Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music

  

"I'm not really interested in this show being about history as much as I am interested in it being about all of us in this room have a lot of history on our backs and we're trying to figure out what to do with it." —Taylor Mac

At noon on October 8, 2016, Taylor Mac stepped on stage at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn and sang the first of 240 songs that would fill the space over the next 24 hours in one of the most astonishing works of performance art in American theatrical history. 

Mac called the work a "radical faerie realness ritual sacrifce," with the event itself the ritual, the audience the sacrifice. Like much of what Mac says throughout, the statement is both absolutely earnest and aware that it's a funny and provocative thing to say. Mac's approach to personal pronouns is similar, because Mac's preferred personal pronoun is judy:

A few people have claimed I use this pronoun as a joke. They are uninformed. It’s not a joke, which doesn’t mean it’s not funny. It’s a personalized pronoun for someone whose gender (professionally and personally) is constantly changing. My gender isn’t male or female or non-binary (which oddly creates a binary between people who are non-binary and people who are binary). My gender is “performer” (one day I’ll get it on the passport). It’s also an art piece. Imagine getting to have a pronoun that’s an art piece! I’m here to tell you, it’s as annoying to navigate as it is delicious. You too may change yourself.

If you don't know the work of Taylor Mac, that statement is a fine glimpse: fun and funny, absolutely sincere, and determined to share the liberating wonders of queerness and art with the world. (To the L.A. Times, Mac said, "I wanted a gender pronoun that is an art piece, that makes people pause and consider and laugh because everyone is so uptight about getting it right.")

Now, HBO has released a 2-hour documentary about the 24-Decade History of Popular Music made by Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, who previously made together Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, Paragraph 175, The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and Epstein made The Times of Harvey Milk, which won the 1985 Oscar for Documentary Feature. 

It is a 2-hour documentary, not a concert film — hardly any of the songs are presented complete, some of the footage is out of chronological order, and there are brief talking head sections throughout. Thus, what we see is well under 10% of the whole.

Do I wish there were something significantly longer and more of a concert film? Yes. Do I love this documentary? Yes. (See, it's not hard to be nonbinary!) I have so far watched it twice this week and will probably watch it again soon.

The nonstop 24-hour version of Mac's show was an experience that cannot be replicated on a movie screen. The media are different. Even the various 6-hour segments that Mac performed for many years were different from the full 24. The challenge of performing for 6 hours is daunting; the challenge of performing for 24 hours would give even David Blaine a moment of pause. Similarly, while 6 hours is a lot to sit through, plenty of people do that when watching TV these days, and it's hardly unprecedented in the theatre. (Queer saint of the theatre David Greenspan performed all of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude himself for 6 hours!) The whole point of the 24-hour event was to create community, and I am not sure how community could be created through a film alone. Certainly, film events can create community — I know communities that have sprung up via various film festivals, for instance — but I can't think of a way that a film itself (or a book itself or a song itself or...) could create community. Theatre has that magical ability because theatre is itself an event.

What makes the documentary so special, though, is that it gives us glimpses of the unique community that formed during those 24 hours in Brooklyn in October 2016. Epstein and Friedman don't push it, don't make lots of big gestures to show us; they're better filmmakers than that. They let the magic be and let it present itself to us.

That's the wonder of this film. Not that it itself creates community, but that it shows us community being created during the show, helps us feel the importance and beauty of that community, and inspires us to seek the same for ourselves.

As much as it is about community, Mac's show is about queering. In an interview with Jack Smart at People, judy called it an invitation: 

Like, I'm not trying to make something that the mainstream is comfortable with. But I do wanna invite them into the discomfort or the curiosity of what we're doing. And so I'm never trying to bash them over the head, and I'm never trying to exclude them and pretend like we're cooler than they are, which we're not. I'm just trying to invite them into this different experience. And so it's all about invitation, invitation, invitation. That's what I hope the film will continue to do.

From the opening, The 24-Decade History of Popular Music proposes that queering is a duty of all patriotic Americans. It begins with the classic "Yankee Doodle Dandy", but Mac explains that this song was originally a British song making fun of Americans for being effeminite sissies ("Which is really saying something, coming from the British!"). The colonial army won a battle and then, with some captured Brits, "we pointed our bayonets at them and made them sing 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' over and over and over again. And that's how it became an American song. Dandy revenge!"

The entire event that was the show revealed itself as a space for an important what if: What if the world were viewed with queerness at the center rather than the margins? This plays out in countless small ways throughout the film, as well as some deliberate ways, the most obvious being two moments, one funny and disconcerting and touching, the next profoundly moving.

During the 1950s segment, Mac invites straight men ages 18-30 to the stage. The 1950s are famously the decade of suburbia, when white people moved to the segregated suburbs. But they had a problem. They succeeded in keeping many different types of people out of their nice white neighborhoods, but, Mac says, "What they can't do is stop the white queer from being born amongst them. You thought you were safe in the suburbs and then your child is ME!" Thus arose narratives of contagion and conversion: the queer must be sought out, segregated, villified, de-sexed, destroyed because otherwise their terribly faggotry might spread into the pure products of suburban white patriarchal America. 

Mac decides to take the conversion narrative as seriously as the wonderful early-'90s Lesbian Avengers slogan: We recruit.

Once the straight men are on stage, Mac instructs them to imitate what judy does, leading to various amusing and lewd moments. Then judy chooses one of the men and instructs him try to get away from judy while judy sings the Elvis Presley hit "Don't" ("When I feel like this and I want to kiss you, baby, don't say don't..."). (The straight guy is so good it's tempting to think he's a plant, but given that Mac is beloved in the theatre world, I bet a lot of the audience that night included folks with some theatre experience, and this was a guy who was both a good sport and someone with an inkling of how to do improv.) The effect is complex: Mac brings the straight fear of queer desire alive, rendering it real, while also (particularly via the choice of song) showing that what straight men who, for instance, invoke the gay panic defense actually fear is that gay guys will treat them the way they treat women. Funny as the scene on stage is, it's also disturbing because it's so terribly familiar in reverse. And if we remember Elvis singing that song, there's some perfect evidence.

The second moment in the film of queerness-as-norm arrives with Mac's version of Ted Nugent's vile 1975 song "Snakeskin Cowboys", the lyrics originally intended to make fun of guys who dress in a manner Nugent considers too feminine. It's basically an anthem for fag-bashing. And Mac does something beautiful with it. 

Working with music director Matt Ray, judy turned Nugent's song into a slow dance for a queer prom. Mac instructed everyone in the audience to find someone of the same sex to dance with ("and if you're genderqueer you can dance with anybody"). They could be couples or threesomes (they're not creating, judy said, "a heteronormative narrative"), but they needed to do it and do it seriously, get beyond the internalized homophobia that makes them giggle at dancing slowly with someone of the same sex, perhaps a stranger, and just give in to the moment, make it real. The music is beautiful, tender, sweet. Nugent's hate gets detourned into the prom dance so many of the people in that audience were denied. Just as the insult queer got made into something of our own, and then released back into the world for anybody to use in a positive way, so is the terror embedded in "Snakeskin Cowboys" undone, and what results is magic.

From early in the show, the 24-Decade History of Popular Music wrestles with the paradox of beautiful music saying terrible things. In the film, this paradox first really gets addressed with an 1829 sea shanty adaptation of a minstrel song, "Coal Black Rose". It's early in the show, Mac's voice is in great form, the performance is gorgeous. It's compelling music. Just as the audience is about to applaud at the end, Mac stops them. This is not a song that should be applauded. The beauty of the music makes it easy to miss what the song is saying in lyrics like, "One more round then heave her dry/ Come on, Jack Tout, you're not that shy." 

The men on the boat are hoisting up a sail, and they're trying to build their community by hoisting up the sail together, with the idea that when they get the job done they can go into town and gang rape a slave, a woman who is enslaved. People love things that build communities, and they never want to get rid of anything that builds a community. But. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that the things that have built the community, the foundation for them is evil, and it's not serving you, and that you have to tear it down and start from scratch.

Mac could have made fun of the song in the arrangement or performance, but judy is smarter than that. The music is arranged to encourage a positive reaction, to make us like the song, to find it beautiful and rousing. That's part of the power of music. The word community itself has a certain music to it, a certain emotional power, and it is to the credit of everyone involved in making the show that they recognize that how we create community matters. It is entirely possible to create community by bonding over the oppression and even destruction of other people. (Every military understands this.) Everyone involved with The 24-Decade History of Popular Music wanted to create a truly positive, creative community, not a community of oppression.

But they also know that community is possible through the shared experience of being oppressed. The whole idea for the show originated in Taylor Mac's experience (in adolescence) of political events during the first AIDS crisis. It was the experience of seeing a community come together because they were being destroyed together.

Taylor Mac is a couple years older than me, and we both first arrived in New York in the same year, 1994. (We never met, alas, that I remember.) I entirely identified with what judy said late in the film: "Dating in the '90s was navigating whether you wanted to go on a date with someone who might not be here in another six months. Never having a moment where your sexuality is free. Kind of having a sense of what you may be missing, but always, always being afraid of sex."

This is why the kind of sex positivity Taylor Mac embodies in performance is so important. Gay men in the '80s and '90s tried to develop an ethos of absolute honesty about sex, without shame or stigma, and with as much of a sense of humor as possible, because it was literally a matter of life and death. That is not an easy ethos to practice, especially if you, like many of us, internalized plenty of homophobia, suffered oodles of self-hatred, and grew up terrified of your own desires. (I've written about my own experience in a 2016 piece for LitHub.) That stuff warps the soul, and the only way through it is to practice openness and honesty, doing whatever you can do to banish the idea that physical pleasure should be spoken of with shame. It ain't easy. My single favorite performance of Mac's is actually about this — it's a 2007 performance of a song called "Practice", available on YouTube here. It's funny, explicit, and then deeply moving. It also gets at some of the challenges and contradictions of our ethos when, speaking of judyself in third person, Mac sings: "Sometimes he thinks he'll never have a healthy lovelife because he has a problem talking about sex with his lovers ... even though he doesn't have a problem talking about sex in front of a hundred and forty strangers."

AIDS inevitably looms large over the show and the film. The disease and the politics around it provided Mac with his own first experience of queer community. Co-director Niegel Smith speaks movingly about how much loss there was from HIV/AIDS and how deeply it affected the artistic community. They built this loss into the show by starting with 24 musicians on stage and sending one away each hour. After singing Suzanne Vega's 1992 "Blood Makes Noise", Mac announces that they will now be losing their costumer Machine Dazzle, an integral member of the team not only behind the scenes but on stage helping Mac in and out of the many astonishing costumes. "The audience has a bond to that queen," Mac says. "Every time you see one of those outfits, it's just pure delight. So when you think all that delight, all that artistry is going to be taken away ... for me, it's what it was like to come of age during the AIDS epidemic. Every incredible artist that you hoped would be a mentor, you know, passes..."

This leads to Mac's scorching performance of the great Pansy Division song "Denny" (which I recently included on my Largehearted Boy playlist for Last Vanishing Man, unaware that Mac put it in the show). It's one of the important songs of the AIDS era because it so vividly captures the anger, desperation, fatalism, and despair of that time. "Denny had a skull and crossbone smack in the middle of his forehead. He said, 'I want them to see what they done to me, Denny." Mac's voice is pretty hoarse by that point, making the performance less pretty than the original, but the harshness captures the emotion even more than the Pansy Division version.

The last person to leave, before the final decade, is Matt Ray. It is a wrenching moment, even for us watching the movie at home. As musical director, he not only helped put it all together, he was up there conducting and playing instruments throughout. The exhaustion and love are palpable in the frame.

And then it's just Taylor Mac, alone — except not alone. The magic of the event is that the audience has been rejuvenated, liberated, empowered. Taylor Mac strums a ukelele and scratches out, in a voice that's been going for almost 24 hours continuously, a beautiful song of judy's own composition, "When All the Artists Leave or Die". 

Sleep well
Get up
Do it again
Day after day after day
Until the cockroaches are your only patrons
Even then
You can lie down
Or get up and play

Mac gives the song to the audience to sing in the end, and a gentle, enlivened, inspired chorus echoes through the theatre: You can lie down ... or get up and play...

It's gorgeous and moving. Epstein and Friedman allow it to settle, then they run Mac's invigorating performance of Patti Smith's "People Have the Power" (which you can see judy perform on the Colbert show on YouTube here) and then a really fun, upbeat rock version of "Turn, Turn, Turn".

For HBO to release this film now has been lifegiving. This week — on the last day of Pride month — the U.S. Supreme Court declared that discrimination against queers is legal. This while states like Florida and Texas pass one initiative after another against us, and particularly against trans people. The Department of Homeland Security, of all places, says hate crimes against us are on the rise. No surprise. The rhetoric of the rightwing is all about how monstrous we are.

Only half an hour south of my house, neo-Nazis — literal neo-Nazis — disrupted and intimidated a drag story hour at a queer-owned coffee shop. Now is the time we need to embrace Taylor Mac, Machine Dazzle, and everyone else involved with The 24-Decade History of Popular Music as exemplars of the messy, utopian possibilities of drag, of genderqueering, of historyqueering, of musicqueering. For all of us, straight and [whatever] alike. 

Heteronormativity seeks to destroy everyone's freedom by confining us all, regardless of who we are or what we want, to a suffocatingly claustrophobic idea of what life can and must be.

We know better.

The great subversive power of work like The 24-Decade History of Popular Music is that it shows that life from the margins can be not only liberating but joyful, and the people who hate us seek to destroy our joy because they are incapable of opening themselves to its possibilities. We offer invitations; they insist on prohibitions.

Queer utopian theatricality shows that a world open and welcoming to all sorts of expression is a world of wonder. That community is possible in the best ways if we work at it. That imperfection is glorious. That we can make and remake ourselves, with love and honesty and maximal fabulousness.

These are difficult times, but we know how to live through difficult times. We know how to hold each other, scream with each other, love each other, laugh with each other. We know what to do.

You can lie down — or get up and play.