ALL HAIL THE BITCH GODDESS! | PAGE 2 OF 2 Paglia: Don't you think it's odd that the book begins and ends with Anne? -- since she's a symbol of the WASP personality of the establishment of that period. She's from Radcliffe and Cape Cod and has perfect manners. Here's Jacqueline Susann looking at her from the perspective of a Jewish woman, a New Yorker. Isn't "Valley of the Dolls" the ultimate revenge fantasy of having the perfect WASP undergo this downward trajectory? She brings Anne down, trashes her at the end. Belverio: Oh, right. Sliding into decadence -- slavery, in fact! I never really realized that. Paglia: But the thing is, it's not overblown, this depiction of the Hollywood lifestyle or of the sordid world of the entertainment industry. We now know in the 1990s that there's no exaggeration there. We've seen so many drugs, so much destruction of so many figures in show business over so many different decades that now there's a kind of realism to the book. People used to think it was pure wicked fantasy. Belverio: Yes, now more than ever, this book is completely contemporary. It's no relic from the 1960s -- it's even more relevant than it was then! Paglia: It really shows the ferocity of the careerist machine. We've just come out of the supermodel era, one of whose first victims was Gia Carangi. Heroin chic came back. River Phoenix went down. Belverio: And Courtney Love. She's Susann's Neely O'Hara -- God! Neely gets cleaned up for a while, and her image gets squeaky clean, but she goes right back -- she never really recovers. Last night I had a fantasy about recasting the film with a dream cast, so that Audrey Hepburn would be Anne Welles, Elizabeth Taylor would be Helen Lawson (with a lot more lines), with Brigitte Bardot as Jennifer and Judy Garland as Neely O'Hara -- who was based on Judy in the first place. You wouldn't need to give Judy any lines -- just throw her in front of the camera, and let her do her thing! Paglia: I'll never forget my ex-student Kate Flannery's sensational performance as Neely in that brilliant West Coast production of "Valley of the Dolls" that we saw at New York's Circle in the Square last year! I laughed and whooped so hard at every single line that tears were rolling down my face and I was practically on the floor. In fact, Kate and that company, Theater-A-Go-Go, did the play again last month at a sold-out performance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- the crowd loved it! Listen, in terms of the book's re-release at this moment, with the big turmoil and ideological debates going on about gay male identity, where do you place it? Belverio: (Laughing) Well, since gay men have become so boring, hopefully "Valley of the Dolls" will become the bible -- so that they can turn to it for salvation, because let's face it, there's nowhere left for them to turn! They've descended into mundaneness. Paglia: So you feel, as we maintained in our videos, that the mainstreaming of gay culture isn't entirely good -- that at some point, assimilation becomes cultural erasure? Belverio: Yes. Gay people have to stay in touch with their roots. And those roots are old Hollywood movies and books like "Valley of the Dolls" -- whether they realize it or not. Paglia: The new Warhol exhibit at the Whitney Museum really plays into this, because it shows what an obsessive collector of Hollywood memorabilia Warhol was. Here we have the Whitney -- which just a few years ago was into ludicrously PC rape-survivor videotapes -- now suddenly celebrating "glamour, fashion, style!" Naturally, as a faithful Warholite since college, I'm absolutely delighted to see my rubrics becoming institutionalized in the museums. But we have to emphasize here that this is largely a gay male taste. I as a lesbian always felt alienated from other lesbians because of my absence of a common discourse with them. I've never met a lesbian who was as instantly electrified and then obsessed with "Valley of the Dolls," just as gay men were. Why is that? Belverio: Gay men find it much easier to identify with female characters. Lesbians don't have male camp heroes the way gay men have female ones. Do they have icons at all? Paglia: (Sighing) Oh, yes, they have lesbian books and lesbian films and lesbian music -- all of which drive me crazy. It's a squishily sentimental, banal sinkhole, a black hole of non-art! My working hypothesis is that the roots of male homosexuality are not in biology -- Belverio: Oh, I agree! Paglia: -- but in some charged, ambivalent relationship to the mother or to woman -- whether it's the real mother or the glorified goddesses of Hollywood. Queer theory is so focused on externals, on politics, that it's blind to psychology. Belverio: I wasn't born gay. People aren't born gay. I get attacked for saying this all the time. But it's absurd. Being gay is a cultural condition. Paglia: How often we have examples of a flamboyant, overwhelming mother or a mother who injects her sensibility into her son. My working theory is that it's an artistic gene in the son -- not a gay gene -- which makes him different and eventually gets him ostracized by other boys, leading to his craving for masculine contact and acceptance. The sexually fluid son identifies with the beauty and excitement and art and glamour of the inner world of the mother, rather than with the boring, closed-down, factual world of the rejecting father. Belverio: That's absolutely true. So how is lesbianism caused? There's certainly an absence of something. Paglia: I think it's completely different. Mothers who produce lesbians are more passive-aggressive and use the daughter as a vehicle in their bitter war with the father. The mother can't confront that conflict, and the daughter becomes a proxy in expressing the hidden anger. The powerful, flamboyant mothers who produce gay sons often have an amazing charisma -- they may be equally angry at men, but the way they've routed the anger is theatrical. They create their own sexual persona; they're starring in their own movie, in some way, and the son becomes part of the cast of that movie. So to get back to Susann, what is it in "Valley of the Dolls" that gay men are identifying with? Belverio: It's the high drama of what's going on in her women's lives. Paglia: Isn't it that men feel very repressed in our still quite Anglo culture? In other world cultures -- Latin, Arab, African, Hindu, Chinese -- men can express themselves far more emotionally and theatrically. Belverio: So other societies don't need camp the way we do! Paglia: Right. "Valley of the Dolls" may seem extreme and extravagant, but it's actually a window into the modern Western soul. SALON | Dec. 19, 1997