I’ve been gay for a long time, thirty-five years this April, and I have met thousands of gay people around the world from all kinds of backgrounds, living in all kinds of conditions. Something I’ve noticed over and over again is that one of the most significant consequences of what we have endured is the creation of our various national and global subcultures. These subcultures are the highest stake in the gay marriage debate.
Some of us have CHOSEN to avoid the pain by living in subculture in order to minimize contact with the official culture and its people. When we make this choice, we don’t socialize with them that much; we don’t read their bad books; we try not to be subjected to their false ideas about us. Others of us have tried to transform them and failed. We’ve gone head-to-head with the glass ceilings, bad thinking, ignorance, cruelty and, then, if we’re defeated, we are then forced back into subculture simply because they won’t let us into the big world. We have commitment ceremonies and publish with marginal presses.
There is also the third intention: choosing to live in the subculture as a place to prepare to force change. And this is where so many gay people of my generation have lived. Viewing our subcultural commitments as a way of strengthening ourselves for the task ahead of changing the big structures so that we can live inside them, alongside straight people, without being distorted by them. That is the most utopian, most difficult, and yet most inspiring option. So far, it has not been successful.
The desire for gay marriage is, in many ways, a refusal of all of those subcultural positions. For in some ways, gay marriage is a sign of spiritual exhaustion. It is a way to get out of the trenches, the white flag of surrender that can bring the tired soldier to a hot shower and a bowl of gruel.
So now I see gay and straight people getting married and, as a consequence, I look at their relationships. These are supposed to be good relationships that enhance the world—that’s why the world is cheering them on, right? But, I see many relationships that frighten me. One thing I have seen is talented, exceptional people hooking up with simple, more limited people so that the relationship can be built entirely around the centrality of the more gifted partner. This upsets me. I find it disappointing and somewhat monstrous. I also see people who can stay together because the connection is superficial; they fear a depth of understanding. Some of them have been traumatized and truly reaching another person triggers, falsely, fear of violation. I see many relationships that are boring, not fun, repetitive. Is this truly what these people would want given a state of nature? And will they produce follow-the-leader children, who will in turn make the rest of us miserable?
So little is right about how we live today, and relationships are the microcosm of the society. Stalin noticed that “the family is the building block of Socialism,” and he was right. Relationships keep the social order, but what about when the social order sucks? When it is social imperative, convenience, and shallowness that cement the bond, do we have to say “Mazel Tov”? I hate to open up this can of worms, but do destructive relationships and their consequential impact on those around them deserve a party? George Bush’s marriage reinforced and protected his destroying other people’s lives everyday. Many relationships allow people to stay cruel, dishonest and cause havoc and pain. We’d be better off if these were not rewarded simply for existing.
Conversely, I see breakups that never should have happened. That are wrong, symptoms of mental illness, alcoholic behavior, untreated post-traumatic stress. I have also experienced and witnessed lesbian breakups rooted in the devaluation of one partner from outside the relationship, and the power of suggestion on the other, similarly devalued partner. Once individuals learn that no one cares how their lover is treated and also that no one cares how they themselves behave, they too can act out their fear and anger on the same person being scapegoated by the culture, the person before them. If there was gay marriage, perhaps this would be somewhat reduced. That woman shunning me on the street? If she were my legal wife, she wouldn’t be able to just stop speaking to me one day; she’d have to negotiate something, say a few sentences. The law would mandate it. The law would care, and I think that would be a good thing.
If gay people know that the law cares about how they treat their lover, perhaps they would be slightly kinder. If they felt that their lover was considered to be a human, and not lesser than, perhaps they would be able to negotiate and express instead of just destroy. If gay marriage would make her have to “show cause,” I am for it.
I recently had a dinner party at my house with four friends from San Francisco. Wine collectors. On bottle four, one of them, Alice Hill, said, “Gay marriage is like abortion. Whatever you think of it, you have to have the right.” Okay, I can go along with that. But my enthusiasm ends there. What I really want is for the shunning to end so I can stop thinking about how I have to change myself to make the shunning stop when I know it’s unjustified in the first place. I want to see you on the street and say, “How are you?” and have you smile and let me know. I want my books to be equal to your books. I want my death to be equal to your death. I want my feelings to be equal to your feelings and my place in the family to be equal to yours. And when you’re mad about something, I want it to be for real reasons that can be articulated, and then I want us to sit down and solve them together. If I had these things, I would not need gay marriage.
TO BE REAL
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around will forget even faster.”
—Milan Kundera
Now I want to discuss prime time shunning: the exclusion of lesbians from culture. Not being represented in a media culture puts one at a gross disadvantage. I want to share some experiences and perceptions with how the lack of mainstream, exterior authentic representation, reinforces the dehumanization of gay people within the family structure. I want to especially share with you literally how the exclusion of lesbian content replicates the structures of scapegoating, victimization, false accusations, and shunning. By examining this, you can understand the materiality of this on-going, backstage phenomenon.
If you have no family, and you have no society, often the only thing you have is a vision of a different world. That’s why so many alienated people live in the movies, books, plays, television. Because I am an artist, my relationship to these images is as a consumer and a producer. I sit in my room, and I get to have my say, to grapple with the questions that matter to me, to create new paradigms. It’s my calling. It’s absorbing, and a great freedom is there—the freedom to potentially exist.
But in order to actually exist, the work must leave my room. From this necessity, a new question arises, that of materiality. What good is it to make work that no one else sees? Of course, there are historical swings to these representational questions. At times, women represent 12 percent of all playwrights whose work gets produced in a given season. At other times, women represent 7 percent. You know, it ebbs and ebbs.
I’m working with a wonderful actress, a great lady of the stage. She has asked me to write a play for her and we’ve done the work, made something really special and it’s ready for the world. No takers. She calls me:
“How can this be? How can the play be any good if nobody wants it?”
“Honey,” I say. “Plays don’t get done because they’re good.”
There is still no lesbian play in the American repertoire, and I promise that that is not because all the men are better writers.
Back to the drawing board.
Some years back a young white gay man from a wealthy family, who doesn’t work and who has a prestigious graduate school degree (this describes so many people that saying so implicates no one), showed me a play. I read it and I told him that the women characters were not real. But I added that I was sure that no one would care but me. H
e showed it to the gay male literary manager at a theater and told him he was worried about the female characters.
“You’re a gay man,” the literary manager told him. “Don’t worry about that. It’s not your area of interest.”
A year later the play got produced and there were two very different kinds of responses. A black female critic (there was only one so you know who she is) said that the writing was predictable because the Asian and female characters were condescended to. A white gay male critic (there are so many to choose from, it’s dizzying) said that the play is brilliant.
I ponder this discrepancy.
What does “brilliant” mean?
Is it true that if a man creates characters out of people who have fewer rights than he does, and these characters are not fully human, in a context where real people who are just like those characters cannot get their plays produced, does that mean he is a “predictable” (predictable in his dehumanization of the less powerful) writer or a “brilliant” one? Does white gay male critic #5 care, or even consider, whether or not people unlike himself are fully drawn? And would he know if they were? Is the play “brilliant” because the people in question don’t matter or brilliant because the critic doesn’t know anyone like them well enough to see how distorted their representations are?
I’m of the school of thought that says that a good writer writes complex characters. They have language and a structure that comes organically from the emotions at the core of the piece. They are grappling with something that matters. And the values of the piece are not rooted in maintaining the supremacy of the dominant. That last one is the killer.
After over three decades as a working artist in a variety of forms, it has become clear to me that there is no relationship between quality and reward. Sometimes good work gets rewarded, but not because it is good. That’s just a coincidence.
Let’s face it, people think that the system works if it works for them. If artwork was fairly evaluated on its merit instead of demographic or point of view, an entirely different cast of characters would be reaping rewards. The rewarded get what they get because they’re, for example, white, but they think they’re just better. They confound demographic (accident of birth) and quality. And whenever one person outside the box manages to be an exception, they insist it’s because she’s black. “They gave it to her because she’s black” is something you hear all the time. “They needed a woman.” But the truth is that those guys get it BECAUSE they are white. Not because of the depth and breadth of their Asian and female characters.
And lesbian literature? Oy vey. Now here’s a long story. The battle for lesbian representation in American publishing is more complex than the Battle of Bulge. And more bloody. Occasionally, books pop up on the radar every few decades, even big sellers like the 1950s hit The Price of Salt by “Claire Morgan” (the pseudonymously frightened Patricia Highsmith). Skip a few years to Rubyfruit Jungle, published in 1973. After that, the only overtly lesbian protagonists by lesbian authors to be allowed on mainstream America’s bookshelves were from Britain. Since the British mainstream publishers published Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters in the first place, marketed them like regular people, reviewed them in regular places as though they were full human beings, rewarded their labors, made films out of their books, the U.S. presses decided that they were worthy of republication. But since no lesbian writer with lesbian content could be treated the same way here, none were able to achieve the same level of currency that Winterson and Waters have been able to achieve. So they get re-published here, occupying the American shelf space for quality lesbian fiction because they have already achieved an acclaim that we are not allowed to have. Basically, as Urvashi Vaid has said, in America “lesbian content is the kiss of death.”
My first lesbian characters were Harriet the Spy and Anne Frank. In high school in New York City in 1974, I went to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop and bought and read Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sydney Abbott and Barbara Love. In college in 1977, I read Rubyfruit Jungle, the edition from Daughters Incorporated. The first lesbian reading I ever went to was in 1979 by Joan Larkin, Susan Sherman, and Honor Moore. I was very inspired by the pioneer generation in New York City—the people already on the scene when I came into it—Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Irena Klepfisz. I admired their intellectual prowess and personalized their message, feeling that they wanted me to be a moral person. I still feel this way about them. Many of the decisions I’ve made in my writing and in how I’ve handled my career have been determined by this feeling of having to live up to them. Audre was my teacher at Hunter College; she’s been dead for years. I met Adrienne Rich once for five minutes. Irena and I occasionally meet at demonstrations. Yet, I made them into a lineage or an ancestry and imagined that they had expectations of me. I imagined that they were raising me to practice democratic principles of community-building and to apply them to the literary community, which to me means returning phone calls, responding honestly to people’s work, being available, helping people who have less access, maintaining integrity about lesbian content, always knowing that there are some things that are more important than money. Keeping my promises. With these kinds of ideas, I made them into my ancestors.
Grace Paley, another one of these people I pretend is watching me, says that writers choose their themes when we are very young and stick with them our whole lives. One of my main themes is creating the lesbian life as an organic part of American literature. This has forced me since my first novel was published when I was twenty-five—twenty-six years ago—to constantly look at the reality of what we are living and translate it into an artful representation or, in some of my books, a representational art object.
What are the stakes in this? Why is having authentic lesbian content excluded from mainstream representation reinforcing shunning and oppression in gay people’s daily lives? The key answer is POWER. Truthful lesbian representations teach straight people, through some trickle down theory, to be kinder to gay people. But it’s not just that. With lesbian representations, lesbians can see truthful depictions of themselves and thereby realize that they are human. But it’s not just that either. Far more important is the daily material behavior of the people who create popular culture, people constructing global ideas about kindness and beauty behind the scenes. These influential people determine whose work will be seen, what paradigms will dominate and become normalized, who will be able to earn a living, what kinds of opportunities artists will have to develop. They determine who will feel right and who will feel wrong. Remember, what gets seen has almost no relationship to what is created. What is created is what is expressed; what is seen is what is selected.
Let me give you an example. This story takes place in 2003. I am working on a musical adaptation of my novel, Shimmer. My collaborators are the lyricist Michael Korie, who was the lyricist for the Broadway musical Grey Gardens, and a character in the story of the transformation of my novel People In Trouble into the musical Rent (see my book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, 1998), a composer we will call Notorious P.I.G., and a director/producer we will call Manny Brice. We had been working for years. At the center of the musical is a lesbian romance. Not only is there no authentic lesbian play in the American canon (The Children’s Hour’s tragic homosexual narrative does not count), but also there has NEVER been a real lesbian protagonist in any American musical. So this content is exciting, important, and difficult. Furthermore, the piece is about the McCarthyite mentality and takes place against the backdrop of the blacklist. The issues of scapegoating and exclusion and silencing are at the core of the work itself.
We’ve been having a series of workshops and Manny is heavily dramaturging the piece. I take every one of his notes. Every line of the musical’s book is exactly the way he wants it to be. Every word. We have a final read-through of the script at his apartment. He changes one line. Now we’re ready for a workshop with actors.
Casting the central role of the bi
-sexual white woman married to the black playwright and sleeping with the young lesbian neighbor is crucial. Casting for lesbian roles is a complicated and difficult process. I currently have a number of plays with lesbian protagonists in “development” around the country. This means that the plays are having readings, staged readings, and workshops in a variety of venues that will hopefully result in productions. While laborious and anxiety-provoking, this process has given me the opportunity to hear the same plays be presented by a wide range of actors working in very different circumstances. I’ve heard plays read by regional repertory companies in small cities, by A-level New York stage actresses, by students in various collegiate theater departments, and by neophyte companies. I’ve seen the same part read by a twenty-five-year old ingénue from a regional conservatory, and an over-fifty-years-on-stage New York theater veteran.
I have to say that I am lucky. I have been able to work with some great stage artists, and with many good ones. But strangely, the one thing that most of them share is an inability to play a lesbian convincingly on stage. I’ve worked with gifted actresses who can easily transform themselves into full human beings whom they have never been. I’ve worked with a robust young woman who brilliantly played a paraplegic, a Texas Southern Baptist who won great acclaim playing a Jewish princess, a young Asian woman of enormous range who fully inhabited a white southern gossip. I’ve worked with actresses who have played every accent, age, class, and point of view. And yet, overwhelmingly, most of them have no idea of how to play a lesbian.
The first question is WHY? The obvious reason is there is no lesbian play in the American repertoire. There is no play, from a lesbian perspective, with openly gay female protagonists that has been broadly produced in regional theaters, with a major production in New York. As a result, there is no standard lesbian text used in scene work in acting schools. And so, there is no unifying theatrical reference point from which heterosexual actresses can learn. So, when straight actresses come to a play that is fully from a lesbian perspective, they are working with something that they have not only never worked with before but have never even seen performed. Or heard about it being performed. The producers have never experienced producing such a play, and the directors have no experience directing them. Everyone is starting from scratch. Except the writer. Most lesbian writers working with primary lesbian content for the stage have been channeled into performance or performative-styled live work. This work uses direct address, is often solo, or has the writer perform in the piece, or has a more vaudeville or performance art style. It is taken less seriously than the blue-chip form of conventional “play” in which the playwright asserts the authority of creating a contained universe occupied by multiple characters. People who don’t have full citizenship are encouraged into performance art instead of plays because it occupies the kind of lighter side of entertainment; historically Jews and blacks were channeled into this form of entertainment through stand-up comedy. Now gay and lesbian people and Latino people are. The more respected, more rewarded, and more authoritative form of theatre is still restricted to men, and generally white men.
Ties That Bind Page 10