I haven’t been able to stop thinking about The School For Scandal since Blaze’s excellent comment in class:

“Why can’t a production just be queer / have queer aesthetics? Saying it can’t have those aesthetics ‘just because’ – is that any different than saying women shouldn’t be acting unless a piece is feminist? Saying it can’t asserts a normative male narrative as the default.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment because Blaze is absolutely right, in a way I didn’t really conceive/consider, and yet I still have a weird feeling about TSfS. But now that I’ve accepted Blaze’s view as true, I’m left struggling to find a justification for why that feeling lingers. The resulting word vomit will be my real time processing of these thoughts, and hopefully together we will come to some satisfying conclusions.

One of the main comments I get on my writing, whether it’s supposed to be a reflection or a research paper or an analysis, is on the strength of my voice and of my perspective and the way they seep into my writing. And I realized that if (or when) I direct a show, it would be drenched in queer aesthetics just by way of me directing it – a queer narrative is my default narrative, and I would have to purposefully assert a more normative viewpoint onto my storytelling for it not to have those queer aesthetics. So maybe the director of this show is just a very queer person, and this is how they tell stories. Now I don’t know anything about the director, and I don’t really care to, because the point of this isn’t to take offense to the presence of queerness and then demand a justification – that concept is exactly what Blaze’s point rebukes: you shouldn’t have to justify a non-normative viewpoint/aesthetic just because it differs from the norm.

So why does TSfS leave me with that aftertaste? Especially because I loved the show while I was watching it, and still do absolutely love it. Let’s look at the queerness itself.

How is this show queer? The constant ballroom culture references, from costume design to “HOUSE OF JOSEPH”. The color palette. The quippy, rhythmic asides. It’s definitely queer. Is that queerness doing anything?

When I first saw all the aesthetics, I thought the show might have a specific queer commentary in regards to scandal. The queer community has a serious problem with scandal – us queers love to “eat our young” and dogpile on or publically excommunicate people based on bits of gossip. I hate to use the phrase “cancel culture”, but there is a lot of queer-on-queer canceling: this person isn’t blank enough (so must be The Opposite), this person said something a few years ago that’s insensitive now, this person didn’t respect this concept/group/tradition we value, Do Not Interact Or Associate With Them.

With the introduction of Charles, I wondered if the show was making a connection between excess and queerness. The campy excess of ballroom culture came about as a critique of society, of how the people in the semblance of excess at a ballroom were, in real life, forced into poverty and lower class living by the society they lived in, and would never have an opportunity for excess in the real world. And today, a kind of perverted inverse exists where actual people in positions of power and excess love to steal queer aesthetics and culture, completely untethered from its history. “Vogueing” as a dance is a commentary by the black trans participants in ballrooms on how they could never be on the cover of vogue, and now it’s just,, a dance. A word for striking a pose. Was the show piggybacking on this? Overdone ballroom extravagance as a stolen stand in for someone with neither real wealth nor authentic queerness?

Hmm. Maybe the show was doing that, now that I mention it? Let’s look at Charles. Charles is the queerest character in the show. At his house, he’s in violent pink drag and drinking with three half nude men. He’s also shown to be the most excessive, squandering his fortune and throwing away money on champagne and giant fountains. Additionally, he is kind-hearted and charitable, which we learn is part of the reason for his debts (he overgives to friends and charities). We see a lot of drag aesthetics in the outfit of Snake, our scandalous gossip, who I felt especially was played as the opposite of straight (gay) (see what i did there). Snake, also, turns out to be kind of a nice guy, helping Charles and Sir Oliver in the end. So we have the two gayest characters, one of whom appears extravagant and the other as a shit-stirrer, but both are also ultimately good guys? How does their queerness connect them? Does it? Or does it not – I don’t really think the queerness represents a character trait that is exemplified in those two characters. Maria is not queer at all, but also is kind of a blank canvas of “a nice, desirable lady” so the queerness probably isn’t their good nature. Teazle is extravagant, and excessive, but not especially queer in her aesthetics, just kind of pink.

I would be tempted to just tie this excess to the color pink and not queerness, with a good data point being Lady Teazle who is not queer but just extravagant and also covers herself in pinks. But color seems to be doing other things in this show, with pink seeming to be this showy wealthy nobility, black being joyless, and white being “goodness”, or something along those lines. We see Lady Sneerwell go from pink to black, Lady Teazle go from solid pinks to pink and white, Maria consistently in white, Charles consistently in pink, Joseph consistently in black, Peter in black until the final scene in pink, Oliver naturally in pink but in disguise in black, and Lappet and Rowley in pink. All this seems to show the colors doing something independent of queerness. And Snake has no pink at all!

So, it seems like the queerness is benign! And that’s totally okay, as we learned earlier!

Right?

Because I mentioned earlier that queerness and ballroom culture have a history of being appropriated by the very society they are produced in defiance of. And looking back on the play, I felt shades of that. I wonder if there are things that this play did that made its queer aesthetics feel inauthentic, and that inauthenticity made it feel like a colonial endeavor. Maybe most obviously, all the relationships depicted are straight. There’s no gay or trans characters, which feels especially odd because they are clearly okay with changing the text to fit their staging. They felt fine replacing the very anti-semetic character Moses with a woman named Morehouse and then not making any references to jewish people. Lappet, the servant, is an entirely new character added in this production. And yet with all these additions, all the relationships are straight. Why not have Maria be Mario? Why not have Joseph be a lady, a Josephine, vying for this Mario and painting Charles as queer and excessive and therefore unworthy? That could add a really fun dimension to this play. But this isn’t a smoking gun of it being offensive, that’s just something I’d have liked to see.

Ultimately, I think the feeling I have towards the play’s aesthetics, and of its “aftertaste”, isn’t offense or disapproval, but disappointment. In the first moments of watching it, I thought the play might’ve been using the queerness to comment on the queer community’s harmful penchant for scandal, or to comment on how the rich and powerful steal and pervert queer culture. And ultimately, it didn’t choose to do either of these, or really to do any commentary on queerness, or even include it in relationships or people.

And y’know what? That’s fine, actually. Queerness is fun! The aesthetics are awesome, there’s a reason all the rich and powerful want to be like us. I think it’s great the show was so queer, it’s one reason I enjoyed it so much – and that feeling in my stomach is just a slight disappointment it didn’t do more, not a deep-set belief that the whole production is exploitative and colonial. I guess for the real commentaries and controversies, ya just gotta go to the globe.