In November 1965, ABC aired The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood—or Oh Wolf, Poor Wolf, a musical adaptation of “Little Red Riding Hood” tailored to the holiday season.1 Written by Bob Merrill and starring Liza Minnelli, Cyril Ritchard, Vic Damone, and the British band The Animals, the program allowed Ritchard’s wolf character, Lone T. Wolf, to tell his own side of the story. Describing himself as the victim of a “misunderstanding,” Wolf recalls “the Red Riding Hood incident” in direct address from a zoo cage likened to jail, offering ironic commentary on his innocence. “She was a cutie pie,” he recalls, saying, “No wonder the storytellers took her side.” Like Rocky and Bullwinkle’s “Fractured Fairy Tale” version, which relocated the classic Red Riding Hood narrative to a Hollywood boutique called Red’s Riding Hoods, Dangerous Christmas facetiously amplified the role of fashion in the original story. In doing so, it participated in the camp sensibility emerging within U.S. media culture in the mid-1960s. In addition, it affirmed the queer content of popular debates about camp by representing it as an “outsider” sensibility.

The wolf’s central role in the revision focalized issues of social ostracism and acceptance, themes that sent up popular conventions demonizing miscreant characters through gay codes like effeminacy.2 While a promotional bulletin ABC circulated in anticipation of the show noted that the young Liza Minnelli would “whet…viewers appetites,” it prioritized Cyril Ritchard’s performance. According to the agency advertising the program, this actor exemplified camp. Describing the trademark “Ritchard style, which seesaws form witty elegance to premeditated hamming,” the authors of the press release invoked terminology brought to light by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” writing, “If ‘high camp’ ever goes from slang, circa 1965, into Webster’s dictionary, it will undoubtedly be followed by ‘i.e. Cyril Ritchard.’” As this announcement suggests, Ritchard does not play the typical Big Bad Wolf, but a different animal, one the copywriters identify as a “dandy wolf—or a wolf dandy.” Although he ostensibly intends to clear his name, he also dryly recognizes the futility of this endeavor. “Why did I do it?” he says, “I wanted to be noticed.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

This same desire is evident in Liza Minnelli’s Little Red Riding Hood character, known here as Lillian. Picking up on unexplored details in the original story, Lillian editorializes on her love of red and reads fashion magazines. When presented a blue garment for Christmas, Lillian turns it inside out to show the bright red lining. As Lone T. puts it, she is “dressed to the teeth.” Insinuating that Lillian was asking to be eaten based on the “beauteous, exquisite” color of the garment, he asks the audience slyly, “Did you notice she had rather flashy taste?” This dialogue would seem to rehash the earlier version’s judgmental attitude toward sartorial excess, but Lone T.’s dandyism undermines the moral of the classic tale, which Dangerous Christmas characterizes as a conservative warning that women should shy away from flamboyance and refuse to cavort with strange men. Likewise, the program’s emphasis on fashion, trends, and the importance of “being noticed” plays up connections between queer culture and camp’s aesthetic concerns. As the wolf says, “It’s all about style.”

Camp emerged as a fad in the mid-1960s alongside two primary assumptions: that the sensibility was rapidly accruing converts and that its interest in style threatened social norms. In a 1965 New York Times article, for example, writer Thomas Meehan echoed Sontag’s comments on both the queerness of camp and its zeitgeist status, reporting, “In many areas of life, camp taste is becoming dominant over what is today generally accepted as good taste.” 3 He also quoted an “anti-Camp” psychiatrist who called camp “sick and decadent,” claiming camp was “not only extremely childish but also potentially dangerous to society.” Meehan’s article noted that although there were very few camp television productions, small screen phenomena like Soupy Sales’s comedy shows and the music revue Hollywood à Go Go were “in part Camp.” The Dangerous Christmas special was more than “part Camp,” and it actively participated in the debates about camp taking place at the time.

In promoting a formerly suppressed point of view while excavating the erotic overtones of a fairy tale, Dangerous Christmas created an ironic story that aligned sexual deviance, social ostracism, and style from a camp perspective. As a wolf, Lone T. is considered a “miserable misfit” beyond the world of the forest, and he laments his position on society’s margins. From his point of view, Lillian’s fear of wolves is unwarranted, and he attempts to change her perception of his kind, which he figures stems from “malicious gossip.” “She’ll get over her aversion,” he sings, a line to which The Animals respond in unison, “She has cast her last aspersion.” At the same time, Lone T. articulates his position as an outcast through his disdain for the group of “longhair musicians” who play his pack, and who he refers to as “the undesirable element.” Wanting to achieve respectability, he attempts to transcend his outsider status, plotting to rise above “riff raff” like the rock ’n’ rollers with his sophisticated taste. As he explains to Lillian, “Even a country gentleman can be conscious of haute couture.”

Through the ironic displacement of conventional masculinity, the updated fairy tale mapped issues around the rise of camp and queer culture onto a quintessentially heteronormative narrative, in which Little Red Riding Hood learns to do as she is told lest she be eaten. Dangerous Christmas emphasized the sexual metaphor of the wolf’s desire, not least through Lone T.’s comic refrain that Lillian “completely misunderstood [his] intentions.” As a “dandy wolf,” however, Ritchard’s threatening qualities are emblematized in his aesthetic sensibility rather than his attitude toward women, which is represented in contrast to the modus operandi of the wolf pack.

Discussing his plan to become Lillian’s friend first, before devouring her, Lone T. poses the question, “Why should I eat up Red Riding Hood or harm her? / Let her get to know me better / I’m a charmer.” In doing so, he rejects the advice of Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, who tells Lone T. to “just walk up and bite her.” Accusing the group of “thinking with their stomachs,” he calls them “lowbrows.” Saying that such a gauche approach would “set wolfism back twenty years,” he voices a preference for sophistication that is significantly queer. Looking disdainfully at the hungry youngsters, with their bared fangs, he announces, “There are other, more meaningful relationships, you know.” Meanwhile, the band’s musical number, “We’re Gonna Howl Tonight,” expressing a less genteel desire to “swallow the world in one big bite.” In light of the connections Dangerous Christmas drew between style, social alienation, and erotic scripts, Ritchard’s dandy wolf represented a new set of sexual mores. Declaring “a wolf with teeth for gnashing…passé and out of fashion,” the character transcended his outsider status through displaced commentary on camp as a popular trend.4

As Sontag explained, camp presented an “answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.” 5 In documenting ephemeral discourse around camp as an outsider sensibility in the mid-1960s and mimicking homophobic rhetoric about its ascent to power, Dangerous Christmas offers insight into the queer practices of the television industry, which predated—and continued to coincide with—the rise of camp to mainstream recognition. Moreover, in demonstrating ABC’s active participation in producing camp pre-Batman, the show’s PR suggests that dandified forms of TV programming existed even before most media consumers received news of queer sensibilities.

Image Credits:

1. IMDB
2 – 7. Author’s screen captures

Please feel free to comment.

1. “Cyril Richard’s Little Red Riding Hood.” November 4, 1965. Wisconsin Historical Society.
2. The writers of the press release described the Lone T. Wolf role as the “most comically conniving, vain, flamboyant and boastful characterization since [Ritchard’s] Captain Hook.” Casting Ritchard in the wolf role intensified the program’s suggestion that effeminate men were often misunderstood, particularly because of his previous role in the Peter Pan stage play and 1960 TV musical. Ritchard reportedly played the villain in a camp style that failed to scare anyone (an outcome What’s My Line host John Charles Daly called “the art” of Ritchard’s performance.
3. Thomas Meehan, “Not Good Taste, Not Bad Taste—It’s ‘Camp,’ ” The New York Times March 21, 1965; SM30
4. See the song “I’m Naïve,” for example, and the subcategory of “naïve” camp.
5. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 63.

Uncertainty surrounds camp—that queer sensibility propelled by oppression—in many venues, among them TV studies. Misconceptions abound about camp, yet two weeks’ worth of Michael Buckley’s Buck Hollywood website might clear them all up. In fact, the verbal repartee ensuing since “Buck,” a veritable “cewebrity,” added a tag segment called “Queer Comments” to his popular What the Buck?! comedy show reveals everything you ever wanted to know about camp, including even its implicit rebuttal to age-old charges of sexism.

What the Buck?!, a six- to eight-minute dish, began in 2006, and Buckley has been making a six-figure salary from the show since 2008, when viewer statistics put him in the top ten comedians on the site.1 Part critic, part gossip columnist, Buck posts several videos a week. Scripting and rehearsing What the Buck?! before shooting it in a single take, he reviews television series and specials, celebrity news, and movies. Buckley reportedly signed with HBO a year and a half ago, but apart from a few cable appearances, he has stuck to YouTube.2 In this format, he plays the preeminent “gay news man,” with his review drawing out New Moon’s debts to Little Shop of Horrors and The Sound of Music while performing sitcom theme songs in vlogs filmed in his pajamas. Tirelessly articulating his camp perspective, he jokes during the first segment, “Are we not watching the same movie?”, and vamps in the second, “I love dancing to The Patty Duke Show. I wish you understood.”3

Buck’s channel exemplifies journalist Will Doig’s observation that the “blogosphere” is a “homophobosphere” where any post’s comment section might be filled with “dozens of homophobes trying to outdo each other with vitriol.”4 While other TV critics delete hostile contributions to their sites, Buckley’s include rampant comments running multiple gamuts of gender policing, general maliciousness, and direct homo-hatred—from “Are you gay?” and “That guy sounds like a fag” to “go fuck yourself you deserve to die” and “This guy makes me want to commit a hate crime,” remarks Buckley has paraphrased as “Die fag,” responding, “Clever.”5 Buckley makes a point to reply to many of these statements, most emphatically to the venom commenters direct at his mother (e.g. “cumguzzler”), to which he says he always sends back an affable response along the lines of, “My mother died of lung cancer, but when I’m praying for her tonight, I’ll pray for you, you little fucker.”6

Buckley’s YouTube channels (his personal moniker is peron75) provided a forum for colossal misunderstandings about what it means to be gay long before What the Buck?! debuted the new segment. Buckley’s talk back has always emphasized that being gay is a good thing, not something to be ashamed of. Hearing “You’re gay,” he counters, “I’m super gay. I’m gay like you read about gay,” explaining, “I like being gay. I like making gay videos.7 At the same time, the “queer comments” idea experiments with the friction between camp perspectives and straight mindsets to an even greater degree and escalates the constant drama of his inning and outing.8 Calling a comment like “Who is this screeming [sic] faggot?” a “queer comment” shifts the slur’s frame of reference, allowing Buck to respond in a cheer-coated showdown: “Me, Michael Buckley!” Promoting the catchphrase, “They’re not gay, they’re peculiar!”, the segment draws another layer of attention to Buckley’s public contention with pointed criticisms of his camp presentation and his mockery of the clueless feedback and general fag bashing he regularly receives on YouTube.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I offer a quick-and-dirty defense of camp’s alleged sexism in response to a complaint about the “cute/ugly euphemisms for vaginas” that suffuse What the Buck?!. Its author wrote Buck to say, “We’re raped enough in real life without being cheerfully demeaned by our gay brothers,” and Buckley dubbed this a “queer comment” following a January 15 video in which he referenced a “golden era of vaginas” (2006-2007), referred to Lindsay Lohan as “ginger lips,” and invoked “another fire crotch, the devil” (and also called someone a “fugbian” [a fucking ugly lesbian]).9 While Buckley responded to this fan’s charge on multiple counts, a video about a different comment better demonstrates the wider playing field for his litanies of girl parts. This viewer insisted that Buckley’s “talk about vaginas and boobs” proved that he was not gay, but rather a “bisexual, vagina penis-loving…freak” because he has “the voice of a gay and the mind of a perverted man[.]”10 Reading the email even though the author threatened to kill him if he mentioned her in a video (or made fun of the Jonas Brothers), he writes, “Don’t tell my husband! …I love the Buffalo Gums!”

Focusing on the “inning” satire and celezbutante-specific aspects of this vocabulary helps draw out the relationship between Buck’s camp style, his full-on engagement of queer bashers, and his work as a TV critic. In an early video, Buckley joked that his language was “limited to curse words and gay slang.”11 In the January 15 video, which promised “gigantic boobs [and] lesbian sex tapes,” Buckley tried to make sense of a breaking bit of gossip connecting Tila Tequila and Lindsay Lohan through a mutual lover, Courtenay Semel, a socialite who was baiting E! with a sex tape she made with Tila Tequila’s deceased fiancé, heiress Casey Johnson—a truly depressing news item prompting him to exclaim, “Thank God for Ellen and Doogie Howser—I speak their name!”12 Mocking Semel’s suggestion that the sex tape was a “beautiful piece of art,” he asks, “Has this clamdigger never been to a museum? Has she never seen an episode of Glee? That’s art, bitch, not your Scissor Sister home video.”

As this knotty analogy suggests, Buckley’s attempt to reconcile the world of undeserving celebrities, sustaining television programming, and ridiculous homophobia that Hollywood produces reflects a camp investment in queer representation that includes something like lesbian feminism, an investment that surfaces in a different guise during his Golden Globe review show when he reports “dying for a good ten minutes” in “the best part of the evening,” when Jodie Foster was introduced in connection with her new film The Beaver.13 In the context of a favorite film star, the camp effect of Buck’s cooch slang becomes clearer, particularly when compared with other celebrity gossips. While Perez Hilton wrote, “P.S. Jodie Foster knows A LOT about beaver. Obvs!” when announcing, “We’re certain we would enjoy this kind of movie, along with all the puns we can come up with about it,” straight Hollywood blogs prove that even if this Foster project puts most people’s “minds [in] the gutter,” specific references to Foster’s sexuality do not reliably follow.14 Entertainment Weekly’s “Popwatch” blog report notes the “locker room terminology for genitalia,” but doesn’t actually go there with the “beaver” talk—and certainly doesn’t go there.15 While the Perez post includes a pointed visual representation of Foster’s disinterest in potential co-star Mel Gibson, commenters on the EW site anticipate Foster’s sexual chemistry with him as if it were based on natural attraction, worrying that the pairing might “cause trouble” in his marriage. In a context where critics who step lightly around anatomical language also steer clear of queer innuendo while others—such as a poponthepop.com columnist referring to “fish tacos”—obscure fallen idol Lohan’s love life, Buckley’s “cute/ugly euphemisms for vaginas” may offend, but they also pack a billboard’s worth of queer knowledge into What the Buck?!16

Image Credits:
1. Michael Buckley, star of the What the Buck?! show
2. Ad promoting the What the Buck?! show
3. Michael Buckley and stills from the What the Buck?!

Please feel free to comment.

1. CBS Evening News interview with Michelle Miller
2. Jenna Wortham, “What the Buck? Creator Inks Deal With HBO,” Wired September 3, 2008.
3. “THIS IS NOT MY P*NIS!!! – A singing dancing walking talking amazing vlog! January 03, 2010.
4. Doig argues that the homophobosphere’s “frightening, mob-like, torches-and-pitchforks effect can seem more personal than a random public bashing.” Will Doig, “Homophobosphere,” Advocate 1002, February 26, 2008, Advocate.com.
5. Aaron Barnhart, for example, moderates comments on his “TV Barn” blog writing, “I don’t mind dissenting points of view, but they must be free of personal attacks…I know how vitriol can take over an online forum if it isn’t checked. http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/faq.html
6. “Backstage at Hairspray With Ryan O’Connor! Oprah says Sub Him!” January 4, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcHjg6m_1tg
7. “ARE YOU GAY?” January 7, 2009.
8. The theme song, written and performed by the band Harry and Alfie, ends with the lyrics, “Thank you for leaving a comment…even if they’re gay,” and represents how perceptive many What the Buck?! fans are in response to the “homophobosphere” phenomenon. See also Slyth66’s “Michael Buckley – Parody of ‘Paparazzi’ by Lady Gaga.”
9. “Lindsay Lohan Sex Tape/Gay Pants on the Ground.” January 15, 2010.
10. I’m Not Gay – Sorry!!! March 11, 2008.
11. “America’s Next Top Lesbian!” October 28, 2006.
12. “Artistic Lesbian Sex Tape & Heidi Montag Titty Fire,” January 21, 2010.
13. Foster is directing the film. “Gossip Girl Disses Haiti Relief/Golden Globes/Kimmel V Leno!” January 18, 2010.
14. “Mel Gibson Might Want in Jodie Foster’s Beaver” July 10, 2009.
15. Margaret Lyons, “‘The Beaver,’ starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster: weird yet intriguing,” July 10, 2009. http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/07/10/
16. Snarky, “Lindsay Lohan Talks About Casey Johnson’s Death” (http://poponthepop.com/2010/01/lindsay-lohan-talks-about-casey-johnsons-death/) January 5, 2010.

A short two months ago, my iPod Touch device was in disuse, and I never expected to play a video game again. Things changed with the release of Hi, How Are You, an iPhone application based on the work of Daniel Johnston, a cult artist who hit the Austin, Texas music scene in the 1980s and still tours, supported by family members who sell his drawings for up to $2,500 a pop. I had not saved anyone onscreen since Princess Toadstool in the original Super Mario Brothers, but suddenly I was back trafficking in digital damsels, intent on passing all twenty-six levels in order to liberate Johnston’s true love from the devil. The game is not a faithful translation of the artist’s repertoire, given its traditional guy-rescues-girl plot, but this archaic convention unexpectedly complements important themes in Johnston’s songs and drawings, including the sexual politics of courtship and hopeless devotion.

Johnston recounts his history with the “Hi, How Are You” phrase in “Grievances,” a song in which the protagonist learns that most people consider passion a distraction and commits himself to pursuing love even though he knows he may never be with the person he wants most. As the story goes, Johnston fell for a woman named Laurie in art school. She soon married a mortician-in-training, and Johnston saw her hanging up coats at her husband’s father’s funeral parlor while attending a service. He recalls, “As I walked in, I said, ‘Hi, How are you?’ and I shook her hand. I looked behind her and there was an empty casket and I just thought, ‘Well, I’m just gonna crawl in there.’” As he sings in “Grievances,” “I saw you at the funeral
/ You were standing there like a temple
/ I said “Hi, how are you, hello” /
And I pulled up a casket and crawled in.” Johnston ended up staying there, and singing about Laurie in “a thousand songs,” as he put it, or for “a thousand years,” according to one lyric. As an interviewee in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston said, “he really liked that event even though it causes him great pain.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Johnston’s voice continues to emanate from the place of “Grievances’” punch line and is chronically misunderstood, mostly because of critics’ hang-ups about his bipolar diagnosis.1 Fixating on archetypes of good and evil and true love, fans and reporters overlook Johnston’s interest in “impossible love” (as one song is called) and his self-reflexivity about what it means muse on love as a man presumed mentally unstable. Importantly, Johnston believes that “true love will find you in the end,” rather than the other way around, and he has long been aware that intense affection creeps women out. Instead of a knight in shinning armor he is a proud pest, a shameless, inescapably morbid, and highly self-conscious romantic who pursues love in the present by processing how he lost it in the past.

Hi, How Are You creators Steve Broumley and Peter Franco eschew this complexity, cutting the darker elements from upbeat songs to construct a happy-go-lucky soundtrack. A video game requires high-energy music and an adventure with enemies, assistants, and someone to save. Like many critics preoccupied with platitudes about unrequited love when it comes to Johnston’s work, Broumley and Franco rewrite his requiem as a “quest for true love.”2 This narrative fits video game conventions, as well as unspoken understandings of the artist as a doped-up would-be stalker. According to one reviewer, Johnston’s work “is still rooted in the adolescent male fantasies that have populated gaming for years.”3 From this point of view, Johnston’s drawings are the “perfect fodder” for an video game not because they complicate the damsel in distress story, but because its lopsided set-up makes the question of unwanted advances seem moot. As GamesRadar critic Shane Patterson explains, some players equate a rescue plot with sexual consent, seeing a girl character’s onscreen presence as a promise that she “will screw [his] brains out” when he wins.4 Similarly, in Hi, How Are You, saving Laurie constitutes a happy ending rather than an action potentially warranting a restraining order.

While the game egregiously misrepresents ideas about love in Johnston’s work, his humorous and direct sensibility shines through, not least because players gain access to original art by completing tasks. When you push every block in a level over the edge, for example, you unlock “Love is Real,” a picture of a dazed figure saying, “Whatever it’s really cool and like wow you know what I mean.” Irony frames Johnston’s depictions of his desires in many of these drawings, given that his commentary on love both affirms his devotion to Laurie and doubles as a response to listeners who dismiss his emotional spectacle as the “endearingly naïve” psychotic symptoms of a “man-child.”5 In actuality, the artist’s exploration of the ethical questions raised by a permanent crush and his multi-layered awareness of how ambiguities in sexual pursuit are exacerbated by conventional gender roles and hetero norms set him apart from better paid pop stars who sing about imaginary relationships with women they barely know. (The song “Devinare,” for example, briefly riffs on the quintessential love-as-surveillance song, “Every Breath You Take,” by The Police.)

Johnston’s departure from the traditional unrequited love narrative is evident in the queer temporality of his work. When he sings, “We were in love forever,” for example, he is not describing a moment in time when two people felt as if they would always be in love, but instead a personal sense that experiencing love for someone—no matter how long ago—actually constitutes being in love with them forever, both in that moment and beyond. Likewise, Johnston flouts social prescriptions to “move on” in the song “Thrill,” attributing a present liveness to the effects of falling in love in the past (She was the one I chose
/ At very first sight”) and of having committed himself to processing that love (“Oh what a dream it was / A realistic dream”), singing “You are everything I ever imagined so far.” This outlook resonates throughout the game, in mundane elements like losing lives. Johnston clearly plans to die in the throes of a decades-old, one-sided love affair, and his avatar’s tendency to get killed during play recalls song lyrics and drawings about death (“I’m already dead and I already died”; “There’s Nothing Like Life After Death”) that relate to his vision of love. You “die” in most video games, but the mechanics of re-materializing with as many new lives as you need takes on odd significance here. After completing the “Time Bandit” achievement, for example, one of Johnston’s more morose figures commands, “Die 3 times,” which is inevitably a low figure.

By that point, the heroine caged in flames appears less like a prize than an image of love as a “cool” and “dangerous” “nuisance”—thoughts voiced in the game’s art library. In one piece, titled “Let Love Live Try to Love Again,” a woman tells a figure down on one knee, “Leave me alone.” While it is hardly apparent in the world of Hi, How Are You, Johnston generally recognizes women’s ability to say what they want, if only by dwelling on his own rejection. In the game, Laurie is presented as a standard reward for completing a mission, but more complex ideas about loyalty and seduction resonate throughout. Pulling up speech bubbles with slogans like “Love is dirt and worms love it” on your iPhone continues to draw out ironies from Johnston’s funeral lore, so much so that when a bright red heart encircles your avatar and his “princess” in the game’s final vignette, Johnston’s promise that “true love will find you in the end” may seem downright chivalrous.

1. Pitchfork reviewer Jason Nickey is an exception. He writes, “The fact is, Johnston’s mental illness does not make up his central characteristic as a songwriter, though it does color it significantly.” Jason Nickey, Pitchfork October 1, 2001
2. Jon Jordan, “Dr Fun Fun on making the Daniel Johnston-inspired “Hi, How Are You”: Replicating marker artwork and the Quest for True Love” Pocket Gamer June 10, 2009. .
3. John Glover, “Interview: The Developers and Daniel Johnston” Finger Gaming November 5, 2009 .
4. Shane Patterson, “Top 7… Blue Ball Moments: The Game May Be Over, But Where’s Our Happy Ending?” GamesRadar US
5. Jane Oriel, “Hi, How Are You? DiS Meets Daniel Johnston, Drowned in Sound July 23, 2007 ; Randy Kennedy, “A Brain on Fire, Spreading to Phones” The New York Times
   September 28, 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/arts/design/29john.html>.