In 1996, Sotheby's in New York held a four-day auction of many of the possessions Jackie Onassis purchased during her lifetime. This paper is an ethnography of a loose social circle of gay men, some of whom attended the pre-auction display of these objects and who regularly hold their own informal Jackie ‘O’ celebrations. It looks at what their worshipping of a female figure, Jackie ‘O’, means and how a distinctive cultural capital is espoused by gay men which differentiates them from other Jackie collectors. To this end, the paper also focuses on ‘vocabularies of appreciation’ (Armstrong, 2001), or kitsch consumption among this loose social circle and, in this process, categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are performed (see Bourdieu, 1984; Miller, 1987; Pierce, 1994).
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