Be Gay, Do Crimes: On the Gurlesque, Lana Del Rey, and Teen Girl Theory

Ben Fama: I wanted to have a conversation about how the Gurlesque tradition has responded to and been transformed by our current climate of social justice, and what you each see happening now with other writers and in your own work. Can we start by each of you telling me what books are on your nightstand, so to speak?

Rachel Rabbit White: Someone dear to me just gifted me the collected poems of Frank Stanford, a southern rural poet who died in the late 70s. Last night I decided to treat the book like an oracle, opening randomly to a page as if picking a tarot card. I opened to “Directions from a Madman,” which was so good I had to immediately make a recording of myself reading out loud, you can hear that here, if you like.

It begins with a bang: “Tonight you better listen because I am going to tell you/ What you always wanted to hear./ All you bad hombres better take a deep breath./ I shit you not./ This is the night of nights./ Take a chance on love.”

When that same dear-to-me person and I got back from the bookstore, where he bought me Frank’s book, I read Dana Ward’s poem aloud to him, “The Crisis of Infinite Worlds.”

That’s the one that starts: “Krystle/ Krystle Cole/ You’re all I thought about sometimes. I watched you while our daughter slept/ your Sissy Spacek ways/ your laconic demeanor in relaying/ either ecstasy or trauma/ & the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed/ on YouTube/ which is our loving cup/ the solution of butter/ & DMT you took/ anally that really made you/ freak the fuck out/ & your friends just stood there/ watching you /as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels.”

After I read it, he immediately opened YouTube and found Krystle Cole, the infamous Krystle Cole! It was almost sacrilegious to me seeing her, but then she was as magical, as perfect as I could’ve imagined. There’s something about loving something so much that you want to leave it unconsumed. It’s that fear of exhausting your satiety. Fear of the edible. Of losing what you have.

Of course I am talking more than about Krystle Cole, I am talking about romance, which I am now trying to write poems about, my personal relationship to romance. And when it comes to that, I finally decided: I’d like to learn to be enraptured by my fear.

But on romance, I am also closely reading Elaine Kahn’s new book Romance or the End, which is a stunning meditation on romance on anti-romance. That book is so prophetic, you can also treat it like an oracle. Let me do it now, I’ll close my eyes and see what I land on. I got: UNFUCKED IN THE BED WE FUCKED ON, which goes: “When you loved me/ life was real/ when you forget me.”

I apologize as my project with romance maybe doesn’t relate to the Gurlesque? Or does it? I mean I am interested in queer romance but also my formative history of heterosexual romance, and how it continues in my bisexuality, in my work as a sex worker. The kind of romantic conditioning that is thrust upon us all and how that’s shaped me. How I love or hate it or question it or want it.

For me, Elaine’s book goes into something more metaphysical than gender roles and compulsive heterosexuality, beyond bio-essentialism while still rooted in, as she puts it “Romeo & Juliet & Elaine.”

If anything, I do think the Gurlesque questions romance, or has a sense of anger toward the problem of romance, toward the male object of desire. I think of Ariana Reines’s coeur de lion.

Sandra Simonds: I spent most of the day reading Our Death by Sean Bonney, a friend and poet who I just found out yesterday died last week. There are these brief moments in the book where he talks about sex, but it feels almost mundane. On the first page: “sleep fuck get high,” or in a poem called “From Deep Darkness, “my sexual uncertainty I keep to myself/ my love I leave to the suicided,” and there is some point in the book where he talks about how the unemployed, junkies, and sex workers should be the only people allowed to take over a city. I wonder if the Gurlesque was so focused on performance that it perhaps wasn’t able to see sex and sexual relationships in terms of labor and violence? The Gurlesque also felt very heteronormative and white. So I think the current political climate, fascism and white supremacy calls for an aesthetic that though rooted perhaps in some Gurleque practices, is able to more broadly encompass the political immediateness and despair of the moment. So the question is how does pleasure, specifically sexual pleasure, fit into this and what relationship does that have to art? In my new book, Atopia, one of the first poems starts out “I am a terrible American/ so suicidal” and then later I say “I wanted resplendent queer sex/ I pulled the hair from my head/ like a Greek lament,” so I think in my imaginative landscape queerness has the potential to be associated with liberatory politics.

Rachel: Yeah, we’re a post-Gurlesque period. And yeah, the “Gurlesque,” a term Arielle Greenberg coined in 1999, sitting in her kitchen (maybe she was in grad school then? She went on to work in academia) after noticing a trend in poetry by women but also in music, in film-making. As Sandra said, it was very white, it was also pretty hetero-centric, and I think, with many more traditionally “academic poets” in the anthology, there are maybe class dimensions that also went into the Gurlesque—that makes sense why it was a sort of “feminist” poetry that when it was about sex wasn’t about economics, maybe more about objectification.

I think about this lens when it comes to attitudes to sex work, a lot. I think what makes all women want to speculate on sex work, and also makes them nervous, is that it often seems like sex work is a labor that’s available to basically every woman, whether or not that’s true. (Maybe it kind of is but there are things like racism and ableism that make it harder or sometimes impossible to work etc.) (And even if it’s available, we know it’s trans workers and workers of color who face more violence that can be fatal.)

But that seeming availability of sex work is why all women, I think, feel free to speculate on sex work and that’s also why people get uncomfortable with sex work, because it reveals, though sex is supposed to be this unexplainable specter, it’s always also economic. Maybe it’s triggering for women because everyone does these calculations and it’s scary what you have to face within yourself.

The problem though is feminists who have turned sex work into a metaphor, a metaphor about objectification: that’s why we’re still struggling for this to be seen as a labor issue for actual sex workers who are criminalized. Like: Every woman is expected or pressured in heterosexuality to do the labor that sex workers do, but not every woman is a sex worker.

Sandra: I think there was definitely a kind of bourgeois feminism that constellated itself aesthetically around this “Gurlesque” category, if you will. I don’t want to make essentializing claims but I think that that tendency was certainly there (like some of the contributors wrote books about organic baby foods and the glories of giving birth at home etc.) and that’s because a lot of these folks were middle class white women and really that was the imaginative horizon—it was a nostalgic move backwards to a, more than likely, very stable kind of gated-community-childhood (that’s a metaphor) with maybe a few minor horrors thrown in. I don’t mean that to be disparaging. It is what it is. It’s worth asking why Anne Boyer wasn’t included in this anthology. Why wasn’t I? We were all writing at the same time. I think the answer is very clear, in retrospect. We were writing far more explicitly political poems that challenged a lot of these notions and I think that made a lot of people uncomfortable.

Rachel: So I recently was able to interview Arielle Greenberg for the Poetry Foundation, who edited the Gurlesque anthology and coined the term. I asked her how the Gurlesque informed her own work, how she’s seen it seep into her own poems and she said it hasn’t.

She said maybe that’s because she has a tight set of rules when it comes to what makes a Gurlesque poem… of course I was like “well, what are they!” and she said:

For a poem to be a Gurlesque poem, they have to traffic in the detritus of actual girlhood. Maybe there’s unicorns and glitter but there’s also snot and vomit. Because that’s a category that is always so marginalized but there’s nothing more meaningless in this culture than a girl… in terms of age and gender. They’re femme, maybe high-femme. It has to be girly but it has to be aggressive, assertive, to take you by the throat and throw you down the stairs. It has to be a little fearless and bad ass for sure.

Sandra or Ben, does this definition make you feel as though we are in a post-Gurlesque?

Ben: Maybe we are in a second-wave of Gurlesque that is informed by recent notions of radical gender identity and racial tensions in the Black Lives Matter era. I also had an instinctive sense of the Gurlesque as brash, young, and flippant, although when I think of the anthology, with authors like Brenda Shaughnessy and Kim Rosenfield, that’s not their work at all.

Sandra: I sometimes wonder about girlhood was for those of us who experienced abuse. I get that a lot of people have positive associations with girlhood—but for some of us, girlhood was a blur of trauma and objectification, and when I think of that kind of trauma I wonder how much people who have experienced, say, childhood trauma would see the bracketing of girlhood as powerful or even a source of interest? I think a lot of us just wanted to get the fuck out of childhood, frankly. My girlhood was not filled with unicorns and there was no glitter. I think it’s possible that femme or high-femme presentations in the poetic (and I think a lot of this terminology comes from queer culture) is a kind of reckoning with a shattered, fragmented girlhood or perhaps even the absence of one. And I think the power is actually so much in the queering and explosion of this Gurlesque template. So I agree with Ben, that the continuation of the Gurlesque is one that is informed far more by deconstructing the gender binary and not seeing girlhood as even one inhabited by a monolithic “girl,”—since that just doesn’t exist if you take into account class and race.

Rachel: Is Porn Carnival Gurlesque to you then?

Sandra: I think it’s definitely influenced by that tradition: “on the edge of girlhood/ a putrid blossoming.” Also, I see a lot of the Chelsey Minnis influence, the humor. But what I especially like about your book is that even though the language is kind of revolving in a talkative ether, it feels like the voice really comes out of lived experience. I guess what I mean is that the language doesn’t feel ornamental in a way that some of the original Gurlesque poems did.

Rachel: The Gurlesque anthology, at least the one I am looking at was released in 2010, and Arielle’s definition has me revisiting the semiotext(e) book Theory of the Young Girl, which was released in 2012. I actually read both of these books in 2012.

But like, what does reclaiming girlhood mean in a society made of class war that, as Tiqquin write, has become a “stranglehold of Spectacle over the public expression of desires, the biopolitical monopoly on all medical power knowledge, restraints placed on all deviance by an army better-equipped with psychiatrists, coaches, and other benevolent ‘facilitators’, the aesthetico-police booking of each individual according to his/her biological determinations, the ever more imperative and detailed surveillance of behavior…” ?

Arielle and I did talk about how the Gurlesque revels in the bad, in the trope of the bad girl, Bad Bad, like the title of Chelsey Minnis’s book. And here, Tiqquin are talking about a surveillance-enhanced proscription against the Bad Bad, against violence, that becomes self-policed.

Sandra: When I wrote my book Orlando, I was thinking a lot of the power of teenage girls. Are teenagers girls? I was thinking how there’s a sense in which teenage girls are not taken seriously—their stereotypical preoccupations (makeup, shoes, gossip, diaries) are seen as frivolous, not serious. But also how there’s a kind of pornographic obsession with teenage girls in society as well, and I think this has to do with that kind of patriarchal policing you are talking about. In Orlando, I used my real teenage diaries and quoted them and tried to make sense of the framework of power between the teenage girl and the patriarchal society and how that plays out later in life as a woman. Does it change? I don’t think it changes as much as we want to think it does. Like, a lot of times I hear women say “I’m nothing like the person I was in my teenage diaries,” and I’m just like, I don’t think I’ve changed that much. Same bullshit, years later.

Ben: Rachel, this is interesting and a topic where I would love to hear your thoughts. Where anyone has the chance to constantly monitor and report (to be the Cop in the community), versus the liberated subject of the state, who is able to post their own nudes on main, use drugs, promote harm reduction, in short, “be gay, do crimes” as the memetic phrase goes. There’s a scale in how we regulate ourselves between these two positions, even within the self-talking of our own consciousness: “What should I do tonight.”

This also relates to the sense I have about the “flippancy” of the way politics have been discussed around your book. We’re living in times where everything we do is archived, if not immediately reported online, so it makes sense that someone would adopt a strategy of slant, ironized or even coded meanings. I’m mostly thinking about The Cut article and how people responded to the playful and almost blasphemous pull-quotes about a few political issues.

Rachel: Personally, I feel so done talking about the “party discourse.” I will say my favorite response to the “controversy” surrounding the launch party and The Cut article came from organizer and sex worker Lorilee Lee. She pointed out that it was great that the party had a mutual aid aspect but as she basically said, so what if it didn’t? What if it weren’t. Why can’t sex workers lives be about fun and community and partying, like basically anyone else’s.

Sandra: I don’t have much to say about parties. I never go to them. They are usually uninteresting to me and I would rather stay home. That said, I don’t care what people do at parties and yes anyone should be able to have a party just to have a party and also without being subject to some sort of overarching surveillance system of social control. I have a tendency, in general, to be attracted to petty criminals. They don’t bother me, for the most part! Everyone has the right to enjoy life and it doesn’t mean you are not “serious” about other things like politics or art or whatever. Some people just want to have a good time and it ain’t my biz.

Rachel: On “Be Gay Do Crimes” though, and I guess while we’re on cops, makes me think of “More Lana than Lana,” which is the title of a poem in Porn Carnival, if we’re going to indulge more in “self-talking of our own consciousness,” and the trope of the bad-bad girl.

Ben, you were there for the talk at McNally Jackson, where Ted Dodson asked me about the title of one of my poems, “More Lana than Lana,” which has now become a shorthand in my community. When one of my friends or I are going through some personal drama, “more Lana than Lana” is now always an apt (and meme-like) response.

Like I said at that talk, I’ve thought a lot about Lana Del Rey. In her lyrics Lana plays with the fallen woman archetype. But Lana always also plays with nostalgia, and in Lana the fallen women is somewhat nostalgic, harkening back to a time when there were real consequences for things like having a child out of wedlock or even like 1950s sort of consequences for having sex on a first date. We’re all aware of these histories, of times when women were sent to nunneries for this sort of behavior.

And we all relate to Lana, because we all feel that there are consequences for our romantic actions. But no one understands the trope of the “fallen woman” more than those outside the system. Sex workers I think have a special relationship to Lana because of the Fallen Woman trope. Even without talking criminality directly, because of the nature of the job, our personal and professional love lives remain spaces of risk and of melodrama. Sex workers are still living in the fallen woman paradigm. Sex workers, all criminals, trans people, queers. More Lana than Lana.

Of course, I am a huge fan of Lana Del Rey and I imagine a life of fame must be pretty intense—I’ve never met her but Lana could also be more Lana than Lana. Lana, if you’re reading this, let me know. Are you also more Lana than Lana? We love you. You mean so much to sex workers, to queers, to those of us on the margins. You know your music gets us through it.

But I wonder how Lana’s playing the bad girl, or “more Lana than Lana” fits into a Gurlesque or post-Gurlesque.

Sandra: Is Lana still dating a cop? I can’t think of anything more unsexy! Isn’t that fact less Lana than Lana? In general, I like “fallen” women. I think there’s something about femme fatales from noir films that are very attractive. Maybe it’s because they are constantly slapping men and screwing them over and it’s kind of funny and sad, and I like how they are diametrically opposed to the “good” housewives in these movies. They are the criminals. But I also agree that in these nostalgic worlds of reality and cinema, there are very few options for women. But we are writers and I think writers are able to disrupt these terrible binaries. I like this quote from Clarise Lispector. She says:

I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things - and the world is not on the surface, it's hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.

I agree with Clarise. It’s writing that is the most dangerous, sexy thing of all.