could want to be in a relationship with another woman continues to confuse the gossip press. Meanwhile, out gay men like Neil Patrick Harris, Anderson Cooper, and Ricky Martin have become media mainstays.
More recently, transgender stars have garnered public attention on reality TV shows and in the pages of tabloids. Since former Olympic athlete and Kardashian family dad Bruce Jenner’s 2015 revelation that he identified as a trans woman, changing her name and identity to Caitlyn, transgender celebrities have been the subject of fascinated and mostly supportive commentary; Jenner famously told her story in the July 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, where she became the first sixty-five-year-old woman to appear on the cover. The issue garnered 432,000 single copy sales, making it the highest-selling cover for Vanity Fair in nearly five years.108 Nevertheless, coverage of LGBTQ stars remains limited and compulsory heterosexuality continues to be a hallmark of celebrity coverage.
Considered together, these narratives reveal a limited framework of success and happiness that privileges a narrow range of identities, bodies, behaviors, and life choices while punishing or excluding those who don’t check all of the prescribed boxes, all of the time. It may be difficult to understand, then, how it is that audiences, especially those who do not fit the lauded models (i.e., 99% of us) can find pleasure in such representations. Why would I want to read about stars who seem nothing like my friends, my family, or myself?
Celebrity narratives provide us with the opportunity to consume vicariously, to indulge in a pleasurable escape to a world where money is no object. We enjoy the visual simulation of perfection and luxury that famous bodies, homes, vacations, and sports cars convey. We may temporarily forget our own financial constraints, our budgets, our rent payments. We may be seduced by the suggestion that, if we can buy some trinket that the stars love and recommend, our lives might be just a bit more glamorous. We are transported away from our workaday routines, our boring commutes, our ho-hum grocery lists, into a world of fantasy and fun.
While the pleasures of this type of transportation may be fleeting, celebrity narratives also promise us the potential for permanent escape. Stories that insist celebrities are “just like us” perpetuate the long-running tale that anyone can be famous; you, too, could live this life. Today’s digital platforms, where user-creators self-promote and brand themselves in an effort to attract followers and earn capital, both cultural and monetary, amplify the sense that we are all just a few well-conceived clicks away from Instafame. This fantasy of democratic access, of meritocracy and social mobility, may be especially appealing to audiences during our contemporary era, where inequalities between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, have widened and deepened.
As previously noted, celebrity news places women and girls at the center. The top-selling and most viewed magazine covers, TV shows, and Instagram feeds belong to women. Modeling and acting remain two of the few fields where women can actually earn more than men;109 here, the Kardashians earn millions just for Tweeting baby pics. And unlike in the precincts of Congress, where male politicians dominate and issues like women’s health care and child-care access are regularly ignored or fought against, in celebrity-world, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alfre Woodard, Gina Davis, and Robin Wright have all occupied the Oval Office as commander in chief. For many women, lacking political power and faced with much more logistically complex, and economically tenuous, situations, these stories offer an appealing reverie.
Celebrities as models for how to look and behave, embodying fantasies of rising above the herd and being seen as a distinctive individual, celebrity gossip as emotionally and cognitively satisfying puzzles to solve and, also, as a kind of social glue, celebrities as the inevitable result of the rise of leisure in capitalist systems, the media’s need for increasing numbers of celebrities to attract viewers and ad dollars, the role of celebrity culture in transporting us out of our everyday lives—all of these and more, when taken together, help explain why celebrity culture has exploded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
2
The Rise of Mass Culture and the Production of Celebrities
It would be quite easy to see celebrity culture and celebrity journalism as fairly recent phenomena, commanding our attention primarily in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But by the early nineteenth century, celebrities—what they stood for, what fans invested in them, what behind-the-scenes or self-aggrandizing promoters sought to extract financially from them—had come to assume an unprecedented role in the cultural life of the country. And despite the absence then of electronic media, which is now so central to celebrity production, many precedents were set about how stars were created, promoted, and embraced. This trend was enabled by the rise and intersection of several key technologies—the telegraph that expedited the spread of news, the railroads that carried entertainers around the country, photography that made the famous visible more quickly and cheaply, and, most important, the explosive rise of daily newspapers and then mass-circulation magazines, nearly all supported by advertising, that made celebrity construction and maintenance possible.
The Astor Place Riots
In 1849, in what was still the early republic, a feud between two well-known actors—or, more accurately, their fans—caused a riot in New York City in which twenty-two people were killed, 150 injured, and eighty-six arrested. It was the deadliest event of its kind in the city up to that point. The melee was ostensibly about which actor was better. But conflicts about celebrities are never only about them. Ever.
Celebrities—their appearance, behaviors, their expressed attitudes, their biographies, their failings, their scandals—have, in the past and the present, served as flashpoints for clashes about larger contentious issues gripping a culture. In this case, what came to be known as the infamous Astor Place Riots was a battle about class identity, resentments over economic and cultural privilege, and about manhood and national pride. It was a battle personified by allegiances to two actors and what they stood for: the British performer William Charles Macready and the American Edwin Forrest, both celebrated Shakespearean actors.1 Today, we associate Shakespeare with “high art” and culture, but in the nineteenth century Shakespeare was by far the most popular playwright in the United States, beloved by people across a range of socioeconomic classes. His plays were performed in venues from opulent theaters to saloons, and many knew key lines so well that they would recite them along with the actors.2 By the 1840s cities like New York, despite religious and moral opposition among some of the educated elite to the potential corruptions of theatergoing, had a robust theater culture with known actors. Thousands of new theaters, especially in cities, were built between 1850 and 1900.3 The theater, then, was one of the first venues for the production of entertainment celebrities in the United States.
Early nineteenth-century theaters—often very rowdy places known for their shouting, spitting, the smell of booze—contained audiences (mostly men) from all walks of life who were then spatially segregated by income, line of work, class, and race. The expensive boxes above and to the side of the stage were reserved for the wealthy. Below the boxes (what we would today call the orchestra) was “the pit,” where the emerging middle class—manual laborers, sailors, mechanics, tradesmen, and, in New York, the Bowery b’hoys—sat. Known for their boisterous (often drunken) behavior, bright clothes, and love of the theater, the b’hoys were single, working-class men, mostly firemen and mechanics. Above and behind the pit were the cheap gallery seats (today’s mezzanine) occupied by newsboys, apprentices, and other lower wage workers; segregated from everyone in the upper third tier were African Americans (assigned the very worst seats), and prostitutes and their clients.4 Those in the gallery were known to pelt actors who displeased them (as well as those in the boxes) with rotten fruit, eggs, peanuts (hence the peanut gallery), and pennies. Those in each sector of the theater resented the others. As the historian David Nasaw noted, “The box holders were disgusted by the rowdiness of the pit and gallery; the pit was offended by the box holders’ continuous chatter and inattention to the stage; the gallery was disgusted by the actors’ fawning attention to the box holders.”5 As you can imagine, this was becoming
