Darren Criss, America's Boyfriend

This is the last of a 3-part series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

“Your eyes are like stars right now…Mind if I move in closer?” sings dreamy crooner Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss) to our countertenor hero, Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), as they perform the classic Hollywood duet, “Baby, it’s Cold Outside.” This is only one of the many charming and provocative romantic overtures Blaine makes, in song, to Kurt as well as to other young men during the course of Glee’s second season, and it is only one of the many performances by Blaine, both with Kurt and with his a cappella group The Warblers, that queers the performance of a traditionally gendered song.

With Blaine’s character, Glee both honors and re-imagines the crooner for the new millineum. As I discussed in Part 1, the crooner has long been a liminal figure in American culture, operating both in the commercial mainstream and on the fringes of gender normativity, and has been culturally stigmatized for both reasons. But Dalton Academy is Glee’s version of Oz, where normative American gender expectations and roles have been suspended and gender hierarchies largely reversed. The allure of the prep/college boy culture has always been, in part, about prolonging male adolescence by delaying the assumption of normative male roles. Indeed, the first crooning idols originally emerged from college culture in the 1920s, and it is a world in which the crooner thrives.

Glee celebrates the crooner for the very qualities that masculinist America does not: his alignment with the cultural feminine through his preference for romantic songs and commercial pop, his status as an erotic object for male and female audiences, his beauty and sensitivity, his emotional openness and transparency. And Glee’s producers have cast an actor as Blaine, Darren Criss, whose star persona emphasizes and extends these same qualities to a remarkable degree. Like Kurt/Colfer, Blaine/Criss offers a new model of American male performer, one that goes beyond being gay-and-girl “friendly” to truly embracing a gender-queer performance style and persona. Blaine/Criss retains the sincerity of the crooner even as he performs beyond the boundaries of a fixed or normative gender identity.

As an all-male a cappella group, the Warblers sing de facto love songs to each other, a violation of gender norms that has generally made such groups accessible only to the cultural elite (they are dubbed by Tuft University’s Beelzebubs). But Glee takes its transgressions much further. Because Blaine is the lead singer, an out gay character, and seen primarily through Kurt’s desiring eyes, all of his performances have a homoerotic charge. Moreover, Blaine specializes in songs by female singers without changing the lyrics, thus often positioning himself in the feminine role, whether that be as the erotic object (the one who will “let you put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans”) of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” or the annoyed girlfriend of Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills.” When Blaine does play the seducer (he’s versatile), he serenades other boys as girls, for instance, when he continually addresses a male Gap store attendant as “baby girl” while wooing him with the Robin Thicke song “When I Get You Alone.”

It is Blaine’s musical performances with Kurt, however, that give emotional and narrative weight to the Warblers’ gender-play. When Kurt transfers back to McKinley, Blaine and the Warblers come to sing “Somewhere Only We Know” to him, evoking the “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” period of Kurt’s stay at Dalton, but assuring audiences that, unlike Dorothy, Kurt will retain both the maturity Dalton gave him and a dreamy prince:

This particular performance sparked euphoria among fans as soon as the single and the scene were released on Youtube, which happened a few days prior to the episode’s premiere. The verbal and physical reactions to crooning haven’t changed that much in 80 years; fans repeatedly cry when listening to the song, compliment Darren Criss on the beauty of his voice, claim to be falling in love as well as erotically aroused by him (“Can this song make me pregnant?”), and indicate “repeated abuse” of the replay button to prolong their ecstatic state. What is less common here is the context for such intense emotion: the fact that Blaine is singing this song to Kurt makes the song more rather than less meaningful for fans, who largely identify with Kurt and love Blaine as the boyfriend Kurt “deserves.” Cross-gender identification is common practice for television fans, who often create “slashed” homoerotic fiction surrounding a relationship that is not homoerotic in the text. In this case, however, the intensity of fan euphoria is tied to the text slashing itself, further naturalizing gay relationships by revising the rules of the musical genre. As the warm, pure-hearted crooner, Blaine becomes the perfect counterpart and love object for the more ambitious, complex Kurt and for fans.

Part of the reason Blaine is so beloved is because of the young man who plays him. Darren Criss himself occupies queer cultural space in that he identifies as straight but plays gay, champions the mass culture associated most with women and children (like Disney songs), and is more than happy to be an erotic object for both sexes (see, for example, his spread in Out magazine). Perhaps most unusual of all, Criss writes and performs songs from a female point of view even outside of the Blaine character. Criss composed the song “The Coolest Girl,” for the character of Hermione in a musical adaptation of Harry Potter. In concert, he often performs the song, asking the largely female audience to join in, since “I am not a girl, although I try to be sometimes”:

Just as Colfer provides a model for queer kids who have not yet been represented, so Criss provides an equally significant alternative model for queer straightness. Both performers, through Glee and beyond it, give voice to radically fluid adolescent masculinities that do indeed offer their audiences new ways to dream.

This is the first in a series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

Part 1: The Trouble with Male Pop Singing

What immediately struck me about this still of Glee’s Chris Colfer (as Kurt Hummel) and Darren Criss (as Blaine Anderson) from Entertainment Weekly’s January 28, 2011 cover story is that this image might easily have been taken in the mid-to-late 1920s,  but it would have been unlikely to appear in the mainstream press since that time. Attractive young men in collegiate attire, sporting ukuleles or megaphones, singing to each other and to their adoring publics in high-pitched voices was a mainstay of 1920s American popular culture, then vanished during the Depression. Even the easy homoeroticism of a boy positioned between another boy’s legs dates back to popular images of the 1920s. In the early 1930s, a combination of greater media nationalization and censorship, increasing homophobia, and panic regarding the emasculating effects of male unemployment formed the context for the first national public attack on male popular singers as effeminate and as cultural degenerates. As a result, new, restrictive gender conventions became entrenched regarding male vocalizing, and the feminine stigma has remained. Until now, that is. The popularity of Glee, and, in particular, these two singers, has made me think that American culture may finally be starting to break with the gender norms of male singing performance that have persisted for the last 80 years. Since much of my research has focused on the establishment of these gendered conventions, I would like to offer some historical context and share some of the reasons why I find Glee’s representation of male popular singing so potentially groundbreaking.

Male singing has not always been so inextricably tangled up with assumptions about the gender/sexuality of the performer. Before the reactionary gender policing of popular singing, men who sang in falsetto or “double” voice were greatly prized. Song styles such as blues, torch, and crooning were sung by both sexes and all races; lyrics were generally not changed to conform to the sex of the singer or to reinforce heterosexual norms, so that men often sang to men and women to women. Crooners became huge stars for their emotional intensity, intimate microphone delivery, and devotion to romantic love. While they sang primarily to women, they had legions of male fans as well, and both sexes wept listening to their songs.

When a range of cultural authorities condemned crooners, the media industries developed new standards of male vocal performance to quell the controversy. Any gender ambiguity in vocalizing was erased; the popular male countertenor/falsetto voice virtually disappeared, song styles were gender-coded (crooning coded male), female altos were hired to replace the many popular tenors, and all song lyrics were appropriately gendered in performance, so that men sang to and about women, and vice-versa. Bing Crosby epitomized the new standard for males: lower-pitched singing, a lack of emotional vulnerability, and a patriarchal star image. Since then, although young male singers have always remained popular and profitable, their cultural clout has been consistently undermined by masculinist evaluative standards in which the singers themselves have been regularly ridiculed as immature and inauthentic, and their fans dismissed as moronic young females.

From its beginnings, however, Glee has actively worked to challenge this conception. The show’s recognition and critique of dominant cultural constructions of performance and identity has always been one of the its great strengths. Glee has continually acknowledged the emasculating stigma of male singing (the jocks regularly assert that “singing is gay”) while providing a compelling counter-narrative that promotes pop singing as liberating and empowering for both men and society at large. Glee‘s audience has in many ways been understood to be reflective of the socially marginalized types represented on the show, and one of the recurring narrative struggles is determining who gets to speak or, rather, sing. Singing on Glee is thus frequently linked to acts of self-determination in the face of social oppression, a connection that has been most explicitly and forcefully made through gay teen Kurt’s storyline this past season, which has challenged societal homophobia both narratively and musically. In the narrative, Kurt transfers to Dalton Academy to escape bullying and joins the Warblers, an all-male a cappella group fronted by gay crooner Blaine. Musically, Glee also takes a big leap, shifting from exposing the homophobic, misogynist stigma surrounding male singing to actively shattering it and singing on its grave.

From the very first moment Kurt is introduced to Blaine and the Warblers, as they perform a cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” to a group of equally enthusiastic young men, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The song choice is appropriate in that it posits future-boyfriend Blaine as both a romantic and erotic dream object for Kurt, and it presents Dalton as a fantasy space in which the feminine associations of male singing are both desired and regularly celebrated. “Teenage Dream” was the first Glee single to debut at #1 on iTunes, immediately making Criss a star and indicating that a good portion of the American public was eager to embrace the change in vocal politics.

And “Teenage Dream” was only the beginning. This fantasy moment has become a recurring, naturalized fixture of the series. Just as Kurt turned his fantasy of boyfriend Blaine into a reality, so did Glee effectively realize its own redesign of male singing through a multitude of scenes that I never thought I would see on American network television: young men un-ironically singing pop songs to other young men, both gay and straight; teen boys falling in love with other boys as they sing to them; males singing popular songs without changing the lyrics from “him” to “her” to accommodate gender norms; and the restoration and celebration of the countertenor (male alto) sound and singer in American popular culture (I will address Chris Colfer’s celebrated countertenor voice in the next installment of this series). And instead of becoming subjects of cultural ridicule, Colfer’s rapturous countertenor and Criss’s velvety crooner have become Glee’s most popular couple, its stars largely celebrated as role models of a new order of male performer. It’s about time.