It Takes a Village People

Semiotic freedom is put to the test

When Rob Halford, the caterwauling lead singer of vintage heavy metal stalwarts Judas Priest, came out as gay in 1998, one of the more open secrets in pop culture had at long last been revealed (I used to say, referencing the situationist influenced movie which put the Sex Pistols on the map, that Halford had “exposed the real greatest rock’n’roll swindle").

As the frontman of a musical group that had turned leather and studs into the chief signifier of heavy metal fashion, Halford had long seemed to be edging for this somewhat late-stage “revelation”: unlike his bandmates, whose personal branding tacked closer to hippiedom, Halford, who cropped his wispy blond hair short and appropriated the iconic muir cap from the leather scene, had clearly been standing in for the Mr. Leather aesthetic of the LGBTQ community.

The MTV segment in which Halford sat for an interview when he came out perhaps includes the exact moment when this obvious mask fell from the face of heavy metal culture, a moment when its hypermasculine heteronormativity, which had been heavy metal’s longstanding diktat, found itself destabilized. He was going public with his homosexuality and wanted to be clear for audiences about the chain of signifiers which he had contributed to the overall coding of this most “un-gay” genre of music.

“[I]f you want to go through your Priest collection, you’ll be surprised to see how many innuendos, how many metaphors, are used, some obvious, some not so obvious.” His words give way in the segment to the campy spectacle of vintage Halford, resplendent in glimmering chrome and shiny black leather, with some illuminating lyrics from the 1977 Judas Priest track “Raw Deal” superimposed over the shot that read: “All eyes hit me as I walk into the bar/then steely leather guys were foolin’ with the leather dudes.”

With that one shot, and with those lyrics, Rob Halford deconstructed in real time an entire horizon of meaning and signification, a semiotical order that now, in front of the whole world, was collapsing in on itself.

The destabilized rostrum of patriarchal straightness which Halford’s act had lopped off the face of heavy metal finds an interesting, though utterly inverted, parallel today in the appropriation of the Village People’s song “Y.M.C.A.” by the MAGA movement, a subsuming of classic gay coding that reached its peak recently in the actual live performance of the song by the group at a Trump rally, with none other than Trump himself dancing along onstage with the band.

Now, it might be concluded from the specter of a classic emblem of gay culture being placed alongside the most visible political formation of heteronormativity that we are here witnessing the selfsame destabilization of straight culture which we saw in the Halford coming-out saga.

However, such a theory would assume some subversive potency on the part of the Village People, an assumption made erroneous when one considers how antique its representation of gayness is by this point in the 21st century. The gayness of the Village People, over decades of postmodern pop cultural evolution, is to a large extent by now an outmoded signifier. And the MAGA movement at this juncture is too absorptive and grandiose for such a dated signifier to deploy its originally subversive impact.

The fact is it’s actually the other way around, that it’s because here, in this bizarre confluence of patriotism and gayness, that, somewhat paradoxically, heteronormativity itself is being reconstituted.

In the successful appropriation of gay coding by the Trumpian onslaught of modern political life, American patriotic heteronormativity is reinstated, but only as a synthesis of new energies. We have reached a stage wherein the appearance of an age-old signifier of gay life within the larger signifying chain of the political straightness of MAGA no longer presents the hegemonic structure of patriotic life with a poisonous ingredient. All of the gay panic that previously was so integral to an understanding of heteronormativity no longer seems present and we can take the Village People’s appearance within the infrastructure of MAGA world as a sort of bellwether of this new understanding.

Modern conservatism, in the style formally encountered by the Nixons, the Reagans and the Bushes of the world, would not have had the capacity to absorb this cultural force back in their neoliberal and “moral majority” eras. Such displays would have presented it with a toxic and alien energy field. But, the evolution of conservatism as a postmodern, MAGA-defined strain of political life under Trump, at least as far as appearances go, looks more than capable of accomplishing this feat.

We should take note that such appropriation also appropriates the appropriator: for one cannot put the Village People onstage without allowing its representations, however dated, to live alongside the representations of the hegemony and thereby alter the content of that hegemony. This may even be accomplished paradoxically, as it seems to be doing so here.

It of course cannot be said that MAGA world is making any sort of explicit attempt to court homosexuals in its appropriation of the Village People, though that’s neither here nor there given MAGA’s agnosticism towards marginality, at least on the level of rhetoric. Polling indicates that Trump lost a significant portion of the LGBT vote last November. This is to be expected given the Republican Party’s loud vituperation over what they deem to be trans-accelerationist overreach. There is also a case to be made that a certain falling to the fate of Roe v. Wade should be understood in some of the murmurings about gay marriage among the Republicans. And it goes without saying that, whatever you think of his politics, Trump is nonetheless savvy enough to know that if he wanted more LGBT votes, shimmying alongside a 50 year old corny disco track is probably not the most effective way to go about it.

But this mistakes semiotics for politics. In the postmodern, the spectacle has a life independent of whatever political machinations more agentive forces, such as politicians and political parties, may be characterized by in their use of such spectacles. The political rhetoric may be saying one thing while the spectacle living alongside might be saying the opposite. The Republicans may very well be hostile towards the LGBT community, but this may also have little do with the fact that the patriotic signifying chain over which it still claims monopoly oversight has experienced a fundamental shift in what it is permitted to deem politically toxic. Like with the overseas bellicosity of the neoconservatives which it decries, MAGA seems to be putting forth a different form of patriotic content than what was permissible before. And this points to a certain potency in the spectacle to which the hegemonic structure must adapt.

To pick a merely random example of this sort of thing from the past, it might be helpful to recall the late ‘90s, when the Nu-metal genre came on the scene with its appropriation of rap and turntable culture. The inclusion of these forms within the larger heavy metal genre was innovative at the time, breaking the long-held taboo concerning any kind of non-harmonic and imprecisely executed vocal techniques, something which had fueled its antagonism towards punk and then later on, hip-hop. But this came crashing down with the infusion of these techniques by younger musicians growing up with a much more popular hip-hop than their forebears.

It goes without saying that this semiotical alteration did very little to further the cause of civil rights in the years subsequent to the ‘90s and this fact should help guide us as we try to understand what is happening today with the Village People and MAGA.

For another way to understand the real significance of this merging of semiotical orders, we may look to no other more transparent of a cultural mirror than Saturday Night Live, which has over the years given us two great examples to help illustrate this point.

The first came in 2009 in the form of “The Spartans,” a skit that reenacted the swords-and-sandals theatrics of the movie 300, but as the comedic illustration of an open secret of homosexuality running through the cadres. In it, the mighty, strong, valiant and “fierce” warriors of Sparta, whose specter of masculine strength the original movie depicted in the form of men clad in what were for all intents and purposes over-glorified speedos, reveal themselves as obvious homosexuals.

We see a parallel with Rob Halford’s coming out story of 1998, a moment when some sort of ruse of heteronormativity is revealed for its obvious homoeroticism which we should have known all along. It destabilizes the lie of heteronormative hypermasculinity as some source of masculine strength by undoing the lazy pretense it had masqueraded in front of us. Just as with Halford’s muir cap, the Spartans’ speedos point to a wrinkle in the fabric of hegemonic straightness, a reified element in its enforcement of patriarchal coding desperately in need of interrogation. It is a process of deconstruction.

Saturday Night Live provides us as well with the inverse of this destabilized heteronormativity in the form of its reconstitution in its infamous 1991 “Schmitts Gay” parody wherein two putatively hetero bros played by Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, through some swimming pool antics involving beefcakes in—more—speedos, reveal strong and, crucially, uncomplicated, homosexual desires.

I would call this version of the sort of “appropriation of homosexuality” idea here an early instantiation of the kind of absorption of gayness we see in the MAGA appropriation of “Y.M.C.A.” Here, in the scrambling of codes in the “Schmitts Gay” parody, where the signifier of “straight guy”—baseball cap, t-shirt, Van Halen guitar riff—is seamlessly merged with the celebration of homosexual lust, we are confronted with a reconstitution of the heteronormative order, however, critically, dialectically transformed.

Nothing has changed in terms of the aesthetics and theatrics of this symbolic order, in its immediate form. But its content is now mediated through the integration of visible homosexuality. And rather than revealing inconsistency, as the 300 parody and the Rob Halford revelation do, the “Schmitts Gay” parody, along with MAGA’s appropriation of the Village People, synthesizes and harmonizes two formerly separate discursive orders.

Again, let’s not mistake this synthesis, which is semiotical and aesthetic, for a political one. The evolution of the optics of conservative politics such that it can now “join forces” with what was formally subversive content does not in any way, shape or form prove that LGBT rights are now safe. Those of us who are concerned and even frightened of what the new administration has in store for the protection of the rights of this community are not being hysterical, or, at the least, unreasonable. A symbolic appropriation, as with the symbolic deconstruction seen in the tumbling of statues, does not guarantee political progress.

Rather, what we have in the specter of the Village People collaboration with MAGA world is not some aberration or glitch, but a complicated confluence. Layers of cultural material are being sandwiched together organically, a result of late stage capital’s continual recycling of its limited store of cultural production.

This layer cake was made even more complicated in the sight of the Trump dance, that ridiculous toggling between two shoulder-height fists that became meme-ified during his three campaigns. While the Village People performed, it was being imitated by its own very own author, Trump himself. Quoting oneself through tertiary layers of memes and virality is an example of what I have previously called the first postmodern presidency.

The “mixology” of these mashups should not be minimized nor overstated. On the one hand, the spectacle matters in terms of how we subjectivize ourselves in postmodern life and such self-subjectivization is a core element in the progress of history. On the other hand, the spectacle is limited. State power is free to utilize the spectacle for whatever encroachments into civic life it deems expedient for its own ends, no matter the contradictions between what the spectacle says and what the state is actually doing.

Perhaps the vulnerability of gay coding to hegemonic structures such as MAGA points to a new horizon for gay visibility. Perhaps new symbols are needed, new forms of solidarity, new unifiers, new emblems, new languages, new vernaculars to communicate the necessary resistance to state power, ones that do not succumb to absorption in the larger culture.

There is a tension here between the order accomplished by Obergefell v. Hodges and the need to find new forms of resistance. That Supreme Court decision had a tremendous normalizing impact. But normalization comes at the cost of a certain kind of visibility, a certain bowdlerization of the culture that then succumbs to the hegemony of the mainstream. Certainly, the corporate capture of the Pride Parade is only the most illustrative example of this kind of absorption.

But normalization is perhaps the greatest safeguard for political freedom, for it is in the every day of civic life that we find the social contract operating in its most unmediated form. The normalization of gay marriage may here finds its most durable protection in the sense in which, like women’s rights before it, it has become imbricated into the social contract.

This is an important discussion to be having during this particular administration which is motivated by deconstructing the previous administration’s efforts towards such safeguards.

It takes a Village People to thrust this conversation into the open.