"Inscription"
from Kevin Kopelson's The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky

If Nijinsky were alive today and sane enough to understand my book, he probably wouldn't appreciate it.  I say this not to sustain the strategic self-deprecation of Beethoven's Kiss but because a man who didn't consider himself homosexual might not care to know about his gay reception.  Nor would a dancer be very interested in what may turn out to have been, in essence, an intellectual's attempt to approximate vicarious embodiment.  Fortunately, and unfortunately, Nijinsky isn't alive.  I'd kill to watch him dance, of course, but am relieved to be unable to write for him.  Instead, I inscribe The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky to you who, like me, are haunted by a figure you've never seen in motion and wish to know why.

Although I can't write for -- or to -- Nijinsky, I can, to cite Roland Barthes, "write" him.  Nijinsky is an open text.  Many of his gestures invite multiple readings, the final gestures in particular.  Like Madame de Rochefide, and like Sarrasine itself, the Balzac novelette that gives her the final word, Nijinsky, even in closing, remains pensive -- readable according to the codes of classical ballet and modern dance, yet not contained by them.  It may be that Nijinsky alone, who devised an idiosyncratic system of dance notation few can decipher, knew -- or thought he knew -- what these gestures meant.  But since we can't read his mind and wouldn't limit ourselves to his self-interpretation if we could, it's up to us to trace his gestural trajectory.  It's up to us to transcribe and, if necessary, reconstruct our impressions of Nijinsky -- plastic as well as psychic, ascetic as well as aesthetic, because he shaped the way we've both envisioned and enacted, in both fine art and daily life, gay or, to be postmodern, queer identity.

Why trace the gestural trajectory, as opposed to describing spatial patterns or picturesque attitudes?  Most of us read dance as mimetic -- even dance not meant to be.  The dance in question was meant to be.  Working in the wake of choreographers who conceived of classical ballet in terms of expressive movement (Jean Georges Noverre, the innovator of ballet d'action, and Michel Fokine, its renovator), Nijinsky captivated audiences who, with his help, learned to conceive of modern dance in similar terms.  No wonder our significant impressions, including ones not based on direct observation of Nijinsky dancing, concern unconventional gestures we know, think, or imagine he made.  True, many of Nijinsky's patterns and attitudes were equally unconventional.  It's just that we don't read them as well and can't see how they signify in a particularly gay way.

But why, given that most of his followers weren't gay, describe Nijinsky's queer afterlife?  Nijinsky was the Lord Alfred Douglas of the Ballets Russes.  The dancer, however, had even more lilac-hued notoriety than the dilettante who, having lauded the love that dare not speak its name, landed Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol -- notoriety based upon common knowledge of his relationship with Serge Diaghilev, upon his having been one of the first sensuous young men to dominate a Western stage recently riven by the homosexual/heterosexual division we're still contending with, and upon his mastery of leading roles and body languages that had little to do with conventional masculinity.  Notoriety, moreover, that few of the gay dancers who've worked in Nijinsky's wake, including Rudolf Nureyev and Michael Jackson, have matched.

And what does it mean to say that Nijinsky, like Wilde, haunts gay identity or that he's had a queer afterlife?  It doesn't mean he originated us, in the way that simple-minded psychoanalysts trace adult male homosexuality to aberrant oedipal scenes or lesbianism to isolated instances of childhood sexual abuse.  It does mean that his gestural trajectory is a series of events in relation to which one should cultivate a complicated sense of nostalgia, but that one should hesitate to decontextualize.  If I seem to decontextualize them here, it may be that one of us, against his better judgment, is still too invested in creation myths.  However, it may be that I alone can't think of a more (or less) original way to resist the erasure of all such gay events, whether at the instance of postmodern friends who have sufficient reason, if insufficient desire, to learn something about pre-queer history, or at the instance of homophobic enemies who, to throw shade where shade is due, can't have read this far, if at all.

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