Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 24, Issue 1, Pages 71–86 Tina Theory: Notes on Fierceness Madison Moore Yale University Touching Queerness Everything I know about being queer I learned from Tina Turner. More specifically, you might say that Ike and Tina’s cover of “Proud Mary”— the soundtrack of my childhood—taught me, through camp performance, how to be a “Mary.” During the holiday parties at my great-grandmother Lucille “Big Momma” Jones’ house, for as long as I can remember, we kids ended up in the “Children’s Room” so the grown folks could curse, drink whiskey, smoke, laugh, and be as loose as they felt. The “Children’s Room” was not that special. It was usually a bedroom with a computer or television and a few board games, located next to the food which was always laid out buffet style. My favorite moments were when we would lip sync for our lives by doing drag karaoke, where my cousins and I would lock ourselves away and perform great popular music hits for an invisible audience. We pulled songs from Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears’ latest album to older joints that circulated long before our time, songs like “Stop! (In the Name of Love)” by Diana Ross and The Supremes and Patti LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade.” But one song we kept in our catalog and that we seemed to have the most fun with was the Ike and Tina Turner cover of “Proud Mary.” Whenever we did “Mary” I insisted in being Tina. But what was it that drew me—a black gay boy rooted, like Tina, in Saint Louis, which is either the South or the Midwest depending on who you ask—into her style of performance? And why “Proud Mary” in particular? Was it Tina’s way with sequins and fringe that turned me on? Or did it have to do with the way she instinctively knew how to work a stage? Gay men idolize many kinds of divas, as the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum has revealed. 1 But perhaps the one commonality they share among them is the virtuosic styling of the body: the use of sequins, fringe, sunglasses, big shoulder pads, and bedazzled hats—accessories that help transform the diva from a mere mortal into a fantastical image, or what Guy Debord might describe as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” even if the pearls are fake (24). C  2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.