ode to antony and the johnsons’ transgendered open-air cabaret.
Noah Berlatsky has a sharp analysis of the new Antony and the Johnsons’ album, The Crying Light, in the Chicago Reader. Berlatsky follows the transgendered singer Antony Hegarty’s shift from an urban to a natural setting for explorations of gender, sexuality, the self, and the world.
Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons (photo: Alice O’Malley/Secretly Canadian)
Queering the Grecian Urn, Berlatsky explores Antony’s recalibration of gendered transcendence in the Romantic poetry of Keats. But he’s on to something more. We’re not “leaving camp” in the new music of Antony and the Johnsons; we’re returning to its traditions.
We usually place camp deep in the city, but it’s actually got country roots. Where does the term “camp” originate? Noone really knows, but the lore places this cultural (and political, one might add) style and sensibility among female impersonators who would follow military encampments around. Others claim that gay men in San Francisco used to journey to the high Sierras to camp out, sometimes playing elaborate games of cowboys and Indians.
Either way, Berlatsky’s essay is right to investigate the shift to the outdoors in Antony’s explorations new music: there’s always been something natural at work in camp’s artifice.