Under the Cover:
k.d. lang in Vanity Fair
By Indie Murphy
Embedded Files
Meet the real author of this website. She hasn’t quite gotten the handle on makeup yet and the pink dye has entirely washed out of her hair. I might be nearly 23 now, but this version of me, then 14, deserves the credit. After all, she got here first.
It was 2016 in Ohio when I first came out, the only openly gay person in my entire middle school. I thought this news would be contained to my small circle of friends, but it took maybe one full day to reach my little sister, two grades below me. If you think coming out in middle school is hard, try doing that right after the president-elect runs a very successful campaign upheld by homophobia. Everyone had something to say about it: kids I didn’t even know were telling me they couldn’t be my friend, I was banned from friends’ homes, and I found out that someone’s mom was talking to the other adults at school about how my parents “shouldn’t let [me] run around and be gay.” That’s a real quote from a real adult woman by the way!
I had never felt more confused or isolated. If I couldn’t find community in the real world, then I would search for it online. Tumblr was the place for weird gay kids, trying to figure themselves out. This often resulted in some of the most annoying posts and discourse you’ll ever see, but it also allowed me to hear from people with experiences like my own. I’m sure it was after scrolling through various tags like “#gay” or “#queer” (basic, I know) when I eventually came across a photo of what looked like two people getting very close to each other for the cover of the August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair.
k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford, photographed by Herb Ritts for the cover of Vanity Fair. Styled by Marina Schiano.
I’m supposed to be pouring over an algebra textbook, but this photo proves to be a far more interesting course of study. I am thrilled to see a woman dressed in this way. I didn’t have a lot of experiences with butches at this time; I only knew mom’s friend, a drag king named Becky, whom I had really intense but undefined feelings about I was seven. k.d. lang and Cindy Crawford create a scene of mutual desire and attraction, depicted without shame. I had yet to see anything like this, any piece of media celebrating lesbian sexuality without trying to mitigate or soften it.
My child self understands the queerness in this image, but she has yet to discover the queerness behind this image. That is what I have spent an entire research project uncovering. The queerness in this image is so much more than the scene depicted here, it flows into every aspect of this photo’s creation, reaching back to a history of boundary breaking moves. That is what queerness is, existence that has been made “other,” the constant interrogation and subversion of norms. The August 1993 Vanity Fair cover is made from queerness at both the creative and historical level, it is made possible by a history of boundary breaking acts. For myself, who couldn’t see this bigger picture, it’s finally time to get under the cover.
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