My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Raquel Welch (1940): As My Mother

147 Raquel Welch As My Mother Ron Palmer Raquel Welch is posing in a white space-jumpsuit zippered down to her cleavage; she must be my mother prancing around the movie screen like a panicky cat trapped inside a body (Fantastic Voyage, 1966). When your mother is beautiful, there are her breasts snug and big as those on Raquel Welch. It can be confusing when your mother looks like Raquel, because sometimes you substitute her for the woman in the movie, which ultimately recalls Freud’s infamous statement on Oedipal desire: “At a very early age the little boy develops an object-cathexis of his mother, which originally related to the mother’s breast and is the earliest 148 instance of an object-choice on the anaclitic model” (The Ego and the Id, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 1923–1925, vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1961], 31). Am I the son of Raquel transformed by desire when my mother’s breasts so closely resemble hers? I mean to say regret resembles my mouth while feeding on her Raquel-esque breasts as snow falls through the Connecticut moonlight. I mean to say I remember Raquel. What is a diva anyway? A woman who possesses kindness and beauty without any hint of self-righteousness; surely this is true of our diva pursuits, no? Stunning eyes with the adorable I DARE YOU glossing her lips? Raquel challenges the diva genre as she ages and still looks beautiful even after sixty. Have you seen her lately? Good God, the woman redefines the relevant dimensions of diva fierceness. The most likeable diva allows one to pierce her aura and swim around inside her trance for a little while. I experienced this myself as Raquel’s room service waiter in 1992. One buzzing midnight of hotel kitchen lights, the phone showed in green block letters : M. W R . It momentarily blinked out my loneliness, which I have carried like a bag of water inside me my entire life. A face so stunning I gasped when she opened her hotel room door. I stood dumb with a round tray on my palm balancing a glass of milk and two white porcelain plates: one with a piece of cheesecake, the other with five chocolate chip cookies on a paper doily. Sturdy yet gentle, she was standing with the phone behind her back, wearing a full face of makeup and retying her white terrycloth robe. Smiling, she greeted me: “You won’t tell anyone how naughty I am, will you? I’m on the phone with Japan.” She opened the door wider, motioning and backing away, “Oh, let’s see . . . [she was immediately motherly] Maybe on the bed . . . Right there, dear, is fine.” Raquel Welch 149 So I said, “Here you are, Ma’am,” placing the black tray on the white bedspread. I politely leaned toward her as she talked to Japan, sat on the edge of her bed near the lamp-lit pillow, and extended my primal hand with the receipt to be signed. She gave her exquisite neckline shadows while she signed her looping signature lovingly. Everything was completed so sweetly; I was in a trance! How can you love a diva if she won’t let you into her psychological sphere? The diva must be able to rise above social expectations of the cultural heroine and carry herself without negative weights like smugness and evil arrogance, but rather cultivate a graceful air. If she accomplishes this daunting task, then she never needs to save face because she’s always impeccably tactful. My mother wanted to bounce like Raquel and therefore did the doo-wop dancing, hopping left leg to right leg, shifting her weight and be-bopping back and forth; she took Raquel a little too far: inviting all the men to drool into her bathing suit cleavage . This is a preschool memory of my mother dancing at a lake party beside a red cottage. Did I want to be Raquel Welch or my mother? Something that I respected about my mother is the fact that she never learned shame (especially over the size of her chest, unlike the teenage girls who so often internalize shame of their own development due to constant teasing, girl-group bullying). My mother chose to flaunt...