Burlesque!

Today I was introduced to a subject that I had never really given much thought to before. At my weekly Teen Awareness Group (TAG) meeting, a former TAG coordinator and Planned Parenthood intern, James Haas, gave us a mini-lesson in burlesque; what it is, but also how it has evolved in the past 25 years to where it is now. As a burlesque performer, James discussed not only his own performance experience as a queer “boylesque” performer, but also discussed the intersections of this art form with gender identity, gender expression, fluidity, masculinity/femininity, theatre, sexual performance, sex work, and all things queer and fabulous.

I had thought that what he had to share was fascinating and incredibly valid for everyone and so I am going to share some of it here. Burlesque originally was a kind of side show that caricatured society etc.--it was satire meant to get people to laugh. The show was typically dramatic or musical, but it was very different from what we would associate Burlesque with today. Instead of women taking off their clothing, the cast was primarily men, with few women (although they were definitely present). As time went on, the women’s role in the show became much more prominent. The woman at first was a pretty figure, cursory to the main events, but that evolved into women dancing, or even doing strip teases, while there were still other figures. That aspect of the performance became increasingly popular, hence the image we have of burlesque--big bosomed beautiful women doing a strip tease, typically alone, on stage. It’s important to note that burlesque performers were viewed, and viewed themselves, similar to the way we would a stripper. Their performance was for the masculine gaze which was part of the reason that their appearance conformed to conventional beauty standards of the time.

With the advent of the puritanical forties, burlesque died out of the mainstream until around 1990 when neo-burlesque was born. Neo-burlesque essentially harkened back to the initial spirit of burlesque--and focused the shows around performance and artistry; for example, the strip-tease focused more on the tease than the strip. With neo-burlesque came more freedom to mold burlesque, and thus male performances started to become increasingly common. While at first male performances were constrained to masculine images and “vibes”--men with six-packs and the typical masculine body--performers increasingly started to play with feminine costumes and gender bending performances. Additionally, burlesque as a whole became much more inclusive of non-perfect bodies, LGBT people, and people of color.

James was introduced to burlesque through Carnivale Debauche, Champaign-Urbana's only vaudeville burlesque troupe. He described his performance currently as feminine in some ways. He wears heels, feathers, sequins etc., but he described how despite that, he does not ever feel like to perform he has to shed his masculinity. Rather, preforming enables him to embrace the many facets of his masculinity and feel sexual and powerful. James is not transgender and he chooses to dress in a typical masculine-normative way in his day to day life but performing allows him to bend gender expectations--he is still male and masculine, yet as he put it, “with softer edges” and all of it is sexy. James also talked about how despite not having the perfect body etc., performing enables him to embrace his sexuality and feel smokin hot while performing. It is not about pleasing someone in the audience, but rather owning the stage and your performance.

Both James and our TAG coordinator Jamie do burlesque, and they each said that the people who hit on them after shows were not typical. James, a gay man, has been hit on by a straight male, and a lesbian female--speaking to the universal sexuality of burlesque performance. That, James said is perhaps what separates burlesque today from both drag and stripping. Drag, although it can be sexual, is not necessarily meant to be titillating yet is very much about accepting the performance. Stripping on the opposite hand, is associated much more with the sexual performance for the observer--especially the female performance for the masculine gaze. Burlesque falls between those two in its overt sexuality and it’s rejection of the performance as just “strip” but rather more about the “tease”.