Queer Opulence: How Marie Antoinette Became a Gay Icon
Graphic by Catherine Frediaini
The name of the infamous queen Marie Antoinette is synonymous with royal excess, with glamour, the French Revolution, and with death by guillotine. But it was also used as a secret Sapphic code by lesbians in the 18th and 19th centuries; asking if one had “heard the rumours about Marie Antoinette” or dropping her name in some way would indicate where your erotic inclinations lay.
Lil Nas X in “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”
Since her reign, the Autrichienne Dauphine has had a powerful impact upon fashion, visual culture, pop culture, and most interestingly, queer culture. Recently, in tandem with the rising popularity of “royalcore” and historical-inspired fashion trends, we can see the use of a distinctively Antoinette-aesthetic in hyper-pop artists’ music videos: Dorian Electra’s “Ram It Down,” Shygirl’s “Tasty,” and, of course, Lil Nas X’s viral “Montero” video, in which he wears a decadently coiffed blue wig in genderbending homage to the lavish queen of France.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, “Marie Antoinette with a Rose” (1783)
It doesn’t stop there; young designers such as Max Allen, William Dill-Russell and Christopher Reid are queering royal core through their “historically inspired, genderqueer” designs. King Kong Magazine’s 2021 Fetish Issue styled a shoot around Lorena Prain as Marie Antoinette, the iconic piled hairstyle made to stand out even more through the juxtaposition with various proffered contemporary objects: McDonald’s fries, Starbucks, a joint. Here, the macarons and cakes of the court at Versailles are cleverly replaced by more “postmodern candies,” but the message remains the same. Or as King Kong’s instagram caption reminds us: “opulence you earn everything.” This is an indirect quote of ballroom icon Pepper LaBeija, who is captured in Paris is Burning saying, “Opulence: you own everything,” a phrase which has proliferated through the internet’s hall of mirrors and is associated with queer culture in particular, as ContraPoints’ “Opulence” video makes extensive note of.
The use of this visual language of luxury by the queer community is powerful and political.
In the same way that Marie Antoinette’s enormous “pouf sentimental” hairdo was a symbol of wealth and power, serving “a performative role within the context of French queenship,” and operating as “a site of dynastic agency” (Blakemore 2016), queer opulence offers a site for the transformative power of performance through the material signifiers of “success” to a community previously denied this kind of indulgence or visibility. From Raja’s Marie Antoinette drag in Season 3 of Drag Race to the ball category “bring it like royalty” that Electra Abundance walks as Antoinette in the first episode of FX’s Pose to Madonna’s ostentatious impersonation in her “Vogue” video, the camp style’s overt artifice and exaggeration provides the perfect materials for drag queens and ballroom scenes to work with. It’s a subversive reclamation of the french white elite’s luxurious extravagance––its allure, as well as its grotesquery. ◆
Raja, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3
Madonna as Marie Antoinette
Dominique Jackson as Electra Abundance in Pose