i am humbly asking you to explain that orville peck tag. im so intrigued
For anyone who needs context, I said that being an Orville Peck fan has made me immune to “kink at pride discourse.” I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of what kink at pride constitutes. It seems to mean different things to different people. What I am specifically talking about here is the simple existence of things associated with kink (such as harnessses) at pride events.
Orville Peck has a new mask these days. It’s molded to his face, a perfect fit. It emphasizes his eyes and the shape of his nose.
But before this mask, he wore another style: those masks were soft, flexible leather. They did more to obscure the shape of his face. He made them himself. Which makes sense. He’s said before that his mother was a seamstress, among other things, and that he spent two years studying masks and theory associated with them.
"I studied the Jacques Lecoq mask as a performance and, you know, especially in something called the neutral mask which is something that a lot of actors study with and things like that. And, it basically just works off of the idea that sometimes, putting a mask on reveals a lot more than it conceals. I mean, I would actually encourage people to look into it and research it. It's an extremely fascinating art form. It's actually very telling of who people really are."
Jaques Lecoq was a French acting and movement coach. He had a lot of unique techniques, but the one Orville focused on was his work with masks. From his Wikipedia page:
“His training involved an emphasis on masks, starting with the neutral mask. This neutral mask is symmetrical, the brows are soft, and the mouth is made to look ready to perform any action. Lecoq believed that this mask allowed his students to be open when performing and to fully let the world affect their bodies. This is because the mask is made to seem as if it has no past and no previous knowledge of how the world works. This is supposed to allow students to live in a state of unknowing in their performance. The aim was that the neutral mask can aid an awareness of physical mannerisms as they get greatly emphasized to an audience whilst wearing the mask.”
He has also talked openly about what masks mean to him.
“I love masks. I come from a culture where masks are really prevalent—used in ritual and performance. I think that masks enhance a personality and reveal things about a person you would never know otherwise. People get hung up on mine because they think I'm trying to fabricate a mystery or hide, but it's not about any of those things.”
“I don’t think of myself as anonymous at all. It’s what I needed to do to make the kind of art that I wanted to make. This is just an expression of who I am deep in my heart. And it allows me to be completely exposed and sincere. I guess that’s kind of the irony of what I do.”
He has compared his masks to Dolly Parton’s wigs, Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black” persona, and Porter Wagoner’s Nudie Suits.
"I grew up loving country and western stars like Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard—people that built a whole legend about themselves, and it wasn't just about music. It was sincerity, but it was also storytelling and performance. So that's what I wanted to do.”
He also makes it clear that the masks are a type of drag.
But in spite of his openness about the masks and their meaning, a lot of early reviews begged to differ.
Not EVERY review called his mask a bondage mask. But a lot did. Often right after reminding the reader that Orville Peck is gay.
Reading those early reviews is one of the things that made it click for me that everything queer people do will be sexualized. And not just sexualized, placed under the label of kink.
Orville Peck doesn’t get explicit, but he has also never shied away from expressing his sexuality, or sexuality in general. He talks openly about being gay. The music video for his first single, “Dead of Night,” was filmed in the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada. In “Blush,” a song on his new album, Bronco, he says, “I don’t miss you that much, but, baby, watching you blush, some of us we just gotta ride. Some of us, we gotta saddle up and ride.”
If the mask was meant to be sexual, I think we would know. But he is a queer artist who uses his mask as a display of identity and of vulnerability. That kind of thing is pretty much always going to get sexualized. No pride celebration, no matter how tame, how vanilla, ever stood a chance.