The put-on was naïve, or even politically regressive, Brackman argued, because it proceeded from the basic assumption that the forms of dominant culture could be used against themselves. In spite of its ability to denaturalize existing social positions and relations, the put-on nonetheless remained ultimately reconcilable to that which it destabilized. No matter how “subversive” the put-on might seem, if the “victim” failed to recognize the joke, his or her assumptions were not thrown into question but reinforced. Its exasperating (rather than insurrectionary) confrontations were thus inherently limited. And because of these limitations, Brackman wrote, the put-on was most frequently “employed against the most sympathetic elements among the enemy.”71 Rarely was it used for any purpose other than to confound an individual who might otherwise be persuaded by rational arguments. Police officers, for example, would often be treated with “careful deference,” while a “friendly probation officer or social worker” would be “put on mercilessly.”72 The threat of “real” retaliatory violence, according to Brackman, inevitably caused the put-on artist to lose her/his nerve. For this reason, as far as he was concerned, the put-on was not revolutionary but theatrical. The progression of one-dimensional society thus appeared to have been completed. “Resistance,” taken in by its own ruse, had been successfully colonized.73
Much as Brackman would have liked to dismiss the put-on as nothing more than simple cynicism, however, he was forced time and again to acknowledge the potential oppositionality of these misdirections. At one point he wrote, “Even though it’s really a defensive weapon, the put-on almost always provides an offensive for the questionee, representative of the smaller, more helpless faction, making his group appear In and the larger, more powerful group of the questioner appear Out.”74 The put-on could also be a means of empowering the weak insofar as it tricked the powerful into engaging the essential inadequacy of their own terms. Thus, as a political identity, the “militant Negro” may have been a site of opposition, but not in the sense that Marcuse proposed. The critical edge of this character/caricature lay not in its existence outside the grasp of dominant culture but in its exaggeration of that culture’s stereotypes. Brackman’s analysis therefore pointed to a dilemma overlooked by Marcuse. The political pronouncements of “other races and other colors,” believed by Marcuse to be the site of a potentially powerful opposition, were, according to Brackman, recognized to be thoroughly stereotypical. Rather than simply dismissing these identities for that reason, however, the logic of Brackman’s argument points to the ways in which these stereotypes may have presented a different form of resistance, one that began from a sense of the historical impossibility of transcendence, and thus looked to seed resistance in acts of interpretation.
Looking back on the political activism of the late 1960s with Brackman’s analysis in mind, any number of actions begin to appear different or less settled than they once did. Consider, for example, the work of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, or WITCH, a loose organization that eventually split from New York Radical Women in the winter of 1968–69. After participating in the bra burnings outside of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the previous summer, Robin Morgan and friends chose to embody, quite literally, stereotypical notions of feminists as evil or unchristian, dressing in black robes and pointed hats (among other things) to place a hex on Wall Street. That Halloween, to “liberate the daytime ghetto community of the Financial District,” she later wrote,
the Coven, costumed, masked, and made up as Shamans, Faerie Queens, Matriarchal Old Sorceresses, and Guerrilla Witches, danced first to the Federal Reserve Treasury Bank, led by a High Priestess bearing the papier-maché head of a pig on a golden platter, garnished with greenery plucked from the poison money trees indigenous to the area. Bearing verges, wands, and bezants, the WITCHes surround the statue of George Washington on the steps of the building, striking terror into the hearts of Humphrey and Nixon campaigners nearby, who castigated the women for desecrating (with WITCH stickers) the icon of the Father of our Country (not understanding that this was a necessary ritual against a symbol of patriarchal, slave-holding power). The WITCHes also cast a spell rendering the hoarded gold bricks therein valueless—except for casting through windows.75
Using the Republican and Democratic campaigners as their “straight men,” as it were, the WITCHes lampooned both popular clichés about feminism and the dominant forms of American political debate. Was either Humphrey or Nixon really the solution . . . to any of the problems that faced the United States? The fact that supporters of each one considered New York’s Financial District a good place to unearth sympathetic voters certainly suggested otherwise. But beyond this, and more importantly, the action also posed serious questions about the assumed means of addressing what seemed an exceedingly stubborn political impasse.
As Brackman suggested, examples like this are in no way uncommon. The chapters that follow thus present three case studies of political uses of the put-on, illustrating the perceived social utility of the gap between saying and meaning that so preoccupied the film critic. Chapter 1, “Monkey Theater,” will address the group that made perhaps the most obvious and elaborate use of the put-on, the Yippies. In the wake of the riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, a number of activists felt a great deal of anger toward Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Seemingly caught up in their own status as “movement celebrities,” these “leaders” appeared incapable not just of speaking for the movement they called their own but of “speaking truth to power” in any significant fashion. As Todd Gitlin, once a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, put it twelve years later, “Deprived by resentful constituents of the chance to use the media legitimately as political amplification,” Hoffman and Rubin were cut off from their supposed base.76 Shunned by fellow radicals, the Yippie spokesmen were left to perform ever more outrageous visions of political opposition for viewers they could never hope to influence. This chapter reconsiders the ways in which the Yippies were seemingly co-opted, asking if Hoffman and Rubin were indeed so blinded by their celebrity status that they might have believed that nominating a pig for president was a “revolutionary” act. Were their threats to taint Chicago’s water supply with LSD or to develop a pernicious new sex drug that could be administered to unknowing victims via water pistol anything other than irresponsible publicity stunts? What could it have meant for Hoffman to claim, following the riots in Chicago, that he hoped to fashion himself as a combination of Fidel Castro and Andy Warhol, or to write “FUCK” across his forehead—a move that he initially said would keep anyone from taking his picture—for a studio shoot with fashion photographer Richard Avedon?77 Through an analysis of the Yippies’ various media myths, one begins to see that their tactics may not have been designed simply to provoke the authorities but also to transform the futility of opposition decried by Marcuse, Brustein, Brackman, and others into its own historically specific form of technologically mediated transgression.
Chapter 2 looks to the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, two organizations that formed in New York following the Stonewall riots of 1969. At first glance, it may seem an odd choice to include the gay liberation movement in the current discussion. After all, not only were activists like Hoffman, Rubin, and Cleaver accused on more than one occasion of homophobia or antigay bias, but, as so many historians have pointed out, in the wake of the Stonewall riots an authentic visibility became one of the guiding concepts in the struggle for gay and lesbian liberation. Oppression would never end, it was said, if gay men and lesbians refused to “come out,” to show their families, their friends, and the rest of the world who they “really” were. While it is true that the gay liberation movement held a different relationship to visibility than the counterculture, by revisiting these calls for visibility and authenticity in light of the Gay Liberation Front’s efforts to be included within the constellation of progressive causes and organizations known at the time as “the Movement,” the complexities and contradictions of that relationship will begin to emerge. Although, as so many historians of gay liberation remind us, groups like the GLF often took great pains to distance themselves from “queens and nellies,” transsexuals,
