The Sydney Gaze
I want to talk about The Sydney Gays, a new podcast released by Instagram identity Jay Fisher and music producer (I think) Wil Sabin. The podcast came in for some pretty heavy criticism after episode one — mainly on the grounds of its being completely shallow, vapid and perpetuating every negative stereotype a person could possibly have about Sydney gays. These criticisms are 100% legitimate — the first episode was terrible. But as the week has gone on, and they dropped a second episode, it opened up a whole bunch of possibilities for further thinking. So I felt like writing a bit of an essay (my original intention was to start a competing podcast, but since the second episode isn’t as atrocious that now seems like a mad and impractical plan).
I realise that writing an essay about a podcast positions that podcast as worthy of analysis. This is what Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called illusio: the idea that simply positioning something as worthy of critique means that we are tacitly acknowledging that the ‘game’ is worth playing. I am playing the game of The Sydney Gays by writing about it (and posting about it on social media). Maybe this feeds into their audience. I have it on good authority that Fisher was shocked and a little hurt by the negative feedback to the first episode, so my own take — “all publicity is good publicity” — mightn’t be what they were going for. So in the spirit of enriching the intellectual life of the gay community, I offer my take on Instagram and the representation of identity in The Sydney Gays.
“We’re just going to be raw and authentic”
Immediately on listening to the second episode, I noticed the way Fisher and Sabin repeatedly stressed that their plan was to be their authentic selves. It’s an interesting dilemma, I think, because the need to emphasise that they will be authentic suggests that they are somehow pre-authentic at the moment. And what does it mean to be ‘authentic’ anyway? Podcasting is a medium that works when presenters have a kind of ‘sparkle’ and chemistry, we get an insight into their character, there’s a sense of authenticity that attracts us to good presenters. Think about My Dad Wrote A Porno, which works not just because Rocky Flintstone’s bad pornography is hysterically funny, but also because the chemistry between the hosts is genuinely wonderful. They are authentic because there isn’t any apparent contrivance to the things they are saying — they’re as horrified by Rocky’s creation as we are. We can identify with them, and that locks the listeners into the program.
Not so, episode one of The Sydney Gays. As a Sydney Gay myself, I felt particularly alienated from the experiences Fisher and Sabin trace in the first episode. I rarely if ever engage with Instagram (and as my friends discovered on the weekend, my recommended feed has a weirdly large number of videos featuring barbecued meat getting cut up). I have never had botox or fillers, I don’t particularly like the Beresford, and I like spending my weekends reading books, not going to parties. I am a 33 year old Sydney Gay: I don’t expect a 26 year old Instagram celebrity to think the same way that I do. But I do think there’s a problem when a podcast stakes a claim to represent a demographic as diverse and heterogenous as ‘Gay Sydney’. Twitter has blasted the diversity problem of the podcast (even the vastly improved episode two has been criticised for adding a white, muscly, Christian-raised man to the lineup). But from the outset, Fisher and Sabin stressed that this was a ten episode project, so there’s time to add people of colour, lesbians, trans people, and to dig into the variety of identities that constitute LGBTQ+.
The real discomfort I have with this question of authenticity is that it’s a clash between the experience the hosts already have with ‘social media’, and what happens when they treat podcasting as just another variation on the same theme. In the 80’s, Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulacra and Simulation, in which he unpacked the journey of a symbol (a representation, usually in language, but we can build on that idea). Where some symbol begins as a faithful representation of an actual thing, over time it might drift into the condition of a simulacrum: a copy of something that has no actual original. The simulation of authenticity is part of the problem with Instagram: what counts as ‘authentic’ on a medium as inauthentic as Instagram? Nothing. It is a simulacrum of authenticity, the word has lost all meaning. Candid is not remotely candid. And in a way, episode one of The Sydney Gays was the most Instagram a podcast could possibly be (that’s probably why Instagram was mentioned so many times).
Why is Instagram so central to gay identity? Really Jay Fisher, a man with 170k followers and whose public identity is fully imbricated with his Instagram account, has an opportunity on this podcast to offer something we haven’t heard before: an influencer properly interrogating what it means to be an influencer. I don’t mean in the sense of how #instafamous you are, or how to set up the perfect shot, or what it means when you get to the Beresford and everybody recognises you. No, I’d rather he dive into the ontological question of being, by which I mean how life and identity is possible as a famous person from Instagram. What is the nature of life itself when it is performed for a network that doesn’t know you? And what kind of ‘you’ is produced by this process?
In episode one, Fisher claims that Instagram is his ‘side hustle’, but I think that’s just a bit of a cute response. Without his Instagram following, would Fisher really be hosting a podcast? What distinguishes Jay Fisher as an identity in the Sydney gay community isn’t his role as a real estate agent — that’s about as glamorous a profession as an Academic Librarian (Pat says cutely). “Jay Fisher” is a node in a network of individuals who circulate through Instagram’s visual index. He is bound up in the #instagay #gaysofsydney hashtags. This isn’t a criticism, by the way. Instagram is a symptom of a broader trend in capitalism (what we’d lazily call ‘neoliberalism’ — the production of commodified identities). Why do we feel so compelled to share our experiences and photos of our lives online? Who knows, but the logical next step is to commodify them, to turn them into something saleable, which is what ‘influencers’ have done.
In some cases, of course, there’s an aesthetic dimension to Instagram as well. Is the craft of photography being celebrated? Yes, sure. The construction of these images is perfect, if a little stale because it is massified. The Frankfurt School critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer warned us about the problems of massified culture: it cheapens artisanship by making it accessible to everyone. Salvador Dali’s insane, joyous mania was so amazing because he was the first, but now it’s not inconceivable that someone could create an image like this in an afternoon.
Massification doesn’t cancel out the aesthetic pleasure of the experience, but it deadens the intellectualism of it. There’s nothing innovative or transgressive about strategically deployed lens flare, or perfect framing and balance: photography on these feeds is reduced to thirst traps — lusting after (or envying) the male form. Compare a Mapplethorpe shot to any one of the countless lazy ‘candid’ photos on Instagram — you’re looking at the delicate craft and narrative of suggestion versus the blunt force thumping of presentation. Where an artistic photograph evokes, the Instagram photograph simply records. Instagram so rarely plays with metaphor, so indelicately engages with imagery. There is nothing ironic about Instagram (Celeste Barber’s excellent satire notwithstanding).
I was beginning to unpick these ideas on a walk through Victoria Park with my (lesbian) colleague Heidi the other day (my lunchtimes apparently spent in Austen-like indolence, strolling past Lake Northam on the off chance that Mr Darcy would rise out of the eel-infested water). I told Heidi about Ai Weiwei’s work Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, in which he took a 2000 year old priceless artefact and destroyed it.
This is transgressive art. And in 2014, at one of his exhibitions, someone smashed one of Weiwei’s urns, and was charged with criminal damage (the urn was worth over a million dollars). But doesn’t this act feel poetic? Vandalism, sure, but also an act of vandalism in line with the artistic impulse that conceived Weiwei’s original piece. My point is that photographs like Weiwei’s go beyond the mere framing and capture of a perfect life and body, and instead say something.
Instagram — dominant in our discourse and understanding of contemporary gay life as it is — seems to have plenty to talk about, but very little to actually say. The banal and uninteresting quotes people attach to their photos — shit about sunrises and motivation — get plenty of likes, and simultaneously hollow out the medium and corrode our souls bit by bit.
I don’t want to elide the part I play in this, by the way. One criticism of The Sydney Gays (particularly the first episode) was that it seemed completely un-self aware. So in the interests of self-awareness, here’s an instagram post of mine taken at the statue of Christ over San Sebastian. Note pithy quote and clever framing:
I’m sure in my head I could manufacture a story about this though: reading myself as a modern Christ, perhaps the ridiculousness of the image, maybe something about the concreteness of a statue rendered into pixels, or how about the way travel, image and the atheist identity work to cheapen God’s grace? The point is — poorly made — that you can create a narrative out of this.
Here’s a photo I took a few years prior:
What’s the narrative here? Shirtless fuckwit on a wharf. That’s literally all you can take from it — and I only have 500 followers, so I can’t even justify this with reference to cashflow or celebrity.
Multiply this across a huge social network and you get Instagram, and then it makes sense how a thing like ‘the influencer’ is produced (influencing what? What does it even mean?). Instagram is an inauthentic medium. You only need to consider the effort that goes into each photograph — how completely uncandid a ‘candid’ photo actually is. The aim of these networks — the reward factor — is likes, the dopamine hit that comes from cheap validation. That language translates into the The Sydney Gays, with the hosts both noting in the second episode that they’d be interviewing “people that are more well-liked than us”.
On a typical Instagram post, Fisher pulls about twenty thousand likes, so these people must be off the charts. Or, more likely, they have internalised the social media language of ‘liking’, of seeking favour and popularity, and that’s being given expression in this podcast. Being liked is, frankly, boring. Liked for what exactly? Years ago, Kylie Minogue said she hated hearing young people say they wanted to be famous — famous for what? Being interesting is a far better ambition. It offers something of substance that transcends the ephemeral favour bestowed on us by Instagram or Facebook (or worst of all, Twitter).
In episode two, Fisher and Sabin comment on the strong negative reaction to the jingle from their first episode. The problems with episode one of The Sydney Gays is crystallised in this song, where they sing about seeing guys from the gym and walking into the Beresford. It’s a threadbare understanding of the multiplicity of gay identity and culture (and it’s a relief that they dropped it from episode two). Fisher stresses that he wants people to “leave that Sydney shit at the door”, but I think the jingle — and episode one — inadvertently give us a sense of just what that “Sydney shit” actually might be.
Sydney is a beautiful, but profoundly superficial city. Sydney is an Instagram-ready city, an #instacity if you will. I know the lockout laws come in for a lot of criticism for killing night life, but it’s the cultural life of Sydney that they really thinned out. Drag is now confined to the clubs, where it used to be celebrated and performed loudly on Oxford Street until the early hours. Taylor Square used to be a buzzing hive of activity at 3am — the feel was similar to the night the Yes Vote came back: the street and the culture was alive and transgressive. It’s apt that I’m writing this at the top of Sydney’s Vivid festival, which has become the usual packed-out, early-finishing, heavily commercial beacon of meaninglessness. The Sydney Gaze is the perfect metaphor for Instagram: directed at a simulacra of the self — contrived, artificial, flawless and beautiful.
Episode two of The Sydney Gays is a vast improvement over the first. Their guest — Ryan Perryman — is articulate and interesting, and he takes the time to unpack the denominations of Christianity and the relationship between his own identity and his position within that social web. It’s the kind of authentic, careful introspection that makes podcasts worth listening to: there is chemistry between the hosts and Ryan (even if Sabin continually interrupts with ‘that’s so awesome’). There is something in episode two to inform listeners — it’s a person looking at their life and asking the question: what makes me who I am? How did I come to be here today? It is self-aware.
It’s interesting that getting slammed so savagely added a degree of humility to their chemistry, perhaps because the vulnerability which Fisher describes at the start — and his apparently genuine concern about the backlash — added a sense of that elusive authenticity. The problem with vacuousness is that it makes people uninteresting and come across as deeply arrogant. The first episode swung from inane details about career, to uninteresting stories about Coachella (Destiny’s Child walked out on stage! A fact that was reported widely at the time and this podcast added nothing to the existing reportage), to the loathsome ‘chic or shit’ segment, which I think really captured the superficiality of this particular mode of gay culture. Carson Kressley — inter alia — was the cattiest fashion-aware gay I knew of in my youth. Seeing people try to emulate this style of cattiness isn’t charming, it’s a symptom of the tragic inauthenticity that harms young gay men.
What would I like to see from a podcast like The Sydney Gays? For starters, a richer understanding of what it means to be gay — a way to break the shallow circuit that drives young LGBTQ+ people to self harm, drugs, or isolation. I love the richness of gay culture: I love — for example — that while we don’t own it, we are arbiters of the successful execution of ‘camp’ at the Met Gala. Dennis Altman argued in The End of the Homosexual that our drift towards conservative totems — like Marriage Equality — was happening alongside a mainstreaming and diminishment of transgressive gay culture. I love our deviance and difference. I would like to see a podcast celebrate the idea that you are permitted, even celebrated, to be completely different. That means breaking ranks with the hegemony of ‘the scene’, and it would mean reaching out to the types of people that Fisher and Sabin might not typically ever meet.
That would be impressive to me. That would demonstrate a degree of self-awareness, of genuine openness to using this ‘passion project’ for self growth. For an Instagram celebrity to take his 170 thousand followers on a journey of intellectual discovery, to open their eyes to another way of being in the world that didn’t revolve around a simulation of a life that doesn’t exist in real life: that would be a bold journey.
And it would be a journey that I would be interested in following.
Update: since the podcast was cancelled a week or so after this post, I wrote a follow-up which you can read here.
