Heated Rivalry is Menshevik yaoi

I am quoting a friend of a friend.

 

‘Heated Rivalry is straight media. Love Story is queer media. She (CBK) is for white women and gay men with high taste.’

 

There is a gulf between gay men who like hockey players and gay men who like JFK Jr., between men who Carolyn dates and the man she marries. Gay men who watch The Piano Teacher (2001) and think they are Erika Kohut, and those who know they are Isabelle Huppert. Gay men who love Diana Spencer, and gay men who love Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

 

gay men who like diana

chopped huzz

grandpa drip

goes running

loves europe

eats at cipriani

plath 

conservative woke (conservatives of colour, brown mothers)

 

gay men who like cbk

mythic huzz

archival drip

goes on walks (loiters)

loves america

doesn’t eat at costes

didion 

woke conservative

 

The appeal of Diana Spencer is that she was the People’s Princess. The appeal of Carolyn Bessette is that she wasn’t.

 

The tragedy of Diana Spencer is a melodrama. The tragedy of Carolyn Bessette is a Bergman.

 

In the words of Kalie Minor, ‘gay men who like Diana shop at Urban Outfitters and liked Brat too much for too long.’ They tend to have more female friends, moved and consumed by what cultural theorists call ‘Doomed Yaoi’—Brideshead Revisited, Call Me By Your Name, in a very unironic, straight way.

 

They are gay in a very quotational way. Twinks whose anatomies consist of Debordian spectacles and Baudrillardian simulacra.

 

They are the Public Gays. They are the democratic men. They are out and about. Based on the way they are, you might not be able to tell their class.

 

I am obliged to recite Maxim 50 of Notes on Camp,

 

50. Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.

 

The Public Gay™ is the populist aristocrat. ‘Every Man a King’—it is what Huey Long was to Socialism. To be a Public Gay is the populist route to homosexual self-legitimisation.

 

They want to be seen. For the same reason men want to see Bond looking at Bond girls. It is the second kind of visual pleasure Laura Mulvey writes about, narcissistic identification within the media.

 

It is for this same reason that women watch Heated Rivalry; some enjoy their identification with a muscular masculine gaze, a gaze which could just start jerking off in the shower in front of another muscular man. But the phenomenon also reveals a second truth. As much as we love to speak of representation, it is pleasurable to see/be seen as other than oneself. 

 

Representation is often burdensome. There is something humiliating about constantly having to declare oneself, forever in line on Ellis Island.

 

The Anti-Public Gay™, on the other hand, is Bolshevism—a new aristocracy born out of the advantage of its theoretical vision. The Bolsheviks, who self-styled themselves as the majority, were, of course, the minority. But they were the minority who were able to bring into existence a new majority in agreement with them. The Menshviks, despite being the actual historical majority within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, failed at this very task.

 

I don’t mean to slime, but in defence of being Anti-Public, uncontroversial homosexuals rarely make history.

 

One’s taste is always a revelation of something deeper. Gay men who like Diana might revel in their misery. Gay men who like CBK dgaf. Not because they belong to a certain class or demographic. Carolyn worked at a mall in Newton, Massachusetts, four years before she met John-John. There are personalities which move between classes, the Tom Ripleys, Carrie Bradshaws of the world, and those who exist above. The Goethes of the world, the Iron Felixes, those who could survive under any circumstances with just work, water, and bread. The militant minimalists.

 

Like how, in the words of David Foster Wallace, there is a lot of narcissism in self-hatred—here is camp in minimalism. The thing I find sinister about some democratic homosexuals, the Brat-listening, Heated Rivalry-watching, Menshevik homosexuals, is that they are not real camp. It is the same thing I find sinister about democratic politicians. That they are willing to betray the sensibility of the homosexual aristocrat for middle class voters. In the words of Logan Roy, they are not serious people. Whereas in High Camp there is always an underlying seriousness, Low Camp, intentional camp, is less satisfying. Sleeping around is not camp. Marriage is camp.

 

You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.

 

Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was camp in the way Mozart, El Greco, and Dostoevsky are camp. In the way her favourite Yohji Yamamoto is camp. Prada is camp. Diana’s Versace is not camp. Dior is not camp (in fact, she has made those iconoclast brands saintly through her philanthropy). Those who always have ‘camp’ by their lips are not camp. Those who never speak of camp—are.

 

Words by Zac Yang. JFK Jr in the 1975 Collegiate school yearbook via PICRYL.