Letters to the Editor
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watching whitney
I was appalled to find myself riveted to the cyber trail of whitney houston's horrifying and lurid decline.
what was so compelling? disbelief, grief, perverse fascination?
i appreciate traister's effort to restore a humane angle to our ambivalent gaze. if margo jefferson can write a treatise on the cultural ramifications of michael jackson (another tragic public spectacle), maybe someone should grapple with ms. houston's plight.
i suspect a major psychological fault line opened under the pressure of her sexual confusion.
and -if so- it would not be race that sabotaged her,nor bobby brown, but the glorious but immobilizing influence of the church on her sense of who she could be.
she seemed to sentence herself to bobby brown and a self-defacing, near suicidal sassy sort of giving up.
her hopeless bind is heart-breaking and-now- grotesque. i root for recovery - not death.
but it is a doomed trajectory rarely survived...lest we forget lenny bruce, jimi hendrix, janis joplin, john belushi, river phoenix,, curt cobain et al with their own secret, poignant torment.