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On Duran Duran and being a man
BY JOSH KUN
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Duran Duran released their second album, Rio, in 1982. My grandmother bought it for me, on cassette, just as I was finishing elementary school and preparing for an all-boys junior high. That they were British and grown men while I was a small and skinny pre-pubescent blond LA Jew didn’t stop me from making them my idols. They wore white pants and yacht-club stripes and styled their hair into flips and waves, streaking it with highlights and holding it with mousse. These were men who primped and posed, and I, whose mother was on a first-name basis with sales girls at Neiman and Saks, was a boy who grew up thinking there was nothing wrong with primping and posing. In one of the earliest family photographs of me as a child, my mother had dressed me in a one-piece yellow jumper and white leather sandals with silver buckles. I’m in an Omaha forest, holding a flower and leaning against a tree. No surprise, then, that though I liked Duran’s leading heartthrobs, Simon and John, just fine, I identified most with Nick. "Give me a bridegroom slender and pale," goes a Yiddish folk song; Nick was "slender and pale" and always hiding behind his synthesizers. He looked like a really pretty girl, and that made me feel better about having soft hands and no hips and weighing less than a hundred pounds. All of the singles from Duran Duran’s golden age (1981-’85) are newly available as an artful box set of 13 CDs, each one a re-creation of the original seven-inch. Released in just in time for a Duran Duran summer tour and new album, the set is the gemstone of the current ’80s new-wave revival (even Dead or Alive are back). After all, nothing denotes ’80s as acutely as Duran Duran, the band who in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel Less Than Zero blared from the bedroom of an out-to-lunch Beverly Hills mom while teen girls in bikinis watched hardcore porn on a Betamax. The set is also out just in time for the new "metrosexuality" marketing trend that the New York Times gave recent front-page attention to in its Sunday Styles section. Duran Duran fit the bill then, and I fit it now — sexually straight men who like to shop, who have a bathroom full of facial products, who appreciate a good spa day. But for me, the music on Duran Duran’s The Singles 81-85 (EMI) is far more than a marketing ploy and far more than ’80s nostalgia. It’s the soundtrack to an alternative masculinity — music that doesn’t rely on conventions of toughness and locker-room high-fives. The scholar Daniel Boyarin recently wrote that the stereotype of the effeminate Jewish man is not only true — in traditional Ashkenazic culture, the most desirable male is the biggest sissy, the one who stays home to study — but progressive, a far better option than a street thug or a chest-pounding Iron John. My Pink Floyd–listening high-school friends could tease me all they wanted about my own version of the Jewish sissy’s uniform: Guess jeans with knee flaps, white-on-white wrestling boots, Ton Sur Ton sweatshirts. I looked like Duran Duran, and Duran Duran were superstars. At an all-boys school, you are either straight or gay, a guy or a fag. As a Duran acolyte, I got harassed even though I had girlfriends (one of my friends used to sing "More Than a Woman" when I sat down at the lunch table), and occasionally I internalized that harassment enough to participate in the harassment of others. The filmmaker Darren Stein, who knew he was gay when he was my high-school classmate, talks about his own campus harassment in his new documentary Put the Camera on Me, which is making the national festival circuit. Put the Camera on Me pulls together all the videos Darren directed as a kid, from campy Holocaust re-enactments where he and his neighborhood friends role-play as dying Jews and SS officers (all dressed in the same tight white underwear) to "Gay As a Whistle," where they find a magic coin that turns straight football players into screaming queens. The films are incredible portraits of masculinity being made and unmade during an adolescence willfully caught on tape. Straight boys and gay boys romp around with their shirts off, bodies wiggling, playing with fake blood and competing for starring roles. It’s a shame that Put the Camera on Me is out at the same time as the press-grabbing Capturing the Friedmans, a far more sensationalist film about (suburban Jewish) masculinity that is also structured around the analysis of home movies. Where Friedmans is suffocating and coercive, Put the Camera on Me is freeing. Darren made his movies because he wanted people to see them (especially his parents), because directing movies was (and still is, I imagine) his way of directing his own life. I used Duran Duran’s music to be the kind of boy I wanted to be. Darren used a video camera, creating worlds where it was safe to be himself.
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