Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (review)

In 2004, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In 2006, six states proposed amending their state constitutions to do so. In 2007, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced support for the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" ban on gays serving in the military because homosexual acts "are immoral." This was about the same time that the Reverend Ted Haggard, after admitting to having sex with a male prostitute, was "cured" of homosexuality through three weeks of intensive counseling. Meanwhile, America learns everything it needs to know about queer sexuality from watching Brokeback Mountain, Will and Grace, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

In such a cultural climate, a book like Cast Out should be required reading in every American classroom. The tenth title in the University of Michigan's Triangulations series, which is committed to presenting "a triangulated notion of lesbian/gay/queer, as well as to tracing the lines between drama/theater/performance" (http://www.press.umich.edu/series.do?id=UM111), Cast Out includes eighteen autobiographical essays and three interviews exploring "queerness and theater as two practices, two trajectories, that intersect in individuals' lives" (12). Edited by Robin Bernstein, Cast Out contributes to recovering the "hidden history" of America's lesbian/gay/queer theatrical past, illuminating the ambiguously progressive present, and charting possible paths toward a brighter future.

Bernstein, a former editor of the Washington Blade who teaches gender and sexuality at Harvard University, brings to the project more than a decade of experience in gay/lesbian/queer scholarship. For this collection, she has assembled an inspired roster of contributors and interviewees, including Edward Albee, George C. Wolfe, Craig Lucas, Robert Patrick, Cherríe L. Moraga, Tim Miller, Ricardo Bracho, Cherry Jones, Peggy Shaw, Lisa Kron, Kate Bornstein, Michael R. Schiavi, and Barbara Carellas.

In addition to the autobiographical essays and interviews, Cast Out includes a foreword by series editor Jill Dolan that briefly traces her personal development as a "desiring spectator" (vii), and a twenty-page introduction by Bernstein that offers an overview of queer theatre history and elucidates the definition of queer employed in the collection as "a vision of multiplicity" that also signifies "diversity, difference, and disagreement" (7). As Bernstein asserts, while the book does not exclude anyone from the "queer pleasures" that theatre may offer, Cast Out deliberately reserves a "privileged space" for those who are living queer lives (16)—the one common bond among the group of contributors who otherwise represent considerable diversity of gender (men and women in roughly equal numbers and one transsexual), age, race, religion, nationality, and educational background. Self-identifications range from theatre librarian Kevin Winkler's "model, middle-class queer" (71) to performer MilDréd Diyaa Gerestant's "multi-spirited, Haitian-American, gender-illusionist" (45) to Barbara Carellas's "radical sex-positive pansexual" (109). Multiplicity and diversity are hallmarks of the stories, and Bernstein was probably hard put to harness them into the three parts into which she has grouped them. They are all written in an informal and performative style: personal, frank, frequently funny, sexy, occasionally painful, moving, informative, and insightful.

Part 1, "Everything Is Possible," includes a brief interview with George C. Wolfe during his Public Theatre days and five personal narratives relating the impact of lucky (theatrical) accidents—breakthrough moments—that propelled the writers toward personal, professional, and/or sexual fulfillment. for lesbian troupe Split Britches founder Peggy Shaw it was an encounter with a black drag queen; for Five Lesbian Brothers founder Lisa Kron it was seeing Split Britches (one of the many serendipitous interconnections revealed among contributors); for Jim Provenzano it was sexual awakening in a light booth with a hunky TD; for MilDréd Diyaa Gerestant it was drag king night at the Pyramid bar; for Kevin Winkler it was Bette Midler's bold, campy bathhouse performances: "her breakthrough [w]as our breakthrough...