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 |  Subject: Pattinson and Lambert: the men teen queens created  01.12.09 16:28 | |
| - Quote :
- As Robert Pattinson returns, with New Moon and a Vanity Fair cover, another, more sexually threatening male superstar is making ladies' hearts beat faster.
I am taking about the new Details cover boy, singer Adam Lambert, who is, yes, as a gay man, more threatening than the image of a straight male vampire.
To the morality police that is. To straight girls, who are already highly homosocial, men in bits of drag are just something to get excited about.
Both are young and both are beautiful: more notably, both are precarious mixtures of masculine and feminine characteristics. Pattinson, for example, is frail and submissive; his lips are bright red against the pallor of his face, where his eyes reside like dark shadows.
Lambert, on the other hand is large and in charge, a hulking former fat boy caked in makeup, and loaded down with jewellery, fringes, scarves and other extravagant accessories.
In the Vanity Fair feature, Pattinson, photographed in various states of moodiness and described, in one passage, as sometimes having “to be restrained” from sinking his teeth into his hunky co-star, Cam Gigandet's neck.
Actor Robert Pattinson arrives at The Twilight Saga: New Moon premiere in Westwood, Calif., Monday, Nov. 16, 2009.
He is also deemed “Byronic,” because, one assumes, of his faint resemblance to the 19th-century poet who, according to one biographer, “stopped traffic” and “drove women wild” in his day: “His beauty, his nobility, his genius, his aloofness, his deformity” writes Bergen Evans, “added mystery to fascination,” none of which “moved his cold, cold heart.”
Well, the Pattinson comparison falters here, or, precisely at the word “genius” and through the image of the arctic, unmovable heart: Pattinson is, every week, in every tabloid, seen hand-in-hand with his boyishly handsome co-star Kristen Stewart, and is approximately as aloof and intriguing as Jaleel White was during his heyday as Urkel on Family Matters.
In interviews, he tries desperately to persuade his interlocutors that he is clumsy, uninteresting; that he has one leg that is longer than the other (here Pattinson is being willfully Byronic, for the darkly devastating poet had a pronounced limp), that he is boring and so on: a common strategy of the passive sex-object, designed to appeal to girls' nurturing side. And by “nurturing,” I mean their compulsion to commit violence against anyone who would injure their love object; their furious desire to understand and love him better than anyone.
On the other hand we have the genuine article, for Byron was bisexual, if not homosexual (such terms meant very little in the early 1800s), and rumoured to, again, in Evans's words, “indulge in criminal debauches”: He is entirely infamous for having been described, by a spurned lover, as being, “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
Singer Adam Lambert greets fans during an appearance on CBS's The Early Show in New York, November 25, 2009.
That sounds more like Adam Lambert, who was, criminally, the runner-up on American Idol last year: “It doesn't matter who … won it,” Lambert states, repeatedly, but it does, if the better gay man lost to the churchy, straight bore. It matters a great deal.
Yet, what he means is that after tearing that tacky little stage up all season, he was handed a pass to an actual career, one which has just arrived, with his newly released CD, For Your Entertainment , a techno-pop, is it fair to say nightmare?, that, in spite of its canned beats, random screeching and insipid lyrics about movin' and groovin' is insanely catchy.
But Lambert is a whole package: Recently, he performed at the American Music Awards, where he kissed, crotch-grabbed other male performers and did a terrific simulation of oral sex with another, prompting a cancellation on Good Morning America and two new gigs on The Early Show and Letterman . Such scandals emanate calculation – aggressively irritating conservatives is old hat for mass-marketed provocateurs.
Details asked, “Why Does Every Woman in America Want to Sleep with Adam Lambert?” in response to his huge, ardent straight-chick fan base. A fan base to whom he is unfailingly sweet, if not adorable. Cagily, Lambert talks about how “pretty” women are, and how, when he is drunk, he will make out with girls. “Yeah I'm gay,” he says. “But I like kissing women sometimes.”
Perplexed, I talked to a Toronto-based circuit queen, Baby Couture, who tells me he is often propositioned, while in full drag, by straight women. He finds it ridiculous, and he finds Lambert's equivocations offensive and counter-political. The key to Lambert's appeal? “Adam doesn't pose a threat to teen girls. He is a gay who is never going to give them the time of day … but they can throw themselves at him because of his non-threatening persona.” His female fans are far more threatening than he is; they are sexually depraved and forever throwing bras and panties at him. The Details photo-spread shows Lambert pawing a nude female model in the soixante-neuf position – “I am responsible for what I created on that show,” Lambert says testily at one point. “I created it and you didn't,” he states of his fans.
He may be hot, but he is very far from talking this sort of trash: Even Madonna, who could buy and sell us all, has never bit our hands as such.
Of his mindless pop record, Lambert says he wants to be a controversial artist on one hand; on the other, “I don't want to alienate a bunch of people.” Now that sounds just about right.
You made both of these men, you pretty kissing girls! And you can destroy them.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/pattinson-and-lambert-the-men-teen-queens-have-created/article1383122/ | |
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