January 2007 Cover
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And its demise
By
Mitzel
How does one get famous in this culture? What constitutes fame? The dictionary is very concise about what fame is: renown; public eminence. (Actually, the word "falsie" gets a slightly longer definition, perhaps
appropriately.) What is the difference between fame and notoriety? Who can judge?
There are industries that can make people famous. The political machine. The movie machine. The music machine. Very useful, as these are results-oriented enterprises-- more votes, more tickets sold, more LPs and CDs
moved out the door. Being a novelist, a poet, or an academic is a tough track to get famous, though every once in a while the press will move its magic finger, touch one among the obscure, and create a whole new story for the
chosen. This is pretty much what happened to Camille Paglia, an academic whose first book made her very famous indeed.
T
here's a new biography of Allen Ginsberg just
published, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen
Ginsberg. One of author Bill Morgan's main points is how adamant Ginsberg was to become famous, which he
did. But what did he pay for his fame? I think Ginsberg is a perfect example of this trade-off, certainly amongst the poets. Auden, Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop-- their fame equation was each considerably different from what Allen got.
Allen at least got to write his own ticket, pretty much so. The "coming out" thing was cleared out of the way early on, something not available even today to famous people in movies and television. Allen, also, was farming
new turf, very much in the tradition of Walt Whitman, both New Yorkers. Whitman, too, had ambitions in the fame game, and did well, given the times.
Gore Vidal once noted that getting famous in the USA wasn't that hard; the harder part was staying famous. And he's right. Staying famous is contingent on media attention, which is a fickle and adamant thing. A lot of
those made famous by their crafts, and then tossed into media fire, flame out-- this is a very old story. Some self-destruct, some just disappear from the media circus, dropped like the famous hot potato. Only a very few get a
second bite at the apple. The line to replace those ejected is very long indeed.
Acres of skin
What interests me is the level of fame of the men who appear in the gay men's skin rags. Each month, these numerous titles feature dozens and dozens of new faces and bodies. Many would be considered famous in the
context of their world. I know men who have loving memories of their favorite physique models from the 1950s and '60s. I was an eager consumer of physique mags of the period, but I never learned the name of any particular
model. There have been so many of them! And the assembly line just keeps churning them out, all sorts of them.
Is this a career-track to fame? Or does the sheer mass of them constitute something that transcends our notions of fame? I suspect the latter.
What I've observed in the behavior of men who collect skin mags is that there are a few who do, in fact, collect pictures of certain specific models. The majority just collect and collect, hundreds and hundreds of magazines,
with hundreds and hundreds-- thousands-- of gorgeous nude men. To achieve the status of fame in this vast gallery of bodies seems irrelevant. But there is meaning in it, perhaps even more important. That is: it keeps active
an ancient tradition of erotic human representation.
I still cannot comprehend those cultures which have banned the depiction of the human body from their arts, like making mayonnaise without the eggs. When I look at the nude men in the mags, I flashback to the
Italian Renaissance, then time-trip to classical Greece and land in front of a great carven
kouros. In the high Renaissance, there must have been at least one individual who filled the function that the famous Chi Chi LaRue does
today. There are no new types, just new technologies. Imagine Michelangelo Buonarroti's studio! Is it more Jackson Pollack or Joe Gage? In either regard, the spirit lives!
One of the charming qualities of the world of the skin models is its evanescence-- here today, maybe around tomorrow, fading, fading, like youth. Ready to be replaced by the new cohort. Just one more meditation on the
buff guys in the skin rags: the very commonness of their physical display seems to negate the concept of exhibitionism that is being sold, that which is supposed to be titillating.
Fame can last for a long time; think of poor Greta Garbo, who tried to escape from her fame cage but couldn't. Garbo even wound up, in this weird cameo of her crossing a New York street, in an early porn movie (the title
of which I cannot recall; it wasn't that famous) by the late, and great, director Jack DeVeau, who was. Or fame can disappear like a wisp of cigarette smoke. Think Brenda Frasier, Yma Sumac, Rula Lenska. Or among the
men: Vaughan Meader, Paul Lynde, and Bill Tilden. It's probably just as well that fame has an expiration date and falls into the cult-hole, wherein, at least in the previous times, it was the queens who kept the flame burning.
And still do!
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