Hysteria over Notre Dame drag show is...a drag

philistine Catholics need to chill and learn about art

Most of us have learned by now to tune out conservative reactionary outrage over all things drag related. But the recent scandal over a drag show taking place at Notre Dame has caught my attention. In First Things, an ND student published a piece critiquing the event’s lack of congruence with the university’s Catholic mission.

It’s not so much that having a drag show at a Catholic institution is morally “problematic,” but that it’s utterly cringe, and demonstrates that cognitive dissonance of both the drag queens and the university admins. A real drag queen would have no interest in performing in such a drab, sanitized (and increasingly bureaucratic) setting. To use drag parlance, such spaces are not “giving.” But the article—and the broader movement of Catholic students condemning such events on moral grounds—has left me incensed…making me feel like Paglia when she had a massive sperg attack at that 1990 presentation at UPenn about Lacan.

I spell out my philosophy of drag as a subterranean artform (that has no place in public libraries) in this article for The Spectator World. But I’ll summarize why this particular incident has me sperging out to such a degree.

My main hang up is that so many Catholics fall into the Protestant trap of reducing faith to morality. As Luigi Giussani emphasizes often in his works, Catholic morality is the fruit of a particular ontological and aesthetic imagination which springs forward from the Christian “event.” His phenomenological approach to the faith is cautious not to skip ahead to morals, for fear of emptying out the faith of its metaphysical substance. Pope Benedict similarly quipped that “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

Thus the problem is less one of ethics, but one of nature, of “being.” It’s not just that these drag shows ought not happen in these space, it’s that they aren’t meant to be there—their ontological nature does not “fit.” Drag speaks to a subterranean underworld that inverts the order of nature. Traditional drag, and the camp culture it emerged from, does not claim to be moral or “natural.” It exalts artifice, the unnatural, “lies.”

Surely we can say the camp aesthetic, for this reason, is diabolic, in the classical sense of the word: “to separate” the intrinsic substance from a given reality. But the fact that camp is honest about its intentions is part of the reason I don’t think it’s truly evil or satanic. True evil masks itself as something good (like The Gates Foundation, or Born This Way)…it doesn’t tell the truth about its lies. This is part of the reason so many turn-of-the century decadents—the forerunners of camp—who dabbled in satanism eventually found their way to Catholicism “through the back door,” as Huysmans would say.

So no, I’m not totally sure a devout Catholic would want to advertise that they frequent drag shows, but—provided they don’t blur the lines and keep it in its subterranean realm—I don’t see the problem with them appreciating it as an artform…especially if the drag show they go to see is well done. Put simply, keep sin sinful and sanctity holy.

I feel the same way about most kinds of vices…I’m not going to pretend that listening to music with overtly erotic lyrics and pagan-inspired rhythms, or getting lit at a disco is somehow virtuous. But it is inevitable that we will seek out these moments of “anti-structure,” of self-indulgent frivolity…and if they lead us into objective vices, then we can go to confession. And perhaps we may even encounter the beauty of God’s grace lurking within the corners of our moments of debauchery (more on these topics in my posts about Bad Catholics and Anti-Structure).

Lastly, just because a form of art may be “morally problematic”…even diabolical or satanic, on strictly aesthetic grounds, that doesn’t preclude it from being deemed “real art.” In this regard, my Paglian-Wildean sympathies are showing:

“Ethical values and guidelines that should structure the social realm of business and politics do not automatically transfer to art, which occupies the contemplative realm shared by philosophy and religion. Great art has often been made by bad people. So what?” Besides, she adds, “the impulse or compulsion toward art-making is often grounded in ruthless aggression and combat.”

Paglia’s comments highlight the cognitive dissonance of internet progressives who at once are moralistic defenders of oppressed communities while being proponents of libertinism and ethical relativism: “expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.”

We can see here how these kinds of Catholics have much in common with the iconoclastic, puritanical progressives they are reacting to.

While Aquinas will remind us that the moral integrity of a piece of art is essential to making it formally “good,” a good Catholic should be able to recognize art that is good—if not on a moral level—than at least on a purely aesthetic level. Gaga’s song “Judas” is morally disturbing, but aesthetically is a masterpiece. Same with the Netflix series Elite and the film Call Me By Your Name. Inversely, they should be able to recognize that PureFlix movies may be morally sound but are aesthetically/ontologically atrocious. But if for you, religion is merely a matter of morals, you would not understand this.

A devout Catholic should not be afraid to recognize a piece of art for what it is—perhaps maintaining a healthy sense of detachment from it, when necessary—but still grappling with it in its fullness and complexity, without resorting to infantile reductionism. The fact that these “conservative” Catholics cannot manage to engage with drag for what it actually is—formally speaking…ontologically, aesthetically, metaphysically—and can only seem to fall back on sophomoric, moralistic reactionary fodder, is a sign of how bankrupt the American Catholic imagination has become. Why would anyone want to join a club of philistines and simpletons! Wilde and Huysmans are surely turning over in their graves.

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For more on these topics, check out the pod episodes with Glenn Belverio (the drag queen who starred in Camille and Glennda do Downtown), Zach Langley ChiChi (a drag queen’s critique of drag story hour), Urban Hannon (on his article Against Heterosexuality and on the 3 narratives of homosexuality), and the hosts of Contra Gentiles (on Making America Sinful Again).

Also check out these articles on camp and Andrea Long Chu, Quentin Crisp, Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulous, and on the Sisters of Perp. Indulgence vs. the Dodgers.

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graphic by @revolvingstyle