Dear Readers,
Good morning, happy Friday, and welcome to another helping of ‘Off The Fence’, a newsletter that is weekly, except for on special occasions, and we’ve got a bumper edition for you this time around. Our winter sale is ending very, very soon, so if you would like to score a whole load of free mags, click on the link below and subscribe to the print option, and we’ll give you Issue 15, Issue 16, Issue 17 and Issue 18.
We’ve been enjoying some snaps of Issue 18 out and about - we love this snap of Rosalind Jana’s handsome feline – do remember that there is a very active Cat Cabal here. Do keep sending them in and we’ll share them.
Right, let’s get to it. A reader, who we thank unduly, sent us these photos of Donald Trump dancing to a Village People tribute band at Mar-a-Lago. So it got our editor-at-large thinking…
Camp David
As the applause died down at the Emmys, Jennifer Coolidge began her list of thank yous. Who topped her list? ‘Evil gays’.
Coolidge’s thanks, of course, had relevance to the plot of The White Lotus, but spoke too of a recognisable trope within wider American society and Hollywood in particular. The United States is simultaneously a more open and accepting country than it was, but also cattier, more venomous. This isn’t, contra Coolidge’s remarks, actually down to a particular group of people. Rather it is something which affects the nation as a whole.
It isn’t even really about sexuality. This was memetic gayness twinned with real evil. Coolidge’s performance in The White Lotus works, and was acclaimed, because it is part of the iconostasis of the dominant aesthetic and political movement of the late American Imperial age: what we might more appropriately call ‘evil camp’.
While, by virtue of its love of the big, the brash and the morally questionable, America is the natural home for evil camp, it exists elsewhere too, particularly in Britain. However its American manifestation is its most interesting and most powerful form. It isn’t, however, Hollywood where this has reached its apotheosis, but in politics, specifically of the right-wing variety.
There are obvious, prominent standard bearers. Take George Santos, who, when responding to a question about whether a baby he was photographed holding was his, replied with the gloriously maleficent, ‘not yet’. He is still, just about, a member of the House of Representatives. He is also accused, inter alia, of having a long career stealing puppies, like a chubby, even camper Cruella de Vil; of taking money intended for a navy veteran’s veterinary bills and spending it on clothes; and is, perhaps most chaotically of all, locked in a series of prolonged legal battles with his sworn enemy from his time living in Pennsylvania: the Amish community. This is a man who has ‘be gay, do crimes’ engraved on his heart.
That Santos is a terrible person is undoubtedly true. But the flair and shamelessness with which he executes this is, regrettably, funny. Santos is, however, comparatively far from the levers of power. There is another figure who serves as a more obvious political totem for evil camp: Donald J. Trump.
The former, and possibly future, president has, by dint of it being his handpicked campaign anthem, danced to the YMCA more times than any other heterosexual in history. He attempted his coup to the strains of Gloria by Laura Branigan – a song about a sexually promiscuous older woman. From Stormy to Rudy to ‘Meatball Ron’: Trump surrounds himself with and communicates in all of the tropes of evil camp. He is petty, he is catty, he is ridiculous. Yet he is also powerful. Perhaps his embodiment of the evil camp ethos was using the suspicious death of his first wife to circumnavigate tax laws by burying her on one of his golf courses.
Of course, while Trump might personify evil camp now, he didn’t invent it. There have been antecedents to this particular blend of right wing politics and subversive kitsch. Ethel Merman – who when given a swear jar asked how much she’d have to pay to tell the profferer to go fuck herself – delighted in being unpleasant to people. She was also a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and active in campaigning for Nixon.
Nixon himself is the godfather of political American evil camp. While he lacked the borderline drag-queen characteristics of trump or the actual drag queen characteristics of Santos, it is no coincidence that Nixon has become a meme for late Imperial evil camp America. From his head in Futurama to new imaginings of his taped conversations with aides becoming a Gen Z trope online, Nixon demonstrates that evil camp has a long and not always obvious heritage. All this is despite – or perhaps because of – his lack of real glamour. Take for example his final lunch in the White House: a ring of tinned pineapple topped with cottage cheese and accompanied by a glass of cold milk. It’s Victoria Wood meets Hannibal Lecter.
But Nixon and Merman still had an air of seriousness about them, which made their malevolence, at times, genuinely scary. They had a camp side rather than a lifelong commitment to the brash and the tasteless. Now that edge has gone. In the latest round of the aesthetic, America is no Kissinger – now literally the case, as well as metaphorically – and all cottage cheese.
As Trump’s return looms, American evil camp looks likely to have another throw of the gold-plated dice. However, for it to work, it has to remain funny, with the high stakes evil offset by the low stakes, quotidian preposterousness of the camp. The world has changed since Donald’s first tenure. War, climate change, disease and insurrection have reared their heads and, very obviously, the evil now outweighs the camp not just in America but everywhere. Whether this age-old double act can still be funny remains to be seen.
You can follow Fergus on Twitter here
Buckaroo!
Nobody involved in The Fence has any idea what the seventies were like, not really. Our collective understanding is that it went pretty much like those BBC4 Rock Britannia documentaries describe: Mannfred Mann’s Blinded by the Light playing over sepia footage of shopping precincts, intercut with Ted Heath telling everyone that their power is about to go out.
So, to enhance our understanding of this long-forgotten age, we turned to our friend Ian Martin, the brains and foul-mouth behind many of Britain’s greatest comedies. He remembers the seventies very well, as a time of free love, loud music and generous state subsidies. It’s a barnstormer of a requiem for the baby-boomer age, and you can read it right here.
Sun, Sex, and Suspicious Clerics
We are collecting entries for an occasional series on the best sounding job titles ever. An entry this week for the, now sadly dormant, job of the ‘Archdeacon of the Riviera’. Until the late 1990s, when it was subsumed into the Archdeaconry of France, this was a cleric in charge of the Anglican expat communities along the French and Italian coasts. Often resident at Nice or Cannes, they would gently tour the churches in their care, making sure the clergy were fulfilling their duties. This wasn’t always the case. At Saint Raphael in Provence there was the Reverend Alexander Frederick Dyce who spent most of his time and money on helping to found the Victoria and Albert Museum back in Kensington. At Bordighera just into Italian Liguria there was Reverend Clarence Bicknell, the botanist and Esperanto poet who left all of his 38,000 brass rubbings to a museum, the main building of which is now being slowly consumed by an invasive species of Oceanic Ficus tree (which Bicknell, predictably, had introduced). Further submissions from readers for jobs that sound better or just as good, very welcome.
When You’re Twenty-One, You’re No Fun
For everything, there is a season – apart from with coolness, that ineffable human virtue, which can come and go without you ever noticing, if you even receive it at all. For Issue 18, we played a little game of 7-Up, taking you through all the stations of life, diagnosing the myriad states & symbols that make you cool at 7, 14, 21 and beyond. It’s the funniest thing from our Etc. section last time around, and is now free to read as you saunter into the weekend.
Wilde Harts Can’t Be Broken
We all like to hope that we have someone watching over us from above, guiding us through life’s challenges, giving us the drive to pursue our passions or be our best selves. Best case scenario, you’d assume, would be a kindly grandparent or Genghis Khan or something. But for the author Fiona Mozley, it was hibernian homosexualist Oscar Wilde, communed via online séance from the Spiritualist Church of New York City, stepping across the spectral plain to give professional encouragement. With spirits like that in your corner, who can stop you? Read Fiona’s wonderfully funny dispatch here.
Don’t Miss Out
Remember that our sale is going to end very soon, and you’ve got an opportunity to stick eight mags at a ridiculously low rate. We won’t be repeating this offer any time soon.
In Case You Missed It
It’s sixty years today since the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan show, so why not flash back to this stunning bit of writing about Beatlemania from Haruki Murakami.
Francisco Garcia enthralls with this look at the retired life of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last executioner.
Piers is pivoting to YouTube – but the enterprising folks over at Guido Fawkes aren’t sure whether he jumped or was pushed.
Laura Snapes has collated a beautiful accounting of the life and work of Smash Hits’ Tom Hibbert, by those who knew him best.
How Tucker Carlson became Putin’s useful idiot.
And Finally
‘Read some fucking Orwell’ is a cry you hear all too often these days, often by people who, quite obviously, haven’t progressed much further than Animal Farm. We commend to you this excellent excerpt from a Melvyn Bragg doco about Novara Media’s favourite Old Etonian, dated from 1973, featuring W.H Auden, Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer. Enjoy.
There it is: your bumper Friday newsletter, delivered in sparkling form. Join us again on Tuesday, where we’ll be coming present & correct with more tips, tricks and featurettes. If you need anything else in the meantime, drop us a line at support@the-fence.com and one of us will get back to you. Remember the sale is ending soon. Until next week, that’s everything.
All the best,
TF