Emerging

At long last, it's winter. So I'm coming out of my little hiatus. Live in fear.

I've been busying myself reading this book, 'Party Monster'. It purports to be "a fabulous but true story of murder in Clubland". Hoo-boy, one can hardly wait.

Now, I enjoy a good melodramatic and steamy story as much as anyone. But there is a conceit these days with memoir: one must portray oneself as having some flaw in order to make oneself believable. And the author here, James St James, has flaws aplenty, and they're not confined to his writing and story-telling skills.

In short, it's the story of a young man with borderline personality disorder who, in the course of building his reputation and 'power', did a lot of drugs, excused any and all damaging behaviors around him, and killed a man. Very titillating, to be sure. But St James never sees the obvious; he begs us, as we read, to "understand" why his pals made the choices they did. And understanding means 'look at us, we're all fabulous and high on ketamine and heroin and crack and cocaine and we made such a splash, we put downtown New York ON THE MAP and, oh, did I mention we were fabulous?'

The reader is meant to open his heart to these poor drug-addled folk cuz, well, they're drug-addled and they just can't help themselves. They can't see themselves for the messes they are, and this is meant to evoke our pity. But hey, everyone was doing it (and they were fabulous, too).

Never at any time does St James apologize for his behavior. He writes, now and then, that he is ashamed of what he does, but clearly glories in his tales of debauchery. All along, he eschews any sort of judgment, any sort of attempt at real understanding of what he's involved with, just how damaging it is, not just for him but for the community around him. It is a book peopled with those who forgot they ever left high school. Indeed, revenge on his school tormentors seems to be part of the motivation for writing the book: 'Look who's the cool kid now!'

Curiously, this story was made into a movie twice, both times by the same producers. First it was a documentary, then it was a dramatization of St James' book. One wonders why the producers would feel so strongly about presenting the material twice: money? fame? success? glamor? the sheer ability to bring to the screen the same story twice, each within years of each other?

Why would one wish to 'understand' the exploits of a man with borderline personality disorder? There is no understanding to such a thing; it simply is. We've all had the boss from hell, the aggressively needy but somehow charming friend or parent. There's nothing new here, and yet it gets lavished with attention, even when it says it does not wish to call attention to itself.

And this, at long last, is our topic: the oft-quoted line that 'drag is the mask that tells the truth'. I submit it is not. Drag -- typically gay men dressing outlandishly in order to get away with obnoxious behavior they wouldn't ordinarily manifest, but anyone may dress or behave so -- calls attention to oneself, not one's ideas. One *wears* drag; one is *not* drag itself. It is in this way that gay men (okay, fags) and fundamentalist Christians find themselves in common practice: fundies say 'marriage is an institution which must remain unsullied', and fags say, 'drag is the mask that tells the truth', when the flaw both commit is reification. (Oh, look it up.) Essentially, they hold some thing in such esteem that it becomes something more than the thing itself, more than the concept itself. It is on some high pedestal, unreachable by mere mortals, having been put there by god himself.

Ack.

Sure, we'll always have an abundance of intellectual rubbish. But dammit, this shit gets to me sometimes.