Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton.
The list of colleagues and friends who have helped with various forms of professional, intellectual, and moral support over the years is far too long to include. There are, nevertheless, those whose omission would be unforgiveable. To my colleagues Zainab Bahrani, Francesco Benelli, Holger Klein, Matthew McKelway, Bill Hood, Caroline Earley, Kate Walker, Anika Smulovitz, Beverly Howard, Dominick Longbucco, Barrett Norman, Andy Goodman, and Michal Temkin-Martinez, I would like simply to say, “Thank you.” Any attempt to formulate a specific debt I might owe you individually would only prove embarrassing. To Chad Laird, J. P. Park, Sarah Cartwright, Yvie Fabella, and Terry McLaughlin, I owe my gratitude not only for their friendship but also for their understanding and forgiveness in those times when the demands of this project—among other things—kept me from writing or calling as often as I would have liked. I must also thank Mike Hoglund and John Gold for their generosity and technical support; without their help, this work would have taken so much longer. Joel and Naomi Rosenthal, and Miranda Townsend and Jonathan Bayer provided me with homes away from home, playing an important, albeit unexpected, role in bringing this project into being. Similarly, Dave and Carol Hoglund may (still) never know just how much I appreciate their help and hospitality. And special thanks are due to my parents, Larry and Sharon, and my sisters, Stephanie and Katrina, without whom I would never have written a word.
I also owe thanks to Columbia University Press for allowing me to reprint “The ‘Counterculture’ in Quotation Marks: Sontag and Marcuse on the Work of Revolution” from The Scandal of Susan Sontag, edited by Barbara Ching and Jennifer Wagner-Lawer, 154–70, © 2009; and to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to use “‘Styleless Style’: What Photorealism Can Tell Us about ‘the Sixties’” from the Journal of American Studies 47, no. 3 (August 2013): 743–57 (portions of both appear in revised form in the introduction). Taylor and Francis has allowed me to reprint “Formlessness as Figure: Guerrilla Theater and the Image of Utopia” from Third Text 17, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 261–71; and Cambridge Scholars Publishing has allowed me to use “Commercials for the Revolution: ‘Movement Celebrities’ and the Theatricality of Protest” from Film and Television Stardom, edited by Kylo Patrick Hart, 161–79, © 2008 (both of which appear in revised form in chapter 1). And Berghahn Books has allowed me reprint portions of “Representing Black Power: Handling a ‘Revolution’ in the Age of Mass Media” from Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present, edited by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen, and Rolf Werenskjold © 2014 (appearing in chapter 3).
Finally, I will offer my deepest gratitude to Sarah Hoglund, who for more than a decade has provided me with support and encouragement, regardless of context. Without her, nothing I do could ever be called complete.
INTRODUCTION
Stereotypes, Opposition, and “the Sixties”
IN 1970, DRAMA CRITIC ROBERT BRUSTEIN COMPLAINED THAT IN America revolution had been reduced to a form of theater. What had once appeared to be legitimate opposition to the morally bankrupt policies of the United States government had become little more than costume drama. Groups such as the Weathermen and the Black Panther Party, he wrote, “certainly have the ability to transform their rhetoric into violent action, and are now suffering the consequences in even more violent official retaliation.” Nevertheless,
both actions and rhetoric are an extension of theatricality, and proceed through the impulse to impersonation. When the Weathermen lock arms down a Chicago street, chanting “We love our uncle, Ho Chi Minh” . . . or when the Panthers, in paramilitary costumes, have their pictures taken serving breakfast to ghetto children, then the link with public relations and play acting becomes obvious. Indeed, the alleged murder of an alleged Panther informer in New Haven bore sufficient similarities to the plot of a recent movie . . . to make one suspect that life was imitating art.1
Shortly after the appearance of Brustein’s essay, journalist Robert L. Gross of the Miami Herald stated the argument in even starker terms. “Posing is the key,” Gross wrote. “Revolution has become the giant put-on of the era.”2 To many, these arguments would have seemed preposterous. How, in the face of mass protests, police riots, shootouts with authorities, threats against heads of state, and even bombings, could anyone think of trivializing the political conflicts taking place in the United States by referring to them as mere “theater”? The answer, according to Brustein, lay in the guaranteed right to free political speech. By allowing individuals to “speak their minds,” American culture had succeeded in replacing direct action with “radical verbal displays.”3 It should have come as no surprise therefore that no matter how loudly these “revolutionaries” called for meaningful action, their cries seemed to fall upon deaf ears. Stripped of its efficacy by the putative tolerance of contemporary American society, political activism appeared to be more caricature than rebellion.
But what if the “verbal displays” Brustein lamented represented, in their very theatricality, a form of resistance that neither he nor Gross recognized? This book argues that the political work of individuals such as Eldridge Cleaver, and organizations such as the Youth International Party (Yippie) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) may in fact mark the emergence of a different approach to political dissent. Rather than dismissing these individuals and organizations for having missed the point of Black Power, the counterculture, or the gay liberation movement, I suggest that they may instead be understood as efforts to negotiate the challenges of presenting radical politics at a time when, as Brustein and others pointed out, the possibility of opposition appeared to have been historically foreclosed. To reframe these political tactics, I place the visual and verbal media games of Cleaver, the Yippies, and the GAA next to the contemporary social and cultural analyses of a number of their critics, each of whom was, in his or her own way, perplexed by the crisis of theatricality that Brustein described. Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton, documentary filmmaker Norman Fruchter, countercultural theorist Theodor Roszak, and film critic Parker Tyler—all politically progressive, these authors worried at length over the damage that activists like Cleaver, the Yippies, and the GAA might do to the various causes they advocated. At the same time, however, each author recognized that the way in which the dominant social order seemed only to thrive on images of opposition also jeopardized the very possibility of meaningful dissent, at least as traditionally performed. Faced with this predicament, each one argued in his own way for the importance of what one might call a nonrepresentational politics, that is, the enactment of a “real” alternative in the present.4 Thus, to give but one example, in contrast to the media games of Abbie Hoffman, which seemed only a juvenile provocation of authority, Roszak celebrated the “authentic” sexuality, the “free love,” as it were, of the counterculture.
But was it really so simple? Was there really nothing more to the Yippies’ media mythmaking than childish pranks? Had Cleaver really mistaken his rhetoric of armed revolution for an actual uprising? Had the GAA, by employing media “zaps” to call for gay rights, turned the fight for gay liberation into a modest proposal for social reform? Put differently, one might ask, as many did, if each of these individuals and organizations had “sold out” their particular struggles, allowing a legitimate, systemic critique to be co-opted. When approaching their work in terms of the aesthetic, the very aspect that so bothered Brustein, those acts that seemed so thoroughly compromised begin to look quite different. After all, as others have noted in discussions of contemporary art and culture, it was in the 1960s that the very oppositions that had structured so much thinking about politics, the avant-garde, and so on—radical/compromised, alienation/assimilation, outside/inside—became far less stable than had been previously assumed.5 Thus, for example, the artist’s desire to “detach” himself or herself from society and
