Michael Betancourt, ‘Judy at Carnegie Hall’

I was unaware of this series, the album equivalent of the BFI classic series, and Manuel Betancourt’s Book on JUDY AT CARNEGIE HALL is so good, I plan to try out more. Betancourt covers the so-called ‘greatest night in showbusiness’ from many perspectives, the audience, the songs, the performance, the performer, the recording, the liveness. And one gets a rich understanding of Garland’s career to that point, the movies, her significance, how much of the career draws on nostalgia for a different time, race, androgyny. It ends with an analysis of Rufus Wainright’s homage, bringing all of these elements together through comparing the performances whilst exploring Garland’s relationship to queer cultural histories, exploring why Garland is always positioned as a gay icon whose significance lies in a previous generation of gay culture (BOYS IN THE BAND figures prominently in this part of the analysis) in the face of objective evidence that later generations ‘get’ and ‘use’ her in ways not too different.

I love Betancourt’s book and I learned a lot from it (the double album was no. 1 for 13 weeks and charted for 73) but, as I am often feeling now in relation to Garland, there is an over-emphasis on her gay audience. Isn’t what her Betsy Booth meant to young girls or what her radio recordings might have meant to young soldiers or what her persona throughout the 40s when she was a top box office attraction and her personal problems still unknown of any interest? It should be. The majority of those  boys and girls (and parents and grandparents, and grandchildren) would not have been gay. How that minority that were would have shared both a mainstream understanding, a subcultural one, and the tensions between them.  I of course welcome a study of what she meant and continues to mean to queer subcultures but I’d like to see that in relation to, in play with, what she meant to a more broadly popular audience for such a long time, and this is less a criticism of Betancourt than it is a criticism of the over-emphasis of a particular positioning of Garland as a cultural figure.

José Arroyo