of making music and videos with people I loved. What follows is an edited version of that text, whose inclusion began earlier in this book. In lieu of a more classical academic introduction, I have marked the development of my interests and concerns as they arose alongside sex, subversion, and music video.