camp Counselor
HOW WAYNE KOESTENBAUM'S "JACKIE O" COMPLETED MY QUEST FOR OPERA QUEENDOM.
BY PAUL FESTA | i don't suppose many people travel from San Francisco to Houston to become gayer. But that was exactly my motivation when I journeyed to the world premiere of Wayne Koestenbaum and Michael Dougherty's opera "Jackie O" at the Houston Opera Studio. Having lived in San Francisco's legendarily gay Castro District for the previous three months, I felt sufficiently queer in my everyday life; the homoerotic energies of grocery shopping, for instance, are particularly intense in my neighborhood. But aesthetically I had been on a downhill slide ever since completing Professor Koestenbaum's undergraduate seminar at Yale, "English 461b: Opera and Gender." As time went by I found myself listening more to piano sonatas and string quartets than to opera; I realized, in something of a panic, that the divas in my life were not past-prime operatic sopranos or B-movie stars but dead old Russian Jewish virtuosos. Not Leontyne but Vladimir. Not Joan but Jascha. My queer sensibility flagging, I needed strong medicine, and the diva doctor was going to be in Houston. So I went.
Wayne Koestenbaum's diva manifesto was his 1993 book "The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire," in which he explored the widely recognized but academically unacknowledged gay cult of opera. While at Yale I took three of the professor's courses, though only Opera and Gender was strictly about homosexuality or diva worship. I was attracted to Koestenbaum for many reasons -- one was that I was attracted to him. I signed up for my first Koestenbaum course as a sophomore in 1989, during the heyday of the gay studies movement at Yale. Less interested in gay studies than I was in gay men, I was painfully drawn to my diminutive, bespectacled, husky-voiced, 29-year-old English professor. During my first office hours appointment, preparing to recite from memory the first 18 lines of "The Canterbury Tales," blood throbbed in my ears so violently my hearing was temporarily impaired and I had to ask Koestenbaum to repeat himself several times. I thought perhaps the professor's voice grew huskier as our stilted conversation progressed, but nothing untoward happened in that office, then or ever, which I long considered one of the prime failures of my undergraduate career. If gay studies didn't mean having sex with one's professors, I wondered, what did it mean?
The coursework, however, was nearly sexy enough to compensate for Koestenbaum's professorial chastity. The most titillating class I took with him was the opera seminar. The first requirement was to choose a diva, not just as a paper topic but as a personal object of worship for the semester. Koestenbaum describes this process of election in "The Queen's Throat": "Choosing a diva to love is like inaugurating any erotic arrangement. You see the boy at the pool every afternoon. At first he is just another male body. But you begin to dream of his abdomen. You blush when he passes on the street, and feel motion in your groin. You loiter by the travel books because he is browsing there ..." And so on. The class was not about such a dry, academic subject as opera's relation to gender, it was about how to channel one's queer desires into the love of opera. It was a course on how to become an opera queen.
I had a very long way to go. Though a musician since infancy (Suzuki victim) and a homosexual by trade (campus activist), opera queendom had remained for me an elusive state of consciousness. I was much more interested in the violin concerto, an art form that inspired in me grandiose fantasies of bowing deeply before a raucous standing ovation in Carnegie Hall, half a dozen broken horse hairs dangling from my bow. But in opera there was no room for me: I could not sing, I could not write music, I barely knew what a libretto was. I did own a couple of operas as a teenager, Alban Berg's "Lulu" and "Wozzeck," but these only because I was so infatuated with the composer's violin concerto -- and so frustrated that he had only written one of them -- that I listened to his operas as compensation, grudgingly. I showed some signs of improvement by developing a fascination with the boxed set of "Lulu," whose cover art featured the American soprano Evelyn Lear looking slutty in a Weimar-era black-beaded negligee, spoked tiara and fishnets, with German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Diskau glowering behind her. "Before I loved opera I loved the idea of opera," Koestenbaum wrote, "and what I loved in this idea of opera was the boxed set." I loved my boxed set, too, but I loved my violin concertos more.
On the first day of Koestenbaum's seminar, I made a humiliating display of my inadequacies as opera queen. The first class meeting felt like a cattle call for a Broadway show: The room was packed with would-be disciples, only a quarter of whom would make the cut. Determined to stand out, I had come to class wearing a plaid, kilt-style Gap skirt (with safety pin), nylons, a black turtleneck, a black leather motorcycle jacket and combat boots. The skirt was very tight around my middle and I had not yet mastered the art of the tuck. My attempt to mask my operatic deficiencies in genderfuck might have been successful, but I made the fatal mistake of opening my mouth. The professor had played for us Maria Callas' recording of Carmen's famous Habanera, and in the ensuing discussion I excoriated the diva. She was totally wrong for the part! I exclaimed. Carmen was young and saucy, not some big overblown prima donna with a wobbly vibrato. Callas' performace was weird, it was off-scale, way too operatic. It was totally inappropriate --
At this point in my tirade Koestenbaum, who had been listening with an inscrutable, possibly tolerant expression, became suddenly animated and cut me off. "That's it," he said. "That's what interests me about opera. What about opera is weird, and off-scale, and inappropriate. That's what we're going to be examining in this course."
Speechless, I crossed my legs and fingered my skirt. When would I learn to keep my mouth shut in class?
Despite this disgrace, I was admitted to the seminar. A diligent student, I tried to look at opera through the lens of the inappropriate. I wrote about Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman singing together at the Met and mused how the two sopranos felt about their conductor's reputed penchant for underage African-American males. I analyzed the phenomenon of soprano Julia Migenes-Johnson's resemblance to Barbra Streisand and spun semiotic fantasies about her underarm hair as displayed in Franco Rossi's film "Carmen." I worked up a theoretical frenzy about the fabulousness of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appearance in 17th century drag (high white wig, white lace fan and gloves, push-em-up bra, petticoats galore) as a non-singing extra at the Washington Opera.
I did well in the course. By the time I had handed in my final paper I could say with confidence and some pride that I was significantly gayer than I had been at the start, which seemed to me one of the more tangible benefits of my college education.
I re-encountered Koestenbaum immediately on arriving in the lobby of the downtown Hyatt in Houston. I was not actually staying at the Hyatt, I was staying at the YMCA, which was squalid but which evoked pleasant memories of my first months at the Juilliard School. Along with several dozen other first-year students I had been housed in New York's West Side Y, where shower room hand-jobs were as common as cockroaches. Checking into the Houston Y I felt gayer already.
"I'm nervous," confided Koestenbaum as we sat down for breakfast at the Hyatt restaurant. "I have absolutely no control over anything at this point. It's absolutely nerve-wracking. The soprano singing the part of Maria Callas is sick -- she's lip-synching through the final rehearsals, and there's no understudy. Actually, it would be perfectly appropriate if she had to croak her way through the premiere -- she has lines like, 'O my fatal voice, my beautiful voice, why did you desert me?'"
Koestenbaum and I spent the next two days in conversation. I basked in it. As his student I had always felt Koestenbaum conversation to be a sparely rationed commodity; students lined up before office hours as if his office were a trendy new restaurant. There was something narcotic in his presence that invested even the most mundane discussions with the aura of his poetic imagination. Students knew they would encounter something valuable in his person (sexually magnetic or not), something in his conversation, his style, his foppish clothes, his clear plastic corrugated briefcase -- a charismatic, intoxicating aura.
Here I had no competition. We were in downtown Houston, a desolate place that appeared to have been evacuated except for a few stragglers.
"The boredom here is wonderful," he said. "There is such luxury in there being nothing to do."
Koestenbaum and I talked about boredom and luxury. We talked about cities: Houston, New York, New Haven. We talked about the Home Shopping Network's resemblance to pornography, monogamy vs. "multiplicity" (his word), cruising, opium, his recent dream about Jackie (she showed him a wooden apparatus Ari had given her; he advised her on drawing up an estate), his recent sighting of his diva Anna Moffo at her husband's funeral. We discussed career and I listened carefully for clues. I've always admired the path Koestenbaum, a professionally trained amateur pianist, has been able to carve out. He has pulled off an enviable feat, marrying his career to queerness, to words, and to music.
I was nervous about the opera's premiere. I understood from "Queen's Throat" and from the opera class what Wayne Koestenbaum valued about opera: the inappropriate, the weird, the off-scale. It was one thing to value those qualities as a spectator, but what would it mean to value them as librettist? The camp sensibility cultivated in his class celebrated the warped quality of opera, but only to the extent that opera didn't know it was warped. When Maria Callas sang her Habanera, she was dead serious. She was innocent of her weirdness. What if "Jackie O" were just weird, and not innocent?
There was certainly reason to suspect this. Koestenbaum's book "Jackie Under My Skin," which appeared in 1995, had examined, among many other things, Jackie's synesthetic resonance with Chiclets, her fondness during her White House years for grilled cheese sandwiches and the sublimity she shared with Jesus Christ. This book -- inappropriate, off-scale, weird and anything but innocent -- had baffled me before it delighted me. I had read it with stupefied astonishment; critics read it with something closer to outrage. The New York Times declared that the book, finding significance in everything, wound up "signifying nothing." I eventually came to love the book for its freewheeling interpretive fantasy, but only after multiple readings. Opera-goers wouldn't have the same luxury; a world premiere is a one-shot deal.
As I entered the theater several minutes early there was a "happening" in progress. A tap dancer, who would play the role of Jackie-stalking paparazzo Ron Galella, was tapping menacingly in the lobby, leering at passers by. On the stage, set up to resemble a SoHo warehouse loft, '60s hipsters were variously strumming on guitars, smoking cigarettes, demolishing potato chips with drug-induced zeal and staring trance-like into a reel-to-reel tape playing Italian opera arias. The scene was random, mildly cacophonous, somewhat goofy. It was fun.
I must have gotten something of a contact high during the happening, for it put me at ease. The opera gradually coalesced out of the happening, as the hipsters transformed one by one into celebrity characters (Jackie, Liz Taylor, Andy Warhol), as choruses and solos and other familiar operatic conventions emerged in the context of an energetic, equally familiar pop score. And the idiosyncracies of Koestenbaum's obsession emerged along with them, the odd details and ephemera of Jackie's life and era assembled, staged and set to music.
There were dramatic and even poignant moments in the opera, but the predominant mood was whimsical. The audience seemed somewhat confused by this whimsy; throughout the performance people seemed unsure when to applaud, which was clumsy, or when to laugh, which was worse. Clearly they should have laughed more: When Aristotle Onassis and the "Playboys" are portrayed on the deck of his yacht singing the Roman alphabet (an operatic first, I believe), what's not to laugh at? The audience response was so tentative that I worried the opera was going to be a flop. But after the final chorus (an ironic if not absurd folk anthem setting of "Ask not what your country can do for you ..."), the audience rose to its feet and gave the performers and the creators a Texas-sized standing ovation.
In "Jackie Under My Skin," there is one line that spoke to me more personally than any other: "... if you weren't even born until 1970, your attitude toward Jackie obsession may be sheer confusion." It happens that the year of my birth is exactly 1970, and it also happens that until encountering Koestenbaum's obsession with Jacqueline Onassis, I didn't care two Chiclets about the woman. She was just that poor lady in the Zapruder tape, crawling onto the back of the limousine. I read the book, and I saw the opera, and after getting all shook up with "Jackie O" significance, music and drama, I found myself more infatuated with the poet but exactly where I had started with Jackie. I still didn't care about her. I still don't.
And that, I realized, was all right. Koestenbaum's lesson, whether it was about how to become gayer or how to look at art, was to worship obsessively and trust your obsession. The man who submitted to the Yale tenure committee reveries about the semiotic significance of Jackie's hairdos did not preach, by his example, any brand of conformity. Maybe Koestenbaum's lesson, in my particular instance, was not to be an opera queen. Maybe it was my lot in life to worship dead Russian virtuosos -- or diminutive bespectacled librettists. After all, as Koestenbaum pointed out, deciding on a diva is like inaugurating any erotic arrangement. Whether choosing a mentor or falling in love, the obsession chooses you as well.
Paul Festa is a regular contributor to Salon.
DIVA WORSHIP | WHY GAYS LOVE JOAN DIDION |
