Hedwig and the Angry Inch: the Paradox of Queer Art and Celebrity

Criterion Collection’s Box Art for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Perhaps, if you follow the right people on Twitter or Instagram, or even belong to a particularly trendy Facebook page, you may be familiar with the work of an artist named Alex Norris. Norris is a queer artist who lives in the UK, and while their comic strips have appeared all over Twitter in the past few years, one in particular has always stuck out to me.  I often reference it whenever I talk to friends or family about what it means to be queer today.  

I’ll link it here on Norris’s page for reference, and attach it below. 

Norris is queer, as am I, and I think (for both of us anyway) the message of this comic is relatively clear. After all, the exclusion narrative for most queer people often follows a similar path. First, we’re excluded and separated from society based on our identifiers, then we band together as a survival tactic against oppression, and are subsequently chastised for surviving by our oppressors, usually under the guise of being exclusionary ourselves. 

Queer people surviving together flies in the face of the oppression that forced us to survive together in the first place.  And, the real joke is that most of the time, oppressors would argue that our survival is actually damaging to them, because it’s exclusive and further deepening the lines that divide us.  

And, not to sound like a 4th grader on a playground, but to that I say: “You started it!”

But, what attracts the attention of those who would seek to harm us once we’ve separated ourselves from the mainstream?  What exposes our safe haven?  What causes this inclination towards reading as exclusionary?   

I would argue that it’s what we do while we’re there in that safe haven, particularly if you’re alone there, that draws unwanted attention. It’s when we make art that we suddenly become the object of either adoration or hate from the oppressors that singled us out in the first place. 

John Cameron Mitchell as “Hedwig.”

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of an “internationally ignored” genderqueer rock star, understands this narrative better than anything.  In the film, we’re taken on a musical road trip with the titular Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell) and her band, The Angry Inch, as they shadow the tour of popular rocker Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), Hedwig’s ex-lover and former collaborator.  As they follow the tour from town to town, city to city, Hedwig and her band proselytize the truth: Hedwig wrote every song on Gnosis’s latest album.  She is the genius behind every word, and it’s time for her to get her due. 

Meanwhile, as we follow the colorful and brassy Hedwig, we continually peel back layers of her backstory, and her tragic origin.  As the film progresses, we learn that Hedwig used to be a young boy named Hansel, who lived on the East Side of the Berlin Wall right before its collapse.  In order to escape the oppressive East, Hedwig (then Hansel) got engaged to an American soldier named Luther, who encouraged Hansel to get a sex change operation from man-to-woman so that they might pass the state’s medical examination, and flee communist Berlin as man and wife.  However, as we learn in the song “Angry Inch,” Hedwig’s sex-change operation got botched, leaving her with a dysfunctional one-inch mound of flesh in lieu of functioning genitalia.  

The phrase “Angry Inch” does a lot of heavy lifting in Hedwig.  A multi-hyphenate if ever there was one. 

Nevertheless, Hedwig eventually makes it to the United States to be with Luther, who promptly leaves her for another man.  Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall falls shortly after Hedwig moves to the US, meaning her sacrifice was largely for nothing.  Alone and desperate, Hedwig does the only thing she can do.  She makes art, and links up with her backup group, now named the “Angry Inch.”   She fully adopts her “Hedwig” drag persona, rocking and rolling until she one day meets, falls in love with, and is spurned by Tommy Gnosis, now her ex. 

Hedwig amongst the masses.

Such is the setup of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but what is the conclusion?  As we follow Hedwig, it’s easy to wonder: “What does she hope to achieve by casting aspersions (accurate ones) on Tommy Gnosis?”  Is her goal to dethrone him as the country’s latest celebrity obsession and usurp him?  How does she intend to do this?  What does she do along the way?  

Well, for one, she continues to make art.  She sings her songs (the ones Tommy stole) in dive bars, cafes, and salad bar buffets all across America, hoping that her art will triumph over Tommy’s commercial success.  But why?  Why make art along the way?  

Some would argue that making art, particularly queer art, is an act of survival.  Even the act of survival can be an art form* in and of itself.  And, from the start, Hedwig is a survivalist through and through. She escapes oppressive East Berlin, pulls herself up by her high-heeled bootstraps after Luther leaves her, and fights for her integrity against Tommy Gnosis.  When it comes to queerness, at least in Hedwig’s case, it seems artistry and survival often go hand in hand.  It’s natural, and it’s definitely natural to Hedwig.  But, that naturalness is often misunderstood.**  

In the film, Hedwig’s manager Phyllis Stein (Andrea Martin) often discourages Hedwig from making big, public scenes at Gnosis’s events, lest accusations of stalking befall her.  And, it’s not until the film’s end, when Gnosis is caught rekindling his flame for Hedwig in the back seat of his limo, that Hedwig’s story even gets credibility, and her celebrity slowly begins to outshine Tommy’s.

But once Hedwig usurps Tommy and achieves financial and commercial success, what happens to the art?  What happens to the art of surviving when there’s no more surviving to be done?  

Hedwig and her backup band, “The Angry Inch,” wait outside a Tommy Gnosis record signing.

In the film’s final sequence, Hedwig performs with the Angry Inch in Times Square to what’s presented as (if not explicitly) a mostly straight audience.  The performance goes south, reading as angry with no cause, and culminating in the violent removal of Hedwig’s drag; her armor, so to speak.  Hedwig’s defenses down, raw and vulnerable once again, the film ends in an extended fantasy sequence (which I’ll avoid spoiling explicitly); a sequence that alludes to an answer for this question of survival and art.

I’ll preface this next part by saying that this is only my interpretation of the film’s subtle, layered finale. I’m certain there are at least one hundred other ways to read the subtext the film’s final song offers, if not more, and I encourage anyone reading this to watch the film yourself, and come to your own conclusions.

That said, in the film’s finale “Midnight Radio,” it seems Hedwig ultimately learns that her art may not have a place in the mainstream, and that’s okay.  She’s still just as worthy as all the musicians she once idolized (“[...] Patti, and Tina, and Yoko, Aretha, and Nona, and Nico, and me”), despite her rejection of celebrity. Who knows, maybe at one time, these artists may have been just like Hedwig: on the outside, looking in on success. And, perhaps that’s the shared quality that made Hedwig and them great artists in the first place.

If, on one side of a coin, we accept the idea that survival can be a queer art form in and of itself, the opposite side of that coin may be the idea that queer art and popularity can’t truly coexist, or at least, not on the same level as a “Tommy Gnosis.” If the need for survival generates queer art, and the need for survival is taken away via celebrity, does the art a queer person makes become somehow less queer? Is that art something else entirely? Is it mainstream?  Is queerness, inherently, a victim of its own popularity? 

In some ways, that’s what Hedwig seems to posit, and I think there is some truth to that, however bleak that thought might be. At the very least, it seems that perhaps the best art at first starts from a place of necessity, and the will to live amongst increasingly oppressive circumstances. Strangely, I do find some comfort in this notion, and the idea that we, as queer people, have an incentive to make queer art for ourselves, rather than for pop culture, or even the mainstream.  

The title of the finale, “Midnight Radio,” even hints at this notion as well.  After all, what popular rocker has their song blaring on the radio at midnight?  

Just Hedwig.  

Maybe the Midnight Radio is actually another queer safe haven for Hedwig, never to be found by oppressors who would ask, “Why are you excluding us?”  After all, most people are asleep by midnight anyway. 

But, for those of us who aren’t, we’ll listen, and sing along.

*The Modernist Art of Queer Survival, by Benjamin Bateman, Oxford University Press, pp. 13–14.

**Can you believe I actually did an MLA citation for this? Desperate and weird.