Today's Libertarianism.org features my essay about how Lesley Gore's classic song "You Don't Own Me" expresses a basic principle of freedom. In it I elaborate on how different philosophers and artists, including Shakespeare, Milton, Nabokov, Elton John, George Michael, and Sidney Poitier, have elaborated on the theme of self-ownership. Here's an excerpt:
The gay poet David Trinidad loved Gore’s song when it appeared, and recalled how he would sit in his room and play the record over and over until it was too scratched to enjoy. In his 1994 poem “Answer Song,” he imagines how Lesley’s marriage to Johnny might have fared...:
What if Lesley hears about women’s lib?
What if she goes into therapy and begins
to question her attraction to emotionally
unavailable men? Suppose under hypnosis,
she returns to her sixteenth birthday party,
relives all those tears, and learns that
it was Judy—not Johnny—she’d wanted
all along. There’s no answer to that
song, of course, but I have
heard rumors.Lesley Gore in fact was a lesbian, as she admitted to herself only a few years after “You Don’t Own Me” hit the air....
Ironically, the effectiveness of “You Don’t Own Me” as a cultural weapon of self-defense has made it prime for borrowing by others whose message is not quite so gay-friendly. The rapper Eminem sampled the song in his 2010 tune “Untitled (Here We Go),” to fling back criticism about his violently homophobic and misogynistic lyrics. “Untitled” revels in violent fantasy and braggadocio, citing Gore’s song both in irony—to ridicule the notion of feminine assertiveness—and in conviction. He admits he’s “always shittin’ diarrhea at the mouth,” but “don’t strut away from me, cause / You don’t own me.” As for “remorse, I really don’t feel any.” He is “fashionable and ’bout as rational / as a rash on a fag’s asshole / Now let’s take that line, run it up the flag pole with Elton.”
Elton, of course, was Elton John...who in 2001 chose to perform alongside Eminem at the Grammy Awards. Many gays were shocked at this public alliance with a performer whose lyrics regularly incorporate images of savage violence toward homosexuals. But John has often refused to boycott performances in similar circumstances.... John refused to join other artists in boycotting performances in Russia after Vladimir Putin’s government began tightening persecutions of gays. In 2014, he told a St. Petersburg audience that he was shocked that the government had removed a memorial to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs claiming it was “homosexual propaganda.” “Can this be true?” John asked his fans....
Is Tchaikovsky’s beautiful music “sexually perverting”?! As a gay man, I’ve always felt so welcome here in Russia. Stories of Russian fans—men and women who fell in love dancing to “Nikita”’ or their kids who sing along to “Circle of Life”—mean the world to me.
John’s reference to “Nikita” was well chosen. That song was released in 1985, when John was not only still in the closet, but a year into his marriage to recording engineer Renate Blauel. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of state “anti-sodomy” laws in Bowers v. Hardwick. The state may impose the “majority[’s] sentiments about the morality of homosexuality” virtually without hindrance, wrote Justice Byron White. To this Justice Harry Blackmun answered that the right to privacy in intimate relationships deserves protection “not because they contribute, in some direct and material way, to the general public welfare” but in consequence of the “‘moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole.’” You don’t own me.....
“Nikita” makes no reference to homosexuality—at first it appears to be an ordinary love ballad, sung to a sweetheart trapped behind the Iron Curtain. In the music video, John sits in a red convertible on the free side of the Berlin Wall, singing across the line to a gorgeous female border guard whose striking eyes really do “look like ice on fire.”
Oh Nikita you will never know
Anything about my home.
I’ll never know how good it feels to hold you.
Nikita I need you so.Yet Nikita is a man’s name, and the song in reality plumbs the hopelessness of love locked behind the borders of an oppressive state....
That was a feeling with which many Europeans could sympathize. When Communist authorities decreed the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, they severed thousands of German families from relatives on the other side. In his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech—delivered the same month that “Judy’s Turn to Cry” appeared—President Kennedy called the wall “an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.” The “modern walled-in society,” wrote Vladislov Krasnov, who defected from the USSR a year later, had revealed to the world the basic principle of the Communist state: “all citizens are considered state property."
Simply by using a Russian name that most Western listeners would mistakenly assume to be feminine, John could evoke all of these ideas, and employ both metaphor and appropriation to tweak the deplorable similarity between Soviet authoritarianism and the legal and social barriers against same-sex love still so prevalent in the west....
[T]he Civil Rights Movement was also largely a generational movement, in which young Americans demanded an end to long-established generational practices. The young protestors who marched to Washington or rode buses in Freedom Summer were, King said, the “integration generation.”
In January, 1968, only months before King’s assassination, the connection between the movement for racial equality and the generation gap found ingenious expression in the film Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, starring Sidney Poitier and Katherine Houghton
....Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is actually not about race, but about the older generation accepting their children as adults.... Joanna cannot envision any problems with the engagement—she’s made up her mind, and sees no reason in the world not to be married immediately. But for John, the struggle is harder. His admiration for his father has left him unwilling to buck the older generation until at last he is forced. And when he is forced, the film’s climactic confrontation comes not in a clash the white and black families, but between John and his father. In words that might just as well have been spoken to white America by the rising generation of blacks fed up with being treated like children, John announces his independence and his right to make his own choices:
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