In
1993, President Clinton had just taken office, Tom Hanks
played a gay man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, and supermodel
Cindy Crawford was named one of People magazine’s
50 Most Beautiful People. In August of that year, Crawford posed
on the cover of Vanity Fair giving a shave to a platinum-selling
recording artist—out lesbian k.d.
lang.
The
August 1993 Vanity Fair cover is one of the best-known
images of a butch lesbian ever produced. Published during the
height of 1993’s “lesbian chic” craze, the
cover photo generated media buzz that continues to be noted
today, and made lang even more of a star than her album Ingenue
did.
Before
lang posed on the cover of Vanity Fair, images of butch
lesbians were few and far between. In the 1920s, Radclyffe Hall
became one of the first celebrity lesbians due to the obscenity
trial she faced for writing The
Well of Loneliness, and in photos she was always dressed
in men’s clothing. Indeed, Hall was the prototypical “mythic
mannish lesbian.”
And
in the 1940s, photos of the iconic Marlene Dietrich dressed
in a tuxedo and top hat, smoking, lent a Hollywood elegance
to the image of a woman in a suit.
But
by an large, butch lesbians were regarded as unnatural, and
television shows and movies about lesbians consistently judged
them as such. This condemnation continues to this day, when
even lesbian characters on The L Word have referred
to butch lesbians dismissively as “hundred footers,”
and lesbian reality TV contestants chide other dykes for not
being feminine enough.
Thus,
the August 1993 Vanity Fair cover was unique, even
revolutionary, for featuring a butch lesbian engaged in a clearly
sensual encounter with the nation’s most well-known female
supermodel. But even though the headline imprinted over the
image reads “k.d. lang’s Edge: Crossing Over, Catching
Fire,” thereby positioning lang as “edgy”
and thus approaching mainstream, the cover image is not entirely
positive.
Yes, lang
looks butch and it looks like Cindy Crawford likes it, but even
as her head is tossed back in ecstasy Crawford is holding a
straight razor to lang’s throat. Suggesting, through the
careful placement of shaving cream, that lang has a beard that
needs to be shaved, evokes a deep sense of masculinity. But
Crawford also has the power to destroy that masculinity by shaving
it off (not to mention slitting lang’s throat).
The
interior images also echo this double-edged sword.
One full-page photo features lang licking a small round mirror
with the callout “I have a little bit of penis envy. They’re
ridiculous, but they’re cool.” Though this image
can be titillating to lesbian readers, it is also meant to serve
a heterosexual audience. The obvious correlation of her tongue
with a penis reflects simplistic heterosexual ideas of what
lesbians do in bed, but it also comforts male readers by letting
them know, with the assistance of the caption, that lang does
envy them.
In
addition, the article itself goes to great lengths to point
out that beneath lang’s manly uniform, she has a “voluptuous”
body with the “gravitas of an ancient female fertility
figure.” Therefore, though anyone who didn’t know
who lang was might have mistaken her for a man on the cover
(even her name is not gender-specific), anyone who bothered
to read the article would learn that she is definitively a woman.
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