Elton John Kisses Rush Limbaugh's Cyst

I love the way that the French honour performing artists. When the seminal film director D.W. Griffith died, his colleague Erich von Stroheim eulogised him for the BBC and, in said process, explained why he had himself moved to France permanently after the Second World War. Stroheim explained (I’m paraphrasing here) that Hollywood only gave a damn about whether you had a film in production in the last three months and, if you didn’t, you were forgotten; in France, if you wrote one good book or made one good movie or made one good performance on a stage fifty years ago, regardless of whatever utter shite you may have had a part of perpetrating in the decades since then, you are still recalled for the good work you did generations ago and accordingly honoured as an artist.

It’s because I subscribe to that French philosophy of artistry that I must admit that Elton John, based on great admiration of only two songs in his catalogue – “Friends” and “Grow Some Funk Of Your Own,” neither of which, you’ll note, were among his biggest hits – is truly an artist. Those are the only two singles of his I can recall actually buying at the time they were on the pop charts, and yet today I enjoy their sound like very few other pieces of 1970s pop music. And I love 1970s pop music in general.

To quote Jerry Reed (a man whose own artistry is criminally underrated, about which I’ll be expounding on a Refried Vinyl post sometime later this month), I said all that to say all this. I also firmly believe that Elton John’s true talents are wildly overhyped, and his reputation as a superstar of the first water is hysterically undeserved. That his clumsy reworking of “Candle in the Wind” from a memorial piece for Marilyn Monroe to one for Princess Diana became the biggest-selling single in world history speaks vastly more to how beloved Diana was (Chumbawamba’s withering anti-royalist critiques of her notwithstanding) than anything John himself ever did with that dreary tune. The most charitable thing that can really be said about his success is that he was no more than a glam rocker who somehow got lucky and cashed in big, which can’t be said about more deserving glam rockers like, say, Beggars Opera or, outside of Canada anyway, Michel Pagliaro.

Thus, it doesn’t surprise me in the least, as it seems to have so many gay civil rights activists, that Elton John was the main entertainment at the wedding reception this weekend of Rush Limbaugh, one of the most virulently homophobic public figures ever to breathe syllabically within audible range of a microphone. (Had John sang for Michael “Savage” Weiner’s wedding reception, even I would have truly been surprised, not only that John would have consented to do so but also that any human being would consent to being the new spouse of such an acidic misanthrope like Weiner. At least with Limbaugh, sometimes it’s the oxycontin talking.)

More than anything, Elton John is what could probably be considered a “House Queer.” (My attitude towards the use of the word “Queer” in relation to homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered people will be the subject of my next post. I’ll just say for now that I don’t like having to use the term in such a manner, or any other epithet for that matter.) I liken this to Malcolm X’s delineation of (in the terminology of Minister Malcolm’s day) “House Negroes” and “Field Negroes” during America’s slavery days. The “House Negro” was the personal servant slave that the slave owner permitted to live in the mansion on the plantation. S/he ate the same food as the slave owner, often wore the same clothes as the slave owner and, when it came down to it, probably loved the slave owner multiple times more than the slave owner loved himself. The “Field Negro,” on the other hand, was limited to working in the fields, planting and picking the crops that the slave owner made his money by selling. The “Field Negro” had to live in shacks and barns not horribly unlike those dwellings (like Mohandas Ghandi, I will never dignify them by calling them “homes”) in which the slave owner’s livestock were minimally sheltered. The food that the “Field Negro” had to eat was often unfit for human consumption. And the “Field Negro” was likely to hate both the slave owner and the “House Negro” with the same passionate loathing.

Since I reject the junk philosophy of sexual orientation identity that approves of the term “Queer” being applied to any human being, but a very significant amount (perhaps even a majority?) of BLGTs do, I have to consider Elton John to be a prime example of what a “House Queer” would be like. He is satisfied with second-class status in his native United Kingdom; he has publicly questioned why gay civil rights activists are so concerned with same-sex marriage, and has suggested to some that they should knock off their pursuit of equality when “civil unions” are “just as good.” Part of this comes from John’s social status, being one of the wealthiest entertainers the world has ever known and, therefore, able to afford the legal fees for the court filings that make his domestic relationship roughly equivalent to the rights of the most ardent heterosexist “married” couple. He can afford his own in-house doctor if he wishes. He can simply ignore the bigotry that maintains homophobia and heterosexist social supremacy if he so feels like it. His money, granted him in large part by a global society that loves his stage act and doesn’t mind his being “queer” as long as he doesn’t try to violate the limits of what “queer” really means to these people, cushions his very existence. And so what if he does challenge those limits and some fundamentalist imam issues a fatwa on John’s head for publicly stating his belief that Jesus Christ was and is a gay man? He can afford the costs of the additional security men, and he just won’t perform in the shadow of the Pyramids anymore, that’s all.

The money that has been dumped into Elton John’s lap has made him at least temporarily immune from the effects of what a Limbaugh, or “Savage” or O’Reilly or Coulter for that matter, does to the rest of us. The playwright and gay American man Terrence McNally wrote the stage play Corpus Christi, which displays Jesus Christ and his disciples as being homosexual men in the modern-day Corpus Christi, Texas. For his merely suggesting such a thing in fiction, McNally has himself been the target of a fatwa by the London-based Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad of Al-Muhajiroun, an Islamic group with pre-9/11 connections to Osama bin Laden, as well as a propaganda campaign by William Donohue, chief of the self-styled (and ironically misnamed) Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights. McNally may have won several Tony Awards for his other work, but he can ill afford the security force that would guarantee that some religious fanatic won’t take him off the count for writing a play the fanatic hasn’t even bothered to read or view.

If anything, this situation that finds John privately entertaining America’s leading propagandist of homophobia and other bigotries should (but probably still won’t) prove to every non-heterosexual American, once and for all, that nobody deserves to be considered a cultural leader in any manner, primarily based on his frequent habit of having sex with another man. Far too often, simply being one of us qualifies too many of us to be our collective heroes. Actual qualification of such leadership is only dependent on said individual’s demonstrated integrity and courage in publicly acting against said bigotry. By coming to the stage of Limbaugh’s party simply because the propagandist waved his checkbook, Elton John has proven himself to be a morally corrupt artist whose day has long passed and whose integrity has been lacking a core, or the core has become comfortably numb, for far too long for him to realise what he is really doing.