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Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall
Starring Rufus Wainwright.
How to order I'm Not There
Directed by Todd Haynes
Starring Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Marcus Carl Franklin.
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Transvestism -- and other forms of gender impersonation -- are staples of almost all cultures, from the "aboriginal" to European civilization's alleged heights. In the past, Americans have shown an enthusiasm for transvestism that today might seem startling. Female impressionist (as he was sometimes called) Julian Eltinge was so famous in the early 20th century that a Broadway theater was named after him. But cross-dressing has been too associated with gay culture for most audiences to feel completely comfortable with it. This changed a bit in the late 1970s and early 1980s with films such as La Cage aux Folles (1978) and Tootsie (1982). John Waters's diva Divine attracted mass media attention for his role as Edna Turnblad, the harassed yet understanding housewife and mother in the 1988 Hairspray. (Divine's impact was such that even John Travolta won plaudits for his scrupulous drag performance in that film's 2007 musical remake -- in which he does Divine one better and seems to be playing Edna Turnblad as an aging Gina Lollobrigida.) The re-popularization of transgender owes much to the enormous gay (and feminist) influence on popular culture and a resulting radicalizing of our ideas of gender roles.

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onsider Todd Haynes's extraordinary I'm Not There, a faux documentary of the life of Bob Dylan. Haynes's subject isn't gay, but his film would be impossible without gay culture. More explicitly gender-bendingly gay is Rufus Wainwright's new CD Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall -- a meticulous recreation of Garland's noted 1961 Carnegie Hall concert and a fabulous reclamation and reaffirmation of gay culture and history.

Hipster songster

There's always been something slightly queer about Bob Dylan -- not at all gay, but queer. His Jewish roots were entwined with American traditions of political folk-singing and lyric poetry. But he was more William Blake and Dylan Thomas (from whom he took his last name, when he dropped "Zimmerman") than the more overtly homoerotic Walt Whitman or Hart Crane. Still, this mixed legacy positioned Dylan in the early 1960s as an alternative to both the traditional and emerging hard-rock musicians. Dylan's visceral social protests as well as his emotional connections to the feminine -- his bruised and hurt emotional self in "Positively Fourth Street" or his empathetic, even feminist sentiments in "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and "Just Like a Woman" -- constructed a unique, decidedly unmasculine public persona.

Todd Haynes's I'm Not There takes a postmodern approach to Dylan and fractures the singer (whose career is itself marked by radical disjunctures) into a kaleidoscope of characters including a 14-year-old African-American blues singer named Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), a reformed Western outlaw named Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), a 1960s coffeehouse singer named Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), an actor named Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), and a late-1960s folk star named Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett).

Haynes's film is a cavalcade of impressions, inside jokes, cultural ruminations, parodies, insightful asides, and sheer-out audacity. Haynes has the pop-cultural depth to pull it off. He turned Karen and Richard Carpenter into Barbie dolls in his 1987 Superstar, explored David Bowie's ambiguous glam-rock sexuality in The Velvet Goldmine, and in his 2002 Far From Heaven explicated the homoerotic subtext of Rock Hudson's performance in Douglas Sirk's 1955 All that Heaven Allows. As written by Haynes and Oren Moverman, I'm Not There takes its title literally, displacing or confusing Dylan's persona and career so that the artist is figuratively deconstructed and reassembled before our eyes.

The film's standout performance is Cate Blanchett's, in her cross-dressed appearance as Jude Quinn. She portrays a mid-to-late '60s Dylan -- all diffident and sort-of-angry, with black jackets and close cropped unruly hair, and still reeling from the affair with Edie Sedgewick. Blanchett really gets at the heart of Dylan's androgynous character. She has always been a mercurial actor; her regal, tough queen in Elizabeth (1998) and its 2007 sequel are perfect counterparts to her epicene Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004). Whatever the gender gyrations her roles demand, Blanchett finds an emotional center. It's not that she feminizes Dylan (that would have been disastrous) but rather she locates him in the specificity of the radical gender changes of the 1960s.

The genius of Blanchett's performance -- and Haynes's savvy in casting her here -- lies in her ability to limn the psychic territory that Dylan explored at this time. Dylan's popularity followed in part from his threatening/non-threatening, aggressive/passive, angry/healing sets of dichotomized messages -- all located in his gender presentation. Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," contended that "camp" promotes the epicene star (she is writing here about Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich) and contradicts gender-specificity as a ploy to make the star desirable to both sexes. That's in part the case here, but Blanchett's performance feels as far from camp as you can get, yet still is one of the most startling investigations into androgynous creativity you'll ever see.

Girly boy Garland

It would be tempting to write that Rufus Wainwright's theatrical impersonation of Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall concert was -- or verged on -- camp. But this is not the case. Wainwright -- the son of singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle -- released his debut album, Rufus Wainwright, in 1998, a compelling mixture of songs that, while tinged with traditional folk touches, were a mixture of early Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen and a kinder, gentler middle-period Bob Dylan. Wainwright, openly gay, became extraordinarily popular with both gay and straight audiences and has built a devoted audience over the past decade. He has not been afraid to experiment with musical forms.

But nothing here has prepared us for the sheer audacity of Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall. Here Rufus not just recreates Garland's 1961 performance -- the high-water mark of her career, a landmark of American popular music, and a milestone of 20th-century gay pop culture -- but elevates it to iconic status. Vocally, Wainwright shines. While he does not have Garland's purity of tone or technical abilities (hell, even Garland didn't have that many tics in concert) he certainly has her emotional depth and psychic commitment to the material. There are even times -- in "Puttin' on the Ritz" and "You Go to My Head" -- where Wainwright actually seems to have a better grasp of the lyrics and timing than Garland.

Wainwright has mined and reclaimed an important aspect of mid-20th century gay culture, reinventing it for contemporary audiences. During one of the numbers a gay audience-member shouts out "This is our heritage!" -- and he is right. But it is short-sighted to think that Wainwright is claiming Garland only as a gay icon. What he's doing in Rufus Does Judy is exposing the complicated, complexly interwoven, interconnections between American popular culture and gay culture and celebrating them from a queer perspective. Wainwright literally turns Garland into a gay man; when he sings "The Man Who Got Away" or "San Francisco," he is isn't so much "queering" the songs as uncovering the gay context and content. His "transvestism" here -- much like Blanchett's in I'm Not There -- is less a disguise or masquerade as an exposure of the obvious. Now that's queer.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com