Changing Idols – Confessions of a Complicated Fan

I am a bad fan, I am a strange kind of fan, I am a confused fan. I am in the peculiar position to be adressed by my idol. It is my own fault; I could not stay in the shadows of anonymity like most fans have to, even if they are desperate to be known. There is this one Zac Efron site that has this very official announcement to all the fans that they should not believe anyone who writes them as Zac, because it for sure is not Zac.

http://www.zefron.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90018

He does not have the time to write to any fan in person. And he said clearly in a Degeneres show that he does not use Facebook or Twitter, he calls his friends on the phone.
When it comes to Zac I expect to stay in this completely anonymous position, even though my niece who happens to be a society reporter actually did speak to him in person recently.
But when it comes to Brent, who still is another category and another type of star, I carelessly stepped out of this status by writing a text about him (for the catalogue of the Viennese art show “The Porn Identity”, now over; the catalogue (in German), in my opinion the best thing about that show, can be ordered at

http://www.vfmk.de/($Itbi1F_kTX6EERp5I8zcjC$)/s,showModuleObject3,9_q1klWYtB,cxW0_xm1dtqZgVG,4Fa0jtW3hxW2nB,8xa0nVX0_JH,nRXYoxF1m_

a2uAb1jRW28Rr1uwVYpRr04NTMsQ8NmAD,nB,9VG.xhtml

My insistence to send mail after mail asking for the photographers of certain pictures I wanted to use is just one half of the story though; the other half is Brent’s amazing willingness to communicate with fans in person; a very irregular willingness, but still probably a phenomenon in its own right; the specific communicational strategy of a person who plans his status as star on the basis of a web 2.0 strategy. In a way in his extremely open use of all the common platforms, blog, email, facebook and finally Twitter, he still acts like any other youth who has a MySpace profile. By doing so he seems to deny his stardom and at the same time boost it. Any other star would have a pr manager who sometimes even writes to strangers or fans using the name of the star, – a nasty habit that I can only hope will never seem appropriate to Brent’s management; as it is becoming obvious that with the new site there will finally be someone who takes care for the contact with the public. Soon this contact will be a lot more professional and predictable, and a lot less exciting than my odd chats with someone calling himself Brent Corrigan, who once waited for a plane at an airport in Pennsylvania, telling me that the only other person he was chatting with was his mother. I was a bit nervous because I sent far more messages than I received.
This whole story of me being a fan of a young gay pornstar is very peculiar, and does not offer me any code of conduct. There are times when I think I overdid it, that I have been to public with my comments, at the same time too private, too outspoken. Yet I had to give my fandom a creative and an articulate character. As I said before, I deny the supposed pathology and regressive nature of adult fan culture; but I recommend building a culture, a creative activity around it.
I was flattered and proud to be mentioned by my web name after the announced photo moment with Zac had not happened. In a way I already knew, as the universe had not imploded.
http://myblog.brentcorriganinc.com/?p=848, right under the Patrick Wolf clip.
But a little later, instead of being grateful for that honour, I managed to upset the little star who knows me. In a comment to his celebratory post about his shooting in Palm Springs I mentioned my disappointment about him not bottoming in any of the scenes and got him really pissed off (comments now missing due to technical problems). Hm. What does it mean?

The obsession with the stars seems often perverted, aggressive, and cruel because it does not only resemble a cult for the hero but also a totemistic ritual. The desired powerful entity, the totem animal, the spirit, the ancestor, works like an energy source. And as we know of many rituals around Gods that are brutally torn apart and reassembled later on, Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, to name but a few, the object of desire is also in danger of being destroyed. All the celebrities who are a bit afraid of their fans have their good reasons.

But me, knowing about the secret cannibalism of fandom, I don’t want to be one of those crazy over-demanding fans who just feed from their star’s every move. Or is this a law too profound to be overcome by simple will? What about those absurd demands addressed towards a stranger? In fact I do not really appreciate demanding anything from anyone. And so I am a bit sad that I came across as an over-demanding fan in that comment. The whole situation is full of misunderstandings.


Mainly the problem here is about changes. Brent is a specialist in changes, and some of them come across as quite abrupt, some are just a storm in the water glass, and prove to be reversible, and a lot of the zeal for changing himself, his looks, his image and the circumstances of his life is still connected to the urge to leave certain things behind. Those changes are also part of his star appeal, as the trajectory of his career so far has so closely been related to his readiness to share his everyday life with the public. If this life would not be exciting there would not be anything to share.
How to be the fan of an ever changing person? It is not always easy, because one main part about fandom is projection. There was one particular image, a look, a situation, an appeal one fell in love with. In this case I was for sure fascinated by more than one look, role, period of his transformations. Still I know that it was something particular that struck me. And I am also aware of the poetic and indeed a bit tragic fact that a lot of the elements that struck me are bound to the very circumstances this young man desperately wants to leave behind. And with my blessing. Those elements were a special vulnerability, a certain grace, a radiant appeal in situations commonly labelled “passive” or “submissive” that had the power to put exactly those labels to shame. I have trouble to accept that this person, this image I got infatuated with is only a passing stage of a person who grows up and moves on. The situation is, however, even more complicated than that; I do like some of the new elements, but I see something forced in some of the recent changes. And that’s were the communication problems set in.
Brent often complained that people do not accept that his looks change with the normal process of growing adult. I do not see a problem with that. Still, it is an altogether different story that he decided to completely change his body type while his body still transformed. To read that it is those bitchy, over-demanding fans like me who make him slave in the gym and fast really bothers me. This is so very untrue. How could I, a woman who finally made peace with her inability to ever become slender, “demand” of anyone to torture himself for a certain look? I always thought Brent is a naturally slender person. In short, I assumed he does not need the gym to stay slim. And growing up would probably not change that. Maybe I am wrong, I don’t know. I can just say that there is projection and there is counter-projection. Just like in psychoanalysis, where there is transference and counter-transference. Also the star projects his ideas on the fans. I think that it is Brent’s idea that his fans “demand” a certain look. I have an altogether different theory about his obsession with working out. Brent discovered early on that his body is his product, the basis of his personal economy. And it was perfect as it was and probably would have stayed perfect while growing adult. But this contradicts the culture of capitalism: you cannot earn money from an uncultivated resource. This would simply be obscene. The source of your income needs to be also the object of hard labour.
Ok, this is a frivolous theory, in fact I know that it is simply the love for muscle within the or one particular gay community. There is just nothing clever I can say about that, as I do not get the point.
Which leads to more complicated questions about the productive or indeed not so productive relations of feminist and/or lesbian culture to gay culture, an extremely rich and tricky subject, and finally to Brent’s complaint the people like me just want to see him take it up the ass, a claim that is hard to deny when it comes to simple fact, but needs a lot of elaborating to show how very wrong the vulgar and dismissive tone is in relation to it.

To Be Continued …