It was surely not possible to stand proudly hunched before “Little” Edie Bouvier Beale did it. Most every gay icon is a study in contradiction, stable (or not) in a distinctive, vibrating sort of way, and Edie epitomizes the type. She stares down the camera with a queer combination of defiance and desperation, craving to be understood while resisting all understanding. Her outfit, close-fitting, just this side of tight, is a bizarrely lovely mnemic bricolage in which each piece’s function is altered without altering at all its purpose. From her clothing to her core, Edie is a meticulously put-together wreck.
Her hands are on her hips, fingers cupped and palms turned outward, hiding her love handles. Her skirt—one of Jackie O’s castoffs, apocrypha has it—is upside-down, fastened with a knot and a safety pin. “You can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape,” she explains. Her brows are almost completely bald, as is her head, stripped by alopecia, and droop over a deep squint. Her iconic headscarf, midnight blue, tied into a twist and fastened with an intricate gold brooch, falls limp and empty onto her back.
In the pantheon of gay divinities, Little Edie looks a little out of place. She sings, but nothing like Streisand; she’s glamorous, but nothing like Garbo; she dances, but nothing like Dietrich—Edie’s appeal and fascination are unique. She never had the fame that makes a downfall so juicy, nor did she ever—aside from harboring a crush on the homosexual handyman Jerry, a classic symptom of fag-haggery—show any particular affection for the gay community. Edie was never a truly great beauty, not so much a one that she could build a life on it; and like her home, her looks didn’t so much fade as collapse—her face and her figure have literally fallen, drooped, “like an old flag”; she hunches; she squints. The years falling like weighty dust motes over Grey Gardens have also settled on Edie. They’ve found purchase on her cheekbones and sunk them into jowls, alighted on her waist and congealed into love handles, and cascaded down her back like burrs, catching and pulling out her hair. Edie gives the impression of having not passed but collected time; she wears it repurposed as an accessory. And yet there she is. Almost in spite of herself, Edie remains divine. Fabulous.
Tony Kushner writes that “ ‘Fabulousness’ is one of those words which provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular oppressed culture’s most distinctive, invigorating feature.” Edie moves in the realm of high fabulousness, there can be no doubt—and surely not because she adheres to any standard of conventional beauty or perfection. (Is the conventional ever fabulous?) No—Edie is fabulous because she manifests the most invigorating characteristic of gay subjectivity and culture: the sheer audacious strength of will required to generate a self.
The quintessential gay superlative, fabulous resolves etymologically into the adjective form of fable—story, legend, myth. The fabulous contains some fragment of the mythical. At the same time, it generates something novel, its own part of the myth. Edie’s is a mythopoeic feat of self-construction: cut off from society as well as Society, her impossible task—for a person only coheres in a community—is to hold herself together in a socio-mythic vacuum. It’s no accident that an unsympathetic viewer would call her incoherent. Intending to disparage only what she says, this viewer winds up pointing to one of the Grey Gardens’ more central and animating horrors: that Edie, cut off and shut in, broken away from society, alone in a world of two, ceases to hold together as a person. Falls apart. Becomes “just” mad. Becomes a citizen of nothing.
But Edie not only insists upon cohering, she insists upon cohering with a nigh-inimitable ferocity and strength. She makes for herself fashion, and art; and so she makes for herself memory, and history; and so she becomes a citizen. She is an artisan of myth—she is fabulous.
Of course, artisans typically produce things, and so perhaps it’s no wonder that Edie is not content to leave her myths intangible. Edie’s life is full of things—things that anchor and support her, things that give her soul material and sensuous reality. “I feel very strongly about mementos… and what do they call it, memorabilia, or something,” she tells the Maysles. “I couldn’t throw anything away.” Each one of her things is a memory; each one of her memories is a part of her self.
Indeed, it’s less myth than memory that gives her the strength to cohere, to stand against the health department, the family, and polite Society. It’s her memory that secures for her an alternative citizenship, an alternative personhood, and an alternative society, and thus provides the foundation for some kind of resistance against repression.
The Way We Were is a study of memory in its material, historical form. It examines the recent social history of the gay community through the lens of a brand-new, theoretically rigorous account of historical memory’s functioning. From the notion of memory is develops the problem of forgetting, investigating the current gay generation’s efforts to commemorate or repress its relationship to the AIDS plague. And none of this does it do for the sake of doing it—on the contrary, The Way We Were is an elegy and a political manifesto, an engaged, post-“post” call to action with the potential to change the face of gay politics.
One of the lessons of Edie’s experience is that the threat of amnesia is constant and dire. And amnesia, ultimately, means reversion to a state before politics, before identity, and before community, a state in which one is alone and excluded, a citizen of nothing. Amnesia is solipsism and pathologization; amnesia is the essence of oppression. We turn to memory because it is the only other option, there is nothing between remembering and forgetting; we turn to memory because it is our best hope for a politics of liberation.
For more information about The Way We Were, including a chapter outline and set of sample chapters, please contact Daniel.