Kill the Diva
Bebe Rhexa, Ava Max and the sour joke of gay men's diva worship
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The heat is unbearable, the air is dense with fire-smoke and I’m playing Padam. The world feels hotter and more hateful these days, but still I’m seeking refuge in the typical place: pop music. It is the gay boy’s lingua franca after all, our ultimate symbology, our casual fodder.
“Padam Padam” — Kylie Minogue’s silly, essential comeback. Even I have hyped myself into a Padam-fueled mania. Everything about it is gorgeously gauche, from its plucky bass to its title, a riff on the 1951 Edith Piaf song of the same name. I like this allusion. With it, the lavish aura of French big band has found its way into the dehydrated vibe of global, gay club-pop. A little pomp for our circumspect circumstance.
I love the song and though I raise my arms in revelry at the club whenever I hear Padam’s ominous intro, I do wonder: am I dancing or memeing when I’m screaming along? Because I can’t shake the thin smile that came upon me when I fist heard the tune, when I saw gay boys on Twitter share their Grindr messages featuring the phrase. “Padam” would go one blue message. “Padam” would go the response in orange. “Padam, padam/I hear it and I know . . .” like a Grindr message’s startling alert, if you know, you know. And we laugh at the familiarity. But is it a laugh of recognition or sort of comic despair?
This fuzzy feeling — that space between sincere enthusiasm and ironic amusement — is not a rare one for the pop-listening gay boy. Gay boys’ affect, after all, leans ironic. Hedosnism in our niche is often mere subtext for a generalized ambivalence to clear-cut modes. In our vibe-world, nothing is right, nothing is wrong, nothing is serious, nothing is purely comical. Everything is everything. And thus we can feel deep ecstasy to Padam and turn it into silly, forgettable fodder at the same time. We can say something as crass as “Meghan Traitor is MOTHER”, feeling genuine sincerity even while smirking knowingly towards out girls. We are gemini-people. And pop girls, the centers of our world, seem to bear the brunt of our twin impulse. We worship and laugh at. And we feel ambivalence regarding which we are enacting. The ironic stan. The sincere jester.
And I can luxuriate in that grey zone, and take refuge in our unique culture of sneering turning into pleasure turning into sincerity turning into bleary nights not caring. But these days I feel that the pleasure of this indistinction is souring. It all icky, a sorry coverup for the gay boy’s misogynistic impulse.
I’m thinking of Tanya from The White Lotus [SPOILER . . . but where were you!?]. Jennifer Coolidge’s iconoclastic heiress meets a grim, watery fate after she is trapped on a yacht by a gaggle of seemingly adoring gay men. Those gay men, she finds out, are trying to "murder her” for her latent fortune. But they get her aboard by wining and dining her, lavishing her with praise and setting her up with fabulous clothes, food and men. Their feigned worship was all a front for a dark plot. Maybe that’s why her line, “These gays are trying to murder me,” became the iconic hallmark of the show. How many of us have felt that same mixed impulse? These fun gays . . . they’re scaring me!
I though of Tanya when I recently witnessed a slew of horrid fan attacks on mid-tier pop divas.
A boy threw his phone at singer Bebe Rhexa. It hit her right in the eye, leading her to collapse to the ground and go to the hospital. After, when the press asked why he would do such a thing, he responded with terrifying honestly: “I thought it would be funny.”
Oddly enough, the same thing happened to pop girl Ava Max, who was slapped on stage by a crazed male fan(?).
And then more such occurrences: someone gave a wheel of brie to singer P!nk. And then, someone else, their mother’s ashes.
Some of these occurrences feel deranged. Other’s, like the brie, potentially tongue in-cheek. But I can’t help but notice that these string of strange fan attacks and offerings seem to have struck B-list pop girls who are often the butt of adoring(?) jokes on the gay web. These are not untouchable mega-stars, but our stars. Gay micro-macro celebs who we both love, find amusing, and share a communal exasperation regarding the fact that it is our community who largely populates their fanbases.
Let’s take the case Bebe Rhexa. Her career has largely consisted of providing vocals to the world’s biggest songs made by other people. In the days before her attack, I saw joke upon joke about her tour. She was pricing tickets at literally 8 dollars a pop. The sad reality of that proved to be good fodder for the half laughing, half-omg gay internet tribe.
It was a similar laughter that reverberated across the gay internet when, days later, a young gay boy came out to his mom in front of Rhexa in a now-viral TikTok. The video is hopelessly earnest. It’s also too, insane. To come out to your mother with your favorite pop star as witness, like a minister, is cute but also??? The comic absurdity was not just the strangely sincere encounter, but the fact that it was Rhexa who was bearing witness. Of all the people? we thought, laughing aloud.
Rhexa’s dirt-cheap tickets. The hilarity of this coming out ritual. And then too, the phone toss. It all feels part of the same breath of half-laughter. The smirking gay boys laugh and laugh. That is until someone takes the joke and boinks her in the eye. Violent contempt, it seems, is only one mark away from ironic amusement
Over a year ago, I waxed on similar themes. Unpacking my tepid adoration for one Carly Rae Jepsen, I tried to find the thread that ties gay fans to both campy queens and sort of casual pop girls like CRJ. I wanted to know why gay boys seem to “Stan” every pop girl, regardless of their explicit allegiance to the gay community or stereotypically campy affect. I wrote:
It’s a moral and aesthetic lack of clarity that I believe allows for the infinite stanning of pop girls. While gay icons may seem classically required to exude the vibes of Judy or Cher — that is the over-the-top, the messy, the glamorous — the overwhelming queer adoration for every pop girl shows that something more than a love for excess is at work here. We don’t know if we’re joking because we don’t know what we like and that’s, sort of, the point. We don’t know what’s good and we never want to define it, because once the idea of “good” is solidified, we surely fall outside its bounds.
When I wrote that, I posited a low-key radicality to the gay man’s all around pop standom. But time, and recent violent events, have colored this differently. To love all pop stars, even as a joke, is not radically liberating, but instead may stem from a desire to dominate: a smirking abjection masked with feigned excitement.
That’s the scary thing. The clap of ironic applause can so easily slip into a brutish hurtful thing. Ru Paul famously said that he connects with Cher and Diana Ross, his pop divas, because they exemplify both strength and vulnerability. I relate to this. It’s that same wide breadth of being — the pain and the glamor and the strength — that allows me to identify with the multitudes of pop girls. But too often, gay boys seem to mistake an identification with pop divas and their expansiveness as an invitation to render them a blank canvas. It’s a canvas for us to draw both tragedy and trash upon. For us to cry at and laugh around. Meanwhile, there she was, the whole time: fully colored in, a presence unto herself. We didn’t need to turn her into irony-pilled discourse, we could have simply noticed, and appreciated.
With my pop girls, I don’t know if I’m laughing or loving. But maybe she deserves to know about the tenor of my laugh. She has good reason, after all, to doubt the sincerity of its sounding.
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Raini Rodriguez skinny legend
excellent thoughts and words as always tobias !!!!!!