I know a place where you can get away

The male "authenticity" aesthetic beat Madonna and 90s self-invention. But we're still heading back to the dance floor.

Everywhere you turn is heartache. It's everywhere that you go. I know a place where you can get away. It's called a dance floor. And here's what it's for, so.

Thirty years ago, Madonna’s triple-platinum single “Vogue” described a dance floor without boundaries, on which it doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl. You’re a superstar, that’s what you are. This third possibility, to bust out of the binary vise for for celestial glory, came as good news.

Thirdness was making a name for itself then. Homi Bhabha’s Third Space Theory was among the primary innovations of postcolonial philosophy; it named hybridization, impurity, liminality, mimicry, and interstice as among the great features of subaltern cultures. (Notably, Trump loathes such philosophy, at least as he caricatures it; he attacked Columbia expressly because it’s the birthplace of postcolonial theory, under the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said.) What’s more, the twoness of the bipolar Cold War—the never-ending Rocky IV us vs. them—seemed not just a square basis for identity, but a fragile one. Indeed, the Soviet Union folded its tents the next year.

Madonna’s idea that universal superstardom was the way to dissolve, subvert, and especially transcend binary oppositions—it was intoxicating, like the MDMA that then dissolved inhibitions, class anxiety, and sexual stratification at raves.

If you liked that fluid dance floor, on which you’re born naked and the rest is drag, you probably enjoy its cultural yields today. Figures like Obama, Oprah, Ru Paul, Harry Styles, and Dolly Parton, and megahits like Hamilton and Barbie offer superstardom as the purest way to slip the heartbreak of dichotomy.

But in the American language, binaries can’t be kept at bay forever. In the 1990s, far from the clubs, sober of MDMA, unable to afford MTV so as to watch David Fincher’s grayscale “Vogue” video, the left-outs no doubt felt that American culture was now divided between superstars and non-superstars—stars, that is, and nobodies.

There were those who could afford, by dint of charisma or imagination or money or surplus life force, to (post-structurally) opt up and out of gender, race, class, political divisions—and there were those still (structurally) ground down by such things.

For the superstars, through the 2010s, there was Obama and Madonna. For both the left-outs and the seething aspirants, there was Bernie Sanders and Trump.

Obama’s identity was boundaryless, non-binary, Kansan and Kenyan, elegant and athletic, book and street smart both. Like Madonna, he had style to give him exit velocity. Bernie and Trump, by contrast, rejected stylishness: Bernie with mittens and Trump with bad taste. Deep voices, all male, monolingual, loud, tuneless, that’s what they are. All outline, no fluidity, easily memed and doodled with Sharpies.

Identity in Trump and Bernie seemed stubbornly fixed. To people who don’t dance, who are scared of gay disco, their voices could be heard over the music. This timidity and provinciality read as authenticity, against which disco dancers—coded gay, black, female—are all styled as artificial. Disco Sucks made its return. What a nightmare.