Vogue Boy : Year One

One year and 1.5 million views later, I’m still in a state of astonishment when I force myself to fully appreciate that one of the most-viewed videos of my childhood has become a tiny but permanent little piece of the internet. In the original form, remixed videos, excerpted stills, or that wildly popular .GIF file that keeps getting reposted on Tumblr, The Vogue Boy just keeps on dancing. 

The truth is I don’t have much interest in viral videos myself. "Vogue Boy" was purely my ABBA-esque attempt to steal the spotlight through a means that no one is inclined to take seriously and then to deliver pop art that people would have to take seriously. I thought that I could launch a screenwriting career with a viral video in much the same way that ABBA thought they could be taken seriously by winning the EuroVision song contest. It took the string of stellar singles that followed “Waterloo” for ABBA to reach their goal. That's why I remain optimistic my video will one day be recalled as the unexpected start of a career defined by deliciously clever works of FUN.

The Oomph Girl Herself: Miss Ann Sheridan

I appropriated that name “Vogue Boy” not as a nod to Madonna's  “Material Girl”, but rather as an homage to The Oomph Girl, Ann Sheridan. (I thought that referring to my inner child as The Oomph Boy made me sound a bit TOO precocious!) Otherwise, I might have coined “The Vogue Kid”, because I hate to ascribe a gender to my identity. In fact, I can’t say I haven’t been tempted to start a rumor that I’m really an androgynous female, as on an unconscious level that is how I have always thought of myself. Better judgment prevailed, for the significance that that video ended up having to many gay male viewers in particular warmed my heart and truly changed my life.

I’m forever grateful to the hundreds of people who left comments on my Vimeo and Facebook pages. In the year since, whenever I need to lift my spirits, I just scroll through and try to convince myself that the words they are writing were actually written to and about me. It was also a unique and massive thrill to be not only discovered but posted about by so many bloggers. I was featured on some of my favorite blogs, such as Boy Culture, GangsterSaysRelax, Wicked Gay Blog, and Andrew Sullivan's The Dish, as well as DListed, The Huffington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Towleroad, DallasVoice, HyperVocal, The Daily What, The Bulge Report, The Kiss 102.5 FM Blog, MostWatchedVideos, Jezebel, PudWhacker's Madonna Scrapbook, PureJuice, A.V. Club, Good Culture, and PerezHilton. The video was broadcast on the syndicated series The Daily Buzz, and an excerpt of it was shown on Anderson Cooper 360 and in Jessica Frech's 2012 music video, "Dance."

DJ Paul V gave me the opportunity to contribute my growing-up story to his incredible project The Born This Way Blog and Megan Johnson interviewed me about the video for her blog The Assistant. Perhaps the most exciting outcome of all was the clip's use in video projects and art exhibitions, the first of which was Gerald Hubert's "Beauty's Where You Find It" at The POParazzi Gallery in Roanoke, VA in Summer 2011. The video will be given its first UK presentation as part of "Mistaken Identities", an exhibition by Marcus Keating and The New Happiness that is being presented at Modern Art Oxford from June 8-10th, 2012 as part of Oxford Pride. "Vogue Boy" inspired the song "Video Boy" by Swedish artist Cristian Dinamarca and the single artwork for the song "Ecstasy" by Japanese artist Masculin. 

Since the video was downloadable for many months, numerous people uploaded it to YouTube. The video was viewed tens of thousands of times on various YouTube channels before Warner Music Group pulled most of them--including a fabulous tribute by a Japanese fan that paired my video alongside Madonna's original. However, they left up an assortment of fan videos made by people who put their own spin on my home movie. Now, enjoy this trio of my favorites. They are all brilliant, and they all make me feel more special than I can put into words. In the event the people who made them should ever read this post: THANK YOU for the smile that you put on my face by making this clip into amazing new works of art.

Now, out of respect to those who made the original version of this video a viral hit, allow me to link you back via one of my favorite Madonna quotes:

"Ain't nothin' like the REAL thing." 

;)

Rob Loves Paula @ 24 fps

 
To honor the 50th birthday of one of my favorite singers of all time, Paula Abdul, I look forward to sharing with all of you my "blue-screen finale". I've coined it "Vogue Boy Returns" because it will be unveiled on June 19th, 2012, the 20th anniversary of Tim Burton's "Batman Returns", and because I've become detached from that "Vogue Boy" since he became a viral figure. (Trippy, huh?) Speaking of 'detached', I must warn you all that the Paula Abdul song I thought I would be lip-synching to turned out to be a re-recording by a karaoke cassette artist. As such, the video lacks the spark of my tribute to Madonna's immortal "Vogue", but I hope these photos attest to its continued effectiveness as a source of amusement.

Psst! It's now online: http://vimeo.com/robertjeffrey/coldhearted ! ;)

 

 

08/08/12 ADDENDUM: Thank you all for making this my most popular post on RobWorld!! :) My tribute to "Cold Hearted" was featured on Boy Culture and PerezHilton.com as well as being shared on Facebook and Twitter by The Born This Way Blog and the makers of the upcoming film I Am Divine. All of these amazing people helped make my "Vogue Boy" video a viral success, and thanks to their championing of "Vogue Boy Returns", the video went on to be viewed 10,000 times in its first week! Better yet, it was seen by the single most AWESOME possible viewer: Paula Abdul!! On June 26th she answered a Tweet from Perez Hilton asking if she had seen my home movie...and my inner nine year old is still flying high from her reply.

My Love Letter To "Give Me All Your Luvin'"

Like many of you, I am sick of the ageism being hurled Madonna’s way for the last, oh, say, twenty years. Megaforce’s “Give Me All Your Luvin”, Madonna’s first video of the new decade, is an affront to that ageism. 

It’s not the defiantly and effectively youthful quality of Madonna’s (fabulous) song that makes the most powerful statement about the triviality of a performer’s age. It’s the ripe-at-fifty-three sexuality on display in the video. Madonna's sexuality isn’t dark or intense in this video, as in Jean Baptiste Mondino's “Justify My Love" or Madonna's SEX book. Rather, it’s colorful and silly and fun and frothy, just like the song itself. It’s Madonna affecting positive change the way she does best: not with an overt political statement, but rather by being herself, without any hint of shame. Physical beauty will always be subjective and societal. But sex appeal is irrefutable and eternal. Madonna is sexier than ever at fifty-three, and she seems to be having more fun than ever, too. I don’t love this simply because I love Madonna. I love many women in their 40s and 50s who are sexy and funny and have many decades of living ahead of them. Their uniquely earned glory is being celebrated by Madonna, and in turn by the millions of people who are watching this video. After all, the young should be jealous of the experienced—NOT the other way around. 

I think that this is Madonna’s best work in music videos since the one-two punch of Johan Renck’s “Hung Up” and Jamie King’s “Sorry”, the former of which might be her best video and the latter of which might be my personal favorite. I also think that “Give Me All Your Luvin’” is her most important video since Guy Ritchie’s “What It Feels Like For A Girl”. Both are works of pop art meant to evoke “oohs” and “aahs” amongst the loyal fans who are bound to love seeing Madonna achieve the impossible in a music video fantasy world. But they’re also both chances for Madonna to express her frustration with the rules handed down on her, not as Madonna herself but as a representative of two overlapping demographics that she belongs to. “What It Feels Like For A Girl” was about the restrictions that are commonly and universally placed on women from birth to death, and the violent extremes to which one might go in rebelling against those restrictions. In “Give Me All Your Luvin’” Madonna lashes out at the constraints that society places on women over fifty. “What It Feels Like For A Girl” makes a statement through the glamorization of violence being committed by a woman against all men. Madonna’s similarly in-your-face approach in “Give Me All Your Luvin’” takes the exact opposite form: it is a display of adoration of an older woman by hordes of younger men.  There are many women who can and do attract the adoration of younger men, but few of them are celebrated for it. In fact most of them, like Madonna, are scorned for it, publicly and privately, by gay and straight men and by gay and straight women.

I haven't emphasized the invaluable contributions of M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj to the song and video because they will inevitably (and involuntarily) be credited with bringing young people to the clip. This is not to undermine their own brilliance as artists, nor the edginess and self-definition which prompted Madonna to see herself in them. Thankfully, there’s a sign on YouTube that the "Give Me All Your Luvin'" video is already making an important impact on young people, separate from its M.I.A./Nicki appeal. Special thanks to my friend Nelson for showing me a video that fills me with optimism. After all, nothing trumps ageism quite like brilliant teenagers.

Madonna’s career as an artist has coincided with her contributions as a liberating icon, and her comfort with her own sexuality has been at the center of her positive and vital impact on feminism and gay rights. Now, at the dawn of a new era in her career, I hope that Madonna will continue to shatter Western society’s concepts about aging. All people, male and female, reach a certain age at which they’re expected to act a certain way, dress a certain way, and restrict themselves a certain way. Madonna is saying NO to that "certain age"/"certain way" mode of thinking. The more her message reaches the masses, the better chance we all have of living in a world that is rid of the prejudices that shape our conscious and unconscious perceptions of people. 

I have actively followed Madonna's life and career since 1990, and I have witnessed the world's perception of my sexual orientation changing dramatically since then. Madonna’s once radical views on gender and sexuality have become absorbed into the mainstream in the two decades since her most famously progressive works of art achieved commercial success and media saturation. But there’s a new terrain for her to conquer, and that warpath is the world’s intense resistance towards women who do not age quietly.

And who better to change the world than the woman who rules it?

Why I Made Myself "The Vogue Boy"

http://vimeo.com/robertjeffrey/vogueboy

I knew the whole time I was vogue-ing in Hampton Beach that I was nowhere near as impressive as a trio of teen girls who’d already pulled off an amazing recreation at the same venue. A crowd formed while I was performing, and that’s when I really got going: I needed the audience. I graciously accepted their applause, but I knew that it was those teenage girls deserved the real applause—and they still do.

I ignored friends’ pleas for years to post my “Vogue” video to the internet because, as the little boy in that video, I dreamed of it being one day pulled out to embarrass me on a talk show after I’d become a big movie star. Incidentally, then or now, I would have had to feign such embarrassment.

Showing the “Vogue” video became a pastime when hanging out with my friends in college. I enjoyed playing it for groups, for I knew who would be amused by it: people who never knew I had THAT in me. In March 2010, I tried to upload it to YouTube to commemorate the 20th anniversary of “Vogue”, but for copyright reasons I was unable to. I put it on Facebook, and friends told me to give Vimeo a shot.

I promised to do so in Summer 2011, twenty years after the performance. I planned to upload the video on July 10th, exactly five years after I scored a single ticket to Madonna’s “The Confessions Tour” in Boston and found myself in the first row at the end of the catwalk. The most artistically satisfying experience of my life, it is worthy of a separate entry. But when I learned of Madonna’s upcoming film “W.E.” premiering at the Venice Film Festival, I put a new plan into motion. 

I wanted the video to snowball into enough of a viral success that a reporter might show it to Madonna on an iPhone while she worked the red carpet, and I pictured someone sending me a funny YouTube clip of such a moment. I uploaded it on June 7th and sent the link out on June 9th, one year after I saw Diana Ross live in concert for my first time ever, at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles. It’s another perfect tonight worthy of a separate entry, but since Diana Ross and The Supremes had been such a reigning influence on that nine year old, it seemed thoroughly appropriate.   

I knew the June 9^th upload would coincide with Pride Weekend in many cities, including Boston and LA. I thought this might help it get viewed amongst groups of friends celebrating, but the reaction I expected was NOT the reaction I got. I predicted it would be viewed purely as comedy, for everyone who knew me always got a big kick out of seeing how committed I was to impressing Madonna. I did NOT expect people to tell me that they were inspired, that it brought them back to childhood, or that my performance exemplified a child being raised in a household of love, acceptance, and support. When such words were written to me in the form of comments, messages, and wall posts, I looked at the video differently: it took on a life all its own.

ME AT NINE: MY "VOGUE" VIDEO! :-) 

I’m so grateful that the individuals who choose to contact me through Vimeo and Facebook are not only doing so, but doing it in a way that is public to my family members, all of whom are following these comments and are as emotionally moved as I am. It has received well over 800 comments on my Vimeo page alone, and only ONE was negative—I felt sad for the person who wrote it, whose confused reaction to the imagery of self-expression clearly spoke to his own personal struggles. If he ever reads this, I wish him well and send love and hope his way.