Just over the halfway point in CNN’s biography of Luther Vandross, Luther: Never Too Much, friend and writing partner Richard Marx shares his disappointment with “people who have talked about his personal life, people who he considers friends,” disclosed aspects of his sexuality and its repression with the media. What follows is a quick flash to a photo of Luther performing and a cut to an infamous 2017 interview with Patti LaBelle on What’s Happening Live With Andy Cohen, where the legend devotedly discusses their private conversations, confessing that he didn’t want to come out because it’d probably upset his mother. It’s a nasty bit of editing especially because of LaBelle’s craterous absence from the rest of the work. It’s a moment within a relatively toothless projection of who Luther was that threatened to break a viewer’s suspension of disbelief and unlock a sense of same ol’, same ol’ frustration when it comes to tamping down the late artist’s queerness for the sake of… well…I’m not sure exactly.
But that decision and a few more omissions — including his very publicized beef with En Vogue in 1993 and the full extent of his diva-ness — convey the truth of Never Too Much; that this is not a documentary work historicizing one of the greatest musical performers of the ‘80s and ‘90s. It's a hagiography rubber-stamped by an estate that, according to LaBelle, might’ve been upset if Luther ever disclosed his sexual preferences. The silence has ignited discourses around the state of modern documentary-style work, what might’ve been lost in the wake of queer erasure especially as it reduces queerness to a question of gender and sexual identity, and what Black queer people are owed in the narrative tellings and re-telling of folks we consider kin.
Modern celebrity documentaries involving the participation of celebrities or their estates is, as prolific filmmaker Ezra Edelman told Pablo Torre last year, “bordering on branded content.” For Luther’s estate, who sold off stakes to his likeness and some of his music catalog to Primary Wave for $40 million in 2021, the tradeoff here is straightforward: In exchange for the rights to use his music, the family would have some level of creative control in its production. If Never Too Much leads to a boost in streams or newer fans purchasing music, that’s just more cash flow. So it bears the question, what kind of documentary do viewers want to see; one that is considered “branded content” with Luther’s hit records and concert footage interspersed; or one with very little music but told with a more holistic perspective? It’s an unfair circumstance made more aggravating by Luther’s caginess about his private romantic life. But that doesn’t mean that his silence wasn’t, itself, a kind of queering that, rather perceptively, was detangled from just sexual attraction.
Queerness goes beyond sexuality, it’s a mishmash of political and ideological modalities. The seminal work of queer theorist Eve Sedgwick, Tendencies, uncovers what queerness represents. She chronicles the word “queer” from its Indo-European meaning, across, to its Latin meaning torquere, “to twist;” but she finds that queerness is an entanglement of “loose ends where representation, identity, gender, sexuality and the body can’t be made to line up neatly together.” Citing Sedgwick in his work Queer Figurations in the Media: Critical Reflections on the Michael Jackson Sex Scandal, John Nguyet Erni defines queer sexuality as “a practice of discursive excess that twists normal notions of gender and sexuality.” Queer identity, specifically, “has to do with the relation across unfixing and unfixable political and social positionings against ‘heteronormativity.’” The depth of these labels isn’t just about determining if one is gay, straight, bi, or pan, but “the refus[al] to operate in the paradigm of categorization.” Luther’s silence could be read as a method of his queerness within the public eye rather than some kind of internalized hatred over who he is or whom he loves. He won’t tell you his sexuality because he’s resisting categorization either way. This is not a closet, it’s an unsent invite to a romantic space that Luther is in no rush to send out.
On a musical level, it’s impossible to remove queerness from Luther’s equation completely. Luther wasn’t moved by steamy priapism performed by Black male acts like Teddy Pendergrass, Otis Redding, or that Purple Virtuosic Muhfucka from Minnesota. He reminisced on falling in love with Dionne’s tonal control, Dianna’s youthful coos, and Aretha’s range and power in a 1985 issue of Jet Magazine. “I acknowledged what Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Tony Bennett and all the fabulous male singers did,” he told Jet, “but that’s not what aroused my artistic libido.” Luther’s performative softness and effortless sentimentality was a vast departure from the funk-soul froth of his contemporaries. That singularity, in addition to his lyricism, performance and declarative loneliness contributed to the questioning of his sexual preferences.
Both in songwriting and in speech Luther was tactful. His wedding fodder hit, “Here and Now,” lacks pronouns, as does any allusions to past lovers going back to his very first crush on a schoolteacher. As an artist covering his favorite songstresses, Luther notably sang all masculine pronouns in his versions. There’s the coyness of his record “Religion” where he begins, “Little Billy likes his best friend Jack / How in the world could he be like that / Mama and Henry wanna have a chat / Boy you need religion.” The line on Luther was that his music was made for lovemaking. And though positioned as a more normative, romantically monogamous singer, his vagueness opens up his music for lovers of all kinds to get their freak on.
Luther was as meticulous in his presentation as he was in his music. Everything was on purpose. As ‘Never Too Much’ gushes on about his chops as a fashion head, home decorator, and stage director. But perhaps most personal for Luther was the home. He says that if he hadn’t become a singer, he’d have been an interior designer. The opulence of his home is another gesture towards queerness just beneath the surface.
Jason King, Dean of Cultural and Media Studies at USC, argues in his 2000 piece, Any Love: Silence, Theft and Rumor in the Work of Luther Vandross on Luther’s reconstruction of Dionne Warwick’s “House is Not a Home”, that the Lutherian version’s “mix of historical fact and imaginative speculation” deems him as “not merely a musical artist but an archivist.” And in the context of this reconstruction dovetails quite nicely with his actual life. While Luther might call “Any Love” his only truly autobiographical record, “House is Not a Home,” still remains one of his most personal. Both in the symbolic and the actual, “Vandross’s problems”-- his love of food, loneliness, and desire for romance– “tend to be wholly circulating under the aegis of domestic space.” Within a heteronormative context, this presents a swath of contradictions that even the documentary couldn’t shield our eyes and ears from if we just dug one layer deeper. In the foyer of that opulent, highly publicized $8.5 million home that had Oprah gawking during an interview, sits an original painting by David Hockney with an image of two men in a shower which displays, well, two men in a shower. Everything is on purpose.
So what does it mean that the film operates, in this silence? And why exactly do we as a queer community feel so pricked by the omissions? The answer lies in the defiance. It felt meaningful that LaBelle was absent – her team told Page Six that she did sit for an hour-long interview but refused to sign a release because of the production team’s unwillingness to allow her to see the final cut – especially as Luther was LaBelle’s biggest supporter before anyone outside of New York even really knew who she was. He created the first Patti LaBelle fan club after cajoling his friends to join. She was right there singing at his funeral. If the filmmakers were committed to such silence, why bring it up at all?
I suppose, for better or worse, the argument would be that Luther’s bellyaching over his sexuality, his code of silence, was honored here. That might not feel totally fulfilling. However, with the understanding that Never Too Much isn’t a historical document of his life from a neutral perspective, perhaps, looking toward a heteronormative canon to properly tell our stories in ways that feel sufficient is a fool's errand regardless. Knowing how Luther’s own silence functioned as a method to avoid further intrusions in his private life, which in itself, is an act of queering especially as celebrities began to evolve parasocial relationships structures we see today, Luther is tasking us with something different. We as queer viewers and listeners have to seek those complicated heteronormative refusals elsewhere. Those who know Luther, knew Luther in ways that we never will. And fortunately, not even a documentary made in his name will get us any closer.
source https://www.okayplayer.com/never-too-much-luther-vandross
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