The Cockettes
David Bowie
The question of what these performances ask us to ignore seemed relevant to me in the Auslander reading. The queer reading of glam rock he presents led me to think about the paradigm presented of queering rock n roll, but still producing rock stars (Marc Bolan, David Bowie) who served as heterosexual sex symbols, at least, to the mainstream audience.
Auslander writes that hippies hated glamour, which may be true, but he ignores "hippie" collectives/performance groups like the Cockettes who embraced a sense of drag and glamor at the same time as part of their Bohemian lifestyle. They were, however, openly queer, not in a mysterious way or as rumors (Mick Jagger and David Bowie had sex!) but as not-straight individuals.
I think this relates to Auslander's idea that to be a successful musician is not only to sell a performance of music that people like, but to sell the performance of a genre-specific (or perhaps bending) identity. He writes about cross-dressing being a "creating a sort of anxiety" in the United States, but the glam rock groups not only had large amounts of angry homophobic anti-fans, but also large amounts of female fans who found the performance of androgyny sexually provocative (in a good way).
I suppose I'm saying it seems like it might be a function of the form of glam rock to preference the idea of creative rebellion and exploration and ignore the possibilities of calculated gains both in shock value and female attention.
