Sontag’s late lesbianism: sexuality, photography, celebrity

Abstract

This essay is concerned with two public figures whose intimate relationship complicates their established independent celebrity – on the one hand, Susan Sontag, an intellectual star whose authorial persona kept in play the open secret of her bisexuality; and, on the other, Annie Leibovitz, a photographer whose reputation derives from her capacity to capture the celebrity of others. As many specialist and non-specialist commentators note, Sontag always operated with a keen eye to the forms of celebrity sustained across the expanded literary marketplace and the middlebrow print-media of the 1960s–1980s. Across her career the celebrity-effect Sontag cultivated drew on the modernist ideal of a literary and cultural original, hence the significance she placed on the holograph documentation deposited at UCLA that now comprises the Sontag Papers, an extensive collection of manuscripts, journals, lecture notes and correspondence. But from the late 1980s onwards, Sontag’s celebrity avatar was increasingly drawn into the image-driven circuits associated with Leibovitz’s rising fame as the premiere photographer of contemporary celebrity. Occurring primarily at the level of image, Sontag’s photographic entanglement with Leibovitz reveals how lesbian celebrity, even in its most reflexive iterations, derives its charge from the volatile relations between privacy and publicity that continue to manifest in the vicinity of homosexuality.

Keywords:

• Susan Sontag
• Annie Leibovitz
• celebrity
• lesbianism
• photography

Notes

^1. Considering Miller’s critique of Sontag’s authorial style, Leland Poague points out that her ambivalence with regard to camp may be less directed at gay sex than at sex period, which she sometimes depicts as brutal, not least in her private journals. I am grateful for this observation and many others provided in the context of peer review.

^2. For a discussion of the persistence of theories of the photographic trace despite critical acknowledgment that photographs lie, see Geimer 2007.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lee Wallace

Lee Wallace is an associate professor in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (2003) and Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments (2009). She currently holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and is working on archives of queer domesticity. She has recently published on gay mood and Tom Ford’s A Single Man.