World Without Tears: A Devotional

Coda:    I climbed all the way inside    Your tragedy    I got behind    The majesty    Of the different shapes    In every note    The endless tapes    Of every word you wrote

Preface: Twilight of the Idols

Much has already been said about the gay men and their beloved tragedy queens. From Oscar Wilde to Judy Garland to Lady Gaga's current acid reign over the homosexuals who overpopulate her fan base, it is indeed possible, and far too easy, to cast a certain genealogy of tragedy queens who have held court in the hearts and minds of modern gay men. Rather than orchestrate or even critique the cultural impacts of these figures, whose stories and identities have already been told and retold, this essay will offer up Lucinda Williams as an overlooked tragedy country queen, carrying with her an approach to ruin that transcends the hackneyed misrecognition of camp to be creative, forceful, and, in the end, something other than just ruined.

The problem with the fixation and attachment to the archetypical tragedy queens I have laid out before you is that the interest in them that gay men have cultivated and held dear has been based on bad faith and misrecognition. While my decision to draw on Wilde, Garland, and Lady Gaga may seem, to some, too subjective or general, I would like to simply point to the significant role that themes and invocations of tragedy have to play in the reception and affiliation that undergirds each of their individual constructions as iconic figures in the "homosexual imagination." From the scandalous, failed, and even pert ways Wilde himself presented the details of his private life to the public, to Garland's unfortunate and very well-known problems with substance abuse, to the tears that Lady Gaga conjures up and weeps for her "little monsters," the publicity machine that has produced this particular line of tragedy queens has relied on sentimentalizing and protecting the bond made with their gay audience around a shared sense of misfortune. Tragedy operates here not only as a spectacle to behold, but also as a site of identification and affiliation necessary in the maintenance of the bond held between tragedy queens and their homosexual audience—failed women bonded to failed men.

Lucinda Williams is the subterranean, all-powerful, aural, post-tragic queen of ruin. Composing her ruin as a work of art, Lucinda's approach to destruction and loss finds capacity in despair and invents a new form of musical expression that intensifies violence and romances ruin as a way of becoming-imperceptible. While tragedy, and indeed the term woman itself, may imply, both discursively and historically, a kind of lack, Lucinda's ruin is about capacity—to act upon it, to sing about it, and to find glory within it. More than a transformation of a negative term into a positive one, Lucinda's creative approach to ruin is a kind of becoming—a decomposition of loss and an invention of force within experiences we might mistakenly write off as merely tragic.

Ruin is Lucinda's style and not just her burden. Style is a process of being and becoming yourself—a way of performing and broadcasting difference before the world that both defies and travels through familiar ways of being. Quentin Crisp, the subject of my dissertation project on style and failure, is, like Lucinda and indeed any object of my attention and affection, a counterhero in the story he has to tell about the life of the modern homosexual. Failure is a source of creativity for him in the same way that ruin and tragedy operate for Lucinda as a process of invention and artistic creation in her body of work. Style, for both Quentin and Lucinda, constitutes a sacred endeavor: of both constituting and spreading themselves unto the world by not only being, but also becoming their failures and tragedies, which are able to become events and beautiful objects in and of themselves. How personality and creativity are tethered to any project of style is exactly what, in Quentin's terms, we must lament about the ways our celebrities...