Miss Snooks was really awfully nice
And never wrote a poem
That was not really awfully nice
And fitted to a woman,

She therefore made no enemies
And gave no sad surprises
But went on being awfully nice
And took a lot of prizes.
---Stevie Smith
 
Stevie Smith’s poem is on my mind this week, because I just had a meeting with a New York producer about a musical for which I wrote book and lyrics. He told me that the lead character was “unlikeable” and  “off-putting,” and that it was impossible for him to care about what happened to her. Same feedback I got from a Broadway producer, and before that, from a top theatre critic in the state where it was workshopped.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about male lead characters in musicals—the ones that make big bank. There’s that man with such a hideously deformed face he has to wear a mask. He has an out-of-control sexual obsession with an opera singer, stalking and abducting her. There is a carousel barker who is an alcoholic wife-beater and a thief. Oh, and what about the scam artist whose racket is selling non-existent band instruments to innocent children? There is the pederastic older man, arguably also a pimp, who trains his band of street urchins in the art of picking pockets. The colonial plantation owner on the lam for committing murder who has fathered a couple of children with his native concubine—who was too much of a social inferior for him to marry. The patriarch who rejects his daughters for marrying without his permission. And, of course, the demonic barber who slits the throats of his customers.
 
Well, you get the picture. No one has ever asked me if I found any of these male characters unlikeable or off-putting… or if I found it impossible to care about what happened to them. In fact, if they had, I would have answered in the negative. Not because I have not known and loved women who have been stalked, battered, pimped, sexually abused as children, exploited by colonialism, rejected by their fathers, and attacked with knives and razors. I have. And I have worked with these women, written for them, lobbied on their/my behalf, and loved them.

But that’s real life, and this is theatre. There is that “willing suspension of disbelief,” which for women in the audience translates into a willingness to believe that these onstage male stalkers, wife-beaters, slashers, etc. are nothing like their real-life counterparts. These men are not dangerous and scary…  Well, okay… but scary in a good way. They burst into song, and so do their victims. Whatever the nature of their perpetrations, we understand them to be idiosyncratic dissipations custom-tailored to enhance our fascination and augment our empathy. It goes without saying they had terrible childhoods.
 
Women are smart enough not to spoil our own fun by too literal an interrogation of our responses to these musicals, and only the most paranoid man-hater could read into them sinister ulterior motives.

Well, if throat-slashers and exploiters of children still warrant the patronage of Broadway producers and critics, then what horrendous atrocities has my character committed that have placed her beyond the pale of “likeability?” Fair enough. She cheated against her teammates in the 1932 Olympics. That’s it. Doesn’t beat anybody up, maim or kill anybody.

It would appear that there exists a significant double standard for what is deemed acceptable behavior for male protagonists and female ones. Could this have some bearing on why women playwrights are so notoriously underrepresented on Broadway, and especially in musical theatre?
 
People come to the theatre for spectacle, for something larger than life. These male reprobates are certainly larger than life, and because of this, their narrative arcs can be huge. They are not excoriated for their hubris; it’s the very diving platform for the dramatic plunge we’ve paid to see. These men can be reformed, or they can sink deeper and ever-more-colorfully into the abyss of their depravity. Because of their flaws, criminality, perversions, vices, addictions, dementia, and so on, there can be a sweep to their trajectory, and a catharsis or an exorcism for the audience. And when their personal arc meshes gears dramaturgically with the larger historical or sociological arc, such as the Pacific arena in World War II or the French Revolution, the result can be an epic musical.

Plays with female protagonists are handicapped before the pen ever hits the paper. And it’s an ingenious form of discrimination. Nobody is barring the work of female playwrights. In fact, these days, there is a veritable Greek chorus of critics and producers lamenting our lack of representation in commercial theatre. They want to help us. They share their wisdom with us when we present them with our work. And that wisdom includes what they know personally and professionally about “likeable” heroines. What they know, and what I am learning, is that “likeable” means feminine. Even if the protagonist is the world’s greatest sharpshooter, she must still throw a match to get her man and take a number that says “I enjoy being a girl.”
 
What these helpful critics and producers are not critiquing is the implications of their association of likeability with femininity. What happens to the narrative arc, so dramatic with those deeply flawed male characters, when it is applied to a “likeable” female protagonist? She can travel all the way from “likeable” to “more likeable.” Her dramatic arc becomes a dramatic arc-ette, ladylike and petite, like the half-moons of her perfectly manicured nails. One is reminded of Dorothy Parker’s review of Kate Hepburn: “a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B.”

Ironically, in my musical, the unlikeable female lead complains about a similar double standard in the 1930 rules for women’s basketball:
 
"What do I mean? I mean we’re not allowed to play full court, that’s what I mean. We gotta stop on this center line like it’s a game of “Mother May I” or something. And this business about “travelin’ with the ball?” Three bounces and pass? You don’t see no rule like that in the boys’ game. They get to have the ball as long as they want and go with it as far as they want. Why don’t they come right out with it and tie our shoelaces together? And then people have the nerve to say that girls’ basketball ain’t as interesting to watch, because there ain’t no star players, and that’s ‘cause girls ain’t no athletes. Like to see the boys get to be star players with all that stop-and-start shit."
 
But I haven’t been entirely forthcoming about my musical. The lead character is a butch. There, I said it. And that’s actually why she cheats against her teammates. It’s the 1930’s, and these other girls will go on to have husbands and babies, but the working-class butch, with her Adam’s apple and rippling muscles, is facing a lifetime of marginalized spinsterhood and low-paid women’s work… unless she can figure out a way to become the greatest athlete in the world.
 
And that’s not going to happen by being nice. She is rejected by her mother. She is bullied and ridiculed in high school. She is lesbian-baited by the media. They revoke her amateur status after the Olympics, and they revoke it again when she takes up golf. The catch, of course, is that there are no professional sports for women in that era. For my protagonist her choices are clear: “Get tough or die.” She chose to get tough, and that is why I wrote the musical.

I need that kind of role model, because I, too, am up against a boys’ club. I, too, am needing the emergence of a professional producing organization for women to enable our financial and artistic autonomy in a field where dependence on male producers has resulted in our permanent status as amateurs or tokens. I believe that the Disney princesses, for all their multi-cultural permutations, tell a limited story and one that is largely dependent on magic, coincidence, and luck. I believe there is a powerful untold story in the lives of butch women. It is a story packed with self-determination, analysis and strategy, the identifying of enemies and the locating of allies.
 
I am coming to understand that it is the power of that story that is what is actually so “off-putting” and “unlikeable.” It is a feral story in a world of sexual colonization. The chorus line of fishnet hose and high heel shoes does not hold up on the same stage with a chorus of butch athletes, dressed to maximize human potential. These are mutually exclusive universes. And when two women end up together, how can we tell which one is the princess… and, even scarier, what are the implications for heterosexual romantic narratives when neither of them is “the girl?” If masculinity can be a normal female attribute where does that leave men? The lesbian butch strips away the mystique surrounding male power, unveiling the privilege that it masks.
 
This is how it works. This is how it worked in the sports world in the 1930’s and how it works in theatre today. You can’t build muscle and worry about femininity at the same time, and being an exceptional individual is not enough to change the game. The game changes when a critical mass of exceptional individuals pool our assets, raising our own money to name our own terms. Until that day, my philosophy is this:  As long as they will hang me for stealing a chicken, why shouldn’t I steal a horse? And when I write about the lesbian butch, I take the whole herd.


Originally published in  Howlround: A Journal of the Theater Commons, August 5, 2012.

Interested? Check out Gage's "Butch Visibility Project."

I get it. I do. Shakespeare is brilliant, and— as the world of theatre continues its fatal slide down the rabbit hole of four-person, single-set, and fifteen-minute plays—the Bard is one of the only playwrights with large-cast plays who is still being produced on any kind of regular basis.
 
But, of course, Shakespeare was a man. Not just a man, but a man writing for theatre companies that were all-male.  And, on top of that, his plots often reflect the stories of kings and princes and military leaders. Not surprisingly, the roles for men outnumber those for women five-to-one, with all of the major characters being male.
 
In recent decades, we have seen an increase in women cross-dressing some of these roles, and even all-women productions. Why not? Acting is acting.  If we can pretend to be Lady Macbeth, why not Macbeth himself?  If Shakespeare’s actors could impersonate women, we can certainly have a shot at his male roles.

And there is another way for women to get a larger slice of the Shakespeare pie: cross-gendering the roles. This means Queen Lear, Romeo as a lesbian butch, and so on…. turning the male roles into female ones.
 
This is what I want to talk about—this cross-gendering of Shakespeare.
 
Some celebrate this as a kind of bringing down of the dramaturgical Berlin Wall between the sexes. I actually see it as a form of shoring it up.
 
Before I explain, I am feeling a need to put out some of my credentials in the gender-bending department. My first directing project as a theatre major was an all-female, cross-gendered production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. The actors played the roles of Peter and Jerry as women. I considered this very daring. I remember that I did make one adjustment… small, but significant.  Jerry’s use of pornography did not resonate for me in the landscape of lesbians in the early 1980’s. This was before the Internet and before the rise of lesbian pornography. I switched the reference to romance novels, which women did and still do consume in mindless quantities in order to generate feel-good endorphins. It seemed to me to be the female counterpart to porn.

Even then, thirty-plus years ago I was aware of the perils of uncritiqued occupation of male narratives. In retrospect, of course, I realize that Jerry’s porn use was intrinsic to the storyline of The Zoo Story. He is cruising, with Peter as his potential hook-up. My simplistic substitution of a few words was inadequate to render the play coherent as a woman’s story. And certainly, the murder/suicide at the end of the play, came from left-field in my production. Sadly, life-threatening violence was and still can be the final act of an evening of attempted anonymous sex in the world of gay male cruising. In Albee’s play, this plotline may have been coded for a privileged group of insiders who understood the play to be about a hustler and a closet case, but there was still a ring of truth to the ending.
 
My production, in spite of my best efforts, lacked integrity. The women’s final choices appeared to be senseless, sensational violence. They had no historical precedent (the class tensions between gay males, with privilege temporarily and superficially leveled by shared outlaw status), and no social context (cruising in a New York City park), and no established archetypes (the middle-class, closeted family man and the youthful, gay street hustler). I liken my cross-gendering of the play to the wearing of “boyfriend jeans.”

“Boyfriend jeans” is a term for clothing made for women, cut intentionally larger and looser to be suggestive of—what else?—the wearing of one’s boyfriend’s clothing. “Boyfriend jeans” are marketed as a status symbol, signifying the confidence of a woman with a boyfriend, whose satisfaction with her appearance is such that she can afford to eschew uncomfortable, tight, traditional female fashions and wear what she damn well pleases. After all, she has already bagged her guy… right? From a marketing perspective, these “boyfriend jeans” are not as liberated as they might appear.  The message is that the  only excuse a woman might have for acquiring comfortable clothing is that her boyfriend is allowing her to wear his. This leads to subliminal associations with recent sexual activity, the careless casting off and the insouciant putting on of clothing left behind… perhaps as a way to extend the limerance of the encounter. But the clothing is not really hers. She does not fill it the way the presumed boyfriend would. It’s not her comfort she’s inhabiting, but his—and on loan at that. And when she steps onto the stage of life in her “boyfriend jeans,” the shadow of the boyfriend is permanently embossed on her image.
 
My production of The Zoo Story was clad in Albee’s “boyfriend jeans.” Yes, my production had a toughness, a sense of daring, a kind of tomboy swagger that was rare in the early 1980’s world of women’s plays. We were not doing a romantic comedy. We were not accepting the roles for women created by male playwrights. We were not doing a Wendy Wasserstein coffee klatsch, or a Megan Terry hippie play. We were hefting beefy chunks of tough male dialogue and heaving them into the gaping maw of our rabid male critics. Or so we thought. In fact, we were prancing around in “boyfriend jeans.” Nobody mistook our production for The Zoo Story… except us.

Fast-forward a few decades… I was hired to coach an actress who was auditioning for the role of Cassius in a production of Julius Caesar where many of the men’s roles were being cross-gendered. It was set in contemporary times. We talked at length about costume—the corporate “power suit,” which is designed to convey the message “tough enough to play with the boys, but feminine enough not to threaten them.” Short skirt, long jacket? Tight across the thighs in front, but with a subtle kick-pleat in the back to allow for mobility? Cleavage—but how much? Knotted scarf or foofy bow? Pockets, not purses. Shoes with a heel, but not too high.  Flats, never.
 
This was territory we both understood. This was the no-woman’s land we had both learned to navigate in our careers. We knew the game completely, but when the conversation shifted to interpretation of the role of Cassius, we lost our footing. Because in this production, the women were supposed to share power with the men. It’s called “gender-blindness.” But we did not have gender-blind words. Cassius’s speech was written by one man for another man, who would be portraying a male character who was in the political elite of an all-male government in a country where women had almost no rights, no financial independence, and no political voice or presence whatsoever.  There was no inner truth, no integrity to the interpretation, because neither of us had any cultural referent for “gender-blindness.”  It is not possible to act political idealism. If it were grounded in any reality that could be embodied, it would not be idealism. Duh. Boyfriend jeans.

I also attended a production of “Queen Lear” done by a local girls’ theater company. All the characters were cross-gendered. These were high-school and middle-school girls. I was uncomfortable throughout the production, because I was aware that what I was seeing was something like “let’s all pretend to be  fish who live on dry land.”  From gills to fins to scales, there is no aspect of a fish that is adapted to life on dry land. Everything that makes a fish recognizable as a fish precludes their presence on dry land.

What are we talking about with Queen Lear? There is no woman, especially of a royal family, and especially as the head of that royal family, who lives outside of patriarchy. There is no mother whose relationships with her daughters has not been shaped by some dance of compliance and resistance to that patriarchy. I felt that the girls were being taught to believe that power was a question of temperament, of personality, and that it existed apart from social systems, historic precedents, political realities. The dreadful unraveling of Lear’s kingdom, family, and sanity are testament to the rigidity and distortions of a patriarch whose will has gone unchecked for his entire adult life. His ownership of his daughters was a legally defined relationship that informed his fatal choices.  Well, I could go on. It was boyfriend jeans again, and the girls were getting a ton of props for parading around in them.
 
The problem I have with cross-gendering these roles is two-fold: They cannot provide powerful material for the actor. That fish-on-dry-land thing. Acting in a vacuum.  Dialogue from a science fiction world that the director fails to establish and that the playwright never intended and that is not the actor’s job to create.
 
The second problem I have is more serious: The masking of the very real patriarchal context that pervades the world of Shakespeare’s plays and which his narratives continually expose and challenge. Hamlet gets in trouble, because the son of a warrior king cannot be allowed the contemplative bachelor life of a poet and philosopher. King Lear is a cautionary tale about even the so-called winners in a patriarchal hierarchy, because old age and impotence catch up to us all. And so on.

I do support women’s desire for more powerful roles. Sadly, the first two thousand years of Western drama were not by us or for us, and there is nothing we can do about that. We can play men and play them as well, or even better, than men. But we cannot do our best work in cross-gendered roles, and that has nothing to with our abilities.
 
The good news—the very good news— is that women have found our voices now, and some of us are actually writing classical dramas with large casts and epic themes. Ahem. I have several, myself. Just ask.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is a brand-new biography about the lesbian who led the charge for LGBT rights beginning in the late 1950’s, when she organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), through the tumultuous 1960’s when she edited DOB’s The Ladder and walked the picket line protesting the US government’s homophobic hiring policies, into the 1970’s where she worked to bring LGBT liberation to the American Library Association and to the American Psychiatric Association. 

The biography is written by Tracy Baim, who is no slacker herself when it comes to LGBT activism . Baim is the publisher and executive editor of Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, the oldest LGBT newspaper in Chicago—co-founded by Baim in 1985. She has authored, co-authored, or edited books about the LGBT press, about lesbians in the service, about Obama’s relationship to the LGBT community, and about mothers of LGBT kids. In 2014 she was inducted into the Hall of Fames for both the Chicago Headline Club and the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. In other words, Baim, like the subject of her biography, is a lesbian force of nature.

Baim brings her insider’s appreciation of the world of activism to her subject, along with her editor’s ear for a good story—and Gittings’ life was full of those. She also brings her journalist’s eye for photography to the (literally) hundreds of photos that are included in the book, which had initially been conceived as a photo album. Fortunately for us, Gittings’ partner, Kay Lahusen, documented their life, and in doing that, she ended up documenting five decades of a movement.
 
Baim has done so many important things in her writing of this book. Here are just a few:
 
She has written a major lesbian activist back into a history of the LGBT civil rights movement that was at risk of looking like a gay male movement. The erasure of lesbians has now, alas, become a “thing.” Advocate writer and blogger Victoria Brownworth has written about it. Feminist scholar Dr. Bonnie Morris has a book coming out this year titled The Disappearing L. Last year Curve Magazine published a story on “Erasing Our Lesbian Dead,” and AfterEllen posted a reminder to the culture at large that lesbians are gay people, too. So, thank you Tracy Baim, for giving Gittings such a solid, cast-in-cement,  gold-star biography in our LGBT Walk of Fame.

Next, there are the photos. These have been carefully sorted into the different eras of Gittings’ long career, and then meticulously captioned with names, dates, associations. They are truly worth a thousands words. One of the radical steps that Giddings took when she began to edit The Ladder was to feature real faces of real lesbians on the cover. Fortunately, Baim includes several pages of these archival covers, and they speak volumes about the courage of both editor and subjects.
 
This same kind of courage is also evident in the photos of those early marches at the Pentagon and the White House. There was no rainbow flag. It was all gray flannel suits and shirtwaist dresses with sensible shoes. These picketers were dressing for the jobs they were not allowed to hold.
 
In many ways, the book is like a family album. Thumbing through it, some names jump out, like "Sylvia Rivera" or "Vito Russo." So that’s what they looked like…  And other times the faces jump out.. Oh, look, there’s Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and Karla Jay!

As the pages and eras scroll past, the photos become less crowded, quieter, more domestic. Another side of Gittings emerges. Here she is performing with the Philadelphia Chamber Chorus… and here she is announcing the purchase of a house… and sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee. One of my favorites is a photo of her with Lahusen posing on the front steps of Gittings’ mother’s house. Both women are holding stuffed dinosaurs and laughing. Here’s the story: In the 1970’s, a new wave of LGBT activists swept into the movement, and, as new waves are wont to do, they immediately set about eliminating the “old wave." They labeled Gittings and Lahusen “establishment accommodationists”… or just “dinosaurs.” Not fazed in the least, Gittings and her partner rolled with the punches, and began to show up to meetings with stuffed dinosaurs under their arms.

And this brings me to one of the most memorable aspects of this book… the stories. Gittings was a valiant foot soldier, logging her hours at the mimeograph machine and the mailing parties, and logging her miles in the picket lines… but she was also a brilliant, creative strategist with a wicked sense of humor. She knew how to turn her enemy’s homophobia against him. One of the most unforgettable examples was an action she planned at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association annual convention. After years of lobbying, she and her fellow activists were finally allowed to present a panel titled, “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?—A Dialogue.” The plan was to put two national, LGBT rights activists,  Gittings and Frank Kameny,  on the panel with two heterosexual, but sympathetic psychiatrists. It was Gittings’ partner who noted that something was missing: Where was the gay or lesbian psychiatrist? The simplest answer was “in the closet.” Being professionally out at that time could actually put one at risk of losing their license.
 
But once Gittings had a vision for an action, she was unstoppable. She located a psychiatrist willing to appear in disguise—and what a disguise! He wore a tuxedo three sizes too large and a huge, full-head, rubber mask of Richard Nixon. His appearance was grotesque, and so was the reality to which he was responding. The panel was an overwhelming success, no small influence on the removal of homosexuality the following year from the APA clinical roster of mental diseases.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is filled with stories, often in Gittings’ own words, as Baim has incorporated excerpts from interviews as well as Gittings’ writings. The stories of her childhood, and especially of her long and rocky road to acceptance of her “difference” make for wonderful reading. It always inspires me when I discover that these super women who changed the world had to wrestle with the same demons that plague us lesser mortals.
 
Gittings is family, and her personal photo album is part of our heritage, too. Her journey, like that of a first generation immigrant, is embedded in our second-, third-, and fourth-generation lesbian DNA. Her traumas are in our bone marrow, and her victories are the legacies on which we build.

Thank you, Tracy Baim, for this meticulously researched, sparkling biography of Barbara Gittings!

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is available in both a black-and-white-photo edition and a color-photo edition!