Joon Lee     Leave it to Diva Vague, probing depression hits while watching the Oscars, which the lesbian/gay magazine The Advocate has appropriately dubbed "The Gay Super Bowl." Just as the Super Bowl serves as a pleasurable theater in which collective American masculinity is played out, the annual parade of movie stars getting armed like Roman gladiators to squeeze each other out of those lithe golden men has always had epic proportions for those of us fiddling with our queer identifications. Certainly, it's a test of our prissy aesthetic acumen (Will The English Patient sweep? Does Lauren Bacall "deserve" the best supporting actress award merely for being a legend? Will Madonna and Courtney Love end up in a stylish catfight on-stage?), but more important, the Oscars are a parade of icons through which our phantasmic egos try to find stable embodiments. Same as the Super Bowl: a small-dicked couch potato can work out his masculinity complex by watching tight-assed tight ends bump and grind their muscles, just as a faggot can stabilize his nationally-disavowed sexuality upon radiant bodies which gracefully perform the privacy of their individuality upon a public stage. There is a privilege about the stage: on that narrow box of scrutiny, in those few hours in front of an audience, the performer is expected to communicate an utterly authentic coherence of identity. In this way, the Oscars provide a chance for Tom Cruise to play Tom Cruise, Halle Berry to play Halle Berry: an orgiastic performing of mass un-closeting. Despite the vaguely stirring epiphany of Angela Basset's "I Dream of Jeannie" weave, this year's ceremony provided no sites of subversive gender identification. There was a stasis and rigidity about the performers in their tasteful gowns and tuxedos. One longed for the seething Diana Ross, who, nominated for "Lady Sings the Blues" in 1972, had changed gowns to suit her persona -- black dress for "presenter," white tux for "winner" ‹ only to lose. It made me long for Toni Braxton. Braxton's scandalous appearance on the VH-1 Fashion Awards in late 1996 marked her as a shimmering icon of American citizenship. Striding across the stage to perform her hit "Un-break My Heart," Braxton was black woman as the Queen of America: her brown skin shining against her lithe black slip of a dress, her head held high and her body held straight, she was, despite her actually diminutive stature, deifically monumental. And that hair: topping off her iconographic presentation was a dark afro-mop of perfectly controlled Medusa curls. The really stunning thing about Braxton's performance, however, came after the actual singing: hopping up to the podium moments later to accept an award for "most stylish performer," Braxton revealed her "true" head of short, lacquered black hair. In the ensuing weeks, journalists black and white snidely kvetched about Braxton's decadent gesture: didn't anyone tell her that you don't change wigs in the span of one evening? I was ecstatic: there was something profoundly, disturbingly liberating about Braxton's gesture, which revealed an empowering fluidity around social identities. The gossip columnists were giggling nervously because Braxton had dared to re-associate the tradition of American performance with the ambivalent politics of minstrelsy. There's always been a political ambivalence about the image of an African-American who performs in front of a predominantly white and privileged audience; that performer's self- objectification is often read as complicity to the work of blackfacing, which theatricalized, and thus rigidified a stereotypical "essence" of blackness. In choosing to go bare-headed to receive the award, Braxton had underscored the cultural work of her curly "African" wig: to perform in a proto-minstrelsy setting, the singer emphasized the blackness of her performative persona by suggesting that her "true" self (picking up an award outside the context of singing) is somehow physically divorced from the implications of the afro wig. The multiple meanings of this wig charges Braxton's gesture with the same highly ambivalent political energy of the blackfacing. She had confessed in previous interviews that the afro that she had been sporting for the past few months had actually been inspired by Barbara Streisand in the film A Star is Born. Streisand. Not Angela Davis. Not Kathleen Cleaver. Not even Cicely Tyson. But Streisand: a Jewish outsider who became a WASPish Hollywood insider. For Braxton, an African-American woman, to wear a hairdo that was widely associated with the black aesthetic/power movement of the 1960s and then blatantly displace its cultural origin onto a white woman's appropriation of that style, is to reveal a simultaneously conservative and transgressive political unconscious. In this, it is ultimately a startlingly subversive act that suggests an exciting model of fluid, performative identity. Slinking around on-stage, Braxton changes her hair, thus changing the seemingly unchangeable: the biological inevitability of one's body and thus, race. Where a fixing coherence, a singularity of identity is expected, Braxton deflects the freezing gaze of American identity politics and offers a dazzlingly rich possibility of identities.

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