Letter from the editor: August

Interview, August, 1995 by Ingrid Sischy

What happened on this flight was a big deal to me, and also to my friends. We'd spent a lot of Saturday afternoons in my bedroom, singing along to her big hit back then - "I Only Want to Be with You." In the usually gray, usually cold town of Edinburgh, where excitement for teens was at a premium, we had a routine that to us felt like heaven. We'd pick up bars of Cadbury milk chocolate - it had to be milk - go up to my room, close the door, switch on the heater, and put Dusty on. While she melted our hearts we'd hold the chocolate bars in their foil close to the red-hot electric fire and, when they felt soft and warm according to our specifications, we'd devour them. The goopy chocolate was our caviar and champagne. The singer was our Maria Callas, the one who got us in our stomachs as well as inspired our first imaginings of real romance. Those afternoons were the paradise that we would lose when life got less innocent feeling.

Memories of those times were triggered when we were arranging for the piece you'll find on Dusty in this issue of Interview ("Dusty, the Celt of the Earth," page 106). As I recalled those earlier times and the day I returned from my trip (eager for once to get to school because I had a Dusty story), other things occurred to me, too. I realized that I had no memory of talking to my friends about what I'd seen and heard and felt before I got on that plane. I'd been to visit my grandmother in South Africa, where I had lived until we immigrated to Scotland a few years before. What had been so shocking to us when we'd lived there was now even more shockingly abhorrent.

The rule of apartheid and all that came with it made South Africa feel like another planet, a terrifying, ignorant, paranoid planet where whiteness meant people were free and color meant they were not. Beyond a general discussion of how awful such a system was, I doubt that I went into the physical and emotional horror of a place where the color of one's skin was used as a right to power or the equivalent of a branding iron. My Scottish friends, who were all white and who had spent their entire lives in that tiny, sheltered, peaceful country, had no experience with these things. I probably kept them to myself. Dusty was our common ground.

Back then, I didn't analyze why I loved her voice so much. But the other day, during an editorial meeting here at Interview, we got to talking about her career as a musician and somebody said that when she first began, many people couldn't tell if she was black or white or a woman or a man. The voice crossed over so much that she couldn't be defined. That's it, I thought. It was the voice that went beyond the usual polarities of man or woman, black or white. Little did I know that there was a kind of symbolism in her being on the plane, since she embodied the opposite of the divisions that were the rule in South Africa. And little did I know, when this magazine asked RuPaul to interview her, how perfect the pairing would be. I'd just thought RuPaul was a big fan. I hadn't remembered that Dusty had this history.

Needless to say, RuPaul would not have been a VIP in South Africa in the '60s. It's doubtful whether America would have had cosmetics contracts for RuPaul back then either. Drag may have been a major part of the underground, but it sure didn't make it to mainstream pop status. Today, RuPaul is an American pop icon and would not be censored in South Africa, as would automatically have happened a short while ago. So, from some angles, we have definitely come somewhere - and there is reason to celebrate. That sense of celebration is there in the conversation between Springfield and RuPaul. You'll also find many other stories in our August issue that give reason to feel good, to laugh, or to be inspired by individuals' creativity and the way it can move things forward. There are people in these pages whose sense of freedom soars.

But you'll also come across stories that point to opposite currents in our society, forces that would take the culture backward if they could. Our cover story in particular brings up the fact that the politicians are back at it, doing their "decency" rap. The feature is an interview with Chloe Sevigny ("Destiny Calls Chloe," page 62), who has a lead role in Larry Clark's Kids, a film that seems ripe for a Senator Bob Dole or a Senator Jesse Helms to pounce on. The movie covers many subjects from real life, such as sex, drugs, AIDS, alienation, as well as courage and friendship, subjects that always seem to bring on these people's backward thinking. What makes Kids so memorable are exactly those realities that these politicians are campaigning against as "indecent." To me, their impulse to block out, to brand, to control, to censor is what's indecent. And while it's just a few guys making hay - over the content of today's art and movies and music and literature - in order to make sure that they're in the political limelight, their ignorance and paranoia can set the whole barnyard of nervous politicians jumpin' on the backwards bandwagon. Who knows what led some of President Clinton's Secret Service officers to put on rubber gloves when they greeted a group of gay elected officials at the White House in June?