Missed this past Saturday night’s performance?
Here’s what happened:
Just two more weekends before the show is done and gone, dear friends – grab your tickets while they’re still available for our two spaces through the links in the “performance” section of this blog, or take your chances at the door!
Either way, we can’t wait to see you there!
It’s been some time since we talked about Hamlet’s existential/cosmic struggles, and the waning days of this blog seem as good a time as any to return to that subject. Even if only (fairly) briefly.
It’s also been some time since I’ve seen the weirdly cool claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain. In my recent reading of a new review of it, I was reminded of how Satan figures into the story. It’s a small part, but he’s there. And in a piece of brilliant design, he looks like this:
Now at one point, Satan – also called The Mysterious Stranger – says the following: “Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists, save empty space and you. And you are but a thought.”
Again, this is from what was fundamentally meant to be a children’s film from 1985. Like a twisted, Mark-Twain-infused version of The Pagemaster. And here’s Satan, who in this context (as with the play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) is less a facilitator and more a responder, someone who speaks (often terrifying) truths to those who think they have power.
But fear is a choice. Always, always, always. And it’s a more dangerous choice than most, because its tendrils instantly sink in to the soul’s surface. And they only dig in as time goes on, burrowing deeper, worming their way into the mind and heart. And when they’ve done so – when fear has taken root and thereby taken hold – that’s when it starts to warp perspective. Warp trust. Warp confidence. And warp reality.
Because we are each the architects of our own reality. And it is up to us to decide what forces will shape the world we see, with the potential for tragedy and transformation both lying in how and what we choose to build.
So when you make it to the show, watch for this. Keep an eye and an ear (or even two of each) out for how characters close themselves down, how their chosen courses waver and how they attempt to correct that. How their love gives them strength or sobers them to themselves, how their fear strangles their sight until it is dimmed down to a frightening blood-haze filter that suffocates any sense they have of themselves.
Reality is a choice. Insanity can be a kind of choice. All who are mad are not found in madhouses, and madhouses are not filled with only those who are mad. But no matter the case, no matter the loss or the love or the discovery, certain elements remain. The sky and the universe beyond, human connection, creative spark, the ego’s fight for survival, and the transience of all of that. Laugh to laugh, tear to tear, dust to dust, transference to transference, void to void, infinite possibility to infinite possibility. “Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists, save empty space and you. And you are but a thought.” Empty space filled with thoughts, thoughts under the vast umbrella name of reality.
The title of this post should probably technically be “characters and audience” rather than “actors and audience,” but the visual aesthete in me couldn’t help itself.
I want to go back a bit to something I accidentally ended up touching on in yesterday’s post, specifically the bit where I said:
“Hamlet’s dual senses of alienation and isolation are, arguably, self-induced to a large degree. She decides to not share her thoughts with most characters, speaking instead via soliloquy to the unbound – and thereby unpredictable – audience. I say “unbound” because there is a new audience each night. Like a jury, they do not actively respond to what Hamlet gives them – they form their own internal response in the moment and then digest it after. I say “unbound” because they are, by virtue of the rules of their existence in the play’s space and the play’s time, not locked in to the same vicious circle that keeps Hamlet and most all of the play’s other characters chasing each other, aching on a soul-level but never able to make contact and connect. The audience is removed but not impartial, safe yet an accomplice, and above all able to be changed.”
I’ve though about the relationship between audience, character, actor, fourth wall, and performance – every writer, actor, and director must at some point or another – but never before in this specific way. Yet now that I have, I keep coming back to it.
When the audience buys their ticket, enters the space, and takes their seat, they are laying their cards on the table. They’re saying “I’m here, I know what this is, I know why and how it is – now entertain me. Challenge me. Change me. Move me.” Or they might not even know why they’re there, only that they have been drawn by a tug somewhere in the back corner of their spirit to this storytelling exchange. Or because they were dragged by a partner or a parent. Can’t forget those folks.
When the actors enter the green room, put on their costumes and makeup, and then take the stage, they too are laying their cards on the table. They’re saying “I’ll call your cards, and once I’m done with that I’ll really show you something amazing.”
It’s all a gamble, is what I’m saying. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off – for whatever reason the performances don’t click, an audience member or three falls asleep, the director’s vision never quite coalesces and the audience leaves dissatisfied, an actor just has an off night – and sometimes it does. You can’t plan on that sort of thing. It can only be what it will be each night, and each night will play out on its own terms. The main point is, each side comes to the theatre in question knowing the exchange. Knowing the possibilities. Knowing the conceit.
But it does seem to me to be that there’s… something else to the exchange.
I personally don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in predestined ends, “things happening for a reason” and all that. I’ve experienced plenty of beautiful coincidences, of lucky, weird, even genuinely frightening cohesions between time, space, humanity, and possibility. But there’s a constant shaping of perspective and path going on through every single level that makes me up, and I respect the power of that constant process to change me. And my power to change the process, with every choice I make, on levels both subtle and stark.
A play performance is the snapshot of a life, or a series of lives. It is often quite literally a pre-written series of encounters, a defined over-arching experience that begins one way and ends one way. Sure, performances can change, becoming deeper and more alive and more inspired over the course of a run. But fundamentally, the building blocks that make up that presentation will – in most theatrical cases – not change. The blocking is the blocking, the epiphanies are the epiphanies, the end is the end.
What will always change – what will retain its unpredictability – is the audience. On some meta level, the actor goes out on stage and knows, as the actor, that their character has a predetermined path in the self-contained world of this particular performance. And that it’s the same path that has been taken before and will be taken again. As the actor, they have to have some part of them that’s aware, that serves as a witness to keep people safe during the stage combat and to be louder on certain cue lines and so on. As the character, they have to have some part of them that’s aware, that serves as a witness to make sure they discover love with character X or build a vitriolic enmity with character Y or achieve a sudden enlightenment about world view Z.
But some part of the actor – and by extension the character – knows that the audience is different that night. Knows that they’re not only able to be changed, but knows that that’s exactly why they’re there. And thus, the audience provides a potential way for the character to break the shackles of their direction on a higher level. To actually achieve something unique and observable and, at the same time, unknown. To give it the inherent sparks of life that always arise when we find ourselves in new situations. Be we speaking about a new pair of sweatpants, a new job, a new gig, the first day of school, a first date, or anything else like any of those experiences – we don’t know what to expect, and so we’re alert. We’re excited. We’re alive. And some part of the actor – and by extension the character – knows that with enough passion and energy and honest that audience can be changed. And that when they leave, there’s no telling where they’ll go or who they’ll be.
I may be talking in semantic circles here about something that is actually very obvious to most theatre-going folk, but… I don’t know, there’s something that strikes me about all this. Especially when it comes to doing a play with where many of the character truths and philosophical fears are revealed through soliloquies directed at the audience. Yes it’s fun to break the fourth wall, and yes it’s an easy way to inform the audience about exactly what’s going on in a character at any given moment (especially one who evolves as much as Hamlet does). But I can’t help but want to ascribe a greater purpose to that conceit’s existence and possible use.
I also can’t help but notice that I might be starting to ramble. So I’ll stop now.
“Now I am alone.”
So says Hamlet about halfway through the play.
Arguably though, it’s hardly news by that point. A realization, sure – but something Hamlet perhaps knew but was not consciously aware of up until this point. Either way, it’s not news to the audience. The entire play is potentially predicated upon the notion that Hamlet is, through a combination of her own action and her world’s response, alone in her experience.
Because this is Shakespeare we’re talking about, and one of his keenest and deepest works at that, it’s a statement that is of course layered in multiple levels of meaning.
On the first, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have just left the room – and so Hamlet is alone in a literal, physical sense. On the second, Hamlet is alone in terms of her perspective – she has just shared her true feelings and thoughts and fears and doubts with two people she thought to be her good friends, only to have those two people either brush aside or outright knock down everything personal she has shared. On the third, Hamlet realizes she is alone in experience – she glimpses that part of the brushing off and shutting down might have happened not just because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in the employ of the king and queen (and care more about their reward than Hamlet’s well being), but also because they as human beings simply aren’t interested in conceiving. In examining the world in such a stark, startling way (you’ll note this is the same scene in which Hamlet talks about a human being being nothing more than a “quintessence of dust” – see some of my past posts about Hamlet, mortality, and the atomic bomb).
So far we have her recognizing how she’s along in a physical sense, an emotional sense, and a mental sense.
And then there’s the fourth level, where she’s alone in a community sense. Her two friends are the latest in what is by then a long line of people who she believes have betrayed her trust, have blatantly lied or expressed confusion or disgust or doubt with her. And what she probably fears – but of course cannot know for sure until she witnesses what she believes to be proof just a scene or two later – is that they won’t be the last. And then there’s the fifth level, where Hamlet is alone in a moral sense. It’s this moral sense that sets her apart from other Hamlets written by earlier playwrights, and it’s this dogged, desperate, deliberate pursuit of a moral certainty that sets her apart from the play’s other characters. She seeks the truth almost above all else, truth which she hopes will guide and define her decision making as it shapes her story. There are probably yet more levels to be had, but I’ve already talked a lot about layers and levels and need to move on.
Incidentally, we’ve been making a lot of jokes at rehearsal about how Shakespeare is like an ogre, and how ogres are like onions. Or cakes. Mostly onions though. Anyway.
Move on, as it happens, by moving back. Back to the fourth level – that of community.
Hamlet’s dual senses of alienation and isolation are, arguably, self-induced to a large degree. She decides to not share her thoughts with most characters, speaking instead via soliloquy to the unbound – and thereby unpredictable – audience. I say “unbound” because there is a new audience each night. Like a jury, they do not actively respond to what Hamlet gives them – they form their own internal response in the moment and then digest it after. I say “unbound” because they are, by virtue of the rules of their existence in the play’s space and the play’s time, not locked in to the same vicious circle that keeps Hamlet and most all of the play’s other characters chasing each other, aching on a soul-level but never able to make contact and connect. The audience is removed but not impartial, safe yet an accomplice, and above all able to be changed.
And that is key for Hamlet. It’s key for a woman in her period and her circumstances to know that her voice might still be heard. It’s key for a lesbian woman in her period and her circumstances to know that there is yet hope for acceptance and support and respect and love somewhere out there in the shifting, coughing shadows. Because in our play’s year of 1946, in its small town/asylum setting, in the unstable nexus of her age, her evolving perspective, and the emotional tumult rocking everyone at Elsinore, Hamlet has never felt more alone. Unable to understand what God wants of her, unable to discern whether the ghost she may or may not be seeing is an evil and destructive one, unable to speak plainly, unable to find an ear she trusts, and above all unable to act on the love she feels for women in general and Ophelia in particular… it’s no wonder she descends, manic, into the pit.
And so we come to the vicious circle (another subject about which I’ve written plenty about before) – Hamlet will try to speak the truth about her thoughts and feelings to someone, only to have that someone cut or shut them down. And so Hamlet in turn shuts down, keeps her thoughts and feelings inward, and loses the wrestling match with them by the end. Which in turn causes certain characters to isolate themselves, entrenching deeper in their own judgements about Hamlet, which in turn confirms for her that they’re either not to be trusted or outright out to get her. Though she tends to equate those more than she doesn’t. OR Hamlet will just outright decide in advance to withhold certain elements of her thought and feeling from a character (such as Horatio or Gertrude), which means that character is lacking any empowerment on Hamlet’s part to be proactive in aiding her, and so they are reduced to a passive place where they can do little but try to ease certain small cases of circumstantial suffering. Which Hamlet in turn uses as license to withdraw more, any possibility that they might be able to help her if only she would even talk to them pushed out by her own obsession and depression (as well as all the doubts and fears and hurts generated by the first vicious circle I wrote about).
Hamlet can’t help the way she is. Moral, human, empathetic, woman, lesbian. And there’s nothing to”help” – those are all beautiful things, simple truths that make up her whole self. But she’s in a rough way and a tough spot, a world and time and place where none of those are valued and all of them are viewed as signs of weakness, of damage, of disturbance. And on top of all of this, she young and she’s in mourning and she doesn’t have anyone in the world she trusts to help her with her… maelstrom of thought and feeling. No one who she trusts to help her focus it, to parse it all apart so she can come out stronger on the other side of this whole mess.
And, perhaps… perhaps that is the tragedy shared by nearly every other character in the play. Ignorance and fear, and how those two clouds give so many human beings the tools to repress their own understanding of humanity and thereby suppress the humanity of others. To sweep away the homeless, to hate the skin that covers someone’s heart and mind, to tear away someone’s way of love because it’s different from yours, to shut away the damaged and the challenged because if you can’t see them locked in themselves and suffering without a compassionate guide they trust to help them then they don’t exist, to beat and abuse and demonize a prisoner, to torture your enemy… none of these choices, or any like them, have never served any end but to spark another round of vicious circles. And all, when the question/answer are potentially so damn simple.
Because beyond law, beyond civilization, beyond government and power and religion, beyond everything – what greater crime could there be, what greater tragedy, than to deny someone else their humanity?
So I was just out shopping at Trader Joe’s, like a good Seattleite, and when I emerged wit my groceries I was hailed by a great guy looking for support on behalf of an organization that I’m very sorry to say I’d never heard of before – SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center. As far a I was pitched their main mission these days in securing rights for the LGBTQ community in the Deep South. But it’s far from their only mission, and to pull from their website as they can pitch themselves much better than I can:
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. Using litigation, education, and other forms of advocacy, the Center works toward the day when the ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity will be a reality.
Founded by civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in 1971, the SPLC is internationally known for tracking and exposing the activities of hate groups. Our innovative Teaching Tolerance program produces and distributes – free of charge – documentary films, books, lesson plans and other materials that promote tolerance and respect in our nation’s schools.
We are based in Montgomery, Ala., the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, and have offices in Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami, Fla., and Jackson, Miss.”
These people are the real deal, doing work that desperately needs to be done in those deep places that need it the most. Places that seem far to us. Struggles that, in their way, are far beyond our attention or concern. Gay marriage and adoption are legal here. Bullying isn’t in our conscious lives because many of us are no longer in school and/or don’t have children of that age. The assaultive impacts of racism don’t disrupt our lives because we’re part of a largely homogeneous community that leads the “green, innovative, coffee-fueled life.” A sweet latte costs $3.50 – so does a dozen eggs+ a pound of fruit that could make breakfast for a family of three for several days. A new video game is $60 – that could go an impactful way towards paying the legal fees of a challenged family fighting a system that doesn’t favor them. It’s things like that, those things beyond our attention and concern because most of us are in positions of power and privilege (whether we like it or not or know it or not) where we don’t have to worry about being beaten up daily, about whether we’ll be “encouraged” to go to a different school, about if we’ll show up to work only to find we’ve been fired for the way we love, about if our children will be denied what they medically need because of how they look.
Which is all to say… it’s not a guilt trip, I swear. Just some thoughts on how we always have the opportunity to be more aware. And more so, we always have the opportunity to DO something in response to that awareness. Perspective, is I guess the word I’m looking for. Many of the people that the SPLC helps – be it by education or legal fees or other means – would be unable to fight for the rights and consideration they’ve been denied without its support. Support that comes from paying legal fees, paying the time of qualified educators and lawyers and professionals, and so on.
So if you see anyone representing SPLC when you’re out and about in Seattle – give them a minute, even just one. Listen to what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Consider if there’s anything you have the time or resources to do, be it contributing financially or volunteering or who knows what. And if you find a “yes” bubbling up from within, listen to it. And know that you’re making a difference. You really are. You’re your own actor playing your own character on your own stage, telling your story your way and pushing back the darkness of fear and ignorance that would otherwise swallow the world.
This show’s current state form, feeling, and function, in most every respect, have been ones which I more uncovered after beginning rather than knowing straight off the bat. But they’ve never felt forced – rather as if my mind looked at what it had each step of the way, applied its lifetime of experience and knowledge and perspective, and drew a pattern for me between the play and its possible purpose. Maybe that’s the way this always goes, like seeing Darth Vader’s face in a burnt slice of toast or a giant’s body in a mound of fallen rocks or a dragon in a cloud – the mind generates patterns to better understand its world, to provide some baseline of connecting with as much as possible as often as possible.
Which is all to say I wasn’t setting out from the start to put on a play that so smoothly brought history, text, character, and contemporary resonance under one roof of the connective emotional resonance that is the LGBT experience. That Hamlet would be a woman was the first element I decided/discovered, and from there it was very easy to say that Ophelia would remain a woman. That immediately made their relationship unique within the period – originally set as circa WWI, but once research sparked me to shift it to immediately after WWII and I read my Stage Manager’s research as to the relationship between women and asylums then everything fell in to place.
This discovery has intimately informed the staging (look out for the action of “Hamlet’s Commitment” in Act II), the acting (listen out for any time the adults or Laertes talk about Hamlet and/or Ophelia’s “love”), and the deeper unspoken histories and perspectives shared by certain characters (let’s just say our Rosencrantz is unlike most any other you’ve seen in terms of tone). And perhaps most importantly, our doubling down on this theme has imbued the show with a very particular contemporary resonance and relevance that it might not have otherwise had. I’ve written at length – and I’m far from the first to do so – about Hamlet’s “universality” and how it has certain themes and questions which apply everywhere and everywhen. But we’re in dark days, rough days, fearful days, where the world’s public allowance of the LGBT community onto its stage is still very new and an alarming number of powerful and violent people are still resistant to that change. We’re in early days, where public acknowledgment, acceptance, and safety of the LGBT community is barely a hundred years old in thought and maybe barely fifty in practice.
This is Hamlet fitted to new communities and concerns, applied to their illumination because there’s no reason not to. Because it’s the right thing to do. And best of all, because it absolutely works in context of the play. The narrative, the characters, the text – they all lend themselves well, with really very little shuffling, to telling this story in this way at this time with nothing and everything gained lost in the translation.
Hamlet’s sexuality must be addressed at some point in the course of rehearsing this play, no matter the actor’s gender. This is because 1) the character’s relationship with Ophelia is not an arbitrary one nor an ignorable one, and 2) the sexuality of any character (or indeed human being) is essential to their, well, character. Not necessarily in a “label” sense, but rather just in the sense that how connected (or disconnected) they are with their own sexuality will inevitably inform they way they carry themselves, as well as interact with the world and with other characters/human beings. And one thing which Hamlet’s current sexuality does for us is exacerbate thoughts and feelings and experiences already expressed by the character in the text – of persecution, of not being understood, of being alone, of being betrayed, of denied love, of the relationship between desire and the natural world + order and society + cultural structure. It’s all already there, and making this particular character choice gives us an enormous natural leg up in starkly defining Hamlet’s very responsive relationship to her world and, even more importantly, how that changes her over the course of the play.
And it does. For the worse, sadly. But, as I’ve written before, that’s part of her tragedy.
A few dates and important things here, and then this blog shall march along to the textual analysis side of this subject.
1970: if time travel is ever invented and you want to use it to march alongside the very first Pride Parade, then head back to New York City circa this year.
1971: the last man jailed for his homosexuality in Canada is released.
1972: Sweden becomes the first country to provide official support for new discoveries people make in their gender identity by giving transsexuals the right to legally change their gender. And, because why stop there (hint: there isn’t a reason), it also offers hormone therapy for free.
Also in 1972: Lesbianism 101 becomes a course offered at the University of Buffalo.
Also also in 1972: A divorce case awards custody of the children to Camille Mitchell – an out and open lesbian. The judge does include a provision that her lover cannot move in to the house so long as the children live there, but it’s a start.
1973: It is declared by the he Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council that homosexuality is not an illness. In 1973. That’s not even fifty years ago. A month later the American Psychiatric Association follows suit.
1979: the Rainbow Flag is first flown as part of LGBT pride.
1980: the Democratic Party is officially the first U.S. political party to include “homosexual rights” as a part of its platform.
Also 1980: Steve Endean founds The Human Rights Campaign (http://www.hrc.org/).
1982: Wisconsin somehow takes the honor of being the first state to ban discrimination against the homosexual community.
Also 1982: After a few other names are tried, the term AIDS is officially used by the CDC.
1984: Massachusetts Representative Gary Studds is re-elected even with his public reveal on the Senate floor the year before that he is gay.
1985: Rock Hudson brings AIDS sharply into the public eye by being the first celebrity to die from its ravages.
1989: Denmark brings the “civil partnership” into being, affording gay couples all the rights of married couples, minus those of being married in a church and adoption (though the latter right was restored in 2010).
1990: the World Health Organization gets its head on straight (no pun intended) and follows the suit of certain other countries by declaring homosexuality is no longer to be considered an illness.
1991: viewers of the how L.A. Law are treated to the first publicly-broadcast lesbian kiss on television.
1994: the US military institutes the now-infamous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Also 1994: homosexuals who feel unsafe in their native country are granted refugee status by Canada. Because they’re cool up there. Not just because it’s actually damn cold.
1995: certain drugs are shown to be effective when it comes to treating AIDS, though they are not without their own potentially-seriously detrimental side effects.
1996: while the world moves onward and upward, the United States passes the Defense of Marriage Act.
Also 1996: viewers of Friends are treated to television’s first lesbian wedding.
1997: the Journal of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association becomes planet earth’s first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study and support of health in the LGBT community.
1999: California kicks things off on the civil partnership front in the United States by legalizing said partnerships (albeit initially without adoption).
I don’t mean to shortchange things here, but there’s even more history to be had as these dates get closer and closer to 2015 than there was when I was trying to encapsulate the causes and effects of World War II – suffice it to say, the intervening years have seen “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repealed, a major section of the Defense of Marriage Act declared unconstitutional, the Boy Scouts challenged on their stance regarding acceptance of homosexuality, same-sex marriage legalized, LGBT rabbis and priests supported, public members of the LGBT community elected to nearly every level of public office, an openly gay character be written into a wide-release animated film (ParaNorman), and so so so much more. All beautiful, all wonderful, all necessary if we’re to continue living as a planet-wide community of human beings.
Because as it was, is, and will be with the women of this world, with any and all peoples of every First Nation, with people of every color and creed, this goes beyond civil rights or social rights. Like all of those, this is a question of human rights.
And in that respect, we’ve still so far to go. The changes between our time now and years past is night and day, but only by comparison. We’re nowhere near – nowhere in sight – of the true other end of the spectrum that holds hate and fear and repression on one side and freedom and love and communication and collaboration and respect on the other. Imagine how different things could be in five years, in ten, in fifty. Can we keep up the momentum? Can we hold the ground we’ve gained? Can we rally more arms and legs and backs to continue pulling, pulling, pulling until the shackles of ego are burst and the bonds of fear and dark feeling broken?
One thing an interested person can do is to get involved, and an excellent place to do so is a local community resource in Capitol Hill called Gay City (https://www.gaycity.org). Books, entertainment, psychological support, health awareness, events of activism, and beyond are all offered as a part of its service to Seattle as a city-wide community.
Which is why we’re partnering with them for two performances, where they’ll have volunteers on hand with material and we’ll be donating the proceeds to their great work. So thanks to them for their support and promotion. It’s our pleasure to be connected with their name and all that they do.
One hundred years is a long time. Within the context of recordable human history, anyway. Even within the context of the span of human history. And it’s still just a drop in the cosmic bucket.
But it’s what we have. And a little over one hundred years ago, a Russian immigrant named Emma Goldman was at work out on the streets of the United States. Her speeches and writing supported the development of the anarchist philosophy and were an important voice in the fight for women’s rights.
Her efforts to combat the draft during World War I led to her being deported to Russia, while subsequent travels and experiences took her from support of the Bolsheviks to subsequent denouncement of them and their methods to support of Spanish anarchists during their country’s civil war. She was arrested or challenged by the police on multiple occasions for multiple reasons, including attempting to incite a riot and distributing information about birth control. And, in the words of German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, “she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public.”
While we’re at it, in the words of Emma Goldman herself: “The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” And to quote her once more, because I can: “The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
Around the time Goldman was deported to Russia, Alice Paul and members of the National Women’s Party were smack-dab in the middle of their own (eventually successful) fight for women’s suffrage. A fight which, while passionate, came at the expense and exclusion of all others. In fact, they were rather conservative on most every other question of politics and rights. And it is an example which is not the exception but rather the general rule of the time, where a group fighting tooth and nail for its rights in one particular context would either ignore or outright exclude other underprivileged or minority groups fighting their own similar fights.
But this was all a hundred years ago. And also less than a year ago.
And the balance is still no easier. We’ve made bits and pieces of progress here and there, but sexism and racism and hatred and fear are as rampant and entrenched as they’ve ever been. The faces may be different, the expressions, the visible degrees. But to deny their very active, vitriolic, and insidious presence is to put both hands over the, shut the eyes, and yell “LA LA LA LA LA LA.” So it’s altogether understandable for a group that has established a base for itself, crafted a haven and a way to confront and transform the challenges it witnesses every day in society, to want to hold on to that. But times change, and the constructions of reality shift, and the layered universes of society, culture, interaction, creation, structure, and human experience only grow more complicated the more we unveil.
Which is all just a rambly preamble for an absolutely fascinating article I read recently about ever-bending gender barriers and society’s attempts to adjust to them in the context of a traditionally women’s college. To quote from it, pulled from a section about a shift from using the term of “Sisterhood” to the more all-inclusive “Siblinghood”:
Some female students, meanwhile, said Wellesley wasn’t female enough. They complained among themselves and to the administration that sisterhood had been hijacked. “Siblinghood,” they argued, lacked the warm, pro-women connotation of “sisterhood,” as well as its historic resonance. Others were upset that even at a women’s college, women were still expected to accommodate men, ceding attention and leadership opportunities intended for women. Still others feared the changes were a step toward coeducation. Despite all that, many were uneasy: As a marginalized group fighting for respect and clout, how could women justify marginalizing others?
“I felt for the first time that something so stable about our school was about to change, and it made me scared,” said Beth, a junior that year, who asked to be identified by only her middle name because she was afraid of offending people she knew. “Changing ‘sister’ to ‘sibling’ didn’t feel like it was including more people; it felt like it was taking something away from sisterhood, transforming our safe space for the sake of someone else. At the same time, I felt guilty feeling that way.” Beth went to Kris Niendorf, the director of residential life, who listened sympathetically and then asked: Why does “sibling” take away from your experience? After thinking about it, Beth concluded that she was connected to her classmates not because of gender but because of their shared experiences at Wellesley. “That year was an epiphany for me. I realized that if we excluded trans students, we’d be fighting on the wrong team. We’d be on the wrong side of history.”
I won’t go on too much longer, as it speaks very well for itself about questions and an experience that I admittedly have little personal insider perspective on beyond those small ways in which I don’t always act in a traditionally masculine fashion. But as medicine becomes more capable, as language swirls and evolves, as the human mind expands its capacity to conceive of new ways it can potentially redefine the structures of its reality, there will only be more questions. And they’ll continue, as they have for a hundred years (and more, of course) to be challenging questions. But the only way forward is to continue talking about them. That’s what this post is about, that’s what this article is about, and that’s a part of what this production is about. It uses a text from the early 1600s and setting of the late 1940s to illuminate the ways in which so many conversations must still be kept alive, burning and bright. We cannot stop, we cannot stay. We can only tell our stories and continue to push back the darkness. Together.
You can read the full thing here: When Women Become Men At Wellesly College
In other news, here’s an interesting sidebar extract from the article (emphasis mine):
In the 19th century, only men were admitted to most colleges and universities, so proponents of higher education for women had to build their own. The missions at these new schools both defied and reinforced the gender norms of the day. By offering women access to an education they’d previously been denied, the schools’ very existence was radical, but most were nevertheless premised on traditional notions: College-educated women were considered more likely to be engaging wives and better mothers, who would raise informed citizens. Over time, of course, women’s colleges became more committed to preparing students for careers, but even in the early 1960s, Wellesley, for example, taught students how to get groceries into the back of a station wagon without exposing their thighs.
Trans students are pushing their schools to play down the women-centric message. At Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke and others, they and their many supporters have successfully lobbied to scrub all female references in student government constitutions, replacing them with gender-neutral language
Jury Duty + rehearsal + work + cooking + everything else can really wipe you out.
Still working to get this thing back on track, beginning with where we left off a few days ago:
1947: Lisa Ben (a pseudonym of author, editor, and songwriter Edith Eyde) writes and publishesVice Versa, North America’s very first lesbian publication.
1950: remember Paragraph 175? East Germany partially does away with what the Nazis added to it. Which, for a land that had been at the forefront of so much sexual progressivism and this close to repealing one of its most repressive laws, was a welcome half-step back in the old direction.
Also 1950: Los Angeles is home to the founding of The Mattachine Society, the United States’ first sustained homosexual activist group. While originally intended to be called Bachelors Anonymous (as a play on Alcoholics Anonymous), the final name was derived from that of certain societies in medieval France whose members wore masks and could thereby criticize the ruling class with the immunity of anonymity.
1952: Marijane Meaker uses the pen name Vin packer to publish Spring Fire, the best-selling (as in 1.5 million copies) first entry in what would become the lesbian pulp fiction genre of writing.
Also 1952: Mattachine Society membership increases after a member, accused of and arrested for allegedly soliciting a police officer, contests the charges and the jury finds itself unable to decide. This is known as a hung jury. I may or may not be specifically mentioning that fact for a very specific referential and humorous reason.
Once again in 1952: George William Jorgensen, Jr. gains the honor of being the first publicized case of sex reassignment surgery by successfully becoming Christine Jorgensen.
1955: even as The Mattachine Society founds a chapter in New York, the United States’ lesbian community joins the politics front through its formation of The Daughters of Bilities in San Francisco. Not only a rights and awareness advocacy group, the Daughters also served as a community support and even conducted research.
1957: the first fabulous seeds of Rocky Horror Picture Show are sown with physician Harry Benjamin’s coining of the word transsexual. More serious seeds are sown when psychologist Evelyn Hooker manages to publish a study of homosexual men which serves as a major source for the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders.
1958: The United States Supreme Court formally rules that First Amendment rights extend to gay and lesbian publications. It is the first time the Supreme Court has ruled on any sort of case involving homosexuality.
1960: two women are discharged from the U.S. Air Force reserves on the grounds of being gay. They successfully challenge the discharges, though their “success” has to do with the court being unable to find enough evidence to demonstrate that they were lesbians and not that a discharge for such cause was inherently discriminatory.
1961; Jose Sarria, an openly gay man, runs for the the public office position of San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
1965: by way of demonstrating how far we still are behind certain other nations of the world when it comes to certain aspects of philosophy and moral maturity, this was the year that saw Everett Klipper arrested in Canada for “private, consensual sex with men.” Identified as “incurably homosexual” his sentence is “indefinite preventative detention” as “a dangerous sexual offender.” The Canadian public, gay and straight alike – yes, as in the whole country – took umbrage with the severity of the sentence to such a degree that legal reform was introduced as swiftly as 1969.
1966: The Mattachine Society challenges the New York State’s Liquor Authority and its ban on serving alcohol to gays through a “Sip In.”
Also 1966: what may be the first Transgender riot occurs and is recorded in San Francisco.
1967: you may have heard of, or even participated in, a “Pride Parade.” This has, as it turns out, roots which run deeper than the surface interpretation of that phrase. It was in this year that twelve plainclothes police officers raided Los Angeles’ Black Cat Tavern and beat/arrested employees and patrons. Protests were held in response, protests organized by an organization calling itself Personal Rights in Defense and Education. PRIDE.
Also in 1967: visitors to New York City could now peruse The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, also known as planet earth’s first homosexual-focused bookstore.
And also in 1967: because of my personal pride, so to speak, the first Latino-American homosexual group is founded in Argentina. It is called Nuestro Mundo – Our World.
1968: East Germany continues to work on that shifty, tricky Paragraph 175. Homosexual acts by consenting adults over the age of 18 are decriminalized.
1969: First a bookshop, then one of the most famous riots in the history of the United States and subject of Roland Emmerich’s next movie – The Stonewall Riots.
Also 1969: West Germany finally joins the reduction-of-Paragraph 175 bandwagon.
Also also 1969: remember that legal reform in Canada I referenced? It’s called Bill C-150 (romantic name, I know), and it formally decriminalized homosexuality in Canada. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau supported its passing with the statement “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” True story.
Also also also 1969 because why stop there: The Daughters of Bilitis branch out to Australia, establishing that country’s first homosexual rights organization.
The timeline in terms of LGBT rights and history only gets more jam-packed from here, which is great for that community but a bit tricky for this blog. It would take me a few more posts at least to recap everything of medium to high resonance and relevance between 1969 and 2015, so just for the sake of limited space and time with the mission of this blog what I’ll most likely do is spend half the post tomorrow recapping the really big events and the other half beginning character and textual analysis as they pertain to this subject.
Let’s hope life lets up a little, because I don’t want to shortchange this subject (of all subjects) but my time in terms of the play’s opening is swiftly running out. But I’ll make it work.
Because this IS important. Essential. And undeniable.
“We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.”
So spoke Elsa Gidlow. It’s one of the most clear-sighted, sensible, and inspiring thoughts about the connection between human beings and their innate creativity that I’ve yet heard. Artistry extends so far beyond painting, writing, acting, dance, all that stuff – it extends to the use of mathematics to redefine the distance between this star and the universe’s expanding edge, it extends to the shared wisdom of a particular person’s perception, it extends to the way in which one human being might express to another entity the span and depth of their love. However the case, whatever the cause, the end is the same: we create, and there is an unknowable, unquenchable, undeniable artistry in that.
But speaking of one of those more traditional forms of artistry I mentioned, what follows are a few selections from the life and works of Ms. Gidlow. Whether they’re from the groundbreaking 1923 publication of her poetry collection On A Grey Thread or not doesn’t really matter. Whenever in her lifetime she composed them, the same remains true: they’re honest, they’re earnest, and they were crafted by a brave voice that never let go of or saw any need to apologize for who and how she was.
Because there is no reason. She was a human being. That’s it.
CHANCE
Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.
If it had been a rose
I might have smiled and pinned it to my dress:
We should have said Good Night casually
And never met again.
But the white iris!
It looked so infinitely pure
In the thin green moonlight.
A thousand little purple things
That had trembled about me through the young years
Floated into a shape I seem always to have known
That I suddenly called Love!
The faint touch of your long fingers on mine wakened me.
I saw that your tumbled hair was bright with flame,
That your eyes were sapphire souls with
hungry stars in them,
And your lips were too near not to be kissed.
Life crouches at the knees of Chance
And takes what falls to her.
CONSTANCY
You’re jealous if I kiss this girl and that,
You think I should be constant to one mouth?
Little you know of my too quenchless drouth:
My sister, I keep faith with love, not lovers.
Life laid a flaming finger on my heart,
Gave me an electric golden thread,
Pointed to a pile of beads and said:
Link me one more glorious than the rest.
Love’s the thread, my sister, you a bead,
An ivory one, you are so delicate.
Those first burned ash-grey–far too passionate.
Further on the colors mount and sing.
When the last bead’s painted with the last design
And slipped upon the thread, I’ll tie it: so;
Then smiling quietly I’ll turn and go
While vain Life boasts her latest ornament.
FOR THE GODDESS TOO WELL KNOWN
I have robbed the garrulous streets,
Thieved a fair girl from their blight,
I have stolen her for a sacrifice
That I shall make to this night.
I have brought her, laughing,
To my quietly dreaming garden.
For what will be done there
I ask no man pardon.
I brush the rouge from her cheeks,
Clean the black kohl from the rims
Of her eyes; loose her hair;
Uncover the glimmering, shy limbs.
I break wild roses, scatter them over her.
The thorns between us sting like love’s pain.
Her flesh, bitter and salt to my tongue,
I taste with endless kisses and taste again.
At dawn I leave her
Asleep in my wakening garden.
(For what was done there
I ask no man pardon.)
LOVE’S ACOLYTE
Many have loved you with lips and fingers
And lain with you till the moon went out;
Many have brought you lover’s gifts!
And some have left their dreams on your doorstep.
But I who am youth among your lovers
Come like an acolyte to worship,
My thirsting blood restrained by reverence,
My heart a wordless prayer.
The candles of desire are lighted,
I bow my head, afraid before you,
A mendicant who craves your bounty
Ashamed of what small gifts she brings.
I MAY HAVE SEEN THE DEVIL 