The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  In 1997, I was assigned by the New York Times Arts and Leisure section to do a piece on the new theater scene springing up below Houston, centered on Ludlow Street. For thirty days and nights I went to see plays and performances and slowly tried to piece together what this new wave's aesthetic and social concerns seemed to be. At that point, I did not fully understand the new phenomenon of replacement artists from professionalization programs, and was kind of shocked to hear the sorts of things the new theater artists were saying and doing. When I realized, and articulated in the article some of the values this new movement stood for, the piece was killed. But what I only came to understand years later when preparing this volume, is that the new artists had no awareness at all of the existence of the dead people who had lived and worked—just a few years before—on the very streets where they were now working and paying high rents.

  “Theater is the new rock and roll for a new audience,” Ludlow Street's undisputed impresario, Aaron Beall, told me in 1997. “People who just got out of college want a theater that is fast and funny at the pace at which they live their lives.” An energetic optimist, he pioneered the Ludlow Street scene by opening Theater Nada in a basement in 1988. Then he started up House of Candles around the corner on Stanton, the Piano Store down the block, and the Pink Pony Café Theater across the street. The year he and I sat down to talk, he inaugurated the first annual Fringe Festival, which has since gone on to become a huge phenomenon, whether offering out-of-town companies their “New York debut” or serving as a platform for fundraising for the Broadway musical Urinetown.

  David Cote, who is now a theater critic for Time Out New York, and television's On Stage, at that time edited OFF, a monthly newspaper devoted to alternative theater. “The majority of young directors, downtown, are right out of school,” he said in 1997. “Anne Bogart in particular has a lot of influence because she's taught at Columbia and NYU.”

  In this new scene, the formal concerns of the erased generation were no longer relevant. Some young artists vehemently insisted to me that they were not interested in theatrical innovation. “Formal invention has reached a level of exhaustion,” said Trav SD, artistic director of Mountebanks Theater. According to Beall, more important than innovation was “the desire to participate in the theatrical experience. It's fun, deep in a pop sensibility of monsters and robots, Nintendo and Gameboy.” And in fact, consistent theatergoing revealed little new formal territory—either, as Beall noted, using ideas from television, consumer goods, and marketing, or very frequent quoting of the avant-garde masters, in a way that rendered their discoveries status quo. Integrated video monitors and the use of handheld mikes in the style of the Wooster Group, choreographed musical sequences influenced by Bogart, and especially pithy one-liners delivered in Richard Foreman's performance style abounded. “Everyone,” said Beall, “is derivative of him rather than creating their own theatrical environment, which he did for so long.”

  While I did hear some pro- and anti-Mayor Giuliani routines at various stand-up open mikes, generally younger companies told me that they hesitated to be politically engaged.

  “Issues are for television,” said Jocelyn Cramer of the Ground Floor Theater Company in residence at the Clemente Soto Velez Center on Rivington. “We don't want to do disease-of-the-week.”

  “People come to the theater to be entertained,” added her colleague Matt England. “If you make being political a priority, you might find that people won't come back.”

  “Many artists today don't have to suffer like they did in the fifties,” said Montebanks' Robert Pinnock. “They have enough intelligence to avoid it.”

  Despite an unwillingness to take on social issues, real estate was a major factor in the lives of these artists. Beall's annual rent payments for his spaces came to one hundred thousand dollars. But company members often took responsibility to keep prices low. At Collective Unconscious, a black box theater on Ludlow, the monthly rent of $2,100 was paid out of the members' pockets, filled by full-time jobs at such serious places as CNN.

  There were still two Latino theaters in the neighborhood, which was still heavily Dominican by the end of the 1990s. The Milagro was a naturalistic political theater with a focus on neighborhood life, such as Ed Vega's drama Spanish Roulette, about a Puerto Rican poet living on the Lower Eastside, performed in Spanish and English. Company member Carlos Espina told me that the newly arrived white residents received a higher level of city services than their displaced Latino predecessors including “picked up trash, fixed sidewalks, and better streetlights.”

  “It's ironically sad,” said company member Martha Garcia. “We would be happier if there was more affinity with the new theater groups coming in.”

  Over and over it struck me how straight the late nineties scene was compared to the eighties. There was a kind of Deadwood feeling, a distinct absence of young queer energy. After all, an entire generation of us had died, while straights had continued to live. What was happening with the new generation of queers seemed to be in the clubs, solo performers behind mikes. Justin Bond was the reigning queen of the East Village late nightclub scene in his persona of Kiki, an ageing cabaret singer who squandered her fortune on Canadian Club Whiskey, touring the country with her broken down accompanist Herb. Bond's Marianne Faithfullesque persona was packing the Flamingo East on Sunday nights. Also evolving at that time was the early stage of the drag king scene, which also happened on Sunday nights, at Club Casanova at Velvet on Avenue A where a young, shy, Haitian woman, Mildred Gerestant, emerged as Dred, the drag king version of a macho blaxploitation antihero. But there was no interaction between the straight theater companies below Houston and the late-night queer cabarets above. They simply coexisted in ignorance, only one knowing clearly what it had and what it had lost.

  In this scramble period, those who were to live had to restart living. And for artists of the AIDS generation, that meant finding a way to represent their own disappeared context, without being locked in nostalgia. My collaborator of twenty-six years, Jim Hubbard, was one of the artists who took on this burden and responsibility, artistically.

  On November 10, 1977, at the sixty-fourth birthday party of gay experimental filmmaker James Broughton, Jim met his lover Roger Jacoby, who died of AIDS in 1985. Jim also got blown that night by Curt McDowell (maker of the great gay classic Loads, who also died of AIDS) and he met Roger's other lover, Ondine, the Warhol superstar of Chelsea Girls. So, it was a big moment in his life, and in the future of gay experimental cinema. Roger was a transitional figure in the history of gay experimental film, bridging from makers who preceded gay liberation, like Kenneth Anger, Broughton, Warhol, George Kuchar, Gregory Markopoulous, and others, to younger makers like Jim and Jerry Tartaglia, whose entire worldview was forged by gay liberation. Roger's work, to a large extent, satirized and criticized heterosexuality, but did not at first deal openly with homosexuality. He was influenced by Ondine and his work was highly operatic, owing a great deal to Maria Callas.

  Roger was a master of a procedure known as “hand processing”—in which filmmakers develop their own 16 mm and Super-8 film, using chemical balances to control color and contrast in the final product. With the advent of digital, video, and computer graphics, this technique has disappeared along with Super-8 film itself.

  “He taught me,” Jim says, “what it meant to be a filmmaker, to devote one's life to a medium and to self-expression. In retrospect, I don't know how good a model it was. It was a life filled with uncertainty and lack of security, but it was a model that produced great work, expressive of itself in every frame, without decorative elements, as Roger would say. That is, without unnecessary moments.”

  Four years after Roger's death, Jim made his most important experimental film, Elegy in the Streets, completed in 1989. It was his attempt to articulate a notion that every person who came to an ACT UP demonstration did so for a personal reason. Either they were HIV-positive and fighting for their lives, or they had someone close to th
em—a friend, a lover, a brother—who had died. “Roger was that person for me. He was the first person I was really close to who died.

  “I'm not sure when I decided to make a film about AIDS,” Jim told me. “But certainly by August 1984 when Roger was diagnosed, I already had. I first started filming a guy named Billy, a PWA I met around the time of Roger's diagnosis. He did not like me hanging around with my camera and the filming did not go well. He was a gardener and I filmed his garden.” When Roger died, Jim inherited his outtakes. At the time of Roger's death, Jim felt that Roger's work was very different from his own. He could instantly tell which footage Roger had shot and which he had shot himself. But after all those years, it started to feel blended. And he decided to use Roger's footage in his own work.

  Jim was the first film artist to systematically chronicle gay and lesbian street rebellions, including demonstrations against the making of the movie Cruising and protests following a police raid on a Black gay bar called Blues. Often, he'd be the only person on site with a camera. So, it was inevitable that when AIDS activism happened, it would come into his work as it came onto the scene he was already documenting. ACT UP demonstrations included in Elegy in the Streets are the Second Wall Street Action (March 1988), Gay Pride (1987 and 1988), Target City Hall (March 1989), another Wall Street demo, Seize Control of the FDA (October 1988), the Shea Stadium Action (May 1988).

  Sometime in 1988, he started editing. There were no appropriate structures available from the formulas of narrative film-making, so he looked to literature, specifically poetry, and started reading a lot of pastoral elegies—a form first developed in the second and third century—especially Milton's “Lycidas.” Elegy in the Streets translates the elements of classical elegy to film. It is silent, forcing the viewer to really look at what there is to see, and not rely on music to convey the emotion. Among the elements he took from the pastoral elegy were the catalog of flowers (symbols of beauty and the brevity of life). The lilacs are a reference to Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” There is a pan of the vine growing on a tenement where Billy had his garden. Certainly this is an evocation of life abiding in the cruelest of environments. There is a procession of mourners, a visit to the underworld (shot by Roger Jacoby) which features negative footage of the gay street icon Rollerina (Charles Stanley) as the archangel mourning or praying over the body, as in Milton's “Look homeward angel now.” And finally the film ends with ACT UP's action at Shea Stadium and “those wonderful kids who are a symbol of hope and renewal.” Again, Milton's “tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.”

  Elegy in the Streets is a film about memory, and the images of Roger usually occur when triggered by an image in a demonstration: when someone looks like him, or the eyes in the Reagan poster evoke Roger's eyes in footage shown in negative. A couple of times he comes out of nowhere, like a memory that suddenly hits you for no reason. Jim tries to present Roger's range of interests—piano playing and filming. But there is no footage of his anger.

  Today Jack Waters, Peter Cramer, and Jim Hubbard are still carrying on the old-school values of building arts communities that are open, intergenerational, and not based on caste. Jim is still in the leadership of the MIX Festival, now in its twenty-fourth year, which continues to show new and emerging artists, including those who were not yet born when MIX started. Current artistic director Stephen Kent Jusick continues the vision that, rather than fostering elite columns of producers of passive entertainment, instead art collectives and institutions can actively create queer artists by presenting queer work, maintaining venues, and staying grassroots. The goal of the organization is to get the work to marginalized people so that they can imagine themselves making art. And history has shown that open door, welcoming, community-based policies produce both high profile and under-the-radar artists. Not only have many well-known successful makers come out of MIX, but the inclusivity has also resulted in the early development of young curators of color like Shari Frilot of Sundance and Rejendra Roy, now film/video curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Both started as grassroots curators at MIX and have grown to be influential leaders with the knowledge and values of inclusion that come only when one is developed in the community.

  Jack and Peter now devote a great deal of their time to Peter's Le Petit Versailles, a squatted community garden, which for the last fifteen years has offered a venue to emerging and senior marginalized artists from the neighborhood and the world. In the summer months there are events almost every night, from films projected onto the side of their building to a wide and wild array of performance. Jack, Peter, and Jim have maintained the old-school value of respecting and welcoming artists, taking them seriously, regardless of their point of view or social position. Today they are, in a sense, living museums of values of the past, but their personal efforts still allow new artists to be heard and seen and to develop. What kind of world the new artists develop into, is sadly, out of our hands.

  • • •

  The avant-garde is in opposition to academia. As soon as something is embraced by academia it is no longer avant-garde. If you do not have a functioning criminal class in the art world then you have academia, and while academia is a reflection of the art world, it is not the art world, it is academia and academia will never be the art world. (Penny Arcade, 1995)

  The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw. (Gertrude Stein, 1926)

  About ten years ago, I invited a friend over for dinner. I won't say his name because I want to protect him. We had been in ACT UP together and now, he too, was a working playwright. I was amazed, probably “dazzled” would be a better word, at the cruelty, lying, mediocrity, and horrific antiart values of the American theater. I, who had lived through many different art forms and art scenes, had never seen anything so vicious and redundant in my life. How could people who understood themselves to be artists be so uninterested in what is true, be so mean, and so committed to the most banal rehashes of the worst of yuppie entertainment? This was especially bewildering to me considering the potential recognition of human frailty inherent in an art form that is performed live in front of other living mortals.

  “It has to do with hierarchy,” he said.“

  What do you mean?”

  “Well, in ACT UP,” he explained “we were all in it together. What was important was that you did your work. In the theater culture, the way it is now, it's the opposite. Everything is based on where you sit on the totem pole. It has nothing to do with how interesting your vision is, how good an artist you are, or even if they like you or not. People are brutally cruel to you if you have less currency, and repulsively solicitous if you have more. That's the only operating principle.”

  He was describing the heart of supremacy ideology, in which people get ignored and disrespected, or attended to and praised based entirely on their social positioning. In a direct mirror of gentrification values, the theater is investing boring corporate and homogenized aesthetics with meaning that they do not hold, simply because dominant culture people are creating it.

  Over the subsequent years I have slowly come to understand that he was not exaggerating. This description, the world he evokes, is accurate. I understand that theater is particularly vulnerable to bad values because of its proximity to movie stars, and the regular interactions between theater artists who can't earn a living and those who make obscene amounts of money that they don't deserve. This brush with money is corrupting, of course, and coupled with the high percentage of theater folks who live on inherited wealth, makes the environment lethal. The other obstacle, I think, is that theater is an elite art form, not a mass art form like book publishing. Not-for-profit subscription theaters that rarely move productions to Broadway really only need to sell a limited number of tickets. So, they don't need to expand the kinds of people they reach and serve. And since there is no checks and balances system, they don't feel accountable to the broad range of human perspectives. But still, the horrible way people are treat
ed in this contemporary theater world has nothing to do with what I learned about being an artist, or the values I picked up over the years about making art. What is the difference between my disappeared world and this current gentrified regime?

  Looking really closely, the most significant factor differentiating the disappeared avant-garde, destroyed by AIDS and gentrification, and the replacement artists, more closely aligned with the social structures necessary to be able to pay contemporary real estate prices, is professionalization. MFA programs. Especially MFA programs as markers of caste and brand. I came of age in the East Village in the 1980s. The freaky, faggy, outrageous, community-based, dangerous, “criminal class” was of course not the only influence, but they were a huge influence. Yes there were trust fund babies slumming, et cetera, but many artists I knew and learned from had an outlaw quality. They had illegal sex, took illegal drugs, hustled literally and figuratively for money, lived in poverty, and said fuck you to dominant cultural values, all of which made it possible for them to discover new art ideas later enjoyed by the world. Many of them died or became marginalized. And they, in part, were replaced by people who were trained in and graduated from expensive institutions. The “Downtown” that I was raised in as a young artist included real innovators, real drag queens, real street dykes, real refugees, real Nuyoricans, really inappropriate risk-taking, sexually free nihilistic utopians. Today, “Downtown” means having an MFA from Brown.