Review by Liz Dexter
While I come at this topic through the lens of my own experience, I share this journey because I believe anyone can learn and benefit from the lessons that flamboyance has to teach us. In pausing to consider the role that it plays in our lives, there is room for us all to see ourselves, reflected back in its flaming light.
Jack Parlett drew critical acclaim for his first book, Fire Island: A Queer History, and here he combines personal memoir with social history to explore the word, the concept and the lived existence of flamboyance.
Parlett starts the book by talking about how he is trying to get better at making an entrance, “lighting up a room with sheer force of presence,” and that that is the essence of flamboyance (which does prove quite hard to pin down to a definition later on). He runs us through some basics: flamboyance can embrace a child-like idea of doing whatever you want; but is not always something to aspire to; it’s used as a heavy-handed code to hint at a man’s homosexuality and is therefore a word that can discomfort queer people and boys and men in general. His own experiences growing up, seeing Will Young on Pop Idol and other queer people being out and proud while he remained closeted left him with a yearning towards, but fear of, flamboyance, and when he came out at 21, he started a journey “trying to find [his] way back to flamboyance” – “less tentative and self-correcting”.
The main body of the book takes us through several sections on The Word (from church architecture through flamingos to flowers), Lighting Up: Creativity and Charisma (decorating, styling, etc.), Flaming: Performance and Protest (performing, walking, resisting, reclaiming and remembering), and finally Burning, which covers Passion and Ecstasy (loving, torching, losing, art, and “a flare”) with a playlist at the end. The book is very wide-ranging, moving from lawn flamingos to Dolly Parton, Donald Trump to alcohol. It treats attitudes to flamboyant church architecture and flamenco, a cultural force being discovered and then devalued through fear of its power, but also the power of flamboyance to draw upon rage and ecstasy as well as kitsch and fun.
There are lots of oppositions and tensions throughout: an amazing coat Parlett worries about wearing or the protection of very masculine pursuits (football, hip hop) affording straight men the option to be flamboyant but not seen as gay, or the reclamation of the word by gender fluid singer and song writer Dorian Electra. In another reclaiming, flamboyance is often used in protest, whether at Prides all over the world or at the 1970s “zaps” performed by American LGBTQIA activist groups. And yes, Trump is in there, his finger-wagging, pursed-mouthed performances, walking out to campy Village People anthems while claiming hypermasculinity having a flamboyance of its own. Returning to those tensions, the chapter about torch singers explores the sad side of the topic, with critic Pauline Kael coining the term “flamboyant downer” when discussing the film The Lady Sings the Blues.
Art is present throughout the book, with the conclusion that
Flamboyance is the beginning of art, and I think the reverse is also true. Art is the beginning of flamboyance, a blueprint for a way of being in the world, where we do not suppress our vibrancy, out of fear or shame, but let it show.
By then, this book has taken us in huge spirals through popular culture, history older and more recent, and enough of the author’s own life to tie him closely into the book but not so much that it becomes wearing. It’s thought-provoking, provocative where it needs to be (cf. Trump) and engaging. The notes are narrative, so you need to know what you want to check at the back but then get a comprehensive bibliographical reference, and there’s an index.
Liz Dexter is probably the least flamboyant person in the world, but it wouldn’t do for everyone to be like that. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Jack Parlett, Flamboyance: The Art of Burning Brightly (Granta, 2026). 978-1803511931, 304 pp., hardback.
