ATHE’s Latent Homosexuality: Commemorative Remarks at the 2015 ATHE General Membership Meeting

I admit that I was surprised by Patti and Kareem’s invitation, as I’m an active member, but not a founding member, of the LGBTQ Focus Group. My first ATHE was in 2004 in Toronto, so I wasn’t there in 1995 in San Francisco for that momentous meeting (although I have heard the stories). In fact, when I joined ATHE as a comparative literature graduate student specializing in queer studies at Rutgers University, I was surprised to learn that the LGBTQ Focus Group was less than a decade old. With so much art and activism dedicated to sex and sexuality, to politics and performance in the latter half of the twentieth century, I asked myself: How was it that the LGBTQ Focus Group as an official body only recently materialized? There are at least three reasons for ATHE’s latent homosexuality.

First, while theatre has perpetuated gross stereotypes that reinforce homophobic, sexist, racist, and classist social hierarchies, it is, to cite Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla’s pioneering anthology, the “queerest art,” serving as a safe haven, a crucible even, for a panoply of aberrant identifications and deviant desires, including same-sex eroticism. Lesbians and gays have been able to be, if not out about their sexual orientation, then to live their lives as open secrets in the theatre, even during some of the most conservative and repressive epochs of human history. While suggesting that there was less of an exigency for queer thespians to organize, I don’t want to downplay the very real personal and professional risks that the founders of the LGBTQ Focus Group took in starting this organization. Initially, the academy was as hostile to sexuality studies as it was to critical race studies and feminism. The earliest histories were written by independent scholars in the 1970s and ’80s, followed by tenured academics with job security in the 1990s. Kim Marra and Bob Shanke’s Passing Performances is groundbreaking in terms of its subject matter, but perhaps its most radical intervention is publishing queer scholarship by untenured professors and doctoral candidates in what was one of the founding volumes of the Triangulations book series. We have these contributors, along with the University of Michigan Press’s senior executive editor, LeAnn Fields, and series editors Jill Dolan and David Román, to thank for legitimating the discipline of queer theatre studies.

Second, there was a tremendous amount of organized queer activity at ATHE, and it took place in the Women and Theatre Program (WTP), which celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary this year. There wouldn’t be an LGBTQ Focus Group without the late Lynda Hart and Willa Taylor of WTP. The truth is, it remains more difficult to be a woman, straight or lesbian, in theatre than it does a gay man. Thus, when forced to choose between an LGBTQ and a WTP panel or focus group meeting, as we sometimes are within the byzantine ATHE conference structure, many lesbians, myself included, choose WTP.

Third, historically queers have been ambivalent about, if not hostile to, the process of institutionalization and the violence of normalization that entry into the mainstream necessarily entails. This ambivalence extends even to organizations as liberal and inclusive as ATHE. In response to the alleged dangers that queers pose to society, authorities have sought to terrorize us into submission. We have been incarcerated, subjected to torturous “cures,” such as shock therapy and lobotomies, disowned by family members and friends, denied housing and healthcare, relieved of our jobs and our children, brutalized by police and vigilantes. I say “historically” because queers, in many parts of the world, are rapidly transforming from outlaws to in-laws. For better or worse, homosexuality is quickly becoming the new normal, and gays—at least white, affluent, able-bodied, integrationist-oriented ones—are now Europe’s and North America’s model minority. As we celebrate hard-fought legal victories, including federal marriage equality in the United States, it is imperative to consider the costs of progress and the consequences of our assimilation into the mainstream. It is not a...