Whenever I find myself wearying of the race-class-gender-bore-ness of it all, I turn to photographs like this as a kind of inspiration. There is something to be said about the creativity that comes with repression, not another marriage ceremony. The inhabitants of these photographs–because that’s what they do in the frame: inhabit it–remind me of what’s been sorely lacking in the public sphere for years now: wit. The reason we love Michelle Obama, say, is because she plays kitten to her husband’s basset hound earnestness. (I love them both but you know what I mean.) Wit is not entirely language based; it can manifest itself in a coyness we do not mean, like Marlene standing “shy,” as Anna works her mouth. (Of all the players seen here, Marlene has the best costuming for play.) And Leni, no stranger to control, looks out of control as she tries to coquette it up on the edge of the frame; she can’t win. In point of fact, the two people who dominate these images are Wong, and the unidentified man. Wong because she knows what the camera can handle, which is to say the smallest of gestures magnified by one’s grand interiority, and the unidentified man because of the enormous heart and pleasure he feels in Anna, Marlene’s, and Leni’s presence. I can relate. Which is why we love looking at photographs, despite their sometimes painful truth: so we can relate.
But back to the race-class-gender-bores. I was recalling, recently, how the late great Barbara Epstein called the
love that dared not speak it’s name the love that won’t shut up. That cheers me. And a black male friend told me he was in bed with a white male lover the other day and the white male lover reached down and said, What I love, really, is how we’re the same size. And my black friend said: But I’m not hard.
I mean, doesn’t that say it all, and with wit, too? My friend’s story equals the scene Richard Pryor wrote for “Blazing Saddles,” where Madeline Kahn, playing a Marlene-like character, purrs in the black sheriff’s ear: Is is true what they say about you people being gifted? And then Madeline says, Oh, it’s true, it’s true! There’s a pause before the black sheriff says: That’s my arm.
(The scene as described above was cut from the film.)
All I’m saying is that there are no answers to any of this stuff, and what I look for, what I need, in addition to society’s various truths and struggles, is the glamour that can come with not putting your cards on the table all at once, and imparting a little style and wit to all the differences you can’t change–and should revel in, without the burden of explanation.
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