"... because he would start saying things like, 'I am the most beautiful. I am the king,' all that kind of stuff. It’s like [Flamboyant 1940s and Fifties wrestler] Gorgeous George. A lot of boxers and wrestlers do that. Trump does that [laughs]. But that was like stuff he said on stage. Maybe he got confused, as many of us do, about whether you’re on the stage or in real life.... When he was the biggest singer in the country and his songs were huge hits, people didn’t talk about him being gay or anything. I don’t know if he was beyond that because he was so scary. They didn’t even know what he was. He was a Martian more than being gay. It was like he was from another planet.... [H]e died completely homophobic and saying horrible things about gay people and transgender people. I would always say in my [spoken word] show that we should kidnap him and deprogram him, like what that guy Ted Patrick used to do with Moonies. Remember when parents would hire him to get their kids, and he would take you to a hotel room for a week and get you unprogrammed?... I guess he flipped over to radical Christianity. He could have been a Christian and not a hate-Christian. He could have just quietly gone to church. A lot of people do, but they don’t say terrible things about gay people. Especially when you look like that [laughs]. Especially when you were Princess Lavonne in the carnival; he was a drag queen in the carnival and wrote about it in his book."
From an interview in Rolling Stone with the film director John Waters. Waters interviewed Little Richard for Playboy in 1987, and Little Richard tried to take the interview back after he'd given it.
Waters has long worn a mustache that he says was modeled on Little Richard:
And Waters used Little Richard's song "The Girl Can't Help It" in his movie "Pink Flamingos":
That's a parody of this sequence in the 1956 movie "The Girl Can't Help It":
Now there's a contrast in the gay experience in America. A poor black kid in the Deep South raised on strict Protestantism and a rich white kid in the mid-Atlantic raised on Roman Catholicism. Little Richard was clearly conflicted between a life devoted to Christ and a life of celebrity excess. His expressed views on homosexuality vacillated throughout his career, though he tended to couple them all with acknowledgments of god's love. Waters nursed a spiteful antipathy towards the Church throughout his career. For people like Little Richard, the church was a source of inspiration and uplift. "We shall overcome." For Waters, the Church was an oppressive killjoy standing in the way of him and his indulgences.
Whatever issues Little Richard may have had can't hold a candle to some of the shit they said about Chuck Berry, including Keith Richards using him as an example of how it's probably better you don't meet your idols.
Little Richard's playful attitude to gender and sexuality and struggles with his own desire are definitely in scope for analysis of one of the most transgressive, transformative and simply bizarre American phenomena of all time. Agree with Waters on the punk thing. And Al Green, my favorite singer of the 70s, is also a fire and brimstone preacher more than soul singer nowadays, although I don't think his and Little Richard's sins overlap much, legion though they are.
""Did he have a sense of humor about himself? Kind of. But you couldn’t quite tell...""
That's an interesting concept and one that could be applied to Waters himself. People who put on a comic act based on their personality do have a sense of humor about themselves, but when the act goes on for a long time, they could come to take it - and themselves - very seriously. The act and the self merge together and people can get sensitive about it. Also, whether or not one has a sense of humor about oneself has a lot to do with what aspect of one's personality or self one is expected to laugh at. It's like that with humor in general: people do have things they can't laugh about. That was probably true of Jon Waters and Little Richard, but the things they didn't find funny weren't the same things.
This is why, despite not being a fan since my younger days, pro wrestling remains fascinating. They tow that line between pretend and real in an explicit winking fashion, once never breaking kayfabe but nowadays finding every more creative ways to sustain and break it. And it's the show business of our times, with Trump having honed his current persona in pro wrestling.
70 years ago maybe, but has anything in our culture more thoroughly jumped the shark than gender bending, and especially drag queens. It really hasn't changed since it was first done by Igor when he pranced around the cave wearing that coconut bra and grabbing Ogg by the ass after they drank that fermented mango juice.
Little Richard: "If I had been White, there never would have been an Elvis Presley."
Why do Black people hate Elvis Presley? Elvis didn't "steal" Black music. Elvis seemed to have favored an eclectic mix of rhythm and blues, gospel, country and rockabilly. His music was something like a "melting pot." Maybe there is a bit of jealousy? Elvis was so talented and influential...
Also, by the Jewish law of matrilineal descent, Elvis Presley was Jewish. Elvis doesn't look like an American White, so maybe there is a bit of anti-Semitism mixed in to Little Richard's views...
Interesting observations J farmer. Do you think the difference is that being gay is more accepted in big white community then and the black community. Isn't the secretly gay negro use of the term on the down-low a social survival technique?
For a nation constantly decried as racist and homophobic we sure do relish, celebrate and reward our Gays and Blacks. Is there a nation somewhere who celebrates them more than here? Both groups are highly over-represented among the rich and famous in America. I don't see that as either good or bad, but it sure doesn't support the accepted narrative.
John Waters is an interesting man, but he's a Professional Gay Guy, who runs around with an invisible hat that says "I'm GAY". Little Richard didn't care to advertise his sexuality. A pattern that more celebrities, straight, gay, and everything else should emulate.
I would suggest that the way we talk about these groups as victims is the real racist and homophobic part of our culture. You don't talk about equal capable people like they are children unless you see them as lesser, and helpless.
A lot of stars have/had mean streaks. Ray Charles was easily as nasty as Chuck Berry. Little Richard... You didn't need Gaydar! Penultimate performer, and true sign of God's love for us.
Who is this "we" you speak of kemosabe? The way you people talk about it is that you think you've pulled yourself up by the bootstraps when you were born on third base and then think that your opportunities are equal to those who walk to the ball field and play with borrowed equipment. It is you people who are they spoiled children.
[H]e died completely homophobic and saying horrible things about gay people and transgender people
Examples please of his homphobia?
Homophobic is one of those epithets that gets thrown around willy-nilhe until it has come to have no meaning at all. It could mean anything at all from saying that one personally prefers coitus with the opposite sex to tying them up and throwing them off of buildings.
As Geoorge Orwell said:
“The word homophobic has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable".
I was raised to believe that adultery and homosexuality were wrong. Okay, I've changed my opinion about homosexuality, but so have homosexuals changed their opinion about how to be a homosexual. They're much more mainstream now, (or maybe it's just how they're portrayed on television.) So far as I know gays are no longer celebrating bathhouse sex and rampant promiscuity as part of their alternative sexuality. I wonder if John Waters would pass judgment on them if they were....I try to be flexible and change with the times, but it's not just arteries that harden. I still think adultery is wrong unless your wife has gained a lot of weight.
BleachBit has it right. Coming out of 1930’s Georgia, Little Richard infused the blues and the black church with his sliding-scale sexuality. He was an original. How could he not have been conflicted?
One could say he was “homophobic” not as a strike against his character, but only in the literal sense: he feared his own homosexuality as incompatible with the deep childhood imprint of Christian salvation, and he periodically tried to distance himself from it. (He once claimed that homosexuality was “contagious.”).
But, in denying what he was, he never changed who he was. He carried the same pyrotechnic flamboyance through each desperate shift between god and the devil. That his conflict prevented him from irrevocably aligning himself with the gay movement is less interesting than the role of that conflict in his art. For example, did Little Richard generate the near delirious intensity of “Tutti Frutti” and “True Fine Mama” because of, or despite, Richard Penniman’s clashing impulses?
A lot of the pathologies associated with homosexuality aren't as prominent now as they were a half-century ago. Gays have less guilt and less desire to outrage society or get back at it. It got easier to be gay. It used to said that it was the smothering, controlling, castrating mother who overwhelmed her son and turned him against his poor, hardworking father that made men gay. Then it was the absent or distant, shadowy, rejecting father who didn't provide a male role model. Now it may just be watching internet porn.
One could say he was “homophobic” not as a strike against his character, but only in the literal sense: he feared his own homosexuality as incompatible with the deep childhood imprint of Christian salvation
First time I had ever seen homophobic used in that way. It makes perfect sense. As Christians many of us fear succumbing to temptation and sliding into what we might think of as sinful behavior.
I think it is a wonderful explanation.
I doubt that it is what the writer had in mind, though. Certainly didn't seem to be the context.
NOTE: I said "sinful behavior" because I could not think of a better phrase. What each of us consider "sinful" will vary from what others consider sinful. And may even vary within us over time. I did not consider alcohol or drugs sinful in the days of my youth but I do now. For me, anyway. Anyone else can do as they like as long as they don't drive drunk.
(He once claimed that homosexuality was “contagious.”).
That goes to one's belief whether homosexuality is acquired rather than innate. If it is acquired, that would make it "contagious" in a sense. As the Lesbian Avengers slogan used to say "We recruit".
I mentioned the other day that I had seen "A Very English Scandal" on Amazon Prime (Very good, BTW) Jeremy Thorp, rising politician, takes a shine to a stable boy. Gets the stable boy fired, takes him home to his mother's house and rapes him. At least he used Vaseline "The bachelor's Friend" as he called it.
Because he had no National Health Insurance card, he could not work and Thorp keeps him in a flat as a mistress. Since that time, in the 70s, he has been at least bi-sexual and perhaps predominently gay.
The mini-series seems fairly faithful to the facts of the case as I found reading about the scandal.
So was the stable boy innately, born, gay? Or did Thorp make him that way?
I am probably going to be castigated as homophobic for questioning whether homosexuality in not innate.
Was Little Richard gay? Not that there's anything wrong with that. However if he was indeed gay white people here are assuming done I don't think it could be called homophobia more like homoclosetus.
the Lesbian Avengers slogan used to say "We recruit"
I suspect that sometimes interference by men in early or pre puberty turns some women lesbian/bi and some men gay, trade, or straddlers who might not have been otherwise. I doubt that interference by women has the opposite effect, but then, I'm phallocentric.
That his conflict prevented him from irrevocably aligning himself with the gay movement is less interesting than the role of that conflict in his art. For example, did Little Richard generate the near delirious intensity of “Tutti Frutti” and “True Fine Mama” because of, or despite, Richard Penniman’s clashing impulses?
5/10/20, 11:20 AM
This is an important point. Those struggles are difficult for the individual involved, but that is what creates art. As Camille Paglia once noted, remove the taboos and artists have nothing to push back against, because everything goes.
Not to get aughts-era hipster about authenticity, but never having heard about Esquerita until today, I'm a little disappointed to learn that much of what I thought was original to Little Richard turns out to have been inspired by or even homage to or straight theft from someone even whackier.
Click here to enter Amazon through the Althouse Portal.
Amazon
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Support this blog with PayPal
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
Posts
40 comments:
Now there's a contrast in the gay experience in America. A poor black kid in the Deep South raised on strict Protestantism and a rich white kid in the mid-Atlantic raised on Roman Catholicism. Little Richard was clearly conflicted between a life devoted to Christ and a life of celebrity excess. His expressed views on homosexuality vacillated throughout his career, though he tended to couple them all with acknowledgments of god's love. Waters nursed a spiteful antipathy towards the Church throughout his career. For people like Little Richard, the church was a source of inspiration and uplift. "We shall overcome." For Waters, the Church was an oppressive killjoy standing in the way of him and his indulgences.
By all means,focus on that aspect of his life.
After all his views on homosexuality(from decades ago) are why he's famous.
Click bait vultures.
Wow. The destruction and hatred of beauty has to be one of the most important things that are happening right now. It feeds into everything else
Waters is not a clickbait vulture, he's the perfect person to comment about this.
MIA
Don’t you love it when you go to the bathroom and you come back to find your food waiting for you?
VINCENT
We’re lucky we got it at all. Buddy Holly doesn’t seem to be much of a waiter. We shoulda sat in Marilyn Monroe’s section.
MIA
Which one? There’s two Marilyn Monroes.
VINCENT
No, there’s not.
Pointing at Marilyn in the white dress serving a table.
VINCENT
That’s Marilyn Monroe…
Then, pointing at a BLONDE WAITRESS in a tight sweater and capri pants, taking an order from a bunch of FILM GEEKS —
VINCENT
…and that’s Mamie Van Doren. I don’t see Jayne Mansfield, so it must be her night of
Whatever issues Little Richard may have had can't hold a candle to some of the shit they said about Chuck Berry, including Keith Richards using him as an example of how it's probably better you don't meet your idols.
Little Richard's playful attitude to gender and sexuality and struggles with his own desire are definitely in scope for analysis of one of the most transgressive, transformative and simply bizarre American phenomena of all time. Agree with Waters on the punk thing. And Al Green, my favorite singer of the 70s, is also a fire and brimstone preacher more than soul singer nowadays, although I don't think his and Little Richard's sins overlap much, legion though they are.
Waters is not a clickbait vulture, he's the perfect person to comment about this.
I was referring to Rolling Stone. The click bait is publishing this crap at this time.
I love break-the-mold people. That they are conflicted is simply normal.
Respectfully and vociferously disagree, The stereotype-busting gender-bending in-your-face weirdness was an integral aspect of Little Richard.
""Did he have a sense of humor about himself? Kind of. But you couldn’t quite tell...""
That's an interesting concept and one that could be applied to Waters himself. People who put on a comic act based on their personality do have a sense of humor about themselves, but when the act goes on for a long time, they could come to take it - and themselves - very seriously. The act and the self merge together and people can get sensitive about it. Also, whether or not one has a sense of humor about oneself has a lot to do with what aspect of one's personality or self one is expected to laugh at. It's like that with humor in general: people do have things they can't laugh about. That was probably true of Jon Waters and Little Richard, but the things they didn't find funny weren't the same things.
This is why, despite not being a fan since my younger days, pro wrestling remains fascinating. They tow that line between pretend and real in an explicit winking fashion, once never breaking kayfabe but nowadays finding every more creative ways to sustain and break it. And it's the show business of our times, with Trump having honed his current persona in pro wrestling.
70 years ago maybe, but has anything in our culture more thoroughly jumped the shark than gender bending, and especially drag queens. It really hasn't changed since it was first done by Igor when he pranced around the cave wearing that coconut bra and grabbing Ogg by the ass after they drank that fermented mango juice.
So glad youtube doesn't have Odorama.
Little Richard: "If I had been White, there never would have been an Elvis Presley."
Why do Black people hate Elvis Presley? Elvis didn't "steal" Black music. Elvis seemed to have favored an eclectic mix of rhythm and blues, gospel, country and rockabilly. His music was something like a "melting pot." Maybe there is a bit of jealousy? Elvis was so talented and influential...
Also, by the Jewish law of matrilineal descent, Elvis Presley was Jewish. Elvis doesn't look like an American White, so maybe there is a bit of anti-Semitism mixed in to Little Richard's views...
Interesting observations J farmer. Do you think the difference is that being gay is more accepted in big white community then and the black community. Isn't the secretly gay negro use of the term on the down-low a social survival technique?
If so that sounds a bit like white privilege.
My dad was good friends with Steve Waters; John’s brother. They were in the same national trade association.
Their dad lent money to John to make his early movies. John paid him back.
Steve Waters died at a young age of brain cancer. His daughter runs the business in Baltimore.
For a nation constantly decried as racist and homophobic we sure do relish, celebrate and reward our Gays and Blacks. Is there a nation somewhere who celebrates them more than here? Both groups are highly over-represented among the rich and famous in America. I don't see that as either good or bad, but it sure doesn't support the accepted narrative.
John Waters is an interesting man, but he's a Professional Gay Guy, who runs around with an invisible hat that says "I'm GAY". Little Richard didn't care to advertise his sexuality. A pattern that more celebrities, straight, gay, and everything else should emulate.
And if I'm right, and these groups are over-represented among the rich and famous, doesn't that reject the need for special protections and support?
Ahmaud Arbery couldn't be reached for comment
I would suggest that the way we talk about these groups as victims is the real racist and homophobic part of our culture. You don't talk about equal capable people like they are children unless you see them as lesser, and helpless.
A lot of stars have/had mean streaks. Ray Charles was easily as nasty as Chuck Berry. Little Richard... You didn't need Gaydar! Penultimate performer, and true sign of God's love for us.
Who is this "we" you speak of kemosabe? The way you people talk about it is that you think you've pulled yourself up by the bootstraps when you were born on third base and then think that your opportunities are equal to those who walk to the ball field and play with borrowed equipment. It is you people who are they spoiled children.
Can't imagine him "resting" in peace. If there's a Rock n Roll Heaven, you know they have a hell of a band!
[H]e died completely homophobic and saying horrible things about gay people and transgender people
Examples please of his homphobia?
Homophobic is one of those epithets that gets thrown around willy-nilhe until it has come to have no meaning at all. It could mean anything at all from saying that one personally prefers coitus with the opposite sex to tying them up and throwing them off of buildings.
As Geoorge Orwell said:
“The word homophobic has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable".
John Henry
I was raised to believe that adultery and homosexuality were wrong. Okay, I've changed my opinion about homosexuality, but so have homosexuals changed their opinion about how to be a homosexual. They're much more mainstream now, (or maybe it's just how they're portrayed on television.) So far as I know gays are no longer celebrating bathhouse sex and rampant promiscuity as part of their alternative sexuality. I wonder if John Waters would pass judgment on them if they were....I try to be flexible and change with the times, but it's not just arteries that harden. I still think adultery is wrong unless your wife has gained a lot of weight.
I don't think people ever sought out Little Richard to be their arbiter of sexual mores and morality. That's not what he was good at.
BleachBit has it right. Coming out of 1930’s Georgia, Little Richard infused the blues and the black church with his sliding-scale sexuality. He was an original. How could he not have been conflicted?
One could say he was “homophobic” not as a strike against his character, but only in the literal sense: he feared his own homosexuality as incompatible with the deep childhood imprint of Christian salvation, and he periodically tried to distance himself from it. (He once claimed that homosexuality was “contagious.”).
But, in denying what he was, he never changed who he was. He carried the same pyrotechnic flamboyance through each desperate shift between god and the devil. That his conflict prevented him from irrevocably aligning himself with the gay movement is less interesting than the role of that conflict in his art. For example, did Little Richard generate the near delirious intensity of “Tutti Frutti” and “True Fine Mama” because of, or despite, Richard Penniman’s clashing impulses?
A lot of the pathologies associated with homosexuality aren't as prominent now as they were a half-century ago. Gays have less guilt and less desire to outrage society or get back at it. It got easier to be gay. It used to said that it was the smothering, controlling, castrating mother who overwhelmed her son and turned him against his poor, hardworking father that made men gay. Then it was the absent or distant, shadowy, rejecting father who didn't provide a male role model. Now it may just be watching internet porn.
Blogger Ozymandias said...
One could say he was “homophobic” not as a strike against his character, but only in the literal sense: he feared his own homosexuality as incompatible with the deep childhood imprint of Christian salvation
First time I had ever seen homophobic used in that way. It makes perfect sense. As Christians many of us fear succumbing to temptation and sliding into what we might think of as sinful behavior.
I think it is a wonderful explanation.
I doubt that it is what the writer had in mind, though. Certainly didn't seem to be the context.
NOTE: I said "sinful behavior" because I could not think of a better phrase. What each of us consider "sinful" will vary from what others consider sinful. And may even vary within us over time. I did not consider alcohol or drugs sinful in the days of my youth but I do now. For me, anyway. Anyone else can do as they like as long as they don't drive drunk.
(He once claimed that homosexuality was “contagious.”).
That goes to one's belief whether homosexuality is acquired rather than innate. If it is acquired, that would make it "contagious" in a sense. As the Lesbian Avengers slogan used to say "We recruit".
I mentioned the other day that I had seen "A Very English Scandal" on Amazon Prime (Very good, BTW) Jeremy Thorp, rising politician, takes a shine to a stable boy. Gets the stable boy fired, takes him home to his mother's house and rapes him. At least he used Vaseline "The bachelor's Friend" as he called it.
Because he had no National Health Insurance card, he could not work and Thorp keeps him in a flat as a mistress. Since that time, in the 70s, he has been at least bi-sexual and perhaps predominently gay.
The mini-series seems fairly faithful to the facts of the case as I found reading about the scandal.
So was the stable boy innately, born, gay? Or did Thorp make him that way?
I am probably going to be castigated as homophobic for questioning whether homosexuality in not innate.
John Henry
Was Little Richard gay? Not that there's anything wrong with that. However if he was indeed gay white people here are assuming done I don't think it could be called homophobia more like homoclosetus.
Here's the Man Himself, live and in concert, Paris, 1966. We will never see his like again
the Lesbian Avengers slogan used to say "We recruit"
I suspect that sometimes interference by men in early or pre puberty turns some women lesbian/bi and some men gay, trade, or straddlers who might not have been otherwise. I doubt that interference by women has the opposite effect, but then, I'm phallocentric.
That his conflict prevented him from irrevocably aligning himself with the gay movement is less interesting than the role of that conflict in his art. For example, did Little Richard generate the near delirious intensity of “Tutti Frutti” and “True Fine Mama” because of, or despite, Richard Penniman’s clashing impulses?
5/10/20, 11:20 AM
This is an important point. Those struggles are difficult for the individual involved, but that is what creates art. As Camille Paglia once noted, remove the taboos and artists have nothing to push back against, because everything goes.
With respect to Little Richard, have to give props to the influential Esquerita.
https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1857-esquerita-and-the-voola
Divine total diva. I saw her perform at rods in Madison when I was 13 in 1981.
Not to get aughts-era hipster about authenticity, but never having heard about Esquerita until today, I'm a little disappointed to learn that much of what I thought was original to Little Richard turns out to have been inspired by or even homage to or straight theft from someone even whackier.
You've given me decades of comfort. Thank you.
Post a Comment