There is an old nursery rhyme that goes: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost/ For want of a shoe, the horse was lost…” and so on, through losses of rider, battle, and eventually the kingdom itself. Something like that happened in Hawaii, for want of a goddess…and here is the story:

It is February,1893. The US Marines have already landed their forces and are occupying Iolani Palace, Queen Liliuokalani’s cabinet ministers have betrayed her attempt to promulgate a new constitution, and she is being scapegoated by the colonial plantation owners as a traitor to her country. They have forced her to draft a document abdicating from the throne, but instead she has written this:

. . .to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps the loss of life, I do under protest and impelled by said force, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States, upon the facts having been presented to it, undo the actions of its representatives and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constituted sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.1

In spite of the care Liliuokalani has taken to define the situation as one that is temporary and coerced by threat of violence, the Queen’s action is interpreted as abdication, and it will continue to be interpreted that way for another hundred years… but that comes later. This is still February 1883, one month after the drafting of this document…

There has just been a great gathering of kahunas, or Native shamans, in Honolulu. They have met to consider ways to restore the Queen to the throne and to recover the sovereignty of their nation. It has become clear to the spiritual leaders that the christian god of the missionaries is not on their side in this crisis. In fact, the christian god seems very much in the pocket of the sons of the missionaries, who have grown up to become greedy plantation owners.

On February 13, 1883, three women from this gathering pay a visit to the Queen. These are three of the most powerful kahuna women of Hawaii. They are coming to tell her the good news: The goddess Hiiaka, sister of the great volcano goddess Pele, has given them instructions, and if the Queen will only follow them, she will be restored to the throne.

The word for goddess or god in Hawaiian is akua, which is somewhat indeterminate. Akua can refer to forces, persons, or things—as long as they have a lot of mana, which is another indeterminate word referencing spiritual power. According to the Wikipedia, mana is “an impersonal force or quality that resides in people, animals, and inanimate objects.” Actually, this lack of specificity is part of the secret power of the Hawaiian language

Prior to colonization, the Hawaiians did not have a written language. They didn’t have currency, either, and there is a connection. Anyway, words were meant to be spoken aloud and understood in the immediate context of what was being said. The multiplicity of meanings was intended to enhance spiritual and artistic associations, not constrict them legalistically, as in written-word cultures. According to Serge Kahili King, a present-day shaman who lives on an active volcano, “What this means is that, when we hear or read stories of an entity such as Pele, the volcano goddess, we can never be certain whether the story is about the spirit of a natural phenomenon, the human ancestor of a particular family line, or both, or neither.”2

It is important to keep this in mind when considering the kahuna women’s visit to the Queen.

Hiiaka is the goddess of Hawaiian culture. She had a human girlfriend, a woman named Hopoe, who taught her the hula dance. Hopoe’s name means “one encircled as with a lei or loving arms,” and she became Hiiaka’s companion-lover. Now, the hula dance is a very sacred practice, a ritual so powerful that even a tiny misstep can result in serious consequences for both the dancer and the community. Because of this, apprentice dancers were ritually secluded and placed under the protection of Laka, one of Hiiaka’s sister goddesses.

But for Hiiaka and Hopoe, the hula was a joyous celebration of their love, to be danced in the sacred groves of their beautiful island … at least, until Hiiaka’s older sister Pele fell in love with a human chief named Lohiau and sent her younger sister on an errand to fetch him. Pele made Hiiaka promise not to seduce the chief during the journey, and, in turn, Hiiaka made Pele promise to protect the sacred groves and Hopoe in her absence. Although Hiiaka performed her errand faithfully, she was delayed on the return trip, and Pele’s jealous temper erupted, pouring lava over her sister’s sacred groves and entombing Hopoe in the molten rock. Hiiaka, with a temper of her own, tricked Pele into killing her warrior chief. Later, much later, the sisters would reconcile.
 
So this is the goddess who has proposed a plan for putting the Queen back on her throne and who has sent kahuna women to deliver the proposal. What was it? Here is an account, taken from Helena Allen’s excellent biography, The Betrayal of Liliuokalani:

They proposed that the three with the queen form a procession and enter Iolani Palace from the King Street gate…The three would chant their way in through the gate, up past the walk, past the guards and soldiers into the throne room… ‘we in front… the queen behind’ and ‘we will stop the mouth of the gun.’ Once inside the throne room the three would lead the queen to the throne, seat her on it and then die. ‘Perhaps!’ they said, ‘death will not come at once but it will come within a few days’ and the queen will know that the gods have accepted their sacrifice.3

And what is the Queen’s response to this bold plan? She turns them down. In fact, she writes in her diary, “I wish they hadn’t come.”

Why? Because Queen Liliuokalani is an Episcopalian. She understands that any association with the kahuna women will be construed by the foreign press as a reversion to heathenism on her part. Her enemies are eager for any “proof” to support their contention that she is a superstitious savage whose irrational leadership had necessitated their intervention on behalf of her countrymen.

Also, Queen Liliuokalani has placed all her political eggs in the diplomatic basket. Naively, she believes that the invasion of her country by the US Marines has been the result of some error in communication, or some unauthorized activity on the part of a rogue commander. She believes that President McKinley, hearing the facts of the case, will set the situation to rights. She is desperate to present a demeanor as Victorian as… well, as QueenVictoria.

Queen Liliuokalani also understands that this plan is likely to result in martyrdom, and that martyrdom of kahunas, and especially of kahuna women, will result in an armed uprising throughout the islands. As a christian and as a woman and as a ruler with a profound sense of responsibility toward her people during a time of overwhelming social and political change, she does not want her actions to be the cause of a massacre by the superior forces of the Marines.
 
And so the Queen sends the kahuna women home. Unfortunately, President McKinley does not do the same with the Marines, and the rest is history.

Would the goddess’s strategy have worked? I believe that it would.

A queen who is arrested or shot as she crosses the hall of her own palace and attempts to mount the steps to her own throne is clearly not a ruler who has abdicated. Had the plan been carried out, the century-long wrangling over the legal interpretation of the Queen’s statement would never have taken place. The focus would have been entirely on the atrocity, not on a document. After shooting the Queen’s escorts, the Marines would have found it difficult to claim they were only there to protect the Queen. Sensational drawings of the murders would have circled the globe, and the international community would have risen in protest over this bloody takeover of a peaceful, island nation.

Yes, it is possible that the United States would have seized the islands anyway, as it had already done with so many indigenous lands on the continent, but Hawaii was different in that it had a constitutional monarchy recognized by the heads of Europe. It had cordial diplomatic and trade relations with the US, and it was also a geographic entity surrounded by water, whose boundaries were indisputable. The lack of armed resistance was confusing to a world that had to rely on written missives, often received months after an event.

There was also a level on which this strategy could not fail: the spiritual plane. A key element of the plan had been the proposed chanting by the kahuna women as they escorted the Queen. This chanting was as sacred as the hula dance, and just as powerful. To make a mistake in wording or pronunciation was as offensive to the goddesses as a misstep in the hula, and these kahuna women were well aware of the danger of performing such a sacred ritual in the occupied palace.

The focus and concentration necessary to perform these chants would actually enable them to create sacred, Native space around the Queen as they formed their processional. No display of imperialist domination would supplant the women’s allegiance to their Native deities, and no threat of violence to their persons would distract them from carrying out their sacred trust. Their statements to the Queen made it clear that, if they died, it would be because Hiiaka had accepted their sacrifice. The Marines had no place and no power in the paradigm they were intending to generate. The outcome was guaranteed: Either the Queen would be allowed to keep her place on the throne, or the sacrifice would be accepted, in which case Hiiaka would keep her promise.

Unfortunately, the Queen did not share the kahuna women’s perspective. She had been spiritually colonized by a turn-the-other-cheek religion—one conveniently tailored to the needs of a colonial invader. She failed to understand that no amount of Western education, European etiquette, or christian churchgoing could erase the stigma of her skin color and her biological sex in the eyes of her enemies. Arguing for the legitimacy of her constitutional monarchy could not protect her resource-rich nation from the greed of the plantation owners.

Throughout her life, she continued to hope, addressing her people in her 1898 biography: “The people to whom your fathers told of the living God, and taught to call ‘Father,’ and whom the sons now seek to despoil and destroy, are crying aloud to Him in their time of trouble; and He will keep His promise, and will listen to the voices of His Hawaiian children lamenting for their homes.”4

And so Queen Liliuokalani waited for a restoration that never came. A century later, President Clinton would sign into law the Apology Resolution “to acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and to offer an apology to the Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.”5 It is an apology deemed to have no binding legal effect.

The story of Hiiaka and Pele reads like a cautionary tale that the Queen might have done well to heed. Pele’s mesmeric attraction to the male chief temporarily blinded her to her sister’s loyalty, even as the Queen’s obsession with colonial perceptions blinded her to the powerful truths being presented to her by the kahuna women of her own nation. Tragically, for a second time, Hiiaka’s sacred groves were desecrated.

[Originally published in n Trivia: Voices of Feminism,, issue 9, March 2009.]

Footnotes:

1 “Liliuokalani,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliuokalani

2 “Hawaiian Goddesses” by Sergi Kahili King, Aloha International http://www.huna.org/html/hawaiian_goddesses.html  

3 Allen, Helena. The Betrayal of Liliuokalani:Last Queen of Hawaii. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1982, p. 199.

4 Liliuokalani, Lydia. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/liliuokalani/hawaii/hawaii.html

5 “Hawaiian Independence” http://www.hawaii-nation.org/publawsum.html

I have a friend named Elliott, who is a disabled, radical, working-class, Jewish, lesbian-feminist activist. She wrote an interesting article about the political implications of the contents of the supplemental dictionary of her word-processing program. The supplemental dictionary is a file that allows the user to customize the spell-check program by adding words that are not in the default dictionary that came with the program. Here is a partial list of words from Elliott’s file:
ableism
ableist
accessibility
Ashkenazic
assimilationist
batterer
classism
classist
clit
dyke
Eurocentric
feminisms
futon
heterosex
heteropatriarchal
homelessness
ism
lesbophobia
miso
mythologize
sephardic
sizeism
tampax
tempeh
therapism
yiddishe

Obviously, the words that are critical to Elliott’s defining her experience—not only her day-to-day reality, but also her identities and her oppressions—are missing. The point of Elliott’s article was to make visible the usually invisible process of marginalization. What does it mean when “tits” is in the dictionary, but “clit” is not? What does it mean when there is a term for hating queers, but not one specific to the combination of homophobia and misogyny? What does it mean when “ablebodied” is in the dictionary, but “ableism” is not? What does it mean when every conceivable category for christian sects and denominations is included, but the words descriptive of Jewish ethnic origins are not? What does it mean when all the pejorative terms for poor people are in the dictionary, but “classism” is not?

Elliott’s printout of the contents of her supplemental dictionary file makes visible a process that is usually hidden. The printout not only exposes a mechanism of exclusion, but it also suggests connections and patterns of oppression among her diverse identities.

What is missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature? Turning to the supplemental file of my own canon of plays, I find that nearly all of the archetypes I use are absent from the traditional canon: the avenging mother, the survivor of sexual assault who is believed, the angry young woman, the ambitious winner, the fiercely loyal sisters, the venerated crone, the lesbian lover. My archetypal narratives are also missing: the sanctioned patricide, the woman’s resurrection through rage, the recovery of memory, the shifting of paradigms, the de-colonization of the body, the furious re-invention of the self, the reconstruction of the ruptured mother-daughter bond.

There are many archetypes in my lesbian-feminist culture that are missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature. As with Elliott’s supplemental dictionary, I find it instructive to examine these omissions for what they reveal about that mainstream canon. These archetypes include the rejected older woman who, instead of becoming consumed with revenge like Medea, liberates
herself joyously from the entire heterosexual paradigm that would put her out to pasture at menopause. In the patriarchal canon, the archetypal survivor is Cassandra, whose ability to predict the future is seen as a curse, not a strategic advantage, because no one will believe her. In my culture, the survivor of male atrocities uses her second sight to heal herself and to rescue and recruit other victimized women. In our epic dramas, the daughter, unlike Elektra, sides with the mother against a perpetrating father, and our goddesses, unlike the motherless Athena, endorse the patricide of the perpetrator, not the matricide of the avenging mother. Our Antigones, longing for a voice in the political process, are not satisfied with impotent and self-martyring protests against a sadistic, misogynist system, but seek out the alliances with other powerful women. We have a literature
replete with warrior women from long lines of unbroken matrilineal bonding. Why are these rich roles and archetypes missing from a canon that purports to be universal?


I suggest that it is because of the censorship of incest as a subject fit for inclusion in the canon. If we believe the statistics that tell us one third of all girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, usually by a male caregiver, the case could be made that incest is the central paradigm for women in patriarchy. Incest is the template for a woman’s experience of betrayal by her fathers and her brothers. When the mother is forced to choose between the interests of her male partner or male offspring, and the interests of her daughter, she will most often align her interests with what will give her the most stake in a male-dominated system. Sadly, most mothers will reject their sexually abused daughters. And here we see the Cassandra who cannot erase her memory of trauma, but who cannot find the women—or the men—who will believe her. Here we see the Clytemnestra, who, in
avenging the murder of her daughter, falls victim to another daughter and a son who identify with the perpetrating father. Here is Medea who avenges her sexual rejection on the younger woman and on her own children. Here is Athena, defining the father as the true parent, the one who provides the “seed,” and the mother as only the empty carrier, the borrowed womb.

When incest is not named, when the incest story is not told, it becomes the accepted paradigm, part of the default lexicon for defining accepted reality.
In preparing this paper, I asked the members of my theatre newsgroup for titles of plays that dealt with child sexual abuse/incest. I say “child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest,” because, in my experience of working with survivors, the two are most often synonymous, or, at least, very closely related in terms of scenarios and syndromes.

The first thing I noticed from the list of titles was that the “slash” has disappeared. There is almost no connection at all between the portrayal of incest and child sexual abuse in the majority of these plays. Incest as a titillating scenario of adult desire is a recurrent theme. Child sexual abuse is all but absent.
A sampling of incest titles from the traditional and contemporary canon include: Oedipus Rex, Phaedre, Pericles, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Desire Under the Elms, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ghosts, Fool for Love.

Lots of stepmother-stepson adult attraction, lots of half-brother-half-sister adult attraction, and a couple of cases of adult parent-child, mistaken-identity attraction. I know and have worked with hundreds of incest survivors, and not one of our stories even remotely resembles any of these. In fact, I don’t know anyone whose story resembles these. The popularity of these models for incest must be attributable to either the fantasies or the subconscious fears of the male playwrights who employ them as plot devices.

Moving away from incest to plays that deal with child sexual abuse, we find the field thins out considerably. Almost all of the plays in this category are recent ones. One of the oldest is Turn of the Screw, with its suggestions of sexual abuse by a tutor and a governess. Part of the much-touted mystery of this play, however, is the fact that audiences never know if the story is true or just the neurotic, projected, sexual fantasies of a frustrated spinster. There are two contemporary plays about child sexual abuse set in all-male environments, focusing on the fate of the perpetrator in prison communities: Lilies and Short Eyes.

Two of the suggested titles finally dealt with experiences of child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest. The first is Nuts, a play by Tom Torpor that was made into a feature film starring Barbra Streisand—a film which, unlike other Streisand films, received almost no critical attention. The protagonist is a prostituted woman who has murdered a john. During the course of her trial, she recovers repressed
childhood memories of paternal incest.

And then there is How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which has just won a Pulitzer. In this play an older girl is sexually abused by her uncle. What does it mean that a play on the traditionally taboo subject of incest has been officially recognized by being awarded the Pulitzer? Is this a sign that the silence about incest is being broken, or just a subtler form of censorship. In order to answer
that question it is important to look carefully at the depiction of the survivor in How I Learned to Drive, and it is also important to understand something about the process of a child when she is sexually abused, especially by a trusted adult or caregiver, as is the case in Ms. Vogel’s play.

The experience of the sexually-abused child is this: “This can’t be happening to me” and “This is happening to me and I can’t stop it.” There is a variation on that second part: “This is happening to me and it’s going to keep happening to me, night after night, for years and years and years, and I can’t stop it.” Obviously, “This can’t happen” and “This is happening” are mutually exclusive propositions. To accommodate them in one body, the mind splits off the second part--the
unthinkable, the unspeakable part. Some children literally experience themselves rising up to a corner of the room and watching it all from the ceiling. Others spontaneously repress the memory as it happens. In the case of Marilyn Van Derber, a former Miss America who was raped by her father for years, she had a “day child” and a “night child” identity. The “night child” had no communication with the “day child,” until Van Derber was in her 30’s and began to recover her
memories, the recovery apparently triggered by her daughter having reached the age at which her own abuse had begun.

Some children experience displacement. A typical episode of displacement involved a child who was raped by a friend of her father’s while her father held her down. During the rape she focused on a poster of a rock star that was on the wall, and afterwards she “remembered” the abuse being perpetrated by someone whose description tallied with that of the rock star. She successfully displaced the identity of the rapist to protect herself from information too dangerous to access.
In some cases, the child does not travel to the corner of the room, but instead, she merges her identity with that of the perpetrator. In this syndrome, referred to as “fusion with the perpetrator, “ the child identifies with him during the abuse, adopting a pornographic perspective toward her own body as “other.” Because of her complete lack of agency, it is safer to identify with the experience of the perpetrator than with her own. The child who experiences fusion during the trauma learns, as a survival skill, to become aroused by her own pain, fear, and humiliation.

Most survivors split off not only the incest, but also various emotional affects associated with the experience. The child whose natural instinct would be to fight off or even kill her assailant is obviously in a dilemma if this assailant is a primary caregiver on whom her survival depends. In cases of incest, normal healthy emotional responses can jeopardize the life of a child and she may develop completely various dissociative states to store these taboo and life-threatening emotions and behaviors. Rage at her rapist and grief at the betrayal are two of the strongest and most taboo emotions for the survivor, and it may be very difficult for the victim to access these, even later in life, because of her early association of these emotions with life-threatening conditions.

Getting back to How I Learned to Drive and the Pulitzer… Ms. Vogel’s play is an accurate depiction of a certain type of incest, in which the girl is older and the perpetrator is not violent and poses as someone supportive of her interests. In situations like these, it is common for the victim to feel complicitous, to mistake the perpetrator’s predation for a “relationship,” and to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. Her confusion stems from the still-necessary repression of rage and grief.

Does this have anything to do with its official recognition? I maintain that it has everything to do with it. The key to that Pulitzer lies in what is missing from the canon: the incest play from the perspective of a recovered survivor—the survivor who has integrated her rage and her grief and who understands her experience in the context of a male-dominant culture dependent on the sexual subordination of women.

Ms. Vogel’s play was praised for the “humanity” with which she treated her subject. She was also praised for depicting the “complexity” (read “mutuality?”) of incest, the fact that is not always so “black and white.” They praised her even-handedness in the sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrator, the confusion of the victim. In other words, the majority of the critics were not noticing that the point-of-view was pathological, that the victim was still deeply dissociative. But in order to
notice this, they would have to notice the lack of anger or grief. I submit that her critics did not miss the anger or grief at all, and, furthermore, I submit that she received the Pulitzer precisely because that anger and that grief were missing. She told an incest story in which there is not political context, in which the act itself is as isolated as a tree falling in the woods, in which the perpetrator is not a sadistic predator, but “merely” a loser. Her survivor is resigned, superior, moving on. How poignant, how handy.

How I Learned to Drive is not the only dissociative narrative being valorized as the whole story. There are several well-known performance artists, women and self-declared survivors of horrendous sexual abuse, who tour to colleges and universities where they take their clothes off and even recreate scenarios of sexual abuse in the name of sexually liberating themselves or protesting the
objectification of women. Performance art critics have written tomes of theory about these artists, none of which incorporates a shred of theory about trauma and recovery.

What if these “radical porn feminist activists” are actually partially-recovered survivors still in the “acting out” phase of early recovery? What if the replication of traumatic scenarios under these more controlled and therefore subjectively more empowering circumstances (no pimps, no johns) is part of their process in integrating? What if the audience is watching an unrecovered survivor
parade her pathologies in front of us in an articulate, but still incoherent attempt to tell her story and integrate? What if these are not sexually liberated adult women at all, but women who are still slaves to their traumatized childhoods?

One sure way of finding out would be to compare their performances and their narratives to the work of recovered survivors, whose narratives incorporate anger toward the perpetrator and a full sense of the lost entitlement of safety and agency, with the cultural context in which their abuse occurred as subtext. But these narratives are conspicuous in their absence. The story of the fully integrated
survivor is missing, even as the survivor who sentimentalizes her perpetrator or who recreates her own abuse for mass consumption receives the official endorsement of the mainstream.

Why aren’t more women noticing and protesting this absence, this censorship? Well, let’s imagine we are at a play right now. And let’s assume that those of you who are listening to this paper are the audience. Let’s break it down: Half of you are women. For every three women in the audience, one will have been sexually abused as a child, most likely in a situation involving incest with a male
perpetrator. Let us consider that those women, those women who comprise one third of the female audience. Do they remember at all? Many will not. If these women do remember, how have they dealt with it? More to the point, with whom are they sitting? Probably with family. Would those seat companions be there if she remembered, if she told? If the companion is a spouse, would he welcome the inevitable disinheritance, the stigma, the disruption of childcare arrangements, the
awkwardness at family gatherings? Is he up for the financial and emotional demands of the healing process? If she’s there with parents, would she lose one? Both? And how many siblings? Most of these women will have tried to forget or ignore. Frequently they are helped out in this by dissociative disorders which keep the memory conveniently disconnected from the emotions, which have been hermetically sealed off in other parts of the psyche. And here How I Learned to Drive, with its deeply dissociative heroine, will provide reassurance and validation. This play will be much more comfortable for the woman in denial than a play about a recovered survivor.

If these survivors in our audience are inclined to be religious, they can mistake this dissociation for forgiveness or transcendence, as did the critics of How I Learned to Drive. Forgiveness and transcendence are both endorsed as feminine virtues in ways that anger or a sense of entitlement are not.

But maybe these women in our audience have forged an entire identity from their fusion with the perpetrator. Maybe they experience themselves as sexually liberated, because they revel in the recreations of scenarios of their abuse. Certainly a pornographically-inclined partner will not be likely to complain. In fact, mainstream culture will endorse the woman who enjoys acting out sexually against herself. One could, in fact, make the case that this is the point of incest. If this third
of our female audience is still experiencing fusion with the perpetrator, they might enjoy the work of performers who treat their own bodies as “other,” and who arouse themselves with self-violation.

But what if this audience is not identified with the perpetrator? Then they are likely to react to this kind of “performance art” with sexual shock, retreating into the various dissociative states to which they have become habituated. Or maybe they are further along in their healing than the performer and they are feeling anger toward the rest of the audience for their exploitation of an obvious survivor. But if these women express this opinion, if they protest what is going on, or if they walk
out of the theatre, they will be labeled puritans, members of the sex police, feminazis. They are greatly at risk of calling attention to themselves as survivors, which is very dangerous in a situation where sexual predation is being encouraged. She may feel trapped with dangerous perceptions she
cannot articulate. If she is on a road to integrating, she may be forced back into splitting, and this is tremendously destructive of the healing process.

What is my point?

My point is that the canon is skewed, that the depictions of child sexual abuse that are allowed serve an agenda to marginalize the voice of the recovered survivor. My point is that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing on the stage, nor can we theorize about it, until we have allowed all the voices of incest survivors to be heard, and especially the voices of those who have integrated
their experience and who can make the larger connections between a culture that looks the other way when girls are raped and then turns around and markets their damaged sexuality as role models for all women.

[Originally presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, Toronto, 1999.]

There are two things to keep in mind when adapting historical material for the stage: 1) Tell the truth. 2) Entertain. These are not as easy as they sound. Real life is often incoherent and boring. It does not follow a neat dramatic arc, and few us ever gain closure for the big tragedies in our lives. Misfortune is arbitrary, injustices are seldom redressed, and very few of us end up with what we think we deserve. The bad guys do appear to win, and all kinds of folks get away with murder.

Theatre, as playwrights know, cannot make allowances for the disorderliness of real life, because it has its hands full with a reality of its own: real people in real (often uncomfortable) seats, observing performances with real actors that are taking place in real, contemporaneous time. For this reason, a play must do certain very specific things, and it must do them within relatively rigid time frames. For example, within the first few minutes, the audience must have a very clear understanding of what they are watching and why. If, after ten minutes, they are still struggling for context, they are likely to become frustrated or bored—unable to invest themselves in the game of “let’s pretend,” which is what puts the “live” in “live theatre.”

Ideally, at the halfway mark, something should occur to substantially raise the stakes. After all, the audience’s investment in terms of time and attention is mounting, and the playwright has an obligation to up the ante. If the audience engagement is everything it should be, they should be needing some kind of “seventh-inning stretch” about three-quarters of the way through. And then, of course, there are those last three minutes, for a definitive resolution or a definitive commitment to non-resolution. (“Game called on account of rain…”)

In fact, thinking about theatre in terms of a spectator sport might be more useful than storytelling. A good play should keep the audience literally on the edge of their seats, like a football game that’s gone into overtime.

So there is this issue of craft. The historical truth must be bent to fit the framework. A tight play that plays fast and loose with historical facts will work far better than a poorly structured play with rigid adherence to biographical chronology.  The playwright must be willing and able to take liberties. These are separate issues. The willingness means being able to step away from the research, to lose the sense of reverence for the literal, biographical truth. The playwright needs to make the character live, and she can only do this by breathing her own life force into the character.

This is dramaturgical CPR is a process. The playwright probably has a passion for the historical subject, and it can feel blasphemous and presumptuous to appropriate the facts.  Sometimes I have to remind myself that a poorly written play will not be much of a tribute to my subject… or myself!

The first few drafts are usually hybrids, lumbering awkwardly down the runway of my imagination, still encumbered by weighty historical detail. The prototypes become lighter, more streamlined, and somewhere around the fourth draft, there is usually dramaturgical lift-off.

Outside permission may also be required, because adapting history can raise legal issues of libel, privacy, or copyright violation. Is the adaptation going to involve text from letters, journals, or other documents? Who owns the rights for these materials? Is the playwright intending to adapt a book? The Dramatists Guild is a great resource for contracts, as well as information about using historical characters. Their website has publications that address a number of pertinent questions.

Adapting does involve special circumstances, but the bottom line is still the same: high stakes and uncertain outcome.


Sample adaptation:

From Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter

CALAMITY JANE: I met Bill when I was still wet behind the ears. Just a kid. See I was orphaned when I was fourteen, and I learned to hustle pretty good… (To herself.) Had to. (After a pause, she turns back to the audience.) First time we met, we was in a poker game together, an’ I beat him. I beat him real bad. Bill don’t like to lose, ‘specially with folks watchin,’ so he rears up an’ calls me a cheater. So I says… (Slowly, savoring the moment.) “Hickok, you play cards so dumb I’d have to cheat to lose!” (Smiling.) Well… everybody’s laughin’ at that one, so he pulls out his gun, an’ then Molly behind the bar yells out… (Imitating a shrill female voice.) “Put that back, Bill! That there’s a gal!” (Smiling.) Well, that done it! He just stands there lookin’ at me like a hog starin’ at a wristwatch. An’ then all of a sudden he throws his gun on the table an’ hollers, “Drinks for the house …!” (Hoisting the bottle.) “… I want all of ya’ll to drink to this here gal—the finest poker player in the Territories!”

[Originally published in Seasons:The Quarterly Journal of the International Centre for Women Playwrights, July 2010.]

There are many challenges in writing lesbian-feminist plays, and today I want to talk about two of them. The first is working without antecedents in the popular consciousness, without a canon of lesbian dramatic work from which to draw. The second is the particular kind of audience response to the work which generally results from this lack of a cultural context.

Playwriting is an intensely compressed art form, taking place in a single location, over a two-hour period of time, with real human beings. Plays rely on narrative and dramaturgical conventions in order to work around these restrictions. Conventions are a form of shorthand, based on common cultural assumptions. They involve familiar paradigms and archetypes, and also stereotypes. Unfortunately, the narrative and dramaturgical conventions I inherited came from 2,000 years of theatre written by, for, about, and serving the interests of men. The lesbian character does not fit into the patriarchal paradigm except as an object of ridicule, pity, disgust, or prurient interest. The lesbian can be the superfluous spinster, or the male sexual fantasy, or the vampiric seducer of women all of whom would otherwise presumably become compliant heterosexual wives and girlfriends. And, of course, the lesbian character can be a tormented outcast who kills herself. Obviously, within this paradigm I could not tell the stories I wanted, the stories that reflected my truth.

An even more serious problem with this lack of authentic models is the fact that the lesbian-feminist paradigm, aside from being new and unfamiliar, is also inherently hostile to the patriarchal project. The lesbian experience is hugely shaped by compulsory heterosexuality, which is so pervasive in the patriarchal models that it is just taken for granted. The fish does not know it is wet. But the lesbian looking down into the pool sees the fish, sees the water, feels the hands that, since birth, have been inexorably pushing her toward the edge of the pool, and, knowing she cannot swim or does not want to learn, she must resist. To tell the story of that resistance is to draw attention to the existence of the pool and the hands that push--something that, in my experience, most men and many women are very uncomfortable hearing about. To make explicit, as I do in the play Ugly Ducklings, the negative effects of this pushing on girls who may still be rooted in a world outside the pool is to invite criticism and even censorship.
 
Similarly, the lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs some of the most venerated archetypes of patriarchal theatre, beginning with the patriarch. In this model, which does not disguise the fact that women have historically been barred from positions of power and authority--often by violence--the male hero does not come off looking quite so godlike. The lesbian-feminist playwright sees, notes, and foregrounds the masses of women whose appropriated power props him up. She states how his exercise of power perpetuates her and their oppression. He actually begins to look like an enemy, and a cowardly one at that. In the lesbian-feminist paradigm, women, typically depicted by the mainstream culture as vying with each other for his sexual attention or approval, turn to each other as more empowering, enjoyable, and appropriate companions and partners.

The lesbian-feminist archetype deconstructs the patriarchal archetype of the so-called "good" woman, the compliant woman who privileges the interests of others--especially men--at her own expense. Not only does her behavior appear foolish and self-hating, but it also appears immoral in the lesbian-feminist paradigm, because female self-effacement enables the patriarchy that is systematically destroying the planet.

Writing the lesbian-feminist play requires a rejection of the models, assumptions and expectations of the traditional Western canon. This is hard work. It is the work of decolonizing oneself. The resistance to it comes from inside the playwright's own head as well as from the world around her. Necessary disciplines of isolation and attention to one's own experience can translate into anti-social behaviors and self-absorption. Both are occupational hazards, but they are seldom appreciated as suchCeven by the playwright herself, who may be wondering "what is wrong with me?" This has been by far my most serious oppression.

Fortunately for me, even though there was no visible, substantial body of lesbian-feminist dramatic work, there was a huge, vibrant, radical, radiant, life-saving, fire-breathing body of lesbian-feminist fiction, history, theory, poetry, music, and art. I began writing in 1986, and I can honestly say that had I been born ten years earlier or ten years later, I would have never been able to write a play like Ugly Ducklings--or any of my other plays. I feel incredibly blessed to have begun my career when I did, and I am incredibly grieved about the fact that women who came of age in the 1980=s and later are so often completely unaware of this amazing heritage of radical feminist literature from the Second Wave. Much of it is out of print. With the demise of the women=s bookstores and the women-in-print movement during the late 1980=s and early 90=s, there have been fewer and fewer institutions or publications for centralizing the work and facilitating access to it.

One of the books that was foundational for me as a writer was Dale Spender's Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. I recommend it to every woman who wants to write. It explained why I had no role models in theatre and it explains why I am censored today and why you cannot find many of the books that inspired my work. It explains why my work will be lost after I die. Unless, of course, I commit a high-profile suicide. More on that subject later.

In any event, I did have models for my content. I turned to the writings of Andrea Dworkin, Anita Cornwell, Audre Lorde, Christos, Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Daly, Julia Penelope, Phyllis Chesler, Barbara Smith, Cherrie MoragaCas well as the tremendous collections of radical feminist writings by lesbians without big names, lesbians writing about their experiences on the land collectives, women documenting projects, publishing women's newspapers, etc. I was fortunate enough to be living contemporaneously with some of my mentors, and I have had the great privilege of meeting many and even befriending some. The majority of us were banned from the academy just by virtue of being "out," and this was a great class leveler, granting us precious permission to write without fear of ridicule or class comparisons. It also enabled radical thinking. If they're going to hang you for stealing a chicken, you may as well steal a horse. And so we did. Whole stables. Also, the economy was such that few of us had student debt, we could survive on part-time, minimum-wage jobs, and so we had the time and energy to create our own culture. I feel a lot of rage about the fact that working-class women and even some middle-class women no longer have that leisure.
 
The point I am making here is that art is not created in a vacuum. Not even the most brilliant woman can write without precedents. She will either use--and use at her peril--the ones that are hers by default--the mainstream, patriarchal ones that bombard us 24/7, or else she must actively seek out the feminist ones that will enable her to tell the story that empowers her.

But content was not enough. I also needed plays to use for models. Combing through the mainstream canon, I could find no radical feminist models, with the exception of a few highly encoded scenes from Gertrude Stein operas, a handful of one-act Suffrage plays, and a little one-act treasure called Trifles, by Susan Glaspell--and I did direct and produce all of these. But I needed successful, full-length, large-cast plays for models. I was going to have to locate the mainstream plays that most closely resembled the one I was intending to write. I was going to have to close my eyes to the content, and tease out the elements of structure that I could apply to my work. This is a dance familiar to many a native artist whose own tradition has been banned, stolen, corrupted or destroyed. I do experience my lesbian identity as a colonized one.

I found three plays, and I want to take some time to talk about them, because they illustrate so beautifully the problem of assimilation, or attempting to tell a partial lesbian truth without making it radical--"radical" as "down to the roots." All three of these plays were attempting to change attitudes about gender. All three of them, in my opinion, did more to further entrench the stereotypes than they did to challenge them. I have no doubt the hearts of the playwrights were in the right place. But it is the structural mechanics, often relying on those dramaturgical conventions, that undermined the message.

Patriarchal Culture is a shopping cart with a bad wheel. It steers to the right, unless there is an intentional and constant effort to wrench it back to the leftCin order to get it centered. I want to say that again, because it's such a critical point in my survival. I live and work under career house arrest. I can write whatever I like, but I cannot make a living at it. I cannot find venues for it. My work is not allowed to leave the house. Why? Because I am always wrenching to the left. I would not have to do that in a culture that was authentically gender-neutral. I must wrench because the cart is rigged in the direction of male dominance/female subordination.

So I dug out three former Broadway hits that dealt with issues of gender and sexual orientation in same-sex environments for children.

The first play, Tea and Sympathy, was written by Robert Anderson in 1953. It was an attempt to advocate for the so-called effeminate boy at a boarding school--the boy who prefers the company of women to his rowdy male peers, the boy who's artistically inclined, is not an athlete, and has no interest in sex for its own sake. This advocacy backfired, however, because the play never left the sexually colonized paradigm of heteropatriarchy. It never challenged the essentialist notion of manhood. At the very end of the play, the effeminate, scapegoated student is seduced by his macho housemaster's wife, and this act supposedly rescues him from the questions in his own mind--and in the mind of his audience--about his sexual orientation. His so-called manhood is doubly redeemed in this incestuous scenario, because, by his initiation, he not only "becomes a man" but also succeeds in stealing his enemy's wife.
 
In fairness to Anderson, his play went as far as it dared. Within the paradigm of heteropatriarchy, he did manage to make the point that effeminate men might be more courageous, more appealing to women, more heterosexual than the macho, athletic men who prefer the company of males socially. But in winning that battle, the playwright lost the war. Tea and Sympathy increased the marginalization of gay males--affirming through Tom's example, that they just hadn't found the right woman to rescue them yet.

The second play that dealt with sexual orientation issues in a same-sex environment for children was The Children's Hour, written in 1932 by Lillian Hellman. This play was inspired by an actual trial that took place in Scotland in 1810. Two women who ran a school for girls were accused by one of the students, who claimed to have witnessed them engaging in sexual behavior with each other. Hellman was careful to make the point in interviews that the play was not about lesbianism, but about "the power of a lie." She was defending the right of women to be self-sufficient and to live without men, without being accused of lesbianism. This is a far from dated theme. Most current plays and films about single women go to extraordinary lengths to reassure audiences about not only the heterosexual orientation of the characters, but also their silliness and subordination in relation to men.

For Hellman to make her point, lesbianism must be represented as heinous. If she equivocates on this point at all, it is only in the final moments of the play, when one of the women realizes that her feelings may actually be lesbian. Within minutes of this confession, she kills herself--leaving it up to the audience to decide whether or not this is a tragedy or a necessary consequence.

The Children's Hour was less useful to me than Tea and Sympathy, because it did not work that well dramaturgically. It plays like a melodrama. But, again, it reflected mainstream attitudes toward lesbianism that are still rampant, and it provided a kind of foil for my own play.

The third play was the German classic Children in Uniform, adapted from the film Mädchen in Uniform adapted from a book by Christa Winsloe. This took place in a Prussian girls' boarding school, and actually depicted a butch student and her crush on the female teacher who showed her some tenderness in the otherwise harsh and regimented environment of the school. The film was released in the last years of the Weimar Republic, and critics are quick to point out that it represents an allegory about retaining humanity in a totalitarian environment. Interestingly, critics still fail to identify Winsloe=s intentional depiction of lesbianism as a locus of resistance.

This play was the closest to what I wanted to do in Ugly Ducklings, in that it was sympathetic to the lesbian characters. But the play is not without problems. Winsloe intends us to view the teacher as a martyr, but today's audiences find her relationship with the students inappropriate. Also, in the book Manuela kills herself at the end, leaping from the roof of the school. When the film was made, two alternate endings were shot--one where the suicide was completed and one where it was intercepted. By the time the play was written, box office had obviously weighed in in favor of the intercepted suicide, but it is an obviously pasted-on, fake happy ending. Dramaturgically, all the action is pointed to the necessity, even the inevitability, of Manuela's suicide.

And I want to take a minute with lesbian suicide, because it is such a central theme in my play and in our culture. Lesbian suicide is a nifty ending for lesbian plays, because it offers the audience an opportunity to feel they can empathize with the character's suffering without feeling that they are enabling an identity that troubles their notions about gender or morality. Most of us can afford to feel charitable toward the dead.
 
Consider the 1991 film Thelma and Louise. They are survivors of male violence. They are outlaws. They have killed a would-be rapist. They are on the run. And finally, they indulge in a passionate, lip-locked, lesbianic kiss. Now, in the lesbian paradigm, that would be the turning point, the beginning of their journey out of the nightmare: They kiss, they look at each other, they yell "yee-haw"--and then they get down to the business of survival. They ditch the car. They dye their hair. They go underground on any one of the dozens of women=s lands all over the U.S. They're in Arizona, right? They could go to Adobeland. Or Apache Junction, which is an entire village of lesbians. They get healthy. They heal. They make love. They change their diets. They do yoga. They dance under the full moon. They build a hay bale house. They go to the women's festivals. They make their own clothes or just don't wear any. They get wilder and more politically clear-eyed every minute. They dedicate themselves to women, to the environment. They have a zillion delicious options. But in the movie, they go off a cliff. In the patriarchal paradigm that is all they can do after that kiss. Lesbianism is a fate worse than death. The movie may be dated, but it is still one of the very few that dares to depict girl buddies who retaliate against perpetrators. The ending is not accidental, nor is the timing of the kissCcoming after the decision to commit double suicide. (Twenty years later, Million-Dollar Baby has not traveled far. The empowered woman with fighting skills must ultimately desire her own suicide.)

There are two plots in Ugly Ducklings. One is the coming-out story of a closeted, middle-class counselor who has fallen in love with an out, working-class counselor. The second plot concerns a deeply disturbed adolescent butch and a ten-year-old camper who has a crush on her. The adolescent lesbian acts out intense, internalized homophobia to deflect attention from herself, and the target she chooses is the ten-year-old. The ten-year-old, terrified by the scapegoating, attempts to hang herself on the stage. This attempt is intercepted by the two counselors, and in the course of the intervention, the closeted counselor outs herself. The child is saved, the lesbian lovers, on their way out of patriarchy, are reconciled.

I submitted this play to a well-known, mainstream theater in D.C. several years ago. They considered producing it. The script was circulated among the staff. They had a meeting about it. In the end, they rejected it on the grounds that it was too pedagogical. I was puzzled by this. Pedagogical... meaning preachy? I went back through the script. There's only one preaching or teaching speech in the entire play, and that's the speech at the end of the play delivered to the child with a rope around her neck. It is definitely pedagogical, because the child has internalized some very bad pedagogy that's going to kill her. In the speech, the counselor explains how being lesbian is something like being born left-handed. Absolutely pedagogical, no question about it, and also dramaturgically justified. In fact, there was nothing else I could have put in that spot--unless, of course, I wanted the child to die. What this theatre was telling me was that the difference between art and propaganda was the death of the child. Kill her, it's art, and they'll produce it. Let her live, it's propaganda, and no production.
 
I kept my thoughts to myself for several years, but when the show was mounted last spring by Venus Productions, also in D.C., I had reason to reconsider my silence. The reviews were strong. We had an endorsement from the NPR affiliate station. The show was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for best new play of the year. And yet there were reviewers who took issue with the end of the play. Metro Weekly complained that the ending was "too neat, never takes advantage of ... lucrative opportunities to wrap up her dawdling script."
"Lucrative?" Interesting choice of words. "Dawdling?" The child with the noose around her neck ... as in "let's get on with it?" Potomac Stages praised my restraint (whatever what that means), at least until "the final scene when it turns preachy and, as a result, becomes artificial and off-putting." Why is letting the lesbian live perceived as "artificial?"  I have no comment whatsoever as to the application of the word "off-putting" to the rescue a child from hanging.

At risk of sounding like a touchy artiste, I submit that the intensity of the criticisms that have been so single-mindedly focused on pressuring me to change the ending of this play are in direct proportion to the success of that scene. If you are doing radical feminist work, and you are doing it well, and particularly if you are doing lesbian-feminist work, you will know the power of your work in exact proportion to the resistance you encounter. Never mistake it for a sign you are on the wrong path. We all must wrench, and wrench again, and keep wrenching as long as we are in the toxic, misogynist current of a male dominant culture. Do not ever apologize for that. And don't even think about changing your ending!


[The following was first delivered as a paper for the New England Women's Studies Conference in March, 2005. Originally published as "In Search of a Lesbian Stage Tradition," in The International Gay and Lesbian Review, Issue 14.2, March/April, 2007, Cambridge.]

There comes a time in a woman’s life when she just has to leave her husband at home with his mistress, toss her suitcase in a roadster, and head Downeast for a little timeout with her new, butch girlfriend. In July 1933, that’s exactly what First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did. The roadster was a light blue Buick with a white convertible top, and the girlfriend was hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok, aka “Hick.” Their itinerary took them north to Québec, and then over to the Gaspé Peninsula, and then down the Maine coast. Traveling without benefit of the Secret Service, the two women enjoyed a madcap junket down endless dirt roads, sleeping in a cottage without plumbing, and indulging in nighttime tickle-fests.

Eleanor’s road trip remains emblematic of much of Maine’s lesbian history: hidden in plain view. Now that Maine has adopted a law legalizing same-sex marriage, perhaps it’s time to unpack the closet and take a little road trip through Maine’s lesbian history.

Reversing the direction taken by Hick and the First Lady, our first stop will be in the south… South Berwick, to be exact, where we find the home of Sarah Orne Jewett, one of Maine’s most celebrated authors. Jewett’s 1896 collection of short stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs, about a fictional fishing village called Dunnet Landing (said to be modeled on Tenants Harbor) is considered an American classic, a distinctly female contribution to a catalog of testosterone-charged war epics and whaling sagas. Critics have noted that Jewett’s villages appear to be peopled almost exclusively by women, the men all being dead, away at sea, or senile.

But then Sarah always did prefer the girls. Her early poetry testifies to heartbreaking attempts to secure the affections of young women, but few of these girlfriends could support themselves as Jewett did, and perhaps even fewer were willing to forego the joys of motherhood for a same-sex relationship. It was not until she met wealthy widow Annie Fields (pet name “Fuffatee”) that she was able to consummate her longing for a life partner, living in what was known as a “Boston Marriage” from 1881 until her death in 1909.

Next stop is Portland, where we drop in on the Maine Women Writers Collection, housed in a wing of the library at the University of New England. And here we have struck the mother lode: The collection houses not only writings by Jewett, but it also has inherited the library of lesbian author May Sarton, who moved to York in 1973, the same year her most famous book, Journal of a Solitude, was published. The roster of her library reads like a Who’s Who of Second Wave lesbian-feminist writers. In 1965, when Sarton published her lesbian novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, an entire generation of young women responded to her courageous call by discovering and celebrating their own Sapphic voices.

The Maine Women Writers Collection houses another treasure: the first lesbian novel ever published in America. Who knew that the woman who would donate her mansion for what would become the Portland Art Museum was also responsible for Ethel’s Love Life? Published in 1859, the book describes how a naïve, young fiancée finds herself passionately involved with another woman, making the remarkable discovery that, “Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do men.” Author Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat may have been writing autobiographically, because later she published a book of lesbian love poems, taking care to closet her dedications.

It’s time to head north, this time to Southport Island, summer home of Rachel Carson. Wait a minute—Rachel Carson? Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the book that warned of the dangers of pesticides and saved the planet? The founder of the environmental movement? That Rachel Carson? What’s she doing on a lesbian road trip?

It appears that Ms. Carson had a lifelong history of passionate attachments to women. At the age of forty-five, she began spending her summers on Southport Island, where she developed what biographers coyly call “an intimate friendship” with her neighbor Dorothy Freeman, who was fifty-five, a grandmother, and in a long-term marriage she had no intention of disrupting. Rachel, with a history of financially supporting her mother, a disabled niece, and the niece’s out-of-wedlock child, appears to have been very comfortable with the arrangement.

But was it lesbian? The “intimate friendship” spanned the last ten years of Rachel’s life, and during the winters when the women lived hundreds of miles apart, they wrote letters to each other several times a week. These letters, published in 1995, make mention of the need to destroy certain letters immediately upon reading and discuss the need for Dorothy to enclose an extra letter that might be suitable for Rachel to share with her mother, in case she were to ask. There is a breathless series of letters leading up to a rendezvous in a Manhattan hotel, where Rachel jokes about how she will feign a chilly greeting for the benefit of the desk clerk.

Intimate friends or lesbians? You say “potato” and I say “potahto.”

On to Camden, home of tomboy “Vincent” Millay, known to the rest of the world as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. One evening, at a party at Camden’s Heritage Inn, where her sister was working, young Vincent regaled the summer people with a rendition of her poetry. She apparently made an impression on one of the guests, a woman named Caroline Dow, who took the working-class Vincent under her wing and began introducing her to a network of other powerful and—significantly—unmarried women. Dow took her protégée to New York, bought her a wardrobe, coached her in social graces, and pulled strings to get her into Vassar. At Vassar, Millay’s lesbian affairs were so flagrant, Dow, possibly fearing for her own reputation, sent Vincent a letter threatening her with complete withdrawal of her patronage if she did not break them off. It is after this point, Millay began to show an interest in  men.

And now, the last stop on the tour… Mount Desert Island. In the town of Northeast Harbor is a charming white house with a sign on the lawn that reads, “Petit Plaisance.” Appointments can be made to tour this home of author Marguerite Youcenar, the first woman ever to be inducted into that bastion of literary male chauvinism, the Académie française. Yourcenar, a French citizen, was on a visit to the States to be with her lover Grace Frick when war broke out in Europe. Stranded here for the duration, she acquired a teaching job at Sarah Lawrence and settled into a domestic routine with Grace. The two would travel up to Mount Desert Island in the summers, eventually establishing a year-round residence. Yourcenar and Frick were partners from 1937 until Frick’s death in 1979.  Bar Harbor was also summer home to the family of celebrated lesbian author and Parisian salonist Natalie Barney, who brought her lover, poet Renée Vivien, for a visit in 1900.

And this concludes our road trip, which is by no means comprehensive. How many other celebrated Maine so-called spinsters, like Rangeley’s famous hunting guide “Fly Rod” Crosby, or Brunswick’s noted botanist Kate Furbish, might have led closeted lesbian lives? It’s cause for celebration to be able to reclaim this history, with hopes for the day when all of Maine’s brilliant lesbians can live openly and with pride.

[Originally published in The Portland Phoenix, June 24, 2009.]

 The bathroom has been a site of "gender anxiety" historically, as well as a battlefield, and, although it is tempting to write this off to ignorance about gender and fanatical, knee-jerk policing of the "gender binary," the issue goes deeper than this.

Rapists do choose public bathrooms as sites of sexual predation, and the presence of men in traditionally female spaces is often dangerous. On the other hand, there is a biological and cultural gender continuum among humans, and a gender binary is oppressive and dangerous for people who are not easily identified, or who do not identify, as male or female. Transgender women and masculine women are harassed and humiliated when we attempt to use public facilities. What is the "politically correct" attitude toward gender presentation when the ability to identify a stranger's biological sex in an isolated environment can be a question of life or death? What happens when queer theory butts up against the intensely polarized reality of male violence against women?

These were the questions on my mind when I wrote The Ladies' Room, a six-minute play about a bathroom confrontation. The play opens in a ladies' room at a shopping mall. A woman has just gone to report to the security guard that there is a man in the bathroom. The "man" is actually Rae, a teenage, lesbian butch. Angry and humiliated in front of her partner, Rae is hurling taunts and insults directed toward the woman complainant. Her teen girlfriend, Nicole, is uncomfortable about the dynamic, and the two begin to argue.

When Nicole expresses concern that public bathrooms are the third most common public site for sexual assault, Rae ridicules her for buying into an urban myth. As Nicole defends herself, it becomes apparent that she has been a victim of a stranger rape in a public space. Rae is emotionally overwhelmed by this information. At this point, her accuser is seen returning with the security guard, and Rae has to make a decision about how to respond.

Responses to the play have been strong and personal, especially by women who experience frequent challenges about their sexual identity. In my play, Rae chooses not to run away at the end, but to go out to meet the security guard and voluntarily offer her gender credentials in the form of her driver's license. Several women took exception to that ending, feeling that Rae was enabling of her own oppression in making that gesture. One of my critics, who has experienced humiliating official pat-downs in airport bathrooms, expressed the belief that the women who challenge her appearance are not concerned about rape, but are just trying to impose their class-based sense of a "gender dress code."

Another masculine woman, who actually lived a passing life as a man for several years, took a different approach. She was a victim of a gang rape, and she told me that when she is confronted in bathrooms, she draws attention to the fact that she has breasts and is a woman, and then she thanks her accuser for her vigilance. This woman identifies as a radical feminist, and, for her, it is a priority not to shame her confronters or in any way, punish them, or make them uncomfortable for their vigilance about the possibility of a man being in a woman's space.

The two actors who performed the play this summer at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival shared their own recent experience with unisex bathrooms. They had attended a large conference for queer-identified youth, and one of the first things the attendees did was to convert all of the bathrooms on their hotel floor to "gender-free." The actors commented that women using these bathrooms were constantly exposed to the sight of men's genitals, as the men were using the urinals and also leaving the doors open to the stalls when they used them. The women reported their feelings of shock and discomfort, noting that it would not have been safe for them to express these responses in the context of the conference, which was focused on the safety of trans youth.

The controversial ending of The Ladies' Room was not intended to represent a solution. In the play, the character makes the gesture as an attempt to remedy her perceived insensitivity to her partner's rape history. The play is designed to initiate dialogue between feminists and genderqueer allies.

[Originally published in On the Issues: The Progressive Woman's Magazine, August 18, 2009.]

It was in Boulder, Colorado, and the year was 1972. I was twenty—not old enough to drink, but somehow old enough to have gotten myself married and divorced and fifteen hundred miles from home—if I could call it that. And I didn’t.

I was working on the second floor of J. C. Penneys, in the fabric department. The important thing to remember here is that the second floor of Penneys was where they sold piece goods, baby clothes, and draperies. Everything else was on the ground floor, off the mall. Nobody ever came up to the second floor except women—women who had babies, who sewed, and who decorated. And this is where I saw my first lesbians. Or, at least, it was the first time I identified the experience as such.

They were a couple, I remember—a butch and a fem. The butch was in her forties, dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her breasts were not apparent. She wore her black hair slicked back in a style left over from the fifties, a “duck’s ass” or “DA.” The skin on her face was leathery and tan, with hard lines around the eyes and the mouth. And her hands were in her pockets.

Her companion was everything she was not—except, of course, a lesbian. She appeared to be at least ten years younger, a blonde—although perhaps not a natural one, and she wore tight blue jeans, but not bellbottoms. These were working-class women, or what we anti-war, student-hippie types would call “greasers.”  She was shorter than her companion, and she wore makeup and earrings. Her hair was styled in a kind of bouffant look that was the shellacked, feminine counterpart of the DA.

The femme was buying fabric, and she was anxious that her purchase be pleasing to her companion. The butch appeared to be very uncomfortable with finding herself on the second floor of J.C. Penneys, and she answered her partner in a surly and self-conscious manner. She told her she didn’t know anything about this kind of “stuff.”

I remember that I shared the fem’s anxiety about pleasing this woman. I wanted her to know that I also cared, that I welcomed her presence in my department—was honored by it, even. I wanted to protect her from my co-workers who might be startled by her appearance, who might make judgments, who might even try to exchange a look with me. I wanted her to know that I would not side with them against her, that I would never be like one of them. I wanted her to smile at me, and, of course, she never did.
 
I think of this butch woman now, and I wonder what she made of the lesbians who must have just been emerging in Boulder—my generation of lesbians—young women in hiking boots with hairy legs and hairy armpits, neither butch nor fem, taking and teaching self-defense and auto repair classes, starting carpentry collectives, and organizing women’s clinics and women’s presses and women’s bookstores and women’s festivals. Lesbians fighting and loving and trashing and marching and mimeographing, smashing the state, taking back the night, giving peace a chance, making love not war. Feminists and Marxists and communists and vegetarians. Lesbians with speculums looking at each other’s cervices, lesbians with vibrators learning how to have orgasms, lesbians with kiwis, with zucchinis, with bananas, with cucumbers. Lesbians in threesomes and foursomes, in marriages, in families, in collectives, in cooperatives, in tents, in tepees, in yurts, in cabins, in dormitories. Lesbians quoting Ti-Grace Atkinson, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Valerie Solanas.

What must this butch have thought of this veritable explosion of latter-day tribadists? What could she have thought? Where in her centuries of oppression could she find any reason to trust women, even lesbians, who were not like herself? With the unerring instinct of the hunted, she would have concluded, and rightly, that the lesbians of the early seventies were dangerous to her.
Had she smiled at me on that second floor of J.C. Penney’s, or shared a look that admitted to her vulnerability or—worse yet—solicited my support, I would have betrayed her, and in a heartbeat.

It was this perpetual knowledge of an ever-present potential for betrayal that had etched the hard, hard lines around her eyes and her mouth. It was this knowledge that the fem was hoping to soften, to erase for just a moment, in the manufacture of some article of clothing for herself, for her lover, for their home, that would signify a kind of normalcy, a kind of belongingness that could never be a reality for a woman who had to run daily a gauntlet of scorn, violence, and contempt that would have killed an ordinary woman. And so her eyes never met mine, because they never missed a thing.

[Originally published in Chokecherries Anthology, Society of the Muse of the Southwest, Taos, NM, 2011]

[Originally published in On the Issues, June 28, 2012.]


As a playwright attempting to reclaim the lesbian lives of historic women athletes like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, I run into a peculiar brand of homophobia.

Writing about women athletes is a joy. Women athletes defy expectations and societal norms. They run their own races. They inspire and they revolutionize. This is why slamming into their closets is such a jolt and disappointment.

Yes, it's true that lesbians in the spotlight have historically needed to disguise their orientation. The penalties for deviance from the heterosexual template have been swift and severe. This was especially true for women athletes, who, by the very nature of their achievements, posed a challenge to the tenets of femininity. (They had muscles and they were competing!) The media, and sometimes even fans, were all too eager to find some excuse to invalidate their achievements. For homophobes, uncovering lesbian identity provided a comforting assurance that the athlete could not be a "real woman."

But that was then and this is now. Or is it?

I call the homophobia that I encounter in telling about their lives "misguided allegiance homophobia." In this permutation folks insist that these historic figures would not be pleased by being outed posthumously; that honoring their lives requires honoring their closets and perpetuating the fictions they so carefully constructed.

Babe Didrikson was a tomgirl from the get-go, racking up trophies for a variety of sports in high school and even trying out for the football team. Recruited for an amateur basketball team in Dallas, she made such a name for herself that she was invited to try out for the 1932 Olympic track team. In order to get around the three-event limit for individual athletes, Babe's handlers were allowed to register her as a team, all by herself. In two and a half hours, she won five events (shot put, javelin, long jump, baseball throw, and 80-meter hurdles) and set a world record in the hurdles and javelin. In addition, she tied in the high jump, setting another world record, and finished fourth in discus. She scored eight points higher than her nearest competition -- a team of 22 women!

At the Olympics, bound by the three-event limit, she scored two gold medals and took the silver in the high jump. During this period, Babe was too focused on winning to give much attention to her image. She appears to have been perfectly comfortable with herself and her sole concession to "media spin" may have been misrepresenting her age, claiming to be 18 instead of 21. But Babe may have been catering to the public's acceptance of tomboy behaviors in a teen as opposed to the expectations for "young ladies."

Babe's overnight celebrity attracted enormous attention, and not all of it was positive. Sportswriter Paul Gallico, a ferocious policer of traditional gender roles, wrote in "The Texas Babe" in Vanity Fair in 1932 that this "strange girl-boy child" would have been right at home in a men's locker room. He used the word "boy" more than a dozen times to refer to Babe, attributing her athleticism to an over-compensation for her inability to attract men.

What Gallico did not mention was that Babe had made a fool out of him. After the Olympics, fellow sportswriter and fan Grantland Rice had arranged a friendly game of golf to introduce Babe and Gallico. Exploiting Gallico's machismo, Babe challenged him to a footrace in the middle of the golf course and Gallico idiotically accepted. Needless to say, Babe left him for dead and went on to win the game handily.

The next year Gallico wrote an even more homophobic piece for Vanity Fair. Ostensibly a short story, the central character was a butch Texas athlete named "Honey," a thinly-disguised mimicry of Babe. In fact, a full-page photo of Babe sat on the facing page. Gallico imagines the other women athletes trash-talking Honey. They ridicule her Texas accent, comment on her frequent use of obscenities and speculate about her lesbianism. Gallico depicts his character as a genetic freak, filled with self-loathing in spite of her gold medal, sobbing while she smacks her own face and claws at herself -- because she cannot get a man.

Suddenly, Didrikson began to wear hats, dresses, girdles, lipstick, perfume and nail polish -- things she used to dismiss as "too sissy." And within five years, she married George Zaharias, a professional wrestler who, according to Babe's biographer Susan Cayleff "was a caricature of manliness: tough, ferocious, powerful... able to take punishment." Photographed next to George, Babe, now playing the then-elite sport of golf, did appear more feminine.

So successful was Babe in presenting herself as a traditional housewife that, several years later when Babe entered a long-term relationship with a woman, the press was willing to characterize the woman as Babe's "protégée." According to biographer Cayleff, Betty was Babe's "primary partner." A fellow pro golfer, Betty roomed with Babe on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) circuit and lived in her home for the last six years of Babe's life. Whatever George may have thought of this arrangement, he accepted the situation. When Babe was in the hospital dying from colon cancer, Betty moved in with her, pushing the beds together.

When I wrote the book and lyrics for Babe: An Olympian Musical (score by Andrea Jill Higgins), the show included a love scene and duet between Babe and Betty. The scene marks a turning point in the narrative, as Babe moves from a position of alienation and competition with women to one of intimacy and professional alliance, culminating with the founding of the LPGA.

The response from the first studio production was overwhelmingly positive, but not without reactions to this "outing" of Babe. Was this respectful? What would Babe have wanted?  And, the "smiling homophobia" of: "What does it matter anyway? Babe was still a great athlete." Some critics even felt a need to talk about George.

At what point can we recognize that Babe was bisexual -- or a lesbian whose marriage may well have been a concession to career-busting homophobia? I wish that lesbian athletes -- then and now -- would have time capsules where they can safely store the truth about their lives and the women they love. We should not be left with a closeted record and perpetual questions about how best to honor the memory of remarkable women who were compelled to live a lie.