Truth queens and gallows humor

There’s nothing meeker than a Jew!

Caroline, or Change (Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori)

“so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish”

Book of Esther (4:14)

So it’s a good thing I’m here to deliver the truth

Natalie Wynn

Ok, Colin: here’s my truth

Goober, the Clown/Cecily Strong (Saturday Night Live, Nov. 6, 2021)

During the Trump years of courtier politics, fawning acolytes vied for the king’s ear. So too, it was said, did Ivanka Trump, who was seen as having access to the president, as his favorite daughter. Indeed, the First Daughter, as she was sometimes called, was likened by some at the beginning of the Trump presidency to the biblical Esther, the royal beauty who risked all to save her people. Jewish, Evangelical, and Christian readers of the biblical text see Esther as a Truth Queen, telling the truth to her husband, the King, at great risk to herself. Secretly a Jew, living in the palace, Esther appealed to the King to save her people from a genocide that was planned with the King’s permission by his senior advisor, Haman. On the brink of disaster, Esther lets the King know she too is a Jew, and she too will be killed if his genocidal orders are allowed to go into effect. Her appeal works. The king sides with her against Haman, and Haman falls from grace. In March, 2020, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik published an opinion piece in the New York Times headlined: “Esther, a Hero for Our Time.” ¹ The piece made no mention of Ivanka, but then the not-quite-first lady shared the piece on Twitter, quoting its main message and correcting the Rabbi’s oversight. ²

Why compare Ivanka to Esther? The suggestion was that she, a convert to Judaism, could be counted upon to look out for her fellow Jews in a Trump presidency. After all, it was noted, Ivanka had the President’s ear, just as the biblical Esther had the ear (and maybe also other body parts) of her husband, Ahasuerosh, King of Persia. No one seemed worried about the incestuous implications of replacing husband with father in this new version of the Esther story. She is one of us, the Ivanka whisperers said; she married a Jew, converted, sends her children to Hebrew day school, and her family observes the Sabbath. Surely, she would counter the anti-Semites in Trump’s coterie of white supremacists in the Cabinet. Surely, for her sake, or his grandchildren’s (though there is no sign he knows their names), Trump would not support the white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in 2017, or the Proud Boys militias on the streets in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd drew protestors nationwide, or the cosplay MAGAnauts, most of them deadly serious, at the Jan 6th Capitol Insurrection. Jewish supporters of Trump were proven wrong on all three counts. They may have miscalculated: Ivanka is still and also Trump’s daughter, with an ambi-religiosity that worked in her favor during the Trump years, easing Christian concerns about the Jews (Stephen Miller and Kushner) in the White House and Jewish concerns about the anti-Semites in the White House (Stephen Miller and Bannon). ³

Esther also offered Ivanka an elusive gravity. In the 19th century US, Esther was touted as exemplary by the abolitionist Grimkē sisters, who saw in her example a counter to those who claimed women’s political involvement was against biblical teaching. But the Grimkēs did not promote Esther’s particular techniques of political engagement—the ingratiation, flattery, deception, wiles, and seduction with which Esther pleased the king, and on which Ivanka’s admirers clearly hoped Ivanka would draw. These are what Hannah Arendt criticized as parvenu tactics. Eve Sedgwick criticizes these tactics, too, in a reading of Esther that is tied by her to an old photograph of herself as a child dressed in a Queen Esther costume for the Jewish holiday of Purim. Sedgwick notes her own downcast eyes in the image, suggesting submissiveness, and how her father’s shadow pillars over her in the picture. Sedgwick does not admire the “salvific femininity” sold to young Jewish girls of her generation by way of Esther. But, writing about the homophobic closet and the politics of exiting it, Sedgwick does admire Esther for the courage it took to disclose her real identity at great risk to herself. That said, Sedgwick notes, Esther falls short of the standard set by Vashti, the earlier wife of Ahaseuerosh, the king, whom Esther replaced. Vashti, the Queen, was dismissed when she refused the king’s late-night call to appear, wearing her crown, in his banquet hall full of drunk courtiers. Esther was Vashti’s replacement, the Book of Esther explains, chosen after an empire-wide search for a new wife who would be a more pliant queen and a better model for all the women of the empire. A better model is necessary because, Ahaseurosh’s advisors worried, Vashti’s refusal set a dangerous precedent. If the king can be openly refused by his queen, they warned, no man can be secure in his patriarchal powers.

The ideal of an Estherian Truth Queen is still attractive to many. Some might see in her feminine wiles an attractive “weapon of the weak,” but that is precisely the conundrum for Sedgwick: those forced into the closet by homophobia turn to such weapons for their survival. In the culture of the closet, as Judith Butler also points out, conspiracy and paranoia thrive and every utterance is a trap, fraught with self-exposure or self-betrayal. ⁴ Hannah Arendt also explored the culture of the closet in her analysis of the salon politics of 19th century France, in which Jews and inverts were exoticized, found “interesting,” and sought after as guests in a way that prefigured, and did not forestall, their later targeting for genocide. Where the basis for inclusion is xenophilia, xenophobia still lurks. For Arendt, the weapons of the weak further weaken those who resort to them. ⁵ To 21st century Americans, salon society’s fascination with Jews and queers may seem harmless or remote, but Arendt’s observation about the 19th century remains relevant: “society was far from being prompted by a revision of prejudices. They did not doubt that homosexuals were ‘criminals’ or that Jews were ‘traitors’; they only revised their attitude toward crime and treason” (81). Her observation applies now not just to his stigmatized targets but to Trump, as well, who has long benefitted from similarly revisionist attitudes toward crime and treason.

The problem with parvenu techniques, Arendt argued in her famous essay, “The Jew as Pariah,” is that parvenu politics are a poison. The governed are disenchanted when they see an inner circle empowered, personal loyalties rewarded, pardons promised to secure silence, and policies developed in secret and to the advantage of relatives or insiders. The embrace of Esther during the Trump years was a sign of parvenu techniques of manipulation that could not transform, but only submit to, the world as it was while seeking to gain some advantage in it. This is why it is worth recalling the Esthering of Ivanka: because it highlights the bated-breath courtier politicking with which the US became all too familiar from 2017 to 2021. One sign that we have not yet escaped the trap is that Trump’s views have been reported in the press, since 2020 and through the 2022 midterms, as if he were the current opposition leader in a parliamentary system and not a twice-impeached former president who was soundly defeated in his effort to win re-election.

Esthering Ivanka is in keeping with the parvenu proclivity to authoritative and authoritarian figures: Esther is a Truth Queen. Over such a parvenu figure, Arendt would prefer not the pariah to which the parvenu is juxtaposed, but a third option: that of the conscious pariah. The analogue to the conscious pariah is not, in my view, the (singular) Truth Queen, but rather (plural) truth queens. The latter do not risk getting in bed with power, but choose, rather, to mock the sex-gender authoritarianism of the bedroom and the palace by way of campy practices of refusal. Notably, three of Arendt’s four conscious pariahs are quite funny, if bleakly so, and humor is an important aspect of truth queening. Rather than enjoy or enjoin the earnest carnival of American hetero-nationalism, truth queens, plural, democratizing, inclusive, often funny, vulnerable, and truthful, care for the world.

Without the conscious pariah work of truth queens, justice in our world, just as in the Book of Esther, may depend on the random chaos of who happens to find favor with a drunk, self-absorbed, narcissistic, or distracted leader (often “merry with wine” [Esther, I, 10] or high on Adderol); that is to say, it depends on who has the King’s ear, what mood he is in, and who is touched by his merciful “scepter.” ⁶ With truth queens, by contrast, we get a repertoire of techniques that reject domination. They are not always immediately effective, but they don’t give up on truth even when it is seems to be on life-support.

The comic is what goes missing in all the earnest American Estherisms celebrating the Queen and her “coming out” powers of truth. Even Sedgwick’s Esther is of the earnest variety. ⁷ Where are the truth queens and their powers: comic, snarky, acerbic, and urban? ⁸ They were called upon by Mary Wollstonecraft, who told young women “to laugh contemptuously at [the sentimental novels] that contributed to their subordination.” ⁹ This was a technique employed also by many respondents to McCarthyism, who came from Hollywood and New York to appear before the Committee and whose summoned testimony drew on bleak humor to respond to the Blacklist. ¹⁰ This mode of truth-telling under McCarthyism—a snarky, dark humor, that mocks the self-important and embraces the carnivalesque—is now claimed by today’s new McCarthyites, led by yet another McCarthy, minority leader in the House of Representatives, through the 2022 midterms, anyway. The theatrics that helped Joe McCarthy and his House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to promote a paranoid American nationalism as earnest patriotism are still in the Right’s repertoire. We see them in the pseudo-shocked harumphs and faux outrage of the Jim Jordans and the Josh Hawleys, their endless appetite for faux investigations and their callow avoidance of real ones. But the counter-theatricalities to which McCarthyism’s targets resorted, sometimes effectively, are now usurped by the Right, too. Today, MAGAnaut merchandisers of suspicion and cosplay weaponizers of doubt promote white nationalism as patriotism, as they fight to reopen the closet and close the border. What is left to defenders of democracy? Perhaps, the Book of Esther can help. It is described by Judah Magonet, as “essentially comic” but, Magonet says, it needs further classification. ¹¹ I think its mood is best captured by the term gallows humor. Amidst the unlikely good fortune of Jews to slip the yoke placed round their necks, it invites us to ask: but can we change the joke?

I turn now to four examples of such efforts, performed by truth queens, before returning, finally, to reflect further on truth and Trump: (i) Zero Mostel, arguably a truth queen, who at midcentury used mockery, snark, and other comic techniques to refuse the epistemic bind of the closet when he was accused (of being a Communist) and blacklisted as a result of Joe McCarthy’s HUAC investigations. Joseph Litvak reports the story in his book, The Un-American. (ii) The insurgent or outsider truth-tellers of Lida Maxwell’s Insurgent Truth, whose leakings do not simply correct a wrong, but seek to transform the world. Maxwell’s truth-tellers are Chelsea Manning, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, and Virginia Woolf. Maxwell—who compares insurgent truth-telling to the tragic story of Cassandra—does not highlight the comic as typical of insurgent truth-telling but there are traces of the comic in her stories. (iii) My third example of a truth queen, trans youtuber Natalie Wynn, connects political critique to her identity as a trans woman and she uses mockery and snark in her analyses of contemporary political culture, combining the humor of Litvak’s “Un-Americans” with the leaky precarity of Rustin and Manning, as Maxwell reads them. The result is something campy and new, and possibly less easily appropriated by the Right than are other carnivalesques. ¹² (iv) My final example is Goober the Clown, or rather Cecily Strong’s Saturday Night Live performance in November 2021 as Goober the Clown. Goober the Clown is, in my view, a contemporary “Un-American.” In the context of Texas’ passage of a highly restrictive anti-abortion law, this clown tells the truth of a young woman’s abortion (Strong’s) as the birth of a career in comedy. The politics of clowning have never been so serious nor so necessary as they are now, just a few months later, in the dawn of our newly post-Roe age. ¹³ I turn now to each of these examples in a bit more detail.

Joseph Litvak examines the stoolpigeon culture of American hetero-nationalism at midcentury and the comic cosmopolitanism response to it. His focus is on American Jews persecuted as Communists under McCarthyism, but also targeted for anti-Semitic and homophobic reasons. What Litvak calls “comicosmopolitanism” is the American Jewish and queer response to the deadly serious politics of the Right that then, as now, claim rural earnestness as real and cast as foreign—unAmerican—the polyglot city with its linguistic play. The comicosmopolitans’ queer/Jewish comic entertainment was never serious enough for the nation, Litvak argues, and American citizenship still bears the marks of the earnest sycophancy and stoolpigeon culture of McCarthyism, which pressed informants to collaborate with the state’s brutality. The result, then, was public investigations and parades (of witnesses) that replaced the liberal commitment to the rule of law with something more nefarious: no one is beyond suspicion, a pattern reinvigorated when Trump says his critics are bad for “our country” and suggests they have a secret. Only Trump has no secret, though it is no secret that Trump has many secrets.

One of Litvak’s examples is Zero Mostel, who played Tevye on Broadway in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), just as the Blacklist’s grip loosened. Mostel took on the role of truth queen by refusing the show’s sentimental celebration of Jewish assimilation into modern American citizenship. He took “increasingly outrageous and exasperating liberties with his performance,” Litvak notes (Litvak, 220-1). ¹⁴ One of these involved a “goodbye and good riddance” gesture that Tevye was supposed to direct at the back of a Russian constable who has just warned the Jews of Anatevka about an impending pogrom. Mostel embellished the gesture, pretending to hang himself with a non-existent rope, as if to show what he wanted to do to the constable. It did not end there: “Eventually,” Sheldon Harnick recalls, “the routine consisted of strangling the [imagined] constable, throwing the body down and kicking it, picking up an imaginary shovel, digging an imaginary hole, picking up the body, and tossing it into the whole and then covering the hole with dirt.” ¹⁵ With his experience of the blacklist, Mostel knew where the bodies were buried and he wanted everyone else to know, too, so he buried them/himself again and again, every night.

Mostel’s truth queen performance resonates with the leaky and leaking subjects of insurgent truth described by Lida Maxwell in her book by that name, focused on truth-telling in politics. Maxwell shows how most journalistic framings of Chelsea Manning’s disclosures of government secrets tended toward the singular Truth Queen variety. The framings protected her private life from politics and oriented her politics to the public sphere. But Manning was openly trans and, Maxwell argues, Manning’s disclosures were connected: “Manning connected the secrecy demanded by Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to the military secrecy of information about war” (3). Her “struggles with state secrecy were connected with her struggles with the mandated secrecy surrounding her sexual and gender identity” (53). Manning was not a mere whistleblower, argues Maxwell, since whistleblowers seek to better align existing corroded institutions with their ideals or stated aspirations. Insurgent truth-tellers, by contrast, “do not seek to re-stabilize the world as it is, but instead to change it by creating spaces and connections where marginalized individuals can say what the world is like for them and begin to imagine how to make it otherwise” (4). ¹⁶ Maxwell’s truth-tellers, Woolf, Rustin, and Lorde, as well as Manning, have many strategies but comedy is not one of those singled out by Maxwell. Still, I call them comic truth queens, nonetheless. Manning, Maxwell notes, does at one point humorously describe herself listening to Lady Gaga as she gives away state secrets. ¹⁷

Natalie Wynn is also a comic truth queen, a trans woman YouTuber whose channel, “ContraPoints,” offers a “long theatrical response to fascism.” As she says about one of her videos: “So that’s me as a fairy queen talking to Nazis.” In a TED-like talk online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ix9jxid2YU), Wynn describes her public transitioning as “like a second adolescence” and says she learned the need to insulate the private in some ways from the public. This is different from how Maxwell reads Chelsea Manning, but compatible with the tactics of some of Maxwell’s other truth-tellers, like Rustin and Woolf, who sometimes anonymized themselves for self-protection.

When politics is “theater,” Wynn says, channeling Walter Benjamin, “responding to theater with more theater actually makes sense.” Indeed, “you have to look at fascism as a pageant. You have to bring your own pageant.” Come for the (anti-)fascism, stay for the theatricality, she says, and vice versa. Wynn’s faith in our capacity to change the world via comic truth-telling that sugarcoats the sometimes bitter pill of rationality is connected by her to her experience with sex-gender transition. In a video on cancel culture, in which her sharp analytic skills are on particular display (Wynn was in a PhD program in philosophy for a while), Wynn appears in a Queen of Hearts shirt, holding a very large bottle of alcohol, which she strokes, saying “I love my King.” ¹⁸ If she has not read the Book of Esther, she clearly should.

My final comic truth queen is Cecily Strong’s November 2021 performance, on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, as Goober the Clown. “I need you to laugh so hard,” s/he says in poignant comic pain to Colin Jost: she wants him to laugh as hard as she did at a kind joke made by the doctor who gave her an abortion on the day before her 23rd birthday so she could go on to have a remarkable comedy career and play Goober the Clown on TV. “It’s a rough subject,” she says at the outset of the bit, “so we’re gonna do cool clown stuff to make it more palatable.” She honks a broken, soundless clown horn, screaming “honka, honka,” and she tries to make an animal balloon but fails. She is not a great clown. But she tells desperately, comedically, of clowns getting clown abortions, and soon Colin Jost, straight man (pun intended) of the bit, asks: “wait, are clowns women?” and she berates him for calling women clowns. Then, sucking helium from a balloon to make her voice sound cartoonish, she says: “OK, Colin, here’s my truth. I know I wouldn’t be a clown here on TV today if it weren’t for the abortion I had the day before my 23^rd birthday… it’s gonna happen so it might as well be safe, legal and accessible.” Then, she adds, “The last thing anyone wants is a bunch of dead clowns in a dark alley,” as she doubles down on the metalepsis that both creates the distance for her to tell this true story and sets up the estrangement that makes it possible to laugh. ¹⁹ Are clowns women? Strong’s Goober is definitely a truth queen.

In the Book of Esther, the joke, in the end, is on Haman. When Mordecai refuses to bow to him and pay him homage, Haman is insulted. He has a gallows built in the city of Shushan in the hope that he can get Ahasuerosh to allow him to hang Mordecai. If you build it, they will come, Haman surely thought. (In the Book of Esther, it is Haman who is hanged there, in the end, when Esther turns the tables on him.) But once a gallows is built, it can be used for anyone. That is precisely the point of a gallows, as the January 6th insurrectionists understood. Now that is funny. Or it would be funny if we failed to notice that those insurrectionists, whose McCarthyite forebears had come for America’s Jews, communists, and queers, almost appropriated the city for themselves. On January 6th, their cos-play was in response to invitations from Steve Bannon and Trump to come to the Capitol: “it will be wild,” they were promised. And it was. It was also deadly serious, and deadly violent.

For the insurrectionists, being seen in public was a power-play and a verification of existence. ²⁰ But, for those who “come out” of the closet rather than the woodwork, the closet shapes their existence, ongoingly: individual acts of coming out claim the public but they also (if Sedgwick is right about the “epistemology of the closet”) reconstitute the closet and its hetero-normative epistemology. ²¹ The same holds for coming out about abortions, as Cecily Strong did in the guise of Goober the Clown. “Wow, we kept this secret for so long despite being so grateful it happened,” she says. But telling the truth about something so valued does not only vitiate the power of the secret; it also adds to it. One sign of the paradox is the adjective “brave,” often said with relish to describe such acts of truth-telling. This is what “truth queens” are up against as they/we try to remake the public and wean it from the stigmatizing secrets that constitute it.

Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet analyzes the culture of the closet, which turns sex (plural practices, indefinite, diverse) into knowledge (precise and definitive) and then uses that knowledge to stigmatize those it minoritizes into carriers of a (supposed) secret, sexual truth. Sedgwick compares sexuality to ethnicity to make the stakes clear. For her, Esther’s disclosure of her ethnic identity is a descriptive statement about herself. It is as a matter of fact that Esther is Jewish, and her saying so is what JL Austin would call “constative.” ²² In the epistemology of the closet, however, the truth of one’s sexuality is performative—produced by the culture of the closet which takes sexual practices and makes of them a factical and stigmatized identity. For Sedgwick, then, when gay sexual practices, plural and diverse, are unified into an identity that presents as fact, the sexually minoritized are treated as having a secret when they are in fact constituted by an episteme of secrecy. “To crack a code and enjoy the reassuring exhilarations of knowingness is to buy into the specific formula ‘We Know What That Means,’” says Sedgwick (204). ²³ The pleasure of such ostensible knowing is both in the knowing and in the ostension; it is the pleasure of epistemic superiority and secure reference, seductive in an age of mass mediation, 24/7 accelerationism, and globalization. ²⁴ It is, I want to say, the pleasure of constation or reference, the lure of which, in the work of both Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, is shown to create such metaphysical havoc that the orienting powers of the ordinary are attenuated.

That epistemic pleasure is discernible now in the Right’s victory over Roe. Here is one domain of contemporary political life where they do not celebrate post-truth. On the contrary, they seek to know the truth, specifically that of a woman’s body, using period-tracker apps and, in some of the states’ laws, deputizing everyone to inform on anyone who might be considering an abortion, and in so doing repeating the rhythm of McCarthyism’s stool pigeon culture, as studied by Litvak. The bodies of people with uteruses are now made into crime scenes and, as such, subject to forensic investigation. Just imagine the creative use of all that yellow tape. But the end of Roe is no joking matter precisely because it tethers, politically, juridically, half the population to their uteruses and secures, thereby, access to a referent that makes patriarchal men secure precisely by empowering them as forensic knowers with ostensive super-powers. In the 19^th century trained medical doctors made their case for superior medical expertise by claiming they, with their modern scientific instruments and methods, could better access a woman’s interior than the so-called “hacks” (many of them women and healers) that the newly certified doctors sought to marginalize from medicine. ²⁵ Now in the 21st century, the aim is still to penetrate the truth, and the occasion is still those tantalizingly elusive powers that are invaginated rather than phallic.

Although Trump is neither evangelical, nor pro-life, and is said to have expressed, privately, (electoral) concerns about the Supreme Court overturning of Roe, Trump’s whole national political reputation was built on a similar epistemic politics of knowingness, a stoolpigeon epistemology that Trump vivified constantly, when suggesting that others had a secret that only he knew. He chastised Jon Stewart on Twitter for hiding his true identity: “why did he change his name from Jonathan Leibowitz? He should be proud of his heritage.” No amount of “coming out,” “fessing up,” or “telling on” can assuage the doubt generated by such outings, and this one, notably, was part of a campaign for the presidency, not a meaningless entertainment “feud” as the coverage suggested. ²⁶ Earlier, Trump led the Birther movement, which claimed President Obama had not been born in the United States, and was therefore ineligible for office. This was Trump’s prior political Big Lie and, as with the later one, which claimed the 2020 election was rigged and he did not really lose it, there was no fact or evidence that could undo the lie: no birth certificate, long or short, would put the lie to rest, no recount could ever adequately reassure, no referent could settle the matter. In the course of only 10–15 years, one birtherism, then another: a racist Birtherism designed to delegitimate a duly elected president leads to a misogynist Birtherism in which the state polices the wombs of its subjects and reinstalls the stoolpigeon culture of American hetero-nationalism at midcentury.

Here the Book of Esther is once again illuminating. Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, arguably participates in something like the stoolpigeon culture typical of courtiers’ courts when he exposes a conspiracy against the king, and later wins royal favor as a result. And the king’s role in the story resonates with HUAC’s McCarthy, an interrogator who is impaired but not undone by his inebriation and self-destructiveness. As one might expect, the woman at the center of the story is not at the center of the story. It is through her, but not quite because of her, that a homosocial imperial structure of tolerance is erected. The Book of Esther ends, after all, with Mordecai semi-secretly at the helm, in Haman’s place, while the moody and ineffective Ahasuerosh goes on ruling. We might say that Jared Kushner played the part of Mordecai during the Trump presidency, were it not for the loving charity for which Mordecai is known and Kushner is not.

The comic responses of today’s truth queens will surely not suffice, but mocking dangerous enemies is a necessary piece of the struggle to dismantle the serious theo-fascism that is knocking, as madly as Jack Nicholson in The Shining, at our door. Another necessary element in the struggle will be the banding together of religious groups committed to justice and equality, and to the separation of church and state in whose shelter they have been nourished until now. These groups’ concerted action is now necessary to re-set and rebuild the infrastructures of truth that have been stress-tested in American politics throughout the country’s history but in a newly intense and focused way from McCarthyism to Trumpism. In this effort, certain shared texts like the Book of Esther may be useful. Our readings will differ, the lessons we draw will vary and they may be contested, but having shared points of agonistic contest on a plural, solidaristic compass is one needed element to point the way. In my book Shell Shocked I argued that the heroine of Gaslight, the movie, homes in on the gaslights that rise and fall mysteriously, for no apparent reasons. She invests in their materiality, which is what we need to do in order to fend off the efforts of those who merchandise doubt. Truth is not a guardrail nor a plaything. It is something we hold, together, and it returns the favor when we do so. The solution to the culture of the closet is not just pride but the movement that takes the name “pride” for itself, constituting a community with the power to hold. The only truth that can triumph over Trumpism is the truth of a muti-racial multi-ethnic democracy empowered and determined to preserve itself. Against disinformation and parvenu gamesmanship, truth will not save us. We need to save it.