Ties That Bind

by Sarah Schulman

  There are some lesbian actresses, but it is not a profession friendly to homosexual women. Most of the gay women in the theater are stage managers, casting directors, and other people working behind the scenes. Those actresses who, through talent and commitment and sometimes the casting couch, have survived, are often afraid to play gay parts. They worry that, once seen as gay, they will never be cast as straight again. To spend one’s career playing tomboys, next-door neighbors, virgins and freaks is not any gifted actor’s dream. So, the task generally falls to heterosexual women, asked to transform into and embody a social and erotic reality that they’ve never fully seen represented. Interestingly, these actresses often make the same mistakes. Over and over I’ve seen straight actresses try their best to show emotional and erotic connection with other women on stage, only to have the real lesbians in the audience complain after that “they looked like straight women playing dykes.” I find myself sitting in theaters wincing at absolutely unconvincing kissing scenes, painfully inept attempts to portray physical intimacy, and misguided gestures toward romantic love.

  The most frequent mistake that actresses playing couples make is that they try to establish some kind of outward sign of erotic intimacy by touching each other frequently during the presentation. Regularly, two actresses sitting next to each other, who are playing a couple, will over the course of the reading, turn closer and closer to each other in their chairs until they are facing each other and not the audience. This does not read as erotic partners; it reads as space invasion. Then, they tend to touch each other too much, and in a kind of petting gesture—usually on the arm or back. It looks like they are compulsively brushing lint off the other’s sweater. If theater professionals were experienced with lesbian representation, the director would immediately put an end to this. But how is anyone to know? Erotic tension is defined by distance and deliberate purposeful physical contact so that the impulse to touch is ever present. As one of my favorite actresses, and one of the few who can play gay convincingly, Jenny Bacon, put it, “She has to want me to touch her.” Without the discernment of desire, they end up cloying and clawing in a manner that dilutes all possible erotic power.

  Even if the over-pawing is brought to an end, most heterosexual actresses don’t seem to know where to put their hands when the time for touch is right. Over and over again I see arms go around shoulders. That’s how friends hold each other, not lovers. If we are in an extended workshop, over the course of days, and I have a chance to get to know the actors and to speak to them casually, I try to bring it up. The ideal way to show erotic power and possession is for one woman to put her arm around the other’s waist. To hook her hand into the curve of the other’s body. This is a lesbian, sexual touch, not the way friends hold each other in greeting.

  Beyond physicality, there are other attributes that let an actress read as lesbian convincingly on stage. Interestingly, one actress who has repeatedly successfully played lesbian characters is Jessica Hecht. She appeared in Diana Son’s Stop Kiss, a play by a non-lesbian woman about two straight women whose friendship results in a romantic kiss, for which they are brutally gay-bashed. Then, Hecht played an on-going lesbian character on the TV show FRIENDS. When she has read the openly lesbian leads for my plays, I saw in person why she is so persuasive playing lesbians. She listens. Intensely. She gives so much attention to the other people on stage that when the other person is cast as her female lover, Hecht’s ability to listen reads erotically. Listening reveals a kind of positive submission, a generous investment in the other. And this is something rarely seen on stage between two female characters who are not related.

  Erotic interest is a kind of light. And when it is returned, the whole theater is illuminated. This can’t be achieved through substitution, pretending that the woman before you is a man. It has to be found organically between the two actresses, and what is the best way for this to be achieved? Through knowledge, awareness, and talent. In other words, through craft. And how is craft learned? Through experience. Hopefully, as the world changes, lesbian plays will become an organic part of the American theater, and only then will actresses have the chance to study and learn how to fully inhabit these characters.

  So these were the obstacles facing the casting of Shimmer. Now with an artistic team of three gay men and me, you can imagine which one of us was preoccupied with these questions. The men thought that whoever we had was fine. Good actresses kept coming in and having NO IDEA how to play the relationship. But only I seemed to notice. How could the guys notice? They’d never experienced it personally and, since it had never been represented, they had no idea what it would look like if two women lovers were alone in a room. We went through a number of interesting actresses but none of them could get it. I kept saying, “This isn’t right,” but no one felt the concern that I did.

  Finally, Michael Mayer recommended an actress to me named Sharon Scruggs who was at the time understudying his production of Thoroughly Modern Millie on Broadway. She came in and she was fantastic. She was intelligent, sexy, musical, seductive. She could play all the subtext that none of the other women could figure out. Like Jessica and Jenny, she transcended the category. Well, this changed the entire piece. For the first time, the lesbian sexuality was central to the performance in the way that it was intended to be. The whole work changed and came alive. It was exciting. Thrilling. After the reading the artistic team went upstairs to have our meeting. I was so happy. I thought that now that the guys had seen how it was supposed to be, they would praise me. We came into Manny’s office, closed the door, and P.I.G. said:

  “Sarah, you get titillated by watching sexy actresses play lesbian scenes, but I find it tedious. And no one from Iowa is going to want to pay $90 to see that.”

  I was so shocked and so blindsided that my head started spinning. I did not know what to say. I looked around at the other men, expecting them to explode with anger at Piggy. But they didn’t say a word. They just sat there as though this kind of behavior was fine. The rest of the meeting was a whirl for me. I felt so terrible, so humiliated to be treated that way. Later, when I got home, I realized that Piggy had accused me of being a homosexual and of being a writer. Why was he able to make those two things sound so disgusting? That night the phone rang; it was Manny. Piggy was refusing to complete the second half of the score unless we brought in one of the other men from the team to rewrite the book. This was an adaptation of MY NOVEL, with a book that Manny himself had micro-managed. Of course I refused, and of course I was so upset. The sexism was the originating action, me being upset was the consequence of Piggy and Manny’s humiliating behavior. Now I was devastated. I said “no.” I realize now how Piggy used shunning, by not calling me and talking to me himself, but creating an exclusive structure of deflection from which to scapegoat without the possibility of conversation. I told Manny that I would not agree to that and that he was wrong to even be calling me with such a thing.

  He responded, “Sarah, I know it’s hard for you to hear, but you can’t write.”

  I got off the phone, overwhelmed by the series of assaults. As it sank in, I became angrier and angrier. As I began to process the dishonest mindfuck that I was being subjected to, I started to get some clarity about how I was being scapegoated. I phoned Manny back. Of course he put his shunning mechanism into place by screening his calls and refusing to pick up the phone. This after years of working together on the project and after he approved the script. I left a very upset message. If he had not been shunning and withholding, we could have discussed exactly what was really going on here. They were panicking about the lesbian content and pretending that I “can’t write.” How sleazy can you get? And how clichéd? If he had negotiated and been interactive, the truth would have had to be faced, but by shunning it could be repressed.

  I phoned my dear friend Marion McClinton, the great stage director who had directed my play about Carson McCullers and who was one of August Wilson’s primary collaborators. Marion is black, so when the
se kinds of scapegoating situations emerge, he can always see clearly what is really going on. When I got to the part where Manny said, “I know it’s hard for you to hear, but you can’t write,” Marion started laughing.

  “He played that old game? That is so tired.”

  I e-mailed Piggy and asked for the two of us to get together to talk. He refused. Of course. I was the less powerful one and so he, a gay man, was shunning me. If he had a human face-to-face conversation with me about what was going on, his prejudices, and sense of supremacy might be deflated. There was no reason for him to deal with things truthfully—the silence of the other men had made clear to him that he could treat me any way he wanted to. I had no power. I, and lesbian representation, had no currency and didn’t matter. He has, to this day, continued the shunning, refusing to sit down with me and resolve this experience.

  The happy ending is that Michael Korie apologized to me for standing by and letting this cruelty be enacted. He and I took the piece to Anthony Davis, a well-respected innovative composer, who is also black. Like Marion, when we told him the story, he laughed with recognition. He could spot that type of brutality a mile away. Now Anthony is composing the piece.

  Look at the material difference between Piggy’s experience and mine. He gets to act out homophobic cruelty that he himself has experienced, but he gets to revictimize by choosing an even more vulnerable target, a gay woman. He got to extend the cruelty of the culture. Doing this helps him feel normal, superior, and neutral in relationship to me, who is created as someone whose life does not deserve to be seen or expressed. And he calls on the people of Iowa as the justification for his own visceral rejection of overt lesbian content. He counts on patriarchy, the old boys’ network, to empower him to humiliate me. And then he and Manny use the age old last drawer desperate justification. It’s not that they are sick with prejudice. It’s that they are good, and I am bad. It’s the girl who, coincidentally, happens to be the bad writer. Obviously. Suddenly, after nine books, ten plays, a Guggenheim, Fulbright, the list could go on, I can’t write. They construct themselves as superior to me, even though I actually have more accomplishments. They rely on every sick cruel trick of supremacy and then Piggy hides behind e-mail and phone machines to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.

  Telling the story here is a consequence of the shunning, the withholding expressed by him hiding behind e-mail and phone machines. If he would negotiate and be interactive, I would have other alternatives. As it stands, writing this is my only alternative. What’s fascinating about shunning is that people are so distorted by their own sense of supremacy that they actually believe that you will and should follow their command of silence. It’s both bizarre and creates a lot of pain in conflicts that simple negotiating could resolve.

  Let me say clearly that trying to publish lesbian novels and get lesbian plays produced in this era means encountering this kind of distorted assaultive shunning and cruelty on a regular basis. At least once a week some kind of devaluative experience takes place. Someone acts disrespectfully, disregards my level of merit and achievement, diminishes something of value, because the lesbian content of the work removes any currency that my accomplishments might otherwise create. And lest you feel compelled to try to excuse or justify this, there is no other lesbian writer working in these forms (novels with lesbian protagonists, multi-character stage plays with lesbian point of view) who is faring any better. There is no one else who because of more talent, a more user-friendly personality, better connections, a trust fund, or an Ivy League degree has been able to get lesbian content novels and plays at the appropriate levels of presentation and recognition. Even great, openly lesbian writers like Paula Vogel, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned To Drive, have not been able to have success with a work with serious multi-character dramatic universes with overt primary lesbian content. Where we are allowed to function in theatre is with closeted or coded work and performative or solo theater pieces. None of this is because of the quality of the artistic achievement, nor is it because of the marketplace and people in Iowa. I have learned from repeated experience that it is entirely because of the individuals with the power of selection, their practice of devaluing who we are, our consequential lack of power and social currency, and the ease with which people feel free to extend the shunning they have observed us experience in every other institution of life.

  What is so sinister is that just as this structure keeps complex lesbian content out of mainstream culture, its absence is then experienced, I think subconsciously, by perpetrators in the private sphere as justification for their actions. When a person scapegoats a gay family member, there is no big movie, book, or play creating a cultural status quo telling them not to. The reason for this is that the people with power behind the scenes in art and entertainment behave exactly the same way that people with power do in the private sphere. The shunning is dynamic and mutually reinforcing.

  The history of lesbian literature is a bit more complex than the stage because in book publishing we did break through during the 1990s and have now lost those advances. In theater, the breakthrough still has not occurred. Because it takes so much personal strength to have primary lesbian content in this era, the writers who persevere need some sense of historical context to be able to understand what is happening to us right now and why. Oppression is both informative about the powerful other and infantilizing about the self. We have a very sophisticated understanding of the structures that keep oppression in place. We understand the dominant cultural mind and how it is constructed while they still don’t even know that their power is constructed. We are experts on them. But no one is expert on us.

  Lesbian publishing became established in the 1970s by pioneers like Wendy Cadden, June Arnold, Joan Larkin, and Barbara Grier, with presses like Out and Out Press, Daughters Inc., and Diana Press and later Persephone and Crossing Press, Naiad and Firebrand, Cleis and Seal. Collectively, the feminist publishing movement produced excellent work by superior writers. Work that was as technically advanced as any competitive writer in the marketplace and work that was extremely meaningful to its readers, far beyond the impact of most mainstream writers on their readers. The challenge then moved from the already difficult act of getting these works into print to the next, far more difficult step. Namely, to have our most talented and achieved writers and works of art recognized on the basis of their merit without having to compromise the primacy of the lesbian characters. This is the challenge that we still face.

  The one thing that has substantially changed in the publishing world is that a writer can be openly lesbian personally and still be accepted as an American writer as long as she produces some work with no primary lesbian content. So, the current state of affairs is that books where the lesbian content is coded, sub-textual, involved with secondary characters or sub-plots, written in what is called “lesbian sensibility” or featuring strong women characters with ambiguous sexualities are considered “well written.” Books in which the protagonist is a lesbian in the first and last chapter? These books are not “well written.” They are considered to not deserve to be part of American fiction because the lives that they depict are not acceptable lives. Books with primary lesbian characters are diminished and demeaned because the prejudice and stigma against the characters results in a series of institutionalized lies. Namely that the books are “about homosexuality,” are “political, not literary,” and are all alike. This results in an institutionalized quota system in which books with primary lesbian characters are only compared to each other, only compete against each other, and are never ever placed in the spectrum of American fiction. Even magazines practice this censorship. If the New Yorker or the Atlantic or their ilk have published fiction by openly lesbian American authors with primary lesbian content, it’s escaped me.

  As the obvious merit and ability of lesbian writers became clearer, one of the goals of the lesbian publishing movement became to have our best work accepted by the w
idest range of American readers. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Before the advent of niche marketing in 1992, people wrote books with primary lesbian and gay characters because they had to. They were artistically and ethically compelled to this decision despite the almost certain knowledge that it would prohibit them from ever being able to earn a living. They were speaking to the world from a place of truth. Once people began to perceive of a gay market, they wrote book proposals to develop books purposefully for that market, books that were as superficial as meaningless books that straight people were sold, but with a gay lilt. So rather than our best work and our best talents being recognized and integrated into American literature, the publishing industry bombarded our own community with junk books such as The Gay Hair Book which then dominated the shelves of gay book stores, when there were still many gay book stores. Simultaneously, we were making no progress in getting our quality lesbian literature out to the general public.