LGBTQ Twentieth Anniversary Forum: Introduction
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This forum archives events marking the twentieth anniversary of the LGBTQ Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education during the 2015 conference in Montreal. Although individual papers and panels on LGBTQ subjects had been presented at earlier ATHE conferences, a collective plan for a separate focus group, originally called Lesbian and Gay Theatre (LGT), was first broached at an ad hoc meeting during the 1990 ATHE conference in Chicago. The following year, two officially scheduled LGT organizational meetings at the Seattle conference led to a successful petition for associate status, which enabled LGT to sponsor panels at the 1992, 1993, and 1994 ATHE conferences on the way to achieving full focus-group status at the 1995 conference in San Francisco. Reflecting expansions in the field, the focus group name was changed to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered (LGBT) beginning with the 2003 conference program, and to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) beginning with the 2012 program. ATHE president Henry Bial formally recognized the twentieth anniversary of the focus group’s full status during the general membership meeting of the Montreal conference on Saturday, August 1st. For the occasion, Sara Warner was invited by ATHE president-elect Patricia Ybarra and ATHE’s Vice President for Advocacy and LGBTQ Conference Planner, Kareem Khubchandani, to speak about the significance of this milestone. Accordingly, the forum begins with Warner’s remarks, followed by the proceedings of two panels held on Sunday morning, August 2nd, to commemorate the anniversary: “LGBTQ Historical Scholarship” and “Queer Futures.” The proceedings are presented here in two parts, each curated and introduced by the respective panel chairs, with a connecting bridge by Jill Dolan.
—Kim Marra [End Page 23]
Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor of English, a professor of theatre, and Dean of the College at Princeton University. Among other books, she is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988; second edition, 2012); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005); and The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for Stage and Screen (2013). Her blog The Feminist Spectator won the 2010–11 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.
Kim Marra is a professor of theatre arts and American studies at the University of Iowa. Her publications include Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in American Theatre, 1865–1914, winner of the 2008 Callaway Prize; and “Horseback Views: A Queer Hippological Performance,” in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (2014). Her 2012 article “Riding, Scarring, Knowing: A Queerly Embodied Performance Historiography” in Theatre Journal won the ATHE Outstanding Article Award and honorable mention for ASTR’s Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize.
Robert A. Schanke is Professor Emeritus of Central College in Pella, Iowa. Among other books, he is the author of Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 1993, as well as That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta, which won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for G/L nonfiction in 2003, and Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (2011).
