The Gentrification of the Mind

by Sarah Schulman

  Some of them are good writers, and I'm thankful for that. But the larger cultural point is that the homogeneity of preparation, combined with the lack of opportunity for those not institutionally produced, results in an American theater profoundly complicit with and a tool of the dominant apparatus—which is the opposite of what should be if it is to provide an alternative to corporate thinking.

  I remember kind of realizing this trend somewhere about five years into curating the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, which Jim and I founded in 1987, the same year that ACT UP began. At first we showed artists who were experimental. That is to say, they experimented. “Experimental” meant that each artist singularly tried out their own eccentric idea, their own imaginative way, and then they looked at each other's discoveries. They learned how to be artists by making art, talking about art, looking at art, being with artists. Whether or not one went to graduate school was irrelevant (and still is) to whether or not one was really an artist. But at some point around the height of AIDS/gentrification this shifted. Those true experimenters who needed to earn a living in the rapidly shifting gentrification economy were channeled by inflation into teaching jobs. The increasing number of MFA programs became the only way that artists could earn a living beyond waitressing or copyediting at night at law firms. MFA programs became workfare for writers, as rents skyrocketed, as arts funding—already so elite as to be culturally damaging—was practically eliminated. It was like the role of the artist in society had devolved from WPA to NEA to MFA. Their students started producing inside a now established genre called “experimental.” It wasn't actually any longer experimental, but it was a fixed set of derivative paradigms, invented by their teachers— many of whom did not have MFAs.

  The same thing happened in theater. Experimental discoverers like Anne Bogart, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group started to spawn. Economics drove artists into the academy and schools began producing students working in motifs invented by their teachers. Paula Vogel, formerly at Brown, now running playwrighting at Yale School of Drama, was one such influential teacher. Her dreamlike, sometimes highly stylized humor intercut with heartbreaking emotional truths, entering in and out of “reality” and imagined universes, became a genre of theater. While some of her students are among my favorite playwrights, others replicate or enhance her aesthetic of whimsy without the hard-core need at the heart of her work. After all, the nature of that first wave of mandatory MFA programs is that some students are far more protected than their teachers were, and can embrace the aesthetic ideas without the cultural conflict evidenced, for example, in Vogel's most exciting plays. It's a variation on the theme of hardscrabble artists becoming the tutors of the bourgeoisie. I remember filmmaker Leslie Thornton talking about the issue of teaching students who had more money for their films than their professors did, what that felt like. Or poet Joan Larkin describing teaching at an elite college as, “Sit on my lap and write your novel my darling.” Donald Margulies captured this irony in his play Collected Stories, in which a hardworking woman writer (slightly resembling Grace Paley) is forced to teach the children of the ruling class in order to earn a living. And not being of them, she misassesses them and their ruthlessness—treating them like young artists and not like the elites for whom she is actually a tutor instead of a mentor.

  Of course now that the noose has tightened even further, civilian artists are systematically excluded from teaching, as having an MFA has become mandatory for hiring. Being a product of MFA acculturation is now more important in determining who will influence students than what that person has achieved artistically. So, the frame of information and impulse becomes even more narrow and irrelevant and its product even more banal.

  The same thing happened in fiction, although it took a bit longer. Innovative teachers like Carole Maso, also at Brown, who had accrued an eclectic personal aesthetic, started producing students who were so entranced by the charisma of her work that I could read something and know that that person studied with Carole Maso at Brown. But that's the happy version. The yuppier, more boring teachers reproduced ruling-class pabulum among their students. Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs. The rest of the heap—the programs that accept most of the people who apply—are often just money machines ripping off people who are not writers and will never be writers while paying starvation wages to the real writers teaching to survive. It's a Ponzi scheme. The kind of thing that sent Bernie Madoff to jail. I wonder how many graduates of MFA programs actually ever publish a book or have a real play production? My guess would be less than 5 percent.

  I admit, I did think about getting an MFA once I learned what it was. I had never actually heard of one until I already had two books published, but as the art world around me started to gentrify I realized that an MFA was a necessary socialization if you wanted connections. It was like joining a gang—you had to be a Blood or a Crip or no one would have your back. So, I registered at the City College of New York, and—not even realizing that they offered an MA, not an MFA—I set off for my first day of class. When I got there, the teacher was Grace Paley. A great writer who did not have an MFA, but rather learned to write in her kitchen until she was read by an editor, who happened to live in the same building and was actually interested in literature instead of who knew who. The year this story takes place, Grace was working three jobs. For that first day of class, she had us go around and read examples of our work out loud. I read a scene from my novel-in-progress After Delores, in which the Lesbian narrator meets a little go-go dancer named Punkette, who takes her back to her tenement apartment and tells her about the woman she loves. I finished reading and it was time for the other students to offer their comments. It didn't take long for it to become very clear that the students thought the narrator was a man.

  Oh no, I thought. This is going to be two years of hell.

  After class, Grace looked at me.

  “Come to my office,” she said in that unreconstituted New York accent. “Look,” she told me once the door was closed. “You're really a writer. You're really doing it. You don't need this class. Go home.”

  So I left and never went back. And she saved me.

  But like many of my contemporaries I ended up teaching in an MFA program for fourteen years, and now I teach creative writing to undergraduates in the City University of New York. I got through the system on something that no longer exists called “professional equivalence,” because I had already published eight books at the time of my CUNY appointment in 1999. Maybe nine out of my entire lifetime of writing students are real writers, and I would have helped them anyway. Most of my students have had some kind of personal growth experience that has benefited them as human beings through the work and conversations, but that is more about a kind of therapy and not at all about the process of becoming an artist.

  These developments gentrify cultural production, homogenize what kinds of artists and artwork win approval, and further alienate the rest of the population from having a real shot. What counterindicates professionalization programs from real art-making are some key differences.

  • One is the homogenization of influences. Students in an MFA program often are exposed to the same ideas and artworks as their classmates. They don't stumble through the world accruing eclectic influences, based on their own aesthetic interests, impulses, and chance. They lose the opportunity to fight to be influenced, to check out weird things and trail after unusual people. This creates homogeneity.

  • Second, the process of going to school, the admission selection and the high cost, is itself an enormous filter, reducing who will ultimately have the access an MFA provides. This is further homogenizing the field. Graduate programs are filtered communities, the world is not.

  • Third—and the most obnoxious—some MFA students and recent grads become focused on a concept of mainstream success that is predicated on th
e repetition of what is already known. Before they even achieve anything, many are already involved in the lifestyle of being mean to people who don't have their pedigree and solicitous to those who do. There is an overemphasis on positioning one's self and a grotesque lack of interest in real discussion about art and art-making, a lack of desire to grapple with something that matters, and to face one's self realistically in an honest representation of the real world, lived and imagined. I am consistently surprised at the almost complete lack of discussion about the ideology and values of a play. Critics don't bring it up and artists rarely discuss it. What does each specific play stand for? What is it rendering generic? What is it presenting as neutral? What is it saying about the consequences of experience? The prevailing ideology of the American theater is that the coming of age of the white male is the central and most important story in the culture. Most theaters are rigidly and dogmatically fixed in this idea. And when plays by “others” are allowed to be seen, the extent to which they are praised and rewarded often depends on the extent to which they reflect white males' desire to be seen in a particular light. While never made explicit, as MFA programs prime writers for reward, the message of what kinds of content and points of view are acceptable is clearly articulated. There is an unartful reliance on the cues of the exterior world, an engagement with values that place familiarity over expansion of consciousness.

  • Finally, the payoff of getting an MFA, the reward for paying that bribe in a sense, is that if the person was obedient enough, they can be helped for the rest of their career by their teachers and mentors behind the scenes. The fact of having graduated from a program creates the possibility of a kind of professional opportunity that a civilian cannot access because the institution becomes invested in their graduates doing well. It gives graduates a false sense of pride because they had certain advantages, and makes them treat people like themselves as though their work matters simply because they went to a specific school.

  Despite the fact that these programs are homogenizing and corrupting and bad for the culture, I feel that when I am advising working-class or poor students with talent, I have to insist that they go to them. There is simply no other way of getting into the system. As damaging as these programs are when they codify or elevate ruling-class perspectives and middlebrow practitioners, they become the only hope for outsiders to have a chance to be let in. It's a conundrum. Hopefully a talented person can emerge from these programs without a highly distorted sense of their own importance, and if they come originally from the margins this is more likely. But as far as I can see, MFA programs have done nothing to break down the barrier that full-character plays with authorial universes (not performance art, vaudeville, or stand-up) and authentic lesbian protagonists face in the theatrical marketplace. So although they do help certain minority voices who have had the support and sophistication to access and survive the system, overall they reinforce the dominant cultural voice, the clubbiness and repetition and most importantly, the group mentality that is, itself, counterindicated for art making.

  Because of the severe censorship facing lesbian representation in the United States, and the added obstruction MFA programs have laid on lesbian writers who have both gravitas and lesbian protagonists, I decided to try, in my own way, to take a small action to counter the exclusions of the MFA process. In June 2008 I started a project I call “The Satellite Academy.” This is composed of two monthly writing workshops I run out of my apartment for a small number of talented women writers (and one gay man) who are not enrolled in any academic program. In one class, most of the students are over forty and many are writing about the AIDS era. In the other most of my students are younger, queer in some way, the group is interracial, and all of my students enact some kind of bohemian or oppositional value in the way they live their lives. They are not institutional products. I charge forty dollars a class. I find that this does not take up much of my time—two days and evenings per month—and that I love my students. I adore them. I believe in them. I see in them the kinds of artists that I came up with. In my class they don't have to defend queerness, aesthetic invention, or racial or cultural points of view. And they don't have to take out loans. Once the burden of defending is reduced we can concentrate on craft. They get the same experience as the dominant culture writer in an MFA program: their lives are assumed to be important. And that's what we do. There is no chit-chat, no nurturing, no consciousness raising or eating. They come on time, and I take out my little blackboard and we go through each person's work with an eye towards craft alone. Much of the positioning, competing, explaining, paying tuition/loans, and defending that they would have to do in MFA programs is removed. We're artists together, looking at each other's work, and I am the senior one sharing what I know. In this way, I have recreated my lost world for myself, and it gives me hope that bohemian, smart angry girls with something new to say and a desire to say it are never in short supply. They're just being ignored by the gentrification of creation. But believe me, that's only temporary. My students will be heard—but only in a postgentrification world.

  My dream is that other queer and nondominant culture writers, regardless of what they have to do for a living, will join the Satellite Academy and start their own groups. I remember in the seventies there used to be these radical alternative schools, like The University of the Streets, Brecht Forum, New York Jazz Coalition, and other rogue places of learning where people could take classes for minimal cost with teachers who really knew. If there were twenty low-cost classes a month in New York City for radical/queer/women writers, that would be enough of a critical mass to counteract the censorious impact of MFA programs. One hundred radical students in low-income writing classes in New York City could actually have an impact on our literature. And, it can help those of us who are good teachers and need to work for a living, to realize that while we need jobs to survive, we don't always need institutions in order to teach. We can just do it. Like we always did, before gentrification made us forget who we were.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Gentrification of Gay Politics

  Election Day, November 2008. It's a new dawn for America. Barack Obama has triumphed at the polls and every constituency of people without rights in this country is united in the hope and determination that our system can work for them. Except one. While most of America is literally cheering, literally dancing in the streets, tears streaming down their faces, thirty-six thousand gay people who got married in California are devastated. On the same date that Obama was elected, four state ballot measures passed banning gay marriage, and two of those states—California and Florida—went for Obama. Arkansas, the political home of Bill Clinton, voted in a ballot measure banning gays and lesbians from being foster parents or adopting children. Over the next few days, the details begin to emerge. Barack Obama agreed with Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and George Bush as they all united in their opposition to gay marriage. Obama even went so far as to say that, “God ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman.” This was the recorded message that Christian activists played over their telephones endlessly to California voters.

  Truly spontaneous demonstrations explode in LA and San Francisco. They were not organized by the marriage leaders, who were immediately under scrutiny, but instead were fueled by young people who had believed the phony hype that gays and lesbians had equality. They were shocked at this defeat, revealing how truly effective the placating propaganda had been. It is quickly understood that 70 percent of Black voters in California voted against gay marriage. Racist grumblings start to emerge from white gays who overlook that Blacks are only 6 percent of the state's population. It becomes clear that the pro-gay marriage campaign did almost no appropriate outreach to Asian, Black, and Latino voters, and that Black and Latino and Asian gays and lesbians were not at the forefront of the campaign. Most importantly, it becomes clear that it was white voters who killed gay marriage in California, despite a great deal of white gay rage focused on
Blacks and Latinos. Analysis of the marriage campaigners' organizing materials becomes even more acute. Apparently, few of the expensive television spots encouraging pro-gay voters to vote “No On Proposition 8” featured actual gay people talking about their own rights. Most of the ads featured parents of gays, friends of gays, young straight people proclaiming how proud they were to get married in a state where “everyone” has marriage rights. But gay people themselves were almost invisible in their own forty million dollar campaign.

  While some gay communities are angry, frightened, alienated, and hurt by these political events, straight progressives are barely aware that any of this has happened. They warn us not to “ruin” the Obama moment, and inform us that “the economy is more important.” It starts to be strangely clear after only a few weeks of Obama-elect that we have returned to a state of mind not seen for thirty years, in which straight people—Black and white and Latino, progressive and reactionary—are all suddenly convinced that gays and lesbians are white, bourgeois, privileged, and therefore fine to be sacrificed for the “greater good.” Thirty years of work by gay people of color in all communities is suddenly undone by political expediency. Six months later, on the very day that Obama appoints the first Puerto Rican Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, the California Supreme Court upholds Proposition 8 by a vote of six to one. For the second time, a major victory for racial equality corresponds to a significant defeat for full gay personhood. One hundred demonstrations are organized around the country, but most are rather dutiful and benign.

  How did this happen? How did the gay liberation movement, which Black Panther Party Chairman Huey P. Newton once said “may be the most revolutionary”…a movement whose slogans were “Smash the family, smash the state” and “An army of lovers cannot fail”…a group relationship that envisioned total revolution of gender and sex roles, social accountability, and community-based responsibility…a community that faced the AIDS crisis with unity and endless imagination…how did this radical, living, creative force get excluded from Obama's freedom vision and deteriorate into a group of racist, closeted, top-down privatized couples willing to sacrifice their entire legacy to get married? And fail?