Old Maids and Young Kings

Passing Fancy - Buffalo's First All Women Drag Show

Certainly, as a Bildungsroman Stone Butch Blues is very much a novel about aging, about growing into identity through adulthood. But it is also about aging beyond the identity of adulthood. The narrative is populated with older Butch figures who fill in the edges of the novel, acting often like a chorus. Or they appear in Jess’s life in a series of nested memories, with Feinberg returning with active attentive to the detail of aging identity. It is with these details that works from the LHA  help us to reconstittue the culture and community in which aging and identity became, and become, variegated yet vital. 

Briefly consider two posters appearing at the same time that Stone Butch Blues first arrived on bookshelves. The first, Passing Fancy, shown on left, is a poster for the first drag king night held in Buffalo on April 10, 1992. At this event Feinberg delivered “the first slide show on the history of woman who have passed as men ever presented by a passing woman.” The second poster, shown on right, promotes a play performance exactly one week later, on April 17, 1992. An adaptation by Lucinda Rhea Zoe of Lilian Bell’s 1893 novel The Love Affairs of an Old Maid, the play premiered at the W.O.W. Café in lower Manhattan, running for three weeks. Even from the presentation of these two posters in juxtaposition they give a sense of the cultural scene in which Feinberg’s work, and the question of recalling and forgetting, of aging and erasing, emerged. Here, community-run theaters, bars, and cultural organizations, many of them on the Lower East Side at the time, provided vital safe spaces for expression—spaces where a variety of identities to be enacted, embodied, and recognized. It was also where generational identity—what it meant to be out, to be queer, to build choosen families—could exist within a culture that otherwise often invalidated or obscured queer life.

The Love Affairs of an Old Maid Poster

Correlative to these posters, however, an otherwise tangential third poster from April 1992, carries a strange congruence for posterity. It ran parallel to Feinberg’s novel, Passing Fancy, and Zoe’s adaptation, but was otherwise outside, or perhaps beside, the cultural milieu of early-1920s New York. This was a poster for a nation-wide vote to determine, as The New York Times put it, “which Elvis should be on the Elvis Presley commemorative that’s coming out next year? … The U.S. Postal Service will issue only one. But at least it is, for the first time ever, letting the public decide.”(3) The choice was between a younger Elvis design, based on his mid-1950s visage, and an ‘older’ Elvis, depicting the artist on one of his later tours from the early-1970s. Young Elvis would go on to win, becoming the greatest selling USPS stamp of all time. This third poster may seem incongruous, but it raises a related question: why was this the stamp to be remembered?[4] Why young Elvis?

Elvis, the so-called King of Rock and Roll—or simply, the King—surprisingly cuts across all three posters, and Feinberg’s novel. In Stone Butch Blues, for instance, Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” serves as a punctal detail. His cover, part-ballad, part-spoken word, meditates on how performances and part playing constrain the individual. It reflects Jess’s (and the novel’s) close attention to the roles assumed within and beyond queer-coded spaces. In this way it also refracts the gender-performativity discourse of the early-1990s, perhaps informing the rise of Elvis impersonators among drag kings later in the decade. As Jess uses a Presleyian voice to amuse Paula, we might recall Jack Halberstam’s discussion of Elvis impersonation and the related concept of ‘kinging’: 

“[…] what in drag queen culture has been called ‘camp’ … I am renaming here as ‘kinging.’ Although earlier I identified one mode of kinging as an earnest performance of masculinity, here the kinging mode is realized through the impersonation of impersonation. This kinging effect is hilariously used by drag kings in San Francisco, where the success of Elvis Herselvis has spawned Elvis Herselvis impersonators.”(5)

 Kinging, then, is a kind of metaleptical doubling, a performance related to a previous performative phrase. The reliance on the previous performance, and the audience’s sustained attention to the previous part, makes ‘kinging’ an act of attribution. ‘Kinging,’ thus, becomes an act of remembering. Perhaps for this reason, Passing Fancy is all but misdirection: the night was both historical and historizing. The lecture given by Feinberg, based on the notes that would later become the author’s first essays in Lavender & Red—Feinberg’s long-running column for Workers’ World—present a history of masculine drag or masculine passing, a turn of the ‘kinging model’ to not only self-expressive, but also to function as a sort of historical act of memory. To memorialize, as Halberstam notes, risks a ‘perverse presentism,’ a projection of contemporary identity that obscures the historical subject.(6) Yet at the same time such acts of remembering form the collective memories that help figures like Jess. In acts of remembering a delicate balance is struck between historical aging and the present context.

Something similar to this centrifugal pull between past and present appears in Zoe’s adaption as well. On the one hand, the production brings Jones’s novel into the contemporary context of the W.O.W. Café, where, as Alisa Solomon notes, “Feminism and lesbianism appear in the shows not as issues but as given.”(7) Here, the adaptation recasts queer-coded relationships hinted at, but not made explicit within Jones’s text, as contemporary lesbian pairs, demonstrating how modern adaptations might conflate the time become enacted performance and queer remembering. This is clear, for instance, from the work’s title, which winks at the history of ‘old maids’ as a pejorative name turned queerly-adopted term. On the other hand, the play breaks convection and audience distances throughout, utilizes stilted language and scenography to re-establish a distance between player and audience. In this gap we might see the same ‘kinging model’ turned towards the historical subject, the play impersonating the book impersonating the past. What falls away, and what becomes clear in the 1992 adaptation is a way of queering memory as sources age, of preserving collective memory while creating contemporary identity, of revealing, as it were, young kings from old maids.