The Streisand Effect (Part Two)

To mark the U.S. release of Streisand’s new album, Love is the Answer, here’s an essay I wrote about my partner’s adoration of her. It’s been rejected by some classy publications, so I may as well share it here.

Part one appeared yesterday.

Here’s part two…

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Streisand is part of our lives. A member of our family. A wedge in our household’s pie chart. Some people watch home movies of their kids; we watch “Color Me Barbra,” one of her professionally produced TV specials. She’s gotta move, gotta get out, but not until she finishes melding into painting after painting. Sitting for Modigliani, she plays with a glass of wine, her pilgrim collar akimbo as she sings “Non, c’est rien!”

In the next scene, she performs on a set decorated like a circus, singing about and performing with various animals, and the special ends with The Voice at full tilt. Streisand sings while standing, sitting, and lying on the stage in front of stairs that seem to lift into the sky and disappear. The sky changes color throughout the set. “Tell me,” she demands, “where am I goooo-iiiiiiiing?” Her final question voices the possibility that anything could happen. The studio audience of carefully selected people goes wild, sounding so much more committed than a typical studio audience.

The image fades into what would have been the last commercial break when “Color Me Barbra” was aired on March 30, 1966. But it’s a DVD, so we don’t have to wait to find out if she’ll do an encore. Of course she does. As the credits roll, she sings “Starting Here, Starting Now.” I feel so wistful. I picture Doug as a kid watching his fade out at the end, already pining for her return. Actually he would have been too young when the program first aired. He watched it for the first time on videotape sometime after he began worshipping her in late adolescence as he was starting to develop his own singing and acting skills. He didn’t pine; he rewound the tape and played it again.

Before Doug, I thought of her as a has-been and didn’t remember thinking about her much as a kid. She was there on the radio, on the TV, in magazines, not so much a presence, just one of the pop stars I recognized. I didn’t know yet that she was idolized. But then I remembered that I felt mesmerized every time I heard “The Way We Were.” It was on the radio all the time and my mom had bought it on vinyl. The song made me so sad, but there was pleasure in that pain. I pined for something without knowing what or why. I didn’t know the pining would become an energy source for me and replenish itself, propelling me through childhood. At the age of four, I already longed for the past, but having not much of a past I hoped for a future of my own with pleasurable and painful memories worth singing about. I knew already it’s not just the laughter we remember when we remember.

What I might have completely forgotten had I never met Doug is that Streisand also made me laugh when I was a kid. A local TV station played Owl and the Pussycat as the late movie. I remember watching as she stumbled about an apartment wearing black lingerie with a pink handprint appliquéd on each breast and her character’s name, Doris, emblazoned across her buttocks. She turned to George Segal (as her put-upon neighbor cum love interest) and shouted, “Who gave you permission to read my panties?” Being nine or ten, I laughed until my ribs hurt.

When Doug and I watched the movie a few years ago, we were surprised to hear Streisand call Segal’s character a “fag!” I lost my breath for a moment hearing her throw that slur at him. I felt stung and more than a bit livid for a few hours. How ironic, I thought, for her of all people to have used such an ugly term. She was playing a character in a movie made long before there was much widespread compassion for gay men. To the contrary, she has proved to be an outspoken supporter of equality. Except for the slur, it’s a terrific performance, allowing her to flip attitude but reveal the vulnerability of her character. She wasn’t using the ugly language to speak for herself, as some gay icons (gay or not) have done and still do.

Diva object choice is often fraught with ambivalence, but perhaps the need for gay icons is waning a bit. Fledgling gay people now have at least some exposure to gay life, feeling comfortable with deconstructing old traditions or building new. Closeted gay boys may become an endangered species, capable of singing their own songs of hope instead of needing to identify with a diva whose heart’s a drummer.

As terrific as that would be, I’m a little nervous about losing such aspects of gay identity. As I make the transition from young thing to aging queen, it is my duty to worry about this. Diva History has been cut from the American pop culture curriculum for those born after 1986. They know of Madonna but prefer Britney and Beyoncé. They know little about Donna Summer or Liza. If they’ve heard of Barbra Streisand, it’s not because they admire her for being one of the few who have won the Emmy, Tony, Grammy, and Academy awards. They don’t care that she has sold nearly 150 million albums worldwide. Rather, they know of her as a monster from an episode of “South Park,” causing them to roll their eyes and laugh with disdain as they say, “She’s so gay.”

It seems a cultural crisis, but maybe only for those of us at the end of the Barbra-adoring generation. Change is inevitable–Streisand taught me that on the penultimate track of her 1997 album Higher Ground. And I’ll admit it: I still have work to do. For example, I don’t fully appreciate all of Yentl’s virtues. But I’m working on it. I remain loyal and a bit defensive on behalf of some celebrity who will most likely never know of my existence.

So I do my part, suffering mightily to keep tradition from fading, sometimes going above and beyond the call of duty. When Doug and I sing in the car like raging stereotypes to “What Kind of Fool,” one of Streisand’s duets with Barry Gibb, Doug is always Barbra. Meanwhile, I sing as cheesily as possible, distancing myself from the singer I’m expected to emulate. Streisand may be Doug’s diva more than mine, but who wants to be Barry Gibb all the time?

Doug takes his role seriously, but I’ve noticed that he always stops for a breath at a certain place where Streisand never does: “When someone is in your [breath] eyes…!” He’s a trained singer; he could easily complete the phrase if he chose to. It’s as if he bows to Her by leaving the flaw in his performance. It’s one of my favorite Dougisms.

He continues with the next phrase, and I join in, hesitant but willing, like some kind of fool.