Transcripts / Opulence
This is the transcript for the video essay “Opulence” by Natalie Wynn, originally published on Jan 2, 2020 on the ContraPoints YouTube channel. This transcript is intended as a supplement rather than a substitute for the original video. For references and sources, watch the video here.
Oh, Hey gorg! Heyhowareyou gorg?
Okay listen: I know this looks bad. I know you think I’m bougie, and you’re here to take me to the guillotine, well... fair enough.
But before you do, can a dying queen make one request?
How ‘bout this: I’m the new Scheherazade, so you can cut my head off, but first you have to let me tell you my life story. Fair? That’s super fucking great. Now sit down bitch and allow me to explain myself.
I’ll start at the beginning. My earliest memories are of aesthetic bliss.
I was raised in a suburb of Washington, D.C, where the most exciting attraction for children is the National Museum of Natural History. (At least, it’s the most exciting attraction for nerdy children who, might I add, deserve their abuse at the hands of dumber, cooler children.)
Kids usually gather around the fossils, and, don’t get me wrong, I liked a good stegosaurus as much as the next five-year-old. But my real passion was the Gem and Mineral Hall. Ugh, the sparkle and shimmer!
It inspired me to start my own little gem collection. I had amethyst, quartz, obsidian, jade. The little pleasure of each stone was almost enough to make up for my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Romano forcing me to pee my pants in public.
Fuck you Romano. I’m glad your father died!
Comrades, losers, and haters: I would like to propose that aesthetic sensibility—whether for gemstones, architecture, fashion, or music—begins with absolute pleasure.
You rotate the crystal in your hand and are dazzled by the sparkle and the light; your nape hair stands on end, and a tingle goes down your spine, yes Gawd! But, as you get older, things get more complicated.
Northern Virginia is McMansion country. And while my family lived in a more modest “colonial,” I remember riding around in the backseat of the minivan, looking at some stylistically jumbled monstrosities. And I would get excited by some little detail, like say, a circle of fake battlements atop a misplaced tower.
But then my mom would say, “look at this ostentatious trash!”
So you learn. You learn taste according to the social class of your upbringing. And with taste comes all this adult baggage: snobbery and pretense and conceit.
And I don’t know what you’ve heard from my accusers, but I assure you that I have nothing to do with taste. I am a but simple queen longing for the innocent pleasure of my childhood gems.
So, stripey-sock catgirls of the heckin Revolutionary Committee: before you pass sentence, allow me to make my case gorg.
1 Success
Oh Hey how are you gorg?
Look, I like stuff. I like shiny things. For me there really is still a simple, childlike pleasure to it all. But the adult reality is, opulence is more than shimmer and sparkle; there’s a social context for it; it generally means something.
Why does Donald Trump’s apartment look like Liberace married a Turkmenistani dictator and moved into a Cheesecake Factory? Well, because he’s trying to send a message, maybe to the world, maybe to himself. He’s saying: “Behold! I am a winner, a very stable genius with one of the highest IQs.”
Powerful people have often used opulence to symbolize their power, from the pharaohs of Egypt to the kings of France to even the humble servants of the world’s major religions. (I guess God likes shiny things too.) And in America, opulence more specifically means not just power but success; it is the trophy by which you show the world that you’ve achieved the American Dream.
The plotline of our central cultural myth is the story of rags to riches. In the words of Drake:
“Started from the bottom now we’re here. Started from the bottom now the whole team’s fuckin’ here.”
Opulence is the aesthetic display that you’re here, you’ve made it. You’re rich bitch!
Remember in High School when you had to read The Great Gatsby by F Scott Sparknotes? The character Jay Gatsby doesn’t even like opulent mansion parties, but he throws them anyway just to show his crush Daisy that he’s made it, that he’s a success, that he’s worth something.
And as we all remember in the end they get married and defeat the monster Grendel to save the hall of Hrothgar. At least that’s what I wrote my 10th Grade English essay about how the theme of The Great Gatsby is money always leads to happiness.
I got a D minus!
“Now I like dollars, I like diamondsI like stunting, I like shiningI like million dollar dealsWhere's my pen? Bitch I'm signin'” -Cardi B
I’m sure Cardi B really does like diamonds and red bottoms and driving Lams and all that shit, but—teacher, pick me, pick me!
Let’s talk about about symbols, let’s talk about allegory, let’s talk about metaphor, let’s talk about themes. Fellow students, let us place the text in historical context.
Everyone knows Cardi B went from being a teenage stripper to making money moves. That’s the American Dream.
And hip hop opulence isn’t just gratuitous glitz and hedonism — it’s a celebration of success for people who often come from backgrounds where that kind of success is really improbable.
Don’t you think it’s kinda weird that conservatives still say “rap music is the reason for the problems with the blacks” — since for conservatives, the American Dream is supposed to be the solution to poverty, and is there any sector of our culture where the American Dream is more unironically celebrated than hip hop?
It’s not just hip hop though. Flaunted wealth is pretty inescapable throughout pop culture. I mean, you can’t turn on the radio without hearing about the Gucci and the Ferraris and the Fendi and the Bugattis and the Armani and Maseratis — our entire culture has been replaced by a parade of overpriced Italian bullshit.
Which, to be clear, I’m completely in favor of. Burn down the Statue of Liberty for all I fuckin’ care and replace it with large-scale wax figure of Donatella Versace holding a bottle of Cristal. That’s at least a more honest representation of our culture than the hypocritical cheese verse currently inscribed on Liberty Island.
I guess Cristal is French, isn’t it? Well no one really drinks Italian booze, we… we have standards in this country.
Listen up America, we live in a society — a society of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, not of climbers but of… graspers. To paraphrase Ian Danskin, maybe anyone can achieve the American dream, but everyone cannot. And the fact of the matter is, most people don’t.
I mean, what would it even mean to be rich unless someone else was poor? Who’s gonna polish your golden toilet? Not other rich people, that’s for sure.
So when you live in a society that constantly equates wealth with success, but which is so unequal that most people will never be wealthy… well, what’s the average person supposed to do?
2 Fantasy
I wish the world were my gem collection. I wish I owned everything.
I’m really just the worst kind of philistine, you know? I go to an art museum and it’s like, Monet, Rembrandt, okay that’s super fucking great but can I buy it?
Well no, I can’t buy it. No one can. The grim reality is you that can’t own everything. So what do you do?
Well, you fake it. You create... an illusion.
I don’t own this building. Any rube off the streets of Baltimore can walk in here, as indeed you did.
But that’s okay. I need a witness. I need you to see me here, among the other art, where I belong. Because being seen that way makes me feel good. It makes me feel... valuable.
You know, you don’t actually need wealth to be opulent. Because opulence is not abundance. Opulence is the aesthetic of abundance. It is the aesthetic of owning everything.
The phrase, “Opulence: you own everything” is at this point basically a gay Internet meme. But it originally comes from the documentary Paris is Burning, about Harlem ballroom culture in the 1980s, where it’s proclaimed by emcee Junior LaBeija:
“O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E! Opulence! You own everything!
It’s not a celebration of a real lifestyle of luxury and decadence. In fact, as Pepper LaBeija says of the queer black and Latin-American participants of the balls:
“You know, a lot of those kids that are in the balls, they don’t even have two of nothing. Some of them don’t even eat.”
So ballroom opulence is a fantasy of wealth and glamour — an illusion created by skillful artifice, where participants walk “categories” like executive realness with the goal of being indistinguishable from a real executive.
But nowadays every white queer says the word “realness,” I guess in kind of a frivolous way.
I mean, whomst among us honestly hasn’t slipped into a dissociative fugue state, dressed up as a clown, kidnapped a few neighborhood children and told the cops, “I’m giving you John Wayne Gacy realness, hunty!”
I did it, officer. I did the cultural appropriation. I am a colonizer, I am part of the problem, and I’m sorry. Take me away boys!
I guess I should explain that American slang works according to what we might call a trickle-up model of linguistics: all the new words are invented by the most marginalized gay and trans people of color, then those words trickle up to straight black people and white gays, and then finally white cishets start using them.
A lot of times the original meaning or context of the word gets lost along the way. So originally “realness,” as Shon Faye put it:
“[was] not just a sassy by-word for a convincing costume but a tragicomic disguise of the chasm between what is being emulated and what is absent (namely racial justice, class equality and safety).”
“Realness” in that sense is a much more complicated and interesting concept than the generic trans notion of “passing.”
Passing is just looking like a 5’2” happy baby bouncy biogirl. Whereas in the ballroom sense, realness has a subtext of defying injustice; using artifice to create the illusion of a lifestyle that has been unjustly kept beyond your reach.
As ballroom performer Dorian Corey said:
“You're not really an executive but you're looking like an executive. And therefore, you're showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity I could be one, because I can look like one.”
I think one reason there’s been a surge of interest in 80s ballroom culture, such as the FX drama Pose which is set during the era, is that it dramatizes an essential truth about America: It’s really important to people in this country to at least sometimes feel like they’re living a luxe life, even if in fact they aren’t.
Las Vegas is essentially an entire city that exploits that need. Vegas hotels like the Venetian, the Bellagio, and Caesar’s Palace are designed to make you feel like a fancy bitch, even though they’re actually just high-rise traps designed to lure you in and take your money.
And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s traps.
But the trap works because part of what it is to be American is to want to feel like a fancy bitch.
I actually love Vegas, I was there last year for the only good YouTuber Lindsay Ellis’s bachelorette party. I felt like a fancy bitch, and I wasn’t tempted to gamble.
But when I was younger, when I was in my mid-forties, I did once experience the first exciting stages of a gambling habit.
I happened to go to the casino once out of curiosity and had some good luck playing blackjack. I mean, I wasn’t a high-roller or anything, but my first time I walked out with an extra $200. And that was a lot of money to me.
At the time I was working a customer service job making $10 an hour. So to make $200 in about five minutes, that’s worth 20 hours of soul-crushing customer-service toil… before taxes.
So I went back and I went back, but I never got lucky again, and fortunately that was enough to discourage me.
I remember one time as I was leaving the casino, I saw this man standing outside with this look on his face that I have never seen on a human being before or since. Just absolute shock, despair, this deep shame and self-disgust. The kind of face that says, “I’m gonna have to explain to my wife that I spent the kids’ college savings on a high-limit slot machine.”
And there is nothing opulent about that, nor the people at the slots in wheelchairs with IV drips trying to pay their hospital bills.
America, we are a bad country.
Donald Trump is a Vegas man. He’s pulling this grift on the entire country. And it keeps working because the fantasy opulence of the American Dream is more enchanting to the imagination than any abstract mathematics of economic equality.
And while it may seem like Americans are all under the same spell, there are, in fact, two very different types of magic at work. For the wealthy and powerful, opulence is a flex, a demonstration of their wealth and power; but for the marginalized and impoverished, opulence is a simulacrum of the wealth and power they’ve been denied.
The aesthetic might be similar, but in terms of function, it’s like the difference between a viper and a butterfly serving viper realness.
3 Class
HEY how are you, Hey HOW are you, Hey how ARE you… HeyhowreYOU?
People don’t understand how difficult it is to be this blonde. You know, a biological female that looks like me, I’m afraid some transvestite psycho is gonna sneak in through a rear window and I’ll have to dial M for murder! I get vertigo just thinking about it.
I’ve always found the Marxist analysis of class difficult to apply to the present day. As a typical modern woman it’s just super fucking hard for me to relate to sksksksk anioop anioop anioop that’s praxis.
Like, Bourgeoisie & Proletariat—Whomst? Who is she? Where’s her summer collection? That’s super fucking great but can I buy it?
Marx’s typical examples are a factory owner and a factory worker. Now, I could be out of touch, but personally I’ve never met a factory worker, or a factory owner for that matter. They must all be on a brand trip to China, working on the new B&P summer collection.
What’s supposed to distinguish the bougies from the proles is that the bougies own the means of production and the proles work for wages. But what about a bartender who owns the bar she works in? What about YouTubers? Which side of the revolution are we on?
I’m just trying to figure out where I stand here, ‘cause if the revolution starts on Twitter, my head is definitely going in the basket, and then I’ll have no choice but to do the conservative talk show circuit, you know, like most people whose brains are detached from their bodies.
Marie Antoinette did nothing wrong heyhowareyou!
I feel like a class analysis with only two classes must be overly simplistic. My favorite book about class in America is Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which describes nine distinct classes.
Fussell is not as concerned with economic relations between classes as he is with status, or what Marxists sometimes call social and cultural capital; things like education, style, taste, and attitude towards money.
Now this book was published in 1983 so a lot of the references and details are out of date, but there’s an eerie familiarity to a lot of the core observations. And it’s also just pretty funny, like his quasi-scientific observation that the higher your social class the smaller the balls in the sports you play, or his description of middle-class living rooms:
“your real middle class refuses to show any but the most bland books and magazines on its coffee tables: otherwise, expressions of opinion, awkward questions, or even ideas might result.”
One of Fussell’s core themes is that it’s not how much money you have that defines your class so much as how you got your money. If you had to work for your money, then you’re not really upper class.
The upper class has inherited wealth and as a result they’re very confident. They don’t need to prove themselves. And likewise, the lower classes have basically accepted their position on the ladder.
But then there’s the middle class, who are social climbers and who compensate for their insecurities by, for example, placing a pretentious collage of University bumper stickers on the back of the family car.
This is the meaning of the Lord Melbourne quote:
“The higher and lower classes, there’s some good in them, but the middle classes are all affectation and conceit and pretense and concealment.”
Now opulent aesthetics are typically cultivated by people with something to prove, whether it’s marginalized ballroom performers proving their worth to themselves, or the new rich building McMansions to show off their wealth to others. So there’s something kind of odd about Donald Trump, since he inherited his wealth and should know better than to have golden faucets. But he doesn’t.
As Fran Lebowitz said, “He’s a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” And that’s actually his charm, it’s part of his mass appeal. Trump behaves like a prole who won the lottery — so there’s actually something kind of relatable, un-snobbish, and even pseudo-democratic about the golden faucets.
People who have wealth, but not class, are actually very popular in this country. We don’t like class here, because class is exclusionary. Whereas anyone can acquire wealth (we tell ourselves) so wealth feels potentially inclusive of everyone, even though in practice it isn’t.
Now the upper class cultural elite in this country, the real classy people, are mostly very unlike Trump. Instead of being ostentatious and gaudy, they embrace the reserved old-money values of aristocratic WASPs: white Anglo-Saxon protestants.
Fussell notes, for instance, that they tend to value privacy over showing off — they like to live at the end of long driveways in houses away from public view, and they dress down while traveling so as to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
These are essentially survival skills of the experienced rich. If you flaunt your wealth too much, people might rob you, or they might get envious and come after you with pitchforks and guillotines, or worse — taxation!
Old money knows this, but new money just cannot resist the temptation to show off.
I actually wonder if the old WASPy upper class is dying out. In a way, Donald Trump represents a victory of money over class. His presidency validates the idea that you can be as vulgar as you want, so long as you have the cash to back it up.
So the old class system is dying out, and in its place we have universally adopted the mindset of the nouveau riche: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. If you haven’t got it, find a way to flaunt it anyway.
Now I’m sure this is all very tragic and disappointing to people of class and taste, but to a tacky transsexual rhinestone connoisseur, it’s actually fantastic news.
4 Taste
Listen comrades, I’ve been pretty down on opulence so far. And I could continue analyzing it in terms of inequality and class struggle, but you already know all that. That’s why you came to cut my head off.
But hold on, is that really all there is to aesthetics, Marxist economic analysis, or the SJW version that makes everything about race and gender?
As the most notorious art critic of the 21st century (read: Anita Sarkeesian) once said:
“But remember that It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.”
So what about the enjoyment part? Surely you wouldn’t behead a queen just for liking shiny things. Is there no room for art for art’s sake?
The great philosopher and venerable German closet queen Fräulein Immanuel Hildegard Marlene Kennedy Davenport-Kant said that pure aesthetic taste is disinterested, that is, completely free of any material desire.
Of course Miss Thing also founded the #NoFap movement so I don’t know how seriously we want to take that.
But it’s actually kind of similar to what Plato said about aesthetic sense, that it merely begins with a desire for the bodies of beautiful boys, which is really just a shadow of our true longing for the concept of beauty itself.
God, the entire history of Western aesthetic philosophy is just a bunch of repressed homos trying to rationalize away their debased perversions.
What must that be like? 🤔
From the bottom of my motherfucking and my fatherfucking heart that must be super fucking hard for them I can’t even imagine.
I mean it makes sense really. Straight men don’t have these problems, they got away with painting softcore for 500 years and never had to think about it.
I guess Nietzsche’s the exception. He was straight and a philosopher… but he was an incel. And let’s be honest, definitely a tranny chaser.
The only respectable aesthetician in all of Western history is the upstanding English gentleman Oscar Wilde. According to Wilde:
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.”
Spoken like a poet.
You want to be cultivated don’t you? Don’t you think I’m beautiful?
Look, I’ll play it your way. Let’s swing back to the other side of the Sarkeesian pendulum here.
As sentimental as I personally am about art for art’s sake and all that, from a strictly sociological perspective, I have to admit, taste is pretty intimately related to power.
When you go to a museum you look at various objects on pedestals, under special lighting that makes them appear magical.
Now that’s also what you do at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, but the difference is that at the museum you can’t buy anything. And that turns out to be important for Kantian reasons.
In the retail context of commodity fetishism you correlate your aesthetic taste with material desire. Whereas, in a museum, because you can’t buy anything, you feel like your aesthetic pleasure is pure, that you’re simply enjoying out-of-context objects.
But, of course, that’s an illusion. The museum is the context. And the context is telling you that the things you’re looking at are art. So whoever decides what’s in the museum decides what good taste is, what’s beautiful, and what’s valuable.
Think about the music video for Apeshit by the Carters: Beyonce and Jay Z pose in various places in the Louvre, conferring upon themselves the status and the cultural grandeur of the art. But it’s not just a flex, it means something more than that because of the racial disparity between the performers and the setting.
Black people and black art are mostly excluded from museums like the Louvre, so seeing Jay and B there looking so regal, with black dancers even overshadowing canonical European art, it’s like a full moment.
A lot of people have a deep longing for the sense of dignity and grandeur conferred by classical art. That’s why trans women love that picture someone photoshopped of the Three Graces but with dicks.
I’ll admit that silly picture actually had an emotional effect on me, because here in the West it’s actually hard to think of your body type as beautiful until you’ve seen it sculpted in white marble.
Speaking of which, white marble is a lie.
For most of art history history, scholars have insisted that the iconic ghostly whiteness of classical statues was the distinguishing feature of Western sculpture — proof of the elegant taste of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In reality, of course, it turns out that they were painted the colors of something a drag queen might wear to a Quinceañera.
Scholars had been noticing paint remnants on these statues for hundreds of years, but were completely in denial about it, because the pure whiteness of these figures was like a sacred dogma.
Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker attributes the dogma in part to:
“...a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish… In 2008, Fabio Barry, an art historian who is now at Stanford, complained that a boldly colored re-creation of a statue of the Emperor Augustus at the Vatican Museum looked ‘like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi.’”
...Hey how are you?
And you just know that when the news first broke some horrified WASP classicist turned to a colleague and said, “Oh Kingsley! It looks… It looks Mexican!”
In fact, for the crime of writing about paint on statues, some art historians have been harassed by the Alt-Right, who don’t take kindly to anyone questioning their white supremacist myths about antiquity.
There’s some pretty insidious, um, “identitarian” prejudices at work here, hiding out under the cloak of “taste.”
“Good taste” for upper and middle class white people generally includes a reflexive disdain for anything a little bit too… colorful. It’s these classes that constantly use the words “gaudy,” “garish,” “tawdry,” “tacky.”
Jo Weldon, author of Fierce: The History of Leopard Print, observes that:
“Tacky, as a concept, refers to the lack of cultivation or the resistance to taste, and more often than not refers to tastes that are not suitably conservative. Furthermore, tacky is likely to be feminine, ethnic, queer, deviant; not manly, not practical, not businesslike, not serious.”
Aesthetic excess, particularly of colors, patterns, and bling, is particularly offensive to conservative WASP taste. As Weldon puts it: “Tacky is often where the imagination runs free, where the heart is, where the soul is, and where the fun is.”
Well that’s good news, because people call my aesthetic tacky all the time.
Or camp. People call me camp. And sometimes I don’t know if I’m being praised or insulted. I suppose it depends what camp means.
Camp was the theme of this year’s Met Gala, and my feed was flooded with Brooklynite intellectuals competing to outwit each other with the most erudite definition of what camp really is. And what I gather is that there are a couple competing definitions.
The first I’ll call coward camp; this bratty hipster notion of having bad taste on purpose.
I have no respect for this whatsoever. This is nothing but an anxious and defensive refusal to take a risk.
You think you’re safe from criticism because your look is bad on purpose. Fuck that. Take a stand, you pussy bitch. I take great offense to this as a person whose look is bad on accident.
And Susan Sontag agrees with me. In Notes on Camp, she distinguishes between, “naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.”
Sontag defines naive camp as failed seriousness; a grand artistic vision that gets a little out of control and enters into absurd territory… heyhowareyou?
I don’t know, my philosophy of style is that people should wear what looks good to them. I was joking earlier when I said my look is bad on accident. I think my aesthetic is good, this is what looks good to me, though I’m aware that other people might judge it.
I like what John Waters said about there being good bad taste and bad bad taste:
“One must remember, there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste. To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.”
I’ve wondered for a long time why I’m so attracted to “bad taste.” Like, I technically have the education to know better. I know about Glenn Gould but I prefer Liberace. Why am I so tacky?
I think it’s because I’m a transsexual, which lowers you at least a class. So if you were born upper class and you’re transsexual, you’re now middle class now, bitch. If you were born middle class and you’re transsexual, you are now lower class. And if you were born lower class and you’re transsexual… oof, sweaty, you’d better start a revolution.
Uh, Marsha P. Johnson heyhowreyou?
Chicks with bricks.
5 Glamour
Trans women have a special relationship with glamour—at least, those of us who came of age in the 1960s.
In the most basic everyday sense, glam is a way of styling yourself. It’s luxuriant hair, it's high-drama makeup, it’s long nails, it’s glitter everywhere, it’s posing like a fashion model.
But originally the word “glamour” comes from the Scottish word gramarye, meaning magic or enchantment. And glamour still involves a kind of illusion or charm cast on a spectator.
The connection between glamour and opulence is explored in the 2004 essay, Viva McGlam?Is Transgenderism a Critique of or Capitulation to Opulence-Driven Glamour Models? by transgender writer and underground house music producer Terre Thaemlitz A.K.A. DJ Sprinkles. Sprinkles writes:
“Europe's ruling elite used opulence as an ideological weapon to befuddle the lower classes with glimpses of heaven on earth—a lifestyle so foreign and unattainable that it could only be the result of divination. It is this spell of opulence that led to our current definition of glamour, which is more associated with wealth than magic.”
Sprinkles alludes to an earlier form of glamour or gramarye that was associated with witchcraft, paganism, and sexual deviancy. But in our capitalist society, glamour is a “spell of opulence” conjuring up what is often a fantasy of a lavish life.
For example, a lot of drag queens practice this sort of illusionism by impersonating celebrities, thereby acquiring the glamour of models, popstars, and actresses second-hand.
Sprinkles is bothered by the way this sort of second-hand glamour acquires its power from unquestioned social hierarchies:
“Glamour is suspect as a critical-minded political forum because it is about social distance, not social integration. The promise of the pop-glam diva is not the promise of social transformation, but individual transformation in which the exploited becomes the exploiter. It is a promise of an individual's class mobility, not social betterment or class critique. It is, by and large, the American Dream.”
Now, I have to admit, this is a version of the American Dream that hits pretty close to home for me.
The overarching plotline of my whole entire YouTube gender journey is that I used to be a tragic mess... and I’m still a tragic mess. But when I started this channel I was a broke, gender dysphoric, alcoholic, crossdressing tragic mess. I’d play a clip but honestly those videos are still too painful for me to even glance at.
And now, I mean look at me, look how far I’ve come. I look like a moderately talented female impersonator heyhowreyou.
Those first several months of transition though, they were rough. I had a lot of trouble in the beginning. I used to get laughed out of restaurants. But I was so proud that I wouldn’t let anyone see how much that stuff hurt me.
You know, I’d say, “well fuck them, I know I’m great,” and then I’d go cry my eyes out alone in my car.
And I was a YouTuber that whole time too, which, I mean the cyberbullying alone… I don’t think you can even imagine the extent of it if you’ve never been in that situation.
You know, hundreds of strangers dissecting your voice, picking apart your face and body, clocking your clothes and makeup, digging up your past, trying to deduce the nature of your sexual pathology from the shape of your skull — a lot of this is hilarious to me now, but there was a time when it caused a lot of pain.
But that pain basically spurred me to work on my glow-up like it was the cure for cancer, like my life depended on it, which is how it felt.
Sometimes my trans critics mischaracterize me as, as one Tweeter put it, “crippingly obsessed with passing.” And passing in day-to-day life was always a goal for me, but glam to me is not really about passing. I think I actually pass better in no makeup than in eye shadow “out to here”.
You know, a cis woman can wear eye shadow “out to here” and people think she’s just really into makeup or Instagram or cosplay or something, but when I do it I think it looks like drag, which serves to call more attention to my... situation.
But on YouTube I don’t really try to pass as a normal woman. I mean, everyone here knows I’m trans anyway so what’s the point?
I’d describe my presentation here as female impersonator, and that’s basically what I am—a female female impersonator. And I present this way because it’s fun, I find it artistically fulfilling, and let’s be honest there’s part of me that always wanted to be that kind of larger than life super-woman. But I’m also creating special effects for the camera.
As Sprinkles says:
“glamour offers a strange over-performance of gender signifiers - a tenuously woven layer of super-femininity which is so distracting that it successfully hides the transgendered body beneath.”
Now, a lot of leftist trans people have grown disillusioned with the individual class mobility represented by glamour, as well as by transition glow-up narratives. And I think that disillusionment, and a growing revolutionary sentiment, are at the heart of the intense anger and resentment I’ve noticed a lot of trans women have for drag queens, for glamorous trans Instagram models, and, let’s be honest, for me.
Here’s Sprinkles again:
“As long as an MTF's public acceptance is gauged by her ability to emulate glamorous body and style requirements that elude most ‘real women’, then I'll have to ask you to pardon this transgendered writer for not feeling ‘represented’ by RuPaul any more than my mother feels ‘represented’ by Marilyn Monroe or Princess Di.”
A lot of trans women are basically fed up with having to serve the world a fantasy all the time. They want to be seen for who they are without doing any of that shit. They’re fed up with glamour, they’re fed up with realness, they’re fed up with RuPaul, and a lot of them are pretty fed up with me.
Anioop anioop anioop!
6 Envy
Marxist art critic John Berger called glamour “the happiness of being envied:”
“Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experiences with those who envy you.”
But being envied is a form of happiness that exists only in the imagination. The actual experience of being envied sucks.
This is the risk of opulence: it invites not just enchanted admiration but also envy. And where envy goes, the guillotine follows, or at least vindictive taxation.
This is why the experienced rich know to tone down the opulence, build a nice high wall around their properties, and make a lot of high-profile charitable donations.
We could call this kind of strategizing the public relations of success.
It certainly helps to have a rags-to-riches story, especially if you can make other people feel included in some way in your success. In fact, part of the appeal of hip hop opulence is that it seems to elevate not just a single performer but an entire underclass.
Conversely, being perceived as exclusionary, elitist, or snobbish is gonna cost you big in terms of envy management.
YouTube music critic ToddInTheShadows did a review of Ariana Grande’s song “7 Rings,” in which he basically drags Ariana, who apparently is white, for appropriating a bunch of hip hop rags-to-riches signifiers without any of the subtext of starting from the bottom.
She’s not showcasing a triumph over adversity, she’s just a white girl who likes stuff. And so, in Todd’s words, the song comes across as a grotesque, bullying, VIP-only privilege-flex of a mean girl shoving her wealth in your face.
I actually like that song but… I’m into that sort of thing. Bully me mommy!
Fellow students, as a case study in the public relations of success and envy management let us compare and contrast two successful YouTubers: Jeffree Star and Gigi Gorgeous.
There’s enough similarities between them for the differences to be interesting: they’re both LGBand/orT, they’re both white, they’re both blonde (sometimes), they’re both feminine, they’re both rich, and they both flaunt their opulent lifestyles.
But nonetheless, people basically seem to like Jeffree Star, whereas Gigi, well… I don’t wanna say people don’t like her but… they don’t relate to her.
The best example of this is her 2017 video “I Wear Walmart For A Week”, with it’s gasp-inducing like-to-dislike ratio. Let’s analyze what went wrong here:
“So for today’s video I thought we would take it to a place I’ve never been—Walmart!”
So that’s a bad start, gorg. Most Americans have been to Walmart. Never having been marks your upbringing as upper middle class, at least. And treating going to Walmart as some kind of challenge sort of comes across as you and your rich friends being like “What if we pretend to be poor for a day?”
“I wonder if we’re gonna see any People of Walmart. You know that website?”
“The baby’s crying — the trauma!”
Gigi, no! You need to turn the shade down like twenty notches, gorg.
“I keep kicking my shin on this cart, I’m literally gonna have bruises. Can someone remake these carts please? It’s dangerous.”
They’re gonna cut your head off, gorg.
“What should we get next? Maybe like a gown for a red carpet? Do they sell gowns here?”
This, to me, is peak Gigi—strolling down the aisles of Walmart drinking a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew that she’s plucked from the shelves saying, “I need something for a red carpet, do they sell gowns here?”
This, to me, is an iconic fashion moment. This is naive camp. This is everything.
The idea that she has privileges that other people don’t has never once crossed her mind, and that is a very special, precious thing that I want to cherish. And personally, I have no choice but to stan.
The YouTube comments section, however, is not as amused as I am, nor as forgiving.
(This is the second time I’ve done a close reading of a Gigi video, it’s getting kinda weird. Also why hasn’t she answered my letters?)
Now let’s look at Jeffree Star.
Jeffree does similar kinds of videos to Gigi—he’s even done his own video wearing Walmart for a day, which people loved.
Now, my first impulse when it comes to explaining the difference in public perception is to scream “SEXISM!” And there’s maybe a little of that going on. I do think a rich woman is more irritating to people than a rich man.
But there’s clearly more than that going on here.
Jeffree’s fans are, I assume, mostly women— and not rich women, regular women. The women who work at the dollar store love him.
Ordinary people actually enjoy watching Jeffree flaunt his millions of dollars of designer bags and clothes, because they either live vicariously through him or they see him as aspirational. It’s the same reason why poor people have always enjoyed watching reality TV shows about the extremely wealthy.
The centerpiece of Jeffree Star’s brand is that he’s self-made, he represents himself as having started from the bottom. He talks about his white trash upbringing, and just generally seems like he hasn’t let his wealth go to his head.
A good example of this is his “Private Jet Burger King Mukbang.” At first you might think that a private jet is not very relatable, but the Burger King aspect brings it back down to Earth.
Jeffree seems like he’s been to Burger King before. He’s able to order fluently, he’s even kind of charming to the cashier, he doesn’t like scoff or pinch his nose at anything.
Also the Gucci barette…*tongue pop*
Whereas Gigi… I mean don’t get me wrong, I do love Gigi, but I don’t know if sis would make it out Burger King alive. She’d probably commit some terrible upper class solecism like, I don’t know, not understanding the concept of a value meal.
I’m sure Gigi would make an entertaining video, just not a relatable video. You know, she’d somehow contract syphilis from the toilet seat and do a storytime about that.
That’s really when Gigi’s at her best, she kinda comes back down to earth when she’s serving real transsexual housewives of Beverly Hills meets David Cronenberg.
Economic inequality in this country has always been enabled by the fact that people basically like the rich. Yeah, we judge people who live in McMansions and we get irritated by elitist, out-of-touch behavior, but ultimately we have no choice but to stan.
And the people we stan the hardest are people like Jeffree Star, who in a way, seems like a poor person who just so happens to be very rich.
Now, if inequality increases enough, I suspect the stanning will stop. Because it’s fun to watch Jeffree Star spend $69,000 in one trip to the Louis Vuitton store if what you’re doing is fantasizing about what you would buy with that much money. But if you’re thinking about how $69,000 could pay off your life-ruining medical debt or about how you’d be able to afford cancer treatments for your dying wife, this kind of thing will start getting under your skin. And eventually, people will start building guillotines again.
In fact, the only way I can really imagine a revolution actually happening in this country is if rich people start behaving as badly as possible.
Gigi: So this isn’t your dream job?
Cashier: No.
Gigi: And this is free, right?
Cashier: Oh, whatever you want.
Gigi: Okay, great.
7 Ruin
Good evening, gorg.
Ever notice how most vampires are like counts or queens or, at least rich? I guess some are edgy biker teens, but I don’t associate with that trash.
Gothic horror really got started as a genre with 18th and 19th century novels, which were usually set in an old decaying castle or mansion.
By the late 19th century, the aristocracy had lost a lot of its relevance as a class, so aristocrat vampires like Count Dracula represented a dying world order, and also maybe the metaphorical bloodsucking of commoners by the landed gentry.
Vampires were also usually seducers, and the aristocrat seducer trope had actually played an important role in turning public opinion against the nobility.
So the Gothic aesthetic is an aesthetic of dead and decaying opulence. And that aesthetic has evolved over time from ruins of medieval castles to the iconic haunted house, which in American horror is usually a decaying Victorian mansion.
It’s a trope with an interesting backstory. During the Gilded Age, industrialization produced a new wealthy class of people who built what were essentially 19th century McMansions. And when the Great Depression hit, a lot of these Victorian mansions were abandoned and began to decay, which gave them morbid associations that made them perfect for stories about hauntings and psychos and weirdos.
So ruined opulence becomes Gothic. Which kind of makes you think: we live in an age of opulence and inequality and growing irritation with abusive men in power; the middle class is shrinking, social unrest is on the rise… It seems like a new economic order could be on the horizon.
When the opulence of our age decays, will there be a new Gothic aesthetic of ruined shopping malls? Well, there kind of already is.
The urban explorer Dan Bell is a YouTuber known for his Dead Mall series, in which he explores the ruins of abandoned shopping malls, for example, the now-demolished Owings Mills Mall just north of Baltimore.
The mall opened in 1986 as the Owings Mills Fashion Mall. It had a Macy’s, a Lord and Taylor, a Saks Fifth Avenue; it was a big, high-end mall. But in 1992, a woman who worked as a cleaner at Saks was murdered during an armed robbery on the trail between the mall and the Baltimore Metro Station.
After the murder, the mall got a reputation for being unsafe, and slowly the stores closed down.
Dan recorded two videos at Owings Mills in 2015, when only five of the original 155 stores remained. He takes us through the strangely clean and empty halls, the drained fountains, the gutted food court.
Watching these videos seems to provoke an emotional response in a lot of people. Some say they feel nostalgic or sad, some express rage at the waste and futility, some find it creepy or even horrifying, and some have a dark sense of humor about the absurdity of it all.
One commenter says:
“I think it is still hitting people with slow motion shock that the 20th century is really over… In the 80s, this looked like the start of a big new world of wealth for everyone. In fact, it was the last gasp of 20th century general prosperity.”
I agree with all these comments, and I feel every one of these emotions.
I think there is a new aesthetic sensibility emerging here— a Gothic aesthetic for the 21st century, this decaying opulence that is the carcass of 20th century consumerism.
Oh it gives me a chill. My nape hair stands on end, and a tingle goes down my spine.
The Owings Mills Mall was totally demolished in late 2016. And in Dan’s final video about it, we see clips from his earlier Owings Mills videos intercut with absolutely post-apocalyptic footage of the half-demolished ruin.
It’s not like the feeling of exploring a ruined temple or abbey, where you somehow perceive the spiritual significance of the original building. In a dead mall, you sense the ghosts of the shoppers and the workers, their aspirations and material longings…
But, what does the crumbling wreckage of a JCPenny really mean?
That is a question that will haunt me to the grave.
Coda
Alright comrades, I’ve said my piece. I’ll come quietly, there’s no need to tie me down boys.
Uh, unless you’re into that, in which case by all means.
No, I won’t resist. I accept my fate.
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