Quietly Flamboyant: In Praise of Sober Queerness

In the spring of 1983, the poet Eileen Myles went for a walk with their friend Tom in Manhattan. There was perhaps nothing remarkable about this walk, only that the light “clustered around the buildings” seemed particularly beautiful that day. As they sat and smoked and looked across the Hudson River towards New Jersey, two friends in their early thirties, they felt “overjoyed, overcome with the awareness that we weren’t dead.” This description of an urban scene is of a piece with many of Myles’s poems, which are so alive to dailiness and detail, to the everyday architecture of our feelings.

I remember being floored by this description when I first encountered it in Myles’s 1999 essay “Coming Clear,” being, as it is, an essay about Myles’s sobriety, and being, as I was then, in 2022, recently thirty, and just a few weeks sober myself. I was emotional and full of gratitude in that period, eager to find representations of this new way of life, this not-being-dead.

If recovery meetings were the place to find fellowship, strength and hope, I figured that literature might offer something else, some alternate narrative frames for this first chapter of a life without drink. It was thus a joy to read Myles, one of my favorite poets, on the particularities of early recovery, how it helps illuminate new forms of attention, offers up “a whole world…all out there waiting for you, in a way it never was before.” I too had noticed, in those first few weeks, how the world seemed a little brighter, its colors more vivid.

This sensation was often euphoric, and sometimes overwhelming. The closest reference points I had for it were being in love, or being drunk or high, as if the freedom from destructive cycles were still a part of addiction’s eco-system. This was why people in recovery meetings described it, in a more cautionary fashion, as the “pink cloud,” something elevated, rose-tinted and bound, by gravity, to dissipate eventually.

To drink is to enter of a labyrinth of romantic, thrilling, even glamorous myths; to give up drinking is to give those up too.

The traditional language of sobriety abounds in such metaphors; we count recovery in steps, even if the journey is not always a linear one, and work to fill that hole in the soul, a unifying image of the causation behind addictive behaviors. The question is how to fill it, what you put in its place when the pink cloud evaporates and you are left exposed. The work and regularity of the 12-Step program, for many of us in recovery, offers an important framework. Then there are the changes to daily life, decisions about where you go (especially at night), who you hang out with, how you spend your time, ranging from the prosaic to the profound.

In “Coming Clear,” Myles describes “not going to bars much lately,” nor dinners, but sticking to the company of really good friends, and spending time looking at the sky through their telescope, and “reading several books at once.” Maybe sobriety changes what you read, and also what you write, a reorientation of creative practice. There are “water poets and wine poets,” Myles recalled being told; “and so I began to toy with the idea of becoming a water poet—a reluctant lover of clarity.”

I stopped drinking and using drugs just over four years ago, and in that time I have been faced with many of these same questions. I have often been drawn to insobriety as a subject; it was one of the themes of my first nonfiction book, Fire Island. A queer literary history of New York’s eponymous island, which has been a liberating and often-hedonistic destination for queer people from the city for over a century, the experiences informing that book brought me face-to-face with what I already knew were my problematic drinking habits.

This was something I addressed in the book in its first-person sections, yet I was in no way sober during the writing of it, although some readers had assumed I was already in recovery when I wrote it. My rock bottom hit, perhaps not accidentally, just a few weeks before it was published. I felt grateful for the clarity of sobriety as I launched the book, but I was also apprehensive about tapping into the subject of my next project, on flamboyance, a similarly fiery and unbridled aspect of queer culture.

The word flamboyant literally means “flaming” (from the French flamboyer), and refers to one who attracts attention because of their “confidence, stylishness and exuberance” (OED). On the surface, it seems connected to the proud and loud states of disinhibition that we associate with intoxication, and not the meditative quiet of sobriety. Alcohol and flamboyance are indeed closely linked in the cultural imaginary. Drink certainly made me less inhibited, more able to tap into my own flamboyance. When you feel the shame of growing up closeted lifted, if only for a night, it is easy to believe that what you are tapping into is your real, unfiltered self. To drink is to enter of a labyrinth of romantic, thrilling, even glamorous myths; to give up drinking is to give those up too.

“I want to live,” says Emma, the protagonist of Duncan Macmillan’s hit 2015 play People, Places and Things, set in a rehab facility for recovering addicts. “I want to live vividly and make huge, spectacular, heroic mistakes.” To give up drinking can feel like trading in your exciting, chaotic, heroic existence for a drab and joyless one. “Because what else is there?” Emma asks, “This? Shame and boredom and orange fucking squash?” All of which is to say that sobriety—or at least traditional images of it, preceding the age of sobriety influencers—has a PR problem in a culture centered around pleasure and excitement. Exchange that flaming shot of absinthe for a mug of tea, the glimmer of a neon-lit bar for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a carpeted church hall. Emma’s resistance to the bland wholesomeness of recovery spaces speaks to a familiar cultural trope across media, in films and television shows; that sobriety is where flamboyance goes to die. Elemental opposites, like water and fire.

This assumption is made quite literal in a scene from Rocketman, the 2019 biopic about Elton John. As the film opens, we see the musician (played by Taron Egerton) in one of his signature flamboyant outfits: glittering orange lycra, shaped like the feathers of a flaming bird. He looks like he has just walked off-stage, but we see he is heading into a recovery meeting. He sits in a fold-up chair with a petulant scowl, seemingly resistant, but tearfully aware that he needs help, that he is in the right place. It is a neat gag, this visual mismatch, between the glamorous, excessive life of a famous rock star, flamboyant to the literal detail of his costume, and the calming silence of this nondescript room, its inhabitants seated in a circle, ready to listen.

I thought of this scene a few summers ago when I saw Elton John headline Glastonbury Festival. It was an emotional set, a crowning spectacle of his career, and reportedly his final UK performance. I was swept away by the show and what it represented; a queer elder and cultural icon, a survivor in a shiny gold suit. In the back of my mind I thought of what it had taken to get here, to live long enough to see your legacy celebrated like this, the sky illuminated by fireworks in your honor. It made John’s tributes to lost stars, like Marilyn Monroe, and friends, like George Michael, all the more poignant. I thought of him dressed down, offstage, at a meeting, and of the work that takes place behind the scenes, the ground beneath the flamboyant spectacle.

“The thing I’ve come to understand about being a water poet,” writes Myles, “is that if I’m writing the score to this film, I have to be in it. Even like how it feels.” The film of my first few years of sobriety has contained scenes I could never have imagined, at first. Being able to still go to music festivals and have experiences like this one, powered only by caffeinated soda and enthusiasm for the experience, has been a great joy, a site of deep feeling. While it is not always easy to inhabit crowds of people chasing various highs, it is possible. When I first stopped drinking, I felt a sense of pre-emptive mourning for the queer nightlife spaces I would lose from my life, assuming it would feel too difficult to navigate them without the aid of substances.

Happily, this has not been not been the case, although it is an ongoing journey, and one that has informed my latest book, Flamboyance: The Power of Living Boldly, which is as much a memoir as it is a cultural history of its central subject. It explores, among other things, what a sober flamboyance might look like, whether that’s Eileen Myles, observing the particular textures of a sunset, or Elton John, headlining Glastonbury as the sun goes down. Flamboyance, as the poet Harriet Monroe once put it, is “at least the beginning of art,” an extension of our imagination; not only a surface exterior, but an inner capacity, a mode of creative attention.

I have also found solace in the examples of sober artists, who have shown that such candor can possess a flamboyance all its own.

I had another example to add to this make-shift canon recently when, a few weeks ago, I watched Lily Allen pour her heart out on stage, to a crowd of 30,000 in a park in South London. Of the suite of candid and frequently unflinching songs that make up Allen’s widely acclaimed comeback album West End Girl, inspired by her marriage to actor David Harbour and their divorce, one in particular sent shockwaves through the crowd. “If I relapse,” she sings on it, her voice plaintive, auto-tuned as to sound almost ghostly, “I know I stand to lose it all.” Like many of the tracks on the album, “Relapse” nods to aspects of Allen’s life that are well-documented elsewhere; in this case, her addiction to drugs and alcohol, her six years of sobriety. What gives the song its emotional punch is the sense of the ground shifting, a safety net pulled, as a moment of emotional upheaval threatens to topple the hard-won equilibrium of recovery. “I-i-need a drink,” Allen sings on a loop, against a garage beat, a relatable sentiment for anyone who has ever lost control.

At the level of style, there was nothing obviously flamboyant about Allen’s music, nor her presence on stage, the quiet, acerbic composure of her delivery. That said, her bright pink and custom-made bib, emblazoned with the word “CUCK,” commanded attention, as did the high glamour of her various stage outfits, from a feather-lined night-gown to a particularly vengeful wrap dress, printed with the receipts of her husband’s purchases for other women. There was also a vivid sense of defiance in her capacity to bare so much, to sing about her fear of relapse to a crowd of thousands. Hearing these words sung live, among a crowd dressed to the nines in leathers, feathers and pink cowboy hats, the ideal dress code for London’s premier LGBTQ+ music festival Mighty Hoopla, where Allen was performing, I felt something shift within me too.

The Allen of West End Girl made sense as the headliner for a festival like Mighty Hoopla. Queer communities, after all, have always been partial to performers who embrace messiness and drama in this way, if only because they display a defiance of the shame that so many of us have been raised to feel. With tears in my eyes, I reflected on how intimately candor is related to clarity; how both are forms of “coming clear,” to use Myles’s phrase; how sobriety demands that we at last come to know ourselves honestly, to make that knowledge shareable with one another, without fear. I have certainly felt fear about sharing my own experiences with drinking in my work, and about writing words just like these. But I have also found solace in the examples of sober artists, who have shown that such candor can possess a flamboyance all its own.

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Flamboyance: The Power of Living Boldly by Jack Parlett is available from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.