Acts of Gaiety

Acts of Gaiety
LGBT Performance and the
Politics of Pleasure

Sara Warner

The University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012
All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Warner, Sara.
Acts of gaiety : LGBT performance and the politics of pleasure / Sara Warner.
p. cm.—­(Triangulations: lesbian/gay/queer theater/drama/performance)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-­0-­472-­11853-­3 (cloth : acid-­free paper)—
­ISBN 978-­0-­472-­02875-­7 (e-­book)
1. Gay theater—­United States.  2. Homosexuality and theater.  3. Gays and
the performing arts.  I. Title.
PN2270.G39W37  2013
792.086'640973—­dc23 2012025917
To Mary Jo Watts
a continuous source of strength and guidance,
and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion
and faith, this book could never have been written
Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxiii

Introduction 1

1. “Scummy” Acts: Valerie Solanas’s Theater of the Ludicrous 31

2. Guerrilla Acts: Marriage Protests, 1969 and 2009 72

3. Expatriate Acts: Jill Johnston’s Joker Citizenship 105

4. Terrorist Acts: The Maladapted Hothead Paisan,

a Lesbian Comedy of Terrors 139

5. Unnatural Acts: The Tragic Consequences of Homoliberalism

in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs 163

Afterword 189

Notes 195
Bibliography 231
Index 249
Preface

At approximately 7:00 p.m. on May 1, 1970, just moments after Kate Millett,
chairwoman of the National Organization for Women (NOW), called to or-
der the second annual gathering of feminist groups from across the country,
the lights in the auditorium at Intermediate School 70 on West Seventeenth
Street in Manhattan went out, plunging the audience of three hundred ac-
tivists into total darkness. One of the conference coordinators fumbled her
way to the podium to ask everyone to remain calm and seated while they
determined the cause of the power outage, only to discover that the micro-
phone, too, had gone dead. A commotion erupted in the back of the room,
and a group of people, some emitting rebel yells, ran down the aisle toward
the stage. The lights came back on to reveal a phalanx of women, fists raised,
wearing purple T-­shirts with “Lavender Menace” stenciled across the front.
Some held placards that read “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot,” “Take
a lesbian to lunch,” and “We are your worst nightmare, your best fantasy.”
The audience, visibly shaken, denounced the demonstrators for comman-
deering the meeting to promote their lesbian agenda. Millett, who had been
informed in advance of the protest, urged the crowd to listen to the women.
One of the insurgents, Rita Mae Brown, stepped forward and addressed
the assembly. A well-­known firebrand and philanderer, Brown had recently
staged a public resignation from her position as the NOW newsletter editor
in response to the organization’s attempt to purge lesbians from its roster.
Surveying the spectators as if she were cruising a Greenwich Village bar,
Brown asked, “Does anyone want to join us?” This was the cue for Karla Jay,
who was planted in the audience, to jump up and scream, “Yes, yes, sisters!
I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement.”1 As
x Preface

she spoke, Jay began unbuttoning her blouse, “much to the horror” of the
homophobic members of the audience, who gasped and groaned with each
twist of her thumb. When Jay ripped open her shirt, she revealed a Laven-
der Menace tee underneath. As she ran toward the front of the auditorium
to join her fellow protesters, Jay was greeted with “hoots of laughter” and
cheers of encouragement.2
Never one to be upstaged, the mercurial Brown approached the podium
a second time. Grinning and flashing her best “come hither” look, she, too,
began a striptease. As Brown was already wearing her protest uniform, it
appeared that she actually was going to disrobe. When she peeled away
the Lavender Menace T-­shirt, however, she revealed another one just like it
underneath. This burlesque was met with “more laughter,” Jay recalls.3 The
audience, initially hostile, was now firmly on the protestors’ side. When
Brown asked again, this time more seductively, “Who wants to join us?”
a bevy of women, none of whom had anything to do with the demonstra-
tion, rushed the stage, to thunderous applause and shouts of support from
the audience. The swelling ranks of the Lavender Menace collective stood
before the crowd with their “arms in solidarity around one another’s shoul-
ders” and explained how upset they were that lesbians had been excluded
from the conference.4 They called out Betty Friedan, cofounder of NOW, the
sponsor of the event, for orchestrating animosity and promoting discrimi-
nation within the feminist movement. In a statement to the press, Friedan
had accused lesbians of “creating a sexual red herring that would divide
the movement and lead ultimately to sexual McCarthyism.”5 Friedan pub-
licly denounced dykes as a “lavender menace” that threatened the future of
women’s liberation by warping the public image of feminists and alienating
heterosexuals who wanted equality but also wanted to keep on loving their
husbands and children.6 When word got out that Friedan planned to deny
lesbians a platform at the Congress to Unite Women, for the second year
in a row, a group of activists from the Radicalesbians—­a coalition of dykes
from various organizations, including the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the
Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Redstockings, and Women’s International Ter-
rorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH)—­began plotting the Lavender Men-
ace zap.
A zap, or zap action, as it is sometimes called, is a highly performative,
nonviolent mode of social protest that uses guerrilla theater, irony, and sat-
ire to expose the ruses of power and catalyze public response to political
events. First staged by anarchist hippies associated with the antiwar and
 Preface xi

free speech movements, zaps combine physical comedy, symbolic costumes,

expressive gestures, and farcical timing in brief, improvised skits that are de-
signed to shock and awe people, jolting them out of their complacency and
fixed frames of reference. Zaps serve as paradigmatic examples of what I call
“acts of gaiety” throughout this book. The term refers to playful methods of
social activism and mirthful modes of political performance that inspire and
sustain deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change.
Acts of gaiety are comical and cunning interventions that make a mock-
ery of discrimination and the experience of social exclusion. These antics
provide a creative outlet for the outrage, alienation, and sorrow that attend
queer lives in the form of dramatic displays of revelry and rebellion. As the
Lavender Menace action shows, sexual minorities are expert at poking fun
at the physical dangers and bad feelings associated with being queer in a
straight world, transforming them through jokes, humor, and parodic inver-
sion in the service of liberatory practices. Gays and lesbians have developed
an extensive repertoire of acts of gaiety, which includes but is by no means
limited to zap actions, pageants, parades, spectacles, kiss-­ins, camp, kitsch,
and drag. These anarchic, indecorous, and amusing exploits target the con-
tingent foundations of homophobia and the arbitrary assumptions that al-
low both publics and counterpublics to function in painfully constraining
ways for bodies branded by the stigma of sexual transgressions.
Thanks to the daring exploits and tireless efforts of the Lavender Menace
and other activists, homosexuality and same-­sex desire are no longer his-
torical impossibilities in many parts of the world. As the exigencies of the
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) movement have changed
substantially in the past fifty years, sexual politics has devolved from a grass-
roots struggle for liberation into a conservative program of social assimila-
tion that I term homoliberalism. By homoliberalism I refer to the economic,
political, and social enfranchisement of certain normative-­leaning, straight-­
acting homosexuals at the expense of other, inassimilable sexual minorities.
A coercive and oppressive form of political optimism that tethers individual
fortune and social progress to the workings of the nation-­state, homoliber-
alism is indicative of what Lisa Duggan calls “the new homonormativity,”
a trend characterized by a “demobilized . . . constituency and a privatized,
depoliticized . . . culture anchored in domesticity and consumption . . . that
does not contest dominant heteronormative forms but upholds and sustains
them.”7 Premised on an increasingly visible and lucrative brand of mass-­
mediated citizenship, homoliberalism endorses the passage of integrationist
xii Preface

legal reforms that are profoundly undemocratic and antiegalitarian, includ-

ing same-­sex marriage and the right to serve in the military. These issues
form the core of a consumer rights agenda that is advanced by a proliferating
homosexual mainstream opposed both to conservative claims that gays pose
a threat to the social, moral, and political order and to progressive calls for
a more radical restructuring of society.
Homoliberalism regulates intimacy by linking it with institutions of
reproduction predicated on the accumulation and transfer of wealth. It
calls on gays and lesbians to invest their time and energy in the American
dream—­in the nuclear family, the armed forces, and a Puritan work ethic—­
in order to earn political capital, receive dividends of social equality, and
accrue interest in the form of economic prosperity. In this redemptive nar-
rative of progress and upward mobility, citizenship is understood as a form
of volunteerism organized around private interests rather than the collective
good. Banking on the promise of personal advancement, homoliberals have
relinquished their struggle for revolutionary change and the emancipation
of all people. Previous historical efforts to challenge state oppression, redis-
tribute wealth, and create alternative kinship structures have given way to
a normative politics of liberal inclusion exemplified by the push for state
legitimacy, an unabashed embrace of global capitalism, and an uncritical
celebration of traditional “family values.”
Not surprisingly, homoliberals see gaiety as antithetical to their quest
for legitimization. These are individuals whose pride consists in being “nor-
mal” and who desire to assimilate into existing structures and institutions,
not challenge the discriminatory logic and repressive architecture of straight
society. Eager to prove that they are “just like everyone else,” these homo-
sexuals refrain from any behavior that might draw attention to their dif-
ferences. Since acts of gaiety involve a flamboyant and flagrant flaunting
one’s sexuality, those seeking accommodation within the system do just the
opposite; they practice and promote acts of conformity. Believing that the
faithful and earnest rehearsal of nonconfrontational displays of niceness,
politeness, respectability, and dignity will confer on them the recognition
and validation they crave, homosexuals have renounced gaiety in order to
be taken seriously by mainstream society. This pragmatic approach to social
change constitutes a hastened retreat from the pleasure principle advanced
by activists in earlier decades, and it leeches the joy out of sexual politics.
The purpose of Acts of Gaiety is to investigate the historical emergence
of homoliberalism and to reanimate gaiety as a political value for progres-
 Preface xiii

sive social activism. I argue here that homoliberalism’s precipitous rise in

the United States is fueled by the increasing influence of LGBT communi-
ties’ individualizing and monetizing precepts, a condition buttressed by two
interlinked forces: the mainstreaming of homosexuality and queer theorists’
amnesiac relation to gay history and lesbian feminist structures of feeling.
This book examines alternate relations of affects and desires dissonant to
neoliberal values, disciplinary regimes of the nation-­state, and the circula-
tion of capital. It asks how, and under what conditions, a renewed invest-
ment in gaiety might subtend the profound structural inequalities, econom-
ic disparities, and sobering images of sexual hegemony that accompany the
normalization of lesbian and gay lives.
While this book seeks to counter the stultifying pragmatism of homo-
liberalism, it also serves as a rejoinder to the long-­standing romance with
mourning and melancholia in queer theory. Hurtful emotions, and the de-
sire to avoid or eradicate them, play an important part in the creation of
political worlds. Injury serves as a constitutive element of any disenfran-
chised group’s identity; it is the experience of a traumatic past that gives
the present meaning and provides the motivation to create a better future.
This is especially true of feminism and queer theory, two utopian projects
that are constituted by potent histories of violence, stigma, and suffering.
One effect of sex and gender studies’ focus on loss, abuse, and abjection
has been the privileging of negative affects, emotions that make us feel bad
(e.g., shame, despair, and alienation) but are politically efficacious, as they
move disenfranchised citizens to recognize, contest, and alter the social,
legal, and cultural circumstances that cause them pain. This study redirects
our attention to other aspects of the history of queer life by documenting
and affirming the role of pleasure, humor, fun, and frivolity in shaping the
ways sexual minorities come to understand ourselves and the roles in which
we have been cast.

(Un)Adulterated Glee

Once an epithet for homosexuals and a derogatory term of phobic abuse,

queer became, in the 1990s, the name of a militant political movement and
trenchant theoretical critique of the normal, the normative, and disciplin-
ary regimes of normalization. When activists and academics reclaimed the
term queer, they did so to distance themselves not only from identity politics
xiv Preface

but from the positive and cheerful associations of the word gay and the
rosy rhetoric of pride that came to characterize much of post–­Stonewall era
LGBT activism. Not surprisingly, AIDS organizations such as ACT-­UP and
Queer Nation were some of the first groups to take up and resignify this
insult. Eschewing the affirmative orientation of gay liberation, queer theo-
rists advanced a politics of radical negativity. This approach has achieved its
most extreme articulation among so-­called antirelational theorists (e.g., Leo
Bersani and Lee Edelman), who view queer sex as imbricated with the death
drive rather than an exuberant life force.8 Allergic to any kind of political
teleology, including the notion that queer practices of life are, or should
be, oriented toward a better tomorrow for sexual minorities, antirelational
theorists are deeply suspicious of any forward-­looking, hopeful, or utopian
ambitions. They are skeptical of any praxis that advocates feeling better as
a goal, as feeling better is too often tied to saccharine forms of sanguinity,
normative notions of happiness, and capitalist models of accumulation and
reproduction.
As intellectually stimulating as I find this polemical mode of scholarly
inquiry—­with its unsparing critique of homonormativity—­I find its whole-
sale rejection of futurity untenable. As José Muñoz notes in Cruising Uto-
pia, minoritarian subjects need the future, for it is how we stay attuned to
desire.9 He rejects the antirelational thesis on the ground that it cedes all
articulations of futurity to a normative, white, reproductive sociality, and he
advocates instead for a more expansive notion of futurity on behalf of those
to whom it is systematically denied. This position resonates with Elizabeth
Grosz’s assertion that an “indeterminate future,” a conceptual space created
by “folding the past into the future, beyond the control or limit of the pres-
ent,” is essential to any transformational political project.10 While Acts of
Gaiety takes issue with what this author views as antirelational theorists’
overinvestment in negativity, it does not deny the constitutive nature of in-
jury to LGBT history or the intrinsic value of bad feelings to queer activism.
Like Muñoz, I see “a potentiality in negative affects that can be reshaped
by negation and made to work in the service of enacting a mode of critical
possibility.”11
Gaiety is a technology of endurance and agency for “arranging grief”
that enables sexual minorities to accept but also to alter our painful exis-
tence.12 What I am calling acts of gaiety are those performances and modes
of performative activism that enable subaltern subjects, in the words of that
fruity vixen Carmelita Tropicana, to “cry in one eye and laugh in the oth-
 Preface xv

er.”13 While the case studies in this book all exhibit an antagonistic, menac-
ing, or hostile reaction to oppression and are vehemently opposed to the
social order as it currently exists, they all believe a better future is possible.
The acts of gaiety that I survey here—­Valerie Solanas’s “scummy” events,
anti-­marriage zaps by lesbian feminist collectives, Jill Johnston’s gestures of
joker citizenship, Hothead Paisan’s terrorist threats, and the Five Lesbian
Brothers’ cynical tendentious jokes—­offer alternative strategies to the domi-
nant arrangements of feelings and relationships that govern and organize
national life today. Allying these examples is the actors’ fierce commitment
to mining the negative for pleasure and politics. Employing alternating tac-
tics of menace and merriment, anger and affection, these acts of gaiety trans-
form the space of negativity that shadows homosexual identity and suffuses
lesbian lives with a performative force that gives rise to dreams of a better
future. Arising as they do from tarrying so intensely with the negative, these
dreams are as redolent with dark humor—­violent imagery, homicidal fan-
tasies of retributive justice, and psychotic breaks from reality—­as they are
with levity, hilarity, and (un)adulterated glee. Even the most misanthropic
member of my archive, Valerie Solanas, insisted that “the female function is
to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music—­all
with love. In other words, create a magic world.”14
Highlighting the curative, as well as the corrosive, effects of lesbian femi-
nist cultural production, Acts of Gaiety responds to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
call for a reparative praxis, and in particular to her sense that queer theory’s
once productive, but now protracted, engagement with shame and suffering
has contributed to a paranoid praxis so preoccupied with identifying new
and ever more nefarious forms of injury and abjection, lurking in even the
most hospitable places, that it has ceased to be a source of healing and sus-
tenance. Sedgwick’s turn to the happy and autotelic affects (in her last book,
Touching Feeling) expresses her desire for an erotic and ecstatic mode of
critical engagement that can balm the wounds of homophobia, not to men-
tion other forms of discrimination, and create possibilities for a pleasurable
and sustainable life.15 My project advances a restorative hermeneutic that
exposes the limits of traditional queer inquiry by conjuring, performing,
and producing acts of gaiety, those embodied practices that are imbued with
and generative of affective experiences of joy and jubilation, wishing and
longing, felicity and good cheer.
Taking its cue from Sedgwick, Acts of Gaiety invites us to consider sev-
eral questions. What has been sacrificed in privileging bad feelings to the
xvi Preface

exclusion of more positive affects? What has been lost in sex and gender
studies by queer theory’s preoccupation with abjection, abuse, and sorrow
at the expense of more euphoric emotional registers? How might reclaim-
ing gaiety enable us to create new modes of resistance, new forms of com-
munity, and new opportunities for inquiry into LGBT history and culture?
What does or might gaiety do, how, when, and for whom? Do all social
agents have equal access to gaiety or does it constitute a form of privilege
stratified by differences of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and able-­
bodiedness? Do queers who are clinically depressed, incarcerated, homeless,
or in the hospital have anything to be cheerful about? What do we do when
situations seem so dire that we cannot muster a smile? What use is gaiety
when we do not feel like laughing? What are the consequences of acting “as
if” we are gay when we are not?

Grin and Bare It

Gaiety signifies a jocund and waggish response to the absurdity of the politi-
cal, ideological, and environmental scenarios in which homosexuals have
been cast. The Lavender Menace action showed members of the women’s
congress just how ridiculous homophobia is by responding to a hateful and
discriminatory situation with wit and a sense of amused indignation. This
zap was performative in both senses of the term: it was “staged” and conse-
quential. Protesters created a safe and inviting space for dykes to come out
of the closet and for heterosexual women to openly support their homo-
sexual colleagues. Through their comedic performance, lesbians seduced
spectators into the drama of political change by staging a scenario of what
a better world might look like and inviting the audience to play along. The
ludic register of the event enabled the protesters to show that the real men-
ace to the women’s movement was not the presence of lesbians but their
absence. The goal of the zap was not simply to make lesbians visible or se-
cure a place in the congress’s program but to challenge NOW’s integrationist
logic and radically reconfigure the constitution, commitment, and priorities
of the women’s liberation movement.
As part of the Lavender Menace demonstration, lesbians distributed cop-
ies of “The Woman-­Identified Woman” manifesto.16 Hailed as one of the
founding documents of radical feminism, “The Woman-­Identified Woman”
is a ten-­paragraph political powder keg that defines sexuality as a political
 Preface xvii

choice rather than a biological imperative. The manifesto insists that a com-
mitment to lesbian liberation is essential to the success and fulfillment of
the women’s movement. The audience, won over by the demonstrators’ act
of gaiety and compelled by the persuasive rhetoric of the manifesto, not only
listened to the collective’s grievances, but they voted to make immediate
and substantive alterations to the conference program, adding impromptu
workshops on heterosexism and a women’s dance.17 In addition, the con-
gress assembly voted to adopt several resolutions advanced by the Lavender
Menace, including the following motions: (1) whenever the label lesbian is
used against the movement collectively or against women individually, it is
to be affirmed not denied; (2) in all discussions of birth control, homosexu-
ality must be included as a legitimate method of contraception; and (3) all
sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form
of sexual expression and love.
The Lavender Menace’s zap catalyzed real and significant change. This
action empowered individuals and groups that felt marginalized by the pro-
ceedings to speak out, and it fostered solidarity among various factions at
the congress. Black women expressed their anger at the lack of attention
paid to cultural and ethnic differences and to the unacknowledged and
seemingly intractable racism within feminist circles. Working-­class women
also voiced concerns about the proceedings. They railed against the elitism
of the event, which, like most feminist organizations, was dominated by
middle-­class constituents. By the end of the zap action, workshops on mul-
tiple forms of discrimination had been added to the program.18
Kate Millett attributes the success of the action to the mood of gaiety
it engendered. “There was fun in the Lavender Menace ‘zap,’” she recalls,
“impudence and humor.”19 Redstockings’ Rosalyn Baxandall remembers the
protest as “funny and wonderful,” while Ann Snitow, a founding member of
the New York Radical Feminists, commented on the “wit and vaudevillian
charm” of the demonstrators.20 “It was great theater and good fun, and de-
fused a potentially divisive issue,” remarked Anselma Dell’Olio, a founding
member of New York NOW and the New Feminist Repertory Theater, which
she started in 1969 with Rita Mae Brown, Jacqueline Ceballos, and Susan
Vannucci. “In the end the innovators won,” Dell’Olio reminds us, “and the
movement was not annihilated because of it.”21 The Lavender Menace zap
“completely reshaped the relationship between lesbians and feminists for
years to come,” and it is considered by many historians and activists to be
one of the single most important actions of the feminist movement.22 Yet, in
xviii Preface

spite of its historical import, many queers have never heard of this zap ac-
tion or many of the other acts of gaiety I detail in this book. This is due, in
part, to the fact that much of what was innovative, radical, and sex positive
about lesbian feminism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s has been ignored,
obscured, or absorbed by subsequent waves of activism.
The queer canon is almost devoid of representations of lesbian sexuality,
and it is sorely lacking in depictions of women laughing, joking, or camp-
ing it up. This absence reinforces the stereotype that dykes are dowdy and
dogmatic, solemn and strident, and that lesbians were incapable of thinking
playfully or positively about sex and politics until the 1990s when queer
men showed us how. The Lavender Menace zap manifested most of the at-
tributes of queer activism and third-­wave feminism decades before the Les-
bian Avengers commandeered public space with their Dyke March and Riot
Grrrls hijacked the alternative music scene. This act of gaiety challenges the
notion that second-­wave feminists did not engage in public forms of sex-
ual expression, experiment with hilarious and hyperbolic self-­fashioning,
or explore the theatricalization of identity, as many queer theorists, both
male and female, have charged. The Lavender Menace transformed spoiled
identities, histories of abuse, and everyday outrages into resistant political
practices through humor, wit, and parody. They confronted the deadly ef-
fects of homophobia through a resignification of injurious speech—­lesbian,
like dyke and queer, is an insult, a slur—­and they countered stigma by re-
claiming and celebrating it with in-­yer-­face displays of eroticism. Through
acts of gaiety, the Lavender Menace and groups like it transformed wounds
into weapons, pain into pleasure. The protesters’ seductive striptease made
the shunned and shamed bodies of dykes visible within a symbolic order
that not only devalues but pathologizes them. Lesbian sexuality was drama-
tized excessively as an oppositional strategy, creating an affective economy
of dyke desire—­a euphoric and sensuously charged atmosphere that perme-
ated every dimension of the congress. Members of the Lavender Menace dis-
rupted the drama of heteronormativity through the corporeal instantiation,
in a public place, of a different modality of pleasure and political affiliation.

Allied Farces

In Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, Kate Davy argues that the suppression of
dyke humor was essential to the emergence of queer theory as a novel idea
 Preface xix

in the 1990s. Drawing on Joe Roach’s assertion that cultural memory “is a
process that depends crucially on forgetting,” she writes, “Eclipsing salient
features of lesbian cultural production was the necessary precondition of a
process that valorized queer as an entirely new phenomenon—­a phenom-
enon ostensibly antithetical to feminism.”23 “Such revisionist history,” notes
Sue-­Ellen Case in “Toward a Butch-­Feminist Retro Future,” “promoted
queer ascension through a valorization of gay male practices, arising from
lesbian feminist ashes.”24 Davy and Case suggest that there is something, if
not insidious then certainly opportunistic, about the elision of lesbian gaiety
from the annals of queer theory. The sex radicalism and ludic play of bar
dykes, working-­class butches, and lesbian separatists have been obscured to
make it seem as if queers were making new discoveries, engaging in innova-
tive practices, and developing unique tactics to combat age-­old problems,
even as they were rehearsing and recycling critical methods and political
maneuvers pioneered by lesbians and feminists decades earlier.
“Gender deconstruction and parody and everything else Judith Butler
ever wrote,” Jill Dolan has suggested, “were achieved with great orgasms of
inventive, hilarious performance . . . at WOW Café.”25 The WOW Café The-
atre is an off-­off Broadway performance space and social club that has served
as a laboratory of lesbian and feminist gaiety for over three decades, though it
rarely appears in mainstream or avant-­garde histories of queer performance.
An important, though often ignored, precursor to queer theory, and to But-
ler’s scholarship in particular, Women’s One World (WOW) grew out of an
international women’s theater festival organized in 1980 by a group call-
ing itself the Allied Farces. Long before queer reentered our critical lexicon,
“the wayward girls of WOW”—­Split Britches (Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and
Deb Margolin), Jordy Mark, Pamela Camhe, Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita
Tropicana), Holly Hughes, Reno, and the Five Lesbian Brothers—­were dra-
matizing the performative dimensions of theater and sexuality through their
recognition that identities are transformed in real time by actors and specta-
tors, in electrifyingly close proximity, who produce alternative, subversive
interpretations of bodies and how they matter onstage and off.26
Just as gender is ineluctably linked to performance, so, too, is desire.
The women of WOW, writes Dolan, “insist upon the importance of desire
as history, desire as future, on our importance as bearers and shapers of dif-
ferent, necessary cultural meanings, through the presence of our desire.”27
These artists encourage us to indulge in and share “the pleasure we take in
queer performance, because on some level, our pleasure is our resistance.”28
xx Preface

At WOW, pleasure is a hot commodity, a valuable and progressive form of

political currency. While scholars of the WOW Café fully acknowledge that
the collective is a direct descendent of a radical lesbian feminist sensibil-
ity that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, scant critical attention has been
paid to mapping this influence, and precious little has been written about
humorous and playful forms of lesbian art and activism in earlier decades.
Before there were safe and welcoming spaces like WOW in which to act out
lesbian plays for lesbian audiences, the figures in this study created sexual
vernaculars for speaking lesbian desire in/as performance. These women
understood the radical potential involved in the articulation and embodi-
ment of lesbian desire in visible and public places.
Acts of Gaiety traces the impulses, desires, influences, and exigencies
that conspired to make WOW an artistic possibility and material reality.
While by no means an exhaustive or definitive history, this book brings to
light lesbian performance and performative activism from the 1950s to the
present that have been overlooked, occluded, and underdocumented by the
amnesiac underpinnings of the queer turn and the historical selectivity of
homoliberalism, both of which are characterized by an inattention to, if not
a complete disregard for, satirical and subversive interventions staged by
feminists and dykes in earlier epochs of sexual activism. I am not arguing for
an unmediated or uninterrupted lineage from the performers in this book
to the actors at the WOW Café; rather I am tracing a pattern of contagious
laughter that reflects the infectious nature of a particular mode of political
performance I term acts of gaiety. Through careful examination of a range
of social and theatrical performances, I focus attention on several facets of
lesbian gaiety (e.g., lavender menacement, ludicrousness, anarchic tenden-
cies, practices of joker citizenship, and gallows humor) that serve as obverse
values, political tactics, and aesthetic styles to those in common circulation
today. Taken together, the acts of gaiety that populate this study constitute
what Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of feeling,” one that constellates and
crystallizes a radical and utopic social vision that could refocus and rein-
vigorate LGBT performance and activism.29

Lavender Menacement

As we will see in the following pages, a hallmark of lesbian feminism has

always been its active alliance with other progressive causes. Forty years
 Preface xxi

ago union organizing, nuclear disarmament, peace, urban renewal, prison

activism, immigration reform, the environment, rape, abortion, domestic
violence protection, and birth control topped the list of lesbian causes. By
contrast, most queers today have not made this transversal, intersectionist
model a priority, and the contemporary LGBT movement remains as inat-
tentive to issues of racial justice and as silent on the topic of white privilege
as it has been since its inception. Queer has been defined by and reflects the
experiences and worldviews of those members of our communities who are,
with few exceptions, white, male identified, urban, able-­bodied, and middle
class, and this has not changed in any significant measure in over two de-
cades. With the exception of a few grassroots organizations (e.g., Queers for
Economic Justice, Astraea, the Audre Lorde Project, and the Sylvia Rivera
Law Project), queer collectives have lost touch with issues that were once
foundational to the concept of gay and lesbian liberation, namely, the redis-
tribution of wealth and material resources and the collectivization of labor.
As Kenyon Farrow, the former executive director of Queers for Economic
Justice, notes, LGBT organizations devoted to an intersectional approach—­
and there are dozens in the United States—­“have been underfunded and
marginalized by the mainstream movement, in order to squelch political
dissent, so that people who want to be allies to queer people assume that all
of us want to get married and serve in the military.”30
Accompanying the homoliberalization of the LGBT movement, there
has been a proliferation of single-­issue programs and associations at the
local, national, and global levels dedicated to specific, narrowly defined
platforms such as adoption and immigration for same-­sex spouses. These
single-­issue organizations help promote visibility and raise awareness for
particular causes, but they do little to promote alliances, foster coalitions, or
build infrastructure. The leading national organization, the Human Rights
Campaign (HRC), is a neoliberal bastion that makes NOW appear radical by
comparison. As an institution, it not only fails to reflect the diverse constitu-
encies that comprise the LGBT movement, but it is remiss in addressing the
complex, intersectional forms of oppression that many homosexuals face on
a daily basis. Rather than questioning or resisting homoliberalism, HRC aids
and abets it by touting capitalist enterprise, individual choice, and economic
self-­determination as hallmarks of freedom.
Homoliberal reform tends to benefit the already privileged at the ex-
pense of underserved populations, including people of color, transgenders,
sex workers, and inner city youths. As such, these initiatives alienate con-
xxii Preface

stituencies and weaken the movement. Equally important, they foreclose

possibilities for national public debates about the imbrication of various
forms of oppression and relegate conversations about importunate forms of
inequality to what Lauren Berlant calls the “intimate public sphere,” a sen-
timental space of opinion culture, normative sexuality, and privatized citi-
zenship.31 As recent critiques of neoliberalism have made clear, we must be
mindful of the ways in which the attainment of sexual freedom, for a select
few, comes at a price, and this cost is paid by “others.” We must reaffirm our
commitment to a holistic approach to oppression rooted in a broad-­based
campaign for social, sexual, and economic equality for all so that no others
are left behind by neoliberal narratives of progress. Queer “rights,” such as
access to reproductive technologies, surrogacy, and transnational adoptions,
have real material consequences for women and people of color across the
globe. These “liberties” highlight the uneven effects of capitalist exploita-
tion and social domination, and they intensify rather than mitigate racial,
sexual, and economic disparities that play themselves out on local, national,
and global stages. These inequities are ignored, denied, and exacerbated by
the neoliberal rhetoric of individualism and exceptionalism, which codes
poverty as a private failure, and indigence—­no matter how systematic—­as
the personal choice of people who are simply unwilling to engage in the
purportedly egalitarian sphere of free market capitalism.
Finding contemporary sexual politics enervating rather than energizing,
I propose a counterpolitics of gaiety by indulging in instances of it and by
articulating a mode of criticism that interprets ludic antics by lesbian femi-
nists as vital strategies of resistance to homoliberalism’s attempt to organize
LGBT lives toward nationalist ends. The performances I chronicle here serve
as antidotes to the grim and mirthless mood that characterizes contempo-
rary sexual politics, and that have, even after all these years, the capacity to
productively disrupt ossified categories of thought and calcified modes of
perception. The animating force behind this book is the desire to restore to
sex and gender studies a pleasurable and visceral sense of lavender menace-
ment lest we become what performance artist Jack Smith called “pasty nor-
mals,” his phrase for the colorless and soulless denizens of our planet who
lack the capacity for gaiety.32
Acknowledgments

I am indebted to and deeply grateful for the individuals who have inspired,
encouraged, and nurtured my intellectual development and for the com-
munities that have supported the researching and writing of this book. Col-
leagues, mentors, students, family, and friends in a range of locales have
played a role in shaping Acts of Gaiety, and in the process, shaping me as
well.
At Rutgers University, where the seeds of this project were planted, I had
the tremendous good fortune to work with Alicia Ostriker, Elin Diamond,
Drucilla Cornell, Ben Sifuentes-­Jáuregui, Josephine Diamond, Janet Walker,
Ed Cohen, Linda Zerilli, and Carolyn Williams. This book grew roots and
blossomed at Cornell University among a supportive and challenging cohort
of scholars whose provocations and critical generosity have contributed to
my work in a myriad of ways. For their intellectual acumen, sage advice,
and spirited camaraderie I thank the faculty and staff, past and present, of
the Department of Performance and Media Arts, with a special note of grati-
tude to Amy Villarejo, Sabine Haenni, Alison Van Dyke, Ellen Gainor, Nick
Salvato, Haiping Yan, Beth Milles, Carolyn Goelzer, Byron Suber, Jim Self,
Joyce Morgenroth, Marilyn Rivchin, and Debra Castillo. I include Marvin
Carlson in this list as well, and I am fortunate to have had many inspired ex-
changes about theater and performance with him. A Mellon Fellowship on
the topic of performance in 2006 helped crystallize my ideas for the book,
and I appreciate the many productive conversations I had with fellow partic-
ipants under the auspices of our indefatigable facilitator Andrew Galloway.
A special group of intellectual companions from across the university have
supplied stimulating conversations (at conferences and cocktail parties),
xxiv Acknowledgments

substantive critiques of my work, and heartfelt words of wisdom about how

to navigate what, for me, was a brave new world. I am thankful to Masha
Raskolnikov, Jennifer Tennant, Judith Peraino, Deborah Starr, Elliot Shap-
iro, María Fernández, Dag Woubshet, Sherry Martin, Durba Ghosh, Shelley
Feldman, Lucinda Ramberg, Hope Mandeville, and Cary Howie for their
friendship and support. My students have made every class a joy to teach; I
have gained much more than I have given from our experiments in learning.
This book developed in conversations and exchanges with many schol-
ars and artists. Chief among these are the members of the Women and The-
atre Program (WTP). I am extremely grateful to all of the feisty feminists
who comprise this organization, and especially to Lisa Merrill and Jennifer
DeVere Brody, my initiates and presidential mentors, Erica Stevens Abbitt,
Natka Bianchini, Rhonda Blair, Norma Bowles, Sue-­Ellen Case, Lindsay
Cummings, Aileen Hendricks, Holly Hughes, Kathleen Juhl, Joan Lipkin,
Ashley Lucas, Rose Malague, Deb Margolin, Jen-­Scott Mobley, Domnica Rad-
ulescu, and Maya Roth. Kate Davy provided invaluable feedback on the Five
Lesbian Brothers chapter. Stacy Wolf’s scholarship inspired my approach to
Hothead the musical, and Jenny Spencer published a version of this chapter
in her anthology on political theater. I feel fortunate to have collaborated
on a number of WTP panels and projects with Jill Dolan, whose intellec-
tual rigor, critical insights, and utopian imaginings resonate throughout the
pages of this book. I am honored by the professional and personal generos-
ity she has bestowed on me.
Nat Hurley has read multiple iterations of this book; she is a superlative
academic ally and a great friend. Nat and Susanne Luhmann’s invitation
to the University of Alberta proved to be a valuable lesson in the theory
and practice of lesbian gaiety. Erin Hurley, no relation save for the fact that
they are both brilliant, munificent, and Canadian, offered feedback on the
entire manuscript and was instrumental in helping me conceptualize both
the preface and introduction. Robin Bernstein’s invitation to deliver an early
version of the Jill Johnston chapter at Harvard University helped give this
section shape and depth, as did commentary by Rebecca Schneider, who
graciously served as my respondent. Anthony Lioi and his colleagues at Juil-
liard hosted a talk on Hothead Paisan, and the Center for Lesbian and Gay
Studies at the City University of New York invited me to lecture on zap ac-
tions, where I benefited from the thoughtful and careful critique of Judith
Milhous, Jean Graham-­Jones, and David Savran, whose influence permeates
this manuscript.
 Acknowledgments xxv

This book would not have been possible without the generosity of a
host of artists, activists, and accidental witnesses who have shared with me
their memories, both pleasurable and painful, of some of the most vola-
tile periods in American history. These include Judith Martinez, Lisa Kron,
Moe Angelos, Babs Davy, Alina Troyano, and Ingrid Nyeboe, whose wife,
Jill Johnston, died while I was writing this book. One of my greatest regrets
in life is that I did not have the opportunity to interview Jill for this book.
This list also includes Sue Perlgut, Allan Warshawsky, Robert Patrick, Randy
Wicker, Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz, Mary Harron, Paul Krassner, Ben Morea,
Donny Smith, Norman Marshall, Eddy Falconer, Jeremiah Newton, Phyllis
Rafael, Larry Bob, and Morgan Ahern.
In addition to fascinating human subjects, I have had the great fortune of
working with a number of collections, curators, and archivists. I thank Geri
Solomon, assistant dean of Special Collections at Hofstra University; Matt
Wrbican, archivist at the Warhol Museum; Bruce Kirby, manuscript refer-
ence librarian at the Library of Congress; Marvin J. Taylor, director of the
Fales Library at New York University; James Maynard, assistant curator of
the Poetry Collection of Buffalo (State University of New York); Blair Forn-
wald at the University of Regina; Gayle Cooper at the University of Virginia’s
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library; Marisa Gorman of the
Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut; James D.
Folts of the New York State Archives; and Brenda Marston, curator of the
Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell.
LeAnn Fields at the University of Michigan Press has nurtured this proj-
ect from its infancy. There is no way for me to overstate my appreciation to
her or to adequately and appropriately thank her for her enthusiasm, sound
judgment, and mentorship. I commend the capable and caring staff at the
press, Scott Ham, Alexa Ducsay, and Marcia LaBrenz in particular, for due
diligence and meticulous attention to detail. And thanks to Daniel Gundlach
for his expertise in compiling the index.
An early version of chapter five appeared as “Rage Slaves: The Com-
modification of Affect in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ The Secretaries,” in the
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 21–­45.
Excerpts from the preface and introduction were published as “‘A Terror
to Gods and Men’: The Furies Collective, the Theatrics of Terrorism, and
the Myth of the Angry Lesbian,” in Myth and Violence in the Contemporary
Female Text: New Cassandras, eds. Julie Rajan and Sanja Bahun-­Radunovic,
19–­33 (London: Ashgate Press, 2011). A truncated version of chapter four,
xxvi Acknowledgments

“The Maladapted Hothead Paisan: A Lesbian Comedy of Terrors,” serves as

the concluding chapter in Political and Protest Theatre after 9–­11: Patriotic
Dissent, ed. Jenny Spencer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 219–­34. Thanks to
the publishers for permission to use this material in the present work. I am
grateful to Diane DiMassa for allowing me to reproduce images of Hothead
Paisan and to Mary Ellen Mark, Joan Marcus, and Desdemona Burgin for
permission to use their photographs.
I am appreciative of the broad network of colleagues and friends who
have worked directly and indirectly to support me and this work at various
stages. This includes the expert editorial advice of Iris Fischer Smith, Joc-
elyn Buckner, V. G. Julie Rajan, and Sanja Bahun-­Radunović; conversations
about performance and politics with Madeleine George, Leigh Fondakows-
ki, Roberta Sklar, Rhodessa Jones, Sean Reynolds, Bill Doan, and Kore Alexis
(wherever you are); insights into riot grrrl culture and dyke humor offered
by Jill Franco and Amanda Browning; the keen eye and caustic humor of
Jenny Worley; the academic savvy of Sarah Chinn and the hard-­working
board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS); the beautiful
minds and beneficent spirits of Romana Uhlirova and Josef Benninghoff;
the wry witticisms of Dana Gardner and Betsy Keller; Judy Maguire’s food
for thought; Kate Halliday for keeping me sane; and the many acts of gaiety
I have enjoyed with Marta Pérez, Martina Gallegos, Tony Basoukeas, Alain
Gourranc, Annemarie Rossi, Chris Davis, Calvin Ng, Calvin Doucet, and
Michael Abbey.
My parents, Ken and Judy Warner, instilled in me the values, standards,
and work ethic that have made it possible for me to travel along this tender
track. My first teachers, they taught me how to fight, how to laugh, and how
not to take myself, or the world, too seriously. My siblings, Shannon, Rich-
ard, and Melissa, along with their partners and children, make me proud
to be part of our crazy clan. Most of all, I thank Mary Jo Watts, to whom
this book is dedicated. My partner of fifteen years, MJ is my heart and soul.
She provided the inspiration for many of the discoveries that I make in this
book, thoughtful commentary on every chapter, and the encouragement I
needed to start and finish this project. I could not and would not have writ-
ten this without her.
Acts of Gaiety
Introduction
I became a political animal in order to have a good time. . . .
Feminism struck me as a good time, and it was. Back then, it still
frightened the horses; it made most men foam at the mouth, and it
got the best women horny.
—­Bertha Harris

Once an sobriquet for eccentrics and a slur for sexual deviants, queer be-
came, in the 1990s, a diacritical term for a wide-­ranging political move-
ment and nuanced scholarly critique of normative regimes, phobic policies,
and structural inequalities. Queer theory and activism dramatized, often
in a spectacularly theatrical fashion, the instabilities and incoherencies in-
herent in the purportedly stable alignment of biological sex, gender, and
sexual orientation. An aggressive, confrontational, and media-­savvy mode
of engagement, queer stood for dissent against the oppressive mechanisms
of normativity and normalization. Very quickly, however, queer came to be
defined in opposition to the identity politics of earlier waves of sex and gen-
der activism. This strategy of tactical supersession had the effect of obscur-
ing what was vital and still viable about the ideology and practices of both
second-­wave feminism and the gay and lesbian liberation movement. This
methodological maneuver prompted certain foundational figures, including
Teresa de Lauretis—­who is credited with coining the term queer theory—­to
abandon the neologism on the grounds that it had “become a conceptually
vacuous creature” having more to do with marketing and branding than
social critique and political experimentation.1
In recent years, queer has continued to become increasingly discon-
nected from its theoretical potential and political promise. Its broad-­based
critique of an array of social exclusions has devolved into an assimilationist-­
oriented equal rights agenda advanced by members of an increasingly con-
servative mainstream whose quest for enfranchisement through liberal
2 Acts of Gaiety

reforms—­such as marriage and military service—­allies them more closely

with heterosexuals from the “family values” faction of the Far Right than
with gay and lesbian activists forged in the crucible of the New Left. Years
of relentless attacks on identity politics have tended to foreclose rather than
enable debates about institutionalized forms of oppression and economic
disparities shaped by the material realities of gender, race, class, and eth-
nicity. This has resulted in the alienation of feminists, gays and lesbians
of color, transgender activists, and other minority subjects from the move-
ment, and it has given rise to what Jasbir Puar describes as the “unexpected
flowering of new normativities in these queer times.”2 Commodified by the
marketing and media outlets it courted decades ago, queer has come to sig-
nal an ever-­narrowing sense of sexual identity and a depoliticized form of
consumer citizenship that is complicit with rather than critical of sexual
neoliberalism, or what I call homoliberalism. Homoliberalism names the
quest for acceptance, legitimacy, and formal equality through a pragmatic
program animated by individual economic interests, a privatized sexual
politics, and a constricted notion of national-­public life. A ruse of parity
and inclusion, homoliberalism allows for LGBT representation without a
significant or meaningful redistribution of material and cultural resources
or a transformation in the structures of power.
The issue of what, if anything, remains “critically queer” about contem-
porary sex and gender studies, has been the subject of much debate in pro-
gressive circles in recent years.3 In 2005, David Eng, Judith Halberstam,
and José Esteban Muñoz charged sixteen scholars with the task of assessing
What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? in a special double issue of Social
Text. The editors called for a reassessment of “the political utility of the
term queer” not only in light of the mainstreaming of the LGBT movement
but also with respect to global crises that have reconfigured historical, eco-
nomic, and cultural alliances among political constituencies, remapping the
geopolitical terrain through armed conflict, cellular networks of terrorism,
natural disasters, and the diasporic populations these phenomena produce.
Two years later Janet Halley and Andrew Parker served as guest editors for
a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly titled After Sex? in which they
asked contributors to discuss what constitutes queer theory other than an
abiding interest in sexuality. In 2009, Heather Love hosted a conference at
the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Rethinking Sex,” which featured
over thirty scholars debating the past, present, and future of movements for
sexual freedom.4
 Introduction
3

The general consensus of these collections and convocations, assembling

queer theorists old and new, is that we must pay greater attention to the im-
brication of sexual politics with other historical forces, political dynamics,
and spheres of social engagement. This was echoed in another forum on
recent trends in sex and gender studies, a 2006 roundtable on the topic of
queer temporalities. Here Carolyn Dinshaw suggested that “queer history”
should acknowledge “sex . . . as heterogeneous and indeterminate, even as it
recognizes and pursues sex’s irreducible interrelatedness with other cultural
phenomena,” including the bodily sense of touch.5 This position is affirmed
by Ann Pellegrini, who writes, “[A]ffective relations—­painful and pleasur-
able, enervating and energizing—­are part of the process of forging alterna-
tive histories, alternative values, queer communities.”6
Indicative of the “affective turn” in sex and gender studies (and in the
humanities and social sciences more broadly), these critics have shifted the
conceptual rubrics of scholarly inquiry away from epistemology (from the
alleged truth of sexuality and how we can or cannot know it) and toward
a consideration of phenomenology and feeling (of what motivates politics
and performance).7 The turn toward affect promises a better way of talking
about the affiliations and identifications of minority subjects (better than
discourses of identity and postidentity politics), and it foregrounds the emo-
tional stakes of our scholarly projects, critical methodologies, and modes of
knowledge production. This conceptual maneuver enables us to redirect our
focus from locating gays, lesbians, and queers in previous eras (and in trac-
ing the [in]stabilities of sexual taxonomies over time) to exploring the types
of relations with historical figures that we hope to cultivate. Performance—­
which identifies, enacts, and disrupts sexual difference, not in terms of on-
tology or identity but through the more nuanced avenue of feelings—­serves
as a fertile site for exploring the affective dynamics and temporal logics that
motivate sexual minorities, aligning them into constituencies and fostering
networks of relationality across space and time.
While the affective turn in sex and gender studies promises new para-
digms and new opportunities for the reappropriation of queer, it has not
presented “the discursive occasion for a powerful and compelling fantasy
of historical reparation” that Judith Butler cautioned, back in 1993, was
necessary in order for queer to remain a viable category of critical analy-
sis and a source of progressive political activism.8 Far from helping queer
“overcome its constitutive history of injury,” the affective turn has had the
effect of reiterating and reinscribing it.9 This is because much of the recent
4 Acts of Gaiety

scholarship on queer affects privileges bad feelings, emotions that make us

feel terrible but can be politically productive as catalysts for social change
(e.g., shame, loss, mourning, and melancholia), or “ugly feelings,” negative
affects of a minor register that produce ambivalent situations of suspended,
obstructed, or thwarted agency (e.g., boredom, anxiety, paranoia, irritation,
and envy).10 Acts of Gaiety offers a different point of departure. It takes as
its subject good feelings, positive affects that involve pleasurable sensations
and foster jubilant practices of life, art, and activism. Central to my thesis,
however, is the notion that affective binaries fail to adequately capture or
categorize the emotional dynamics of sexual politics and that trafficking in
this dichotomous logic contributes, if not directly to the rise of homoliberal-
ism, then certainly to a sense of amnesia about LGBT history that makes it
difficult, if not impossible, to combat the mainstreaming of the movement.
What is interesting to me about the affective turn in sex and gender
studies is how closely the reterritorialized queer agendas it has occasioned
resemble the “passionate politics” of second-­wave feminism and the gay
and lesbian liberation movement.11 From the Radicalesbians’ “The Woman-­
Identified Woman,” which defines lesbian as “the rage of all women con-
densed to the point of explosion,” to Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic,”
which promotes a euphoric mode of creation that transcends the essential-
ism of biological reproduction but remains firmly embedded in the corpo-
real, we see forceful and nuanced articulations of lesbian identifications as
what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling.”12 Distinct from ideol-
ogy or worldview, structures of feeling refers to “meanings and values as
they are actively lived and felt  .  .  . specifically affective elements of con-
sciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought,” Williams tells
us, “but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of
a present kind, in a living and inter-­relating continuity.”13 Integral to the
vision of second-­wave feminism and gay liberation was the desire to revolu-
tionize sexual interactions and social relationships by developing new forms
of intimacy that were sensual, egalitarian, and nonmonogamous; by forg-
ing kinship arrangements that were free of sexist attitudes, gender binaries,
and racist biases; and by eradicating the institutions and ordinances that
perpetuate oppressive hierarchies. Groups such as WITCH, Dyketactics,
the Furies, GLF, Third World Gay Liberation, and Street Transvestite Ac-
tion Revolutionaries (STAR) sought to create a new world order that would
bring about the affective, economic, and political liberation of all people.
Much of what transpired during this volatile time was ephemeral and/or
 Introduction
5

undocumented, often by choice as the recording, preserving, and market-

ing of movement activities was seen by many political radicals as bourgeois.
Most countercultural groups not only lacked the resources to archive their
doings, but they feared, with good reason, that they were being surveilled
by the government. As a result, they tended to destroy, as opposed to con-
serve, their histories. This was true certainly in lesbian feminist circles.14 It
is no wonder that so much of our LGBT past is lost to cultural memory or
that it would be so easy for queer theorists and third-­wave feminists to feel
that they were creating new forms, methods, and strategies of political en-
gagement when, in fact, these tactics had been in circulation for quite some
time. The affective turn in critical theory makes me want to return to earlier
waves of LGBT activism in order to identify the felt dimensions and missed
opportunities of our unrealized past.
Intended as an antidote to both the sanguine sentimentality of homo-
liberalism and the enervating saturninity of queer theory, Acts of Gaiety ex-
plores the twinned and mutually informing histories of gayness as politics
and gayness as bon vivance. This affective history of gaiety underscores the
centrality of liveliness to LGBT cultures, and it shows us the folly of sober
and straightlaced struggles for “full and equal rights” that sentimentalize
homonormativity as a mode of political equality, sexual liberation, and do-
mestic bliss. As other struggles for social justice make painfully clear, the
best that this pragmatic approach can hope to achieve is a compromised
form of citizenship. Affective histories involve ways of knowing and show-
ing that are lived in and through moments of acute corporeal sensation. The
sensate body serves as the vehicle and method for this brand of embodied
and visceral consciousness. “[F]or gay people,” writes Joan Nestle in A Re-
stricted Country, “history is a place where the body carries its own story.”15
Affective histories supplement our reliance on evidence and discernible
fact with the sensations, impressions, and emotional connections that the
remains of history can produce. As forms of knowledge production, they
are less invested in recuperating the past than they are in encountering it
as always already present in traces, signs, gestures, and actions. Narrating
the past in a subjunctive and performative mode rather than an indicative
mode, affective histories are rhizomatic rather than filiative, in Gilles De-
leuze and Félix Guattari’s schema, which is to say they are heterogeneous,
nonhierarchical, and nonreproductive in their logic.16 Like laughter, they
are contagious, corrosive, curative, and always already open to multiple
avenues of inquiry and possibilities for articulating the past, present, and
6 Acts of Gaiety

future.17 Acts of Gaiety moves us to confront on an emotional, physical, and

intellectual register what has been unrepresented, underrepresented, and
misrepresented by traditional modes of inquiry and canonical accounts of
our queer past. Galvanized by a gleeful historical impulse and the desire
to advance a more exuberantly progressive political program, this book re-
claims gaiety as an important but neglected political affect that if revalued
might revive and reorient LGBT art and activism.

Gay Play

Gaiety plays an integral part in the establishment and maintenance of LGBT

public cultures. Sexual minorities can boast of a rich performance history of
entertaining audiences (both straight and gay) in bars, comedy clubs, and
drag shows, but historically we have been most skilled in the art of care-
fully crafting personas that enable us to survive the drama of compulsory
heteronormativity. “All of us who are queer can loosely be described as solo
performers,” observes David Román, “insofar as we have had to fashion an
identity around our gender and sexuality, drag being only one manifesta-
tion of this process.”18 Homosexuals learn to pass as straight to avoid insult,
injury, and persecution, often before we are old enough to be conscious of
what we are doing or why. Unable to express deviant desires publicly, many
sexual minorities seek solace in the arts. The theater has long been a haven
for queers. It is a site of yearning and fantasy, a liminal world where almost
anything is possible. Desire, including same-­sex eroticism, serves as a driv-
ing force in the theater, motivating characters and audiences alike. Uncon-
ventional liaisons, aberrant behaviors, lax morals, and powerful emotions
are the keystones of dramaturgy. Trafficking in magic and metamorphosis,
glitter and glamour, which is to say in the possibility of transformation, the
theater provides both a respite and a resource for society’s maligned and mar-
ginalized. Because of the crowd it attracts and the affective power it wields,
playhouses are prime targets for censorship. Seen as a danger, or, like prosti-
tution, a necessary evil, theater is often regulated and relegated to the physi-
cal margins of society.19 Located in entertainment zones, red light districts,
and bohemian enclaves where hedonism is actively encouraged, the theater
is a veritable gateway into gaiety, carnal pleasures, and clandestine pursuits.
Theater is the affect machine par excellence; its most basic function is to
make us feel. Whether through realist dramas, which obscure their normal-
izing force with claims to objectively reflect the world as it is, or through
 Introduction
7

experimental forms that actively challenge received truths and thwart the
normalizing function of catharsis, the theater is an engine of emotions. Per-
formance mobilizes and marshals affects, sentiments, and sensations, giving
meaning and coherence to our perceptions. In its most utopian incarna-
tion, suggests Jill Dolan, the theater “provides a place where people come
together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning mak-
ing and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations” of
“what a better world might feel like.”20 From the halls of academia to the
streets of our cities, performance has become, in recent years, the vehicle
through which our concerns about affect, embodiment, identity, and sexual-
ity are expressed, analyzed, challenged, and refashioned. Paying attention to
performance, understood as the repetition of behaviors that instantiate and
concretize our sense of “self” and “other,” allows us to examine the simul-
taneous and coconstitutive frames of expression, identification, and repre-
sentation that structure our possibilities for agency, sexual subjectivity, and
citizenship. When we celebrate artists such as Hanifah Walidah or D.R.E.D.,
whose dramatized personae challenge hegemonic structures of feelings that
silence and circumscribe lesbians and people of color, or when we call to
task religious fanatics, such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who
attempt to bar sexual minorities from the rites and rituals of civic participa-
tion, we concern ourselves with how bodies matter, with how they do what
they do and feel what they feel, using the conceptual paradigms of perfor-
mance and performativity.
Conscious of performance’s role in ritual efficacy, and seeking to capi-
talize on ritual’s role in engendering identities, Butler defines gender as a
“repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts, within a highly rigid
regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of sub-
stance, a natural sort of being.”21 Performance provides the occasion and op-
portunity to trouble gender—­not to mention race, class, and ethnicity—­by
enabling individuals and groups to “restyle” their bodies in a variety of dif-
ferent contexts, conditions, and environments. Butler’s articulation of gen-
der performativity underscores how public manifestations produce private,
interior identities and feelings of belonging through participation in social
rites that mark one as a member of privileged or stigmatized populations.
Gender performances involve complex, and often contradictory, enactments
of compulsory and elective behaviors, gestures, and attributes whose truths
are performatively produced through one’s fidelity to prescribed social and
cultural scripts. Whether on the stage or in the practice of everyday life,
the successful performance of one’s gender benefits the actor in question
8 Acts of Gaiety

through the bestowal of recognition and rewards. Infelicitous performances,

on the other hand, risk punishment and prohibition, including bodily harm
and death, as the rape and murder of Brandon Teena make painfully clear.
Performances that blur the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate,
normal and abnormal, justice and injustice, provide a forum in which we
can imagine, if not enact, alternative structures of feeling and alternative
ways of being in the world.
While the theater has sheltered many homosexuals and nurtured gen-
erations of gay artists, Robin Bernstein reminds us, it has also perpetuated
gross stereotypes and played a significant role in reinforcing homophobic,
sexist, racist, and classist social hierarchies.22 Plays by heterosexuals typi-
cally cast homosexuals as psychotic perverts, degenerates, and criminals,
but so, too, do scripts by gay authors. Mart Crowley’s landmark play The
Boys in the Band (1968), hailed by many as the first commercially successful
play to offer a sympathetic depiction of gay male sexuality, centers around
a group of closeted and self-­loathing upper-­middle-­class men who rent a
hustler for their friend Harold’s birthday party. Referred to only as Cowboy,
this rough trade is treated as a piece of meat. Paid to be objectified, the hus-
tler must suffer being openly mocked by the intellectually superior college
graduates who contracted his services. One of the friends, Bernard, is an Af-
rican American who endures “Uncle Tom” jokes by the nelliest of the group,
Emory. Emory is punched in the mouth by Alan, a heterosexual friend of the
host who cannot contain his disgust for effeminate men.
In The Boys in the Band, Crowley shows both the devastating effects of
homophobia and the protagonists’ indulgence in gaiety as a way to combat
it. Pleasure is resistance for these queens. The men laugh and joke, drink
and take drugs, sing and dance (the play calls for Michael to camp it up
to Judy Garland’s “Almost Like Being in Love” and for the entire group to
reprise a popular Fire Island dance called “Heatwave”). These seemingly
frivolous acts of gaiety are what keep these men alive. While the party ends
with every one of the boys having been humiliated or abused, some to the
extent that they want to kill themselves, they put on another record, mix
another cocktail, and make it through another night. Unlike most plays
about homosexuals prior to the gay liberation movement, these gay men are
neither alone nor dead when the curtain falls. As Michael notes in the final
scene, “It’s not always the way it is in plays. Not all faggots bump themselves
off at the end of the story!”23
The characters in The Boys in the Band may not be happy—­they may not
 Introduction
9

even be able to imagine themselves as happy (“[S]how me a happy homo-

sexual,” says Michael, “and I’ll show you a gay corpse”), but they manage,
somehow, to be gay.24 Gaiety, here and throughout this book, has less to do
with the expression of an inner emotion than it does with the projection, or
theatricalization, of a feeling that one can inhabit, and enact so fully, that it
appears “as if” it were emanating from the core of one’s being. These acts of
gaiety facilitate a respite from the drudgery of daily life, provide escape from
untenable situations, and enable the construction of alternate realities gov-
erned by values and aspirations obverse to (and despised by) mainstream
culture. At a time when contemporary sexual politics is complicit with what
Sara Ahmed calls “the promise of happiness,” it becomes increasingly urgent
to counter coercive and pragmatic forms of political optimism with, among
other things, historical accounts of the conjunctions of riot and revelry in
earlier epochs of the LGBT movement.25 Acts of gaiety do not make the
world go away; they make worlds, albeit illusory and fleeting ones. The Boys
create for themselves a mundus ludibundus. They experience life through
play, as play, in play.26 Mundus ludibundus is a world governed by the ludic,
a world of pleasure seeking and joke telling, a world of leisure pursuits and
sexual conquests. Serving as what Susan Sontag, in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” calls
a “gesture of self legitimization,” acts of gaiety involve an awareness and
appreciation of illusion, a penchant for the play of surfaces, and an under-
standing of appearances as distinct from reality.27 Through parody, satire,
and physical comedy, The Boys in the Band transforms something as ugly as
homophobia into a cynical joke just as the Lavender Menace’s zap creates a
thing of beauty from an abject identity.

Homo Ludens :: Lesbo Ludens

Lesbians and feminists are not typically associated with gaiety. Dykes, es-
pecially those of the 1960s and 1970s, are routinely caricatured as sexless,
humorless killjoys who (thankfully) lost the Culture Wars to dildo-­packing,
deconstruction-­spouting genderqueers. Stereotypes painting dykes as stri-
dent, frigid, and frumpy abound in both mainstream and queer subcultural
accounts of history. The strategies for self-­definition and self-­promotion
successfully employed by gay men to increase their visibility, political clout,
and economic capital—­including camp, kitsch, and drag—­have not been
particularly efficacious for lesbians, not even those in the performing arts.28
10 Acts of Gaiety

“When lesbians make it to off-­Broadway,” notes butch icon Peggy Shaw, “it’s
the boys who are doing it.”29 Shaw is referring specifically to Charles Busch’s
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, one of the longest-­running shows in New York
theater history.30 The question of whether lesbian sexuality and dyke modes
of humor can be made intelligible on the stage of national politics has preoc-
cupied artists and activists since the 1960s.
The theater world has done comparatively little to challenge stereotypes
of women and lesbians, in part because there were (and are) so few out
dykes working as playwrights, directors, actors, or designers. As Roberta
Sklar told the audience at a recent conference at the Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies (CLAGS) on dykes in the 1970s, “One thing you didn’t do if
you wanted a career in professional theater, you didn’t come out. . . . [I]f you
wanted to be a lesbian in the theater, you understood that it was ‘Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell.’”31 Many lesbian playwrights working during the era, such as
María Irene Fornés, did not write lesbian plays. Why would they given that
there were so few places that would stage them? Although there were many
off-­off-­Broadway theaters where gay men could produce their work, there
was no lesbian equivalent to Caffe Cino or the Play-­house of the Ridiculous,
not until 1976 when Medusa’s Revenge, a short-­lived but influential per-
formance space founded by two Cuban exiles, Ana María Simo and Magaly
Alabau, opened on Bleecker Street.32 Peggy Shaw called Medusa’s Revenge
“the gayest place in town.”33
Lesbians like Jane Chambers, who did write openly gay plays and did
enjoy a modicum of commercial success, tended to work in the realist vein,
which meant that her protagonists ended up dead or doomed to an equally
onerous fate. Unable to break through the glass proscenium, many dykes
gravitated toward agitprop or avant-­garde theater collectives. Sklar, for ex-
ample, joined Muriel Miguel and Megan Terry at the Open Theater, but
she left the troupe when it became apparent that the group had no interest
in exploring issues related to women or lesbians. Partnering with Sondra
Segal and Clare Coss, Sklar cofounded the Women’s Experimental Theatre
(WET), which created work based on cultural feminist assumptions about
innate biological differences between the sexes. Their best-­known work,
The Daughter’s Cycle Trilogy (1977–­80), offers a revisionist history of Greek
drama from the perspective of the female characters. This work presents
the mother-­daughter bond as a universal condition constitutive of women’s
shared experience.
Many feminist collectives, such as It’s All Right to Be Woman Theatre
 Introduction
11

(IARTBW, 1970–­76) and At the Foot of the Mountain (ATFOTM, 1975),

generated content through consciousness-­raising sessions. Their produc-
tions created a public forum for what had previously been seen as private
issues that women suffered with in silence, including rape, abortion, and
incest. These are serious topics that most women’s theater troupes felt
merited serious treatment, and understandably so. While performances by
WET, IARTBW, and ATFOTM were not devoid of humor, they were cer-
tainly more solemn than they were silly. Not all feminists, however, took
an earnest approach to women’s history or to trauma. When Miguel left
the Open Theater, she started a collective with her two (heterosexual) sis-
ters, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo. Drawing on their cultural heritage as
members of the Kuna and Rappahannock nations, they called their troupe
Spiderwoman Theater. Spiderwoman refers to the goddess of weaving, and
the practice of story weaving is the foundation of the collective’s feminist
aesthetic. Their first performance was a comedy titled Women in Violence
(1975), and it addressed violence against women and among women, as
well as self-­inflected abuse. Eschewing the sober tone typically employed
by other—­predominantly white, middle-­class—­feminist collectives, these
sisters used slapstick, burlesque, and bawdy humor to create powerful social
satires. Spiderwoman Theater staged what many considered at the time to
be politically incorrect comedies. While most feminist collectives burned
out or disbanded within a few years, this troupe is still performing. Spider-
woman’s gaiety is what keeps them going.
To engage in gaiety is to create a pleasurable and empowering experience
out of an event or situation that is hateful or painful. Through parody, sat-
ire, and physical comedy, sexual minorities survive by replaying tragedy as
farce. In so doing, they make manifest the pleasure of politics and the poli-
tics of pleasure. Before exploring further ludic forms of lesbian dramaturgy,
I want to chart a longer affective history, as acts of gaiety have played an
important role in LGBT world-­making projects for a century, if not longer.

A Gay Old Time

Helen Furr . . . did not find it gay living in the same place where
she had always been living. She went to a place where some were
cultivating something, voices and other things needing cultivat-
ing. She met Georgine Skeene who was cultivating her voice which
some thought was quite a pleasant one. Helen Furr and Georgine
12 Acts of Gaiety

Skeene lived together then. . . . They were quite gay, they were quite
regular, they were learning little things, gay little things, they were
gay inside them the same amount they had been gay, they were gay
the same length of time they had been gay every day.
—­Gertrude Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”

Although it was officially claimed as a revolutionary political identity in the

late 1960s, gay has been used by people “in the life” to denote same-­sex de-
sire since at least the 1920s. A playfully ambiguous term, gay connotes good
humor and indicates a positive and cheery disposition, but it also enjoys a
long and storied association with passion, promiscuity, and perversion. As
early as the seventeenth century, the word gay was associated with immoral-
ity, wantonness, lewdness, and licentious behavior. It was used to denote
someone “addicted to pleasures and dissipations.”34 The Gay Nineties refers
to the 1890s, the fin-­de-­siècle epoch when hedonists flouted Victorian so-
cial norms. By this date, gay man was the term one used to refer to a rakish
womanizer unencumbered by the shackles of marriage, and gay woman was
slang for a prostitute, which one procured at a gay house, or brothel. An
1857 Punch cartoon by John Leech titled “The Great Social Evil” depicts a
gaily attired working girl, Fanny, in the Haymarket at midnight, posed in
an open door next to a poster of La Traviata, Verdi’s popular opera about a
courtesan. She is accosted by a modestly dressed acquaintance, Bella, who,
surprised at finding her friend in this situation, exclaims, “Ah! Fanny! How
long have you been gay!”35
Gay began to take on overt political connotations in the mid-­1940s,
when, in the wake of World War II, sexual subcultures began to form in ur-
ban areas across the United States. Members of these enclaves began to view
sexuality as an important rubric for understanding themselves as social
subjects and minority citizens in relation to the dominant culture. In New
York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, they created underground networks
where gay was used as an adjective to describe homosexual behavior, queer
aesthetics, and same-­sex events. A woman writing under the name Lisa
Ben, an anagram for lesbian, wrote and self-­published Vice Versa: America’s
Gayest Magazine in 1947–­48 while working as a secretary at a Hollywood
movie studio. She also wrote and sang what she called “gay” parodies in
queer bars in Southern California, including the Flamingo, which, as Ben
recalls in an interview with historian Eric Marcus, “used to have Sunday
afternoon tea dances there for just the gay kids. I would go there and have
 Introduction
13

As early as the sev-

enteenth century, the
word gay was associ-
ated with immorality,
wantonness, lewd-
ness, and licentious
behavior. In this
tableau, gay refers to
a prostitute, which
one sought at a gay
house, or brothel.
(John Leech, “The
Great Social Evil,”
Punch 33 [January
10, 1857], 114.)

a gay old time.”36

In the early 1950s, two black women, Ernestine “Tiny” Davis and her
lover Ruby Lucas (née Renei Phelan), opened Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot
in Chicago. Davis, who was known as “the female Louis Armstrong,” was
one of the finest musicians of the swing era. She played trumpet for the
all-­woman band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an integrated en-
semble that formed in 1937 and played for predominantly black audiences.
Davis’s fans included Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Armstrong himself,
who reportedly offered her ten times her salary to tour with him. In a 1986
documentary film, Davis was asked why she did not leave the International
Sweethearts of Rhythm to play for Satchmo. Grinning like a Cheshire cat,
she said, “I loved them gals too much.”37 The Sweethearts broke up in 1949,
after male soldiers returned from the war and made it increasingly difficult
for women musicians to find work. “[W]e never got the credit we deserved,”
14 Acts of Gaiety

Davis said of the band. “But women have a hard time in anything. There’s
nothing you can do. Just keep on keeping on.”
In 1949 Davis formed her own band, Tiny Davis and Her Hell Divers,
separated from her husband and children, and moved to Chicago. Soon af-
ter, she met Lucas, a drummer, with whom she spent the next four decades.
Asked to describe their relationship, Davis replied, “Ruby came over one
day and never left. Hell, she stayed for forty-­two years. Are we gay? Maybe
we are. We have ourselves a time, I can say that.”38 For Davis, gay denotes
her sexual orientation, but this has less to do with the naming of an identity
than it does with indexing a pursuit of pleasure. Davis and Lucas were out
when many black celebrities, such as playwright Lorraine Hansberry, were
closeted. The influence of Tiny Davis and Ruby Lucas is undeniable in the
Varied Voices of Black Women, a group of Bay Area poets and musicians
comprised of Pat Parker, Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, and Gwen Avery,
whose US tour in the late 1970s helped many lesbians find their gay spot.
Davis’s legacy lives on in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoems, which fuse music
and sound, dance and movement, voice and the spoken word. It consonates
with the eclectic, improvisational virtuosity of Sharon Bridgforth’s theatrical
jazz aesthetic, the subversive slam poetry of Staceyann Chin, and the haunt-
ing Haitian rhythms of Lenelle Möise’s hip-­hop-­inflected performances.
Davis and Lucas risked a great deal in operating an openly gay club in
the 1950s, as these operations were frequently the target of police raids,
even if the owners paid for mob protection. Any man or woman who was
not wearing at least three articles of clothing proper to their gender was
taken to the precinct and booked. Groups of people assembled, even in a
private home, without a balanced number of the opposite sex present were
also subject to arrest. As David Carter reminds us in his book Stonewall,
at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal everywhere except
Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws—­
federal, state, or local—­protected gay people from being denied jobs or
housing. The fines levied against gays and lesbians for these transgressions
were nothing compared to the financial hardships many homosexuals faced
when they lost their jobs and/or spouses after their names and crimes were
printed in the morning’s newspapers. Tired of the public humiliation and
social recrimination, and bolstered by bourgeoning underground networks,
homosexuals began to organize themselves as a political constituency. Un-
fortunately, as queers began to take themselves seriously as a political entity,
some individuals and groups found the gay life of Tiny Davis, Ruby Lucas,
 Introduction
15

and Lisa Ben an obstacle to political enfranchisement.

In 1950 the Mattachine Society became one of the nation’s first LGBT
rights organizations, known as a homophile league—­so named because
newspapers would not print ads announcing gatherings or actions by peo-
ple calling themselves homosexuals or gays, though publications such as
the Village Voice and Los Angeles Times would print notices of homophile
meetings and demonstrations. The Mattachine Society took its name from
a secret society of masked revelers in medieval France that staged peasant
revolts. Founder Harry Hay chose this moniker because he felt that “1950s
gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might be-
come engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through
struggle to move toward total redress and change.”39 Gaiety was central to
the founding mission of the Mattachine Society, but this would soon change.
Many of the original members were communists, and they based their or-
ganization on the cellular structure of the Communist Party, complete with
levels of membership and oaths of secrecy. The Red Scare and homosexual
baiting of the McCarthy era precipitated a coup in which Hay and the soci-
ety’s leftist leaders were cast as ideological extremists and ousted, along with
their ludic politics.
The Mattachine Society’s turn away from gaiety resulted in a lack of
imagination and creativity, as evidenced by the group’s increasingly narrow
political vision. The new leaders promoted integration and liberal reform
rather than radical social change, focusing their energies almost exclusively
on antidiscrimination legislation and the decriminalization of homosexual-
ity. As the founders’ dream of social revolution gave way to the goal of as-
similation, the group’s communist rhetoric and flamboyant tactics came to
be seen as a hindrance to the attainment of civil rights, as they confirmed
heterosexuals’ fears and gave credence to stereotypical depictions of flaming
faggots and angry dykes. The new focus would be on proving that same-­
sex desire was normal and that homosexuals were just like everyone else.
By adopting a politics of respectability promoting the moral and material
achievements of dignified, middle-­class citizens, members hoped to demon-
strate their normalcy and worthiness by distancing themselves from deca-
dent and debauched characters like Hay.
It was the newly sober and conservative Mattachine Society that served
as the model for the first lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis,
which was founded in 1955 by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.40 The group
published a newsletter called The Ladder, which filled the void left by Lisa
16 Acts of Gaiety

Ben’s Vice Versa.41 As the name of the periodical suggests, the emphasis
was on progress and uplift, not gaiety or good times. The Ladder’s “very
establishment in the midst of witch-­hunts and police harassment,” notes
historian Lillian Faderman, “was an act of courage, since members always
had to fear that they were under attack, not because of what they did, but
merely because of who they were.”42 Due to the risks publication entailed,
many of the contributors used pseudonyms, including playwright Lorraine
Hansberry, who signed her letters to the editor with the initials “L.H.N.”43
Not surprisingly, a shroud of secrecy permeated the meetings. Flavia Rondo,
a member of GLF and Radicalesbians, recalls attending her first and only
DOB meeting in New York in the late 1960s. Only three women were in at-
tendance, and no one uttered the word lesbian.44
Shaped by complex, and at times contradictory, motives, ideologies, and
objectives, homophile leagues sought to redefine the meaning of homosexu-
ality, by disarticulating it from sexual deviance and social pathology, and to
forcefully assert the role of queers in the shaping of American culture. By
voicing the initial call for LGBT civil rights, homophile organizations made
important contributions to sexual politics and paved the way for subsequent
waves of activism. But they also set dangerous precedents by crafting poli-
cies and endorsing practices that circumscribed the movement. Believing
that homosexuals would gain equality only by assimilating into mainstream
society, homophile leagues required members to look and act straight. They
mandated conformity to strict rules governing dress codes, social behavior,
and gender norms. The DOB, for example, refused membership to “preda-
tory butches.”45 The desire for social acceptance led homophiles to police
themselves as forcefully, if not more so, than agents of the dominant culture
did.
There were plenty of queers in the late 1950s and 1960s who had abso-
lutely no desire to blend in or become part of the status quo, including: Tiny
Davis; the Beat poets; the Black Mountain artists; playmakers at Caffe Cino,
La MaMa E.T.C., Judson Poets’ Theatre, and Play-­house of the Ridiculous;
Andy Warhol’s Factory entourage; Jack Smith; José Sarria; Sylvia Rivera;
Valerie Solanas; and Jill Johnston, to name only a few. In contrast to homo-
philes who pleaded for acceptance, these gender benders and nonconform-
ing sexual outlaws staged outlandish acts of gaiety that served as potent and
immensely pleasurable critiques of heteronormativity. Homophile leagues
took the opposite approach, abstaining from public displays of gaiety in lieu
of earnest and serious appeals for accommodation. These early activist or-
 Introduction
17

ganizations renounced gayness and gaiety as a precondition for citizenship.

In casting the ludic as antithetical to the struggle for civil rights, homophile
leagues inhibited impulses and legislated pleasures. Because Mattachine and
DOB were so invested in assimilation, many historians cite the Stonewall
uprising rather than the founding of homophile organizations as the origin
of the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement.

Revelers, Rebels, and Rioters

Even the riots were a riot.

—­Jerry Hoose, GLF

Police and patrons alike were surprised during a routine raid of a mafia-­run
bar in Greenwich Village in the wee hours of June 28, 1969, when some of
the clientele resisted arrest. In a spontaneous gesture of civil disobedience,
the clients at the Stonewall Inn—­which included lesbians, street hustlers,
transexuals, and drag queens, a number of them queers of color—­fought
back against the police. Refusing to provide identification and failing to go
quietly and obediently to the station to be processed, they unleashed years
of pent-­up rage at the injustices they had endured by attacking law enforce-
ment officials. People smashed glasses, broke bottles, and threw chairs at the
officers. Outside the Stonewall Inn, a crowd began to form. When the police
exited the bar to place detainees into squad cars, they found themselves
outnumbered. Surrounded by several hundred demonstrators who assailed
them with coins, beer cans, and bricks from a nearby construction yard,
the officers retreated and barricaded themselves inside the bar. Uprooting a
parking meter, some of the demonstrators smashed through the plate glass
window. As protesters seized the police, the officers drew their guns and
threatened to shoot. Someone set the bar on fire, and within seconds the
room was engulfed in flames. Reinforcements arrived and tried to reestab-
lish order. The Tactical Police Force, donning full riot regalia, attempted to
disperse the crowd.
In one of the greatest acts of gaiety in LGBT history, a group of queens
responded to this show of force by staging an impromptu chorus line. Lock-
ing arms and kicking up their heels, they sang, “We are the Stonewall girls.
We wear our hair in curls. We don’t wear underwear. We show our pubic
hair. We wear our dungarees above our nelly knees.” Unable to counter this
18 Acts of Gaiety

display of military might, homosexuals used the most effective weapon in

their arsenal: gaiety. Satire and parody are disarming; they mock objects of
reverence and authority, toppling them from their exalted position by ren-
dering them absurd and ridiculous. Kicking and screaming, this chorus of
queers’ riotous laughter rendered the cops impotent if not pathetic. When
disciplinary regimes go to such extremes—­in this case tear gas and assault
rifles—­to show how obscene and revolting homosexuals are, often the only
thing gays can do is show how ludicrous homophobia is.
The Stonewall uprising was a spontaneous but highly self-­conscious
performance event. Like all theatrical spectacles, acts of gaiety involve par-
ticipants and observers. The spectators may be invited to join in the fun, as
in the case of the Lavender Menace zap, or they may be the butt of the joke,
as the police who raided the Stonewall Inn were. “For years I have heard
people describe the event as angry and I suppose in a way it was,” recalled
the late playwright Doric Wilson.

But that was not the main emotion I remember experiencing that night. I
could never seem to find the right words. While filming the “American Ex-
perience” documentary it suddenly came clear to me. The first reaction that
night was shock and then awe that we were coming out of the “twilight” and
actually standing up to authority—­fighting back. And what followed was a
giddy and joyous glee. And somehow we knew nothing would ever be quite
the same again.46

The rioting and revelry continued for several days and led to the formation
of the Gay Liberation Front in early July. A short-­lived but enormously in-
fluential umbrella organization comprised of seasoned civil rights activists,
radical feminists, socialists, anarchists, and peace activists, GLF’s mission
statement read:

We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realiza-
tion that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about un-
less existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to
impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature.47

The Gay Liberation Front was less interested in attaining social acceptance
for homosexuals than it was in challenging the gendered and racist founda-
tions of patriarchal society. “Gay liberation is a struggle against sexism,”
 Introduction
19

wrote GLF member Allen Young, against the “belief or practice that the
sex or sexual orientation of human beings gives to some the right to cer-
tain privileges, powers, or roles, while denying to others their full poten-
tial. . . . The definition of sexism, as defined by women’s liberation and gay
liberation, presupposes a struggle against the main perpetrators of society—­
straight white men—­and against the manifestations of sexism as they ap-
pear in all people.”48
Part of a rainbow of identity movements that emerged in the 1960s and
1970s, GLF was the first political faction to take up the appellation “gay.”
Martha Shelley, a former president of the DOB’s New York chapter and an
active participant in the Student Homophile League (SHL), is credited with
suggesting that the group add “Gay” to “Liberation Front,” which mem-
bers wanted to use to signal their allegiance with anti-­imperialist struggles
in Vietnam and Algeria.49 Playing off the Black Panther slogan “Black is
Beautiful,” GLF proclaimed, “Gay is Good.”50 Countering the pathological
portrait of same-­sex attraction as sick and sinful, shameful and secretive,
gay affirms homoerotic desire as healthy and happy. Some have argued that
the term was attractive to activists because “Gay is simple and easy to say
and free from the usual stigmas,” which is to say that it employs “a language
free from odium.”51 This line of reasoning seeks to occlude the etymology
and checkered past of the word gay and is contradicted by the militant and
oppositional politics of GLF.
The Gay Liberation Front was not for people who just happened to be
gay. As Martha Shelley notes, “Other organizations were for people who
wanted to join the mainstream, who thought the only thing wrong with
American society is that they excluded gays.” Members of GLF saw them-
selves as part of the counterculture, and they insisted on their difference
from—­not their similarity to—­the rest of society. While members of the
Mattachine Society wore suits and ties to demonstrations and DOB mem-
bers donned dresses and heels to peacefully picket establishments, the
Lavender Menace wore T-­shirts and dungarees to guerrilla theater actions.
These radicals staged aggressive, in-­yer-­face demonstrations to force public
debates about homosexuality. Their media-­savvy protest tactics pushed the
gay agenda to the center stage of national politics.
While gay self-­consciously connotes a positive affect, it also encodes a
history of illicit and transgressive pleasure-­seeking proclivities. The term
acknowledges but seeks to transmute the mournful and melancholic aspects
of a spoiled identity. As the antithesis of straight, gay carries with it a critique
20 Acts of Gaiety

of bourgeois notions of decorum and respectability. To be gay is to be care-

free, to be uninhibited by moral constraints, and to exhibit a disregard for
conventions. The inverse of sobriety and seriousness, gay is frolicsome and
fun-loving. Indicative of a devil-­may-­care attitude, gay worries less about
the future repercussions than it does about present pleasures. It transforms
what is lifeless, plain, and dull into something that is vibrant, vivacious, and
festive. Animated and alive, sparkling and spirited, gay suggests an orienta-
tion that is performative rather than static. Flashy and flamboyant, brilliant,
and showy, gay can be as colorful as Gladys Bentley’s Harlem cabaret act or
as garish and gaudy as Ethyl Eichelberger’s drag.
Playing as it does on and with the multiple registers of gay, the naming of
GLF is itself an act of gaiety. To call oneself gay in 1969 was a defiant gesture
and a bold expression of non-­normative desires. More than a sexual identity,
gay denoted a revolutionary attitude and a collective aspiration for a more
just world. As Young wrote in Out of the Closet: Voices of Gay Liberation
(1972), the groundbreaking anthology he edited with Radicalesbian Karla
Jay, “Gay, in its most far-­reaching sense, means not homosexual, but sexu-
ally free.”52 Gay and lesbian liberationists argued that heterosexuality and
homosexuality are artificial categories propagated by a sexist society, not
fixed or immutable essences. In a more enlightened world, these radicals
reasoned, the need for such nomenclature would disappear. Insisting that
sexuality was much more fluid than existing structures allowed, they fought
to transform the repressive sexual norms of American culture. “[I]n a free
society,” Young insisted, “everyone will be gay.”53
Given the degree to which gay history has been occluded by queer stud-
ies and given the degree to which gay has become attached to the name of
certain conservative aspirations in the past two decades, with gay marriage
and gays in the military dominating the gay agenda, it is easy to forget—­
especially for those too young to remember—­that gay liberationists were
vehemently opposed to such reformist measures. These activists were
highly critical of the institution of matrimony and of the role US armed
forces played in imperialist projects at home and abroad. The language of
gay rights distorts the history of sexual politics in the twentieth century
by disarticulating gay from its radical roots and cementing it to a series
of neoliberal reforms, homonormative programs, and assimilationist aims.
Members of GLF could not have imagined in 1969 that just a few decades
later gays would consent, let alone volunteer, to fight an unjust war and that
 Introduction
21

they would do so under the banner of equality. Nor could they have envi-
sioned that radicals who once decried marriage as the root of patriarchal and
capitalist oppression would demand their right to indentured servitude and
government regulation of their intimate relationships—­and that they would
do so using the tenets of the 1950s homophile movement.
If GLF “hadn’t exploded into existence,” writes Martha Shelley in an
essay titled “Our Passion Shook the World,” “gays would still be pleading
politely for acceptance, and the world would still be deaf to their pleas.”54
These activists “were hot and rude, joyous and angry, utopian and opinion-
ated. ‘Nuanced’ wasn’t part of our vocabulary,” recalls Shelley. “Question
authority? We didn’t even recognize it!”55 Emboldened by the feminist dic-
tate that the personal is political, GLF activists transformed the process of
coming out from a private act into a public event. They urged people to take
part in the political performance of coming out and to stage it as an act of
gaiety. Come Out! was the title of the group’s newsletter, first published in
November 1969. The inaugural edition of the periodical reads:

COME-­OUT, A NEWSPAPER FOR THE HOMOSEXUAL COMMUNITY,

dedicates itself to the joy, the humor, and the dignity of the homosexual
male and female. COME-­OUT has COME OUT to fight for the freedom of
the homosexual and to give voice to the rapidly growing militancy within
our community, and to provide a public forum for the discussions and
clarification of methods and actions necessary to end our oppression.
COME-­OUT has COME OUT indeed for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.”56

Liberationists saw coming out not as a panacea but as a radical act of gaiety
that countered homosexual shame with gay pride. The idea was to come out
and play. Ludic rites such as the Christopher Street Liberation Day March
(later renamed Gay Pride) that GLF organized to commemorate the first
anniversary of the Stonewall uprising served as a ribald retort to a homo-
phobic society (it was actually a demonstration not a float-­filled procession
sponsored by corporate conglomerates seeking to cash in on a niche market
as it is today). Gay pageants, protests, and performances served as ambient
environs in which deviant subjects could fend off some of the bad feelings
associated with being gay in a straight world.
22 Acts of Gaiety

From Gay Pride to Queer Shame

Chants of “Gay Power” became the battle cry for sexual liberation and com-
ing out its paradigmatic expression. Pride has fueled the struggle for the
decriminalization of homosexuality and the demand for legislation granting
protection of civil liberties. It has been the impetus for the establishment
of LGBT studies in universities and colleges, as well as the proliferation of
gay art and cultural festivals, most of which take place during the month of
June. Since 1969 the gay and lesbian movement has made incredible prog-
ress toward the goal of sexual liberation, resulting in unprecedented and, for
many veteran activists, almost unimaginable political change. Despite the
tremendous gains it has wrought, the concept of pride has engendered more
than its fair share of discontent among sexual minorities, in part because its
hard-­won victories have not benefited all homosexuals equally. Reaping the
greatest rewards are homoliberals, whose investment in normative social
and economic structures leads them to reify rather than challenge the status
quo. Seeking parity, equal access, and integration into the national fabric,
homoliberals do little to problematize or expand the criteria for citizenship.
Over time the concept of pride has become disarticulated from gaiety.
The desire for sexual minorities to see themselves accurately portrayed in
the media and to control the means of their (self-­)representation quickly
turned into an imperative to put forward positive, and only positive, images
of same-­sex desire. This has led to the construction of constricted and con-
fining scripts for virtually every aspect of homosexuality, from coming out
to cruising, and to mandates that spokespeople for the movement be clean-­
cut, conventionally attractive, and respectable. In this way, pride has be-
come complicit with social hierarchies of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and
able-­bodiedness in producing “proper” gay subjects at the expense of “im-
proper” ones. Rather than offering an antidote to shame and self-­loathing,
the imperative of gay pride can compound these emotions by making queers
feel that they are the source of their own unhappiness.
Along with the homoliberalization of sexual politics, the concept of
pride has become increasingly commodified. A fatal attraction between ad-
vertisers and apolitical assimilationists has transformed the gay liberation
movement into a gay free market economy. In the past forty years, the an-
nual parade has become less a political act of gaiety and more a celebration
of lifestyle and shopping habits. Whereas the Dyke March (first held in 1993
in conjunction with the March on Washington) refuses corporate sponsor-
 Introduction
23

ship, the Pride Commission actively solicits donations and subsidies from
companies seeking brand integration with a lucrative niche market. As the
parade devolved into a carnival of consumption, the concept of pride came
to be seen as both limited and elitist. People began to wonder: what political
affects had been occluded or ignored in our fervent promotion of pride, and
to what extent had the imperative to be out and proud repressed discussion
of more controversial, less dignified aspects of sexuality?
A three-­day international conference featuring almost fifty panelists was
held at the University of Michigan in 2003 “to confront the shame that les-
bians, gay men, and ‘queers’ of all sorts still experience in society; to explore
the transformative impulses that spring from such experiences of shame;
and to ask what affirmative uses can be made of these residual experiences
of shame now that not all gay people are condemned to live in shame.”57
Events of various kinds commemorating gay shame have been staged across
North America and Europe in subsequent years, including a series of events
exploring political depression by a group of academics, activists, and artists
associated with Feel Tank Chicago. On May Day, members of Feel Tank, clad
in bathrobes and slippers, stand on street corners shaking Prozac bottles and
holding signs that read “Depressed? It Might Be Political.” The collective
explores the potential for bad feelings such as shame, fear, apathy, anxiety,
hopelessness, numbness, despair, and ambivalence to constitute and be con-
stituted as forms of political resistance. These actions are a sharp contrast
to the celebratory, feel-­good displays of community and camaraderie that
typically punctuate the month of June.
Dissatisfaction with the rhetoric of pride can be traced to the sex wars of
the 1980s. Self-­described “pro-­sex feminists,” many of whom were lesbians,
reacted to the puritanical stance of antipornography feminists such as Cath-
erine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin by celebrating what are considered
by many to be shameful sexual practices, including sadomasochism (S/M),
bondage, and public sex. Susie Bright, Honey Lee Cottrell, Tee Corinne, Jew-
elle Gomez, Joan Nestle, and Pat Califia contributed to the inaugural issue
of On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Lesbian (1984), the first
feminist erotica magazine and the first to feature dyke porn by and for dyke
audiences. The title of the publication is a satirical jab at off our backs (aka,
oob), the longest-­running feminist newspaper in the United States, which
served as a platform for the antipornography position. Lesbian feminists
began producing adult videos, unionizing strip clubs like the Lusty Lady in
San Francisco, and reclaiming the art of burlesque. The desire to counter the
24 Acts of Gaiety

moralizing practices of antipornography activists prompted women in the

1980s to renew their commitment to gaiety.
The WOW Café, an off-­off-­Broadway performance space and social club,
took root in New York’s East Village in the midst of the sex wars and became
a laboratory for the exploration of lesbian feminist gaiety. Opening just as
Medusa’s Revenge was closing shop, WOW Café produced some of the most
audacious, sex-­positive, feminist artists of the 1980s and 1990s, who titillat-
ed audiences with their hilarious and witty gender-­bending productions.58
Paradigmatic of the formal experimentation, political daring, and unbridled
eroticism that inspired and sustains WOW to this day is the Split Britches
collective, comprised of the working-­class butch/femme dynamic duo of
Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver and the immensely talented writer/performer
Deb Margolin, who is heterosexual. Split Britches lampoons sexual norms,
social conventions, and coming-­out narratives in plays such as Upwardly
Mobile Home, Little Women: The Tragedy, and Beauty and the Beast. One of the
group’s best-­known productions is the Obie Award–­winning Belle Reprieve,
a parody of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, which they cre-
ated in collaboration with Bette Bourne and Paul Shaw (aka, Precious Pearl)
of Bloolips, an anarchic drag troupe from London. Shaw and Bourne (who
became radicalized though a cell of GLF) had worked together years earlier
when both were members of the glam fab cabaret group Hot Peaches.
While on tour in Berlin in the late 1970s, Hot Peaches received a re-
quest from Spiderwoman, which was also performing there, asking to bor-
row some costumes, as the group’s luggage had been lost in transit. When
Weaver, who was part of the Spiderwoman collective, arrived to pick up the
costumes, it was love at first sight for her and Shaw. Shaw left Peaches in hot
pursuit of forbidden fruit. When she and Weaver returned to the States, they
cohosted an international feminist theater festival in New York City. Seeking
a permanent place for women’s theater, the couple helped create the WOW
Café, where Split Britches became a crowd favorite. It shared the stage with
the likes of Alina Troyano, whose alter ego, Carmelita Tropicana, serves up
Molotov cocktails of bons mots that give new meaning to cuba libre; Holly
Hughes, an abstract painter-­cum-­performance artist who became notorious
as one of the NEA Four; and the Five Lesbian Brothers, a collective of ballsy
and brilliant women whose most recent collaboration serves as the conclud-
ing chapter in this study of gaiety.59
The Brothers banded together in 1989, one year before Queer Nation
was formed in New York City by AIDS activists from ACT-­UP. The AIDS
 Introduction
25

epidemic cut short the utopian moment of gay liberation and reinforced the
perception of homosexuals as degenerate and diseased. A paranoid and mel-
ancholic response to the crisis seemed much more appropriate to a threat
of this magnitude than the cheery optimism inherent in the rhetoric of gay
pride. As the disease spread, and the government demonstrated little more
than apathy for the cause, acts of gaiety gave way to gestures of grief and
mourning. This is not to suggest that gaiety was absent from or inimical to
queer politics. Activists continued to stage ludic forms of protest, includ-
ing zap actions, but these tended toward dark play and macabre rituals as
a way to explore the complex relationships between pleasure and pain, sex
and death.60 At the same time, however, an increasingly vocal contingent of
artists and activists, spearheaded by folks like Andrew Sullivan, a writer for
and later editor of the New Republic, and ACT-­UP cofounder Larry Kramer,
fueled the sex panic by arguing that homosexuals were (or should be) more
invested in monogamy than in having casual intercourse. Sullivan’s Virtually
Normal called for the legal recognition and social normalization of gays and
lesbians, particularly through marriage. Similarly, in Kramer’s deeply affect-
ing AIDS drama The Normal Heart, the protagonist Ned Weeks urges gay
men to “fight for the right to get married instead of the right to legitimize
promiscuity.”61 Although a number of queer theorists sought to counter
these critiques by outlining “the trouble with normal,” the more conserva-
tive voices prevailed in redirecting the queer agenda toward a pragmatic,
integrationist program of homoliberalism.62 This is perhaps best evidenced
by the fact that two recent award-­winning revivals of The Normal Heart,
one off-­Broadway (at the Public Theater in 2004) and one on Broadway (at
the Golden Theater in 2011) did little to foment political outrage about the
persistence of AIDS or its transformation into a global phenomenon but
succeeded in generating considerable amounts of money and support for
same-­sex marriage referendums.

Gaily Forward: Toward a Retro-­Activist Future

For decades, queer theorists have prided themselves on being at the cutting
edge of scholarship, and they have valorized the avant-­garde in aesthetics,
politics, and other forms of culture work. In retrospect, we can see how
this posturing has contributed to a fetishization of evolution, advancement,
and forward motion. In recent years, queer has become increasingly dis-
26 Acts of Gaiety

connected from both its critical potential and its radical aspirations. The
term has come to denote a more narrowly defined sense of sexual identity,
one that advances the economic interests of corporate conglomerates and
the nation-­state through the promotion of cultural hegemony and liberal
norms of social inclusion. Today, queer and nationality no longer strike us
paradoxical terms, antithetical propositions, or an ironic and parodic mode
of dissent. What we thought thirty years ago was a fluid formula of antinor-
mativity turned out to be, with a few modifications and misapplications, a
recipe for the conservative and profoundly antidemocratic assimilationist
project of homoliberalism.
There is no way of knowing what will be the most radical, innovative,
or progressive avant la lettre, just as there is no way of predicting or orches-
trating, with any degree of accuracy, the afterlife of sexual experiments. Of-
tentimes our best shot at thinking outside the box is not by privileging the
vanguard but by enlisting those seemingly passé, obsolete, and useless for-
mations deemed to be at the rear guard. Acts of Gaiety is organized around
what many might consider a retrogressive repertoire of corporeal gestures
and civic performances. My interest in seemingly outmoded acts of gaiety
exemplifies what Lucas Hildebrand calls retroactivism, a form of political
and affective regeneration that seeks to resuscitate the dissident dreams of
the past. Valerie Solanas’s man-­hating manifesto, the antifamily rhetoric of
WITCH protests, the separatist screeds of lesbian nationalists, and Hothead
Paisan’s matriarchal machinations appear to us today as “revolting,” but not
necessarily in the hilarious and politically offensive ways their creators orig-
inally intended. Why attempt to resurrect such cringe-­worthy performances
in order to reanimate a disavowed structure of feeling? The answer is that
this mode of archivalism sheds light on how our construction of the past
dictates political and performative possibilities in the present.
Plumbing neglected archives and seemingly antiquated practices, Acts
of Gaiety places discarded and discredited histories of lesbian art and activ-
ism into meaningful and transformative relations with the present in order
to make the conservative, hegemonic narratives of homoliberalism seem
alien and unfamiliar and to elucidate different modalities for public and
political life. Underwriting Acts of Gaiety is the notion that a Fabian strategy
comprised of dilatory dyke tactics may be our best hope for countering the
forces of homoliberalism. An obdurate, unyielding, and dogged attachment
to outmoded ideals and aspirations is a cornerstone of lesbian feminism
and of my critical methodology as well. I term this approach a degenerate
 Introduction
27

diacritics, by which I mean a mode of scholarly engagement that concerns

sexual deviates and reverts to an earlier stage of culture, development, or
evolution in order to put the past in “touch” with the present so as to re­
imag­ine the future.63 In suggesting that we alter course and proceed astern,
I am in no way advocating a retreat from the public sphere or calling for a
return to identity politics. As Heather Love has suggested, a stubborn insis-
tence on “backward feelings” is a feature of even the most forward-­reaching
lesbian feminist cultural productions.64 While my book promotes “feeling
backward” as a way to reenter a prior historical moment and circumvent the
seemingly relentless forward march of homoliberalism, it resists the mel-
ancholic urge to “dwell at length on the ‘dark side’” of queer life, as Love’s
eloquent elegy to queer history does.65
In its affirmation of the role of pleasure, as well as pain, in shaping the
way subjects come to understand themselves and remake the circumstances
in which they find themselves, Acts of Gaiety is sympathetic with Elizabeth
Freeman’s theory of temporal drag, a tantalizing neologism describing “the
gravitational pull that ‘lesbian,’ and even more so ‘lesbian feminist,’ some-
times seems to exert on ‘queer.’”66 Attention to the temporal drag of dyke
aesthetics reminds us that revolution refers to a new movement instigated by
an insurrection but also to a circuit that is renewed by a force turning back
on itself. Emphasizing the dual meaning of this word acknowledges the nos-
talgic demands of a retroactive lesbian feminism by directing our focus to
the lost possibilities and unfinished business of this still potent program for
social justice.
I refer to the archives that I draw on as “acts of gaiety,” and each of the
five chapters that follow offers an extended meditation on drama queens,
jesters, guerrilla activists, and terrorists who challenge our presumptions
about how much progress we have made since the lesbian and gay liberation
movement began, in what directions, and at what costs. These case studies
blend archival research, performance ethnographies, and close readings of
texts and productions. Because the actors, objects, and events that concern
me here have been so poorly documented, so systematically ignored, or so
grossly misunderstood by both their peers and subsequent generations of
scholars and activists, I have opted to dwell on individual acts of gaiety in
specific moments of LGBT history, offering thick descriptions of a relatively
small number of characters and events. This approach responds to the need
for more nuanced and sustained interpretations of lesbian performance, art,
and politics, and it addresses the dearth of theoretical formulations for in-
28 Acts of Gaiety

terpreting the cultural productions and critical legacies of a pivotal period

in LGBT studies.
Chapter one, “‘Scummy’ Acts: Valerie Solanas’s Theater of the Ludicrous,”
offers the first documentation of the previously undiscovered publication
and production history of the most provocative and profoundly seditious
lesbian dramaturge in the history of pre-­Stonewall American performance.
Better known as the attempted assassin of Andy Warhol than as a pioneer-
ing playwright, Solanas has been denied the recognition she deserves as
the preeminent lesbian feminist dramatist of the sexual revolution. Her ex-
perimental comedies bear a striking resemblance to the work of gay male
playmakers and performance artists of the bourgeoning off-­off-­Broadway
movement, but they are unique in their depiction of lesbian sexuality and
nothing short of pioneering in their articulation of a feminist conscious-
ness. Solanas’s militant tone and scabrous humor were so beyond the pale
that her plays scandalized theater patricians, counterculture radicals, and
pornographers alike.
My focus here is on Solanas’s landmark 1965 play Up Your Ass, an up-
roarious and electrifying parody of heterosexuality, gender norms, race re-
lations, and the misogyny of queer countercultures. Gaiety functions as a
structuring principle in the scummy world of queer street culture where the
play is set. The multiethnic cast of Up Your Ass, which features a Hispanic
butch dyke protagonist and black drag queen prostitutes, exposes the pre-
rogatives and fantasies of white, middle-­class liberals. When Solanas could
not fight her way into the art world, she set about to make her own scene.
Unable to find a home for her play, she began to create happenings, which
she called “SCUMMY things.” I demonstrate here that she not only intended
SCUM Manifesto as a “SCUMMY thing,” but she developed the “script” in
and through performances around New York and San Francisco in 1967
and 1968. This perpetually homeless, hooker dyke self-­produced, in ob-
scure venues for a handful of people, lesbian feminist performances that for
decades would be virtually unimaginable, even in the most forward-­looking
artistic circles.
It was in defense of Valerie Solanas, after she shot Warhol, that Ti-­Grace
Atkinson, president of the New York chapter of NOW, coined the term rad-
ical feminism. Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto had a profound effect on Atkin-
son’s political theory and activism, including highly theatrical antimarriage
protests she conducted with The Feminists. Chapter two, “Guerrilla Acts:
Marriage Protests, 1969 and 2009,” juxtaposes zap actions protesting the
 Introduction
29

institution of matrimony by lesbian feminists with demonstrations staged

by supporters of same-­sex unions after the passage of California’s Proposi-
tion 8. This pairing shows how zaps, true to their name, can either incite
or eviscerate debate on a given topic. More important, it sheds light on the
ways in which marriagists transformed the fortieth anniversary of the Stone-
wall uprising, which took place just a few months after the Prop 8 vote, into
a public enactment of forgetting, one that redefined gay liberation to make
it consistent with a homoliberal agenda. My mission here is to reveal how
LGBT historical memory is being politicized through antiludic public per-
formances that produce amnesiac scenes of assimilation.
Chapter three, “Expatriate Acts: Jill Johnston’s Joker Citizenship,” looks
at sapphic spectacles of anarchic civil disobedience staged by America’s
first shameless public lesbian. Best known for her book Lesbian Nation: The
Feminist Solution (1973), a collection of essays credited with sparking the
separatist movement, Johnston is a progenitor of what I am calling joker
citizenship, a mirthful and militantly erotic mode of insurrection and com-
munion that recasts patriotism as a desire to reterritorialize the nation as a
site of pleasure. Taking seriously Johnston’s insistence that the revolution
should be fun or we should forget it, I argue that her unique mode of po-
litical dissent makes manifest the performative force of the ludic in lesbian
nationalism and theatricalizes a structure of feeling I term national gaiety. I
am most interested in how gestures of joker citizenship create an occasion
and opportunity for sexual agency and how they enable subaltern subjects
to imagine new forms of public and political life that counter assimilationist
forms of homonormative polity.
The spirit, if not the actual practice, of lesbian nationalism, persists in
a variety of forms in a number of dyke subcultures and is a guiding force
behind a genre of artistic production I call the lesbian comedy of terrors.
A revenge fantasy featuring vigilante heroines, scenes of graphic violence,
and dark humor, the lesbian comedy of terrors exploits for humorous effect
the compulsory rites and rituals of hetero-­and homonormativity. Although
most radical lesbians decry the use of violence to combat violence, this does
not stop them from dreaming about mutiny or dramatizing fictional sce-
narios of sedition. Chapter four, “Terrorist Acts: The Maladapted Hothead
Paisan, a Lesbian Comedy of Terrors,” looks at a paradigmatic example of
this genre, Diane DiMassa’s zine Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist,
and a musical theater adaptation of this work by Riot Grrrl Animal Prufrock
that was staged at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 2004. I show
30 Acts of Gaiety

that archaic structures of feeling and disavowed histories can serve as vital
components of a radical agenda or, in the case of this musical, as unwitting
conduits for homoliberalism. Contrasting two related but distinct enact-
ments of lesbian gaiety, I challenge commonplace assumptions about which
modes of art and activism constitute the most potent forms of resistance
to gay normalization by troubling the deeply ingrained notion that culture
workers who position themselves at the vanguard (as opposed to the rear
guard) of social movements actually forge the more forceful and sustained
interventions in national political life. This case study explores what Hot-
head’s unique brand of retroactivism has to teach us about queers’ complic-
ity in the War on Terror.
The final chapter, “Unnatural Acts: The Tragic Consequences of Queer
Homoliberalism in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs,” ex-
amines the personal and political costs of an LGBT movement that turns
its back on gaiety. The Five Lesbian Brothers collectively author and stage
outlandish experimental performances rooted in the parodic inversion of
genres, cultural norms, and audience expectations. The troupe surprised
audiences in 2005 when, after a lengthy hiatus, it returned with a work
that is generically speaking a realist tragedy, but one that, I suggest, is best
understood as what Freud called a cynical tendentious joke. This bourgeois,
lesbian-­themed Oedipus offers audiences a surprisingly normative world-
view not to endorse the conservative political position it depicts but to chal-
lenge it. The Brothers play it “straight” with this play not because they have
gone straight but because the gay and lesbian community has, and much
to its own peril. This tragedy serves as a parable of the ruinous effects of
homonormativity and a nuanced critique of the disastrous implications of
homoliberalism. As such it constitutes a fitting conclusion to Acts of Gaiety,
which dramatizes how in our quest for legitimization we homosexuals have
come to take ourselves too seriously.
Acts of Gaiety peruses performances and protests by artists, activists, and
collectives whose fiercely funny modes of social engagement pack the affec-
tive torque to counter the conservative yaw of homoliberalism. The works
of these performance artists, playmakers, and political dissidents register as
echoes of archaic dreams of revolution, and they make painfully clear the
poverty of our current tactics and taxonomies for sexual expression. My
hope is that the exploits of these backward-­looking, visionary dykes can
inspire us to retard the progress of the current homosexual agenda and to
move instead gaily forward.
1
“Scummy” Acts
Valerie Solanas’s Theater of the Ludicrous
Humor is not a body of logical statements which can be refuted
or proved, but is rather a quality which appeals to a sense of [the]
ludicrous.
—­Valerie Solanas, The Diamondback (1957)

On May 10, 1965, a twenty-­nine-­year-­old aspiring dramatist named Valerie

Jean Solanas registered an unpublished one-­act play with the US Copyright
Office. Solanas called her satirical comedy Up Your Ass, but the official title
listed on her application is From the Cradle to the Boat, or Up from the Slime.
“[J]ust in case the play should ever become a Broadway smash hit,” the
doggedly optimistic Solanas reasoned, “at least there would be something
acceptable to put on the theater marquee.”1 Indicative, in many ways, of
the theatrical experimentation and countercultural expressions taking root
during the mid-­1960s, Solanas’s script is unique in its depiction of lesbian
sexuality and nothing short of pioneering in its articulation of a feminist
consciousness. Remarkable for its explicit portrayal of female desire, sexual
subcultures, and urban street life, Up Your Ass chronicles the exploits of
Bongi Perez, a self-­described “vivacious, dynamic, single . . . queer,” who
cruises “real low-­down funky broads, nasty bitchy hotshots.”2 The protago-
nist, like the play’s author, is a wiseass butch dyke of Hispanic descent (So-
lanas’s paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Spain)
who hustles for a living, panhandling and prostituting. This drama features
a multiracial cast of dueling drag queens, beatnik hipsters, hapless johns, a
feces-­obsessed femme fatale, and a housewife-­cum-­homicidal lesbian ter-
rorist. Homosexuality is a given rather than a problem to be addressed, and
degeneracy is redefined as a “scummy” virtue, which enables social devi-

31
32 Acts of Gaiety

ants and sexual minorities to escape a diseased patriarchal society. Solanas’s

licentious humor and risqué characters were so beyond the pale that her
play scandalized avant-­gardists, political radicals, and pornographers alike.
Despite trying every avenue imaginable, she could find no one willing to
publish or stage the script during her lifetime.
Written prior to the sexual revolution and the Stonewall rebellion, Up
Your Ass offers a riotous and uproarious parody of heteronormativity, racial
stereotypes, and gender roles. It is acknowledged here as one of the earliest,
most provocative, and profoundly seditious lesbian feminist plays in the
history of American drama. This work has been denied the critical attention
it deserves for several reasons: the script was believed, until very recently,
to have been lost; the play has been overshadowed by the author’s later and
better-­known work, SCUM Manifesto (1967); and any consideration of Sola-
nas’s innovation or artistry has been eclipsed by her attempted assassination
of Andy Warhol. In 2010 I discovered Solanas’s copyright application (the
first of three she would file in as many years to protect this and subsequent
works) along with the original manuscript of From the Cradle to the Boat,
which has languished in the Library of Congress for over four decades. My
research has led to a series of startling revelations that not only recast the
social drama of the 1960s but also urge us to recalibrate the models and
methods we have used to construct the artistic and political legacies of this
volatile period in America’s past. In this, the first comprehensive critical
analysis of Solanas’s dramaturgy, I track the creation, “loss,” and recovery
of this extraordinary play, as well as its influence on a genre the author
invented called a “SCUMMY thing,” a guerrilla theater event that is best
understood as a kind of gutter dyke “happening” or “situation.” Archival
evidence confirms that Solanas considered SCUM Manifesto to be a script
for a “SCUMMY thing” and that she was in negotiations with Warhol to
produce and film one at the time of the shooting. Through close readings of
these performative texts and a careful charting of their social and cultural
contexts, I delineate the tenets of an aesthetic of gaiety I term Solanas’s The-
ater of the Ludicrous.

“Up from the Slime”

Much of what is written about Valerie Solanas is based on hearsay and half-­
truths. Like most outlaws, her identity is cloaked in myth and legend. For
 “Scummy” Acts 33

someone who played such a prominent part in the social drama of the 1960s,
and who frequented one of the most obsessively documented sites in the
twentieth century, Warhol’s Factory, Solanas remains surprisingly, if not con-
veniently, anonymous.3 The paucity of data and ambiguity of evidence only
contribute to her lore. With so little information about her, we are free to
make of this woman what we will: predator, prey, casualty, survivor, whore,
man-­hating menace, filthy dyke, paranoid schizophrenic, militant radical,
misunderstood genius, diabolical anarchist, homicidal maniac. Some cast
Solanas as the hero of an epic tragedy; others depict her life as a melodrama,
painting her as the victim of oppressive social forces. My narrative tends to-
ward farce. It explores the absurd situations in which Solanas found herself
and marvels at the ingenuity, creativity, and fortitude she had to muster to
play the hand she was dealt.
Solanas was nothing if not a card. Born April 9, 1936, she grew up on
the Boardwalk in south Jersey, where she developed her talents as a grifter,
a gabber, and a good old-­fashioned working girl. Her maternal grandfather,
with whom Solanas spent a great deal of time as a child, inspired her thes-
pian proclivities with stories of working in burlesque, where he and a part-
ner had a song, dance, and comedy routine.4 What Solanas lacked in formal
training in the theater (she had none), she made up for in raw talent, un-
bridled determination, and the fact that she had been performing her entire
life. She cultivated her talents and developed her aesthetic sensibilities as
survival skills that enabled her to make it through the 1950s and 1960s as a
woman, a queer, and an aspiring artist. Long before she mastered the art of
peddling conversation, hustling johns, or wheedling her way into Warhol’s
films, Solanas learned about the magic power of “as if.” She was introduced
to this technique by her father, Louis Joseph Florent Solanas, a charismatic
alcoholic with a violent temper and pedophilic tendencies. Acting in the
high-­stakes drama of childhood sexual abuse, Solanas improvised charac-
ters with the urgency and efficiency of someone whose life depended on the
part she was playing. She learned at an early age that one must, in the words
of Jon McKenzie, “Perform or Else,” do or die.5
Valerie was by all accounts a wild child, and her problems escalated after
her mother, Dorothy Marie Biondo, a blonde bombshell with the visage of
Lana Turner, divorced Louis, relocated the family to Maryland, and married
Frank “Red” Moran. Solanas was expelled from Catholic school for hitting
a nun, and by the age of twelve she was running away on a regular basis,
hitchhiking all the way to her aunt’s house in Baltimore. She was thought
34 Acts of Gaiety

to be a lesbian by members of her extended family, though no one talked

openly about Valerie’s sexuality, not even when she got pregnant in high
school. Solanas’s younger sister Judith recalls, “I was told that Valerie had a
baby, he was adopted by a ‘decent’ family and there was to be no more dis-
cussion about it. . . . I doubt if anyone cared about Valerie’s feelings.”6 After
the baby was born in 1953, Solanas and her son lived with the Blackwells,
a high-­ranking military family whose teenage son served in the Korean War
with the sailor alleged to be the baby’s father.7 In spite of these events, she
completed high school on time, with the class of 1954. The caption un-
derneath Solanas’s senior portrait in the Oxon Hill yearbook reads, “Val.
Brainpower and a lot of spirit.”8 The Blackwells paid for Solanas to attend
the University of Maryland, and after she went away to school, she never
saw her son again.
What others saw as mistakes, moral failures, and character flaws, So-
lanas saw as resources. She cultivated a raw and rapacious sense of humor
from the material conditions in which she lived and labored. Throughout
her life, Solanas subsisted on very little, but her resourcefulness is evident
in her determination to get an education and later to publish and produce
her artwork. In college, she majored in psychology. She worked in an animal
lab testing the conditions under which rats would learn to avoid electric
shock. These clinical trials would inform Solanas’s theories of biological de-
terminism and fuel her belief that males are genetically inferior, the result
of a chromosomal deficiency. When she was not in the lab, Solanas hosted
a call-­in radio program where she posed as a therapist offering advice. She
wrote letters to the editor of the campus paper, The Diamondback, where her
public tirades against men, marriage, and middle-­class values earned her
the nickname “Maryland’s own little suffragette.”9 In 1958 Solanas gradu-
ated with honors (with a 4.4 grade point average) and was inducted into Psi
Chi, the psychology honor society. That fall she enrolled in a PhD program
at the University of Minnesota, but finding the course of study unbearably
sexist, she left within the year. “The purpose of ‘higher’ education is not to
educate,” she concluded, “but to exclude as many as possible from the vari-
ous professions.”10 Years before the women’s liberation movement, Solanas
identified the link between economic injustice and systemic misogyny.
Valerie thumbed rides from Minneapolis to San Francisco’s Bay Area,
where she encountered a bourgeoning counterculture, one characterized by
free speech and free love, artistic experimentation, and political radicalism.
It was in the Bay Area that she perfected a gay way to earn a living that satis-
 “Scummy” Acts 35

fied her philosophical objection to capitalist exploitation and her desire to

spend as much time as possible writing. In an article titled “A Young Girl’s
Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class,” published in Cavalier magazine
in 1966 (as “For 2¢: Pain, the Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly”) Solanas
explains her ingenious economic strategy.11

Being fresh out of college I found myself in a typically feminine dilemma of

carving out for myself in a male world a way of life appropriate to a young
girl of taste, cultivation, and sensitivity. There must be nothing crass—­like
work. However, a girl must survive. So, after a cool appraisal of the social
scene, I finally hit upon an excellent-­paying occupation, challenging to the
ingenuity, dealing on one’s own terms with people and affording indepen-
dence, flexible hours, great stability, and most important, a large amount
of leisure time, an occupation highly appropriate to female sensibilities. I
contemplate my good fortune as I begin work for the day:
“Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents?”
“Sure, Sweetie, here.” It’s my wild body—­it gets them almost every time.
“Pardon me, Sir, do you have fifteen cents?”
“No.”
“You got a dime?” You gotta keep bugging them.
“No.”
“Nickel?”
“NO!”
“Dollar bill?” Think big.
“Here, here’s a quarter.”
Adds up fast. Four-­fifty an hour. Two hours and I can knock off and
write.12

Panhandling, supplemented by the art of shoplifting, provided this budding

anarchist with rent and food. Blessed with the gift of oracular spontaneity
and a penchant for scatological rhetoric, Solanas specialized in selling con-
versation, an hour’s worth for six dollars.

“Pardon me sir, do you have fifteen cents. . . . ?”

“What do I get for fifteen cents?”
“How ’bout a dirty word?”
“That’s not a bad buy. Okay, here. Now give me my word.”
“Men.”13
36 Acts of Gaiety

Occasionally these dirty words would lead to dirty deeds: a quickie in the
alley, a tumble in the sheets, or a three way with her friend Mary Lou, which
was a big score: up to twenty-­five dollars and three days off to write.
“A Young Girl’s Primer” evokes and embodies the labor of hustling,
pimping, and performing in vividly material ways. Part male titillation and
part pedagogical performance, this essay, rendered in the form of a dramatic
monologue, educates female readers (and there were many who enjoyed
erotica, even then) about the problems and pleasures of being a woman and
a lesbian in a straight man’s world. While not exactly the stuff of agitprop,
this performative essay tempts women with the promise of a better, more
fulfilling life as an out lesbian, greater opportunities for career advancement,
and significantly more leisure time. If it romanticizes life on the streets and
the benefits of working in the informal economy by downplaying the dan-
gers associated with panhandling and prostitution, especially for working
girls without a pimp, it also minimizes moral objections to sex work, a
woman’s right to self-­determination, and queer forms of intimacy. Indeed,
this “excellent-­paying occupation” provided Solanas with ample time and
resources—­not to mention colorful content—­with which to complete her
first play script, Up Your Ass.

“I’m so female I’m subversive”

Solanas produced a small but revolutionary body of autobiographical work

that was born out of and intimately linked to the history of her flesh. Her
scripts inaugurate a critical lexicon and a performative lens through which
she staged both private and public permutations of class, gender, sex, and
sexuality. Solanas’s plays are meditation on the ways in which socioeconom-
ic conditions shape women’s lives and how the realities of our material exis-
tence shape us as subjects. She engaged the labor of theater to embody and
valorize women’s work. Up Your Ass, like “A Young Girl’s Primer,” salutes
the ingenuity and inventiveness of rogues, rebels, and renegades who sub-
vert the dominant culture at every juncture, repurposing its effects to their
own ends, so that others might live, love, and laugh with a greater sense of
freedom than they might otherwise be allowed.
This play begins with what may be the best, and possibly the most hilari-
ous, dedication to women’s labor and creativity in American literary history.
It reads:
 “Scummy” Acts 37

I dedicate this play to

ME
a continuous source of strength and guidance,
and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion
and faith, this play could never have been written.

additional acknowledgements:
Myself—­for proofreading, editorial comment,
helpful hints, criticism and suggestions
and an exquisite job of typing.
I—­for independent research into men, married
women and other degenerates14

The dedication’s parodic structure, heroicomical posturing, sardonic wit,

and overt feminist sensibility are key elements of Solanas’s dramaturgy, and
they form the cornerstones of what I am calling her Theater of the Ludi-
crous. Indicative of this genre is self-­conscious formal experimentation; ex-
plicit eroticism that pushes the accepted boundaries of middle-class sexual
norms; a pronounced anticapitalist critique; a profound engagement with
European philosophy, especially existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism;
the employment of a wry, irreverent, and satirical tone; and, finally, a pen-
chant for wordplay, scatological speech, and linguistic innovation.
Up Your Ass eschews a linear plotline, and the action unfolds in a series
of episodic, interrelated comic vignettes that become increasingly disturb-
ing as the play progresses. Every scene takes place in a realistic locale, but
they all involve actions and events that are so preposterous, shocking, and/
or violent that they transform what are seemingly neutral or safe spaces—­
the steps of an apartment building, an expensive restaurant, a classroom,
and a playground—­into defamiliarized zones that serve as vehicles for social
critique. The outrageous antics depicted in the play call for a broad acting
style that defies naturalistic conventions. The humor in Up Your Ass alter-
nates among corny, caustic, and campy. This play exudes the kind of scum-
my brilliance that radiates from glamazons of the gutter—­hookers, grifters,
and transvestites—­who engage in battles of wit with members of the ruling
class, breeders, and proponents of “great art.”
The play opens with the protagonist, Bongi Perez, a cross between Beebo
Brinker and Joe Orton. She is “dressed in khaki pants, a loud plaid sports
jacket and tennis shoes” loitering on the steps of the apartment where she
38 Acts of Gaiety

lives.15 “Hell’o Beautiful,” Bongi calls out to a woman passing by. When
the broad ignores her, Bongi shouts after her, “Stuck-­up bitch.”16 As is evi-
denced by the central character’s attire and her first line of dialogue, Bongi is
a dyke, and an aggressive one at that. She does not “come out”; she is openly
and unapologetically queer from the word go. Bongi flirts with a second
woman who wanders by, and then a third. “Give me a kiss,” she tells this
one, “and I’ll let you pass.” After yanking the broad’s chain, and mocking her
boyfriend to his face, Bongi declares, “[S]he’s not really my type” and lets
the scared straight couple go about their business.17
Bongi is Solanas’s alter ego, and she dramatizes, in delicious detail, how
the author withstood the indignities and injustices of being female and
queer in Cold War America: with humor, irony, intelligence, and wit. So-
lanas took tremendous pleasure in exploiting the complex gendered con-
tradictions of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than accept received biological
“truths” and cultural dictates, she rewrote the scripts about what it means
to be a woman, a lesbian, and an artist. Like Bongi, Solanas presented as
a butch dyke who made no effort to pass as straight. On the contrary, she
costumed herself in such a way as to draw attention to her gender transgres-
sion. Her uniform, which consisted of a jaunty sailor’s cap, navy peacoat,
and blue jeans, served as a sartorial index of her alterity and a challenge
to normative codes of comportment. Solanas performed her daily life as a
gender outlaw at a time when enactments of what Judith Halberstam calls
“female masculinity” were seen as not only monstrous but sufficient cause
for arrest and forced hospitalization.18 Solanas’s performance as a masculine
woman and an out dyke provided an arresting, if not terrifying, alternative
to traditional gender norms.
Rather than rejecting her female body, as many butches at that time did,
Solanas understood, validated, and harnessed its erotic power. She made
her living from the art of seduction through sex work, a profession rooted in
illusion and gender play. The gritty streets of Berkeley, and later New York’s
East Village, provided some of the only spaces in which women, not to men-
tion lesbians, could engage in gender subversion. There was no theater scene
for lesbians then, and dyke bars permitted only specific, circumscribed, and
highly codified enactments of gender transgression. Solanas was known, on
special occasions or at the request of a client, to sport a dress, high heels,
even lipstick. Far from the idealized image of the brooding, melancholic
butch that made femmes like Joan Nestle swoon, Solanas was gregarious,
gay, and very public in her flagrant disregard for both hetero-­and homo-
 “Scummy” Acts 39

sexual conventions. The enactment of such a complex nonconforming char-

acter is something we typically associate with the performance art of Peggy
Shaw and Holly Hughes at the WOW Café in the 1980s or with drag kings
like D.R.E.D. and Mo B. Dick in the 1990s, but Solanas perfected the art of
gender subversion decades earlier.
As Bongi blatantly cruises chicks, two men, one black and one white,
who have been watching the show from across the street join in on the
action. Spade Cat tries to pick up Bongi. When she playfully rebuffs his
advances, he and White Cat enter into a competition to see who can score a
chick first. Undone by his tired pick-­up lines and lack of finesse, White Cat
exclaims, “I may as well turn in my yo-­yo; all the swinging chicks’re either
queer or they go with spades. A white man doesn’t have a chance nowadays.
What’re we stuck with? All the fish.”19 As White Cat exits, a well-­dressed,
middle-­aged man walks by, discreetly eyeing Bongi. “Hey, Joe,” she asks, af-
fecting a Spanish accent, “you like to meet my seester?” The john, named
Alvin Koontz, fancies himself a “connoisseur of fine living.”20 He reads all
of the “zestful men’s magazines—­Tee-­Hee, Giggle, Titter, Lust, Drool, Slob-
ber . . . and Lech,” which he keeps next to his revolving bed, the kind, he
boasts to Bongi, that “they feature in Playboy.”21 Although he claims that
he’s so dynamite in the sack that women typically pay him for sex, Koontz
tells Bongi he’s willing to spend a few dollars to let her have the opportunity
of seeing him in action. When he asks her the price tag for an experience
that she will never forget, Bongi replies:

Well, for fifty bucks you get five minutes with a three-­quarter minute in-
termission. For an additional ten bucks I sneer, curse and talk dirty. Then
there’s my hundred dollar special, in which, clothed only in a driving helmet
and storm trooper boots, I come charging in, shrieking filthy songs at the
top of my lungs.22

When Koontz balks at the price, Bongi offers him the bargain special of
twenty-­five bucks and assures him that she’ll do almost anything that is not
repulsive, like “kiss men.”23 Bongi tricks Koontz out of dinner at the fancy
restaurant next door. Over their meal, she tells salacious stories about previ-
ous tricks and performs a number of lewd dances that get her john so horny
that he settles for quick hand job in the alley.
Up Your Ass explores the material reality of lives lived under particular
conditions and in extreme, sometimes fantastical, situations. The play is
40 Acts of Gaiety

redolent with the hunger and desperation that attends abject poverty, yet So-
lanas’s tone is humorous and the action is interrupted, in a Brechtian sense,
by song, dance, and acts of vaudevillian shtick. Over the course of this epi-
sodic drama, Bongi emerges as a picaresque hero, a charismatic rogue of
low social standing and questionable ethics who chooses to live by her wits
rather than “honorable” work. Picaresque literature is a highly theatrical
genre, originating in Spain in the sixteenth century, in which play func-
tions as a means of survival and empowerment that enables characters to
circumvent the pathos of lives lived on the margins. An itinerate drifter, the
picara wanders among people from all walks of life, exposing and ridiculing
the hypocrisy and corruption of different castes, including her own. Unre-
strained by prevailing moral codes, the picara lies, cheats, and steals her way
in and out of situations, often barely escaping punishment. As a picaresque
drama, Solanas’s Up Your Ass, serves as an ironic and satirical comedy of
manners, but it also offers audiences rich and detailed portraits of people
from social, racial, and sexual subcultures rarely seen on stage, even today.
After Koontz ambles dejectedly down the street, Bongi resumes her seat
on the steps of the apartment, waiting for her next adventure. “Miss Col-
lins,” she shouts to a “made-­up, bitchy-­looking drag queen” sashaying down
the street.24 The two greet each other warmly, sharing physical affection and
complimenting each other on their looks. Their gab session is interrupted
by another drag queen named Scheherazade, Miss Collins’s nemesis. “Oh,
Gawd. She is without a doubt, the most garish, tasteless faggot I’ve ever run
across. I’m ashamed to be seen with her. Look at her—­1965 and she’s wear-
ing wedgies.”25 Bongi and Scheherazade exchange greetings. Although she
clearly likes both queens, Bongi, the consummate trickster, cannot resist the
opportunity to cause some mayhem. She instigates a little drama by prais-
ing Scheherazade’s physique. You’ve got a fine ass, she tells the belle, you’ve
“got an ass just like a girl.”26 Jealous, Miss Collins fishes for a little flattery.
When Bongi tells her, “You are very pretty, for a boy,” she seethes with rage.
This fuels a heated debate about whether drag queens are men or women.27
“I AM a piece of pussy,” insists Scheherazade. “That’s just what I’ve always
said,” retorts Miss Collins, “you have a face like a twat. Twat Face! Twat
Face.” “Oooooo,” fumes Scheherazade, “I despise faggots.” “I despise men,”
Miss Collins interjects. “Oh, why do I have to be one of them? Do you know
what I’d like to be? A Lesbian. Then I could be the cake and eat it too.”28
As the two queens continue reading each another, Scheherazade hits Miss
Collins with her purse, which begins a game of pushing each other down
the street and offstage.
 “Scummy” Acts 41

The quotidian endeavors dramatized in Up Your Ass—­trash-­talking, hus-

tling, and cruising—­are more than ritualized behaviors designed to pass the
time; they are acts of survival and resistance. Bongi is not simply a home-
less person; she is part of the very fabric of her neighborhood, intimately
connected to the stoop on which she sits, the sidewalk she paces, and the
alley where she turns tricks. Bongi makes things happen—­her words have
an impact, and her gestures have consequences. She commandeers public
space, discomforts middle-­class heterosexuals, and topples sex and gender
hierarchies. She lives and works on the street, which serves as the locus,
indeed the heartbeat, of this queer community.
As the drag queens exit the stage, a young woman named Ginger emerg-
es from one of the apartments. “Say, Miss, did you, by any chance, see a turd
anywhere around here?”29 Initially, Bongi thinks the woman is referring to
the john she just hustled, but she quickly realizes that Ginger is searching
for an actual turd. When Bongi questions this behavior, Ginger explains
that she is hosting a dinner party for a man she really wants to impress and
“Everybody knows that men have more respect for women who are good
at lapping up shit.”30 Ginger is a “Daddy’s Girl,” which Solanas defines in
SCUM Manifesto as

passive, adaptable, respectful of, and in awe of the male. . . . Trained from
early childhood in niceness, politeness, and “dignity,” in pandering to the
male need to disguise his animalism, she obligingly reduces her “conversa-
tion” to small talk, a bland, insipid avoidance of any topic beyond the utterly
trivial—­or, if educated to intellectual discussions, that is impersonal dis-
coursing on irrelevant abstractions—­the Gross National Product, the Com-
mon Market, the influence of Rimbaud on symbolist painting.31

Having completely internalized society’s misogyny, Ginger eats what she is,
a lowly, abject turd, the excremental residue of civilization.
She offers to set up Bongi on a blind date with Russell, a noted “expert
on women,” who is joining them for dinner. “You’ll adore Russell,” Gin-
ger tells her; “he’s extremely talented, absolutely brilliant mind: he writes,
very unique outlook—­he satirizes women; and he writes the most brilliant
essays—­you can’t understand a word of them.”32 As they wait for their dates
to arrive, the women become better acquainted. Ginger tells Bongi about her
job. “I deal with really fascinating men—­all neurotics. I adore Neurosis; it
is so creative.”33 “Men have so much better judgment than women,” Ginger
asserts. To which Bongi retorts, “Yeah, they dig women.”34 “I don’t like to
42 Acts of Gaiety

brag,” Ginger interjects, “but I could never get along with other women;
Those mincing snots, they turn my stomach.  .  .  . I’m completely attuned
to the gripping dynamism of the male mind.”35 We learn that Ginger is an
aspiring novelist struggling to combine marriage with a career. “What’s even
trickier,” Bongi tells her, is to combine no marriage with no career.”36 In the
middle of their conversation about art, philosophy, and religion, Russell ar-
rives bearing bags of gourmet goodies for the repast he is about to prepare.
Before he consents to the blind date, Russell gives Bongi a vocabulary
quiz to see if she’s up to his level. Although she fails to answer all of the
questions correctly, and he is clearly not attracted to her physically, Russell
accepts Ginger’s arrangement, believing it will lead to sex. “You’re not too
bad looking,” he tells Bongi, “or, at least you wouldn’t be if you’d put a skirt
on and look like a woman.”37 “Why should I dress to give men hard ons?”
Bongi rejoins. “Let them get their own hard ons.”38 Shocked by Bongi’s lack
of femininity and hostility toward him, Russell proclaims Bongi “sick” and
“unsanitary” in addition to being frigid and humorless.39 “You women take
yourselves too seriously,” he spouts. “You can’t take a joke.” Bongi replies,
“No, I dig jokes. I’m just waiting to get the stage so I can tell my funnies.”40
Ginger diagnoses Bongi with penis envy and suggests that she visit a shrink.
She recommends Dr. Aba Gazavez at the Marriage and Family Institute, who
has developed a theory called creative passivity.
Bongi shares with Ginger and Russell her own theory of creative passiv-
ity: “When I’m on my knees,” she quips, “I get paid.”41 The revelation that
Bongi is a prostitute both repulses and excites Russell. He inquires about the
precariousness of the profession, to which Bongi responds, “It has its ups
and downs.”42 Sensing her guest’s titillation, Ginger expresses her longing
to be an “artful courtesan,” a “high priestess in the temple of love, fulfilling
the time-­honored role of pleasing men.”43 The noblest profession, Russell
informs her, is motherhood: “the crowning achievement, what every woman
is aching for . . . the highest honor, the supreme power.”44 Deferring to male
authority, Ginger states, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”45
“That’s a slick little maxim,” Bongi interjects, for “while the hand’s rocking
the cradle it won’t be rocking the boat.”46 She tells Ginger that if women were
freed from the shackles of maternity, they could rule the world. Suddenly
inspired, Bongi states, “Maybe being president wouldn’t be such a bad idea. I
could eliminate the money system, and let the machines do all the work.”47
Having suffered long enough listening to Russell’s drivel, Bongi launches
into a conversation about sex determinism and the elimination of the male
 “Scummy” Acts 43

species. This diatribe presages Solanas’s call for male genocide in SCUM
Manifesto, which begins:

Life in this “society” being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of “society”
being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-­minded, responsi-
ble, thrill-­seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the
money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.48

Bongi explains to Russell that men are “half-­assed women,” or, as Solanas
would soon put it, “The male is a biological accident  .  .  . an incomplete
female, a walking abortion . . . a machine, a walking dildo.”49 Russell re-
sponds by calling Bongi “a desexed monstrosity.”50 “Quite the contrary,” she
quips, “I’m so female I’m subversive.”51 Russell’s insists that he is repulsed
by Bongi and wouldn’t have sex with her “for a million dollars,” nor if she
“were the last woman on earth.”52 Bongi demonstrates that he, like all men,
is “obsessed with screwing” and will “swim a river of snot, wade nostril-­
deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy await-
ing him. He’ll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-­toothed hag, and
furthermore, pay for the opportunity.”53 All Bongi has to do is unbuckle her
belt, and Russell gets down on his hands and knees and begs her for sex.
As the two go at it behind the bushes, Russell discover Ginger’s turd, which
turns into a celebration. In a ludicrous ending to a ludicrous scene, Ginger
leads the cast in “Dance for Turd.” Spade Cat and Bongi join in while a de-
jected Russell goes inside “to start soaking his squid.”54
This musical interlude is followed by a second number, which Bongi
calls “Dance of the Seven Towels,” a parody of the “Dance of the Seven
Veils” performed by Salome for her uncle, King Herod, in order to inflame
his desire and grant her the head of John the Baptist. The “Dance of the
Seven Veils” mythologizes the origin of belly dancing, and it has a long and
storied association with other forms of erotic dancing, including burlesque,
striptease, and, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894), drag.55 Bongi
satirizes the pretensions of modern dance in her sapphic rendition of this
classic form.

[A]fter ripping off the seventh [towel], I soap myself up, work myself into a
lather, then the chorus girls, all wearing shower caps, flog me offstage with
wet washrags. Then there’s my modernistic fan dance—­I use an electrical
fan. . . . For my grand finale I short-­circuit myself before your very eyes.56
44 Acts of Gaiety

Horrified by Bongi’s mockery of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Loie
Fuller, Ginger calls out, “Russell! These Philistines! They’re trampling on
ART!”57 The scene comes to a close with Ginger hooking up with Spade Cat,
while Bongi and White Cat take advantage of a free meal.
The penultimate scene takes place at Dr. Aba Gazavez’s Creative Home-
making Class at the Marriage and Family Institute, the purpose of which is to
indoctrinate young women into compulsory heterosexuality and teach them
how to be “Daddy’s Girls.” The course, Gazavez explains, is rooted in “the
belief that marriage should be FUUNN! FUUNN! FUUNN! but, responsible
fun, the fun that derives from duty and sacrifice.”58 The doctor boasts that
the institute’s philosophy has “kept some of the most incompatible couples
together.”59 The curriculum consists of household basics: “cooking, market-
ing, budgeting, dusting, childrearing and fucking,” with a goal of integrating
fucking into all of the other activities.60 For example, the teacher explains,
the class will work toward combining fucking with dishwashing and child
care. “Wait until hubby’s getting ready to take his bath; then, quick, [s]oap
up the baby bottle brush, working it into a nice, foamy lather; then when
hubby’s all nicely naked and is leaning over to test his bath water, you come
te-­e-­a-­a-­r-­r-­ing in . . . (Demonstrating) . . . r-­a-­a-­m-­m-­ing the brush right up
his asshole.”61 At this point, a group of boys enters the class for a hand’s-­
on exercise in fucking. Assuming the (missionary) position, the girls move
along to the beat of the doctor’s hands. One girl, Marlene, starts deviating
from the script. When the teacher catches her tweezing the anal hair of her
partner, the doctor scolds her: “please confine yourself to fucking. The Mar-
riage and Family Institute doesn’t exist to turn out prostitutes, just simple,
basic, serviceable wives.”62 Doctor Gazavez ends the lesson with a prayer:
“Oh, God, Our Father, Son of the Holy Ghost, Husband of Mary, give us
this day our daily cookies, but, most of all, make our marriages FUUNN!
FUUNN! FUUNN! Ah-­men.”63
The final scene returns us to Bongi, who is seated on the steps cruising
chicks. “Hey, Dishrag,” she calls to a woman who walks by. “If you’re calling
me,” the woman shoots back, “my name happens to be Mrs. Arthur Haz­
lett.” Bongi tells her that Arthur is a funny name for a woman and Dishrag
is much more appropriate for a wife, which is, after all, something to wipe
things up with. “What makes you so sure I won’t wipe up the street with
you,” responds Arthur, relishing the flirtation.64 “This could be the begin-
ning of a beautiful romance,” Bongi teases her; “one shared experience is
all it takes.”65 Their foreplay is interrupted by Arthur’s son, referred to only
 “Scummy” Acts 45

as Boy, who has superglued his penis and can’t get it back in his pants. Ex-
asperated, Arthur sends him back to the playground. “I’m one of society’s
rejects,” she tells Bongi, “a wed mother.”66 Bongi asks her why she stays
married if she doesn’t find the relationship fulfilling. “Well, you know how
women are,” Arthur says, “loyal, faithful, dedicated and reliable.”67 “Yeah,”
replies Bongi, “and they oughta get slammed right in the teeth for it.”68 Ar-
thur admits that she’s afraid her son will grow up to be a faggot if he doesn’t
have a father. “That’d be just as well,” Bongi tells her; “let the guys ram each
other in the ass and leave the women alone.”69 Boy returns, and this time
he’s glued his pee hole shut, causing him to throw a tantrum. Arthur loses
her temper, and the boy goes away crying.
Arthur complains to Bongi about her sex life and confesses that she’d
“like to do something radical and daring.”70 Going out on a limb, she propo-
sitions Bongi. “What say you and me ball tonight? I’ll bet you’re a crazy lov-
er.”71 Clearly uninterested in serving as a diversion for a frustrated house-
wife, she tells Arthur, “Actually, I’m a lousy lover—­I’m too good a talker.”72
Pleading with Bongi, Arthur says, “Ah, come on; I’ll bet you’re a titillating
bundle of eroticism.”73 Bongi ends the flirtation by telling Arthur that’s she’s
just not her type. “You know what really flips me? Real low-­down, funky
broads, nasty bitchy hotshots, the kind that when she enters a room it’s like
a blinding flash, announcing her presence to the world, real brazen and pub-
lic. If you ever run across any broads look like neon lights,” Bongi tells her,
“send ’em my way.”74 Arthur handles the rejection in stride. “Send ’em your
way,” she jokes. “From now on I’m in business for myself.”75 When she sees
Boy coming up the street, she bellows, “Here comes that little prick again.”76
Something in Arthur snaps as she “grabs the boy by the throat and squeezes
it. Snarling, her closed teeth bared and her eyes bugged, she picks him up by
the neck and hurls him to the ground, squeezing hard all the while.”77 Boy
tries to scream but cannot. The stage directions read, “(His face turns blue;
she continues to squeeze for another fifteen seconds; she then throws him to
the ground, picks up a garden shovel lying near the bush and begins to dig
behind it).”78 “Not here,” yells Bongi, who has witnessed the entire scene;
“it’ll attract dogshit. There’s enough turds rolling around here as it is.”79 Ar-
thur chooses a spot farther back, digs furiously, tosses the boy in, and covers
him with dirt. “You’re a good head,” Bongi congratulates her, “even if your
name is Arthur.”80 In front of them passes a chick. “Hell’o, you beautiful,
low-­down funky doll,” coos Arthur. “Hey, you like to meet my seester,” of-
fers Bongi. “Why not,” responds the woman. “I have an eye for the ladies.”
46 Acts of Gaiety

As Bongi and her broad move out of sight, Arthur calls out, “What’s the
other eye for? Whores?”81 Their voices fade away as the play ends.
Solanas’s Up Your Ass passes beyond the absurd, beyond the ridiculous:
her lesbian feminist comedy is absolutely ludicrous.82 What I am calling Val-
erie Solanas’s Theatre of the Ludicrous begins in 1965 with the completion
of her first play. Up Your Ass not only predates what is called “women’s the-
ater” by five years, if we take Its All Right to Be Woman Theatre (1970–­76)
as the progenitor of this movement, it was more formally innovative, politi-
cally daring, and affectively challenging than the plays created and staged by
female collectives like the Women’s Experimental Theatre and At the Foot
of the Mountain. Trafficking in essentialist notions of gender and stereotypi-
cal depictions of feminine attributes, women’s theater collectives typically
performed in an earnest, didactic tone. In contrast, Solanas preferred satire
and employed a highly ironic mode of storytelling that would become the
hallmark of multicultural groups like Spiderwoman Theater and the Flam-
boyant Ladies in the mid-­to late 1970s.
Thematically and stylistically, Up Your Ass has more in common with
the work of gay male playwrights, such as Ron Tavel and Charles Ludlam,
and the trashy brilliance of performance artists like Jack Smith than it does
with the dramaturgy of the women’s theater movement. In fact, the year
Solanas copyrighted Up Your Ass, 1965, is the same year John Vacarro and
Ron Tavel debuted their Theatre of the Ridiculous.83 While this troupe
evolved to include lesbians, such as the amazing Lola Pashalinski, it was
primarily a gay male collective.84 Although Solanas’s Theater of the Ludi-
crous shares many traits with the Theatre of the Ridiculous, these forms
were developed completely independent of one another—­the former on
the West Coast and the latter on the East Coast. Valerie’s sister Judith
confirms that Solanas wrote Up Your Ass before she moved to New York.
She told me, “Valerie wrote the play or at least the first draft while living
in Berkeley.”85
A comparison of the inspired raunchiness of these two forms of experi-
mental theater illuminates many of the tensions around which Acts of Gaiety
is structured and sheds light on the misogynistic and lesbophobic under-
pinnings of the male-­dominated queer counterculture of the 1960s. Both
the Theatre of the Ridiculous and the Theater of the Ludicrous break with
the dominant trends of dramatic realism by calling for a broad acting style
with minimal stage settings and props, fantastical settings that reach far be-
yond the drawing room, and characters who exhibit neither coherent nor
 “Scummy” Acts 47

stable identities. Both experimental forms feature contrived scenarios, taboo

subjects, and indecorous acts—­nudity, graphic sex, and outrageously queer
couplings—­designed to shock audiences out of their conventional Cold
War morality. Finally, parodic depictions of high art and campy reworkings
of popular culture serve as sources of humor and vehicles for social critique.
While Vaccaro and Tavel privileged improvisation over the sacredness of
the scripted text (which Solanas held dear), the primary difference between
these playmakers has less to do with their mode of presentation than it does
with their plays’ reception and success.
Spectators and critics alike loved the visually and verbally confronta-
tional Theatre of the Ridiculous. They could not get enough of Vaccaro and
Tavel’s spectacles. The raunchier and grosser the better—­like the perfor-
mance featuring Siamese triplets joined together at the anus or Turds in Hell,
which stars a guy whose cock (evoked by a surrealistic papier-­mâché penis)
is so huge that he cannot control his bowel movements. Every time he takes
a step across the stage, excrement squirts out of his ass and drips down
his leg. The obscene vignettes, Rabelaisian humor, and scurrilous satires of
the Theatre of the Ridiculous packed houses, garnered reviews in both the
underground and mainstream press, and brought Vaccaro, Tavel, and their
associates (especially Charles Ludlam) at least a modicum of fame and for-
tune. Whereas fabulously filthy acts of gaiety by queer men evoked (then
but also now) praise for being avant-­garde, subversive, and revolutionary,
the same acts, when committed by a gender-­non-­conforming dyke, elicited
disgust and derision.
Although Solanas—­whose path would soon cross that of the Ridiculous
crowd—­was working in a similar vein with analogous themes and com-
mon plot elements, her play was judged to be indecent, vile, and repulsive.
Up Your Ass’s caustic wit, unapologetically dykey sensibility, and feminist
consciousness proved to be absolutely repugnant not only to producers
and directors but to publishers and pornographers as well. The play, along
with her subsequent work, was dismissed as the misguided musings of a
maladapted, menacing lesbian. If it was ludicrous for Solanas to believe in
1965 that Americans were prepared for such a bold, brutally honest, and
mordantly mirthful work of art by a female playwright, then it was equally
preposterous for her to believe that she could forge an alternate world in
which her talents would be valued. But this is exactly what she did—­or at
least tried to do—­when she moved to New York City and took aim at the
very heart of white, male, middle-­class privilege.
48 Acts of Gaiety

Peddling her Ass

With Up Your Ass in hand, Solanas hitchhiked across the country in the
spring of 1965. When she arrived in New York City, she took up residence
at the Village Plaza, a seedy single-­room-­occupancy (SRO) hotel at 79 Wash-
ington Plaza, filed a copyright application for her script, and immediately
began peddling her Ass all over town.86 A supremely methodical and prac-
tical woman, Solanas systematically hawked her play to publishers, por-
nographers, directors, and producers. One of the first places she submitted
Up Your Ass for consideration was a magazine called The Realist, a nation-
ally distributed counterculture journal. The brainchild of future Yippie Paul
Krassner, The Realist was popular for its sexually charged content and un-
flinching satirical portraits of American culture.87 Although Krassner cannot
recall exactly when Solanas shared the script with him, it seems likely, given
subsequent events that I document here, that it was in the summer or early
fall of 1965.88 He does remember, however, that he declined the invitation
to print the script in his magazine: “I rejected it on the grounds that I had
no overwhelming desire to share Valerie’s misanthropic evangelism with my
friends.”89 Despite his misgivings about Solanas’s man-­hating rhetoric, he
found Up Your Ass amusing and was intrigued enough to meet her in the
lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. The satirists hit it off, and their conversation
continued over lunch at the Automat on 42nd Street. The two became, in
the words of Krassner, “deep acquaintances.”90 He invited Solanas to guest
lecture in at least one class he taught at the Free University, and he most
likely aided her in publishing “A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the
Leisure Class” in Cavalier, a Playboy-­style men’s magazine for which he was
a regular contributor.91 Solanas’s article appeared in the July 1966 issue
alongside an essay on black humor by Krassner and humorous reflections by
Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, and Ray Bradbury. Ever the hustler, she tried
to interest the editors of Cavalier in a regular column called “The Lesbian at
Large,” which they regrettably declined.
Undeterred by Krassner’s rejection of her play, Solanas sent the script
to Ralph Ginzburg, editor of fact: a magazine (1964–­67), a satirical journal
about society and politics with a muckraking bent. An author, photojournal-
ist, and publisher of erotica, Ginzburg was convicted of violating federal ob-
scenity laws in 1963 on the grounds that his Eros (1962), a hardcover “mag-
book” featuring writing about sexuality in history, politics, art, and literature,
was pornographic. Having received the script while he was in the process of
appealing his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, Ginzburg was not
 “Scummy” Acts 49

only afraid to publish Up Your Ass but he was reluctant to return the manu-
script to Solanas via the US mail lest he be charged with a second violation
for trafficking in pornography.92 He told Solanas that if she wanted her script
back she would have to collect it in person.93 Sometime after she retrieved
the play from Ginzburg, Solanas sent the script to Andy Warhol.
Any number of events might have inspired Valerie to market Up Your Ass
to Warhol in late 1965.94 Perhaps she had seen Andy film Robert Heide’s one-­
act play The Bed at Caffe Cino earlier that summer.95 Perhaps she heard that
Warhol “employed” writers like Heide and Tavel as scenarists for his films.
Or perhaps she read in a newspaper that Warhol was looking for new acts
to sponsor and simply cold-­called him, as she had done Krassner and Ginz-
burg. Based on the success of the Velvet Underground, which Warhol began
managing in 1965, and the popularity of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable
multimedia events, the impresario had decided to solicit other interests in
which to invest his capital. “We had so many people hanging around all the
time now,” Warhol remarked, “that I figured in order to feed them all we’d
have to get other people to support them.”96 Andy ran ads seeking products,
projects, and personalities to sponsor, like this one in the Village Voice.

I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-­DC, cigarettes,
small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK ’N’ ROLL RECORDS, anything, film,
and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY; love and kisses Andy
Warhol. EL 5-­9941.97

However Solanas made contact with Warhol, one thing is certain: she gave
him Up Your Ass in late fall 1965 or January 1966. On February 9, she wrote
him a letter asking for the return of the script, which had been in his pos-
session for some time.98
Warhol corroborates this in an interview with Gretchen Berg, conducted
in the summer of 1966, in which he stated:

[W]e have cops coming up here all the time, they think we are doing awful
things we aren’t. People try to trap us sometimes: a girl called up here and
offered me a film script called Up Your Ass and I thought the title was so
wonderful and I’m so friendly that I invited her to come up with it, but it was
so dirty that I think she must have been a lady cop.99

Solanas found Warhol’s suggestion that she was an undercover vice cop so
amusing that she shared the story with Krassner, reenacting for him the
50 Acts of Gaiety

events that transpired during that meeting. “Sure I’m a cop,” Solanas told
Andy, zipping down her fly to expose her vulva. “And here’s my badge.”100
Warhol didn’t know what to make of Solanas. “I don’t know if she was genu-
ine or not,” he told Berg, “but we haven’t seen her since and I’m not sur-
prised. I guess she thought that was the perfect thing for Andy Warhol. I
don’t resent situations like that but I’m not interested in subjects like that,
that’s not what I’m pushing, here in America.”101 What Warhol was inter-
ested in pushing was male homoeroticism (e.g., Blow Job [1964], Hand Job
[1964], Taylor Mead’s Ass [1964], and My Hustler [1965]), the heterosexual
divas and the drag queens they inspire (e.g., 13 Most Beautiful Women [1964]
and Poor Little Rich Girl [1965]), and female degradation (e.g., Bitch [1965]
and Prison [1965]). Like Krassner and Ginzburg, Warhol had zero interest
in the lesbian feminist aesthetic Solanas was promoting.
When Warhol failed to respond to her letter or return Up Your Ass, So-
lanas began phoning him on a regular basis and showing up at the Factory.
By everyone’s account, Warhol’s “stupidstars,” as Valerie liked to call his
sycophantic minions, were unspeakably cruel to her, especially Viva and
director Paul Morrissey. Andy, on the other hand, typically treated her with,
if not civility then, bemused curiosity.102 As time passed, he appeared—­at
least on the surface—­to become more open to Solanas’s ideas, engaging her
in a number of his projects and even entertaining the possibility of pro-
ducing her play. As Warhol was all artifice, a consummate performer who
cultivated a reputation for being neither genuine nor sincere (except about
making money), it is difficult to say whether he actually thought Valerie
possessed any talent or was simply humoring her because he found her
artistic pretensions and political theories amusing. He had a high tolerance
for mentally unstable people, especially women, whom he enjoyed watching
self-­destruct. Unlike femme fatales Edie Sedgwick, Andrea Feldman, and
Tinkerbelle and drag divas Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis, Solanas did
not attempt suicide; she attempted murder.103

“From the Cradle to the Boat”

Solanas enjoyed a cordial relationship with Warhol in 1966 and 1967, even
after he failed to return her copy of the play, and she remained hopeful that
he would help stage Up Your Ass. Nonetheless, she continued to pursue
other production opportunities, very few of which materialized. By the mid-­
 “Scummy” Acts 51

1960s, there were over three hundred off-­off-­Broadway theaters in New York
City dedicated to promoting new work, experimental dramas, and queer
performances—­places like Caffe Cino, La MaMa E.T.C., Judson Poets’ The-
atre, and the Play-­house of the Ridiculous. While these venues provided
an increasing number of opportunities for theater by gay male playwrights
(e.g., Edward Albee, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson), women (e.g., Adri-
enne Kennedy, María Irene Fornés, and Megan Terry), and people of color
(e.g., LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and Ed Bullins), none of these locales was
particularly receptive to plays about lesbians by lesbians. At a time in New
York City when it was still illegal to stage depictions of homosexuality, no
establishment was willing to risk closure to produce a sardonic, sapphic
spectacle like Up Your Ass.
Unable to find a publisher or producer for Up Your Ass, Solanas decided
to sell copies of the play in order to finance a production that she would
direct herself. On October 13, 1966, she placed an ad in the Village Voice.

photo offset copies of

“UP FROM THE SLIME”
by Valerie Solanas
are now available at
$10 per copy
222 W. 23rd St. Room 606104

Solanas refers to the work as Up from the Slime, rather than Up Your Ass be-
cause the Voice did not print profanity in feature stories or advertisements. Of
the various titles of the play, Up from the Slime most explicitly evokes a scum
aesthetic, which Solanas would continue to cultivate as both a performance
praxis and a political theory over the next two years. Equally important,
this simple three-­word title would have been cheaper to print than From
the Cradle to the Boat, or Up from the Slime. Money was a constant problem
for the author, especially after she moved to the higher-­rent Chelsea Hotel
(the address listed in the ad), and given the price of the script—­$10.00 in
1966 is the equivalent of $66.44 in 2010—­fund-­raising was clearly Solanas’s
objective.
Within four months she had earned enough money to typeset and pub-
lish the script. On February 2, 1967, Solanas placed the first in a series of
ads in the Village Voice book section announcing:
52 Acts of Gaiety

SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men)

“Up From the Slime” & “A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Leisure
Class” (reprinted from Cavalier)
will be on sale starting Thurs. Feb 2 at:
8th Street Bookshop 17 W. 8th St.
Sheridan Square Paperback Corner
10 Sheridan Square
Underground Uplift Unlimited
20 St. Marks Place
Tompkins Square Book Store 97 Ave. B
East Side Book Store 17 St. Mark’s Place
$1.50105

This ad, which lists the play at $1.50, as opposed to the original $10.00
she charged for the offset copies, offers proof that Solanas mass produced
the script, thus accounting for both the lower cost and the wide availability
at numerous Village book stores. Solanas placed a second, almost identical
notice in the Voice the following week, on February 9. The next day she filed
for a second copyright on the play. On February 10, 1967, Solanas registered
a work titled Up Your Ass, or From the Cradle to the Boat, or The Big Suck,
or Up from the Slime and “A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Leisure
Class, a Non-­fictional Article Reprinted from Cavalier” under the imprimatur
SCUM Book.
The text of the 1967 published version of the play is the same as the
1965 unpublished edition, with a few notable exceptions. The original
manuscript, on file at the Library of Congress, is a carbon copy of a hand-­
typed document numbering sixty pages that is bound with two staples. It is
riddled with typographical errors (clearly Solanas skipped secretarial classes
in school!), which were corrected using white tape and blue ink in the au-
thor’s hand.106 The published version is professionally typeset (and error
free). It totals twenty-­nine pages (the result of a very economical mode of
professional typesetting). The entire document—­the play script, article, and
leaves—­numbers forty-­three pages and is bound with a cover—­yellow in
the front and blue in the back held together with two machine staples down
the left edge. The arresting front cover bears the title of the play, written in
the author’s hand, in black marker across the top. At the bottom, in the same
script, is the title of the article. In between the text is a drawing of a white
arm rising defiantly out of a black morass (literally “up from the slime”).
 “Scummy” Acts 53

Advertisement for Valerie Solanas’s first SCUM Book containing the script of
Up from the Slime (aka Up Your Ass) and a reprint of the article “A Young Girl’s
Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class,” from Cavalier magazine, in the Vil-
lage Voice, February 9, 1967.

Reminiscent of the iconic “black power” fist, the hand in this image is also
gesturing, but it is shooting the bird. Although the 1967 script, with its “do-­
it-­yourself” scummy cover art, might project the appearance of a mimeo-
graphed pamphlet, the document is, in fact, a published work of literature.
Many seminal texts produced in the 1960s, from chapbooks to manifestos,
evidence a similar amateur aesthetic, and this is especially true of works
advancing critiques of capitalism and lambasting bourgeois conceptions of
art, as Solanas’s play does.
It was a copy of this 1967 SCUM Book edition of the play that punk
rock journalist turned cineaste Mary Harron (and her intrepid research as-
sistant Diane Tucker) unearthed while researching the film I Shot Andy War-
hol (1996). Harron incorporated scenes from Up Your Ass into the biopic’s
plot, treating audiences to what she thought was the world’s first look at the
comedy that had such tragic consequences for Warhol.107 Harron’s rich and
remarkably entertaining film deserves the credit for recovering a play many
people believed was lost. Her movie generated renewed scholarly interest
in Solanas and led to a fully staged production of Up Your Ass in 2000–­
2001 by director George Coates.108 Unfortunately, however, I Shot Andy War-
hol perpetuated many fallacies about the author’s personal life and artistic
exploits—­including the notion that the play was written in 1967, around
the same time if not after SCUM Manifesto, and that Solanas penned it with
Warhol in mind. More important, the movie reinforced misconceptions and
mistaken beliefs about the role Up Your Ass played in the assassination at-
Cover of Valerie Solanas’s first SCUM Book (1967) containing a typeset version
of her play Up Your Ass (1965), issued with a reprint of her article “A Young Girl’s
Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class,” from Cavalier magazine (1966).
(Image courtesy of Hofstra University Library Special Collections.)
 “Scummy” Acts 55

tempt, namely, that Valerie shot Andy because he lost her only copy of the
play. This theory was bolstered when a misplaced trunk belonging to Billy
Name (né Linich), the photographer responsible for the Factory’s silver de-
sign, yielded, buried beneath an array of old lighting equipment, the script
for Up Your Ass. The document was nearly identical to the one Harron and
Tucker found (in the collection of an erotica dealer), and both were miss-
ing both the front and back covers.109 The obvious conclusion, everyone
agreed, was that Name found the copy Warhol lost while Harron and Tucker
had tracked down Valerie’s original manuscript or, as they dubbed it, “The
Holy Grail.”110
Two recent treatments of Solanas by Martin Puchner and James Harding
take embellished accounts of Up Your Ass and Valerie’s relationship with
Warhol from Harron’s fictionalized film as historic fact. In Poetry of the
Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-­Gardes, Puchner cites Up Your
Ass as exemplary of what he calls the “manifesto–­performance theory nex-
us” of modern aesthetics. Adopting the chronology of events that Harron
charts in her biopic, he concludes that Up Your Ass is “an enactment of the
SCUM Manifesto,” that it “was written in conjunction with the manifesto”
and “takes terms and figures from the SCUM Manifesto and turns them into
characters.”111 In actuality, the play was written two years before SCUM.
Rather than exemplifying Puchner’s theory, Solanas provides an interesting
counterexample to his assertion that the manifesto is the paradigmatic genre
of performance through which modern cultures have articulated their revo-
lutionary ambitions and desires.
Whereas Puchner finds Solanas representative of dominant paradigms
at play in the historical avant-­garde, James Harding argues the inverse, that
Valerie’s “radically subversive project aimed at recalibrating the trajectory
of the American avantgarde.”112 In “The Simplest Surrealist Act,” he reads
the shooting of Warhol as “a carefully orchestrated and radically disturbing
aesthetic performance” that turned “the tropes of the avantgarde against it-
self.”113 Harding calls Up Your Ass “adolescent and contrived” and states that
the script “is perhaps best understood as a provocation than a work of dra-
matic literature.”114 For him, the play has little merit aside from its function
as “an allegorical parallel” to the assassination attempt. This theory is based
on the willful misreading of Up Your Ass as a play “about a woman who ‘is a
man-­hating hustler and panhandler’ and who, somewhat more successfully
than Solanas, actually ends up killing a man.”115 Harding cites as evidence
the meme that there are two different versions of the play—­one in which
56 Acts of Gaiety

a woman kills a man and one in which a mother strangles her son—­rather
than following the plot of the actual script, which is excerpted alongside his
article. Up Your Ass is not about a woman who shoots a man but a mother
who commits infanticide, and the homicidal female in question is not Sola-
nas’s alter ego, Bongi Perez; it is Mrs. Arthur Hazlett.116
As I have demonstrated, there are two versions of the play, one published
and one not, but their content is identical. I have also proven that Solanas
did not write this play for Warhol or even with him in mind as a potential
producer. The play Andy lost was the 1965 unpublished version of Up Your
Ass, which Valerie wrote in California. This could not have been the only
copy of the play, as Solanas sold the script on the streets and through ads
in the Village Voice. The discovery of a copy of the 1967 version of the play
in Billy Name’s trunk suggests that Valerie remained on good enough terms
with Warhol and his entourage to entrust someone at the Factory with at
least one copy of the published edition of the play. This also proves that Up
Your Ass was written before SCUM Manifesto and that the latter is based on
the former, not the other way around.
This “smoking gun” was “hiding” in plain sight for forty years at the Li-
brary of Congress.117 It never occurred to Harron and Tucker (or, in all fair-
ness, to anyone else) to search for copies of Up Your Ass in libraries, not even
after they recovered the script, which boasts both a publisher’s imprimatur
(which I discuss at length in the next section) and multiple copyright dates.
As fate would have it, there were at least four copies of the 1967 SCUM
Book edition of the play in special collections of university archives during
the time Harron and Tucker were searching for Up Your Ass. The University
of Virginia acquired the play sometime between 1964 and 1977, Hofstra
obtained it in 1971, Indiana owns a copy but has no record of its acquisition
date, and the University of Arizona had an edition that was lost and paid for
in 2003 (“lost” by a would-­be SCUM insurgent, no doubt—­one I am fairly
certain I could identify). I can say with absolute certainty that Solanas did
not shoot Warhol because he lost her play, but whether she tried to kill him
because he refused to produce it is another matter entirely.

“I dedicate this play to ME”

On February 15, 1967, less than a week after Solanas published and copy-
righted the SCUM Book edition of Up Your Ass, she produced a multieve-
 “Scummy” Acts 57

ning staged reading of the play at the Directors’ Theater at 20 E. 14th Street
in the East Village. This off-­off-­Broadway playhouse was located in the same
building as the Free University of New York (FUNY), where Solanas took
classes and guest lectured for Paul Krassner. Its leader was Bob Brady, who
taught acting and directing at the School of Visual Arts. Brady, who is best
known for his role in the cult classic B-movie Liquid Sky (1982), had rather
unorthodox pedagogical methods, which included, among other things, re-
cruiting homeless people from the streets to act in romantic scenes with his
students.118 This may be how Solanas first encountered Brady. According to
performer and playwright Norman Marshal, who worked as a paid profes-
sional actor in Brady’s directing courses, Solanas took part in at least two
classes in 1967.119
That Solanas invested a great deal, emotionally and financially, in this
staged reading is evidenced by the fact that she took out a series of ads,
over a four-­week period, in both the theatre and the book sections of the
Village Voice to promote the performance and the script. The first ad for a
“pre-­production reading” of “UP FROM THE SLIME” appeared on Febru-
ary 2, 1967.120 It was positioned just below an obituary for Joe Cino’s lover
Jonathan Torrey and immediately to the right of a notice for the critically
acclaimed happening Snows by Carolee Schneemann (who would, years
later, write a moving elegy for Valerie titled “Solanas in a Sea of Men”).121 A
second ad, placed on February 9, appeared just above a notice for The Play-­
house of the Ridiculous Repertory Club, Inc., which was showing Charles
Ludlam’s Big Hotel and two shorts by Ron Tavel, The Life of Juanita Castro
and Kitchenette.122 A third notice, printed February 16, included a cast list
for the show and an announcement that Solanas would be appearing on
Randy Wicker’s WBAI-­FM radio program.123 The ad reads:

SCUM
(Society for Cutting Up Men)
presents
pre-­production reading of
UP FROM THE SLIME
by Valerie Solanas

Beg. Wed. Feb 15. 8:30 PM

every day except Tues. & Thurs.
Directors Theater School 20 E. 14th St.
58 Acts of Gaiety

admission by contribution
Cast (in alphabetical order)
Harold Anderson,
Donald Eggena, Bonnie Greer,
Marcia Sam Ridge,
Gary Tucker, Barbara Wallace
copies of SCUM book (:)
“Up from the Slime” & “A Young
Girl’s Primer on How To Attain to
the Leisure Class”
(reprinted from Cavalier 1966)
will be sold at reading for
$1.50 per copy

-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­
Listen to Valerie Solanas on
Randy Wicker’s Interview Show
WBAI-­FM in a few weeks
(watch Village Voice for exact date)124

The only names in this cast list likely to resonate with theater enthu-
siasts are Gary Tucker and Bonnie Greer. At the time of Solanas’s produc-
tion, Tucker was a member of The Play-­house of the Ridiculous, which he
would soon leave with Ludlam to form the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
In 1971 Tucker moved to Chicago, where, under the pseudonym Eleven, he
founded and directed the Godzilla Rainbow Troupe. A short-­lived but influ-
ential collective, Godzilla, in the words of Albert Williams, “lived up to its
name. It was monstrous and beautiful; it breathed fire and gave off a glow-
ing wet afterglow; it had a hell of an impact, and it was gone almost as soon
as it had started.”125 Carrying the torch of the theater of the ridiculous, the
troupe became notorious for its scatological content, cross-­gender casting,
graphic nudity, and campy sense of humor. Their inaugural show was Bill
Vehr’s Whores of Babylon, which was followed by Turds in Hell (written by
Vehr and Ludlam).126 Bonnie Greer may or may not be the highly acclaimed
African American actress and playwright associated with the Actors Studio
and the Negro Ensemble Company who moved to London in 1986 and was
recently honored with an Order of the British Empire. I have been unable to
confirm or deny that this Bonnie Greer, who would have been nineteen in
1967, is the person in Solanas’s cast list.
Advertisement in the February 16, 1967, issue of the Village Voice theater sec-
tion announcing a pre-production reading of Valerie Solanas’s play, Up from the
Slime (aka Up Your Ass) at the Directors’ Theater in New York City, including a
cast list and press for an upcoming radio show.
60 Acts of Gaiety

The Lortell Off-­Broadway Database lists a Harold Anderson in a 1964

production of Finis for Oscar Wilde by one Reverend Edward A. Molloy at
the Blackfriar’s Guild Theatre. Neither Anderson nor Donald Eggena en-
joyed a very distinguished acting career, but the latter was clearly a skilled
entertainer. In 1971 he opened Lend-­a-­Hand Personnel Service, which of-
fered a variety of services—­from dog walking to gourmet catering—­to lu-
minaries such as Lauren Bacall and Tony Bennett. Staffed by unemployed
actors, Eggena’s operation featured a crew of livelier, better-­looking temps
than other agencies, which gave Lend-­a-­Hand a competitive edge, not to
mention a number of nods in high-­profile places such as New York maga-
zine. For whatever reason, this esteemed publication tracked many of Egg-
ena’s entrepreneurial activities, including his purchase of eighty-­five pairs of
Joan Crawford’s false eyelashes for $325, which he sold for $30 a pop.127 The
only female member of the cast that I have positively identified is Marcia
Sam Ridge, who at the time of the production worked at Paul Krassner’s The
Realist as an administrative assistant or, as she titled her position, “the Shit-­
On.”128 Ridge described her job as the lowest on the totem pole, lower even
than a secretary, or “scapegoat,” as The Realist’s Sheila Campion dubbed her
office.129 Did Marcia play one of the two “shit-­on” women in the play, Gin-
ger or Mrs. Arthur Hazlett? Or did she strut her stuff as Bongi Perez? How
I would love to know.
The quantity, quality, and content of these ads show how dedicated So-
lanas was to this play, how hard she worked peddling her Ass all over New
York, and how confident she was about its future. The designation of this
show at the Directors’ Theater as a “pre-­production reading of UP FROM
THE SLIME” suggests that the February run was a prelude to a larger event.
Archival research indicates that she discussed with Warhol the possibility
of producing the play at Grove Press’s Evergreen Theatre in 1967. At the
time Warhol made this alleged pact with Solanas, he was engaged in con-
tract negotiations with Grove over a: A Novel, which it published in 1968.
The press’s Evergreen Theatre, named after its literary journal Evergreen Re-
view, showed both theatrical productions and movies, including the Factory
film in which Solanas starred, I, a Man.130 A letter in the Warhol Museum
archives states that Andy was ready to mount a two-­part dramatic produc-
tion of Solanas’s work, the first being a staged version of her panhandling
article, the second being the play itself.131 The letter goes so far as to detail
the fact that Up Your Ass was too short for a full production, so “A Young
Girl’s Primer,” in dramatic form, was to be used as a lead-­in. According to
this document, Warhol, after learning that Solanas had signed a book con-
 “Scummy” Acts 61

tract with Olympia Press, changed his mind, became vague, and did nothing
more about the production despite his former enthusiasm.
On or around August 15, 1967, Solanas received a five-­hundred-­dollar
advance from Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press to write two novels. Gi-
rodias, a publisher of modernist literature and erotica, including Vladimir
Nabokov’s Lolita, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Pauline Réage’s Story
of O, and Samuel Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnam-
able), was intrigued by Solanas. He recalls:

Her manner was friendly, lively, and she had a sense of humor—­which
somewhat took the edge off the anti-­masculine doctrine she proceeded to
preach to me. The title of her play, Up Your Ass, was sufficiently indicative
of her iconoclastic disposition. . . . The play was rather clever, and I found
it amusingly wild.132

Unable to or uninterested in fulfilling the contract for Girodias, Solanas

granted him permission, in the spring of 1968, to publish SCUM Manifesto,
which Olympia Press put into production only after the shooting in order to
capitalize on the publicity it generated.133
Sensing that Warhol’s interest in Up Your Ass was waning, Solanas
pitched the play to other producers. She terrified the Roundabout Theatre’s
Gene Feist (a classmate of Warhol’s at Carnegie Tech) when she barged into
his office unannounced, introduced herself, and threw a copy of her script
onto his desk. “The lady was a lunatic,” Feist recalls.

People who are either severely ill or have been institutionalized get this kind
of sexless, dumb look, an oxen look. That’s what she had. I was getting more
and more alarmed—­here I was a natural born coward, and it was obvious
she was insane. “I’m sorry we only do the classics,” I said. She took her
script and left. I locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief, and as soon as
I calmed down, you know the first thing I thought? I should have told her
to go see Andy. She had a threatening presence. But Andy felt crazy people
were gifted. Anyway, that was that.134

Feist’s memory of how menacing Solanas was may be accurate, but the fact
that he recalls the play being titled Up Your Ass with a Meathook and the fact
that he interjects Warhol into the story lead me to believe that his recollec-
tion of this encounter may be embellished, or perhaps influenced by the
violence Valerie would soon perpetrate against Andy.
62 Acts of Gaiety

What this account makes perfectly clear, however, is that Solanas tried
to apply the same rules of engagement she used in panhandling—­namely,
aggressively and sarcastically harassing passersby until they gave in to her
demands—­to the art of contract negotiations. While the adoption of a men-
acing posture may have scared many people into donating a dime, a quarter,
or even a dollar to her tip jar, this tactic, not surprisingly, failed to attract
patrons willing to pony up hundreds of dollars to produce her work. While
I admire Solanas because she was a politically astute, artistically daring
dramatist who refused to compromise or acquiesce to make herself more
acceptable to mainstream society, I have to wonder how her life (and, by
extension, history) might have played out differently had she mastered the
art of subtlety, which is a necessary skill for anyone who wants to attract a
producer, not to mention an audience.
Solanas came very close to securing a fully realized production of her
play in the fall of 1967. “The Cino might have been the fountainhead of fem-
inist theatre if not for my prudery,” laments Robert Patrick. “Charles Stanley
begged me to direct a play by a fetid, somehow fetal woman who wandered
in. But I found its coprophagic theme disgusting, so Valerie Solanis [sic]
took Up Your Ass elsewhere, to Andy Warhol, whom she shot for not pro-
ducing it.”135 This agonizing admission lies buried under the heading “Is-
sues: Uncategorized” on Patrick’s extensive Internet archive documenting
the birthplace of off-­off-­Broadway. Patrick has expressed deep remorse over
his refusal to stage the play: “I . . . regret not directing it, not only because
of its importance, but because I have the grandiose idea that if I had, I might
have saved Mister Warhol’s life.”136 Patrick does not remember when or un-
der what circumstances he first met Valerie. “I only remember coming into
the Cino one afternoon and seeing her standing there looking just like Ms.
[Lili] Taylor [who played Solanas in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol].
Mister Stanley introduced us and gave me the play. Ms. Solanis [sic] left. I
am sure she said something, but nothing that I remember.”137 Patrick may
be a southern gentleman, but he is no prude; while his revulsion over So-
lanas may have prevented him from seeing the merit in what he correctly
intimates is a landmark feminist play, his rejection of Up Your Ass had little
bearing on, and certainly no causal relationship to, Valerie’s attempted assas-
sination of Warhol the following June.138
Caffe Cino was not a place for lesbians. Despite its reputation as a queer
utopia, the Caffe promoted theater that was, for the most part, by and for
gay men, most of whom had little time or interest in dykes like Solanas. The
queens of Cornelia Street may have fawned over conventionally attractive fe-
 “Scummy” Acts 63

males like Bernadette Peters and Mary Woronov, but they had little patience
with (or stomach for) gender nonconforming women with a radical feminist
agenda. There were some lesbians at Cino, including playwright Claris Nel-
son (née Erickson) and director Roberta Sklar, but they did not write or stage
work that was as brazen as Up Your Ass. Only two people at Cino exhibited
any degree of tolerance for or interest in Solanas: Charles Stanley and Ma-
gie Dominic. “I can’t remember how I met Valerie,” recalled Dominic. “She
was like the Caffe. One day she was suddenly there.”139 In her memoir The
Queen of Peace Room, she writes, “Joe Cino and Valerie Solanas were alike
in some ways. People saw what they needed. A Rorschach test.”140 Dominic
certainly saw something in Solanas, for they had a brief affair. “Valerie and
I slept together on two occasions,” she notes in her memoir. “At her room
in the Chelsea Hotel. Valerie was the only woman I slept with in the ’60s.
We never called it forbidden love. We just called it sleeping together. And
we did. In each other’s arms like two old tired women.”141 Dominic recalls
a particularly intimate and loving exchange with Valerie. “Someone should
write a play about you,” she told Magie, “and call it Cleopatra.”142
This remembrance is one of the few records I have found of an affec-
tionate encounter between Valerie and another human being. Dominic is
the rare witness to Solanas’s tenderness and vulnerability, but she was also
acutely aware of the playwright’s volatile temperament and propensity for
violence. “I think if people had tried to harm me while I was with Valerie,”
Dominic writes in her autobiography, “she would have killed them with
her bare hands.”143 Solanas asked Magie if they could become roommates
(something Valerie asked almost everyone—­those she slept with and those
she did not). “She was having trouble at her hotel and wanted to stay with
me at my hotel room,” Dominic remembers. “I said a difficult no. [After Joe
Cino’s death] I didn’t know how to cope with anyone anymore.”144 Solanas
told Magie she was having some sort of dispute with the Factory. “She was
afraid Warhol was going to steal her idea,” Dominic writes, “It was during
this time that Valerie kept phoning the Caffe wanting Charles to produce
her play.”145
Charles Stanley, a dancer, writer, and actor best remembered for his
exploration of genderfuck in H. M. Koutoukas’s Medea or Maybe the Stars
May Understand or Veiled Stranger (a ritualistic camp), was perhaps Sola-
nas’s greatest champion.146 Patrick recalls, “when I refused to do the play,
I remember only him literally thrashing about in anger, repeating over and
over that it was an important play. I never understood why he did not direct
it himself.”147 By all reports Stanley was so overwhelmed by the administra-
64 Acts of Gaiety

tive demands of the Caffe, in the wake of Joe Cino’s amphetamine-­fueled

suicide (which coincided with an influx of hopped-­up Factory habitués at
the Caffe), that he was too busy to take an active role in staging produc-
tions.148 What he lacked in administrative skills, Stanley made up for in
artistic vision and political daring. During his brief tenure as Caffe Cino
manager, he pushed the envelope at the already cutting edge venue. Stanley
was less interested in work that promoted dignified portraits of gays or pre-
sented positive images of homosexuality than he was in exploring deviant
desires, sexual fetishes, and internalized homophobia. Had he remained at
the helm, Stanley might have produced Solanas’s Up Your Ass. In December
of 1967, however, he was relieved of his duties, and the Caffe closed for
several weeks as a new administrative team took over.

A “SCUMMY Thing”

The Village Voice ads tell us a great deal about Solanas’s plans for Up Your
Ass, but they also provide insight into SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men).
Indicative of Valerie’s audacity and mentality agility is her transformation
of scum, a slur hurled at her repeatedly from the time she was a girl, from an
insult into an aesthetic. Solanas resignified this four-­letter word, changing it
from an epithet into a badge of courage that she donned with defiance, de-
termination, and pride. The promotional materials for the “pre-­production
reading” of the play begin, “SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) presents,”
and the announcements for the sale of the script (published separately in
the same issues of the Voice) read, “SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men)
Book.” These ads indicate that Solanas conceived of SCUM as a “literary
trope” under whose imprimatur she published and promoted her creative
work long before she envisioned it as an activist organization or the title of
a political tract.149 In February of 1967, when Solanas published Up Your
Ass as a SCUM Book, she had neither written nor conceived of SCUM Mani-
festo. The creation of this notorious document was something of an after-
thought.
When Solanas realized that she could not beg, borrow, or steal her way
into the male-­dominated art world, she set about to create her own scene.
Unable to find an audience for her play, she attempted to create one by plac-
ing ads in the Village Voice that she hoped would attract like-­minded people.
In the March 30 edition of the weekly newspaper, she printed the following
announcement in the public notice section.
 “Scummy” Acts 65

SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) is being formed to eliminate through

sabotage all aspects of society that are not relevant to women (everything),
to dispose of the garbage pail that men have made of the world*** to ef-
fect a complete female take-­over, to end the production of males (It’s now
technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males and to produce
only females) and to begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-­of-­sight female
world. SCUM has a men’s auxiliary to accommodate those men who wish
to perform a public service and hasten their inevitable demise. If you’d like
to work to help end this hard, grim, static, boring male world & wipe the
ugly, leering male face off the map, send your name and address to Valerie
Solanas, Box Office 47, NY 14.
***war, money, marriage, and prostitution, work, prevention of auto-
mation, niceness, politeness, clean language, “dignity,” censorship, trivial
“entertainment,” secrecy, suppression of knowledge & ideas, ignorance, fa-
therhood & mental illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity,
passivity), authority, government, boredom, monotony, “Great Art,” “Cul-
ture,” philosophy, religion, morality based on sex, competition, prestige,
status, formal education, prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious, etc.), social,
economic classes, domesticity, motherhood, materialism, sexuality, ugliness,
destruction of cities, poisoning of air, hate, contempt, distrust, prevention
of conversation, friendship & love, isolation, suburbs, violence, disease &
death.

With this ad, Solanas attempted to create a mailing list of militant, fun-­
loving, radical feminist guerrillas and their male allies whom she might per-
suade to produce, attend, or purchase Up Your Ass or other work.
One month later Solanas ran an ad in the Village Voice announcing a
gathering of the Society for Cutting Up Men.

Valerie Solanas
SCUM
Fri., April 28. 8:30 PM/Farband House 575 6th Avenue (at 16th) Men 2.50,
women $1.00150

The fact that Solanas is charging admission suggests to me that this event was
some kind of performance. This is supported by a transcribed conversation
between her and Warhol in which Solanas tries to recruit Andy for the men’s
auxiliary. In this exchange, she describes SCUM “as some sort of forum—­
except it wouldn’t be exactly a forum—­there’s no word for this, I mean, it
66 Acts of Gaiety

Announcement in the Village Voice on May 18, 1967, for a SCUM Forum con-
ducted by Valerie Solanas at the Directors’ Theater. This is the first known ad-
vertisement for the sale of SCUM Manifesto, which, in this iteration, consisted
of a single-­page flier.

doesn’t fall into any place or occasion. I don’t know what to call it. Just a
SCUMMY thing. You know, sort of—­not really a lecture—­except that there’d
be a lot of interaction with the audience.151 Solanas harnessed the power of
performance to create a novel and, as we shall see, utterly ingenious social,
political, and aesthetic form she called a “SCUMMY thing.”
On May 23, 1967, one month after the Farband House gathering, So-
lanas staged a “SCUMMY thing” at the Directors’ Theater, where she had
held the “pre-­production” reading of Up Your Ass. Solanas billed this event
as a “SCUM Forum, explaining how and why SCUM (Society for Cutting
Up Men) will eliminate [the] male sex.”152 The price of admission is the
same as the previous SCUM event, $2.50 for men and $1.00 for women.
This notice includes what I believe to be the first ad for SCUM Manifesto,
listed as $1.00. This first edition of the manifesto consisted of a single page
flier with the text of the March 30th Village Voice ad and the drawing of the
bird-­flipping hand coming “up from the slime” that graces the cover of the
SCUM Book edition of Up Your Ass. That Solanas refers to this version of
the manifesto as a “recruiting poster” in conversations with Warhol, offers
further evidence that her primary motivation was to generate an audience
for her performances.153
I believe the motivation to create SCUM Manifesto had less to do with an
attempt to earn a few extra bucks or the desire to articulate a revolutionary
political theory than it did with the fallout from a disastrous appearance
on a popular television program. On the bottom of this first edition of the
manifesto, which was clearly created to promote the “SCUMMY thing” at
the Directors’ Theater on May 23, Solanas includes the following statement.

Valerie Solanas, because she was kicked off the Alan Burke Show (to be
shown Sat., May 20) for “talking dirty” after only fifteen minutes on and pre-
vented from fully explaining to the public how and why SCUM will elimi-
nate the male sex, will conduct a SCUM Forum.
 “Scummy” Acts 67

It is immediately after being humiliated by Burke that Solanas decides to

create a manifesto, and even so, her aim is the generation of an audience
for her live event, not the elaboration of a political tract. Valerie came to
this project the way she lived her life, impulsively, reacting viscerally and
violently to life’s indignities and people’s intolerance.
Solanas continued to develop the manifesto, in and through perfor-
mances of her “SCUMMY things,” over the course of the next few months.
In a letter to Warhol dated August 1, 1967 (written between the filming of
I, a Man and its premier), Solanas states that she is almost finished with
SCUM Manifesto and that she intends to sell it on the street within days. She
asks Andy if he would like to film some of the SCUM Forums and outdoor
rallies that she is planning in conjunction with the Manifesto’s launch. The
world will be corroded with SCUM, Solanas promises him, noting that she
has already had a large and positive response to the draft of the Manifesto
she published in the Village Voice and that the majority of respondents were
male.154 Later that fall, she brings up the issue again. She tells Andy that
her SCUMMY things are very successful, and by successful she means that
they are popular; they aren’t well known, she tells Warhol, but they are
popular.155
A brilliant, caustic, and satirical analysis of the cesspool men have made
of the world, the Manifesto is more than a performative genre advancing a
SCUM aesthetic. Like SCUM Book, which consists of a play and a dramatic
monologue, SCUM Manifesto is a script for a production. Solanas’s sister
told me Valerie’s “intent, at the time was to have various people read from
the manifesto.”156 This is confirmed by the fact that Solanas submitted her
manifesto to a variety of off-­off-­Broadway venues, including the Directors’
Theater and Judson Poets’ Theatre, as a play.157 Undeterred by rejection from
these two locations, Solanas tried alternative venues, including Café Bizarre,
an edgy Village coffeehouse on West Third that Bob Dylan made famous. A
former coach house, Bizarre was “seedy, loud, a haven for hitter-­chicks, the
kind who’d take you home for the night without asking you your name and
number, tolerant of rock-­n-­roll, off-­beat, and off-­limits to the tourist.”158 An-
other site Solanas considered was the Electric Circus, a popular East Village
dance club and pleasure dome that featured a variety of entertainment from
experimental theater and circus performers to light shows and cinematic
projections.
As she had since 1965, Solanas continued to hustle Warhol, hoping that
he would finance one of her productions for a cut of the profits. A transcript
in the Warhol Museum archives documents negotiations between the artists
68 Acts of Gaiety

in the fall of 1967. From the casualness of the conversation, the number
of jokes the two trade, and the range of topics they discuss, it is clear that
Solanas and Warhol were on friendly terms and had been for quite some
time. It is also clear that Valerie harbored no delusions of—­or any desire to
be—­one of his superstars. After lighthearted banter and being interrupted
by a number of people waltzing in and out of the Factory, the conversation
takes a serious turn about their work.
Solanas tells Andy she’s been selling SCUM Manifesto and working on a
couple of new projects, including a novel and a nonfiction book. She asks
him if he’s been promoting SCUM during his college lecture tour, as he
promised he would. Warhol insists he has. Valerie then tells Andy of her
conversation with the owner of Café Bizarre about staging a “SCUMMY
thing” there and of her plans to talk with the owner of the Electric Circus,
where she knows she could negotiate a percentage of the cover charge. She
says the problem she’s having is a lack of funds; she does not have the mon-
ey to advertise or promote the show. Solanas asks Warhol if he’d finance a
production, adding that naturally he would get a cut of the proceeds. Rather
than dismissing Valerie or changing the subject, Warhol engages her in a
conversation about specifics, including the kind of financial investment she
has in mind and the logistics of the event: where it would take place, when,
how frequently, and what his investment would be. Solanas tells Andy that
he should partner with her because he would not only make money off the
deal but would garner great publicity for I, a Man. She adds that she’s been
telling everybody she talks to, including Randy Wicker at WBAI, that he’s
going to produce and direct Up Your Ass. Warhol’s next statement suggests
that he not only takes Solanas seriously but he is familiar enough with her
work to believe that it might serve as a suitable project for his newest “It”
girl. You know Candy Cane, Andy asks Valerie.159 Yes, she replies. He’s the
drag queen one who looks like Joan Bennett. Well, we’ll talk to Paul Mor-
rissey about it Warhol says.160

“The Big Suck”

Somehow, some way, negotiations between Solanas and Warhol and Sola-
nas and Girodias went terribly awry, and in her mind they were not only
related but part of a vast conspiracy by powerful men to steal her work and
cheat her out of money and fame. On June 3, 1968, Valerie entered the Fac-
tory on Union Square armed with two pistols and shot Andy at point-­blank
 “Scummy” Acts 69

range, along with two of his associates, Mario Amaya and Fred Hughes (who
dodged a bullet when Valerie’s gun jammed).161 Girodias is believed by many
to have been the target that day. An analysis of the “long involved story” that
led Solanas to shoot that saintly satanic prince of pop lies beyond the scope
of this inquiry.162 Whatever the shootings reflect—­a desperate bid for fame,
a desire for revenge, a paranoid schizophrenic breakdown, the demented
logic of psychosis—­they most certainly do not exemplify the deconstructive
logic of parody embodied in Solanas’s performance texts. In other words,
while the assassination attempt may have been a carefully plotted (though
ultimately botched) production, it was not a “SCUMMY thing” acting out
the tenets of her manifesto, as Harding and others have suggested.
As far as Girodias was concerned, Solanas was crazy or paranoid or both.
“Obviously,” he wrote, “the pixies were moving in, pretty fast.” No other
explanation made “any sense since she had nothing that anyone would want
to steal.”163 Was Solanas insane to think that the most famous artist of the
twentieth century would want to stage her plays? Was it delirium that made
her feel her scripts were valuable enough not only to publish, copyright, and
produce but also to steal? Was it crazy for this intelligent, acerbic, fiercely
ambitious, ass-­peddling, penniless dyke to consider herself an artist? Was
it madness that engendered Solanas’s profane political imaginary, her auda-
cious alter ego Bongi Perez, and her scatological sense of humor? Was it lu-
nacy? Perhaps. But it was certainly ludicrous. What is even more ludicrous
than this dyke’s ballsy gestures is the fact that had she not shot Warhol there
might not have been a radical feminist movement.
Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz, an American socialist who was in Mexico City on
her way to Cuba, glimpsed, out of the corner of her eye, a newspaper head-
line proclaiming, “Super-­Woman Power Advocate Shoots Andy Warhol.”
“[T]hrilled” by the idea that “a woman shot a man because he was using
her,” Dunbar-­Ortiz believed this was a sign that “finally women were rising
up.”164 Hopping the first plane back to the States, she “planned to form—­
or find and join—­a female liberation movement” with “warrior women”
and to “find Valerie Solanas and defend her.”165 By the time Dunbar-­Ortiz
landed in Manhattan in August, two rogue members of NOW, veteran civil
rights activist Florynce Kennedy and New York chapter president Ti-­Grace
Atkinson, had already installed themselves as Solanas’s counsel. The former
dubbed Valerie “one of the most important spokeswomen for the feminist
movement,” while the latter proclaimed, “She has dragged feminism kicking
and screaming into the 20th Century, in a very dramatic way.”166
In a press release delivered on June 13, just hours after her initial meet-
70 Acts of Gaiety

ing with Solanas, Atkinson made the “first public use of the concept of ‘rad-
ical feminist’” in describing her client’s political program.167 Incensed by
these events, Betty Friedan fired off this telegram to Atkinson and Kennedy.

DESIST IMMEDIATELY FROM LINKING NOW IN ANY WAY WITH VAL-

ERIE SOLANAS MISS SOLANAS MOTIVES IN WARHOL CASE ENTIRELY
IRRELEVANT TO NOW’S GOALS OF FULL EQUALITY FOR WOMEN IN
TRULY EQUAL PARTNERSHIP WITH MEN.168

Ignoring Friedan’s order that they drop the Solanas case, Ti-­Grace and Flo
continued to advocate for Valerie. The issue caused a major rift in the ranks
of NOW, as a mass exodus of feminists, including Atkinson and Kennedy,
fled in the liberal wing of the women’s movement in search of more militant
organizations advancing the kind of revolutionary agenda they understood
Solanas to be advocating.
Solanas had endured painful ostracism from aesthetic and political
movements until she shot Warhol and was hailed as a hero by a handful of
extremists. Although she desperately desired the attention, admiration, and
camaraderie, Solanas’s longing for recognition and community were over-
shadowed by her fear (however irrational) that any attention she received
would only benefit Warhol and publicize Olympia Press’s version of her
Manifesto, which it rushed into production in the fall of 1968 to capitalize
on the shooting. Valerie maintained, to her death, that Girodias’s edition was
a crass and opportunistic bastardization of her art. Solanas grew increasingly
ambivalent about the political changes her actions inspired, in part because
she felt her ideas were being misunderstood and misrepresented by both her
detractors and her supporters. In fact, she came to see the embrace of SCUM
by radical feminists as disingenuous and predatory. After she was released
from jail, she engaged in vicious and protracted battles with leaders of the
women’s liberation movement (in Majority Report and other print publica-
tions) over feminists’ use, and in her eyes abuse, of her manifesto.
What Solanas wanted to talk about was not SCUM but Up Your Ass. This
surprised Dunbar-­Ortiz, who prior to meeting Solanas imagined her as “a
martyr for all women everywhere.”169 After spending three hours with her
in jail in August 1968, Dunbar-­Ortiz came to see Valerie in a different light.
In a letter to a friend, she wrote:
 “Scummy” Acts 71

What a mind Valerie has. I can guarantee she is not a violent person, nor
is she anti-­male. She is angry and she is Anti-­Man. . . . I think of her more
as Rimbaud than Ché, and I don’t think she will ever be a revolutionary in
the left political sense. Perhaps destroyers like her can never transform their
energy, but only inspire others.170

Years later Dunbar-­Ortiz would recall that Solanas spent the majority of
their meeting talking about her play. In what was likely the final perfor-
mance of the Theater of the Ludicrous, Solanas acted out Up Your Ass for
Dunbar-­Ortiz and her comrade Dana Densmore in the visitors’ room at the
Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane in Beacon, New York.
Not only did Valerie “reconstruct the whole play from memory,” but she
gave distinct voices to each of the different characters.171
By the time Solanas was released from prison in 1971 (she was charged
with assault, sentenced to three years for the shootings, and given credit for
time served), the movement had moved on, and she was no longer a central
player in the drama of women’s liberation. Solanas tried to stage a comeback
by republishing (an authorized edition of) SCUM Manifesto in 1977, but the
“treatment” she received from the “correctional” system, made her worse in-
stead of better. Mentally unstable and in poor physical health, Solanas died
in 1988 at the Hotel Bristol, a welfare residence in San Francisco’s Tender-
loin District, a neighborhood that bears a striking resemblance to (and may
very well be) the scummy setting of Up Your Ass. It is not surprising that
Valerie drifted back into a state of abject obscurity from whence she once
rose “up from the slime,” nor is it surprising that this play remained hidden,
or should I say repressed, for so long, tearing as it does at the conceptual
fabric of American society and the contingent foundations of patriarchal
culture. Scandalous even today in its insolence and seditiousness, Solanas’
picaresque political aesthetic makes the contemporary LGBT agenda seem
ludicrous by comparison.
2
Guerrilla Acts
Marriage Protests, 1969 and 2009

Florynce Kennedy and Ti-­ Grace Atkinson’s defense of Valerie Solanas,

against the express wishes of Betty Friedan, incited rancor within the ranks
of NOW. Citing “irreconcilable ideological conflicts,” Atkinson resigned as
president of the New York chapter of NOW and founded the October 17th
Movement, named after the day of her stormy departure in 1968. Shortly
after its inception, members of this militant faction rebranded themselves
The Feminists.1 Claiming credit as “the first radical feminist group” in the
United States, this small but influential collective worked toward the goal
of annihilating sex roles.2 Influenced by and seeking to enact the ideas dra-
matized in SCUM Manifesto, The Feminists took as axiomatic the notion
that sexual orientation is elective and fluid, not innate or fixed, and they
promoted political lesbianism as a positive path to women’s liberation. Fem-
inism is the theory, Atkinson proclaimed, and lesbianism is the practice, by
which she meant, “It is the commitment, by choice, full time, of one woman
to others of her class, that is called lesbianism.”3
In stark contrast to Friedan’s position that dykes constituted a “lavender
menace” that threatened the women’s liberation movement, The Feminists
insisted on “the political and tactical significance of lesbianism to feminism,”
going so far as to argue: “any feminist should fight to the death for lesbian-
ism because of its strategic importance” in combating patriarchy, which the
group defined as a coercive social contract, a discriminatory cultural institu-
tion, and a scripted set of ambitions and behaviors.4 Political lesbianism was
less a prescribed identity for members of the collective than it was a glori-
ous aspiration. In an effort to achieve “consistency” between The Feminists’
political beliefs and their actions, the group limited the number of com-

72
 Guerrilla Acts 73

mitted heterosexuals who could join their ranks.5 The Feminists valorized
lesbianism (not necessarily lesbians) as an idealized model of egalitarian
relationships. Rooted in an androgynous, desexualized notion of woman-­
identified women’s bonding, the collective ultimately reinforced, rather than
challenged, the heteronormative view that dykes are emotional rather than
erotic beings. Because The Feminists regrettably saw women’s liberation and
sexual liberation as mutually exclusive, the group’s contribution to the de-
velopment of radical feminism is often disavowed or downplayed by subse-
quent generations of scholars and activists.
The majority of The Feminists’ time was dedicated to consciousness-­
raising and the development of theoretical tracts, but these Aretmesian war-
riors possessed a flair for the dramatic and engaged in a number of high-­
profile political performances that serve as paradigmatic examples of acts
of gaiety. On September 23, 1969, The Feminists staged a guerrilla theater
action at the New York City Marriage Licensing Bureau. Atkinson, a former
artist and model-­cum-­doctoral student in philosophy, led her entourage—­
fiercely coiffed and dressed to the nines in miniskirts and chic sunglasses—­
into the waiting room where they foisted on future wives, or “hostages”
as The Feminists liked to call them, pamphlets peppered with incendiary
prose.6 “Do you know that you are your husband’s prisoner?” the fliers
asked the brides-­to-­be. “Do you know that rape is legal in marriage?”7 Argu-
ing that heterosexual love is a pathological condition, the internalization of
a coercive fantasy, and the contingent foundation of patriarchal oppression,
The Feminists sought to abolish the institution they claimed legalized rape
and profited from women’s unpaid physical and emotional labor. “All the
discriminatory practices against women are patterned and rationalized by
this slavery-­like practice,” the group’s leaflets pronounced. “We can’t de-
stroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage. We
must free ourselves. And marriage is the place to begin.”8
The Feminists may have harbored strident views on sex, but no one
could accuse these dissidents of being dowdy dykes or frumpy feminists.
These Amazons possessed charisma, intelligence, and a penchant for haute
couture, making them the object of everyone’s gaze. The media followed
their every move. A photograph of the Marriage Licensing Bureau zap in
Life magazine captures five of The Feminists posing for the camera beside
what appears to be the mother of a bride, who has turned her back on the
protesters to shelter the happy couple to her left. The beaming bride, in
full wedding regalia, is oblivious to everything except her fiancé, a balding,
74 Acts of Gaiety

The Feminists’ zap action at the New York City Marriage Licensing Bureau on
September 23, 1969. Pictured are Ti-­Grace Atkinson, Linda Feldman, Pam Ke-
aron, Sheila Cronan, Barbara Mehrhof, and members of an unidentified wedding
party. Note the mother of bride attempting to keep the activists at bay and the
groom twiddling his thumbs. This image first appeared in Life, May 18, 1970.
(Photo by Mary Ellen Mark.)

middle-­aged man slumped in the chair next to her who, because of nervous-
ness or boredom or both, is literally twiddling his thumbs.9
As part of their zap action, The Feminists issued a declaration charging
“the city of New York and all those offices and agents aiding and abetting the
institution of marriage, such as the Marriage Licensing Bureau, of fraud with
malicious intent against the women of this city.”10 Zap participant Sheila
Cronan penned an influential essay titled “Marriage” that further explicates
the guiding principle inspiring this act of gaiety. “Since marriage constitutes
slavery for women,” she writes, “it is clear that the women’s movement must
concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be
won without the abolition of marriage.”11 The Feminists were not alone
in their full-­frontal assault on this venerable institution. Throughout the
1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, activists of various sexual proclivities and
political persuasions staged spectacle after outlandish spectacle to protest
 Guerrilla Acts 75

the sine qua non of what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality”:
matrimony.12 This position, put forth in Solanas’s Up Your Ass and SCUM
Manifesto (1965, 1967), is echoed in the Radicalesbians’ “The Woman-­
Identified Woman” (1970), Roxanne Dunbar’s “Female Liberation as the
Basis for Social Revolution” (1970), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970),
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Na-
tion (1973), Atkinson’s Amazon Odyssey (1974), and the Dyketactics “Dec-
laration” (1975), to name only a few. These tracts call for replacing marriage
and the nuclear family with communal households predicated on nongen-
dered divisions of labor and for using advances in reproductive technology
to free women from the biological imposition to bear children.
While lesbians of color were often as adverse to marriage as white dykes,
many black and Latina activists contextualized their critiques of the nuclear
family in an understanding that this structure, however problematic, pro-
vided a safe haven in a racist society. Still others were reluctant to enter into
the discussion at all, for, as Barbara Smith notes in the preface to Home Girls:
A Black Feminist Anthology:

Raising issues of oppression within already oppressed communities is as

likely to be met with attacks and ostracism as with comprehension and read-
iness to change. To this day most Black women are unwilling to jeopardize
their racial credibility (as defined by Black men) to address the reality of
sexism. Even fewer are willing to bring up homophobia and heterosexism,
which are of course inextricably linked to gender oppression.13

One of the first black lesbians to risk ostracism was the spoken-­word poet
and activist Pat Parker, who before she came out in 1969 was married twice,
the first time to the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture, the playwright
Ed Bullins. Parker claimed, “As long as women are bound by the nuclear
family structure we cannot effectively move toward revolution. . . . [T]he
nuclear family is the basic unit of capitalism and in order for us to move
to revolution it has to be destroyed. . . . [W]e must make a commitment to
change it; not reform it—­revolutionize it.”14 Another vocal critic of matri-
mony was Barbara Smith’s twin sister Beverly, who claims in “The Wedding”
(1975) that “celebrating marriage is like celebrating being sold into slav-
ery.”15 Whereas slavery served as a powerful conceptual analogy for Atkin-
son, Cronan, and other white women, it indexes for Smith and lesbians of
color the lived experience of a brutal colonialist legacy. As Gloria Anzaldúa
76 Acts of Gaiety

observes in Borderlands/La Frontera, “The dark-­skinned woman has been

silenced, caged, gagged, bound into servitude with marriage, bludgeoned
for 300 years, sterilized and castrated in the twentieth century. For 300 years
she has been a slave, a source of cheap labor, colonized by the Spaniard, the
Anglo, by her own people.”16
Identifying marriage as the keystone in a tower of interlocking oppres-
sions, lesbian and feminist critiques of heterosexism served as the founda-
tion for a broad-­based liberationist agenda aimed at radically transforming
society. This approach could not be more antithetical to the contemporary
LGBT movement, which is dominated by pragmatists who consider the
right to wed the litmus test of freedom. Same-­sex marriage is touted, even
by members of the Left, as a progressive cause, when, in fact, it is a heavily
freighted issue that has as much to do with conformity and propriety as it
does with basic human rights. For many gays and lesbians, formal marriage
equality is an important civil liberty, one that should be an option for any
citizen who wishes to enter into this kind of relationship. Others, myself in-
cluded, want no part of what the poet Marianne Moore called “[t]his model
of petrine fidelity” promoted by “savages” obsessed with “the silly task of
making people noble.”17
My objective here is not to disparage queers (or straights) who wish to
wed but to contribute to conversations about the contested role of formal
marriage equality in the LGBT movement by bringing back to the table a
marginalized perspective: lesbian feminism. Many scholars and activists,
from Lisa Duggan to Urvashi Vaid, have argued that marriage reform ex-
emplifies the neoliberalization of sexual politics insofar as it represents a
narrow, formal, nonredistributive mode of social and political equality, one
that is predicated on prejudicial forms of economic advancement and social
respectability. Surprisingly scant attention has been paid, however, to mar-
riage critiques by second-­wave feminists and gay liberationists who opposed
the institution of matrimony, challenged sexual hegemony, and created a
number of viable alternatives for organizing and living out their lives in
ways that facilitated the reallocation of power, public space, cultural capital,
political liberties, and sexual pleasures for everyone.
In this chapter, I look at zap actions from 1969 and 2009, comparing
ludic, anarchic, antimarriage demonstrations by lesbians and feminists to
dramatic displays by outraged liberals in support of same-­sex unions after
the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Juxtaposing zaps from two dif-
ferent time periods characterized by opposing views on matrimony offers a
 Guerrilla Acts 77

unique way of charting the diachronic status of marriage and its imbricated
relationship with the rise of homoliberalism. This approach reverberates
with what Carolyn Dinshaw calls “a queer historical impulse,” an orienta-
tion “toward making connections across time between, on the one hand,
lives, texts, and other cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back
then and, on the other, those left out of current sexual categories now.”18
When different historical moments “touch”—­even ones that are just de-
cades apart—­sparks fly and tempers flare as signifiers brush against one
another, unsettling naturalized categories and normative structures.
A complex historiographical inquiry into the practice of zaps offers a
particularly generative approach to the topic of same-­sex marriage. It en-
ables us to take critical stock of a divisive issue, provides a broad basis for
understanding the current political landscape in the context of a longer tra-
jectory of social and political activism, and sheds light on the models and
methods being deployed to construct and evaluate LGBT history. A spectacu-
larly theatrical mode of performative protest designed to jolt the public into
consciousness, zaps provide an electric charge that energizes and enlightens
constituencies, but they can also effect the inverse, annihilating opposing
viewpoints, eradicating debate, and anesthetizing critical faculties. My aim
in undertaking this study is to show how the push for marriage equality zaps
history, occluding lesbian and feminist opposition to matrimony in order
to make the past consistent with today’s conservative, integrationist mis-
sion. This chapter culminates in an exploration of the fortieth anniversary
of the Stonewall uprising in June 2009, which took place just a few months
after the Proposition 8 vote. Manipulating cultural memory through care-
fully scripted performances, homoliberals turned this event commemorating
movement veterans and four decades of political struggle into a public en-
actment of forgetting, eliding early activists’ resolutely antimarriage stance.
Transforming Stonewall 40/Pride 2009 into an amnesiac site of assimilation,
marriagists used this event to zap dissenting opinions about marriage reform
within LGBT communities and rewrite the historical record.

Altared States 1969: WITCH’s Bridal Affair

At 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 15, 1969, a coven of radical femi-

nists known as the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell
(WITCH) disrupted the first annual Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden
78 Acts of Gaiety

in New York City.19 Thousands of fliers calling all feminists to “Confront

the Whore-­makers,” a play on the anti-­Vietnam slogan “Confront the War-­
makers,” had been plastered in subway stations, bathrooms, and bookstores
across the city. “Bring posters, brooms, costumes, consciousness, anger,
witches’ brew, love, bridal gowns, tambourines, hexes, laughter, solidarity,
and alternatives,” the fliers announced, to protest the packaging of women
into “‘loving’ commodities on the marriage market.”20 Approximately 150
women took part in the “Bridle Un-­Fair” demonstration. Donning black
veils and trains of Monopoly money, demonstrators sang “Here comes the
slave / Off to her grave” to the tune of the wedding march while picketing
the convention center. They brandished placards that read, “Always a Bride,
Never a Person,” “Ask not for Whom the Wedding Bell Tolls,” and“Here
Comes the Bribe.” Agitators distributed leaflets proclaiming that “marriage
is a dehumanizing institution—­legal whoredom for women” along with
complimentary “shop-­lifting bags,” which they hoped would call attention
to the “consumptive hegemony” of the bridal industrial complex.21
In one of the many mock rituals conducted that day, WITCHes staged a
mass “unwedding ceremony” in which they took a “pledge of disallegiance”
and “gathered together . . . in the spirit of . . . passion to affirm [their] love
and initiate [their] freedom from the unholy state of American patriarchal
oppression.”22 The dissidents took a vow

to love, cherish, and groove on each other and on all living things. We prom-
ise to smash the alienated family unit. We promise not to obey. We promise
this through highs and bummers, in recognition that riches and objects are
totally available through socialism or theft (but also that possessing is irrel-
evant to love) . . . [and] in the name of Revolution, we pronounce ourselves
Free Human Beings.23

The Bridal Fair demonstration culminated with a small group of wom-

en taking the protest from the street inside Madison Square Garden, using
passes procured by WITCH Judith Duffet who infiltrated Bride magazine.
Dressed in ladylike drag to avoid suspicion, these insurgents made their
way to the showroom floor where they proceeded to hex the vendors, those
manufacturers and marketers of fantasy dream weddings and bridezillas.
They cast spells on three of the event’s sponsors: International Coffee, which
engaged in slave-­labor practices in South America; J. P. Stevens, a fabric
company with lucrative defense contracts to supply the armed forces with
 Guerrilla Acts 79

uniforms and shrouds; and Chase Manhattan Bank, which hoped to cash
in by financing not only wedding gowns and ceremonies but honeymoon
packages, mortgages, and loans for furniture and appliances. Just as the ac-
tivists were about to be escorted out of the convention center, they released
cages of white mice onto the showroom floor.
The Bridal Fair protest and The Feminists’ occupation of the New York
Marriage Licensing Bureau are what counterculture radicals in the 1960s
called zaps, humorous, highly theatrical, nonviolent acts of civil disobe-
dience involving skits, costumes, and props. Infusing social protest with
guerrilla theater, zaps are parodic, satirical, and symbolic actions designed
to wow spectators and attract media attention. A zap, as the name suggests,
is a jolt or charge, a sudden infusion of energy, one that typically takes the
form of a strike or attack. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the
first recorded usage of the term was in 1929, as a linguistic representation
of the sound of a bullet, ray gun, or laser.24 By the 1940s, the term had be-
come synonymous with murder, with the rubbing out of an individual or the
extermination of entire populations. This linguistic transformation was the
result, no doubt, of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the looming threat
of nuclear annihilation.25 In the 1950s and 1960s, zap (along with bam,
splat, pow, wham, and other sonorous, onomatopoeic, terms) was used to
punch up comic books, from commercial publications such as Batman to the
underground zine Zap featuring the work of R. Crumb. The term was also
used to punctuate a new form of painting called pop art (e.g., Andy Warhol
and Roy Lichtenstein) that drew inspiration from comics, advertising, and
popular culture. Zap’s bellicose associations returned during the Vietnam
War, where it was deployed to describe American soldiers’ mission to evis-
cerate the Vietcong and the United States’ desire to extinguish the commu-
nist threat. During this time, the word also referred to states of intoxication
and numbness. Zapped was how revelers described how they felt after im-
bibing too much alcohol or taking too many mushrooms. According to The
Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English,
soldiers used the term to describe the trauma of war and the lack of sensa-
tion they felt after battle, while homosexuals employed it to describe the ex-
perience of electroshock treatments, a common form of aversion therapy.26
Since the word zap was first introduced, artists and activists have played
on the antithetical meanings of the term in an effort to smash antiquated
ideologies and create new aesthetic and political models. In the 1960s dis-
sidents saw zap actions as a way to shock a comatose public into conscious-
80 Acts of Gaiety

ness, revitalize a moribund leftist labor movement, and conscript a compla-

cent and complicit citizenry in the fight against capitalist exploitation and
imperialism. Answering the call for a “participatory democracy,” these ac-
tions enabled the direct involvement of individuals in “social decisions de-
termining the quality and direction” of their lives.27 Political activists saw in
zaps a way to combat the suffocating apathy engineered by architects of the
Cold War and to remediate the global crisis in civil rights it left in its wake
by conspiring with radical contingents all over the world to “replace power
rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness
rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”28
The purpose of zaps was to ensure that the revolution would be tele-
vised. Agitators used guerrilla theater tactics to create a media circus, draw-
ing attention to underrepresented causes and unpopular viewpoints, to
stories and perspectives that were not likely to be covered by journalists
at mainstream presses or television studios. Through spectacular, highly
publicized zap actions, activists introduced America to the New Left, the
second-­wave feminist, and the new homosexual. These actions showed the
masses that flower power was a potent weapon, that women were a force to
be reckoned with, and that gays constituted a legitimate but unrecognized
political minority. Early lesbian and gay zaps mimicked surprise police raids
on bars and nightclubs, which persisted long after the Stonewall riots, offer-
ing straights a taste of their own medicine. Activists of all stripes used this
mode of protest to force politicians to take a stand on controversial issues
such as civil rights, abortion, and AIDS, or have their unwillingness to do so
be aired for all to see.
Zap actions were first staged by the Yippies (aka, the Youth International
Party), a group of radicalized hippies associated with the antiwar and free
speech movements who combined the Situationists’ theories of mass me-
dia with the utopian aspirations and direct actions of the anarcho-­theater
collective the Diggers.29 The Yippies, as Charlotte Canning has observed,
“spectacularized politics using the media to point up the representational
nature of public action. Theater was almost inevitable because everyday life
on the Left picked up on two of the important components of performance
for most experimental theaters: the creation of work out of a collaborative
community and the focus on representation and spectacle.”30 Founded on
December 31, 1967, by Abbie Hoffman, Anita Kushner, Jerry Rubin, Nancy
Kurshan, and Paul Krassner, the Yippies were a band of merry pranksters
whose penchant for outrageous antics earned them the name the Groucho-­
 Guerrilla Acts 81

Marxists. Cells soon sprang across the country, attracting the attention of
flower power gurus Allen Ginsberg and Timothy O’Leary, as well as the sup-
port of militant radicals such as Eldridge Cleaver and Tom Hayden.
The Yippies’ mission was to make the revolution fun by any means nec-
essary, and their promotion of “a politics of ecstasy” aroused the ire and
condemnation of “serious” leftists.31 In Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman
explains the group’s moniker: “What does Yippie! mean? Energy—­fun—­
fierceness—­exclamation point!”32 The Yippies’ name evokes joy and ex-
hilaration, and their zaps were acts of gaiety designed to foster pleasurable
communion through daring displays of ribald humor and acerbic wit. The
Yippies’ most famous acts of gaiety included applying for a permit to levi-
tate the Pentagon, addressing the House Un-­American Activities Commit-
tee dressed in the garb of revolutionary soldiers while dispensing copies of
the Declaration of Independence, closing the New York Stock Exchange by
dropping hundreds of dollar bills from the visitor’s gallery onto the trading
floor, and nominating Pigasus the Immortal, a swine, for president of the
United States at the Festival of Life, which they cohosted during the Demo-
cratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.
Robin Morgan, a cofounder of WITCH, was a Yippie who employed the
performative and participatory art of zaps in the service of radical feminism,
as a way to put theory into practice.33 As a writer, editor, and former child
actress—­she played Dagmar in the television series I Remember Mama with
Dick Van Patten in the 1950s and hosted a weekly radio program, The Little
Robin Morgan Show, in the 1940s—­this Yippie knew firsthand the power
of the media in shaping a public image. She drew on her acting skills to
stage the Bridal Fair zap and used her extensive television and journalism
contacts to publicize the demonstration, just as she had done a few months
prior for the now legendary Miss America protest in Atlantic City (Septem-
ber 1968), the event credited with making second-­wave feminism headline
news.34
Taking their cue from the Yippies, WITCH eschewed formal member-
ship and organizational hierarchy, which meant there was little or no contact
between autonomous cells across the country. Jo Freeman, a member of the
Chicago chapter, describes WITCH as “more of an idea-­in-­action than an
organization.” According to Morgan, it was a commitment to gaiety that
connected the disparate cells, “A certain common style, insouciance, theat-
ricality, humor, and activism unite the Covens, which are otherwise totally
autonomous and unhierarchical to the point of anarchy.”35 The group’s com-
82 Acts of Gaiety

mitment to gaiety is reflected in the New York coven’s manifesto, coauthored

by Morgan, which reads:

WITCH is an all-­woman Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror,

joy, garlic, flowers, spells. It’s an awareness that witches and gypsies were
the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression. . . . Witches
were . . . the first birth-­control practitioners and abortionists, the first alche-
mists. . . . WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of
each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domina-
tion . . . [so] if you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a
witch . . . you are free and beautiful. . . . Whatever is repressive, solely male-­
oriented, greedy, puritanical, authoritarian-­those are your targets . . . [and]
you are pledged to free our brothers from oppression and stereotyped sexual
roles as well as ourselves.36

Committed to dramatic acts of political dissent, this collective imagined

itself as “the striking arm of the Women’s Liberation Movement, aiming
mainly at financial and corporate America, at those institutions that have
the power to control and define human life.”37 The first annual Bridal Fair
was an obvious target for a WITCH zap, for it combined “racism, militarism,
capitalism—­all packaged into one ‘ideal’ symbol, a woman.”38
In an interview with the New York Times reporter dispatched to cover
the exhibit, Judy Klemesrud, Morgan explained that WITCH was on hand
to protest “the commerciality of the Bridal Fair and the institution of mar-
riage as it exists in this culture to dehumanize both parties—­but especially
women.”39 Klemesrud, clearly amused by what she describes as the day’s
“unofficial” entertainment, was perplexed by WITCH, and in particular
“Miss Morgan,” whom the reporter notes “prefers to use her maiden name,
is married and expects her first child in July.”40 An advocate of flexible,
antiheterosexist, politicized sexuality, Morgan had recently come out as a
lesbian and was involved in an open marriage with fellow Yippie Kenneth
Pitchford, an out gay poet ten years her senior.41
WITCH attracted creative rebels who, in Morgan’s words, were “gener-
ally bored by marching and would prefer to demolish things—­by magic, of
course.”42 Tired of “comatose tactics” and “dull, overlong speeches,” these
activists could not imagine anything more tedious than petitions, anything
more stultifying than sit-­ins.43 These dissidents wanted to get to the root
of oppression not by talking but by dramatizing the problem. As Morgan
 Guerrilla Acts 83

recalls, “[W]e were . . . newly aroused and angry about our oppression as
women—­and we wanted to move. It seemed intolerable that we should sit
around ‘just talking’ when there was so much to be done. So we went and
did it.”44 The problem, according to many women’s liberationists, was that
WITCH was moving in the wrong direction. Its popular but often poorly
planned demonstrations were a source of consternation for many activists,
who feared that these amateur antics would make a mockery of feminism
and detract from the seriousness of the cause.
Liberal feminists felt that the group was extremist, that its denuncia-
tion of the institution of marriage alienated heterosexual women and its
indiscriminate attack on men estranged potential allies. Such hyperbolic
posturing, reformists feared, would encourage the general public to dismiss
feminist claims as frivolous acts by hysterical women and angry lesbians.
Feminists at the other end of the political spectrum felt WITCH was not
radical enough. Redstockings admonished the collective for its antiwoman
stance—­in likening wives to slaves and prostitutes—­and its uncritical adop-
tion of confrontational tactics of the male Left.45 These radical feminists
took WITCH to task for denouncing consciousness-­raising, which, they ar-
gued, the coven needed more rather than less of. As Canning has observed,
feminists “felt that this kind of protest was not appropriate because it at-
tacked the women participating in the contest instead of simply attacking
the power structure behind the contest.”46 Liberal and radical feminists
were united in their fear that WITCH would impede the progress of the
women’s liberation movement. They disagreed, however, in their definition
of progress and on which policies, programs, and political actions would
best advance their cause.
A look back at lesbian and feminist zaps from 1969 shows how compli-
cated it can be to lobby a critique of marriage (or any other liberal reform)
without offending the people who take part in this ritual. Equally illumi-
nating, it sheds light on the ways in which members of minority groups
can squelch dissent among their own ranks. Succumbing to the molar logic
of second-­wave feminism, Morgan came to see the Bridal Fair action as “a
self-­indulgent insult to the very women [WITCH] claimed [it] wanted to
reach.”47 The protest, she would write upon reflection, “was aimed at the
institution of marriage itself, at the structure of the bourgeois family, which
oppresses everyone, and particularly women,” but the tactics the group em-
ployed made attendees feel as if they were the target of the protest.48 Morgan
attributed the action’s failure to the fact that zaps, as a mode of protest, are
84 Acts of Gaiety

rooted in techniques developed by the Yippies and the “counterfeit male-­

dominated Left.”49 She not only recanted the action, but she renounced the
practice of zaps as a patriarchal tool that could never be used to dismantle
the master’s house.
The Bridal Fair backlash convinced Morgan that the “revolution must
be led by, made by, those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and
white women—­with men relating to that the best they can.”50 Members of
WITCH took a hiatus from direction action, during which time Morgan im-
mersed herself in feminist theory and published one of the most influential
and widely circulated anthologies of the women’s liberation movement, Sis-
terhood Is Powerful. She also helped orchestrate the feminist takeover of RAT:
Subterranean News, a New Left periodical. In the first women’s liberation
issue of RAT (published in January 1970), Morgan issued a feminist dec-
laration of independence from the male Left in which she repudiates both
the confrontational, “ejaculatory tactics” of macho revolutionaries and the
“clownish proto-­anarchism of groups such as the Yippies.”51 In “Goodbye to
All That,” she writes:

To hell with the simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women—­or
nonwhite peoples—­will come about ZAP! with the advent of a socialist revo-
lution. Bullshit. Two evils pre-­date capitalism and clearly have been able to
survive and post-­date socialism: sexism and racism. . . . How much further
we will have to go to create those profound changes that would give birth to
a genderless society.52

In this essay, Morgan encouraged feminists to be “the women that men have
warned us about” and to create acts of gaiety in which they “Let it all hang
out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, Solanasesque, frustrated, crazy, nutty,
frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-­hating, libelous, pure, unfair,
envious, intuitive, low-­down, stupid, petty, liberating.”53
Feminists bullied WITCH members into thinking the Madison Square
Garden zap was an utter failure and pressured them into adopting a position
of gender essentialism, just as queers today are pressed into supporting a
conservative, antiliberationist agenda. While WITCH may not have raised
the consciousness of every woman on the scene that day, the event inspired
covens across the country to engage in similar (and sometimes more en-
lightened) protests at bridal fairs in 1969, and for many years after. In addi-
tion, this demonstration prompted other activist organizations, such as The
 Guerrilla Acts 85

Feminists, and artistic collectives, such as Caravan Theatre in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, to stage agitprop spectacles dramatizing the horrors of mat-
rimony.
Caravan Theatre’s How to Make a Woman (1969) opens with two women
(played by Aili Singer and Barbara Fleischman) shopping for dresses.54 The
pair is seduced by male proprietors into trying on a variety of outlandish
garments that restrict their movement, contort their figures, and objectify
their breasts, hips, and vagina. Through a series of flashbacks and dream
sequences, the women rehearse the rites of passage that prepared them for
womanhood: walking in heels, learning how to type, being raped, getting
married, having children, and so on. The choreography of their movements,
inspired by the Open Theater’s transformations and the Living Theatre’s ab-
stract acting style, heighten the sense of ritual and suggest that women’s
oppression is a carefully crafted social drama.
How to Make a Woman enacts Simone de Beauvoir’s now commonplace
assertion in The Second Sex, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a wom-
an.”55 This declaration is typically read as evidence for the social construc-
tion of Woman, a maxim of second-­wave feminism. What is often forgot-
ten, however, is that a critique of marriage lies at the heart of de Beauvoir’s
philosophy: a critique that is enacted frequently in feminist performance
and protest of the 1960s and 1970s. De Beauvoir, who never married, de-
tails the specific ways in which religious, political, and scientific traditions
create a mystified image of Woman characterized by impossible and con-
tradictory ideals of femininity. The social construction of Woman as Other
supports the fallacy of women’s inherent or “natural” inferiority to men and
provides justification for the patriarchal exploitation of sexual difference.
De Beauvoir’s claim that existence precedes essence and her phenomeno-
logical insight that it is only as embodied beings that we experience and
engage the world laid the groundwork for feminist theory and the practice
of consciousness-­raising.
Consciousness-­raising and zap actions informed the praxis of Caravan
and other theater collectives. The immediacy of live theater proved to be a
particularly fecund site for exploring the corporeal contingencies and lived
experiences of sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Feminist col-
lectives created performances based on their personal experiences of dis-
crimination. The development of this new content necessitated the inven-
tion of new theatrical forms and new modes of production—­including a
nonhierarchical division of labor, the use of nontraditional venues, and the
86 Acts of Gaiety

insistence on there being no separation between audiences and actors. Like

zaps, these feminist productions blurred the line between performance and
protest, and events often ended with women taking to the streets. Feminist
theater collectives shared several ideological and formal aspects with direct
action groups such as WITCH and The Feminists. They used performance
to put politics into action, employed theatricality to foreground gender as
constructed, and engaged in role-­playing to rehearse new ways of being in
the world.
Antimarriage protests in 1969 inspired countless women to join the
feminist and gay liberation movements and to think about ways other than
marriage and maternity to make, mark, and measure their lives. These acts
of gaiety underwrote vast socioeconomic changes in America, engender-
ing revolutionary chronologies that promoted alternative ways of advanc-
ing history. Eschewing teleological notions of progress, lesbian and feminist
zaps endowed leftist politics with a distinctly dykey chronometry, one that
was enjoyable rather than industrious, collective rather than individual, and
ludic rather than linear. Marrying pleasure with political activism, these
spectacular public protests promoted a visionary praxis that was redolent
of ecstasy. Theatrical zaps served an important function in the dramaturgy
of radical feminism, and they were an integral element of the gay rights
movement. The Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), a splinter group of the Gay
Liberation Front that formed in December 1969, became so skilled at the
art of zaps that many histories of the LGBT movement, queer theory, and
AIDS activism mistakenly credit GAA as the progenitor of this form of po-
litical protest, ignoring not only lesbian and feminist guerrilla actions but
the Yippies’ spectacles as well.56 The Gay Activist Alliance is of particular
importance to this study because it is the progenitor of today’s single-­issue,
reform-­ oriented, corporate-­ structured LGBT movement, and because it
staged the first pro-marriage zap. The emergence and success of GAA plays a
large part in the zapping of lesbian and feminist opposition to marriage from
the historical record, and it marks the moment at which gay rights became
synonymous with gay marriage.

A Husbandly Approach: GAA and the First Pro-marriage Zap

The Gay Activist Alliance began when a cohort of disaffected GLF members
left the group over ideological, procedural, and financial issues, including
 Guerrilla Acts 87

GLF’s decision to donate five hundred dollars to the Black Panther Party and
fund women’s dances.57 Unhappy with GLF’s broad-­based political agenda,
activists conceived of GAA as a single-­issue, politically neutral organization
whose goal was to secure basic human rights, dignity, and freedom for all
gay people.58 A central tenet of the GAA was that the organization would
devote its resources solely and specifically to gay and lesbian causes, though
most members remained active in other movement work. A moderate and,
over time, increasingly conservative alternative to GLF, GAA worked within
the system for political reform. The group sought to abolish discriminatory
sex laws, promote civil rights, and challenge politicians to publicly state
their views on gay issues.
Though reformist-­ oriented, GAA engaged in militant, confrontation
politics, publicly exposing and aggressively challenging the homophobic
rhetoric and deeds of government officials, corporate conglomerates, and
media entities, often through zap actions. They protested negative portraits
of homosexuality on television shows (e.g., Marcus Welby, M.D, Police Wom-
an, the Dick Cavett Show, the Mike Douglas Show, and broadcasts by Wal-
ter Cronkite), in films (e.g., Cruising), and in newspapers (e.g., the Village
Voice, where GAA member Arthur Bell was a columnist). New York mayor
John Lindsay was a frequent GAA target, with activists commandeering his
press conferences and even hounding him at the opera. Zaps were used by
GAA as “political theater for educating the gay masses” and awakening the
consciousness of straight America.59 The group became so famous for its
protests that simply threatening to zap a person of authority often resulted
in a victory for the organization. Through bold, political actions, it achieved
a number of important reforms and assisted in many more, including the
declassification of homosexuality as a psychopathology in the Diagnostic
and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).60
These zaps provided a way for lesbians and gays to come out in support
of a cause. In fostering a collective identity, these actions made it safer—­
and indeed more pleasurable—­for others to do the same. As a reporter for
Life magazine observed, zaps “offer [homosexuals] the best therapy for the
humiliations inflected by an anti-­homosexual society. ‘One good zap,’ they
say, ‘is worth months on a psychiatrist’s couch.’”61 Arthur Evans, a founding
member of GAA, speaks to the potential of zap actions as a recruiting tool.

Gays who have as yet no sense of pride see a zap on television or read about
it in the press. First they are vaguely disturbed at the demonstrators for
88 Acts of Gaiety

“rocking the boat”; eventually, when they see how the straight establishment
responds, they feel anger. This anger gradually focuses on heterosexual op-
pressors, and the gays develop a sense of class-­consciousness. And the no-­
longer-­closeted gays realize that assimilation into the heterosexual main-
stream is no answer: gays must unite amongst themselves, organize their
common resources for collective action, and resist.62

Although many in GAA worked to create an organization that reflected the

diversity of the LGBT community, the collective suffered from a lack of gen-
der and racial parity. Membership consisted primarily, though not exclu-
sively, of white, middle-­class men, and GAA’s tactics and targets reflected the
needs and desires of this constituency. The aim of GAA, according to Evans,
“was to reach . . . gay men who were not interested in politics” and “who did
not connect their sexuality with political issue[s].”63 Women’s issues were
something of an afterthought, if they were addressed at all.
Seeking to attract more dykes to GAA, a group of women formed the
Lesbian Liberation Committee (LLC) in the fall of 1971. Although its activi-
ties were primarily social, consisting of film screenings, panel discussions
on topics like coming out and lesbian motherhood, and women’s dances at
the Firehouse, the men of GAA were less than thrilled about this develop-
ment. “We had arguments every single day,” recalls Jean O’Leary, chair of
LLC. “We had debates on the floor. The men were listening, but they just
weren’t hearing what we had to say, and they held on to their stereotyped
views of women. They would also make a point of crashing our women-­only
events.”64 Tensions escalated, and in the spring of 1972 a group of women,
O’Leary included, broke with GAA to establish Lesbian Feminist Liberation
(LFL), a hierarchical, reform-­oriented organization that focused on lesbian
issues but cultivated alliances with both gay and feminist groups.
The lack of gender parity and the timing of the lesbian split from GAA
are important because they coincided with the group’s pro-marriage zap—­
the first of its kind for the LGBT movement—­on June 4, 1971. Not a single
lesbian took part in this event, a fact that is rarely, if ever, reported in his-
tories of this action. The absence of women is glaringly obvious in video
footage of the protest, however.65 Just as The Feminists had done two years
earlier, GAA staged a guerrilla theater action at the New York Marriage Li-
censing Bureau. Whereas the former had protested the coerced participation
of women in this institution, the latter decried gay men’s exclusion from
it. The zap was precipitated by a story in the New York Post about Father
 Guerrilla Acts 89

Robert Clement of the Church of the Beloved Disciple, who performed cer-
emonies of “Holy Union” for gay couples.66 When City Clerk Herman Katz
threatened Clement with legal action, the pastor, whose congregation was
primarily homosexual men, fought back. He told a reporter for the Post that
his church was not in the business of performing “marriages,” and thus the
rites he conducted were neither illegal nor of any concern to the City Clerk’s
Office. GAA plotted to zap Katz at his office and demand that he apologize
to Clement and all gay Americans for disparaging and defaming them.
Demonstrators decided to stage the zap as an “engagement party” for
two male couples—­John Basso and John C. Bond and Steve Krotz and Vito
Russo.67 In a beautifully choreographed event, thirty members of GAA
descended on the Marriage Licensing Bureau bearing invitations, musical
instruments, coffee, cups, cutlery, even a folding table on which to place
everything. Activists serenaded employees and couples applying for their
marriage licenses with chants of “gay power” before serving them wedding
cake, an elaborate multitiered confection decorated with one male couple
and one female couple, a ludicrous gesture given that this protest reflected
a decidedly husbandly perspective on marriage. The figurines were joined
by a large lambda, a Greek letter used as GAA’s symbol for gay unity, which
is ironic since lesbians either boycotted or were not invited to the event. On
the side of the cake, written in a large heart, was “gay power to gay love.”
While cake was being served, Evans commandeered the phone lines. He
told callers that the office could only grant licenses to same-­sex couples and
invited them to come down and join GAA’s celebration. Katz, who was duly
chastised by these firebrands, phoned the police, who arrived on the scene
within the hour to break up the party.
This highly entertaining and effective protest led by white gay men gives
credence to David Eng’s assertion that the legalized nuclear family to which
pro-­same-­sex-marriage activists aspire is a racially ­privileged form of intima-
cy that offers the greatest benefits to those individuals who are cisgendered,
male, Caucasian, and middle-class.68 As such, it sheds light on the multiple
and contradictory functions of zap actions: they simultaneously energize
debate and abate or silence dissent. While the GAA marriage bureau zap
enlightened straight spectators about the heterosexist nature of matrimony,
it not only obscured the misogynist underpinnings of this hallowed institu-
tion but it made it seem—­through the token gesture of the cake topping—­as
if gay men and women were in solidarity on the subject of same-­sex unions,
which, at the time of this demonstration, they were not. I am not suggesting
90 Acts of Gaiety

that all dykes in the 1960s and 1970s opposed marriage. What I am suggest-
ing is that there was something missing in GAA’s pro-marriage zap, namely,
a lesbian feminist optic that might have encouraged the male protestors and
their captive audience to think in broader terms about the institution of
marriage and to go beyond the simple, binary logic and reductive reasoning
animating this protest. The zap reflects a fundamental difference between
lesbian feminists and gay men over the issue of marriage at a key moment
in LGBT history. It has received scant critical attention despite the fact that
it has exerted a profound influence on contemporary politics and activism.
Sensational, confrontational zaps, such at the Marriage Licensing Bu-
reau action, helped make GAA one of the most effective and longest-­lasting
political entities to form in the wake of the Stonewall uprising. As time
went on, however, some members of the group began to question the ef-
ficacy of these shock tactics. Believing that the promotion of positive, less
aggressive, and more domesticated images of homosexuality would appeal
to a wider audience—­beyond major metropolitan cities and into the heart-
land of middle-­class America—­thereby garnering LGBT citizens more allies
and greater political influence, a small but increasingly vocal contingent of
assimilationist-­oriented GAA activists called for the collective to tone down
its militant rhetoric and dispense with zap actions. This conservative fac-
tion suggested that the long-­haired hippies and fairies—­like Arthur Evans,
who led many of the high-­profile actions and served as the public face of
GAA—­be replaced with clean-­cut, conventionally attractive, straight-­acting
spokespersons. Disagreements over the future of the collective prompted
many members to leave the organization, including former GAA president
Bruce Voeller, who went on to found the National Gay Task Force (1973),
an influential lobbying group for gay rights, and Michael Lavery, who started
Lambda Legal (1973).69 These two national rights organizations have played
a key role in the enormous gains that LGBT citizens have gained over the
past four decades. Dedicated primarily to juridical reform, these entities
have been instrumental in the mainstreaming of the movement and in mak-
ing marriage equality the galvanizing issue that it is today.

Altared States 2009: California’s Proposition 8

Prior to 1973, there was no statute prohibiting same-­sex unions in any US

state, but according to common law, or precedent, this was a heterosexual
contract; gay marriage simply did not exist. Around the time of the GAA
 Guerrilla Acts 91

marriage bureau zap, a gay male couple from Minnesota, Jack Baker and
Michael McConnell, who had been denied a marriage license, appealed their
case (Baker v. Nelson) all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to
hear the matter. It was in direct response to the growing gay rights move-
ment, and to lawsuits such as Baker v. Nelson, that states began to enact leg-
islation defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Maryland
was the first state to do so, followed by Arizona, Colorado, and Virginia. By
1980, twenty-­five out of fifty states had passed similar bills into law, and by
1994 the number had risen to forty-five. Two years later President Bill Clin-
ton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage for
purposes of federal law as an opposite-­sex relationship and mandates that
no state may be required to recognize as a marriage a same-­sex relationship
considered a marriage in another state. While some LGBT activists would
have fought for the right to marry irrespective of these legislative acts, the
fact that our government went to such lengths to institutionalize discrimi-
nation ensured that marriage equality would become a primary target of
activist energies, even for gays and lesbians with no personal investment in
the institution, who are ambivalent about it, and who otherwise oppose this
normalizing institution.
Performance artist Holly Hughes speaks to the conflicted position in
which many contemporary lesbian feminists find themselves when it comes
to the issue of same-­sex marriage. In 2010 she created with Megan Carney
(of Chicago’s About Face Theatre) and Moe Angelos (of the Five Lesbian
Brothers) Let Them Eat Cake, a performance advertised as “a gay marriage in
one act with confections.” Based on the enormously popular Tony and Tina’s
Wedding, Let Them Eat Cake asks the audience (“guests”) to salvage a gay
wedding gone wrong by interrogating what it means to be married, single,
gay, straight, commitment phobic, a joiner, included, or jeering from the
outskirts. In an interview with Diana Cage, Hughes admitted:

I didn’t really want to get married. I thought that was one of the perks of
being gay. I mean, a lot of people have said that . . . you didn’t have to get
married, you couldn’t be in the military, you didn’t have to have kids. But
then, I did want to get married when I was told I couldn’t. . . . My desire to
get married was uncovered by the religious Right.70

Another lesbian artist whose support of same-­sex marriage was sparked by

opposition to it is Joan Lipkin, whose That Uppity Theatre Company in
St. Louis staged The State of Marriage in 2010. This show tells the story of
92 Acts of Gaiety

gay and lesbian couples who board the Show Me Marriage Equality Bus,
crossing state lines from Missouri, where same-­sex marriage is prohibited,
to Iowa, where it has been legal since 2009, in order to get hitched. Like
Hughes’s Let Them Eat Cake, Lipkin’s pro-marriage performance piece was
inspired, in large part, by the passage of Proposition 8 in California.71
In May 2008, California became the second state, after Massachusetts,
to legalize same-­sex unions when the State Supreme Court found the ban
unconstitutional (In re Marriage Cases).72 Factions on the religious Right,
opposed to what they considered activist judges’ ruling in the case, drafted
an initiative, Proposition 8, to amend the state Constitution to limit mar-
riage to opposite-­sex couples. This referendum was placed on the November
2008 ballot, and it passed, by a slim margin (less than 5 percent), over-
turning the Supreme Court decision. Proposition 8 did not affect domestic
partnerships in California, nor did it invalidate same-­sex marriages granted
during the brief six-­month window (from May to November) in which they
were legal.
Many liberals were stunned by the results. In the same election in which
Americans selected Barack Obama as the nation’s first African-American
president, Californians delivered a severe blow to LGBT civil rights. Early
exit poll data showed that voters were divided along religious, political, and
racial lines, with whites opposing the measure, Latinos divided, and blacks
in support, by 70 percent according to cable and Internet news sites. These
statistics led many gays and lesbians to blame racial minorities for the out-
come.73 Columnist Dan Savage, for example, posted the following message,
which he titled “Black Homophobia” on his blog on the morning of Novem-
ber 5.

I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—­and
they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—­are a bigger problem for African
Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African
Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.74

Savage’s knee-­jerk reaction belies the fact that the majority of people who
supported Proposition 8 were white homophobes: 63 percent of the elec-
torate in 2008 was white, compared to 10 percent African-American, and
49 percent of Caucasians supported the referendum.75 Blaming black ho-
mophobia, as Savage and others did, occludes the real problem: a predomi-
nantly white LGBT community took for granted the support of people of
 Guerrilla Acts 93

color. As we have seen time and time again over the past four decades, when
the movement ignores the issue of race and fails to make coalition building
a priority, the consequences are devastating. While the queer nation ben-
efits from having many black, Asian, and Latino members, not to mention
advocates, it consistently fails to promote people of color to positions of
leadership. As Urvashi Vaid notes, ethnic minorities constitute 25 percent of
the LGBT population, but this is not reflected in the institutional hierarchy
of most agencies, as racial equality is not considered a priority by the white,
middle-­class men, or the handful of similarly positioned women, who set
the contemporary gay agenda.76 While the Left was busy ignoring the issue
of race, the antigay Right (spearheaded by the Mormon church) actively
courted the ethnic vote in the 2008 election. Its coalition was better funded
(having raised an estimated twenty-­five million dollars), better organized,
and did a superior job of grassroots outreach, developing strong ties with
racial conservatives.
The passage of Proposition 8 and the legal limbo in which it put many
people created both anger and confusion among LGBT communities and
their allies. Almost immediately citizens began to mobilize, plotting an ap-
peal to the Supreme Court and staging protests to generate a media blitz. As
the tenor and purpose of LGBT activism had shifted considerably in recent
decades, so, too, had the types of organizations and the modes of civil dis-
obedience they favored. None of the entities that staged marriage protests
in and around 1969 were still active in 2009. Most of them had dissolved
within a year or two of forming, save GAA, which functioned until 1981 and
had a profound impact on the militant tactics of AIDS activists in groups
such as ACT-­UP and Queer Nation. As was the case in the 1960s and 1970s,
the most prominent and powerful collectives in the 1980s and 1990s were
comprised primarily, though by no means exclusively, of white, middle-­class
gay men, a significant number of whom became champions of the cause of
same-­sex marriage. Denied visitation rights and locked into costly battles
with the biological families of their dead and dying lovers over health care
directives, inheritance, shared property, and child custody, many gay men
came to see marriage as the best and most expedient way to secure the ben-
efits, not to mention the social legitimacy, that the government bestows on
straight couples. These activists made marriage the cornerstone of the queer
agenda, ignoring, just as the men of GAA had done decades earlier, lesbian
and feminist objections to this discriminatory institution.77
The direct action group Lesbian Avengers tried to reanimate this critique
94 Acts of Gaiety

through wonderfully wicked acts of gaiety, to no avail. Founded in 1992

by a coalition of theater artists and activists fed up with the marginaliza-
tion of women in the queer movement, the Avengers focused on issues vital
to lesbian survival and visibility.78 They are remembered for their smart,
saucy, and satirical ads featuring the group’s logo, an ignited bomb; for their
spectacular sapphic hijinks (e.g., unleashing plagues of crickets on ungodly
ministries, eating fire, and marching topless with duct-­taped nipples); and
for establishing the tradition of the Dyke March on Pink Saturday before
the Gay Pride Parade. Opposed to conservative gays’ attempt to legitimize
same-­sex marriage, the Avengers staged a series of demonstrations sur-
rounding Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 speaking tour for his book Virtually Nor-
mal. Playing, as they often did, on the conflation of lesbians and terrorists
(a topic I take up in chapter four), demonstrators positioned themselves
outside of bookstores where Sullivan was holding autograph sessions. They
carried signs bearing an enormous picture of the author’s face over which
they placed bulls-­eyes and crosshairs, as if to say—­in no uncertain terms—­
marriagists are misogynists, regardless of their sexual orientation, and thus
the target of radical lesbian feminists’ ire.79
By the time of the Proposition 8 vote, ACT-­UP, Queer Nation, and the
Lesbian Avengers were, for all intents and purposes, defunct. Like GLF, these
anarchist collectives burned out as quickly as they burst on the scene while
more conservative, mainstream organizations, including the National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF, formerly NGTF) and the Human Rights
Campaign (HRC), founded in 1980, gained traction. These centrist-­leaning,
reformist-­oriented institutions actively reject confrontational modes of pro-
test, including zap actions. Seeking to integrate into existing social struc-
tures, not challenge the tenets of the status quo, NGLTF and HRC eschew
aggressive, in-­yer-­face actions by militant activists in favor of more polite
tactics of persuasion such as letter-­writing campaigns and political lobbying.
This is evident in the names of the organizations. Unlike the Gay Liberation
Front, The Feminists, and WITCH, whose titles announce themselves as
radical, if not extremist, both NGLTF and HRC are devoid of revolutionary
references. Even their acronyms signal serious business, with nary a hint of
playfulness. More corporate than democratic in their structure, these agen-
cies are comprised not of political dissidents but of “insiders” who are out.
Governed by paid officials and boards of directors, as opposed to members
of the rank and file who donate their time, these agencies choose leaders
based on their credibility, respectability, and financial clout, not their politi-
 Guerrilla Acts 95

cal acumen, zealousness, or fervor. With unprecedented access to the halls

of power and well-­endowed coffers, NGLTF and the HRC reflect the extent
to which “the dominant national lesbian and gay civil rights organizations
have become,” according to Lisa Duggan, “lobbying, legal, and public rela-
tions firms for an increasingly narrow gay, monied elite.”80 These agencies
represent the co-­option of a radical social movement by homoliberal con-
glomerates that fight for the special interests of a few rather than the eman-
cipation of all people.
As zaps are antithetical to the mission of the organizations with the great-
est interest in marriage reform, most of the performative protests staged in
the wake of Proposition 8 were conducted either by individuals or by new,
single-­issue groups that sprang up after the election such as Join the Impact
(JTI) and NOH8 (which stands for “no hate”). By their own admission,
many of the people involved with these initiatives had little or no history of
activism (LGBT or other), scant interest in broader issues of social justice,
and a lack of familiarity with social, economic, and political theory. Who
needs Marx, the Situationists, or the Yippies when we have the Internet,
vast media repositories such as YouTube, and social networking platforms
such as Facebook and Twitter. Media-­minded political activism has changed
considerably over the past several decades. A flash mob of hundreds or even
thousands can be organized in a matter of minutes, and with a simple text
message or tweet. Protestors no longer need to court reporters to publicize
their events; they can do it themselves with relatively inexpensive digital
technology and the push of a button. A picture or video that goes viral can
be seen by millions of people around the globe in a single day, far more than
read print journalism or watch network and cable news. In fact, traditional
news sources not only report on but increasingly take their headlines from
items initially broadcast in the blogosphere.
Almost all of the zaps responding to Proposition 8 utilized Internet tech-
nology in some way. Many actions were staged in virtual space, including
Prop 8—­the Musical, a star-­studded, three-­minute video released on Decem-
ber 3, 2008, that was designed to galvanize public support for the appeals
process. Created and written by Marc Shaiman, a Tony Award–­winning com-
poser, lyricist, and arranger (best known for his work on Hairspray, South
Park, and Saturday Night Live) and choreographed by Adam Shankman (di-
rector of Hairspray the movie), this web video depicts a student produc-
tion of Prop 8—­The Musical at a fictitious Sacramento Community College.
The location is a reference to the California Musical Theater in Sacramento
96 Acts of Gaiety

(CMT), the largest nonprofit arts organization in the state. The theater’s
artistic director, Scott Eckern, became the target of Shaiman’s outrage when
it was revealed that Eckern—­a Mormon with a lesbian sister—­had donated
money to a Yes on Prop 8 campaign (California law requires that all contri-
butions of a thousand dollars or more be made public, and donor rolls were
widely circulated after the election). Shaiman called his colleague to say he
was boycotting CMT to ensure that no profits earned from his labor were
being “used to put discrimination in the Constitution.”81 Next Shaiman sent
an impassioned e-­mail about Eckern’s donation to over a thousand people
in his address book. Adam McKay, actor Will Ferrell’s collaborator, wrote
back inviting him to record a protest song on their website funnyordie.com.
On reading McKay’s reply, Shaiman recalls having a “slapping-­my-­head mo-
ment. Oh yeah, why didn’t I think of that? Or why didn’t I do that in the first
place?”82 So “six weeks too late” to impact the election, Shaiman became
a marriage activist. In less than seventy-­two hours, he wrote Prop 8—­The
Musical, recorded it with a few dozen of his Hollywood friends, and posted
it online. The video received 1.2 million hits its first day.
Like the archival footage of the nation’s first pro-marriage zap staged
by GAA forty years before, Shaiman’s video is curiously (though not sur-
prisingly) devoid of a lesbian presence. While Prop 8—­The Musical features
many self-­identified queer women, such as Margaret Cho (a bisexual who
is in an open marriage with a man), it does not include any out dykes (one
closeted one, perhaps, in Allison Janney, but no proudly visible ones). This
protest was created and staged almost exclusively by gay men and their het-
erosexual allies.83 The setting is a school auditorium, which is decorated
with a beach scene. Enter a festively attired ensemble, “California Gays and
The People That Love Them,” featuring Cho, Andy Richter, and Maya Ru-
dolph.84 Elated by the results of the presidential election, the group dances
and sings: “It’s a brand new bright Obama day. What a time to be black,
a girl, or gay. No, nothing could go wrong. So, join us in this song.” The
“Gays” are so busy celebrating the end of the Bush administration and pre-
paring for the inauguration of Obama that they fail to take seriously the
threat posed by “Proposition 8’ers and The People That Follow Them,” a
caustic coalition of bigots, homophobes, and religious conservatives plot-
ting to “spread some hate and put it in the constitution.”
As the Proposition 8 leader (played by John C. Reilly), his first wife (Al-
lison Janney), and his second wife (Kathy Najimy) rally the troops, Jesus
Christ (Jack Black) intervenes, challenging the groups’ tactics, and in par-
 Guerrilla Acts 97

ticular their selective interpretation of the Good Book.85 The Bible “says a
lot of things,” notes Jesus, including “shellfish is an abomination” and “you
can, stone your wife or sell your daughter into slavery!” Rather than “pick
and choose” particular Bible verses to justify homophobia, Jesus counsels
them, “choose love instead of hate. Besides,” he reminds them, “your na-
tion, was built on separation, of church and state.” The word of god does
little to convince these haters to love thy neighbor, but where Jesus fails
theatrical conceit prevails. Enter the deus ex machina, A Very Smart Fellow
(Neil Patrick Harris), who offers a different way “to wrap things up,” one
that eschews religion in favor of economics. Why spend time and money
condemning homosexuals, he asks “Proposition 8’ers and The People That
Follow Them,” when the Right could profit from them instead. The Smart
Fellow sings:

Oh, every time a gay or lesbian finds love at the parade

There’s money to be made.
Each time two grooms say, paint the wedding hall and lavender’s the shade
There’s money to be made.
Think of all the carriages and four white horses.
There’s millions lost from all of your disapproving.
Think of all the lawyers for the gay divorces. . . .

Persuaded by Smart Fellow’s argument, the “Proposition 8’ers” join forces

with the “California Gays and the People That Love Them.” Together they
sing, “I can see. America’s calling me. Gay marriages will save the econo-
my!” The screen fades to black with a link to jointheimpact.com, “a grass-
roots and netroots organization geared toward gaining full equality for the
LGBTQI community through outreach, education, and demonstration,”
which started just days after the Proposition 8 vote. The founders of JTI,
like Shaiman, had no activist experience prior to getting on the marriage
equality bandwagon.
Based on the genre of musical comedy, Shaiman’s Prop 8 stays true to
the form by depicting two opposing forces—­the older/conservative/religious
Right and the younger/liberal/Hollywood Left—­locked in an antagonistic
situation. The warring factions are comprised of stock characters whose
predictability of behavior makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to
resolve the conflict. The seemingly inextricable problem of homosexuality is
suddenly and abruptly ameliorated with the contrived intervention of a new
98 Acts of Gaiety

character, in this case a messenger spreading the gospel of the greenback.

A Very Smart Fellow convinces the older/conservative/religious side that
homosexuality is a minor transgression, one that, if embraced, will not only
reinforce the status quo but church and state coffers as well. A happy ending
results when the two opposing factions reach a consensus on the economics
(as opposed to the ethics) of same-­sex marriage. Shaiman’s micro–­musical
comedy ends with the promise of lucrative gay weddings (not to mention
divorces!) and consumer citizenship for all.
One of the most popular justifications for marriage equality is that it
will boost state and federal coffers. A report by the Williams Institute at
the UCLA School of Law (2008) predicted that same-­sex marriages would
contribute nearly seven hundred million dollars to California’s wedding in-
dustrial complex, generate approximately sixty-­five million in revenue in
the first three years alone, and create twenty-­one thousand new jobs.86 A
study by the Congressional Budget Office (2004) estimated that same-­sex
unions would generate over a billion dollars annually. Similar studies sug-
gest this number could be as high as sixteen billion.87 As the country was
in the midst of deep recession in 2009, one that has showed few signs of
reversing course in the near future, many conservatives who previously op-
posed same-­sex unions began to reconsider their positions on the issue. One
of the most vocal supporters of same-­sex marriage during the Proposition
8 debacle was the Republican governor of cash-­strapped California, Arnold
Schwarzenegger.

Zapped by a Right Hook

While a solid base of the Republican Party clings to the notion that mar-
riage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, a number of prominent
members of the GOP have come out in support of same-­sex unions, includ-
ing Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is an out lesbian, former first lady
Laura Bush, and the mother-­daughter duo Cindy and Meghan McCain. This
change of heart on the issue of gay rights reflects a larger political trend. In
recent years the Republican Party has distanced itself from the extremist
groups that helped solidify its power base over the past forty years—­namely,
the homophobes, religious moralists, and white supremacists who have al-
lied under the banner of the Tea Party—­and it has courted instead conserva-
tive factions of various identity constituencies—­homosexuals, blacks, and
 Guerrilla Acts 99

Latinos—­seducing these minorities into networks of neoliberal alliances

with calculated acts of accommodation. This strategy appears to be work-
ing, as one-­quarter of all lesbian and gay voters list their political affiliation
as Republican, and this number is growing. In the 2008 presidential elec-
tion, 27 percent of LGBT voters supported the McCain/Palin ticket, despite
this duo’s public objection to gay marriage and military service.88 If this
trend continues, Lisa Duggan warns, we may be facing a seismic shift in
political alliances akin to the Southern Strategy of the 1970s when white
Dixie Democrats, opposed to forced racial integration and other civil rights
legislation, flocked to the GOP.
The McCain family cleverly straddles both sides of the fence. John Mc-
Cain’s support of the military’s ban on gay soldiers and his objection to
same-­sex marriage appeal to older and more socially conservative members
of the GOP, while Cindy and Meghan McCain’s vocal support of these issues
speaks to both younger members of the party, who are less homophobic
than previous generations, and Log Cabin Republicans. The McCain women
took part in a slick media campaign called NOH8, a silent photo protest
turned nonprofit organization that plays on the advertising aesthetics of
Gran Fury and the Silence = Death Project. Cofounded by fashion and celeb-
rity photographer Adam Bouska and his partner, Jeff Parshley, NOH8 began
as a photo spread featuring “everyday Californians who support Marriage
Equality.”89 In these portraits, subjects wearing white shirts are shot against
a white backdrop.90 Their mouths are bound with huge pieces of shiny sil-
ver tape, and on their cheeks “NO/H8” is written in bold black letters, save
for the 8, which is in red. Bouska and Parshley advertised for volunteers on
Facebook and Twitter. Within one year, they had taken thousands of photo-
graphs, which they posted on their website. By this time their campaign had
blossomed into a conglomerate, and the number of models had expanded to
included celebrities and politicians, including the McCains.
Meghan McCain was the first to join, in January 2009, followed by her
mother several months later, when Cindy accompanied her daughter to a
photo shoot for Meghan’s book, Dirty, Sexy, Politics. The photographer was
none other than the artist turned activist Bouska. During the session the
group talked about the status of the NOH8 campaign, and Cindy made a
spontaneous decision to join the effort. The team rounded up a white T-­shirt
from the fashion closet and Bouska shot her on the spot. In the photograph,
Cindy McCain looks directly at the camera, her torso turned slightly to her
left to accentuate her right hand, which is placed over her heart in a pledge
100 Acts of Gaiety

of allegiance to America and the family values for which it stands. She has
writing on her right cheek, whereas the more liberal Meghan has the words
on her left. Meghan was photographed in profile, with her arms raised to
her neck and her palms stretched open. In her hands, she holds a gray el-
ephant, the symbol of the Republican Party—­its tusks wrapped in silver
tape. Meghan’s fingernails are painted red to match the 8 on her cheek.91
Few people blinked twice when Meghan McCain, a self-­described renegade
Republican, defied her father’s official (public) views on gay marriage by
participating in the NOH8 campaign, but when the former would-­be first
lady’s photograph was released, the media went wild with speculations that
John McCain would soon announce a change in his views, that the Republic
Party was deeply divided on the issue, and that the conservative movement
was in turmoil.
Republican support for same-­ sex marriage is not only gaining mo-
mentum; it is bankrolling the issue.92 One of the most ardent supporters
of marriage equality is former solicitor general Theodore Olson, a staunch
conservative and veteran of both the Reagan and (George W.) Bush adminis-
trations. Olson joined his adversary in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore,
David Boies, in filing Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal court case seeking
to invalidate Proposition 8.93 In a Newsweek article defending his position,
“The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage: Why Same Sex Marriage Is An
American Value,” Olson writes:

Same-­sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one

of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation . . . We
encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one
another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and
communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one’s own needs. It trans-
forms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in do-
ing so establishes a formal investment in the well-­being of society. The fact
that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social in-
stitution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance.94

Gay marriage serves the Republican Party’s plan to privatize dependency

through the rhetoric of personal responsibility. It facilitates neoliberal eco-
nomic policies by enabling the government and private sector to abdicate
their responsibility for ensuring social welfare. Marriage transfers the bur-
den of care from corporations (which, between government subsidies and
 Guerrilla Acts 101

offshore bank accounts, are paying very few taxes) to families, where wom-
en, members of the working-class, and people of color are expected to per-
form the lion’s share of the physical and affective labor.
In his Newsweek article, Olson claims that nothing short of the right to
marry will end the “discrimination against decent, hardworking members
of our society.”95 The story features a number of photographs to illustrate
his point, images of well-­heeled gay couples on their wedding day. Decency
has a predictable color, normative whiteness. All of the subjects appear to
be Anglo. Decency is unsurprising in other ways too. The images depict
people who are conventionally attractive and staged in traditional poses that
are intimate but not sexual. Many of the couples are locked in embraces,
for example, but none are kissing. The grooms are wearing suits and the
brides dresses (come on!), with all, save one, donning the customary white.
One photograph features a pair of women whose heads are cropped out of
the picture (were they not pretty enough?) in coordinating silk dresses and
pearl bracelets; they are holding matching bridal bouquets, posed in such
a way as to show off their wedding rings. There are no captions under any
of the photographs, and the subjects are not named in the editorial, as if to
suggest that the issue is not about individuals but “the people,” not about
specific homosexuals but all Americans. Through the performative force of
word and image, Olson and his exemplars exhibit same-­sex marriage for
what it is: a deeply conservative social ritual that reinforces rather than chal-
lenges normative notions of sexuality.

Zapping History

The passage of Proposition 8 and the Dream Team of Olson and Boies in-
spired a wave of activism that many dubbed Stonewall 2.0, as these events
coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the uprising. Global celebrations
from San Francisco to Sydney commemorating the birth of the gay and lesbi-
an liberation movement became occasions for promarriage rallies. The pride
parades, civic celebrations, exhibitions, and panels staged that summer had
less to do with paying tribute to the memory of veteran activists than they
did with promoting marriage and military equality, two goals that could not
have been more antithetical to the desires of Stonewall activists. Lesbian and
gay liberationists in the 1960s and 1970s decried marriage for its exclusive
and propertied attitude toward desire, for its constriction of people’s future
102 Acts of Gaiety

growth and development, and for its mimicry of heterosexual social roles.
“A Gay Manifesto,” written in December 1969, captures the essence of early
activists’ position on the issue.

Traditional marriage is a rotten oppressive institution. . . . [M]arriage is a

contract which smothers both people, denies needs, and places impossi-
ble demands on both people. . . . Gay people must stop gauging their self-­
respect by how well they mimic straight marriages. Gay marriages will have
the same problems as straight ones except in burlesque. . . . To accept that
happiness comes through finding a groovy spouse and settling down, show-
ing the world that “we’re just the same as you” is avoiding the real issues,
and is an expression of self-­hatred.96

The manifesto goes on to state: “[L]iberation for gay people is defining for
ourselves how and with whom we live, instead of measuring our relation-
ship in comparison to straight ones, with straight values.”97
Alas, no one at NYC Pride 2009 recited “A Gay Manifesto,” conducted
a dramatic reading of Sheila Cronan’s “Marriage,” or cast WITCH hexes on
any of the corporate sponsors. Activists were preoccupied with fund-­raising
for HRC, distributing temporary “NOH8” tattoos, and collecting coupons
for wedding packages from the many vendors on site. The thoroughly com-
modified spectacles surrounding the celebration of Stonewall 40 had less
to do with marking the history of the LGBT movement than they did with
creating a public act of forgetting, one that enabled homoliberals to rewrite
the past in order to conform to present aspirations.
Securing the right to marry does not guarantee the end of prejudice, nor
does it substantively transform society or its institutions. If the civil rights
movement and the women’s movement are any indication, the attainment
of formal equality does little to ameliorate deeply engrained cultural biases
and institutionalized forms of discrimination. The disparity of incarceration
rates among African-Americans and the persistence of the glass ceiling are
indicators that juridical reform does little to challenge bigotry, biases, or
social hierarchies. For the past three decades, the LGBT agenda has been
propelled in large part by the misplaced faith that legal victories and sym-
bolic acts of recognition, such as the right to marry, are radical achieve-
ments that will guarantee equality for sexual minorities. We have invested
our political capital in what Duggan calls “the false promise of ‘equality’
on offer through liberal reform,” a conception of “‘equality’ disarticulated
 Guerrilla Acts 103

from material life and class politics.”98 In return, LGBT subjects have been
granted what Urvashi Vaid terms “virtual equality,” a conditional and partial
simulation of freedom that is contingent on adherence to the status quo.99
In the mid-­1990s, Vaid warned us that a single-­issue LGBT movement—­
one that ignores the broader dynamics of gender inequity, racism, economic
disparity, and cultural freedoms—­would have no significant impact on the
socioeconomic structures that oppress, denigrate, and marginalize minority
subjects. A myopic focus on marriage reform diminishes the LGBT move-
ment by foreclosing debate about the intersectionality of various forms of
oppression.
While many gays and lesbians have fought for marriage equality, others
have struggled equally hard to establish and promote alternatives to matri-
mony, including civil unions and domestic partnerships.100 For some of us,
myself included, these are not inferior arrangements to be engaged in while
biding our time waiting to legally marry. On the contrary, these relation-
ships have enabled us to organize our lives in ways that afford us far greater
freedoms than are granted to LGBT citizens by the hegemonic institution of
marriage. Some of us choose not to forget that until very recently gays and
lesbians were criminals in the eyes of the law and could be jailed or institu-
tionalized against our will for engaging in same-­sex acts. The thought of the
state sanctioning and regulating our intimate affairs is tantamount to adding
insult to historical injury. Happily alienated from the prospect of marriage,
we have created erotic and nurturing forms of attachment and care that not
only exceed but improve on the limited and confining definition of matri-
mony. I, for one, am not inclined to abandon my extramarital ways of living
and loving simply because some LGBT couples want this option.
Formal marriage equality is an important right, but it should be one of
many possibilities available to people. As Nancy Polikoff argues in Beyond
(Straight and Gay) Marriage, our aim should be to recognize and protect
a wide variety of kinship arrangements not to gain access to increasingly
insular forms of marriage and ever narrowing definitions of families. We
need to acknowledge that there are many ways to create meaningful, sus-
tainable, committed bonds outside the confines of traditional marriage. Not
all gays and lesbians want to be treated just like heterosexual couples, and
we should not be forced into marriage to have our lovers recognized and our
families validated, or to keep the rights we have labored tirelessly to earn.
All too often, however, winning the right to wed entails the loss of exist-
ing rights, disenfranchising many gays and lesbians as public and private
104 Acts of Gaiety

employers in states that pass same-­sex marriage laws often rescind domes-
tic partnerships protection, forcing couples to marry in order to keep their
status and benefits. If marriage equality zaps existing rights, what use is it?
Individuals, be they gay or straight, who have no personal or political inter-
est in marriage should not be coerced into it, nor should they be thrust into
the role of “compulsory witness” to an institution they feel is oppressive and
discriminatory.101
In this comparative study of zaps from 1969 and 2009, I have tried to
show that when homosexuals walk down the aisle to the tune of the wed-
ding march (a straight tempo if there ever was one), we place ourselves,
intentionally or not, into all sorts of compromising positions. Same-­sex
marriage puts queers in the honeymoon suite with the likes of Cindy and
Meghan McCain. It aligns us with facinorous figures such as Dick Cheney
and Ted Olson. Many lesbians and gays fighting for marriage rights are all
too pleased to have conservative support, even from constituencies on the
far right, and rarely do we consider the consequences of our political con-
gress. Such forms of communion enmesh us into complicities of power and
privilege with reprobate right wing zealots. Attention to lesbian feminist
zaps sheds light on the ways in which cultural memory is actively and egre-
giously manipulated by homoliberals. More importantly, it enables us to
consciously embody history in ways foreclosed by the stultifying heteroge-
neity of the mainstream LGBT movement. (Re)inhabiting these performa-
tive and participatory actions of our recent past, we can conjure, create, and
enact other possibilities for sexual life in the present and the future.
3
Expatriate Acts
Jill Johnston’s Joker Citizenship
Suddenly I became someone who did not know her place, and
having no knowledge of my place, I became an instant anarchist.
Only those whose sense of place has been internalized out of habit
and programming can move safely into such a dangerous position.
Strictly speaking, an anarchist has no (political) objective; loosely
speaking, anarchy is a catchword for a stance that veils political
ambitions.
—­Jill Johnston

I was a luxury that the women’s movement could not yet afford and
I didn’t know how true it was and still is apparently even among
lesbians[.]
—­Jill Johnston

On August 9, 1970, Ethel “Spike” Scull and her husband Bob, a taxi mogul
who at one time owned the largest collection of pop art in the world, held a
benefit for Women’s Strike for Equality at their house in East Hampton.1 The
organizers of the fund-­raiser were Betty Friedan, cofounder of NOW, Gloria
Steinem, author Edith de Rham, and fashionista Gloria Vanderbilt. Among
the select group of female journalists invited to cover the event was Village
Voice columnist Jill Johnston. Just one month prior, Johnston had done what
was “hitherto socially unthinkable and suicidal.”2 In a “spirit of marvelous
megalomania,” she came out as a lesbian in her column, making official the
open secret this gadfly had been whispering for years.3 This formal admis-
sion made Johnston “the paper’s, and arguably the country’s, first shameless
public lesbian.”4
An ill-­fated attempt to engage Friedan in a conversation about les-
bian feminism, on the heels of the Lavender Menace zap, sent the presi-

105
106 Acts of Gaiety

dent of NOW into a tizzy. As Johnston, a proponent of new journalism and

experimental—­what she called extreme—­writing, observed in the Voice:

What went wrong between Betty Friedan and me was a lapse of sexual in-
terest. I liked her below the chin and was ready to talk at that level but she
got super huffy when I arsked if there shouldn’t be a pub(l)ic conjunction
between Women’s Liberation and the Gay Liberation Front. Here eyes went
big ’n bulgy and her lipstick leered crimson and she said crisply enunciating
each word that “it” was not an issue . . . And, there’s no relationship between
the movements.5

Friedan’s flippant dismissal would not go unchecked. “In a flash,” John-

ston recalls, she “turned into a One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People
Eater. . . . It was time,” she told herself. “Something had to happen.”6
When Friedan approached the microphone, which had been set up at
one end of the swimming pool, Johnston stripped to her denim shirt and
black panties and dove into the water, screaming “Tarzana from the trees at
cocktails.”7 Showing off her athletic prowess, she swam a ten-­point Austra-
lian crawl. When people played it cool, pretending not to notice Johnston’s
water ballet, she raised the stakes by removing her shirt and swimming three
more laps, this time opting for “a little exhibition breast stroke.”8 Friedan
tried in vain to divert everyone’s attention by leading a group of women
in the song “Liberation Now,” but Johnston climbed out the pool in the
middle of the musical interlude and dripped her way past the chorus. As
if by osmosis or some perverse form of contagion, Friedan experienced a
wardrobe malfunction. While she was singing, her right breast popped out
of her polka-­dot party frock. To her credit, Friedan did not leave the stage
until her song was finished. A former actress, she soldiered on, knowing
that come hell or high water the show must go on. After she thanked every-
one for attending, Friedan muttered something about Johnston being “the
biggest enemy of the movement” and excused herself, ostensibly to go in
search of a safety pin.9 Mrs. Scull, not sure how to respond, allegedly shook
her head and chortled, “I always say if you have a pool, you have a pool.”10
Within minutes of emerging from her swim, Johnston was accosted by
the paparazzi: “Why did you do this?” “Are you a radical lesbian?” “Are you
part of a Redstocking plot to sabotage the event?” Feigning ignorance, John-
ston claimed that she did not dive “into the pool to protest the discrimina-
tion against lesbians by feminists. . . . I wasn’t nearly so organized.” She told
 Expatriate Acts 107

reporters, “I was hot and drunk and I like empty swimming pools and I’m
a very good swimmer so I like to show off my skills.”11 She pretended to be
put out by the suggestion that an innocent attempt to cool off on a scorch-
ing summer day was being “hailed as a disruption,” and of such an austere
and important occasion.12 Johnston used the Women Strike for Equality
fund-­raiser to practice what she called “the improbable art of being a public
nuisance and a maverick or a martyr at the service of the principle of chaos
and corruption.”13 She not only disrupted the benefit; she co-­opted the press
coverage. Charlotte Curtis, reporting for the New York Times, detailed John-
ston’s antics, under the subheading “Enemy within Surfaces,” and her article
featured a lead photograph of Johnston, clad only in her skivvies, accepting
a towel from a bemused Bob Scull. Below this image, the paper ran a much
smaller photograph of Friedan, who is shot from the waist up. The right
sleeve of her frilly summer dress has fallen off her shoulder revealing a hint
of skin, which Friedan has tried to contain by crossing her arms. This ges-
ture of modesty, one might even say prudishness, stands in sharp contrast to
the central image and Johnston’s shameless public nudity.
I call Johnston’s performance at the Sculls’ home an act of joker citizen-
ship, an anarchic and antiassimilationist gesture of civil disobedience that
provides an opportunity and occasion for subaltern agency. This mirthful
and euphoric form of political dissent stands in stark contrast to the serious,
no-­nonsense mode of civic engagement favored by NOW. A spirited, sedi-
tious, and militantly erotic mode of insurrection that challenges audiences
to question, if not transform, the criteria for social belonging, acts of joker
citizenship occur when individuals who are typically the object of scorn,
ridicule, and derision steal the spotlight, creating a public spectacle of their
private shame in order to expose the operations of power and oppression in
society. Seducing spectators with their daring displays, jokers manipulate
and redirect our gaze, distorting our clouded perceptions and disrupting our
preconceived notions.
Disarming the opposition with a punch of humor, the joker pushes the
boundaries of acceptable behavior and makes a mockery of the arbitrary
institutions and authorities, precepts and protocols that govern our worlds.
Interactive and dynamic acts of joker citizenship show the absurdity of in-
justice and make discrimination, along with anyone who supports it, appear
silly. They create scenarios for public life that have nothing to do with inte-
grating into the mainstream or becoming the newest member of the status
quo. On the contrary, these eruptions create a position from which to speak
108 Acts of Gaiety

and act where none is permitted in the established social drama. Calling at-
tention to the disciplinary regimes and normalizing forces that create docile
bodies, domesticate desire, and stifle creativity, what I term expatriate acts
of gaiety thwart attempts—­by both majority and minority cultures—­to or-
ganize sexuality in accordance with a statist agenda. Staking out spaces for
fugitive identities and outlawed socialities, the joker shifts the terrain of the
political landscape, remapping the erogenous zones of the body politic and
reterritorializing the nation into sites of pleasure.
This study of joker citizenship contributes to conversations in femi-
nist and queer theory about public sentiments, national affects, and the
role performance plays in both. Performance is the key to making political
claims in the public sphere, to rehearsing alternative social formations, and
to challenging people’s feelings about controversial issues. A consummate
performer, the joker is a jester, a player, an actor (which the ancient Greeks
called a hypocrite), and her talents include feigning, forging, imitation, im-
personation, deception, duplicity, manipulation, and magic. When faced
with impediments, insurmountable obstacles, or social barriers, she does
what any trickster would do: she cheats, defying or exploiting the rules of
the game in order to get what she wants. The tactics jokers deploy show us
the gap between reality and representation, and they urge us to consider the
virtues associated with being bent, twisted, and crooked, which is to say
queer. Wags, wisecrackers, and wits such as Valerie Solanas’s Bongi Perez,
Rita Mae Brown’s Molly Bolt from Rubyfruit Jungle, and Diane DiMassa’s Hot-
head Paisan (the subject of chapter four) remind us that the joker is an im-
portant, if overlooked, aspect of lesbian feminist dramaturgy.
I argue here that Johnston’s spectacular enactments of joker citizenship
stage a vital, yet neglected, intervention into the workings of national senti-
mentality. By “national sentimentality,” I refer to what Lauren Berlant terms
the peculiar form of “patriotic intensity” that “makes citizenship into a cat-
egory of feeling.”14 Rooted in the false promise that a nation can be built
across fields of social, economic, and cultural difference through “channels
of affective identification and empathy,” national sentimentality abjures pol-
itics by reducing complex, historically specific forms of structural inequali-
ties into questions of feelings.15 Pain, which is taken to be a transparent and
objective form of knowledge, serves as the index of injustice. National senti-
mentality is dramatized in and through affecting melodramatic spectacles—­
such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Burning Bed, and ACT-­UP die-­ins—­wherein
disenfranchised populations portray themselves as suffering victims in or-
 Expatriate Acts 109

der to elicit the sympathies of their entitled peers. Claims to subjectivity are
based not on one’s capacity to think or work but on one’s ability to feel pain
and endure acute physical and psychic violence. Berlant calls sentimental
politics “a terribly flawed vehicle” for achieving a more equitable democracy
because it confuses feeling better with the attainment of justice and obfus-
cates the need to address institutionalized forms of violence and abuse.16
The reduction of politics to a program of protection, rescue, and reparation
from pain impoverishes the definition of freedom, and it obscures the ongo-
ing social antagonism inherent in democratic struggles.
National sentimentality operates through anguished scenarios that dra-
matize the pain of denied citizenship so vividly that it burns into the con-
science of enfranchised subjects, enabling them to feel the pain of the other
as their pain, but without having to experience the conditions that create
and sustain the injury. Jokers like Johnston take an alternate tack; they traf-
fic in gaiety, which incites critical reflection through a differently embodied
affect: the tickle of laughter. The convulsive contractions of laughter re-
semble the shudder of catharsis, but they produce a different experience of
embodiment and a very different field of vision. Whereas the tragic tenor of
national sentimentality purges and liberates, the infectious humor of come-
dy contaminates and implicates. While generative of pleasurable sensations,
including empathetic identification, acts of joker citizenship do not jetti-
son or abjure bad feelings through purgation, nor do they necessarily make
actors or spectators feel better. Laughter makes us uncomfortable, both
physically—­think of the heart palpitations and shortness of breath that ac-
company a good chortling—­and ethically, insofar as it incites us to confront,
if not reposition, our bodies, boundaries, and moral principles. “Laughter,”
writes Suzan-­Lori Parks in “Elements of Style,” “is very powerful—­it’s not
a way of escaping anything but a way of arriving on the scene. Think about
laughter and what happens to your body—­it’s almost the same thing that
happens to you when you throw up.”17 When we laugh really hard, it can
feel as if we are dying.
While the laughter an act of joker citizenship elicits aligns
constituencies—­by revealing previously undisclosed resemblances, bridg-
ing ideological divisions, and inspiring collective action—­it simultaneously
isolates and alienates certain factions, inverting the established social order
by making the familiar appear strange and the strange familiar. Thus, while
jokers build and bolster communities, they also dismantle hierarchies and
institutionalized power structures. Humor may be inherently social, but it
110 Acts of Gaiety

achieves this by inveigling subjects of various persuasions and opinions into

volatile propinquity, transforming the political arena into a speculative terri-
tory, a place of incongruity and instability, a locus of opposition and contesta-
tion. “[L]aughter resides,” according to Boal practitioner Mady Schutzman,
“in the place of conjugality with those we don’t necessarily agree with.” As
such, “laughter might be understood as a place where ethics—­notions of
relational decency, social laws that must address wide differences—­are born,
and where ‘new cartographies of social space’ might be drawn.”18 For many
lesbians in the 1970s and 1980s, including Jill Johnston, that place was the
lesbian nation.
The lesbian nation, at least as Johnston imagined it, was more of an
endeavor than an actual entity, and it was constituted by expatriate acts
of joker citizenship. A return to that much maligned and, in some ways,
grossly mischaracterized utopian project gives rise to a daring diacritics, one
that confounds the dynamics of national sentimentality. The feats of joker
citizenship I explore here make manifest the performative force of the ludic
in lesbian nationalism, and they show the inherent poverty of any libera-
tion movement that is organized around spectacles of wounded subjectivity.
Dramatizing different ways in which sexual minorities might produce them-
selves as subjects, Johnston’s expatriate acts of joker citizenship theatricalize
an insouciant mode of political insurgency I call national gaiety.

“Slouching toward Consciousness”

An aesthetic and political provocateur whose book Lesbian Nation: The Femi-
nist Solution (1973) is credited with sparking the separatist movement, John-
ston played a central role in the artistic and social revolutions of the twen-
tieth century. A dancer by training and a writer by trade, this British-­born
and American-­bred rapscallion rejected models of passive spectatorship,
championed postmodernism, and created a new, personalized language for
criticism.19 Her reviews of dance, theater, music, art installations, environ-
ments, and happenings provide, in some cases, the only documentation of
seminal art events in the 1950s and 1960s that would have disappeared from
our collective memory were it not for her visionary impulses. Johnston’s
style is perhaps best described as a kind of discursive decoupage. The struc-
tures and strategies she employed as a critic correspond with those of the
art and politics she wrote about: her free associational prose correlates to as-
 Expatriate Acts 111

semblage and collage in Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings and Trisha Brown’s

improvisations in dance; her use of found text parallels the found sounds in
John Cage’s sonicscapes and the found movements in Yvonne Rainer’s dance
compositions. Johnston celebrated intermedial connections in art, and she
created her own as well, using visual metaphors to describe choreographed
movement and spatial imagery to analyze sculpture and painting.
Johnston’s defection from literary tradition and journalistic protocol in
the 1950s paralleled her rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and bour-
geois rules of decorum. Her mission “was to mongrelize the language, de-
form and debase every convention, create a freak of culture, engender a mis-
begotten blot on the authorial landscape.”20 Johnston wrote for a number
of publications (including Dance Observer and Art News), but it was at the
Village Voice (1959 to 1981) that her fractured, Steinian-­inflected, stream
of consciousness prose and electrifying libidinal impulses were given free
rein.21 Exemplary of her highly sexualized staccato rhythm is this excerpt
from a review of Lotte Goslar and Company’s performance at the Delacorte
Theatre in 1968: “A queen is a queen is a boy is a girl is a ballerina is a boy
is a dyke is a fag is a butch is a boy is a girl is just a kinky son of a gun like
the rest of us. Hello all you sexes. We’re too good to be true.”22
In Cruising Utopia, José Muñoz celebrates Johnston for her contributions
to a pre-­Stonewall queer avant-­garde, and so he should, but he comes peril-
ously close to romanticizing her views on the postwar period and what he
calls the utopian aspects of preidentitarian subjectivity. To quote Johnston,
“The fifties just sucked. . . . For me the sixties was the great opportunity. The
fifties was hopeless everybody knows that”; it “was the bleakest decade of
all.”23 Lesbianism was considered both an illness and a form of criminal in-
timacy. “I never said I was a dyke even to a dyke,” recalls Johnston, “because
there wasn’t a dyke in the land who thought she should be a dyke or even
that she was a dyke so how could we talk about it.”24 “Dykedom was not a
reality for the world,” she notes, “nor was it real for any of us who were actu-
ally doing it.”25 Unmarked sexuality may have been extremely beneficial to
some queer men in the 1950s, insofar as it enabled them to retain their male
privilege, social status, and economic prospects, but this state of ambiguity
was much less expedient for women, who had few options for creating and
sustaining a life aside from yoking themselves to a husband.26
Dykedom was, of course, a reality for some women in the 1950s, but
even if Johnston had been interested in building clandestine communities
with homophiles, which she was not, her anarchic sensibility and pen-
112 Acts of Gaiety

chant for making a spectacle of herself made her unsuited for membership
in the integrationist-­oriented Daughters of Bilitis. Johnston was equally ill
equipped for participation in the lesbian bar community, where writers such
as Patricia Highsmith, Marijane Meaker, and Joan Nestle found drama, sex-
ual intrigue, and intellectual sustenance. She could not abide by the shad-
owy locales, far removed from the spotlight, or the scripted behaviors of
butch-­femme sexuality. While Johnston relished being an outlaw, she hated
the real and persistent danger associated with being a sexual deviant. Wise
enough to play the fool, Johnston knew she was “better off trying to get it on
with a repulsive man,” so she “turned in the proper direction of social neu-
rotic womanhood and eventually became one of those dykes who gave up”
and took a husband.27 Opting for the “desperate expedient” she called “the
grave of marriage and the hell of motherhood,” Johnston waited “until the
revolution began and concrete external social support was at last at hand.”28
Marriage, that “melodramatic genealogical solution” to the problem of lesbi-
an desire, was not without consequences or collateral damage.29 Johnston’s
relationship with Richard Lanham, which she describes as “an exercise in
violence interrupted by short periods of violence,” lasted six years (1958–­
64) and produced two children.30 She survived the dark ages of her submis-
sion by going mad.
Johnston liked to call herself “a culture star from the bowery and Bel-
levue.”31 The Bowery is the bohemian neighborhood she frequented for art
events, and Bellevue is “new york’s infamous depot for revelatory casual-
ties,” the asylum where she was institutionalized when her rarified world
of libertines and luminaries failed to protect her from the insane realities
of homophobia, misogyny, and the drudgery of her domestic life.32 These
psychotic breaks were expatriate acts that exposed the limits of reality and
the confines of Cold War America. Jokers are often associated with mad-
ness, which can take the form of lunacy, divine inspiration, or both. As a
visionary artist, Johnston was attuned to the invisible, the unseen, and the
irrational forces of the universe that gesture toward utopian possibilities
lying just beyond the horizon of objective reality. Jokers like her remind us
that transformational aesthetics and utopian civic projects are guided not
only by rational thought, discursive logic, and empirical truths but also by
intuition, improvisation, and embodied forms of knowledge. Lewis Hyde
calls the joker’s labor joint work because it takes place betwixt and between
bodies (us and them), temporalities (past, present, and future), and things
(truth and illusion).33 The success of their endeavors depends, Schutzman
 Expatriate Acts 113

reminds us, on the joker’s “ability to survive, even evolve, in ruptured land-
scapes and negative spaces (the nought)—­that liminal space where stable
positions unravel.”34 Johnston experienced her last nervous breakdown
some time around 1969, just before she came out.
The 1960s ushered in a brave new world of possibilities. This was a time
of melodious rhythms and mystical communions, of political upheaval and
social unrest. Recreational drugs and casual sex offered brief respites from
social constraints, and a pervasive spirit of progressive idealism permeated
the culture. Johnston gamboled into the 1960s with what Nietzsche in The
Gay Science calls “the saturnalia of a spirit who has patiently resisted a ter-
rible, long pressure—­patiently, severely, coldly, without submitting, but also
without hope—­and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for
health, and the intoxication of convalescence.”35 As the postwar period of
“privation and powerlessness” gave way to “a sudden sense and anticipa-
tion of a future,” Johnston indulged in “a bit of merry-­making” and “more
than a little foolishness,” breaking aesthetic boundaries and breaching social
taboos.36
Johnston was drawn to the gay liberation movement long before she felt
compelled to explore feminism. So preoccupied was the artist with sexual
shame—­with that fact that what she “liked and wanted was sick or sinful
or illegal or criminal”—­that she did not realize the extent to which her
gender dictated her biological destiny, career prospects, personal happiness,
and mental health.37 For Johnston, the stigma of sexual deviancy was so
heavy that she had never thought about the stigma of being a woman. In
the 1950s, she writes, “Most of us didn’t know yet that it was wrong to be a
woman but we did know it was wrong to be lesbian . . . and in this way some
of us were acquiring the rudimentary emotions of a gay consciousness.”38
Whereas most lesbians came to the cause having participated in other liber-
ation struggles, including the homophile movement, the civil rights move-
ment, and the New Left, Johnston had no history of involvement in progres-
sive politics. The kind of organized insurrection favored by politicos was
incompatible with what Johnston referred to as her “east west flower child
beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach
to the revolution.”39
Her sense of creativity and radical nonconformity was cultivated through
close communion with the Beats, the Black Mountain artists, and the degen-
erate denizens of Warhol’s Factory. These innovators were more interested
in how countercultural ideas and practices played out in the art world than
114 Acts of Gaiety

they were in movement politics per se. In these queer enclaves, Johnston
felt empowered to experiment with altered states of consciousness and to
engage in alternative forms of intimacy. She became deeply invested in re-
placing the practice of criticism with the art of engagement and in break-
ing down hierarchical power structures by abolishing the division between
spectator and performer. She challenged elitist conceptions of what qualifies
as an aesthetic event by highlighting the performance of everyday life, dis-
solving arbitrary distinctions between aesthetic categories, and mixing new
media with live and visual arts.
Not content simply to cover the New York art scene, Johnston fashioned
herself into one of its luminaries. She performed alongside her friends, ap-
pearing, for example, in John Cage’s Music Walk, which he adapted especial-
ly for her, as Music Walk with Dancer (1962), and in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s
Inside Originale (1964).40 Andy Warhol made her the star of one of his films,
Jill Johnston Dancing (1964). Johnston’s most accomplished feats were her
own acts of gaiety: scandalous scenes of lesbian theatrics that she staged
whenever and wherever possible. She treated her coming out as an artistic
event and wrote about her sexual exploits in the Village Voice, reviewing
them alongside performances by Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor. By
the late 1960s, Johnston’s writing had become positively “picaresque,” with
her peccadilloes being given as much, if not more, space in her reviews
than critiques of aesthetic productions.41 Johnston’s editorializing of her
own acting out—­her alcohol-­and drug-­induced escapades, lesbian liaisons,
and evolving political consciousness—­eventually eclipsed her coverage of
everything else: “Gradually life became the theater became the column. The
life being everything of course included everything.” An avid interpreter of
her own process, Johnston noted, “An art form of pure novelty and inven-
tion might naturally be expected from someone undergoing the birth of an
historically unprecedented identity.”42
The decision to take herself as an “object of complex and difficult elabo-
ration” and her “aesthetic” commitment to making her very existence into
a work of art resonate with Foucault’s charge that we perform a “critical
ontology of ourselves” as a practice of freedom.43 This process of self-­care
and strategic self-­styling has less to do with creating “a permanent body of
knowledge,” according to Foucault, than it does with fostering “an attitude,
an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one
and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an
experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”44 Johnston’s perfor-
 Expatriate Acts 115

mance reviews of her own hedonistic pursuits did more than epater le bour-
geoisie; they contributed to the birth of the gay liberation movement and to
the sanctioning and structuring of an inchoate lesbian identity.
Using the Village Voice as both a mouthpiece and a marketing device,
Johnston became one of the most visible and vibrant spokespersons for radi-
cal feminism and gay rights, much to the vexation of more serious activ-
ists, who viewed her as a rogue whose antics were frivolous, flippant, and
self-­serving. Allergic to ideology and averse to dogma, Johnston eschewed
mass movement activities in favor of personal acts of rebellion. “I dislike
meetings for purposes other than parties,” she famously quipped, indicating
her preference for cocktails over consciousness-­raising.45 Claiming, “Poli-
tics cramped my style,” Johnston resisted Marxist doctrine and leftist dic-
tates.46 Finding movement politics “insufficiently lighthearted,” she “lugged
dada forward with [her] into the lesbian feminist arena,” staging scenes of
subversion and propagating acts of gaiety.47 As Melissa Deem has observed,
Johnston “disrupted established politics” through “an adroit politics of mo-
bility, which not only evaded certain majoritarian logics, but also cut across
the molar logics of feminism and the gay liberation front.”48 For this she was
castigated as a counterrevolutionary and a disgrace to the cause. Ostracized
by many of her peers, Johnston’s contributions to the artistic and political
history of the era have been obscured. If she is mentioned in studies of the
1960s, it is usually in a footnote.49
In the same way that Johnston drew Dada into lesbian feminism, I want
to pull this joker into contemporary LGBT politics. In an act of “temporal
drag,” Elizabeth Freeman’s term for “a crossing of time, less in the mode
of postmodern pastiche than in the mode of stubborn identification with
a set of social coordinates that exceed our own historical moment,” I want
to tarry with this controversial figure in lesbian herstory who resisted the
siren song of integration and defied pressure—­from factions on both the
left and the right—­to assimilate.50 In taking seriously Johnston’s insistence
that the “revolution should be fun or we should forget it,” we can see how
acts of joker citizenship produce possibilities for national public life.51 Her
simultaneous assertion of gayness as sexual politics and gayness as joie de
vivre underscores the centrality of liveliness to the LGBT movement, and
it rehearses dramatically different ways in which sexual minorities might
produce themselves as subjects above and beyond enactments of national
sentimentality.
116 Acts of Gaiety

“Better latent than never”

Johnston’s latent feminism, what she would call her “ponderously slow real-
ization of the political truth” of women’s oppression, aroused the incredulity
and ire of many lesbian activists in the early days of the sexual revolution.52
Her first real movement encounter took place in November 1969 when she
was recruited by the Gay Liberation Front’s Lois Hart (a former nun turned
house painter) and her lover Suzanne Bevier (a graphic artist) to contrib-
ute to GLF’s newsletter Come Out! Although Johnston toyed with the idea
of writing for Come Out!, she elected to make her official print debut as a
lesbian in her own column, in a review called “Of This Pure but Irregular
Passion”—­a title borrowed from a line in Colette’s “The Pure and the Im-
pure” (“Ces Plaisirs”).53 What shocked and angered the women of GLF was
not that Johnston chose the Voice for her grand declaration but that she
came off as someone who was not “politically enlightened at all.”54
Although she stressed “the positive identity of the homosexual” and
the need for gays to “celebrate [their] sexuality,” Johnston exhibited more
shame and ambivalence about her sexual orientation than she did pride.
Calling herself “sexually confused,” she wrote, “In my best moments I feel
tran-­sexual and relate to the classical and ancient myths of the sacred char-
acter of the androgynous creature, which is rooted in our primordial bio-
logical origins.”55 Rather than promote the cause of lesbian feminism, John-
ston seemed to renounce it. “[S]ince my personal campaign to ‘come out,’”
she opined, “I have never liked men better and wish they would like me as
well.”56 What many read as evidence of internalized homophobia might be
understood as an expatriate act of joker citizenship, which, while admit-
tedly naive and undertheorized, was designed to thwart the dynamics of
national sentimentality. Johnston went to great lengths in this essay to not
portray herself as a victim or as someone in need of rescue, a position she
saw as antithetical to her artistic aspirations. “[F]or me it’s a downer and a
bummer to dwell on the oppression of women,” writes Johnston. “I can’t
dwell on our oppression and remain a relatively liberated fugitive artist.”57
In this coming-­out column, she actively distances herself from women
who were more interested in waging a battle of the sexes than they were in
sexual liberation. What starts out as a daring polemic devolves into a per-
sonal attack on political lesbian Ti-­Grace Atkinson, who Johnston dismisses
as a hysterical woman who simply needs a good lay.
 Expatriate Acts 117

I can’t accept any program for resisting or attacking the “enemy” such as
feminist Ti-­Grace Atkinson advocates in the struggle for the liberation of
women. Ti-­Grace spoke at the Daughter’s [sic] of Bilitis during gay week.
She says that men are the enemy and she speaks of spokes and armor and
militant tactics and ideological pitfalls and the murder of feminist revolu-
tionaries in Russia in 1919 and the vaginal orgasm as a mass hysterical sur-
vival response and frightening things like that. I like Ti-­Grace and I’d be
happy to help her by going to bed with her but I think she needs intensive
bio-­energetic Reichian therapy by a male chauvinist pig who wouldn’t rape
or redeem her but who would be kind to her.58

In response to this very public piece in the Village Voice, and in particular
her ad hominem attack on Atkinson, Johnston experienced a swift and im-
mediate backlash by the lesbians of GLF. Within two weeks of its publica-
tion, she was denounced at a meeting (on July 14), and shortly thereafter
(on July 22), she had a final heated argument with Hart, who told Johnston,
“[Y]our politics are not sympathetic to the aims and aspirations of [GLF].”59
In Lesbian Nation, published three years later, Johnston concedes that
her coming-­out column lacked “any kind of feminist consciousness,” that it
was a toxic combination of “bravado and bucolic innocence. all gay but not
much woman.”60 She called the article “embarrassing” and refused to repro-
duce it in any of her compilations, omitting it even in her chronicles of the
gay liberation years.61 The fallout from this experience jolted Johnston into
a feminist consciousness. She began reading foundational texts in women’s
liberation, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Notes from
the Second Year, published by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt of the
New York Radical Women. This was followed by feminist interpretations of
Marx, position papers such as the Radicalesbians’ “Woman-­Identified Wom-
an,” and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. “Gay liberation,” she came to
realize, “cannot be considered apart from women’s liberation.”62 Although
she continued to disagree, rather vehemently, with the antisex platform of
groups like The Feminists, Johnston became convinced that Atkinson was
right about one thing: lesbianism was the ultimate goal of feminism.
Like most people who are born again, Johnston became something of
a zealot. She compensated for her latent feminism by developing an ardor
and urgency for the cause, and with a missionary fervor she set about try-
ing to convince every female in America to become a “lesberated woman.”63
118 Acts of Gaiety

As Sally Banes has observed, after Johnston came out in the Village Voice,
her column “became a soapbox for her evolving political ideology.”64 In
1971, the title of her Voice column was changed from “Dance Journal” to
“Jill Johnston,” a reflection of her popularity and prominence as a critic but
also an acknowledgment of the fact that she was the subject, as well as the
author, of her writing. Banes laments this shift, categorizing it as evidence
of the critic’s slow but steady slide into narcissistic navel gazing and self-­
indulgent grandstanding. Others, however, viewed this transformation as
nothing short of heroic. “Have you read anything like this?” asked a contrib-
utor to The Ladder; “The dance this lady discusses is of vital importance to
all of us.”65 As the novelist Bertha Harris recalls, by publicly and repeatedly
declaring her sexuality in the Voice, Johnston “began an extraordinary dance
of her personality, an illuminating revelation that established her as one of
the bravest and strongest writers of her generation. Jill made it possible for
me and others to breathe by her artistry and her personality.”66
Unlike most zealots, Johnston never lost her sense of humor, her pen-
chant for playing the merry prankster, or her interest in having a gay old
time. In developing a lesbian feminist consciousness, however, she did
move from engaging in random, impulsive acts designed primarily to shock
audiences to more carefully choreographed performances of political propa-
ganda. Taken together, these acts of gaiety reflect what we might call “the
evolution of an art form” of joker citizenship.67

Town Bloody Hall

One of Johnston’s greatest acts of joker citizenship took place on April 30,
1971, at a roundtable discussion on the topic of women’s liberation at New
York’s Town Hall. The event was sponsored by Shirley Broughton’s ongo-
ing series, “Theater for Ideas,” a forum for “culture stars with fancy cre-
dentials.”68 Participants included Jacqueline Ceballos, president of the New
York chapter of NOW; literary critic Diana Trilling; Professor Germaine
Greer, whose Female Eunuch (1970) was an international best seller; and
Jill Johnston, the token lesbian. The moderator was Pulitzer Prize–­winning
author Norman Mailer, who had recently published “The Prisoner of Sex”
(March 1971 in Harpers) as a rebuttal to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970),
in which she depicts him as a perpetrator of sexual violence and “a prisoner
of the virility cult” that is patriarchal society.69
 Expatriate Acts 119

Johnston claims that no one on the panel harbored any “illusions

that the event [Broughton] was arranging was in the interests of women’s
liberation—­rather it was to be a farce . . . a vehicle for Mailer to star and
to make box office [in].”70 The “Prisoner of Sex,” she writes, “provided the
foreplay for the orgasm of our appearance at town hall.”71 As far as Johnston
was concerned, the event was less about women’s liberation than it was
about fomenting an “official male backlash” to the movement.72 She charac-
terized the debate as the “first shot like fort sumter of the male retaliation to
the new wave of feminism.”73 The purpose of the Town Hall affair was the
“instant conversion of a movement for revolutionary social change into an
expensive gladiatorial performance.”74
Everyone loves a good fight, and everyone who was anyone was at Town
Hall that night, with the exception, that is, of the leaders of the radical femi-
nist movement, who boycotted the event. To participate in the forum, even
as a member of the audience, was to concur in the absurd premise of the
occasion, which was that women’s liberation was a debatable issue.75 It was
also to acknowledge that Mailer, a man who had stabbed his second wife,
was a suitable and appropriate moderator for a dialogue about feminism.
Kate Millett, Ti-­Grace Atkinson, Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem had
all declined Broughton’s invitation to serve on the panel.76 Robin Morgan
consented to appear on the condition that she could bring a gun and pop a
cap into Mailer.77
Convinced that she could accomplish more by attending the event than
boycotting it, Johnston decided to accept the invitation. As Solanas, whom
Johnston considered “very advanced,” wrote in SCUM Manifesto:

Dropping out is not the answer; fucking-­up is. Most women are already
dropped out; they were never in. Dropping out gives control to those few
who don’t drop out; dropping out is exactly what the establishment leaders
want; it plays into the hands of the enemy; it strengthens the system instead
of undermining it, as it’s based entirely on the non-­participation, passivity,
apathy and non-­involvement of the mass of women.78

Like Solanas, Johnston was neither loyal nor faithful to the feminist cause.
As a joker, her allegiance was to herself and her own creativity and desires.
“[T]hat the event occurred at all,” Johnston reasoned, “it was a disaster for
women. As a social event,” however, it was sure to be “the victory of the
season.”79 “I was a performer and an opportunist,” she rationalized, “and I
120 Acts of Gaiety

couldn’t think of anything more drastic and wonderful than to appear be-
fore thousands of people who lived above 14th street to tell them that all
women were lesbians.”80 Driven by artistic impulses rather than political
dictates, Johnston was less interested in promoting consensus or achieving
a harmonious resolution than she was in advancing a vision of community
that thrives on conflict and contestation. Besides, Johnston relished the op-
portunity to upstage Mailer, who, in addition to being a highly acclaimed
novelist, was also her boss, the cofounder of the Village Voice.81
As far as Johnston was concerned, Town Hall was not a debate; it was
an opportunity to play court jester to the king of the counterculture in the
court of public opinion. A jester is a talented entertainer, a gifted story-
teller, and a foolish clown. Imbued with the power to mock and revile, to
criticize and dispense frank observations, the joker is entrusted with the
onerous task of announcing bad news that others are afraid to deliver (in
this case: “the lesbians are coming, the lesbians are coming!”). The joker is
a subaltern who not only speaks but speaks truth to power. While her status
is one of privilege, this position comes with considerable danger and risk.
This kind of clowning involves what Clifford Geertz, drawing on Jeremy
Bentham, called “deep play,” and it exacts a considerable toll on both the
performer and her audience. If the jester manages to play with fire without
getting burned, she gets the last laugh; if not, the joke is on her.82
To get into character, Johnston spent the afternoon of the debate having
martinis with friends at the Algonquin Hotel bar. She arrived at Town Hall
late and inebriated. With flask in hand, she was whisked onstage so the de-
layed proceeding could begin. Johnston had put a great deal of energy into
her costume, which she acknowledged as a form of “butch fatale”drag.83
Opting for patchwork dungarees with a matching denim jacket, work boots,
and an enormous woman’s symbol necklace, she looked the fool in com-
parison to her well-­heeled colleagues, all of whom wore dresses, save for
Mailer, of course, who had donned a coat and tie. On being seated, Johnston
immediately began to agitate, refusing to speak in the order that had been
established. She successfully jockeyed for a higher position in the ranking
of guests, taking the podium after Greer, who was billed as the event’s main
attraction.84
When it was her turn, Johnston failed to deliver the requested ten-­
minute speech on why feminism matters, launching instead into a thirty-­
minute poem titled “New Approach.” “All women are lesbians,” Johnston
began, “except those that don’t know it naturally they are but don’t know it
 Expatriate Acts 121

yet. I am a woman who is a lesbian.”85 Initially, she had to raise her voice to
speak above the titters, gasps, and groans emanating from the audience. In
no time, however, Johnston had the crowd squealing and squirming, hoot-
ing and hollering with a series of cunning linguistic puns. Her playful de-
meanor countered any semblance of dogma her manifesto might imply. She
delighted the crowd with a ribald exegesis of the biblical begats, supplanting
the “ecce homo-­ness” of history with a gynocentric countercreation narra-
tive.86 In this poem Johnston addresses the glaring absence of women in the
historical record and confronts the homophobic stereotype of the solitary
and lonely lesbian. She charts a literary lineage of Amazons, Sapphists, and
bulldaggers from remote geographical regions and different historical eras.
This act of joker citizenship confers identity while at the same time call-
ing attention to the shifting, volatile, and labile process of identity forma-
tion. Johnston’s gay genealogy offers a hopeful analogy of lesbian desire, one
redolent with a gleeful historical impulse and the yearning for more ecstatic
modes of erotic and political congress.
As the audience was enjoying the show, Mailer was content to let John-
ston prattle on past her allotted time. As a literary titan, he was game for a
little fun in the form of intellectual jousting and witty repartee. When John-
ston’s clowning began to overshadow her host, however, Mailer’s patience
started to wane, and when her jokes came at his expense, his temper flared.
His willingness to play with Johnston was contingent on her adhering to the
script and deferring to his authority. When Mailer attempted to restore order
and put Johnston in her place, he was met with resistance. The audience
booed and heckled him. Worse yet, they questioned his power as master of
ceremonies, suggesting that he had no right to order Johnston to sit down.
After several polite entreaties that she cede the rostrum, Mailer bellowed,
“You’ve written your letter, Jill, now mail it.”87
Unbeknownst to the host, who was engaged in a screaming match with
audience members demanding that Johnston be allowed to finish her poem,
the joker picked a woman out of the front row of the audience, pulled her
onto the stage, and started making out. Mailer realized something was go-
ing on when the crowd went nuts. “What about me?” yelled another female
from the audience, as she jumped up to join them in a ménage à trois on the
floor.88 Some spectators covered their mouths and averted their eyes; others
careened their necks to get a better look. “It’s great that you paid $25 to see
three dirty pairs of overalls on the floor,” Mailer yelled into the microphone,
“when you could see lots of cocks and cunts just down the street for $4.”
Jill Johnston (left) and an unidentified spectator making out on the stage at the
Theatre for Ideas Town Hall debate on women’s liberation, April 30, 1971. (Pho-
tograph by Fred W. McDarrah.)
 Expatriate Acts 123

“What’s the matter Norman,” a woman shouted from the auditorium, “can’t
handle women who won’t let you fuck them?”
Johnston untangled herself from her the limbs of the two women to re-
turn to the podium. She asked Mailer if she could forgo taking questions in
order to finish her poem, to which the moderator replied, “Either play with
the team or pick up your marbles and get lost. There’s a lot we want to talk
about, and I want to talk to you about lesbianism, goddamn it. I’m interested
in what you have to say. Now, you can play these games, but they’re silly.” To
quell the pandemonium brewing in the Town Hall, Mailer called for a vote.
Deeming the results a tie, he cast the deciding ballot and bade Johnston sit
down. Bested by his jester and in danger of losing his crown, Mailer called
out in desperation, “Come on, Jill, be a lady.” This was about the most ri-
diculous thing he could have said at this point, and it sent the crowd into
hysterics. The trio left the stage to cheers and thunderous applause.
The king of the counterculture was brought low through Johnston’s bit
of Rabelaisian ribaldry. Such burlesquing of sacred events through profane
displays and parodic mockery is the stuff of the carnivalesque, but John-
ston’s acts of gaiety pushed beyond the riot and revelry of carnival in two
important ways. First, her transgression was not part of a structured ritual
sanctioned by the powers that be and staged as a diversion to relieve ten-
sion and renew the existing order. It was a rogue gesture, a liminoid act, that
deliberately distorted the rites of privilege and the sacraments of social hi-
erarchy in order to provoke an unprecedented response.89 Second, Johnston
intended her live performance to be the first act in what she knew would be
a much larger social drama. Her gesture of joker citizenship, though staged
at Town Hall, was a spectacle made for the media. Not only were the city’s
most prominent journalists on hand to cover the event, but filmmaker D. A.
Pennebaker was shooting the debate for a documentary, titled Town Bloody
Hall. Johnston played her scenes directly to the camera lens, which am-
plified her cunning wit and erotic audacity, transmitting and reproducing
the story of her mock-­heroic exploits across generations and geopolitical
borders.
Johnston’s performance at Town Hall made quite an impact. First, it
called into question the reliability of truth claims and the apparatus of be-
lief systems. Shattering the stereotype that same-­sex desire is a tragedy, her
comedic turn as court jester recast homophobia as a heterosexual farce. Sec-
ond, in besting Mailer, whom most people hailed as a literary genius and
a counterculture crusader, Johnston revealed him to be little more than a
124 Acts of Gaiety

liberal martinet who wielded his heterosexual male privilege in a despotic

manner. By outplaying the master, this joker showed lesbian feminism to
be a potent political force that was not to be mocked by likes of Mailer. Her
spoken-­word poem offered both an alternative history of the world and a
utopian vision of the future in which women would be relieved of the tyr-
anny of patriarchal preeminence. Third, in simulating intercourse onstage,
Johnston exemplified the radical lesbian position that ‘the sexual satisfac-
tion of the woman independently of the man is the sine qua non of the femi-
nist revolution.”90 This sapphic spectacle underscored the fact that lesbian-
ism is not a private sexual identity but an enactment of public intimacy.
Intimacy is not the result of two distinct selves coming together in a dyadic
union sanctioned by law but of polyamorous pairings guided only by the
pleasure principle.
Johnston said that her only regret was that the debate continued after
she left, as her goal had been to bring the entire proceeding to a halt. She
lamented the fact that her “schemes for theatrical stunts and sideshow in
the tradition of dada the absurd and the happenings” fell “discouragingly
sort of any masterful plan to tear that place apart.”91 Johnston may have felt
differently had she been a fly on the wall for the remainder of the proceed-
ings. After Trilling delivered the fourth and final feminist position, Mailer,
still somewhat frazzled, took the rostrum to offer a response and field ques-
tions. In the midst of his unscripted, rambling remarks, in which he cast
feminism as a form of leftist totalitarianism, he suggested that there might
be “a profound reservoir of cowardice in women that made them welcome
this slavish life” then made a number of homophobic remarks about men
and women. He said, “Something about women’s liberation terrifies me be-
cause it is humorless.” The irony of this statement, in the wake of Johnston’s
performance, must have registered somewhere in Mailer’s unconscious, be-
cause a few moments later he blurted out, in the middle of a riff on liberty,
“If you wish for me to be a clown, I’ll take out my modest little Jewish dick
and put it on the table. You can spit at it and laugh at it, and then I’ll walk
away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown you the
real one.” Unfortunately, Johnston did not have the satisfaction of seeing
Mailer worried about his jester running off with his scepter. The joker had
left the building.
Johnston’s “career as an impromptu clown is studded with glorious ex-
ploits,” but Town Hall remains one of her greatest performances.92 In her
review of the debate in the Village Voice—­which she titled “On a Clear Day
 Expatriate Acts 125

You Can See Your Mother”—­Johnston applauded her performance: “I gave

a fine speech. I made everybody laugh. I got a lot of women excited. I made
a lot of men furious. I gave them a floor show. I provided some good copy.
I enjoyed myself. I felt victorious.”93 The event, which received extensive
press coverage, helped seal Johnston’s status as a spokesperson for women’s
liberation.94 The media attention she garnered would be hailed by many
gays and lesbians today as a victory in the struggle for visibility, but in the
1970s the publicity elicited charges that she was colluding with the enemy,
that she was an ego-­driven artist who craved power and prestige more than
political transformation, and that she was more interested in personal and
financial rewards than she was in fomenting a revolution. Radical lesbian
feminists viewed with suspicion anyone who assumed the position of move-
ment star. They believed the star system was a plot by the rich, white, male-­
run media to destroy women’s liberation by misdirecting women’s attention
away from social activism and toward behaviors that keep them oppressed.95

“Movement Schmoovement”

Johnston was, in many ways, an unlikely candidate for movement stardom.

She was a scraggly hippie dyke who lacked Steinem’s visage, Atkinson’s
wardrobe, and Greer’s legs. She did, however, have a certain je ne sais quoi,
the “it factor,” which Joe Roach defines as “the easily perceived but hard-­
to-­define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people.”96 Johnston’s
position as a movement star was cemented with the publication of Lesbian
Nation: The Feminist Solution in 1973. The title is a reference to Ti-­Grace
Atkinson’s dictum: feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice. Al-
though Johnston criticized Atkinson’s militant ideological stance in 1970,
in her coming-­out article, the author came to endorse this position herself.
While feminism may have been “the complaint that got the movement go-
ing,” writes Johnston, it can offer no solution. “When the Feminists have a
solution they’ll be Gay/Feminists.”97
In Lesbian Nation, Johnston argues that any woman who remains male
identified, diverting her emotional and sexual energies toward men and
male institutions, cannot become an emancipated subject or an autonomous
human being. In the book she calls for “all gay people, those who know
and accept it, to stand up and speak for themselves,” insisting that coming
out is the “only way” to ignite a revolution.98 The dedication reads, “for my
126 Acts of Gaiety

mother, who should have been a lesbian and for my daughter in hopes she
will be.” With its galvanizing rhetoric, its insistence that “the lesbian is the
revolutionary feminist” and its call for “the creation of a legitimate state de-
fined by women,” Lesbian Nation is often cited as a paradigmatic example of
the trappings of essentialism and the pitfalls of identity politics that plagued
second-­wave feminism.99
Many feminist and queer scholars erroneously equate Lesbian Nation
with the practice of separatism, with the retreat of radical dykes from the
public sphere into safe spaces free of the male gaze. In an essay titled “Queer
Nationalism,” Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman’s assertion, “The blink-
ing question mark beside the word ‘nation’ in Jill Johnston’s separatist Les-
bian Nation . . . reveal[s] an evacuation of nationality as we know it,” repre-
sents a common misinterpretation of the artist and her work.100 Judging the
book by its cover, or more specifically its title, Berlant and Freeman ignore
the content, which has less to do with mapping out a separatist society than
it does with troubling the codes and conventions that confer identity, govern
expressivity, and establish the categories of intelligibility through which citi-
zenship is defined, regulated, and protected by law. Regrettably, these queer
theorists reinforce numerous misconceptions about lesbian nationalism:
that it was identical to or coterminous with separatism; that dykes sought
to escape from rather than engage with the public sphere; and that women
were incapable of mounting humorous, playful, and erotic spectacles on the
stage of national politics until gay men showed us how.
Johnston’s vision of a lesbian nation had little to do with the formation
of an actual geopolitical entity and everything to do with fostering emotion-
al states of rapture and joy. The felicity of the performative utterance “I am
Gay,” as far as this joker was concerned, had as much to do with coming out
as a homosexual as it did with “coming into that abnormal condition known
as elation.”101 While Johnston’s Lesbian Nation came to serve as a blueprint
for the formation of separatist communities—­one collective in Toronto even
referred to itself as “the house that Jill built”—­this was never the author’s
intention.102 This legacy is, perhaps, Johnston’s most outrageous, and most
durable, act of joker citizenship. The author never lived in a women’s com-
mune, nor was she closely aligned, personally or politically, with separat-
ist collectives that existed in various parts of the country at the time.103
Johnston was not an active member of any lesbian or feminist political or-
ganization. Her brief flirtation with GLF went terribly awry, and her only
other attempt to participate in a feminist collective was in the summer of
 Expatriate Acts 127

1971 when she attended three consciousness-­raising sessions with some up-
town women artists, including Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, and Yoko Ono
(who brought John).104 Johnston recalls, “I couldn’t sustain their straight-
ness and they couldn’t tolerate my challenges.”105 By November of that year,
she claimed she was through with organized feminism. “[M]y final impres-
sion of movement politics,” she writes, is “Movement Schmoovement . . . if
you’re having fun you’re not having a movement and I like to have fun so
I’ve decided to refuse myself the dubious political pleasure” of collective ac-
tion.106 Reaffirming her commitment to personal acts of rebellion, Johnston
decided, “I constitute a movement totally myself complete period.”107 Her
decision to fly solo was made a full two years before the publication of Les-
bian Nation. To crown Johnston queen of the lesbian separatists or install her
as a leader of the feminist movement, then, is oxymoronic, as jokers have
no fixed place in the social hierarchy. Fundamentally opposed to authority,
structure, and categorization, her mission was to disrupt balance, order, and
the status quo.
This legacy has less to do with Johnston’s vision for a separatist revolu-
tion than it does with the marketing of Lesbian Nation by Johnston’s publish-
er. The text was issued by a mainstream press, Simon and Schuster, which
meant it enjoyed much wider circulation than most of the feminist litera-
ture produced during the women’s movement.108 When Johnston signed the
contract for this, her second book, back in 1969, she was recovering from
her third (and final) schizophrenic breakdown. As a result of this “awaken-
ing,” Johnston notes, “I became motivated to write about myself instead of
others.”109 She wanted her next endeavor to reflect this shift, so she signed
a contract for a book to be titled Autobiography. Johnston envisioned this
project as an experiment in “creating the ‘universality’ of the ‘minority point
of view,’” much like Monique Wittig’s Lesbian Body and Les Guérillères,
where lesbian feminism dovetails with textual innovations in the creation
of “a personal and political tract but not a unified text.”110 By 1972, when
the book went into production, feminism had become a hot commodity, a
lucrative niche market, with Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Robin Morgan’s
Sisterhood Is Powerful, and other texts selling tens, sometimes hundreds of
thousands of copies in multiple printings to mainstream audiences.111 Seek-
ing to capitalize on this trend, Simon and Schuster proposed to Johnston
that it pitch the book not as a critical memoir but as a feminist manifesto.
In a 2006 interview Johnston acknowledged, “Lesbian Nation was
bought by a male editor, titled by him, and produced and publicized by his
128 Acts of Gaiety

male-­owned corporation.”112 She admitted to being not only complicit with

the publisher’s agenda but also “agreeable, sometimes enthusiastic” about
the deal, especially when she walked past Brentano’s on Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan and saw that her book took up the entire window display of the
store. Johnston rationalized her actions by claiming that the entire feminist
revolution, such as it was, “was male-­supported, -­defined, and -­perpetuated
right down to the barricades.” She claims that she was always acutely aware
of the fact that the movement “was a gift of the male-­owned media,” as was
her own fifteen minutes of fame. “It was probably the singular definition
of myself as sexual that gave me the franchise I had for several years, at a
man’s newspaper, to run on at great length about myself and women, once
I’d said who or what I was. I mean the curiosity, the prurience of the man
was there.”113
It was Johnston’s editor at Simon and Schuster who gave the book a
“consensus and identity” that the experimental writing itself actively re-
fuses. Lesbian Nation, like Johnston’s first book, Marmalade Me, is comprised
primarily of selected columns from the Village Voice (1969 to 1972). This
collection of diatribes and dalliances chronicles dyke life, queer art, and
the author’s complicated and circuitous path to gay feminist consciousness.
The preface of the book instructs readers that the text should be read as “an
interlocking web of personal experience and history and events of the world
forming a picture of an evolving political revolutionary consciousness of
one who was female who emerged from straight middle unconscious post-
war amerika.”114
A polemically pleasurable text, Lesbian Nation is a mesmerizing mélange
of political theory, incisive social critique, and painful personal reflection
peppered with humorous anecdotes, wry witticisms, and salacious gossip.115
Anyone familiar with the critic’s work would immediately recognize that
Lesbian Nation is much too literal, serious, and straightforward a title for
Johnston to have chosen it. The chapter headings are much more indicative
of the author’s style and sensibility: “The Making of a Lesbian Chauvinist,”
“The Second Sucks and the Feminine Mystake,” and “Amazons and Arche-
dykes.” Despite the editor’s best intentions to create an easily digestible,
coherent narrative, the experimental prose is pitched at such “a high level
of difficulty and complexity” that it is “hardly the stuff of political pamphle-
teering.”116
As far as manifestos go, Lesbian Nation is severely lacking in prescriptive
dogma. Johnston’s vision of a gyno-­utopia is inchoate at best. She calls her
dream “a cosmic plan,” as if to suggest it is more fantasy than an attainable
 Expatriate Acts 129

reality, and she admits to having no “real strategy” as to how to go about

it.117 The goal, as she articulates it, is “to somehow buy up a lot of space and
establish a chain of lesbos on the mainland and invite the lesbian population
and introduce the rest to the mysteries and just forget about the men, leav-
ing them to their own devices destroying themselves with their machines
and frozen foods.”118 True to her joker nature, Johnston does not dictate a
course of action; rather she leaves the exact nature of any subsequent action
to the reader.
Although she calls for the creation of a legitimate state by and for wom-
en, the author had no interest in women separating from men, as this would
have meant, among other things, giving up her position as a prominent art
critic; instead, she wanted to inspire her sisters to dedicate their emotional
energies to other women. While Johnston may have trafficked in an essen-
tialized notion of “woman,” she clearly understands “lesbian” to be a social
construction, and a fluid one at that. “[L]esbian is a label,” she notes in her
Town Hall poem, “invented by anybody to throw at any woman who dares
to be a man’s equal and lesbian is a good name it means nothing of course or
everything so we don’t mind using the name in fact we like it for we can be
proud to claim allusion to the island made famous by Sappho . . .”119 More
than a static identity, “the lesbian” was a character Johnston performed in
her expatriate acts of gaiety. She had an entire repertoire of selves, in fact,
but the lesbian, being her most famous, came to symbolize, if not to stand
in for, her person. Although it was a dramatic effect, Johnston’s lesbian per-
sona came to resemble, through repeated performances, an essence. As the
sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in 1959, the year Johnston began contrib-
uting to the Village Voice:

In our society the character one performs and one’s self are somewhat equat-
ed. . . . A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute
a self to a performed character, but this imputation—­this self—­is a product
of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a per-
formed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose
fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect
arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue,
the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited.120

Johnston’s image as a lesbian separatist was credited, in Goffman’s sense of

the term, by a cadre of women, by dykes who wanted and needed to believe
in a coherent and legitimate sexual identity, and by radical feminists who
130 Acts of Gaiety

saw women loving women and women loving themselves as revolutionary

acts.
Lesbian Nation captured and rehearsed Johnston’s gesture of joker cit-
izenship in performative prose for a broad public audience, one that ex-
tended far afield of New York City, carrying the practice of consciousness-­
raising and the idea of lesbian feminism beyond the urban enclave of her
Village Voice readership. The author’s sexual self-­definition and her affirma-
tion of a deviant desire expanded the artistic and performative possibilities
of lesbianism through the articulation and enactment of alternative modes
of thought, feeling, and existence. Johnston’s tome allegorized a “national”
lesbian culture, one that is hailed by print media but also, as I have shown,
by live performance. Like the paperback pulp fiction of the 1950s, by Ann
Bannon and others, Lesbian Nation helped foster an “imagined community,”
in Benedict Anderson’s sense, of gay feminists.
Nationalism, as Anderson has suggested, is performatively enacted. It
does not involve the awakening of a nation to self-­consciousness. Rather, “it
invents nations where they do not exist.”121 This is especially true for nations
without a state, according to Erin Hurley, as these entities rely on theatrical
and cultural performances to vouch for their legitimacy. Her adroit analysis
of Quebec’s national mimesis “opens the door to thinking through how peo-
ple may produce themselves as national in conditions that militate against
it  .  .  . and how one may identify with the nation (its values, types, etc.)
without identifying as national.”122 For lesbians of Johnston’s generation,
whether they identified as separatists or not, the nation served as a powerful
metaphor for the visible and tangible existence of a subculture previously
consigned to a marginal existence predicated on shame and debilitating se-
crecy.123 It was an emotional cartography forged by a conscious sense of
identification rooted in sexual identity and a shared sense of history, culture,
and affective experiences of the world. Influenced by the radical insurgency
of groups such as the Black Panthers and the National Liberation Front in
Vietnam, lesbians did not renounce or reject the idea of nation. Instead, they
inverted the dominant paradigm by challenging static, heteronormative no-
tions of citizenship, kinship, and governance.
The conceptual force of the nation’s performativity is evidenced in the
myriad ways lesbians signaled their sense of collective agency to one an-
other across expansive physical spaces, multiple historical eras, and vast
ideological differences. The lesbian nation was propagated through shared
rituals, such as consciousness-­raising groups, and collective spectacles, in-
cluding protest marches, pride parades, and music festivals. It was reinforced
 Expatriate Acts 131

through the creation and transmission of images, icons, and metaphors,

such as the labrys and the figure of Sappho, and through collective prac-
tices of commodity consumption, including everything from flannel shirts
to rainbow flags. The lesbian nation had a constitution (The Radicalesbi-
ans’ “Woman-­Identified Woman” manifesto), a national anthem (Maxine
Feldman’s “Amazon [Woman Rise]”), a state seal (the woman’s symbol), a
national economy (a network of women-­owned businesses and laborers),
a system of defense (an army of lovers), and a declaration of independence
(Johnston’s Lesbian Nation).
The lesbian nation, as Johnston imagined it, lies somewhere between
the virtual and the actual. Exemplary of what José Muñoz in Cruising Utopia
calls a “spatio-­temporal (im)possibility,” it is an idea that exists primarily
in its affective potential. Radiating the “anticipatory illumination” of a uto-
pian dream, Johnston’s lesbian nation exhibits a profound yearning for a
way of life that does not yet exist but is desirable and thus worth working
toward.124 In gesturing toward a territory of futurity, a chrono-­and geopo-
litical coming to be, the lesbian nation reflects the world-­making efforts of
both radical feminism and the gay liberation movement.

“A Truly Dated Idea”

In 1993, Johnston took part in a performance that surprised many people:

the woman who vowed she would never be the “victim of lesbian monog-
amy” entered into a civil union with her longtime partner, Ingrid Nyeboe,
in her lover’s native Denmark.125 The timing of this event seemed particu-
larly significant, and more than a bit ironic, as 1993 marked the twentieth
anniversary of the publication of Lesbian Nation and the year it went out
of print.126 Johnston’s decision to settle down may seem antithetical to the
expatriate acts of gaiety for which she was notorious; however, we must
consider that gestures of joker citizenship are not designed to stand the test
of time but to respond to its vicissitudes. The bent of these anarchic antics
is toward transience, not permanence. Johnston’s predilection, as a peripa-
tetic, was to remain fluid, mobile, and nomadic and to resist the pressure to
commit herself to a singular identity, a specific cause, or a fixed ideological
camp. From the 1950s until her death in 2010, this joker traversed to and
fro, circled forward and back, zigzagged left and center, defying any and all
attempts to arrest her motion or pin her down.
Johnston is one of many lesbians whose views on matrimony, monog-
132 Acts of Gaiety

amy, and motherhood have changed dramatically as they have faced the
realities of growing older in a country that is not only homophobic but
ageist as well. The circumstances of Johnston’s nuptials and the ceremony
commemorating them offer ways for us to consider how same-­sex unions
might be something other than conformist or indicative of homoliberalism.
By way of conclusion, I will show how this couple’s civil union serves as a
gesture of joker citizenship that complicates and questions the homonorma-
tive strivings and homonational aspirations that typify the conservative case
for gay marriage I outline in chapter two.127
Johnston and Nyeboe’s ceremony was staged as a Fluxus performance
by artist Geoffrey Hendricks in conjunction with a retrospective of his work
titled “Day into Night.”128 The festivities began with a traditional civil union
conducted at the Town Hall in Odense, a city on the island of Fyn, where
same-­sex couples have been legally joined since 1989 when Denmark be-
came the first country in the world to grant registered partnerships to ho-
mosexuals. The rather perfunctory bureaucratic proceedings were made less
mundane by a most unconventional procession through the city streets to
the Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik (art school and museum). Part pageant
and part political demonstration, the Fluxprocession’s dramatis personae
included a canine, a Great Dane, which led the merry band of marauders
and a host of revelers in various costumes and states of undress. Fluxus art-
ist Ben Patterson, who designed the musical accompaniment, pulled a cart
carrying two portable radios, which played simultaneously. One blasted the
overture to Wagner’s Lohengrin and the other a version of Bambi in Danish.
A band of local art students distributed white chrysanthemums to passersby
who paused to take in the spectacle. Next came Hendricks, whose nude-­to-­
the-­waist body was painted sky blue and adorned with twigs and branches,
so that he looked “like an aging Pan.”129 Johnston and Nyeboe, dressed in
white pants, white shirts, and white shoes, marched in front of an enor-
mous, thirty-­person, blue bridal gown designed by Eric Andersen. Friends
and family trailed behind the dress, and strangers who were swept into the
festivities served as the rear guard of this retroactivist ensemble. “It’s a crazy
wedding,” exclaimed one impromptu member of the Fluxprocession.130
Once the party arrived at the museum, the group climbed several flights
of stairs to the gallery where Hendricks’s exhibit was being held. As Johnston
recalls, “it seemed we were literally part of his show.”131 Hendricks, as Flux-
minister, conducted the service. He offered the couple sanctified libations,
which consisted of champagne poured into glasses the artist had blown es-
 Expatriate Acts 133

pecially for the occasion. Johnston and Nyeboe exchanged rings, for the
second time that day, and climbed into one of Hendricks’s installations, Sky
Car, a 1979 Volkswagen Bug painted to look like the heavens. Guests stood
behind the car, jingling tin cans that had been tied to the bumper below a
sign proclaiming “Just Married.” The brides tossed their bouquets from the
windows as the assembled crowd cheered. The gay old time continued over
erotically shaped food and drinks prepared by the Kunsthallen art students.
The delicacies, arranged in intricate patterns and arresting sculptural forms,
included what Johnston describes as possibly the most unusual wedding
confectionary ever created, “a pyramidal jumble of cake chunks topped by
two marzipan brides.”132
The museum portion of the ceremony was actually an inverted restag-
ing of Hendricks’s 1971 Fluxdivorce, an event that featured the artist and
his then wife Bici, who dissolved their marriage as part of the couple’s joint
coming-­out ceremony. Using scissors, knives, axes, and chainsaws, the pair
literally divided their assets. Fluxdivorce was, coincidentally, one of the first
Fluxus events Johnston attended.133 While the civil union constituted part
of Hendricks’s retrospective, the event was, in many ways, an archival ex-
hibition of Johnston’s Fluxus activities as well. Intimately associated with
Fluxus since the 1960s, as both a critic championing the artwork and a par-
ticipant engaged in actions and events, Johnston helped popularize and pre-
serve this neo-­Dada aesthetic sensibility.134 I say sensibility because Fluxus
is neither an aesthetic movement nor a style, but an attitude and spirit. The
term, derived from the Latin word meaning “to flow,” was coined by George
Maciunas, who organized the first Fluxus event in 1961, at the AG Gallery
in New York City, and the first Fluxus festival in Europe the following year.
Like Dada, the historical Fluxus was not an ideology or a school of
thought but a constellation around which artists and activists briefly co-
alesced, providing a means of alignment for various networks of geographi-
cally dispersed individuals, collectives, and cultures. Estera Milman de-
scribes Fluxus as a “conceptual community, a country whose geography
was a figment of communal imagination, whose citizenry was transient and,
by definition, cosmopolitan.”135 Johnston’s participation in the conceptual
country of Fluxus clearly influenced her own gestures of joker citizenship,
including the Scull pool incident and the Town Hall intervention. It also
shaped her evolving vision of a lesbian nation as an expatriate act. Fluxus’
emphasis on assemblage rather than assimilation and interdisciplinarity
rather than integration explains, perhaps, the substantial number of women,
134 Acts of Gaiety

queers, and people of color who were attracted by and integral to this par-
ticular revolution in aesthetics.136
To be in flux is to be in a constant state of change. Johnston and Nye-
boe’s ceremony exemplifies what is known in the domain of Fluxus as an
intermedial chance composition. Chance, contingency, and chaos are funda-
mental aspects of Fluxus art. Modeled, in part, on John Cage’s experiments
with indeterminacy and sound in the 1950s, chance compositions consist
of an event score, a basic set of notes, instructions, or conditions describing
who and what should be assembled. Intermedial chance compositions are
similar to happenings but differ in both duration and degree of complexity.
Emphasizing simplicity, the scale of Fluxus art tends to be small, the texts
short, and the enactments brief. Simplicity maximizes the degree of chance
in a given composition, and it allows anyone to initiate or restage a Fluxus
action.
Hendricks did not script Johnston and Nyeboe’s ceremony; rather, he
structured the event so that action would flow from the score. Unlike tra-
ditional weddings, which are plotted (typically by the bride) down to the
minutest detail to avoid mistakes, Hendricks’s choreographed performance
invited accidents and established itself so as to be subject to any and all
contingencies that might arise during the course of its unfolding. “Most
everything that happened was a surprise,” recalls Johnston, “some of it to
Hendricks himself, who assembled all the elements but wasn’t always sure
when and in what order they were to take place, or even what some of the
particulars were.”137 The couple played almost no role in the preparation of
the event score. All they were required to do was show up, “look happy, and
follow instructions.”138
The celebration of change and chance in Fluxus projects, according to
Mary T. Conway, “helps resituate the art practice as an element of time rather
than space, and shifts the emphasis away from being toward becoming, and
representation toward presentation.”139 By staging a Fluxus union, in other
words, Johnston and Nyeboe are demonstrating that they are less interested
in being married or entering into a (fixed) state of matrimony than they are
in becoming engaged, with each other and with their communities, which
consists of and blurs the lines between families of origin, choice, artists, and
strangers. Their ceremony shows the potential of civil unions to disrupt and
divert the temporal trajectory of traditional weddings. Whereas weddings
typically mark the beginning of a life together, same-­sex civil unions often
occur in the middle or, depending on the age of the couple, at the end of
 Expatriate Acts 135

a very long, fugitive relationship, as in the case of Del Martin and Phyllis
Lyon. Having been together for well over a decade, but without official sta-
tus, Johnston and Nyeboe’s service was as much about the future as it was
the past, as much about envisioning a life together as it was a retrospective
of the many years they shared before civil unions became a possibility in
Denmark in 1989 (or gay marriage became legal in New York in 2011).
As chance compositions, Fluxus actions are noncommodifiable events
that have little or no exchange value. Opposed to the notion that art has
anything to do with utility, purpose, or efficacy, Fluxus is an antiart form of
art that opposes tradition. Johnston and Nyeboe’s Fluxus union can be seen
as an antimarriage marriage, one that counters normative conceptions of
love, kinship, and forms of social belonging that are tied to property, capital,
and the state. George Brecht describes a Fluxus event score as “the smallest
unit of a situation.”140 In contrast to most couples, who view their wedding
as the biggest, most important day in their lives, Johnston and Nyeboe’s
Fluxus ceremony suggests that their civil union is actually the smallest unit
of their relationship. By minimizing both the importance and the serious-
ness of their “big day,” the women follow the Fluxus tradition of critiquing
the commercial and consumerist aspects of society. Their service actively
resists the capitalist trappings of the marriage industry and works against
one of the most popular arguments in favor of same-­sex unions: that they
boost the economy.
Following the Fluxus tradition of lampooning the seriousness of art and
culture, Johnston and Nyeboe satirize the gravity accorded to the institution
of marriage. The ceremony also mocks the solemn and sanctimonious tone
that characterizes homoliberal appeals for gay marriage. That legal recog-
nition of same-­sex unions is nonexistent in most places in the world was
as absurd to Johnston and Nyeboe as it is to many people. Fluxus artists
respond to absurdity with absurdity. Even the most serious Fluxus events,
such as Carolee Schneemann’s Viet-­Flakes (1965), and the most dangerous
actions, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), respond to social injustice
with highly theatricalized performative interventions that privilege aesthet-
ic play and the subversive power of humor. Humor, along with chance, is a
key component of Fluxus art. As Kristine Stiles notes:

At its best, the humor in Fluxus performance is of an entirely different order

than either the self-­satisfied satire, irony, and parody characteristic of mod-
ernism or the self-­aggrandizing superiority and cynical pastiche claimed for
136 Acts of Gaiety

postmodernism. Filled with the marvel of a sense of discovery and release,

Fluxus humor escorts freedoms: the freedom to play and goof-­off, the free-
dom to value that play as an aesthetic habit  .  .  . the freedom to abandon
reason and aesthetics and to just be.141

The emphasis on gaiety in Johnston and Nyeboe’s ceremony reflects the cou-
ple’s sense of humor, but it also registers their ambivalence about the institu-
tion of matrimony and what it means for lesbian feminists to enter into it.
Johnston and Nyeboe serve as paradigmatic examples of antiestablish-
ment radicals who, compelled by a potent economic impetus, embrace a
pragmatic course of action. Johnston was sixty-­four when she wed Nyeboe.
Facing retirement without a steady source of income or a secure benefits
package, she married not because she wanted to assimilate into the main-
stream but because she simply could not afford to be queerer. In a per-
formance review of her ceremony published in Art in America, Johnston
describes being asked by a friend if the service would change things. “I said
I didn’t know. I did know that as a Danish spouse I would qualify for ad-
vantages unheard of in America—­access to all of the benefits provided by a
high-­level social welfare system.”142 That Johnston did not see gay marriage
as a radical political gesture is evident by her response to a young man who
ran up to her and Nyeboe during the ceremony “to enthuse over the event,
saying, ‘It was the wedding of the future,’ meaning, [Johnston] supposed,
the form of it, not (necessarily) the political aspect.”143 In “Deep Tapioca,”
a second performance review she wrote about the ceremony—­this one for a
progressive women’s periodical—­Johnston likens getting hitched to putting
a rope around her neck. The conflicted critic recalls that she almost called
the whole thing off the night before the ceremony but was persuaded to go
through with the service for two reasons. First, people had gathered from
far and wide to celebrate with her, and she did not want to disappoint her
friends and family. Second, the economic exigencies drove her to it. “I’m
married now,” she writes after the fact, “and if I get sick I can fly over for
medical services.”
In the introduction to Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years,
published five years after her ceremony, Johnston attributes her change of
heart about same-­sex unions to transformations in the culture wrought by
the feminist and LGBT movements. Johnston admits that she could not
imagine living the life she did in the 1960s and 1970s had she not been a
disenfranchised mother free from the demands of child rearing and family
 Expatriate Acts 137

life. Like many lesbians, she was cast into a role for which she was terribly
unsuited at the time, not motherhood per se but motherhood at a moment
in history when having a career and a family seemed mutually exclusive.
Johnston says the “anti-­family, anti-­monogamy leitmotif” of the counter-
culture ceased to interest her “by at least 1980,” and she longed for the
opportunity to become a belated mother to her children.144 “With the nu-
clear family model breaking down, and a postmodern pluralism growing up
alongside it,” she notes, “many of us saw an opportunity to create or recreate
family.”145 Johnston and Nyeboe’s Fluxus ceremony works toward creating
and re-­creating kinship structures by actively deconstructing the model of
the insular, nuclear family weddings are designed to solidify.
What makes Johnston and Nyeboe’s civil union gay is not the fact that
they were two women but that they self-­consciously conducted their cer-
emony as an expatriate act. Staged as part of a Fluxus retrospective, their
service is best understood as a counterculture costume drama enacted in
the present. Their event reflects the iconoclasm of Fluxus art, which not
only is indebted to Cage and Dada but, as Robert Pincus-­Witten notes, is
“inflected by an idealistic anarchy that evokes a political history reaching
back to the Wobblies, the Patterson Strike, and the Feminist model of Emma
Goldman.”146 This Fluxwedding did more than drag the past into the pres-
ent, however. Hendricks conducted the ceremony in such a way that it will
be “complete” only when it can be seen in retrospect. The procession and
the conditions of its occurrence—­its participants, foreign locale, and con-
nection with a retrospective art exhibit—­draw our attention to the fact that
civil unions are, at this moment in time, still a novel act, a contemporary
event that eventually will become, like Fluxus, canonical and traditional. In
the future, when gay marriage is legal in the United States and civil unions
are disallowed and/or stripped of their significance as an alternative to the
homoliberal institution of matrimony, we will look back at this ceremony as
a period piece. Enacting a temporal drag, Johnston and Nyeboe’s Fluxwed-
ding plays itself out according to a gay chronometry, one that pulls the past
into the present from the vantage point of the future.
At a time when we are inundated with romanticized images of queer
nuclear families and idealized portraits of LGBT patriots, it becomes in-
creasingly urgent to counter such sentimental displays with, among other
things, accounts of riot and revelry in earlier epochs of gay and lesbian his-
tory. This study of Jill Johnston’s expatriate acts invites us to rethink the
possibilities for sexual agency and social belonging by expanding the con-
138 Acts of Gaiety

ceptual contours of citizenship for LGBT subjects through a retroactivist

orientation toward other political cartographies in a remote space and time.
This backward glance disrupts and denaturalizes the uncritical conflation of
assimilation with political progress by bringing to light forgotten, discred-
ited, and disavowed practices of communion and collectivity that register
as sites of contestation and dissent. In addition to providing a particular
perspective on the mainstreaming of the LGBT movement, this gesture en-
ables us to move beyond the geopolitical borders of the nation-­state, which
insists on the homogenization of sexual alterity in exchange for social in-
clusivity. Johnston’s acts of joker citizenship remind us that we are actors
in a social drama: we are a composite of conflicting personae, motivations,
and feelings—­about ourselves, the roles we play, and the worlds we inhabit.
Without the joker’s anarchic interventions, we run the risk of forgetting that
the only thing constant is change, our identities are not essences, and some-
times the best way to challenge injustice is not to take the threat so seriously.
4
Terrorist Acts
The Maladapted Hothead Paisan,
a Lesbian Comedy of Terrors
Gay is not enough anymore. It’s a really good start but we have
to get our humor back. . . . We could even be gay terrorists with
humor.
—­John Waters

Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation helped spawn many separatist endeavors,

from communes to co-­ops. Arguably the most enduring and self-­sustaining
experiment in sex-­segregation has been the women’s music scene, which
includes a host of entertainers, engineers, producers, labels, and a lively
concert circuit. Out of this separatist sphere of cultural production came
the first songs written, recorded, pressed, and distributed by lesbians and
feminists for themselves, including Maxine Feldman’s single “Angry Atthis”
(May 1969, recorded in 1972)—­the title is an allusion to Sappho’s lover—
and the album Lavender Jane Loves Women (1974) by vocalist and songwriter
Alix Dobkin, flautist Kay Gardner, and bassist Patches Attom. Many of these
pioneering artists were women of color; Gwen Avery, Linda Tillery, Mary
Watkins, Pat Parker, Judith Casselberry, Jaque Duprée, and June Millington
regularly toured and sometimes recorded with Holly Near, Cris Williamson,
Meg Christian, and Teresa Trull. Several of these performers appear on the
hilarious and satirical album, Lesbian Concentrate: A Lesbianthology of Songs
and Poems (1977) issued by Olivia Records in response to Anita Bryant’s
virulent anti-­gay campaign, Save Our Children. This complication of mu-
sic and spoken word poems features tracks with tantalizing titles, such as
“Leaping Lesbians,” “Sugar Mama,” “Ode to a Gym Teacher,” and “For The
Straight Folks Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t So Blatant.”

139
140 Acts of Gaiety

Women’s music was sold through mail order, at lesbian feminist bookstores,
coffeehouses, and festivals, the largest of which is the Michigan Womyn’s
Music Festival (Michfest), founded in 1976.
On August 13, 2004, Animal Prufrock, of the dyke punk band Bitch
and Animal, staged the world premier of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian
Terrorist on the famed Friday Night Stage at the twenty-­ninth annual Mich-
igan Womyn’s Music Festival. This musical theater extravaganza featured a
star-­studded cast of lesbian feminist icons, including Ani DiFranco, found-
er of Righteous Babe Records; Toshi Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock
and BIGLovely; television personality Susan Powter; and Alyson Palmer of
BETTY RULES! and L Word fame, to name only a few. Animal wrote the mu-
sic and lyrics in addition to playing the title role. Hothead Paisan is based
on Diane DiMassa’s underground comic zine (a cheaply produced, self-­
published graphic novella) of the same name. A cult phenomenon beloved
by Michfest veterans, DiMassa’s zine chronicles the exploits of a “mood-­
disordered, developmentally arrested,” hypercaffeinated, ball-­busting dyke
with “scary hair and an even scarier fetish for guns, grenades” and justice.1
Equal parts Joan of Arc, Bongi Perez, and Aileen Wuornos, Hothead’s mis-
sion is to make the world safe for women and queers by eradicating evil,
one man at a time.
Hothead the musical was hailed by critics and fans alike as the highlight
of Michfest, and this despite the fact that what audiences saw was a work-in-
progress, a prelude to what Animal joked would be a full-­fledged production
she planned to take all the way to Broadway. Not surprisingly, Hothead never
made it to the Great White Way. It did not even make it to New York City.
There are obvious reasons why a musical by a relatively unknown artist
about a homicidal lesbian terrorist in the wake of 9/11 might fail to generate
mass appeal. This has less to do with Americans’ desire to avoid plays about
terrorism during a war—­Steven Sondheim’s Assassins made its Broadway
debut in April 2004 and won five Tony Awards—­than it does with the lack
of support for any kind of theater (mainstream or avant-­garde, musical or
straight) by, for, or about lesbians. What interests me here, however, is not
what the impossibility of bringing Hothead to Broadway may or may not
have to do with theater’s persistent and relentless lesbophobia, but what
the performance’s success at Michfest reveals about feminist and queer re-
sponses to the War on Terror.
DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan exploits the deep historical convergences be-
tween sexual minorities and political terrorists. Cast as degenerate outlaws
 Terrorist Acts 141

whose perverse desires threaten to destroy the nuclear family, the nation,
and, by extension, civilization itself, lesbians and gays have been condemned
as duplicitous traitors, communist defectors, and criminal conspirators who
imperil the forward movement of human and historical progress. Blamed
for the spread of physical, psychic, and moral diseases, we have been treated
as cankerous elements plaguing an otherwise healthy society. In response
to the alleged dangers lesbians pose to the world, medical, juridical, and
religious authorities have sought to terrorize us into submission. We have
been incarcerated and institutionalized against our will, subjected to tor-
turous “cures” such as shock therapy and lobotomies, disowned by family
members and friends, denied housing and health care, relieved of our jobs
and children, and brutalized by passersby and police alike. The LGBT move-
ment has made incredible gains toward decriminalizing and depathologiz-
ing homosexuality. Over the past fifty years, activists have won hard-­fought
battles for the legalization of sodomy, domestic partner benefits, same-­sex
unions, hate crime protections, and the end of the military’s ban on openly
gay troops. Juridical reform has been accompanied by greater representation
in the mainstream media, enhanced political visibility, and increased market
capital.
Not all sexual minorities have benefited from these seismic shifts in
the social order, however. As we celebrate the slow but steady enfranchise-
ment of gays and lesbians, we would do well to consider the consequences
of our assimilation into the national fabric. Who gets incorporated and at
what cost? To what extent does the folding of “proper” homosexual subjects
(those who want to marry, reproduce, and die for their country) into the
nation-­state occur at the expense of “improper” or profligate queers who
cannot be accommodated because they exceed or fail to achieve the narrow
terms of acceptability? People whose identities, politics, and sexual prac-
tices fall beyond the boundaries of what is considered appropriate behavior
are ostracized, excluded, and left behind. These individuals often experi-
ence increased discrimination from heterosexuals, but also from homosexu-
als who feel their personal progress is impeded by the presence of such
nonconforming queer kin.
In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar argues that the neoliberalization of
the LGBT movement—­with its investment in pragmatic goals, commodity
ownership, and state-­sanctioned sexual relationships—­engenders “homona-
tionalism,” a normalizing rhetoric of patriotism and citizenship. The dual
dynamics of homonationalism, in which queers embrace a statist agenda and
142 Acts of Gaiety

the state, in turn, embraces queers, transforms homosexuality’s association

with terror, disease, and death into symbols of life, virility, and productiv-
ity.2 This rebranding of the homosexual—­from terrorist to citizen—­applies
only to those exemplary gays and lesbians who promote “family values”
(e.g., marriage, monogamy, and procreation) and who perform their patri-
otic duty by advancing free market capitalism as the American way of life.
This transformation aligns gays and lesbians, however unwittingly, with the
violent structures of nationalism and the bellicose rhetoric of exceptional-
ism that sanction American imperialism. Homonationalism has been instru-
mental in perpetuating the War on Terror and the racist remapping of ter-
rorist identities onto Muslim corporealities. The tactics and strategies of our
current war machine rely on and benefit from the proliferation of queerness
to produce both the (white, neoliberal) homonational and its (colored, fa-
natical) counterpart, the Islamic terrorist of elsewhere, a figure imbued with
colonial fantasies of sexual perversion, gender dysphoria, and racial stereo-
types. Insisting that resistance to homonationalism will require increasingly
queerer forms of art and activism, Puar allies queerness with extremism
not to stake out an oppositional political stance but rather to reanimate the
“convivial relations” between queerness and terrorism in order to unsettle
and destabilize both terms, realigning them into new ontological and affec-
tive assemblages.3
There is perhaps no better figure, real or imagined, to speak to the
imbricated and potentially transformative relationship between sexual-
ity and terrorism than Hothead Paisan. The two modalities in which Hot-
head appears—­ zine and musical—­ produced at two different historical
moments—­before and after 9/11—­by two different artists—­DiMassa and
Animal—­provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the com-
plex and shifting dynamics of homonationalism. I explore here what a mal-
adapted dyke like Hothead has to teach us about the affective economy of
terrorism, the theatrics of revolutionary violence, and the efficacy of mili-
tant forms of LGBT protest. This lesbian comedy of terrors challenges com-
monplace assumptions about which modes of art and activism constitute
“queerer” forms of resistance by troubling the deeply ingrained notion that
culture workers who position themselves at the vanguard (as opposed to
the rear guard) of social movements actually forge the most radical inter-
ventions into national-­political life. Given that homonationalism seizes on
and distorts feminism and the LGBT movement’s investment in advance-
ment, evolution, and forward motion, it can be advantageous to attend to
 Terrorist Acts 143

the regressive rhythms of anachronistic and recalcitrant forms of retroactiv-

ism, like Hothead Paisan, which aim to reanimate the dissident dreams of
the past. Archaic structures of feeling and disavowed histories can serve as
vital components of political progress. This affective etymology of terrorism
seeks to restore a differently queered body and a defiantly gay agenda to sex
and gender studies.

Stages of Revolt

Animal Prufrock was a sophomore theater major in Chicago in the 1990s

when she first discovered Hothead Paisan. A gender nonconformist, this
budding artist was actively discriminated against at school, especially when
it came to casting. “The faculty,” she was told, “is just having a hard time
imagining you as a woman.”4 Animal refers to her undergraduate theater
training as “one of [her] biggest heartbreaks.”5 Browsing a bookstore one
day, she came across DiMassa’s zine. Her identification with the comic’s pro-
tagonist was immediate and overwhelming. “I SAW ME,” Animal recalls,
and “I immediately said, ‘I’m gonna make a fucking musical out of this.’”
She envisioned a production that would serve as “revenge to the theatre
school, to all that bullshit.”6
Revenge fantasies featuring homicidal lesbian terrorists play an impor-
tant role in the dramaturgy of radical feminism. They were especially ubiq-
uitous in the art, theory, and activism of the early years of the women’s
liberation movement, from the late 1960s to the mid-­1970s when civil rights
struggles, anti–­Vietnam War protests, and militant forms of ethnic nation-
alism (e.g., the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the American Indian
Movement [AIM]) prompted some revolutionary organizations (e.g., the
Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army) to engage in
terrorist acts against the government. Most feminists decried the use of vio-
lence to combat violence, but this did not stop them from dreaming about
the forceful elimination of oppressive regimes or dramatizing hypothetical
scenarios of armed insurrection.
DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan is the animated progeny of Valerie Solanas’s
SCUM Manifesto, the Radicalesbians’ “Woman-­Identified Woman,” and Mo-
nique Wittig’s Les Guérillères.7 These lesbian revenge fantasies are deadly
serious satires featuring vigilante feminist heroines, graphic scenes of retali-
ation and retribution, cunning linguistic puns, and black humor. Lesbian
144 Acts of Gaiety

comedies of terrors exploit for humorous effect the compulsory rites and
rituals of heteronormativity. Their plots revolve around the frustrations and
unrepressed rage of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. Episodic in na-
ture, they depict highly theatrical spectacles, dark play, blood sports, and
war games. Like comedies of manners, these sardonic texts feature stock
characters that are rewarded rather than punished for sexual deviance. Mar-
ginalized by the ceremonies and sacraments that govern human behavior,
sexual minorities are in an optimal position to observe the excesses and
hypocrisies of straight society, the artificiality of gender roles, and the dis-
ciplinary regimes that govern erotic desires. Parodying normative codes of
conduct, comedies of terrors correct gross forms of injustice and reverse
conventional moral judgments. Their humor stems from the protagonist’s
skillful manipulation of ludicrous situations and her virtuosic display of
anarchic wit. Cutting up, verbally and physically, is the heroine’s primary
defense against the tyranny of sexism and homophobia.
Comedies of terrors are caricatures, inked in acid, of the white, middle-­
class, American male and the political, environmental, and economic cess-
pool he has made of the world. Constitutive of this genre is the transforma-
tion of a terrorized sexual minority into a terrorist, which occurs when the
protagonist realizes that compulsory heterosexuality is little more than a
thinly disguised plot designed to keep women subordinate. Male genocide is
depicted as an ethical gesture and an act of mercy, one that will put a death-­
driven species out of its misery and save the planet from destruction. Some
revenge fantasies are premised on the notion that the “real” terrorists are not
deadly dykes but what transgender performance artist Kate Bornstein calls
“Gender Defenders,” the people, institutions, and sociopolitical structures
that terrorize gender outlaws and sexual deviants with the punitive forces of
heteronormativity. In Gender Outlaw, Bornstein writes:

I thought that it would be fun to call what I do in life gender terrorism.

Seemed right at first—­I and so many folks like me were terrorizing the struc-
ture of gender itself. But I’ve come to see it a bit differently now—­gender
terrorists are not the drag queens, the butch dykes, the men on roller skates
dressed up as nuns. . . . Gender terrorists are those who . . . use gender to
terrorize the rest of us. These are the real terrorists: the Gender Defenders.8

Most lesbian revenge fantasies, however, embrace and exploit the conflation
of dykes and terrorists. These works are predicated on an ironic resignifi-
 Terrorist Acts 145

cation of what Lynda Hart calls “fatal women,” the predatory and sadistic
phallic female of patriarchy’s paranoid delusions come true. By putting “the
historical displacement of violence onto lesbians into lesbians’ own hands
and keeping their guns loaded,” these comedies of terrors offer the most
pointed and potent challenge to forms of hetero-­and homonormativity.9
A resurgence of lesbian revenge fantasies took place in the late 1980s.
These comedies of terrors emerged as a response to the AIDS epidemic,
Reaganomics, the feminist backlash precipitated by the Culture Wars, the
rising tide of the religious right, and the misogynist underpinnings of cer-
tain strands of queer theory, which was in its nascent stage of development.
Lizzie Borden’s futuristic mockumentary Born in Flames, the fire-­eating
direct-­action group Lesbian Avengers, Split Britches’ Lesbians Who Kill, the
Five Lesbian Brothers’ The Secretaries, Queen Latifah’s butch bank robber
in the film Set it Off, and Staceyann Chin’s “Dykepoem,” which begins with
the line “I killed a man today,” represent some of the more brazen members
of this new generation of deadly dykes.10 The most important and influen-
tial revenge fantasy penned during this period is DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan:
Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.

Hothead: The Zine

“Tell us,” asks an unidentified interlocutor in the inaugural issue of DiMas-

sa’s zine, “how does one become a homicidal lesbian terrorist?” To which
the character replies, “How does one not, you asshole?!”11 Similar to tradi-
tional comics, Hothead begins with a creation myth, but it is immediately
apparent that this protagonist—­a tattooed, mullet-­sporting rogue—­bears
no resemblance to the anatomically exaggerated, bikini-­clad mistresses of
the Marvel and D.C. pantheons. DiMassa’s zine recounts how a relatively
well-­adjusted lesbian snaps one day while watching television. Annoyed by
images of graphic violence against women, degrading racist caricatures, and
homophobic stereotypes, she switches from channel to channel, from sit-
coms to the news to commercials, but the messages are the same. She begins
to succumb to the propaganda blasting from the boob tube and is on the
verge of complete indoctrination when, just in the nick of time, a shadowy
figure emerges from her psyche. Personality #2 urges the young woman to
resist the “constant onslaught of white heterosexism,” which she does by
grabbing an ax and smashing the television.12 Convinced by her psychic
146 Acts of Gaiety

Hothead Paisan:
Homicidal Lesbian
Terrorist. (Image
courtesy of Diane
DiMassa.)

projection that she must eliminate not only “the machine” but “the man” as
well, Hothead ventures maniacally into the world hell-­bent on vengeance,
packing a small arsenal and an enormously overinflated ego. Like the In-
credible Hulk, her actions are swift, her decisions are final, and her judg-
ment is impaired by a rage of epic proportions.
Hothead’s “terrorist drag” consists of Doc Martins and a leather jacket,
which enables her to hide in plain sight as she looks just like every other
punk dyke in any major metropolitan area.13 She has a faithful sidekick,
Chicken the Cat; a sage mentor, Roz Goldhart; and a signature weapon, the
labrys, which she wears around her neck and wields without remorse, glee-
 Terrorist Acts 147

Hothead Paisan
reading to her friend
Roz from Valerie
Solanas’s SCUM
Manifesto. (Image
courtesy of Diane
DiMassa.)

fully castrating offending members of the opposite sex.14 Hothead’s pals try
to keep her from going over the edge, but their efforts are futile. Chicken the
Cat practices yoga, deep meditation, and other healing rituals. She has been
known to hide Hothead’s coffee, to turn off the television before she blitzes
out, and to hightail it before things really get out of hand. Roz is a recovering
hothead, a former radical lesbian separatist, whose physical blindness serves
as a metaphor for the emotional blindness caused by the unchecked rage of
her youth.15 She tries unsuccessfully to persuade Hothead that change is
best achieved through nonviolent resistance and a commitment to institu-
tional and social reform, not by trying to resurrect the matriarchy through a
program of male genocide. Roz’s liberal humanism stands in stark contrast
to Hothead’s militant feminism, and the zine offers a nuanced deliberation
on the ethical and philosophical differences between these modes of politi-
148 Acts of Gaiety

cal activism. Hothead is constitutionally incapable of engaging in peaceful

forms of protest. When she marches, it is straight over someone’s face; when
she strikes, it is in the dark with a six-­inch blade. Taking her cue from So-
lanas’s SCUM Manifesto—­in one issue of the zine DiMassa depicts Hothead
reading to Roz from it—­this lesbian terrorist is out to destroy the system,
not attain certain rights within it. Like Valerie, she prefers anarchy and crim-
inal antics to polite displays of civil disobedience.
Hothead pushes the envelope, even for a subcultural mode of expression
like zines, the medium of choice for disaffected do-­it-­yourselfers. Stephen
Duncombe describes zinesters as “everyday oddballs  .  .  . speaking plain-
ly about themselves and our society with an honest sincerity, a revealing
intimacy, and a healthy ‘fuck you’ to sanctioned authority” who write not
for fame or recognition but to communicate their views to “an audience of
like-­minded misfits.”16 Produced largely by and for members of the white
middle class—­by people who are not without certain privileges but who
feel at odds with mainstream society—­zines are often dedicated to topics
that are ignored or mocked by the arbiters of culture. In the 1930s science
fiction fans created zines to share their love of a genre deemed low-­brow
by literature aficionados. In the 1970s punks produced zines to celebrate
an underground music scene ignored by the rock ’n’ roll establishment. In
the 1980s and 1990s, zine production grew by leaps and bounds, especially
among riot grrrls and punk dykes like DiMassa and Animal.
Zines are characterized by handwritten text and graphics on found or
“borrowed” paper haphazardly assembled and cheaply reproduced. Authors
often make no attempt to number pages or correct spelling and grammar
mistakes—­as little attention is paid to bourgeois concerns such as order,
etiquette, and “proper” form. Like the performative textual productions of
the dadaists, surrealists, and futurists, zines typically juxtapose text and im-
ages in ways that are meant to be arresting, if not shocking, to the uniniti-
ated. Punk dyke and riot grrrl zines draw on these sources but they also
find inspiration in feminist and gay periodicals such as The Ladder (1956–­
70), The Furies (1972–­73), On Our Backs (1984–­2006), and Lesbian News
(1974–­present). These zinelike publications feature art, creative writing,
personal reflections, erotica, and critical theory. Riot grrrl zines combine
music reviews, artist profiles, interviews with bands, and graphic art along-
side articles on sexual harassment, rape, abortion rights, body image, eating
disorders, and relationships. They offer critiques of normative beauty stan-
dards and challenge acceptable modes of female behavior.
 Terrorist Acts 149

Zinesters tend to be employed in what Duncombe calls “the grim new

economy of service, temporary and ‘flexible’ work.”17 A “protest against the
drudgery of working for another’s profit,” zines produce and circulate with-
in “a culture whose value isn’t calculated as profit and loss on ruled ledger
papers, but is assembled in the margins.”18 DiMassa was unemployed and
in rehab for alcohol and drug addiction when she created Hothead. She
began drawing the character, at her therapist’s suggestion, as a way to chan-
nel her anger. DiMassa’s then partner, Stacey Sheehan, encouraged her to
produce a zine from the material she was generating in recovery. Together
they published Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist quarterly and
sold it for three dollars an issue at a handful of independent feminist and
gay bookstores across the country. They called their outfit Giant Ass Pub-
lishing. From 1991 to 1996 Hothead grew in circulation and consistently
sold out in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. Despite Hot-
head’s popularity, DiMassa and Sheehan have profited very little from the
zine. Not exactly suited for syndication due to its graphic violence and post-­
politically-­correct satirical tone, Hothead has not achieved the success or
longevity of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, a rare example of a
lesbian subcultural success story.19 Hothead was, however, anthologized by
Cleis Press, which “publishes provocative, intelligent books in the areas of
sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, erotica . . . and human rights,” in three
different volumes, thus making the lesbian terrorist readily available not
only to urban guerrilla gals but also rural dykes and budding suburban riot
grrrls at some mainstream bookstores and, of course, on the Internet.20
Due to its explicit content, DiMassa’s zine has generated a fair amount
of controversy among both straights and queers who fail to appreciate its
irony and dark humor. She has received hate mail from members of the re-
ligious right and has had bricks thrown through her windows by “feminists
chanting anti-­violence slogans.”21 One issue in particular (number 8) led to
charges of obscenity and censorship by Canadian customs.22 In this episode
a woman, Roberta, is gang-­raped by three men. Despite overwhelming evi-
dence, the judge dismisses the case and fines Roberta five hundred dollars
for being a temptress. Infuriated by the decision, Hothead takes it upon her-
self to settle the score. In an act of retributive justice, she kidnaps the perpe-
trators, takes them to a deserted warehouse she dubs “The Misogynists’ Hall
of Fame,” and tortures them. Hothead performs a “reverse rape” on two of
the men, and the third she castrates using a guillotine.
The guillotine is a reference to the French Revolution, where terrorism
150 Acts of Gaiety

had, at least at the outset “a decidedly positive connotation.”23 This anach-

ronistic trope calls to mind disavowed political projects and obsolete struc-
tures of feeling. DiMassa’s zine cites the past to incite the present, indexing
failed programs for social change from the 1970s but also from the 1790s.
In her defense of Roberta, Hothead assumes the role of the Robespierre of
lesbian feminism (if she had a battle cry, it would be “off with their [little]
heads”).24 By making the avenger an avatar of both the French Revolution
and second-­wave lesbian feminism, DiMassa urges us to confront on an in-
tellectual and emotional register what has been forgotten, obscured, aban-
doned, and erased in dominant historical accounts of liberation movements.
Hothead’s attachment to discredited and outmoded ideals exemplifies her
commitment to an affective and dissident potentiality that the past cannot
contain. The lost possibilities of unfinished and incomplete revolutions
serve as touchstones, as ways for Hothead to think beyond the pragmatic
present and to imagine different structures of being and belonging. They
also serve as reminders that Hothead is the successor to spirited radicals
whose democratic and egalitarian desires devolved into despotism.25
DiMassa’s zine embodies both a celebration of the revolutionary impuls-
es that gave rise to the French Revolution and an astute critique of terrorism
as a means of effecting social change. It dramatizes the danger Hothead fac-
es, namely, that the struggle for justice will consume her, just as it did Robe-
spierre, and it reminds us that similar fates have befallen other homicidal
lesbian terrorists, including Solanas, whose image and influence pepper the
pages of this zine. In this way, DiMassa underscores the fact that there is
no simple or universally agreed upon definition of terrorism. Nor can there
be, according to Walter Laqueur, as “there is not one terrorism, but a vari-
ety of terrorisms and what is true of one does not necessarily apply to the
others.”26 Terrorism has been practiced by liberal and conservative political
organizations, religious affiliations and nationalistic groups, and resistance
movements and state institutions. Though difficult to define, there are two
generally agreed upon aspects of terrorism. The first is that it involves the
systematic use of violence and/or the threat of violence to induce a state of
fear in a population in order to achieve a particular political objective. The
second is that it is inherently theatrical.
Political violence has become increasingly theatricalized since the ad-
vent of television, rising to new heights during 9/11. Terrorist acts are media
events. Intensely dramatic, and oftentimes tragic, the bombings, hijackings,
kidnappings, and assassinations that constitute terrorist acts transform un-
 Terrorist Acts 151

wary publics into hostages of bloody spectacles. While seemingly random,

terrorist attacks are carefully plotted, meticulously executed, and designed
to deliver the greatest shock value. In order to attract and maintain the wid-
est possible audience, terrorists must generate publicity and sustain me-
dia interest, which results in increasingly violent, high-­profile antics. Many
postmodern theorists have gone past the level of analogy, conceptually
conflating modern media-­dependent terrorism with theater. Herb Blau has
suggested that terrorism is theater, as has Jean Baudrillard, who calls these
spectacles “our theatre of Cruelty.”27 Not only is this polemical posturing
wrong, it is irresponsible, amounting to what Jean-­François Lyotard called
theoretical terror.28 As Anthony Kubiak notes, “[T]errorism may be designed
as theatre . . . it may be simulation, a hyperreality,” but “it is not theatre.”29
Maintaining the distinction is important if we are to have any hope of creat-
ing and sustaining a response to political violence.
Hothead Paisan engages in the theatrics of lesbian terrorism. What dis-
tinguishes her fictional rampages from real violence, according to DiMassa,
is that she “acts out the fantasies that we would never really carry out our-
selves, even though we’re thinking them.”30 Similar to the terrorist spec-
tacles in Western theater, Hothead’s violence offers a cathartic release for its
spectators, a way for lesbians to purge their outrage and sadness at social
injustice in a productive and salutary way, “without getting injured.”31 As
a comedy of terrors, Hothead enables us to laugh at oppression, but it does
not spare the protagonist (or audiences) from the suffering political change
entails. Nor does it liberate us from the ethical quandaries implicit in these
imaginings. DiMassa captures the joy Hothead experiences each time she
saves a woman from danger, as well as the pain and alienation her life as
a terrorist entails. The zine highlights the affective dialectic between hope
and despair that animates all social activists. Hope compels disaffected radi-
cals to act out against individuals and institutions, and desperation incites
them to disrupt and destroy corrupt systems and the humans who profit
from them. Hothead underscores the fact that terrorists, however we feel
about them, are, in the words of John Orr and Dragan Klaić, the “ultimate
utopians,” the “last believers in dreams no one wants to take seriously any
longer.”32 A walking anachronism, Hothead wants to be a revolutionary in
a country that no longer believes in revolution. She has lost faith not in
feminism or gay liberation but in these movements’ ability to effect social
change.
What is radical about the zine is not its advocacy of political extremism
152 Acts of Gaiety

but its acknowledgment of Hothead’s complicity in the affective economy

of terror. By recognizing her participation in the normalization of violence,
DiMassa disrupts the dichotomous logic that produces troubling binaries:
revolutionary/terrorist, patriot/traitor, radical/conservative, regress/prog-
ress. DiMassa’s active connivance of a convivial and productive relationship
between queerness and terrorism is what makes the zine a potentially pow-
erful and effective antidote to homonationalism.

Re-­enlisting Hothead Paisan

DiMassa retired Hothead Paisan in 1996, but the zine’s eponymous paladin
would not rest for very long. In 2001 the United States suffered a devastat-
ing series of attacks at home and abroad, which prompted then president
George W. Bush to declare a War on Terror, perhaps the most egregious of
his many malapropisms—­as if we were battling not the forces of fear but
fear itself.33 In the period leading up to and during the war, a series of forces
(including carefully choreographed strikes by cellular networks of suicide
bombers, a resurgence of religious fanaticism, and neoliberal socioeconomic
policies) worked to align terrorism with Islamic jihad and Muslim extrem-
ists. Bush claimed that people were either with America or against it in the
fight for freedom. Criticizing or questioning the war was cast as sympathiz-
ing with the mujahideen, which Bush suggested was itself a terrorist act.
These geopolitical events and rhetorical maneuvers effectively disarticulated
terrorism from its grounding in the revolutionary struggle for liberation that
it had come to epitomize not only for lesbian feminists like DiMassa but for
generations of political radicals.
The experience of 9/11 scared many queers straight and engendered a
period of fervent homonationalism from which we have yet to recover. A
number of gays and lesbians lost their lives and loved ones in the attacks
and subsequent counterinsurgency. President Bush’s polarizing rhetoric of
“us versus them” allied American victims, irrespective of their sexuality, and
his insistence on forging a united front made dissenting from this form of
“binary terror” nigh impossible.34 Government officials, including conser-
vative Republicans, publicly acknowledged “gay heroes” who died in service
to their country, such as New York fire chaplain Father Mychal Judge, who
was inside the World Trade Center, and United Airlines passenger Mark
Bingham, who helped divert one of the hijacked planes before it could reach
 Terrorist Acts 153

its target. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld justified the War on
Terror, in part, by citing a moral obligation to liberate women and gays op-
pressed by Islamic rule. These extenuating circumstances have contributed
to the lack of LGBT opposition to the War on Terror. This silence has been
compounded by the fact that national organizations such as NGLTF and
HRC have elected not to articulate an official position on the war. Instead,
they worked to take advantage of the shortage of qualified service personnel
to staff the fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan as grounds for the repeal of DADT.
Given the post-­9/11 political climate, it did not take much to coax Hot-
head out of retirement. Shortly after her return, an interviewer for Bitch
magazine asked DiMassa, “[W]hat happens to the terrorist part of Hothead’s
name, now that terrorism has acquired such an emotional payload?” “It was
mine first!” the defiant artist proclaimed, “I’m not changing it.”35 DiMassa’s
nostalgic insistence on an outmoded form of radical feminist terrorism en-
courages us to see the term as a complex and highly contested construction
with a long and complicated history. This stance troubles the rigid distinc-
tion the Bush administration sought to naturalize between war (legitimate
violence committed by sovereign states) and terrorism (acts of aggression
enacted by illegitimate entities). In redirecting our attention to the past, Di-
Massa reminds us that the modern origins of terrorism are imbricated with
revolutionary impulses and democratic ideals while simultaneously privi-
leging the role of lesbians in any survey of terrorist taxonomies.
In “’68 or Something,” Lauren Berlant asks, “[H]ow do we secure the im-
portance of transformational, radical openness and departures from the past
for our languages and practices and politics in a time when revolutionary
projects are so widely and effectively dismissed?”36 How do we counter at-
tempts, by forces on both the left and the right, to frame liberation struggles
as historical, as finished, over, and done? How do we work against narratives
that frame “that ‘revolution’ with a black edge, an edge that has become a
bar” to reanimating progressive thought and action?37 Berlant suggests that
the Left is hamstrung by fear, fear “of repeating the definitional exclusions,
violences, and imaginative lapses” of liberation movements since 1968, and
in particular the fear of rehearsing their “imperialist, racist, heterosexist,
class-­based, culture bound, and overly optimistic parochialism.”38 It is not
simply the fear of failure that paralyzes us, however; it is also the threat of
shame, the shame of being rearward or nostalgic, of being caught in the act
of feeling and doing things whose time, allegedly, has passed. Hope and the
belief in revolution are naive attachments we postmodernists have suppos-
154 Acts of Gaiety

edly outgrown. Berlant alludes to this when she insists upon “the necessity
of preserving, against all shame, a demanding question of revolution itself, a
question about utopia that keeps pushing its way through a field of failed as-
pirations, like a student at the back of the room who gets suddenly, violently,
tired of being invisible.”39 A transformational political practice requires a
willingness to risk embarrassment. It demands both courage and a certain
degree of shameless.
DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan is a dissident subject who shamelessly refuses
to learn the lessons of history, to relinquish utopian longings, or to cede
faith in revolutionary ideals. Her impassioned defense of lesbian terror-
ism in the wake of 9/11 made it seem as if she were reenlisting Hothead as
a rejoinder to both Bush’s imperialist warmongering and the homoliberal
queers who sought to capitalize on the crisis. As the War on Terror escalat-
ed, it became clear that we needed Hothead more than ever. A self-­professed
defender of the stigmatized, marginalized, and dispossessed, Hothead is a
radical lesbian feminist whose revolutionary aspirations are born out of a
long history of antiracist and anti-­imperialist struggles. As a white dyke, she
dislodges terrorism from its contemporary, racist, patriarchal, and oriental-
ist associations. Adopting a downwardly mobile punk aesthetic, Hothead
rejects “middle-­class tactics of polite persuasion in favour of in-­yer-­face pro-
letarianism.”40 Her last name is Paisan, which is Italian-American for “com-
patriot,” a greeting used among members of the Italian immigrant work-
ing class. This appellation signals Hothead’s affiliation with a working-­class
ethnic subculture, just as her first name identifies her as a militant lesbian
feminist. While the time was ripe for the zine’s return, DiMassa, much to the
dismay of her fans, did not resume publication. Instead, she granted another
artist the right to adapt Hothead Paisan as a musical. The creative and politi-
cal force behind the project was riot grrrl Animal Prufrock.41
The riot grrrl movement is a subcultural phenomenon that began in the
early 1990s amid accusations that feminism was dead, Anita Hill was a liar,
and all Gen Xers were apathetic slackers. While many sites played a role
in the development of this genre, the origin of the term is typically traced
to an exchange between members of the band Bratmobile—­Jen Smith and
Allison Wolfe—­after the Mount Pleasant riots in 1991 in Washington, DC.
In response to the turmoil, Smith suggested that the two friends ought to
start a girl riot. Shortly thereafter Wolfe and Bratmobile’s Molly Neuman,
together with Kathleen Hanna and Toby Vail of Bikini Kill (a zine and later a
band), collaborated on a zine called Riot Grrrl. The term grrrl first appeared,
 Terrorist Acts 155

however, in the pages of Vail’s fanzine Jigsaw (1988–­) when she called for a
“Revolution Grrrl Style Now.”
Grrrl features a triple r to give girl a growling, guttural force and reclaim
a diminutive and derogatory term for females. Equally interesting is the use
of riot as both a compound noun and an adjective. Like riot gear and riot
police, these riot grrrls are prepared for battle. The term also encodes other,
more archaic meanings of riot, specifically a flamboyant or theatrical display
(as in a riot of color in the participants’ clothes and hair), an unbridled
outbreak of emotion (as in a riot of laughter that erupts unexpectedly), a
moment of uproarious hilarity, and a mood of unrestrained revelry. To riot is
to disturb the peace. Like the lesbian feminist zaps examined earlier in this
book, riot grrrl actions blur the distinction between politics and play, re-
bellion and recreation. Creating disturbances through dalliances, ones that
are as redolent of fury as they are of frivolity, rioting is an act of gaiety by
another name.
An important and highly visible front of third-­ wave feminism, riot
grrrls rejected women’s marginalized status in the alternative music scene
by forming their own garage bands and fanzines to promote them. Animal
Prufrock, whose desire to study musical theater in college was thwarted by
her department’s misogyny and homophobia, teamed up with a classmate
to form the duo Bitch and Animal (1995–­2004).42 This group, along with
Tribe 8, Sleater-­Kinney, Le Tigre, and the Butchies, constitute the most radi-
cal element of the riot grrrl movement. As Judith Halberstam has noted, this
“new wave of dyke subcultures” draws on two radically divergent strands of
1970s music, British punk and women’s folk.43 Punk is an anarchic, aggres-
sive, and highly stylized mode of revolt, and queer punk, or queercore, as
it is often called, delivers a potent critique of hetero-­and homonormativity.
Women’s folk music, though typically associated with acoustic guitars and
ballads, includes a hard-­edged fringe comprised of angry dykes shouting
confrontational lyrics over their electric guitars. Infusing the rogue aesthet-
ics of punk with a feminist consciousness, bands like Bitch and Animal op-
pose the hegemony of the music industry and the mainstreaming of gay and
lesbian culture.
Bitch and Animal see themselves as heirs to the tradition of cultural
feminism that paved the way for riot grrrls, and like their predecessors, they
have tried (sometimes succeeding, though often failing) to ameliorate the
classism and racial exclusivity that haunt the women’s music scene. The
duo’s “Pussy Manifesto,” a secret track on their self-­published debut album,
156 Acts of Gaiety

What’s That Smell?, and their collaboration with June Millington of Fanny,
a pathbreaking women’s rock band in the 1970s, on their third album, Sour
Juice and Rhyme (2003), exemplify the lesbian feminist ethic of generational
continuity that rejects “the Oedipal imperative to overthrow the old and
bring on the new.”44 This ethic is reflected in Animal’s direction of a mul-
tigenerational, multicultural cast for the show. Animal played Hothead op-
posite her then lover Susan Powter (Personality #2). Ani Difranco starred
as Chicken the Cat; Rhiannon, known for her jazz inflected, body-­based
vocal improvisations, as well as her work in the theater, took on the role of
Roz; Kate Wolf appeared as Daphne, Hothead’s ambiguously gendered love
interest; Suhir Blackeagle played the protagonist’s friend and former lover
Sharquee, a prostitute and witch; and Edie Klecka performed the role of
Hothead’s inner light, Lampy. The musical also featured a chorus, or, as Ani-
mal dubbed it, a “Whorechestra,” with Toshi Reagon, Alyson Palmer, Julie
Wolf (twin sister of Kate), Jami Sieber (a vocalist who plays a mean electric
cello), and Debi Buzil (a yoga teacher and chanter).45
Riot grrrls’ amateur aesthetic is reflected in the fact that Animal had
never written or directed a musical when she set about adapting Hothead
Paisan. Musical theater, while typically seen as a cultural haven for gay men,
has long served as a source of pleasure and power for lesbian spectators,
according to Stacy Wolf, because it “features women as neither passive ob-
jects of desire nor subjects of vilification.”46 Whereas most musical theater,
notes David Savran, is decidedly middle-­brow, indulges in blatant consum-
erism and is both financially and aesthetically unavailable to members of the
working class, Hothead the musical is unabashedly “no-­brow.”47 Animal’s
riot grrrl adaptation of Hothead combined the lesbian revenge fantasy struc-
ture of a comedy of terrors and the musical mettle of John Cameron Mitch-
ell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998), a rock opera about a botched sex
reassignment surgery that was developed at Squeezebox, a (now defunct)
punk drag club in New York. Created by and for disenfranchised dykes,
Animal’s Hothead rejects the commercial values of a neoliberal consumer
culture. Produced by and for dispossessed queers on a shoestring budget
with only four days of rehearsal, the musical was not intended as a slick
production or designed to reap exorbitant profits. The premier was a rough-­
and-­tumble debut plagued by missed cues, technical glitches, and a shoddy
sound system, none of which bothered a Michfest audience accustomed to
do-­it-­yourself (DIY) production values.
The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival serves as a textbook example of
 Terrorist Acts 157

the industrious spirit of cultural feminism and the DIY ethic that has al-
ways been an integral part of its activist aesthetic. For four decades feminist
folk singers, spoken-­word artists, dancers, drummers, and punk dykes have
played “The Land,” a 650-­acre compound in Hart, Michigan, that is trans-
formed each August into a gyno-­utopia built, staffed, and run collectively
by more than five thousand women.48 When Animal pitched the musical
to Michfest producer Lisa Vogel in the fall of 2003, the project was in its
infancy. She had a basic concept, a few songs, and an eager cast of friends.
Although Vogel had included plays in previous festivals, including the Five
Lesbian Brothers’ Brides of the Moon, she had never commissioned a musi-
cal. The time seemed right for Animal’s adaptation. “I think 2004 needs
Hothead,” Vogel told the Advocate. “Hothead’s fearless commentary and re-
lentless ‘fehmuhnist’ underpinning are smart, feminist, and fun. Michigan
will love it.”49
Vogel gave this interview in July, four weeks prior to the premier and just
a few months after the War on Terror took a grotesque turn with the revela-
tion of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison. Disturbing images of American
soldiers abusing the bodies and defiling the corpses of Iraqi nationals were
revealed to the American public by the television program 60 Minutes on
April 28, 2004, and by the New Yorker on April 30. Coverage of Abu Ghraib
dominated the news throughout the summer, and it included chilling details
about the role women and lesbians played in the maltreatment of detainees.
The picture of reservist Megan Ambuhl watching Private Lynndie England
drag a nearly nude man from his cell on a dog leash challenges conventional
wisdom about women, violence, and victimization, as do the photographs
of England forcing nude male detainees into suggestive sexual positions.
Many of these scenarios involve the simulation of homosexual acts, which
American soldiers believed would shame detainees into cooperating with
the United States. Specialist Sabrina Harman took most of the pictures. Like
England, she posed triumphantly with the bruised and lifeless bodies, flash-
ing a smile and giving a thumbs-­up. The hundreds of photographs Har-
man took of the rape, torture, and murder of prisoners provided damning
evidence in the prosecution and conviction of eleven American soldiers, as
did letters she wrote describing in detail the abuse—­letters addressed to the
woman she calls her wife.50
Although the events of Abu Ghraib coincided with the development and
production of Animal’s adaptation of Hothead Paisan, neither they nor the
War on Terror feature in the Michfest premier. When I look at these photo-
158 Acts of Gaiety

graphs, I can’t help but think of Hothead Paisan in her “Misogynists’ Hall
of Fame.” The context is different, absolutely, as are the motivations and
intended audience, but many of the violent tableaux staged in Abu Ghraib
are eerily similar to the fictional scenes of torture animating the Roberta
episode. While Animal, who is one of third-­wave feminism’s most outspo-
ken and controversial artists, is under no obligation to respond to the racist,
homophobic, and inhumane treatment of enemy combatants in a musical
theater piece, the notion that this riot grrrl would completely ignore these
events in a show about a homicidal lesbian terrorist is nothing if not curi-
ous. Even more vexing is the fact that Animal envisioned this project as the
spark that would reenergize the feminist movement. In a fund-­raising DVD
about the making of the musical, Animal states that her goal was “to ignite
something that is dead in this comatose land” and to “get women out of the
coma, back to shouting.”51
In her call to unleash the Furies and rile the Maenads of Michfest into
an ecastic man-­killing frenzy, Animal displays her homicidal lesbian terror-
ist leanings. While this riot grrrl is motivated by the same admirable, yet
naïve and self-­aggrandizing goal—­the eradication of the patriarchy—­as the
fictional Hothead Paisan, her rant lacks the crucial element of self-­parody
integral to DiMassa’s zine. As such, the artist risks collusion with the staid,
self-­serving agendas of homoliberalism and American exceptionalism. The
greatest political gesture, notes Judith Butler, “is not a grandiose act, it’s
not a narcissistic act,” in which one is “responsible for the entirety of the
world,” for one “cannot take responsibility alone. It is something taken with
others.” In order to forge modes of participation, communication, and de-
liberation that allow for a culturally diverse, democratic culture to exist in
all its contradictions and complexities, Butler asserts, we must “work to
foster understanding, without mandating unity,” and in order to do this, we
must position ourselves “in a vividly decentered way in a world with others,
who are their own centers.”52 In other words, we should not assume, as that
well-­meaning rogue Hothead Paisan mistakenly does, that our struggles are
the same struggles, that our pain is the same pain, or that our hopes for the
future are for the same hopes, or even for the same futures.
The zine mocks the ways in which Hothead is so self-­righteous, so sure
of herself and the validity of her mission, that she ignores Chicken and
Roz when they implore her to consider the collateral damage wrought by
her investments in a program of male genocide. Hothead fails to ask ques-
tions of the future or to pose the future as a question, with all of the care
and humility that such a question entails. Animal, like the comic crusader
 Terrorist Acts 159

she brings to life, appears to be acting on behalf of the women in the world
without consulting those women about whether they agree with or support
her activities. In her desire to foment a revolution and get the women back
to shouting (at what she does not specify), she advances an overly simplified
political program for revivifying lesbian feminism that she assumes others
embrace. As such, the musical serves as a cautionary tale about the trap-
pings of solidarity and how activism can morph from a desire for a particular
outcome into a disposition and a predetermined future. This slide into cer-
titude restages the follies of second-­wave feminism, and it risks complicity
with neoliberal assumptions about power, namely that one can will into
being a particular outcome or effect. In purporting to speak on behalf of the
entire Lesbian Nation, but not to the theater of war playing out just beyond
its borders, the musical dramatizes how exceptionalist discourses of queer
sexuality can conspire with political fervor and zealotry in the service of
empire.
Animal chose Michigan for the premier because the festival serves, in
her words, as a “cocoon in which women can be truthful about their rage.”53
Since the 1970s, Michfest has provided an occasion and outlet for women’s
anger. Like the labrys-­sporting, Solanas-­citing, separatist-­leaning Hothead
Paisan, Michfest keeps alive many of the archaic myths and symbols around
which lesbian feminist subcultures have constructed sexual identities, po-
litical affiliations, and counterpublics. Its geographic isolation and insular
environment provide a safe haven in which women can express themselves.
Designed to shelter females from the violence of the outside world, Michfest
takes place in a remote and idyllic landscape far removed from both Hot-
head’s gruesome theater of war and the grim realities of Abu Ghraib.
Whereas DiMassa’s zine acknowledges and explores the ways in which
feminist fury participates in an affective economy of terror, Animal’s adapta-
tion disavows it. Encouraging audiences to root for a fictional lesbian ter-
rorist without acknowledging the fact that real dykes are torturing real Iraqi
men in the name of freedom makes Hothead the musical party to troubling
forms of homonationalism. The Michfest production exemplifies how ter-
ror can arise from the very institutions and practices designed to insulate
individuals from it. The festival’s admission policy prohibits anyone who
is not a “womyn-­born womyn” from entering, which contributes, however
unintentionally, to the terrorizing of transgender subjects. Michfest’s policy
underscores the ways in which violence, and in particular liberal violence,
is perpetuated by those who deny culpability because they see themselves
as innocent victims outside the circuits of institutionalized power. In recent
160 Acts of Gaiety

years the women-­born women rule has been the subject of much contro-
versy, and a protest site, Camp Trans, has been created nearby. Animal, who
describes herself as a “cosmic tranny,” a transidentified person who eschews
surgery and hormones, not only supports the women-­only rule, but she
applauds Michfest as the only festival in the world “that’s filled with cunts.
You have to have a cunt to be there, it’s cunt energy. Yes, that is real. That is
beautiful. That needs to be honored. We need that in the world.”54 DiMassa,
too, defends Michfest’s homogendered, separatist policy. To view Michigan
as antitrans is to miss the point, she writes. It “is a gathering for ‘women
who have grown up female in our patriarchal society.’ . . . It is for women
who have been at the ass-­end of life here on The Planet of the Apes their
whole life. This usually does not apply to MTF’s.”55
While DiMassa publicly supports Michigan’s women-­born women pol-
icy, her zine advocates a more inclusive model of collectivity. One of the
central characters in the comic is Daphne, Hothead’s ambiguously gendered
love interest. Despite repeated and persistent requests from fans, DiMassa
refused to disclose the sexual identity of Daphne. As a lesbian terrorist, Hot-
head harbors many undertheorized, essentialist, and deeply problematic
ideas about gender and sexuality, but even she recognizes the tyranny of
gender binaries. Despite her mission to rid the world of men, Hothead’s vi-
sion of utopia is surprisingly inconsistent with a separatist ideology. In an
issue of the zine entitled “The World of Her Dreams,” DiMassa depicts a
planet populated by hermaphrodites and intersex folks, by “people with wil-
lies and breasts oh my!” This model of citizenship, Hothead notes, represent
an “infinitely more excellent form than a mere gender takeover.”56
The women-­born women rule made Michfest an imprudent location for
Hothead the musical, as it meant that no males could take part in the pro-
duction. Without men to stalk, torture, and annihilate, Hothead is cut off
from her primary identification as a homicidal lesbian terrorist. As much
as she hates men, without them she is nothing. Animal could have circum-
vented this limitation by casting women in male roles (risking the cliché
that lesbians are a bad copy of men) or she could have used dolls, pup-
pets, and effigies in place of male bodies. The latter would have enabled her
to perform much more graphic displays of violence than if she had used
human actors. Rather than portraying or heightening the sense of horror
and hilarity in DiMassa’s comedy of terrors, Animal opted to downplay the
violence altogether, focusing instead on Hothead’s sexual escapades, Roz’s
crone consciousness, and the cute and cuddly antics of Chicken the Cat. In
an interview promoting the Michfest production, Powter notes:
 Terrorist Acts 161

The musical is astoundingly made for the stage. It is romantic, and beauti-
ful, and wild, and crazy, and touching, and truthful. It fucking works. The
“Chicken” song that Animal wrote, sung with Ani . . . there isn’t a lesbian on
earth that isn’t going to love that song, because it’s a love song to their cats!
When Animal does Hothead, the audience is going to come out and want
more information about the truth of patriarchy.57

Disconnected from the forces that inspire lesbian revenge fantasies, namely,
men and the media, Hothead the musical is domesticated and defanged. In
the zine Hothead’s relationship with Chicken humanizes this terrorist and
complicates our understanding of her bloody killing sprees, but in the musi-
cal, the prominence given to the love songs between them, in some ways an
inevitable result of casting Ani DiFranco, the undeniable star of the show, as
the frisky feline, overshadows DiMassa’s principled exploration of violence,
torture, and social justice. While the zine makes sexuality central to an an-
tiracist and anti-­imperialist project, the musical, or at least the first act of
it, does not; it opts instead for a more parochial approach to dyke life. Like
George Coates’s production of Solanas’s Up Your Ass, Animal used music to
defuse her source text’s revolutionary message rather than capitalizing on it.
Instead of recruiting DiMassa’s zine to intervene in the War on Terror, the
production succumbs to the climate of disavowal and denial sweeping the
country, conscripting Hothead to the cause of homonationalism.
Some colleagues have asked me why I bother writing about a produc-
tion that I found disappointing when there are so many more provocative
and compelling acts of gaiety that I could have included in this book. Why
expend emotional and theoretical labor criticizing a production that was
poorly conceived and poorly executed by an artist whose work I admire?
The answer is that we must compose our histories of LGBT art and activism
not simply to archive the exploits of heroes and saints, icons and idols, but
also to record acts of insult and injury, carelessness, complicity and cow-
ardice, exclusion and injustice, acts that are embarrassing and shameful,
apolitical and racist, and that collude with state power, war machines, and
the devastating effects of globalization.
As Puar notes in Terrorist Assemblages, it is quite easy to point our fin-
gers at conservative queers and blame them for the sad state of LGBT poli-
tics, but it is more difficult, not to mention more painful, to acknowledge
that everyone, even the most radical among us, are accomplices in violent
and oppressive forms of homonationalism. While the trope of the homicidal
lesbian terrorist offers a provocative and compelling model for thinking
162 Acts of Gaiety

about the convivial relations between terror and queerness, it is not enough
to simply reenlist Hothead Paisan in the service of feminist or gay politi-
cal projects. In transforming DiMassa’s revenge fantasy into a sentimental
comedy, Animal commits character assassination. Her maladapted Hothead
Paisan calls into question the mantra that theater constitutes “the queerest
art” and musical theater the queerest of the queer.58 This riot grrrl produc-
tion repackages lesbian terrorism into a subcultural style, and it underscores
how easy it is for radical politics to devolve into a sartorial pursuit. Hothead
the musical shows that conservative queers are not the only proponents of
homonationalism; artists and activists in the cultural vanguard are equally
responsible for the remapping of terrorist identities and the evacuation of
history that this entails.
In completing only the first act of the musical and staging this work-­
in-­progress at Michfest, Animal was destined to fail, and fail spectacular-
ly she did. “Failing,” as Judith Halberstam argues in her recent book, “is
something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.”59 As I have
shown in every chapter of Acts of Gaiety, failure is for lesbians not simply an
expectation but an aesthetic and a way of life. Animal’s failure could have
been a source of embarrassment and humiliation, and perhaps it was as she
politely declined my repeated requests for an interview, but it also leads to a
kind of euphoric exposure of the contradictions of the Lesbian Nation and
American imperialism. By implication, it also reveals the precarity of queer
aspirations for citizenship and national belonging.
There are advantages to failing, observes Halberstam, and this is true for
both artists and audiences. Relieved of the pressures, limitations, and lesbo-
phobia of commercial theater, playmakers are free to create raw, renegade,
hilarious, and poignant productions that they would never be possible in
the terms established by mainstream theater and that are so much more
liberating than those afforded by the trite scenarios of success to which it
is conscripted. By conventional standards, most dyke dramas are doomed
to fail, and happily so. The failure of queer theater to reproduce normative
production values, plot structures, and moral standards is perhaps the clear-
est indication of its continued vitality. Spectators (and critics too) can use
the experience of failure to escape the exacting norms that discipline desires
and micromanage affective responses in the service of producing proper ho-
monormative subjects. In addition, scenes of failure enable us to confront
the consolidation of inequalities and the reinscription of social stratifica-
tions that reify rather than challenge the forces of homoliberalism.
5
Unnatural Acts
The Tragic Consequences of Homoliberalism in the
Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs

One of the fiercest and funniest comedies of terrors, The Secretaries, was
penned by the Five Lesbian Brothers, an irreverent troupe of sapphic satirists
who have made audiences squeal and squirm with polymorphously perverse,
politically incorrect, ribald sex comedies since 1989. Delighting spectators
with their gallantry and gallows humor, this theatrical troupe—­which con-
sists of Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, and
Lisa Kron—­wields a rapier wit and a mordant sensibility. These thespians
stage outlandish, shamelessly licentious performances rooted in the parodic
inversion of genres, cultural norms, and audience expectations. The collec-
tive honed its talent and temerity at the WOW Café in New York City’s East
Village, a site that has served as an incubator for the production of progres-
sive lesbian communities and radical artistic experimentation for over thirty
years. The Brothers’ choice of a fraternal moniker signals their interest in fu-
gitive forms of sociality that run roughshod over essentialist categories. Like
their WOW compatriots Split Britches, Holly Hughes, and Carmelita Tropi-
cana, the Brothers offers living proof that dykes do, in fact, have a funny bone
and feminist theater is much more than art for the “terminally earnest.”1
The troupe’s raison d’être “is to explore such dark themes as homopho-
bia and sexism with devastating humor and the occasional musical num-
ber.”2 Their plays delve deep into prurient interests, pathologized identities,
and stigmatized forms of erotic desire. As Brother Dibbell explains:

Lesbian feminism of the 1970s and the 1980s had placed a heavy emphasis
on “positive images of lesbians.” But by the late eighties the emphasis had

163
164 Acts of Gaiety

become a mandate. No good art can come of a mandate, so we incorrigibly

did the opposite of what we were told: we instinctively returned to the image
of the lesbian as pervert.3

Like Valerie Solanas’s Bongi Perez, the Brothers’ dramatis personae revel in
debauchery, degeneracy, and criminal intimacies, and they extol the virtue of
seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake, with little regard for conventional mo-
rality, familial piety, or juridical authority. By creating worlds where fantasies
and fetishes, no matter how bizarre, are given free rein, the troupe grants
audiences license to indulge in the offensive, indecent, and unmentionable
aspects of lesbian sexuality. Their performances—­episodically structured,
preposterously plotted farces with no concern for logic, laws of probability,
or coherent characterization—­feature profligate protagonists in ludicrous
situations involving complex erotic entanglements, murder, mayhem, cross-­
dressing, and flagrant nudity.
Known for their uproarious and seditious comedies, the Five Lesbian
Brothers shocked fans and critics alike when they returned from a seven-­
year hiatus in 2005 with a finely tuned tragedy, and not just any tragedy—­
the mother of all tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The adaptation stunned
Variety’s Mark Blankenship, who could not believe that the group that had
set “the gold standard for campy queer satire” had produced “what is almost
a conventional play.” He hailed the premier of Oedipus at Palm Springs as
a “breathtaking” drama situated at “that intersection of mythic symbolism
and realistic detail that . . . stabs at the heart.”4 The New York Times’ Charles
Isherwood echoed Blankenship’s incredulity (“surprising/ly” appears three
times in his review). The Brothers’ “serious inquiry into the unforeseen ex-
tremities of despair,” he marveled, “is a far cry from the loopy exercises in
scalpel-­sharp satire they once favored.” Isherwood applauded the troupe’s
decision to “forgo another romp in the familiar pastures of zany comedy to
aim at something more complex,” something “brave, funny and quite lov-
able.”5
Not everyone greeted the highly anticipated return of this beloved col-
lective with such accolades, however. The play struck a sour chord with
audiences who viewed the Brothers’ Oedipus as a tragic fall, a calculated
sacrifice of their aesthetic and political ideals in an effort to attract main-
stream audiences and garner greater commercial success. Jill Dolan, one of
the Brothers’ most ardent supporters, found the production “heavy-­handed
and full of perplexing bathos.”6 The troupe’s “desire to gain widespread rec-
 Unnatural Acts 165

ognition forced” it, in Dolan’s estimation, to make a number of disagreeable

compromises and unsavory concessions, including pandering to stereotypi-
cal depictions of tortured homosexuals, capitulating to sexual taboos, and
indulging in the theatrical conceit most deadly to lesbians, dramatic real-
ism. Another avid enthusiast, Hilton Als, dubbed Oedipus at Palm Springs
“disappointing” for similar reasons.7 In the New Yorker, he wrote, “It’s as if
the Brothers, in their bid to be taken seriously by the mainstream, had for-
gotten that life’s lessons can be addressed comedically, too—­which doesn’t
necessarily mean lightly.”8 Whereas Blankensmith and Isherwood lauded
the troupe’s tragic turn as a sign of maturation and progress, Dolan and Als
saw it as selling out. “With ‘Oedipus at Palm Springs,’ the latter lamented,
the Brothers have gone straight.”9
While the group’s adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy features out lesbian
actors playing out lesbian characters, it is indeed a “straight” play—­if by this
term we mean a well-­made, realist, nonmusical production intended for a
broad audience.10 Although this drama is technically speaking a “straight”
play, it is neither as narrow nor as normative as Dolan and Als would have us
believe. The Brothers may have been angling for a hit with Oedipus at Palm
Springs, but to suggest that this production succumbs to market pressures,
accedes to discriminatory social and artistic conventions, or perpetuates
homophobic caricatures solely, or even primarily, for financial gain consti-
tutes an act of hamartia, a missing of the mark. The players haven’t “gone
straight,” I argue here, but they are “playing it straight” in order to turn their
critical eye not on the oppressive forces of heteronormativity, as their earlier
work does, but on the more urgent problem of homonormativity.
In this drama, the troupe sets its sights on contemporary LGBT cul-
ture, delivering a caustic critique of the mainstreaming of the movement,
one that makes visible the emotional and political blind spots produced by
a privatized, depoliticized, and narrowly defined notion of gay life. Oedi-
pus at Palm Springs serves as a parable of the tragic consequences of ho-
moliberalism. The plot of this broodingly luminous play hinges on what
Freud called a cynical tendentious joke. If this dark comedy fails to deliver
the chortles and sidesplitting cackles audiences have come to expect from
Brothers’ productions, this is because it traffics in what Samuel Beckett
termed mirthless laughter—­laughter that laughs at that which is unhappy.
There is nothing unhappier, and thus riper for absurdist parody, Oedipus
suggests, than lesbians who have solemnly sworn to uphold the strictures
of heteroized society.
166 Acts of Gaiety

The Brothers’ Pre-­oedipal Phase

Given the date of the Brothers’ emergence on the American theater scene,
it is tempting to group them under the umbrella of queer performance, as
many critics have done. While this troupe’s rise to prominence may have
coincided with the queer turn, and while it may have benefited from this
cultural shift, these players have insisted on “dragging” their lesbian femi-
nist sensibility along with them. Their artistry, collaborative method of play
creation, and participatory forms of spectatorial engagement reflect their
indebtedness to the tradition of “women’s theater” of the 1970s and 1980s
and to the gender-­bending playmakers of troupes such as the Ridiculous
Theatrical Company and Hot Peaches, which mixed high art with pop cul-
ture, worked in a camp aesthetic, and explored homoerotic themes and
characters.
The influence of both early feminist and gay performance practices is
evident in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ inaugural production, Voyage to Lesbos
(1989). This show features four midwestern gals who try in vain to “cure”
their friend with benefits, Bonnie (Healey), of her homosexual tendencies
before she takes her wedding vows. It is set in the fictional town of Lesbos,
Illinois, in the early 1960s, in what Brother Kron calls “that vaguely de-
fined pre-­Stonewall, post-­Freudian period of American culture.”11 Inspired
by pop psychology and distorted media representations of lesbian desire,
the play explores, in the words of Brother Dibbell, “the warping effects of
internalized homophobia.”12 In Voyage to Lesbos, the characters labor, un-
successfully, to convince themselves, and each other, that marriage is every
girl’s dream. As one of the women, Mimi (Kron), sings, “Today is Bonnie’s
wedding day. But no one looks happy to me. Today is Bonnie’s wedding day,
but it looks more like a funeral to me.”13
Mimi’s words prove prophetic when the maid of honor, Evelyn (Davy),
who is infatuated with Bonnie, murders the groom, Bradley, just before he
is to walk down the aisle. In a parodic inversion of ritual protocol, it is the
groom, described at various moments in the play as “a good guy. Steady . . .
sweet . . . [with] a huge peter,” “a man who will suffice,” “a bastard,” and
“a rapist,” who becomes the sacrificial victim in an exchange between
women.14 In the Western dramatic tradition, weddings typically serve as
the resolution to comedies. Marriage marks both an end—­a conclusion to
the narrated chaos through the restoration of order—­and a beginning—­the
start of a new life and the promise of future generations that will be begat
 Unnatural Acts 167

on and after the honeymoon. Voyage to Lesbos exposes marriage as a theatri-

cal and sociocultural plot designed to domesticate desire, regulate intimacy,
and enforce normative social relations. The play asks us, in the words of
Peggy Phelan, “[H]ow can we change the world without first changing the
(marriage) plot? If ‘all the world’s a stage,’ how can we restage the world to
include the dramas of lesbian lives”?15
Similar themes run through The Secretaries (1993–­94).16 Heterosexual-
ity is depicted as a fatal attraction and marriage as a death sentence in the
troupe’s retelling of Euripides’ Bacchae. Set in a clerical pool of a lumber
company in the 1980s, this maenadic masterpiece chronicles the transfor-
mation of a mild-­mannered clerk, Patty (Dibbell), into a chainsaw-­wielding
serial killer. Patty’s coworkers (Kron, Angelos, and Davy), Slimfast-­swilling
sadists, coerce her into joining their secret cabal, a group whose sole pur-
pose is to ritually slaughter a male coworker at the mill once a month. The
sacrificial victim is a lumberjack who has made the mistake of falling in love
with one of the secretaries. The pitiful fool is given the ax (literally) on the
day when the secretaries get their periods, which the department manager,
Susan (Healey), has manipulated to be in synch, to maximize the killing
rage of her administrative minions.
This play offers an interesting spin on the lesbian comedy of terrors by
exploring the ways in which females are conditioned by society to be the
enforcers of sexism. Men may run the company and make the rules, but it
is Susan who subjects her employees to dehumanizing office policies that
govern their sexuality, physical appearance, and food intake. This work in-
vestigates the forces that motivate women to participate in their own sub-
ordination. While The Secretaries acknowledges patriarchal oppression, it is
more interested in internalized misogyny, in the ways women abuse other
women. “We are equitable in our parody,” notes Brother Kron, “skewering
homosexuals and feminism with the same vigor we apply to mainstream
culture.”17 “The genius of their work,” according to Alisa Solomon, “is that
the Brothers don’t use comedy to make a feminist, anti-­homophobic point
go down easy. The comedy is the point—­and so is the anxiety and terror.”18
No one is safe from the troupe’s stinging satires, least of all members of the
lesbian establishment.
Like The Secretaries, Brave Smiles  .  .  . Another Lesbian Tragedy (1992–­
93) investigates the fraught world of female relationships in a homosocial
milieu, in this case a girl’s boarding school. A parodic pastiche, this play
mines the storehouse of sapphic stereotypes from the theater (e.g., The Chil-
168 Acts of Gaiety

dren’s Hour), movies (e.g., Mädchen in Uniform), and literature (e.g., The
Well of Loneliness), exploiting tired tropes deployed in mainstream repre-
sentations of dyke life, including closeted schoolmarms, menacing butches,
and mythic, mannish lesbians, to name only a few. The action spans several
decades and multiple continents. Act I begins in the 1920s at the Tilue-­
Pussenheimer German academy for orphan girls where Miss Philips, the
pupils’ favorite teacher, hangs herself. This tragedy precipitates the closure
of the school and the scattering of the wayward girls.
Act II takes place in a French cabaret just after World War II. Two of the
orphans, reunited after many years apart, confess their love for one another.
Immediately after their confession, one of them is struck by a truck and
killed. The survivor becomes an alcoholic and moves to New York’s Bowery
district where she encounters another classmate from the academy. In the
midst of their reunion, the two women are accosted by an aggressive pan-
handler, and in self-­defense they stab him to death. The alcoholic hits the
bottle even harder after her friend is sentenced to the electric chair for mur-
der. She finally sobers up when she meets her last remaining schoolmate,
with whom she falls madly in love. On the verge of living happily ever after,
she is diagnosed with a brain tumor and dies. Such misfortune is the price
one pays, society tells us, for succumbing to the love that dare not speak its
name. “If,” explains Brother Healey, “the story of the lesbian is that she was
always doomed to suffer an unhappy life and then die a tragic death, then
we really wanted to pile it on” in Brave Smiles.19 The cumulative effect of so
much carnage, and in such absurd situations, is that it inspires audiences
“to crave some other outcome, not only in the play, but in life, too.”20 Brave
Smiles represents, in the words of the collective “what we love about being
Brothers and what we love about being lesbians: the tragedy of it all which
can be so bitingly and relentlessly funny sometimes.”21
The troupe’s fourth full-­length play, Brides of the Moon (1996–­97), dis-
rupts the assumption that the heterosexual marriage plot is a prerequisite for
theatrical comedy by staging sex far outside the boundaries of conventional
arrangements, proper positions, and prescribed locales. The drama’s sexual
scenarios are completely adrift from normative kinship arrangements and
the imperative to reproduce. A futuristic, intergalactic, interspecies farce,
Brides of the Moon depicts a group of female astronauts handpicked by the
government for a covert operation. The team’s leader is Mrs. Steve Powers
(Healey), a sixty-­something housewife savant who, in the 1950s, was forced
by misogynistic social structures to conceal her scientific genius. Progress
 Unnatural Acts 169

has enabled Mrs. Powers to come out of the closet with her intelligence,
and she is chosen to lead a quirky quartet to boldly go where no woman has
gone before, or at least that is what she’s made to believe by the space agency.
Mrs. Powers and her crew are dismayed to learn, sometime after blastoff,
that their top-­secret task is to provide conjugal recreation for male comrades
stationed on the moon and to populate the new colony with earthlings. An-
gry about being duped, the women abort the mission. They rebel by having
sex with each other, and they indulge in all sorts of queer couplings, includ-
ing bonking the space chimp riding with them in the rocket.
Brides of the Moon, like Brave Smiles and The Secretaries before it, debuted
at WOW Café then moved to the New York Theater Workshop (NYTW), an
off-­Broadway establishment that has nurtured many lesbian and gay art-
ists, including Tony Kushner, Jonathan Larson, and Doug Wright. While the
majority of WOW artists have positioned themselves, consciously and stra-
tegically, in opposition to mainstream theater—­avoiding anything (includ-
ing certain grants) that might impinge on their creative freedom and politi-
cal ideals—­the Brothers have actively courted not only a broader audience
base but the kinds of financial and emotional rewards crossover success can
bring.22 The troupe’s tagline reads “commercially viable yet enchantingly
homosexual.”23 Although WOW and NYTW are located on the same street
in the Village, the two theaters are worlds apart. When the Brothers perform
at WOW, it is like preaching to the converted (not to mention the perverted,
as Holly Hughes reminds us).24 The crowds consist primarily (though not
exclusively) of lesbians and feminists, many of whom are fellow artists and
friends; audiences, in other words, who speak the Brothers’ native tongue
and get the inside joke. The spectacular acts of gaiety performed by lesbi-
ans for lesbians about lesbians at WOW serve as what Diana Taylor calls
“vital acts of transfer,” carnal conduits for the embodied transmission of
knowledge, memory, and a shared sense of identity.25 Staging work at NYTW
exposes the group to a broader, more diverse audience, one comprised of a
loyal subscription base of fairly conventional white, middle-­class New York-
ers and an erudite coterie of avant-­garde aficionados whose political opin-
ions and aesthetic sensibilities are more progressive than they are radical.
Productions at NYTW are infinitely more likely to be reviewed by critics, be
nominated for awards, and make the transition to Broadway. As is the case
in any journey involving foreign travel, crossing the border, even when that
boundary is just a few blocks away, involves a certain degree of translation.
Brave Smiles and The Secretaries moved from WOW to NYTW with only
170 Acts of Gaiety

minimal changes to the script and the troupe’s poor aesthetic, but the the-
ater went to great lengths to explain to its audience that the plays were sat-
ires and intended to be funny. The artistic and administrative staff of NYTW
went so far as to state this explicitly in advertising material and the program
notes. The pedagogical component of the playbill seemed designed to foil
reactions that might upset heterosexual patrons or provoke unsuspecting
and unprepared clientele to storm down the aisles, demand their money
back, or worse, cancel their subscriptions. As Jill Dolan has observed, pack-
aging the Brothers in this way is a “form of discrimination—­why the need
to teach people about parody when it was being wielded, finally, by lesbi-
ans?”26 Kate Davy feels these caveats were, in some way, necessary because
“lesbian desire played out excessively as an oppositional strategy [is] lost
outside the context of WOW.”27
The Secretaries’ successful run at NYTW coupled with a glowing New
York Times review by Ben Brantley led to a special citation Obie Award. Hop-
ing for an even bigger critical and commercial hit with Brides of the Moon,
the Brothers consented to having the production “facelifted” (their term)
prior to the transfer to NYTW.28 Like Mickey Rourke and Jessica Lange,
Brides of the Moon underwent a few too many nips and tucks and was essen-
tially unrecognizable after the procedure. Alterations included upgrading
the sets, softening the satire, and replacing director Kate Stafford with Molly
D. Smith, the founder of Perseverance Theatre in Alaska, who had helped
launch Paula Vogel’s career.29 In his New York Times review of the enhanced
production at NYTW, Peter Marks described Brides of the Moon as a

two-­hour-­plus production, directed laboriously  .  .  . [and] loaded down

with the type of jokey ballast that spoofmeisters as shameless as Mel Brooks
would have jettisoned. The painfully, at times irritatingly unfunny comedy
is of the sort that depends on tired double-­entendres: there are multiple
jokes, for instance, at the expense of the planet Uranus.30

The facelift was, for all intents and purposes, a disaster. Discouraged by
their negative reviews and disillusioned by their failure to break through the
glass proscenium, yet again, the troupe decided to call it quits, at least for
a while. Like many talented lesbian playwrights, they are angry, bitter, and
more than a little resentful about their lack of success, especially compared
to that of gay male artists working in a similar aesthetic who have achieved
far greater recognition by both the mainstream and queer establishments.
 Unnatural Acts 171

During their seven-­year hiatus, some members of the collective worked

on solo performances and collaborative theater projects with other artists
while others tried their hand at film and television.31 Lisa Kron reached
new heights with two works she created: an exquisite monologue titled 2.5
Minute Ride and a remarkable full-­length play, Well. The former juxtaposes
a trip the artist took to Auschwitz with her father, a Holocaust survivor, and
her family’s annual vacation at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. 2.5
Minute Ride takes spectators on an emotional roller coaster that careens so
rapidly between horror and humor that the two become almost indistin-
guishable. Kron premiered this piece at the Public Theater, where it received
much critical acclaim, and a special citation Obie Award, and then embarked
on a regional theater tour. Well continues the author’s autobiographical od-
yssey, this time mining the maternal for content. This play, which Kron dubs
a “solo performance with other people in it,” explores chronic pain (stem-
ming from physical illness but also social diseases such as racism, misogyny,
and homophobia) in an effort to understand why some bodies, histories,
and injuries heal while others do not.32
When The Brothers reunited for a fifth full-­length collaboration, the
players did not yet know that Kron’s Well would make the transition from
the Public Theater in 2004 to Broadway (two years later).33 At the time,
they were still searching for a winning formula, so they looked to gay male
writers they admired for inspiration on how to best craft their play, which
would debut at NYTW rather than WOW Café. The promotional materi-
als for their production begin with the line “Love! Valour! Lesbians!”—­an
obvious reference to Terrence McNally’s Love! Valor! Compassion! (1994), a
play that made the leap from off-­Broadway to Broadway, won Tony Awards
for best play and best featured actor, and was made into a Hollywood film.34

The Brothers’ Oedipal Phase

Oedipus at Palm Springs is precisely the kind of moralizing tragedy that the
Brothers typically satirize, and this is initially what the troupe set out to do
to Sophocles’ torturous tale of woe. This was in the early to mid-­1990s, at
what would turn out to be the apex of the queer theater movement (Kush-
ner won the Pulitzer for Angels in America in 1993) and the zenith of a revi-
talized struggle for sexual liberation, both of which were integrally related
to the AIDS epidemic. The original title for the play was Oedipussy, and it
172 Acts of Gaiety

was set in a Greek diner called the House of Pan Kakés. This idea for a farce
never fully jelled, so the script was shelved. When the Brothers decided to
resurrect it a decade later, the artist and political landscape looked vastly dif-
ferent. Responding to changes in the zeitgeist and seeking to avoid another
Brides of the Moon, the group gave Oedipussy a complete overhaul. They en-
listed Leigh Silverman, the rising star who directed Well, and set off for Palm
Springs to make some magic.35 When their retreat was over, they emerged
with what was essentially a brand new play. The result was a comedy of
anguish so dark that it would leave audiences not only shaken but stirred.
Geography played an important role in the revised script. Palm Springs,
aka the L-­Spot, is a vacation mecca for lesbians, especially well-­to-­do white
ones. For five days in April, during Dinah Shore Week (so named for the
Ladies Professional Golf Association tournament she helped establish), this
resort community is home to one of the largest women’s circuit parties in
the country, if not the world. Soon after arriving in Palm Springs, the Broth-
ers decided that an exclusive lesbian oasis seemed a much more appropriate
locale than a greasy spoon for their adaptation. As Brother Healy explains,
“Oedipus deals with royalty, so we chose lesbians who make money” and
“move in the mainstream.”36 The idea of this was intriguing to the collec-
tive, adds Brother Dibbell, because “bourgeois lesbians” were “almost like
a foreign species to us.”37 They approached the topic from an ethnographic
standpoint: “I don’t understand you, and I want to. You’re in my tribe but
you’re so different from me.”38 The protagonists of Oedipus at Palm Springs
are members of the lesbian elite, and these chic sophisticates, with their
Saabs, six-­figure salaries, and private world of monied exclusion, bear little
resemblance to the orphans, alcoholics, and disaffected housewives who
populate the Brothers’ pre-­hiatus farces.
Oedipus at Palm Springs takes place at a posh women-­only resort in
Southern California. The play opens with a hotel manager, Joni (Davy),
pushing a cleaning cart. When this middle-­aged female with close-­cropped
gray hair steps from behind a stack of towels, she is completely naked, ex-
cept for sunglasses, a cell phone strapped around her waist, and a single
braid that extends to her butt and is tied with feathers. She jingles a large
set of keys as she moves from bungalow to bungalow dropping off welcome
baskets. A buzzer rings, interrupting her work flow. “Mother! Fuck!” she
exclaims, as she crosses the stage to an intercom. For the first time, we see
that the manager is blind.39
The buzzer announces the arrival of the first couple—­Con (Kron) and
 Unnatural Acts 173

Fran (Angelos)—­who come, the stage directions tell us, “with tons of bag-
gage.”40 They are struggling to rekindle their romance, which has suffered
since their birth of their son, Basil, almost four years ago. The problem is
biomom Fran, who does not feel amorous because she is still nursing. “It’s
like my breasts aren’t for sex,” she explains, “They’re for food.”41 Con, on the
other hand, is horny as a satyr, and she refuses to let lesbian bed death be the
death of her any longer. She issues Fran an ultimatum: sex by sundown on
Sunday, or else. The majority of the play’s comedic moments stem from Con’s
frustration and attempts at release, including a memorable scene involving
hot tub jets. Commitment, not passion, is the problem for the second couple,
ardent intergenerational lovers who have very different views on cohabita-
tion. The elder partner Prin (Dibbell), an old-­school butch with a long his-
tory of jumping ship when relationships get too intimate, has grown soft
with her new lover Terri (Healey), a sensitive and needy graduate student
who is mourning the death of her adoptive mother. Prin has planned the des-
ert outing to celebrate Terri’s birthday, and the surprise part of this party is
that she plans to pop the question. Although the two couples are old friends,
they rarely see each other. Fran’s too embarrassed to tell her dear buddy Prin
that she’s celibate, and Prin hasn’t spoken to Fran about her plans to tie the
knot. The mystical Joni foresees the inevitable tragedy that befalls the four
upper-­middle-­class white women when she performs a key reading for Terri,
who wants to know if she will ever find her birth mother.
The events are set into motion when Con and Fran present Terri with
her birthday gift during dinner at the Shame on the Moon restaurant. It is
a report from a private investigator disclosing the identity of Terri’s birth
mother, Laura Campbell, who turns out to be none other than her lover Prin
(aka, Princess, her childhood nickname). The pregnancy was the result of
a one-­night stand, the butch’s first and only sexual experience with a man
(she was in love with the guy’s girlfriend, of course). Prin, who opens the
envelope for the nervous Terri, initially tries to keep this horrifying revela-
tion to herself by pushing her paramour away and into the arms of another
woman at the dance club they attend after the meal. Terri takes the bait, or
so she makes everyone believe, which results in a nasty altercation back at
the resort ending with an intoxicated and distraught Prin punching Terri in
the mouth instead of popping the question.
Wounded and writhing in pain, Terri runs away, but not before she rous-
es Con and Fran, whose long-­overdue sexual reunion is interrupted by the
commotion. The couple mistakenly interprets their old friend’s mood swing
174 Acts of Gaiety

The blind resort manager, Joni (Babs Davy), in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedi-
pus at Palm Springs (New York Theatre Workshop, 2005) performs a key reading
for Terri (Peg Healey) as Prin (Dominique Dibbell), Fran (Maureen Angelos),
and Con (Lisa Kron) watch with a mixture of skepticism and amazement. (Pho-
tograph by Joan Marcus.)

as a case of cold feet, and they try to salvage the relationship by telling Terri
about the planned proposal. While the others are gone, Prin attempts to
drown her sorrows, first with alcohol and then by throwing herself into
the swimming pool. The pool, which has served during the entire play as
a metaphor for the maternal womb, provides neither harbor nor haven for
this wretch. Rescued by Joni, as she makes her morning cleaning rounds,
Prin is denied a watery tomb.
Terri returns later that morning. News of the aborted engagement trig-
gers her abandonment issues, and she begs Prin to take her back. When Prin
tells her that they can never see each other again, Terri has a breakdown.
“No. No.  .  .  . Nobody wants me. Nobody ever wanted me. Nobody ever
will,” she cries.42 The pain of Terri thinking the breakup is her fault because
she is unlovable is more than Prin can handle. She confesses to being Laura
Campbell and, in high melodramatic fashion, collapses on the ground, pros-
trating herself at the feet of Terri and pleading for forgiveness. The disclo-
 Unnatural Acts 175

sure causes Terri to recoil in horror. Fran and Con, who have witnessed the
entire spectacle, are equally revolted. They rush to Terri’s side to take her
away. She refuses to leave, however, until Prin tells the story of her birth. “I
would’ve kept you if I could,” she assures Terri. “You were better off with-
out me.”43 The disgust and shame Terri feels at this moment is complicated
by the tremendous relief she experiences at having found her birth mother
and by the comfort she takes in knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that
Prin loves her, wants her, and would do anything in her power to keep her.
Please stay, Prin entreats Terri, while grabbing her hand. “I can’t live without
you.”44 This time it is Terri who gives Prin away. “I can’t be your baby. Not
any more,” she tells her mother/lover. Finding solace in the arms of Con and
Fran, Terri leaves the stage, deserting Prin at the desert resort.
The sight of Prin reduced to such a state, ostracized and alienated by
her friends and family, disturbed many fans, who could not fathom why the
Brothers, who had spent the better part of their twenty-­year career together
lampooning limitations on sexual freedom, would place such stock in the in-
cest taboo and punish this character for transgressing a boundary she did not
even know she was breaching. The choice to depict Prin’s relationship with
Terri as erotically charged, mutually satisfying, and emotionally sustaining
only to end it in shame and sorrow simply because Prin turns out to be Terri’s
biological mother is what prompted some critics to charge the troupe with
having “gone straight.” “Under the Brother’s old logic,” notes Jill Dolan, “this
would be a minor detail. Here, it’s not only a deal breaker, but it’s horrible,
sinful, enough to leave Prin alone, degraded and exiled from her lesbian
community, a state to which the Brothers bring no irony and no comment.”45
I would agree with Dolan if the play ended with this scene, but, crucially, it
does not. An analysis of the final episode shows that the troupe does bring
irony to the situation and it does so as a way of commenting on the homolib-
eral dynamics that necessitate Prin’s humiliation and banishment.
Since their inception, the Brothers have refused to treat tragic situa-
tions tragically, and they do not waver from this position here. Exemplifying
Samuel Beckett’s dictate that “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” the
collective mines Prin’s horror for humor.46 The degradation and abandon-
ment of the protagonist takes place in the penultimate scene of the play, not
the finale. The performance continues, if only briefly. The stage directions
read, “The wind starts to blow. Joni enters and closes the doors.”47 She sits
beside Prin, motionless and silent. After a moment, Joni turns to face her.
“Didn’t see it coming, did you,” she asks Prin, who shakes her head as the
176 Acts of Gaiety

Prin (Dominique Dibbell) confesses to her lover Terri (Peg Healey) that she is
her birth mother, Laura Campbell, in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm
Springs. (Photograph by Joan Marcus.)

lights fade to black.48 The play ends with a joke, which brings irony to and
undermines the situation that precedes it. In fact, the punch line operates on
multiple registers of irony. This sarcastic comment is an example of verbal
irony, drawing attention to the fact that Prin could not see that Terri was her
child but Joni, who is blind, could see this clearly. It also highlights the situ-
ational irony: Prin said she would help Terri find her birth mother, and she
does, though not in the way she intended.
Joni’s joke addresses the spectator as well, highlighting the dramatic
irony that undergirds the play. That one of the characters in this oedipal
drama will turn out to be Terri’s mother is a given, though most (straight)
audiences are shocked to learn that it is Prin. “A lot of people don’t fig-
ure out which character is the mother until very late in the action,” notes
Brother Kron, “because lesbian sexuality isn’t enculturated. It’s not read.”49
Heterosexual spectators rule out Prin, Kron reasons, because she is so butch
she “gets read as a man,” and men cannot be mothers.50 Last, but certainly
not least, the final scene speaks directly to lesbian and gay audiences, who
are shocked, not by the revelation that Prin is Terri’s mother—­for this is
 Unnatural Acts 177

obvious enough—­but by the consequences of this disclosure, namely, that

Prin’s friends and family would find her actions not only “unnatural” but so
inexcusable that they would make her a pariah and an outcast. The irony of
this situation is that sexual transgression dooms Prin to a life of alienation
and sorrow but saves her from an even worse fate: marrying Terri and turn-
ing into Con and Fran. This paradox gets to the heart of the play’s last line,
which serves as what Freud calls a cynical tendentious joke.

“Mad Vow Disease”

Struck by the curious presence of jokes in our dreams, Freud deduced that
these phenomena are the products of our unconscious, whose involun-
tary processes work to discharge repressed energies. Jokes express wishes
blocked by the psyche’s censoring mechanisms, replacing something that
scares, saddens, or frustrates us with something that makes us laugh. The
pleasure they produce has less to do with the content of the joke, according
to Freud, than it does with the economy of psychic expenditure. He distin-
guished between two types of jokes: the nontendentious and the tenden-
tious. The former consist of relatively innocuous puns and plays on words.
The childlike pleasure of these experiences comes from the delight we take
in the chance analogies highlighted by their linguistic constructions. In con-
trast to nontendentious jokes, which have no hidden agenda and are ends in
themselves, tendentious jokes satisfy sexual and aggressive impulses, giving
playful expression to repressed urges and inhibited emotions in socially ac-
ceptable forms. The energy one would normally spend on self-­restraint is
discharged in laughter, which generates additional pleasure.
Freud identified two types of tendentious jokes: obscene and hostile.
The first exposes hidden, secret, and shameful thoughts whereas the second
reveals antagonistic or defensive feelings. Sometimes the intended target of
a tendentious joke is the person telling the story, in which case these con-
stitute a subgroup of hostile jokes that Freud termed cynical tendentious
jokes. A particularly favorable occasion for this type of humor “is presented
when the intended rebellious criticism is directed against the subject him-
self, or, to put it more cautiously, against someone in whom the subject
has a share—­a collective person, that is (the subject’s own nation, for in-
stance).”51 Freud offers examples of cynical tendentious jokes told by Jews
about Jewish characteristics, which serve, among other things, the function
178 Acts of Gaiety

of inoculating this persecuted group from the slurs, insults, and stereotypes
levied on them by outsiders. Oppressed minorities are well versed in this
type of humor, and the Brothers’ plays abound with lesbian characters play-
fully mocking lesbian culture.
Cynical tendentious jokes assail, through their victims, the modes of
affiliation and rituals of induction that bind individuals to society. As such,
they are frequently directed against institutions of morality and respectabil-
ity. Among the institutions these jokes are in the habit of attacking, none
is more foundational to society—­and hence more rigorously subjected to
moral regulations—­ than marriage. While matrimony authorizes carnal
pleasures, it also installs many obstacles to sexual fulfillment, not the least
of which is the competing presence of children. Marriage is not, as Freud
noted, an arrangement calculated to gratify partners sexually. The reason
there are so many cynical tendentious jokes about marriage is because it
makes people so very unhappy. “What these jokes whisper,” wrote Freud,
“may be said aloud: that the wishes and desires of men have a right to make
themselves acceptable alongside of exacting and ruthless morality.”52
While many gays and lesbians revel in their exclusion from marriage,
as Prin has done for years, increasing numbers are demanding to be sub-
jected to the same “exacting and ruthless morality” as heterosexuals are.
Con, Fran, and Terri are three such examples. By adopting the same rituals,
protocols, and sacraments of straight society, these characters are bound to
the structures and strictures that govern them, including the incest taboo.
Oedipus at Palm Springs features lesbians who act just like heterosexuals, not
to endorse same-­sex marriage or promote assimilation but to make visible,
through a series of cynical tendentious jokes, the emotional tunnel vision
and political blind spots produced by this blinkered vision of equality. Just
as The Secretaries investigates the furthest extremes of femininity, Oedipus
examines acute forms of homonormativity. This play does not condone the
abjection of Prin by her prudish, family-­values-­spouting friends any more
than The Secretaries sanctions the killing of male coworkers by PMS-­raging
clerks. By giving Joni and Prin the last laugh, the Brothers gives voice to a
host of hostile feelings about the adoption of heterosexual paradigms, the
regulation of intimacy this entails, and the fracturing of lesbian communi-
ties that results when “normal” gays distance themselves from “abnormal”
monsters like Prin, who fail, for whatever reason, to conform to increasingly
constrained forms of affective and sexual expression.
Throughout Acts of Gaiety, I have described these dynamics as hallmarks
 Unnatural Acts 179

of homoliberalism, which is best understood as a complex and shifting set of

alliances promoting the economic, political, and social enfranchisement of
certain, normative-­leaning gays at the expense of other, unassimilable sexu-
al minorities. Through the vehicle of a cynical tendentious joke, the Broth-
ers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs dramatizes the tragic consequences of homolib-
eralism, which, in this play, includes a privatized and depoliticized lesbian
culture rooted in domesticity and consumption, an uncritical celebration of
the nuclear family, a romantic idealization of biological reproduction, and
the enforcement of rigidly gendered sexual relationships.
The Five Lesbian Brothers have a long history of parodying hetero-­and
homonormative institutions, but Oedipus is the troupe’s first foray into the
world of same-­sex marriage and gay parenting. When the troupe went on
hiatus in 1997, gay marriage was not legal in any state, and only a handful
of municipalities and private institutions offered civil unions or domestic
partnership benefits. As I discussed in chapter two, it was passage of the De-
fense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996 that made marriage into the litmus
test for sexual freedom. The institutionalization of discrimination by the
federal government is primarily responsible for the outbreak of what come-
dian Kate Clinton calls “mad vow disease.” This condition, which had pre-
viously been “limited to wholesome, unimpeachable gay couples earnestly
seeking to take on the rights and responsibilities of marriage . . . jumped the
pen and crossed into the general population.”53 Mad vow disease is highly
communicable, warns Clinton, and the symptoms—­“frothing apocalypti-
cism, fractured reasoning, knee-­jerking, and involuntary eye rolling”—­can
change a progressive into a conservative faster than a bride can say “I do.”54
When the Five Lesbian Brothers reunited to write Oedipus, same-­sex mar-
riage had just become legal in Massachusetts (the first state to sanction it, in
2004). This landmark legislation unleashed a love bug that infested all but
the most remote outposts of the lesbian nation. Given the political climate
in which the women were writing, not to mention the geographic locale, it is
not surprising that their protagonists contracted a particularly virulent and
normalizing strand of mad vow disease.

Wedded to Normalcy

Con and Fran, both in their forties, have been together seventeen years
when the play opens, and it is clear that they love each other and their son
180 Acts of Gaiety

very much. They have both sacrificed a great deal for their relationship and
family. Fran gave up a lucrative business partnership with Prin to take a
desk job working nine-to-five so she could spend more time with her wife
and kid. When Con could not conceive a child, Fran reluctantly agreed
to have their baby. In sharp contrast to dykes and feminists in the 1970s,
like Valerie Solanas, who hailed reproductive technologies as a means of
liberating women from traditional female roles, Fran and Con use recent
medical advances to create their own lesbian nuclear family. The problem is
that when butch Fran became a biomom it short-­circuited her sexual moth-
erboard and transformed her into something of a femme. Having lost her
swagger, Fran does not feel amorous toward Con; she feels resentful. She
channels all of her sexual desire into motherly love for her son, which leaves
Con feeling both unattractive and abandoned. Neither couples counseling
nor sex therapy has helped one bit.
Con is jealous of her lover for giving birth, of baby Basil for getting all
of Fran’s attention, and of that magical bond she believes only reproductive
mothers and their children share. “They have this mystical connection,”
Con says, envious of Fran and Basil, “their special thing.”55 She reverts to
essentialist notions of maternity to make herself feel better. “It’s biology,”
Con tells herself. “You can’t get around it.”56 Fran does little to dispel her
partner’s sense of disconnection; in fact, when she’s angry at Con for making
her sacrifice her career, her body, and her butch bravado, she plays up the
alleged “mystical connection” with Basil. “I feel like he’s—­me,” Fran says
of the boy. “It’s like his shit is my shit. When he pukes it’s the same as my
puke.”57 In retaliation, Con further emasculates Fran by objectifying her
breasts, which have become quite voluptuous since giving birth. When Con
really wants to humiliate Fran, she not only comments on her partner’s rack
in public, she goes into great detail about lactation, thereby drawing atten-
tion to her very curvaceous and feminine figure.
When Con launches into this routine in front of Prin, Fran is mortified,
but this tactic backfires on Con when Prin, bored by all of the talk about
Fran’s breast milk, pops a nipple into her mouth to see for herself what all
the fuss is about. Fran not only lets Prin suckle her in the hot tub, but she
gets incredibly turned on (for the first time in years) by the experience of
being topped by her butch buddy in this way. This scene enrages Con, who
lays into Fran later that night when they are alone in their room. “Shut the
fuck up about my tits,” Fran finally snaps.
 Unnatural Acts 181

You don’t love my tits. You never even talked about my tits until we had Basil
and after that . . . that’s all I am to you. . . . Your tit obsession has nothing to
do with loving me or wanting me. It has everything to do with the fact that
you couldn’t get pregnant and can’t nurse Basil and you feel left out! You
hate my tits, you’re mad at my tits and you’re mad at me for having a baby—­
which I did for you because I love you—­and I’m tired of it. I’m sick of being
blamed for everything.58

Fran confesses to Con, “I never liked having tits. If I had my way I’d cut
them off to improve my golf swing.”59 “That’s sick,” a devastated Con re-
sponds. “That’s not true. That’s not the least bit true. You’re just saying those
things so you have an excuse not to fuck me.”60 Fran tells Con to go fuck
herself, which is what she has been doing for the last four years. This cou-
ple’s lack of intimacy represents the sexual barrenness of homonormativity,
a barrenness Terri reproduces when she rejects Prin at the end of the play.
Con and Fran have kept their sexual dysfunction a secret from Prin and
Terri by putting on the mask of a happy couple, in part because they are so
jealous of their friends’ passionate and public sex life. Hearing about Fran’s
mystical connection to Basil, and nothing about the pain this has caused
her or Con, makes Terri even more determined to find her birth mother.
Despite the fact that Terri had, in her own words, “a wonderful mother,”
Betty, who reared her with love, she has “this hole in [her] that nothing can
fill,” nothing, she believes, except finding the woman who birthed her. “I
need my mom. I need a mom who wanted me. I am lost,” she tells Prin. “I’m
lost and I’m all alone.” Caught up in the fantasy of the family romance, Terri
is obsessed with Con and Fran’s baby and what she believes is their picture
perfect life.
When Fran spills the beans about her marital troubles, after a few mar-
garitas, Prin is nonplussed. “I told you that kid was gonna fuck everything
up.”61 She tells her friends they need a little “phantom penis. . . . some butch/
femme sustaining energy. . . . a little testosterone in the relationship.”62 “It’s
not the dick,” Prin explains, “it’s the attitude.”63 Con tells Prin she refuses
“to take relationship advice from someone who thinks a lap dance is inti-
macy,” adding that she does not see “the point of being a lesbian if you’re
just aping some heterosexual paradigm.”64 What Con fails to see, because
she is in such a deep state of denial, is that butch/femme couples do not, in
the words of Sue-­Ellen Case, “impale themselves on the poles of sexual dif-
182 Acts of Gaiety

ference”; rather they “constantly seduce the sign system, through flirtation
and inconstancy into the light fondle of artifice.”65 Prin understands that the
subversive potential of the highly theatrical and deliberately self-­conscious
artifice of butch/femme role-­playing is its insistence on roles as roles. This
playful expression of an excess of genderedness unmasks the performative
nature of roles, which have their origin in social constructions rather than
nature, and fosters, through camp and irony, other options for sex and gen-
der identification. Fran and Con fail to see the role of biological mother
as a role, choosing instead to idealize it as some kind of natural, essential
function that cannot be replicated, copied, or shared. It is not the butch/
femme lovers Prin and Terri who are aping heterosexual paradigms, in other
words; it is Fran and Con. They are the unhappily married couple trapped
in a sexually unsatisfying monogamous relationship that they continue for
the sake of their child.
Basil is both a blessing and a curse (insofar as he has contributed to a
serious case of lesbian bed death), but neither of his mothers is capable
of saying this aloud, though clearly they both think it. In fact, the couple
goes to great lengths to deny that Basil is anything other than a gift. “Yeah,
me and Con we don’t fuck all the time like you guys,” Fran tells Prin. “But
there’s more to love than sex. Con, Basil, they make my life all worth it. I’m
not going to apologize for that.”66 Fran need not apologize for her lifestyle
choices, but she is clearly envious of and excited by Prin’s undomesticated
eroticism, which threatens her charade of conjugal bliss to its core. This is
why Fran goes to such great lengths to try to salvage Prin’s proposal. It is the
same reason why married people, even the ones who are utterly unhappy
(or especially the ones who are unhappy?), constantly harangue their single
friends into taking the plunge. This also explains why Fran is the cruelest
and least forgiving of Prin once the incest is revealed. The fact that Prin had
inappropriate sexual contact with another woman is not what bothers Fran.
What horrifies and repulses her is Prin’s lack of “proper” and “natural” ma-
ternal instincts, namely, that she gave up her baby for adoption, and, even
more troubling, that she did not recognize her long-­lost child when Terri
came into her life. For Prin to be this kind of parent, one of two things must
be true. Either “motherhood is overrated,” as Prin has always claimed, and
there is nothing inherently mystical or magical about it, or Prin is defective,
deficient, immoral, a monster. Having invested so much stock in the former,
Fran tells herself that it must be the latter. “A mother knows,” Fran chastises
Prin when the secret is revealed, “A mother always knows.”67
 Unnatural Acts 183

Fran must excise Prin from the communal fold lest the fantasy world of
domestic bliss she has constructed with Con and Basil unravel before her
eyes. This gesture constitutes an act of percepticide, Diana Taylor’s term for
the (voluntary or involuntary) self-­blinding effect trauma can have on in-
dividuals and communities. Although Taylor is speaking specifically about
military atrocities and spectacles of state violence, this provocative concept
can be applied to personal crises that render individuals “silent, deaf, and
blind.”68 “To see without being able to do, disempowers absolutely,” notes
Taylor. “But seeing, without admitting that one is seeing, further turns the
violence on oneself. Percepticide blinds, mains, kills through the senses.”69
Fran, Con, and Terri turn away from Prin rather than defy the normalizing
force of the incest taboo because they cannot or will not bear witness to the
events unfolding in front of them, as they call into question the contingent
foundation on which they have constructed their relationships. Rather than
face the truth—­namely, that the lives they’ve been living and values they’ve
been spouting are rooted in a fiction, the protagonists look away. This ges-
ture may insulate them from the horror and chaos of their immediate sur-
roundings, but it also undoes their sense of personal and communal cohe-
sion. Fran, Con, and Terri don’t simply turn away from Prin; they turn away
from the possibility of political and social alternatives.
The cynical tendentious joke at the end of Oedipus at Palm Springs—­
“Didn’t see it coming, did you?”—­draws attention to the act of percepticide.
We might say it is the antithesis of percepticide because the punch line
focuses our attention on the act rather than away from it. In so doing it in-
vites us to imagine a different response to the dramatic events than the one
Fran, Con, and Terri exhibit. Jokes, and the category of the ludic to which
they correspond, defamiliarize the familiar, demystify the exotic, and invert
the “natural” order of things so as to show us the arbitrariness of social
mores and the contingency of power structures. By enabling us to see the
constructedness of the prohibition that dooms Prin, Joni’s joke invites us
to challenge the rules, regulations, and taboos that govern erotic desire and
sexual conduct and to imagine alternative customs, traditions, and systems
in their place. Through this and other jokes, the Brothers identify opportu-
nities for transformative and substantive change, even in the face of seem-
ingly insurmountable obstacles and calcified modes of thinking.
As the surrealist André Breton observed, “There is nothing . . . that in-
telligent humor cannot resolve in gales of laughter, not even the void.”70
The cynical tendentious joke that concludes the Brothers’ Oedipus is not
184 Acts of Gaiety

particularly funny, and it certainly does not elicit gales of laughter. As Lou-
ise Kennedy of the Boston Globe said of the play, “It may be the saddest
comedy you’ll ever see.”71 Rather than provoking unbridled hilarity, as their
earlier satires do, this play injects a grave situation with a dose of what
Breton, drawing on Freud’s theorization of jokes, called “black humor,” a
term he coined in 1939. If humor is “the revenge of the pleasure principle
(attached to the superego) over the reality principle (attached to the ego),”
Breton wrote, then black humor is “a superior revolt of the mind.”72 Ironic,
macabre, and absurd, dark comedy represents “the mortal enemy of senti-
mentality,” and the laughter it generates constitutes “one of humanity’s most
sumptuous extravagances.”73
Samuel Beckett, the modernist master of black humor, suggests that the
more tendentious a joke is the less likely it is to induce laughter and the
more likely it is to provoke ululations, howling sounds, or shrill and word-
less laments. Beckett distinguishes between three types of ululations: bitter,
hollow, and mirthless. This taxonomy appears in Watt, the author’s fourth
novel, written during World War II and published in 1953 by Maurice Giro-
dias of Olympia Press (who would issue Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, a cynical
tendentious joke if there ever was one, fifteen years later). In Watt the oracu-
lar servant Arsene—­to whom Joni bears more than a passing resemblance—­
exclaims that

of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation,
only three I think need detain us. . . . The bitter laugh laughs at that which
is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which
is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But
the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout—­Haw!—­so. It is
the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the be-
holding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—­
silence please—­at that which is unhappy.74

Arsene’s nomenclature helps us to understand Prin’s response to Joni’s

cynical joke. Her wordless rejoinder (“she shakes her head”) is a mirthless
ululation. According to this prophetic custodian of men and minds, only
mirthless laughter is dianoetic, indicative of decisive insight. In the Poetics,
Aristotle includes dianoia as a central component of drama, following only
plot and character in terms of significance. A protagonist’s dianoia deter-
mines whether or not she will be able to discern the truth, and if so, how
she will react in the face of it.75
 Unnatural Acts 185

In Sophocles’ play, both Jocasta and Oedipus discern the truth, but only
the latter faces the void without flinching. Jocasta is actually the first to
piece together the incest plot, and she seems willing to continue with the
taboo relationship as long as it remains a secret (or perhaps in order to keep
it a secret). When it becomes apparent that neither she nor Tiresias can
dissuade Oedipus from seeking this knowledge, thereby ensuring that the
story will be made public, Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus, upon discovering
Jocasta’s body, stabs his eyes out with her brooch, then asks Creon to send
him into exile. In the Brothers’ adaptation, Prin is the only character (aside
from Joni, the Tiresias figure) to discern the truth—­the other characters
learn when she tells them her secret. Prin moves from avoidance of the
truth (pushing Terri into another’s arms) to denial (insisting that she did
not know), and, finally, to acceptance. “That’s my daughter!” she cries, as
“she lets out a yowl.”76 Prin’s dianoia enables her to bear witness to the truth
while the other characters look away in horror, in a gesture of percepticide.
When Freud says, “humour has in it a liberating element,” as well
as “something fine and elevating,” what he means is that laughter can be
therapeutic—­reparative, healing, cathartic—­insofar as it enables us to re-
cover from delusory happiness (in this case of homonormativity) and enter
into the lucidity of beholding things for what they are.77 Through a cyni-
cal tendentious joke, the Brothers make a dark comedy out of a perfectly
hopeless situation, transforming this tragedy into an absurdist farce and the
spectacle of Prin’s suffering and misfortune from a devastatingly negative
experience into something ridiculously sublime. When Prin sees her reality
for the absurd actuality it is, she laughs the mirthless laugh. This ululation
is an act of gaiety, an acknowledgment of the folly that is the world and an
embodiment of the courage that is required to persevere in spite of it. Prin
could not have accomplished this alone, as humor is an inherently social
phenomenon.

The Joke’s on Us

The fact that Oedipus at Palm Springs ends with a cynical tendentious joke
enacts the belief that these characters’ lives could be organized differently,
and it offers of a glimpse of what one alternative might look like. While Prin
has been abandoned by Con, Fran, and Terri, she is neither alone nor friend-
less at the end of the play, as Dolan suggests; she has Joni. While Joni may
not be the company Prin desires, she is company nonetheless. Joni neither
186 Acts of Gaiety

rejects nor judges Prin, as the other women do. It is she who takes Prin in
after the others have cast her out. Joni saves Prin’s life, fishing her out of the
pool into which she has thrown herself to drown her sorrows. By saving, I
do not mean in the existential sense, as in Joni giving Prin a reason to live,
for she does not; she rescues her from death. Joni exhibits little that qualifies
as comfort at Prin’s darkest hour, though she is physically present and emo-
tionally open to the protagonist. This is important because Joni—­the oldest
character in the play and the mother of a now deceased child—­actively es-
chews any kind of maternal role in her dealings with Prin. She’s less an earth
goddess, in other words, than a wizened old crone.
The reason Joni can foresee the tragic events that will transpire (while
the others cannot) is because she has a special kind of prescience that we
might call retro-­foresight. A relic from the 1970s, a more communal, less
commercial moment in lesbian history, Joni is the only character in the play
who has not embraced a neoliberal lifestyle, sacrificed her political ideals
for the personal benefits homonormativity affords, or ensconced herself in
a privatized sphere of domesticity divorced from material life and class poli-
tics. As such Joni offers insight into how we might move beyond the stul-
tifying pragmatism of queer hegemony. The shared intimacy between Prin
and Joni stands in sharp relief to the nuclear, biological model of kinship
championed by the other characters.
These two social outcasts—­Prin for knowing too little and Joni for
knowing too much—constitute a model of community formation that is
well known to sexual and social deviants, a family of choice. What we can
say about this arrangement is that it is not based on identity politics or any
kind of common experience, real or imagined, that the two share simply be-
cause they are women, lesbians, or mothers. Aside from exile, the two have
little in common. Prin is a swaggering lothario and a clannish urban capital-
ist. Joni is of indeterminate sexuality, reclusive, and an artist. Together they
represent an intentional community, one centered on kinship systems of
choice, on adoptive forms of relationality. The play does not proffer a uto-
pian vision of a new lesbian nation, a gynocentric paradise in which these
two outliers settle in together, start a pottery collective, and live happily ever
after. Prin’s and Joni’s prospects for survival seem bleak, indeed, but we get
the sense that they can go on and will go on. Like Beckett’s Gogo and Didi,
they will carve out some kind of life together from the wreckage, moment
by moment. No one would mistake this play’s conclusion for optimism, but
this act of gaiety does represent a kind of resolute cheerfulness in which the
characters and the audience can take pleasure.
 Unnatural Acts 187

This dark comedy brings to conceptual crisis contradictions of queer

kinships and national belonging as it begs further conversation about the
incommensurability of lesbian sexuality and fully enfranchised citizenship.
The play asks: what sacrifices does acceptance into the mainstream entail?
What types of concession does allegiance to the nation-­state demand? Oe-
dipus at Palm Springs questions marriage and domesticity as indices of po-
litical and social advancement. Rather than benchmarks for human liberty
and freedom, these phenomena are cast as antithetical to a transformational
polity. The demonization of Prin lays bare the false equivalencies of homo-
liberalism and LGBT equality while marking the constitutive limits of the
contemporary queer agenda. Fran’s rejection of Prin, and her retreat into a
puritanical attack on sexual pleasure shows that morality is not a discourse
articulately solely by a reactionary religious right mobilized around the pro-
motion of heteronormativity and proclaimed from a pulpit by fathers of the
church. In recent years, the LGBT movement has produced a congregation
of converts and a choir of moralizing queers who are all too happy to as-
sume the task of condemning and excommunicating the sinners among us.
Fran’s turning against her friend in this manner embodies a fundamental
tenet of neoliberalism: accumulation by dispossession. This lesbian mother
gains and secures access to social respectability by depriving a dyke who
gave her child up for adoption of her humanity. This devastating scene un-
derscores the ways in which homoliberalism reconciles desires and feelings
to the exacting demands of rational subject formation through a logic of
normalization that depicts assimilationists as “good” while castigating those
with deviant histories and aberrant inclinations as a “bad” and therefore
undeserving of rights and recognition. The profoundly antidemocratic ten-
dencies of homoliberalism are made explicit through Fran’s authoritarian,
hierarchical, and moralizing means of maintaining the status quo.
Gayle Rubin predicted in the early 1980s, around the time of the WOW
Café’s founding and just a few years before the Brothers formed their frater-
nity, that when homosexuals enter the “charmed circle” of legitimate sexual-
ity, gender conforming queers in normative kinship structures will become
the standard by which all other lesbians and gays are judged. Those who fail
to comply with or who dissent from this mold will be ostracized and penal-
ized.78 Like Joni’s prophecy, Rubin’s alarming prognostication has come true.
The reality for those left behind or cast outside the borders of the newly
queered nation—­a vast multitude of apparently dispensable people bereft
of sustaining networks and social safety nets—­is that there is little to be
gained from progress except alienation, humiliation, and despair. Obliged to
188 Acts of Gaiety

live among the abject underclass of a nation made a more perfect union by
its tacit tolerance of respectable homosexuals, Prin’s hopes for life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness evaporate before the violent logic and shallow
rhetoric of homoliberalism.
Rubin illustrates how “playing with” dominant categories of sexuality
and sexual identity by members of the “outer limits” can disrupt the very
premises on which these rubrics rely for their legitimization. In its play-
ing with and denaturalizing of lesbian maternity, Oedipus at Palm Springs
dramatizes what might be gained politically by troubling the nuclear family
romance on which this plot hinges. By reconceptualizing intimate relation-
ships not in terms of filiation and genetics, but rather in terms of perverse
affiliations and social contingency, the New York Theatre Workshop produc-
tion emerges as a critical site contesting homonormative family and kinship
structures. The final scene between Prin and Joni recasts domestic and po-
litical communities so that they are based not on blood ties and biological
reproduction but on adoptive relationality and the assumption of a con-
tested set of social practices and ethical commitments. While the Brothers’
decision to play it “straight” with Oedipus at Palm Springs has disappointed
many fans and critics, I see the troupe’s use of dramatic realism as an ideal
and ingenious vehicle for a cynical tendentious joke about how, in our quest
for legitimacy, we lesbians have come to take ourselves too seriously.
Afterword

Acts of Gaiety attests to the salubrious social and political transformations

that have taken place over the past five decades and to ever-­expanding defi-
nitions of what it means to be a sexual subject. This progress, and the pro-
gressive visibility of LGBT life, reflects the incredible successes of queer
uprisings, insurrections, liberation movements, and critical theories that
have made homosexuality and same-­sex desire historical possibilities. As
we revel in our place of pride in the public sphere and celebrate landmark
legal victories, it behooves us to note that these advances are not simply the
result of radical interventions into American polity. Conservative cultural
currents and socio-­economic policies have underwritten the assimilation
of sexual minorities into the mainstream. Many activists and scholars have
cited specific juridical reforms (e.g., the decriminalization of sodomy in the
Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas and the end of the U.S. military’s ban
on gay soldiers) not as indices of sexual freedom but as reactionary respons-
es linked directly to the privatizing imperatives of a powerful, ascendant
brand of neoliberal politics that gained traction in the 1970s and coalesced
in the 1990s.
In this book I deploy the term homoliberalism to describe a set of sexual
and fiscal practices advancing the notion that equality for LGBT subjects
can best be secured by liberating individual entrepreneurial desires for
wealth and status accumulation within a national framework characterized
by rights (to marriage, government service, and private property) secured
through the monetizing precepts of unfettered access to free markets and
the unregulated flow of free trade. The role of the sexual minority in this
speculative form of citizenship is to support and defend the socio­economic

189
190 Acts of Gaiety

structures that enable and maintain these degraded notions of rights, digni-
ties, and freedoms, while the state, in turn, guarantees homosexuals and
transexuals the defenses and protections necessary for the pursuit of these
liberties. The false promises of homoliberalism function as a mask for pro-
tocols that serve, above all else, to maintain, reconstitute, and restore the
discriminatory operations of the nation-­state. The degree to which homolib-
eralism has become embedded in the theory and practice of contemporary
sexual politics has created imbalances and exacerbated inequalities to such
an extent that we are facing a conceptual and political crisis. The widening
gap between rhetoric (that queer is a potent alternative to the mainstream-
ing of the LGBT movement) and the realization (that queer aids and abets
the workings of neoliberalism) is now all too visible. The more that queer
nationality is recognized as a compromised utopian ideal facilitating the as-
similation of gays and lesbians into the restrictive confines of civic society,
the more the foundation is laid for forging political alternatives that pro-
mote social and economic justice for all.
How will this crisis play out? Can we forestall the instrumentalizing
and monetizing course of sexual politics? How might we counter such a
narrow entrepreneurial conception of sexual agency and thwart the homo-
liberal debasement of sexual freedom into a synonym for free enterprise?
Is a yet-­to-­be articulated cutting-­edge discourse the best hope we have for
doing so, or does some revitalized notion of lesbian feminist theory hold
greater political promise? Acts of Gaiety does not provide answers to these
questions, which defy easy or obvious solutions. It does recognize that in
the struggle to articulate possibilities for being with each other and being
in the world internecine struggles will be not only inevitable but desirable,
as they generate ideas, debates, and options. While we need to foster com-
munication, build coalitions, and practice the art of compromise, we also
need to promote dialogue, disagreement, and dissent. What we don’t need is
a moratorium on discord or the silencing of oppositional views, nor do we
need paranoid proclamations that indict anyone and everyone who isn’t an
anarchist or political extremist as an enemy of the people.
The current state of affairs is definitely depression inducing, and it is no
wonder that the anti-­social thesis has gained such traction in queer theory
in recent years. I acknowledge that progressive attempts to exhibit lateral
agency and locate in-­between spaces that eschew the hitches of hegemony
and the shallow satisfactions of consumer citizenship entail traversing, if
not dwelling in, critical realms of rejection, negation, and refusal. However,
 Afterword
191

I resist the notion that we should take up permanent residence in the shad-
owy depths of these murky milieus. My relationships to feminism and LGBT
politics have never felt anti-­social or anti-­relational, not even at this critical
junction in history. My attraction to these world-­making projects has never
been limited to feelings of shame, melancholy, pain, or rage, though these
emotions have, most certainly, catalyzed my activism, imbuing it with both
a vibrant intensity and sense of urgency. My participation in transformative
social movements has felt like something more creative, constructive, and
life-­affirming. Insouciant acts of gaiety are what attracted me to politics,
what gave me the capacity and courage to call myself a lesbian, a feminist,
a queer, and what makes me enjoy the continued fight for programs and
projects that will probably never come to fruition in my lifetime. Gaiety
enacts the promise of transformation, and while it can’t promise us a better
tomorrow, it can certainly help balm our wounds, soothe our suffering, and
bolster our spirits.
This book takes as axiomatic the notion that politics, like theater, is a
sphere of active emotions, and it argues that the ways categories of feelings
have become differentiated and delineated over the past several decades de-
termines, to a great extent, how sexual politics have come to matter, how
certain emotions have come to be valued (or devalued), and how specific
sentiments have come to have social and political import. Seeking to un-
derstand how affects come to mean and make a difference in the public
sphere, I have offered a critical history of emotions commonly associated
with LGBT art and activism and an assessment of contemporary studies of
queer feelings. What might “thinking feelings” tell us about the ethics and
efficacy of feminist and queer studies? Which emotions are likely to mar-
shal and mobilize subjects into collectives and communities? What can a
renewed interest in gaiety contribute to our understanding of performance
and politics? These questions that highlight affect, emotion, and feeling in
relation to public displays and their activist potentials are among those that
animate this scholarly inquiry.
The turn to affect in theater and performance studies, increasingly evi-
dent in conferences, course offerings, journal issues, and books, is indica-
tive of a more far-­reaching shift in the humanities and social sciences toward
non-­representational theory. The affective turn signals a renewed interest
in corporeality and the sensate body; live art, and in particular time-­based
performing arts, are particularly relevant here as they enact the emotional
labor of giving form and expression to human experiences, wishes, and de-
192 Acts of Gaiety

sires through embodied spectacles and the seduction of spectatorship. In

contrast to the linguistic turn and the cultural turn that precede it, the af-
fective turn indexes the need to consider the vagaries of ontology as lived
in and through an array of cultural forms within systems of knowledge and
power. This paradigm shift represents the desire to eke out some conceptual
space for facets of human behavior and motivation that are not harnessed
to consciousness, cognition, and rationality, to acknowledge somatic and
social dynamics that are labile and inchoate, and to explore impulses and
responses that conventions contour but do not circumscribe. Attention to
affects bring us closer to those dimensions of conduct and culture that can-
not be broached by semiotic analysis or a constructivist lens, privileging
those unruly and capricious forces that cannot be fully determined and, as a
result, may be less prone to discipline, regulation, and control.
Gaiety is a form of embodied thought, a ludic rejoinder to historical in-
jury; acts of gaiety are performances of redress that transform the vicious ba-
nality of homophobia and misogyny into something fantastic and fabulous.
Emotional responses reflect the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected
by others. As such, they entail a recalibration of one’s corporeal relation to
social and cultural norms. Whereas fear and hatred can distort bodies in
anticipation of harm, gaiety expands our physical form in the expectation
of pleasurable communion. A gesture of radical openness, gaiety shows us
that what hurts, what causes us shame, and what we feel is wrong with the
world is not necessary or inevitable, and it gives us license to unmake and
remake it in other guises. Tacking with the affective turn, this book attempts
to capture what it feels like to be gay, not what it means to be gay. Theories of
identity, ideology, representation, and signification are not sufficient to ad-
dress the complexities and contradictions of contemporary sexual politics,
and these discourses can’t retard or remediate the neoliberalization of the
LGBT movement.
The case studies I survey here bring gaiety into focus as a research ob-
ject, a methodology, and a pedagogical project. The exploits of the humor-
ous homosexuals, droll dykes, and laughing lesbians that populate this book
could be categorized as a “silly archive,” Lauren Berlant’s term for reper-
toires of “dangerous subrationality, superficiality, or hysteria” that are inte-
gral to the creation of queer counterpublics.1 Silliness is typically associated
with child’s play, and with girl culture in particular; the disavowal of silliness
by members of the male-­dominated left reflects, according to Lisa Duggan,
a rejection of the feminine.2 She links the privileging of seriousness, rigor,
 Afterword
193

difficulty, mastery, disciplinarity, and hard-­reasoning to a virulent variety

of masculinism. Judith Halberstam contributes to the silly archive in her
recent book, The Queer Art of Failure in order to stress the importance of
seeking knowledge in all the wrong places: television, children’s animation,
horror films, and other low-­cultural sites. Gaiety, as I have shown, is a type
of imaginative playfulness typically associated with silly subjects, and with
gay males in particular. In constructing an archive of lesbian gaiety, I am
driven by the desire to revivify subjugated knowledges and ecstatic practices
that have been cast aside in the rush to inaugurate queer theory as a novel
praxis. Lesbian gaiety has been disavowed by self-­described radical mem-
bers of the queer nation and by more conservative factions as well, who see
it as antithetical to their quest for social respectability.
I realize that in promoting lesbian gaiety and indulging in instances of it,
I run the risk of not being taken seriously. In some ways, this is my aim. I la-
ment the fact that in the quest for legitimization, lesbians and gays have lost
their sense of humor and abdicated their investments in fun, frivolity, mirth,
and merriment. Being taken seriously means renouncing play and promis-
cuity, growing up and growing old, and sublimating those penchants and
proclivities that divert us from appropriate aims and aspirations. The desire
to be seen in a proper and dignified light is precisely what compels people
to consent to the disciplining of their desires and the commodification of
their emotions. In an era of homoliberalism, a call to acts of gaiety serves as
a heuristic devise to explore what a more euphoric and ecstatic world might
feel like. In our sober age of compulsory assimilation, a return to gaiety is
urgent. Attention to carnal delights, lavender menacement, and consuming
passions figure here as a modest attempt to realign sexual politics within
an affective economy of pleasure. With this book, I want to interject some
comic relief into the toxic tempest of contemporary sexual politics and hope
that others might join me in staging acts of gaiety.
Notes

Preface
1. Karla Jay, Tales of a Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (New York: Basic
Books, 2000), 143.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 144.
5. Betty Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,” New York Times Magazine, March
4, 1973, 33–­34.
6. Ibid.
7. Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberal-
ism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Cas-
tronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 179. For an
excellent primer on neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
8. The central tenet of the antirelational thesis is that homosexual male desire is
inherently anti-­identitarian and antisocial. See Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and
the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Tim Dean, Unlimited Intima-
cy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009); and Robert L. Caserio, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and José Es-
teban Muñoz, “Forum: Conference Debates—­the Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,”
PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 819–­36.
9. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: New York University Press, 2009), 10–­11.
10. Elizabeth Grosz, “Histories of a Feminist Future,” Signs 25, no. 4 (Summer
2000): 1019.
11. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 12.
12. Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-­Century
America (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
13. Alina Troyano [Carmelita Tropicana], I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing be-
tween Cultures (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), xiv.
14. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (New York: SCUM Book, 1977), 2. This cita-
tion refers to Solanas’s 1977 edition of SCUM Manifesto, published after she was re-

195
196 Notes to Pages xv–xx

leased from prison and intended to correct errors in the Olympia Press edition of 1968.
In Solanas’s original self-­published 1967 edition of the document, this line reads, “In
actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by
anyone else” (6).
15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2003).
16. The chief authors of the “Woman-­Identified Woman” manifesto were Rita Mae
Brown, Lois Hart, Cynthia Funk, Barbara Love, Artemis March, and Elen Shumsky. The
document was created for and distributed at the Second Congress to Unite Women by
members of the Lavender Menace zap, but it was published under the name Radicalesbi-
ans (Radicalesbians, “The Woman-­Identified-­Woman,” in Radical Feminism, eds. Anne
Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone [New York: Quadrangle Books, (1970) 1973],
240–­45). Though enormously influential in the 1970s, “The Woman-­Identified Wom-
an” came under fire by subsequent generations of feminists for its perceived essential-
ism and asexual portrait of lesbianism. The Radicalesbians’ decision to privilege affect
rather than sex as the marker of lesbian identity seemed positively puritanical to pro-­sex
feminists in the 1980s and 1990s, many of whom singled out “The Woman-­Identified
Woman” as the spark that ignited the sex wars. See Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and
Sharon Thompson, “Introduction,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann
Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1983), 9–­50; Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–­1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Biddy Martin, “Sexualities without
Genders and Other Queer Utopias,” in Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of
Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996), 71–­96; Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous
Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000);
and Joan Nestle, “Flamboyance and Fortitude,” in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-­Butch
Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (New York: Alyson Books, 1992), 13–­22.
17. The first women’s dance was held on April 3, 1970, at Alternate University. It
was organized by a radical lesbian contingent of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Many
members of the dance committee were involved in the Lavender Menace zap.
18. The effects of the protest were wide-­ranging. At the next national conference of
NOW, held September 1971, delegates adopted a resolution recognizing lesbianism as
a legitimate concern for feminism, despite continued objections by Friedan.
19. Kate Millett, “How Many Lives Are Here,” in The Feminist Memoir Project:
Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New Bruns-
wick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 494.
20. Quoted in Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 219.
21. Anselma Dell’Olio, “Home before Sundown,” in The Feminist Memoir Proj-
ect: Voices From Women’s Liberation, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 161.
22. Jay, Tales of a Lavender Menace, 137.
23. Kate Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the
WOW Café Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 2, 19.
24. Sue-­ Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-­ Feminist Retro-­Future,” in Feminist and
Queer Performance: Critical Strategies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 54.
25. Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Perfor-
mance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 107.
26. Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, 98.
27. Dolan, Geographies of Learning, 99.
28. Ibid.
29. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
 Notes to Pages xxi–4 197

30. Kenyon Farrow, “Gay Marriage in New York: Progressive Victory or GOP Road-
map?,” June 27, 2011, Alternet.org, http://www.alternet.org/story/151444/gay_marriage
_in_new_york%3A_progressive_victory_or_gop_roadmap/ (accessed July 2011).
31. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 1.
32. Jack Smith, J. Hoberman, and Edward Leffingwell, Wait for Me at the Bottom of
the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 11.

Introduction
he epigraph is from Bertha Harris, introduction to Lover (New York: New York Uni-
T
versity Press, 1976), xxix.
1. Teresa de Lauretis, “Habit Changes,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 6, nos. 2–­3 (1994): 297. De Lauretis coined the term queer theory in 1990 at a
conference on gay and lesbian sexualities at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
That same year, activists associated with ACT-­UP in New York City formed Queer Na-
tion, a direct-­action organization aimed at eliminating homophobia and increasing gay,
lesbian, and bisexual visibility through guerrilla tactics and media manipulation. The
year 1990 also saw the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). While neither of
these texts uses the word queer, both are considered foundational texts of queer theory.
2. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007), xiii.
3. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1,
no. 1 (1993): 17.
4. The occasion for the conference was the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the pub-
lication of Gayle Rubin’s 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” which many credit, along with
“The Traffic in Women” (1975), with inaugurating the field of sexuality studies in its
call for the recognition of the political dimensions of erotic life. See Gayle Rubin, “The
Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropol-
ogy of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly View Press, 1975), 157–­210, and
“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (New York: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984), 267–­319. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex,” GLQ: A Journal of Les-
bian and Gay Studies 17, no. 1 (2011).
5. Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Dis-
cussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–­3 (2007): 13. The
roundtable took place via e-­mail in March, April, and May of 2006 and included Din-
shaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith
Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon, and Tan Hoang Nguyen.
6. Ann Pellegrini, “Touching the Past, or, Hanging Chad, ‘History’s Queer Touch:
Responses to Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-­and
Postmodern,’” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 2 (April 2001): 192.
7. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean O’Malley Halley, eds., The Affective Turn:
Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1.
8. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 223.
9. Ibid.
10. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
11. Charlotte Bunch, Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1987).
198 Notes to Pages 4–9

12. Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–­35.
13. Ibid., 132.
14. For example, someone, possibly Rita Mae Brown, destroyed the video record-
ing of the Lavender Menace zap out of fear that it would fall into the wrong hands.
15. Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1987), 9.
16. Rhizomatic and filiative are key terms in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pub-
lished in two volumes as Anti-­Oedipus and, eight years later, A Thousand Plateaus. See
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane (New York: Continuum, [1972] 2004); and A Thousand Plateaus: Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, [1980] 1987).
17. Ibid.
18. David Román and Holly Hughes, “O Solo Homo: An Introductory Conver-
sation,” in O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, eds. Holly Hughes and David
Román (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 6–­7.
19. On the relationship between actresses and sex workers, see Kirsten Pullen,
Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005). See also Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victo-
rian Culture (New York: Routledge, 2002).
20. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2005), 1, 33.
21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 33.
22. See Robin Bernstein, ed. Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2006).
23. Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band, in Forbidden Acts: Pioneering Gay and Lesbi-
an Plays of the Twentieth Century, ed. Benjamin A. Hodges (New York: Applause Books,
2003), 490. The Boys in the Band ran for 1,001 performances off-­Broadway (at Theater
Four), was made into a successful film by director William Friedkin in 1970, and en-
joys a healthy afterlife in regional theaters.
24. Ibid., 516.
25. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
26. See Matthew Kaiser, “A History of ‘Ludicrous,’” English Literary History 71,
no. 3 (Fall 2004): 631–­60. We typically think of theatricality in terms of theatrum
mundi, the world as a stage, which is related to but not the same as the concept of mun-
dus ludibundus. See Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Scholars of theater and performance have
a vested interest in play. As with the case of ritual, much of our foundational literature
on the subject comes from anthropology and sociology. Key texts on play include Jo-
han Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Taylor
and Francis, [1944] 2003); Brian Sutton-­Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973); Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduc-
tion (New York: Routledge, 2006); Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer
Barash (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001); and Baz Kershaw, The Politics of
Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London: Routledge, 1992).
27. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York: Dell, 1966), 290.
28. Debates about the relevance, efficacy, and ethics of camp as a mode of lesbian
performance took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Conversation has waned in recent
 Notes to Pages 10–16 199

decades, however, as camp has been commodified by the mainstream and no longer of-
fers the pointed social critique it did at earlier moments in the LGBT movement. In the
pro-camp corner are critics like Sue-­Ellen Case, who championed Split Britches’ butch/
femme role-­playing, and Judith Halberstam, who chronicled the rise of the drag king
movement. See Sue-­Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch/Femme Aesthetic,” in Feminist and
Queer Performance: Critical Strategies (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 31–­48; and Judith
Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano, The Drag King Handbook (New York: Serpent’s
Tail, 1999). Kate Davy took the opposite position, arguing that camp cannot work for
women because it reinscribes the technologies of sex and gender that it deploys in its
farcical and parodic performances. See Kate Davy, “Fe/Male Impersonation: The Dis-
course of Camp,” in Critical Theory and Performance, eds. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R.
Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 355–­71. Alisa Solomon cri-
tiques the misogynist component in gay male drag, noting that it is akin to the racism
in minstrel shows. See her Re-­dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender (New
York: Routledge, 1997). Susan Sontag is mum on the subject, and Esther Newton nei-
ther confirms nor denies the possibility of lesbian camp, but she does claim that drag
queens are its natural exponent. See her Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman
are among the theorists who believe that camp was not possible for dyke performers
prior to the advent of queer theory. See their “Queer Nationality,” in The Queen of
America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 145–­74.
29. Quoted in Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, 358.
30. Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which was first performed at the Limbo
Lounge in New York City’s East Village in 1984, became so popular that it was moved
to off-­Broadway in June 1985. It ran for five years at the Provincetown Playhouse and
has enjoyed a healthy run at regional and independent theaters across the country.
31. Roberta Sklar made this statement during a “Women’s Theater in the 1970s” pan-
el with Sondra Segal, Clare Coss, Sue Perlgut, and Muriel Miguel, hosted by Jill Dolan. It
took place at the CLAGS conference “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in
the ’70s,” October 8–­10, 2010, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
32. There were lesbians who both frequented and worked at Caffe Cino, including
director Roberta Sklar, but it was primarily a venue for gay male playmakers and is best
known for launching the careers of Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, and Lanford Wilson.
33. Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, 42.
34. Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com (accessed January 2010).
35. John Leech, “The Great Social Evil,” Punch 33 (January 10, 1857), 114.
36. Eric Marcus, Making Gay History: The Half Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay
Equal Rights (New York: Harper, 2002), 57.
37. Tiny and Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, dir. Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, 1986,
Channel 4, London, DVD.
38. For more on Davis and her bands, see Marilyn Nelson, Sweethearts of Rhythm:
The Story of the Greatest All-­Girl Swing Band in the World (New York: Dial Books, 2009);
and D. Antoinette Handy, The International Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Ladies Jazz Band
from Piney Woods Country Life School (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998).
39. “Harry Hay: Founding the Mattachine,” Outhistory.org., http://www.outhistory.
org/wiki/Harry_Hay:_Founding_the_Mattachine,_part_2 (accessed January 2009).
40. The Daughters of Bilitis is named after a contemporary of Sappho identified in
a book of poetry by Pierre Louÿs, The Songs of Bilitis, trans. Alvah C. Bessie (New York:
Dover, 1988).
41. The Ladder was published from 1956 to 1972, and Lisa Ben was a frequent
200 Notes to Pages 16–23

contributor. The Mattachine Society published its own journal, the Mattachine Review,
beginning in 1955. Arguably the most important homophile publications was One,
which was launched in 1953. Though produced independently of the Mattachine Soci-
ety, many of its contributors, including editor Dale Jennings, were members.
42. Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in
Twentieth Century America (New York: Penguin, 1999), 190–­91.
43. See Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the
Birth of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).
44. Flavia Rondo, “Between Bohemia and Revolution,” in Smash the Church, Smash
the State, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights, 2009), 163–­67.
45. Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Lesbian/Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1997), 273.
46. Doric Wilson, “Stonewall + 40,” May 20, 2009, http://doricwilson.blogspot.
com/2009/05/stonewall-40_20.html (accessed December 2009).
47. Quoted in John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a
Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–­1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 234. The GLF’s statement of purpose was originally published in RAT:
Subterranean News on August 12, 1969.
48. Allen Young, “Out of the Closets, into the Streets,” in Out of the Closets: Voices
of Gay Liberation, eds. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University
Press, 1992), 7–­10.
49. Shelley does not recall this being her suggestion but rather the consensus of the
collective. See Shelley Anderson, “Interview with Martha Shelley,” which is part of the
Voices of Feminism Oral History Project located at Smith College. The interview took
place on October 12, 2003.
50. The phrase “gay is good” was first used by Frank Kameny, founder of the Wash-
ington, DC, branch of the Mattachine Society, in a resolution adopted by NACHO, the
North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, in 1951. See Donn Teal, The
Gay Militants (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 59.
51. Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (New
York: Greenberg, 1951), 108. This book, which Cory, the pseudonym of Edward Sagarin,
would later recant, charts the etymology of the term gay, and it argues that homosexuals
constitute an oppressed minority and should organize under this rubric to achieve social
justice and end the conspiracy of silence surrounding same-­sex attraction.
52. Young, “Out of the Closets,” 28.
53. Ibid., 28–­29.
54. Martha Shelley, “Our Passion Shook the World,” in Smash the Church, Smash
the State, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights, 2009), 96.
55. Ibid., 93.
56. Quoted in Teal, The Gay Militants, 87.
57. The mission statement of the conference is archived at http://www.umich.
edu/~lgqri/gayshame.html (accessed January 2009). Conference papers were published
in David Halperin and Valerie Traub, eds., Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009). For the controversy the conference generated with respect to racial poli-
tics, see Hiram Perez and Judith Halberstam’s contributions to David Eng, Judith Hal-
berstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? Social
Text, nos. 84–85 (Winter 2005).
For an analysis of the tensions between academics and activists, see Matilda Ber-
nstein Sycamore, “Gay Shame: From Queer Autonomous Space to Direct Action Ex-
travaganza,” in That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Brooklyn:
Soft Scull Press, [2004] 2008), 268–­95.
 Notes to Pages 24–33 201

58. WOW Café was located at 330 East 11th Street in New York from 1982 to
1984, when the collective moved to its current site, 59–­61 East 4th Street. For more on
the history and criticism of WOW, see Sue-­Ellen Case, Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/
Feminist Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator
as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Kate Davy, Lady Dicks and
Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2010); and Alisa Solomon, “The WOW Café,” in A Source-
book of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the Stage, ed. Carol Martin
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 42–­52.
59. Hughes became one of the artists known as the NEA Four (along with Tim
Miller, John Fleck and Karen Finley) who sued the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities to have their grants reinstated after the NEA rescinded them.
60. The most comprehensive book of AIDS performance and protest is David
Román’s Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1998).
61. Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays (New York:
Grove, 2000), 78.
62. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer
Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).
63. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-­and Post-
modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
64. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
65. Ibid., 4.
66. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010), 62.

Chapter 1
he epigraph is from Valerie Solanas, letter to the editor of The Diamondback, the
T
school newspaper of the University of Maryland, December 5, 1957, 4.
1. Paul Krassner, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,” in S.C.U.M. Manifesto, by
Valerie Solanas (New York: Olympia Press, 1968), 88.
2. Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass, or From the Cradle to the Boat, or The Big Suck, or
Up from the Slime and “A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class, a Non-­
fictional Article Reprinted from Cavalier” (NY: SCUM Book, 1967), 28. All citations from
the play are taken from the copy of this book in the Avant-­Garde Literature Collection
at the Hofstra University Library.
3. I have consulted the following sources for biographical, historical, and critical
information: Judy Michaelson, “Valerie: The Trouble Was Men,” New York Post, June
5, 1968, 57; Marylin Bender, “Valeria Solanis [sic] a Heroine to Feminists,” New York
Times, June 14, 1968, 52; Diane Dorr-­Dorynek, “Lonesome Cowboy—­Reel 606,” East
Village Other 3, no. 26 (June 15, 1968): n.p.; Raphael Lennox, “The Martyrization of
Valerie Solanas,” East Village Other 3, no. 30 (June 28, 1968): 3, 20; Howard Smith
and Brian Van der Horst, “Valerie Solanas Interview,” Village Voice, July 25, 1977, 32;
B. Ruby Rich, “Manifesto Destiny: Drawing a Bead on Valerie Solanas,” Village Voice
Literary Supplement, October 12, 1993, 18–­19; Donny Smith, “Solanas,” Supplement to
Dwan, March 1994; Mary Harron, “Introduction: On Valerie Solanas,” in I Shot Andy
Warhol, by Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan (New York: Grove Press, 1995); Freddie
Baer, “About Valerie Solanas,” in SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas (San Francisco:
AK Press, 1996), 51–­60; Melissa Deem, “From Bobbitt to SCUM: Re-­memberment,
202 Notes to Pages 33–38

Scatological Rhetorics, and Feminist Strategies in the Contemporary United States,”

Public Culture 8, no. 3 (1996): 511–­37; Liz Jobey, “Solanas and Son,” Guardian Week-
end, August 24, 1996, T10; Donny Smith, Solanas Supplement to Dwan Number 2, May
1997; Donny Smith, “To Live with a Man is to Hate a Man (or Vice Versa),” Holy Tit-
clamps, January 16, 1998; Judith Coburn, “Valerie’s Gang,” East Bay Express, November
19, 1999, 1, 8–­9, 11, 13, 16; Laura Winkiel, “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative
Politics of SCUM Manifesto,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 62–­86; Judith Coburn, “Solanes Lost and Found,” Village Voice, Jan-
uary 12, 2000; Donny Smith, The Third Solanas Supplement to Dwan, n.d.; Dana Heller,
“Shooting Solanas,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 167–­89; James Harding, “The
Simplest Surrealist Act: Valerie Solanas and the (Re)Assertion of Avant-­garde Priori-
ties,” TDR 45, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 142–­62; Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and
the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Isabelle Collin Dufresne [Ultra Violet], Famous
for 15 Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1988); Amanda Third, “‘Shooting from the Hip’: Valerie Solanas, the SCUM Manifesto,
and the Apocalyptic Politics of Radical Feminism,” Hecate 32, no. 2 (2006): 104–­32;
Breanne Fahs, “The Radical Possibilities of Valerie Solanas,” Feminist Studies 34, no.
3 (Fall 2008): 591–­621; Catherine Lord, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,” October
132 (Spring 2010): 135–­63; and Breanne Fahs, “Ti-­Grace Atkinson and the Legacy of
Radical Feminism,” Feminist Studies 37, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 561–­90.
4. E-­mail correspondence with Judith Martinez, January 22, 2011.
5. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York:
Routledge, 2001).
6. Watson, Factory Made, 36. The pregnancy to which Judith Martinez refers here
was actually Solanas’s second. The first occurred when she was fourteen.
7. In a letter to filmmaker Mary Harron complaining about her representation of
the facts in I Shot Andy Warhol, Solanas’s son, David Blackwell, states that the sailor
who impregnated Valerie was married with three children, which is why the Blackwells
took her and the baby in. The letter was sent care of the Andy Warhol Museum and is
housed in its archives.
8. Watson, Factory Made, 36.
9. Ibid.
10. Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (New York: SCUM Book, 1967), 9. Unless
otherwise noted, all citations are from this edition of the text, which Solanas self-­
published prior to the Olympia Press edition of 1968. This document is widely avail-
able in a number of libraries, including the Judson Memorial Church Archives at New
York University’s Fales Library.
11. The editors changed the title of Solanas’s article from “A Young Girl’s Primer on
How to Attain the Leisure Class” to “For 2¢: Pain, the Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly,”
ostensibly because they wanted to play on Harry Golden’s popular 1959 memoir of De-
pression era New York, For 2¢ Plain. During the 1930s, one could get an egg cream for
twenty-­five cents, a chocolate milk for a dime, a chocolate soda for a nickel, or seltzer
water, as the saying went, for “two cents plain.” See Harry Golden, For 2¢ Plain (New
York: World Publishing: 1958).
12. Valerie Solanas, “For 2¢: Pain, the Survival Game Gets Pretty Ugly,” Cavalier,
July 1966, 38.
13. Ibid., 40.
14. Solanas, Up Your Ass, n.p.
15. Ibid., 1.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
 Notes to Pages 38–45 203

18. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
19. Solanas, Up Your Ass, 3.
20. Ibid., 5.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 6.
23. Ibid., 5.
24. Ibid., 7.
25. Ibid., 7–­8.
26. Ibid., 8.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 8–­9.
29. Ibid., 19.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 23.
32. Solanas, Up Your Ass, 10.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 11.
35. Ibid., 13.
36. Ibid., 11.
37. Ibid., 12.
38. Ibid., 13.
39. Ibid., 14.
40. Ibid., 15.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 16.
44. Ibid., 17.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 1.
49. Ibid.
50. Solanas, Up Your Ass, 18.
51. Ibid., 23.
52. Ibid., 18.
53. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 1–­2.
54. Solanas, Up Your Ass, 19.
55. When word got out that Oscar Wilde was to play Salome in drag, the play was
banned by Lord Chamberlain’s licensor of plays. Doric Wilson staged an adaptation of
this play, titled Now She Dances!, at Caffe Cino in 1961.
56. Solanas, Up Your Ass, 21.
57. Ibid., 22.
58. Ibid., 23.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 24.
63. Ibid., 24.
64. Ibid., 25.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
204 Notes to Pages 45–49

67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., 26.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 27.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., 28.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. “We have passed beyond the absurd: our position is absolutely preposterous.”
This is the one-­line manifesto of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Ron Tavel hit on the
term ridiculous while studying the Theatre of the Absurd in college. His collaborator,
John Vaccaro, said the name was inspired by the actress Yvette Hawkins, who used
ridiculous to describe the group’s rehearsal process. See Bonnie Marranca, Gautam
Dasgupta, and Jack Smith, eds., Theatre of the Ridiculous (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998); David Kaufman, Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of
Charles Ludlam (New York: Applause Books, 2002); Stephen J. Bottoms, Playing Un-
derground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-­Off-­Broadway Movement (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2004); and Rick Roemer, Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous
Theatrical Company: Critical Analyses of 29 Plays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010).
83. The inaugural evening of the Theatre of the Ridiculous consisted of a double
bill at Manhattan’s Coda Gallery on July 29, 1965, featuring Shower and The Life of
Juanita Castro, both of which were originally film scenarios Ron Tavel had written for
Andy Warhol’s Factory. Soon after, Vaccaro and Tavel founded The Play-­House of the
Ridiculous, which featured a number of Factory superstars. A conflict over Conquest
of the Universe (aka When Queens Collide) led actor and playwright Charles Ludlam to
form his own troupe, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, in 1967.
84. Lola Pashalinski plays a psychiatrist who analyzes Solanas after the shooting in
the film I Shot Andy Warhol.
85. E-­mail correspondence with Judith Martinez, January 19, 2011.
86. The Village Plaza hotel is the return address listed on Solanas’s 1965 copyright
application for the play.
87. The Realist debuted in the spring of 1958 and was published out of the offices
of Mad magazine. Famous for its parodies and political cartoons, the periodical also
provided a forum for a number of conspiracy theories.
88. E-­mail correspondence with Paul Krassner, November 8, 2010.
89. Krassner, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,” 88.
90. Ibid., 89.
91. Launched in 1952 by Fawcett Publications, Cavalier originally featured short
stories and serial novels by the press’s Gold Medal authors, including Richard Prather
and Mickey Spillane. Purchased in the 1960s by the DuGent Publishing Corporation,
Cavalier evolved into an erotica magazine. It continues today as an online porn site.
92. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in Ginzburg v. United States, 383 U.S.
463 (March 21, 1966), and the publisher served eight months in a federal prison on
obscenity charges.
 Notes to Pages 49–50 205

93. Krassner, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,” 88.

94. Nat Finkelstein, a Factory photographer from 1964 to 1966, claims he intro-
duced Solanas to Warhol at the behest of an ex-­girlfriend named Ellen Marcus, who
met Richie Berlin, sister of Factory superstar Brigid Polk, and Solanas in a mental in-
stitution. After a falling out with Warhol, Nat gave Valerie his private phone number.
While Solanas did have Warhol’s private phone number and address, I can find no
confirmation that she was institutionalized prior to the assassination attempt in 1968.
See Nat Finkelstein, “The Nat Finkelstein Interview,” Planet Group Entertainment,
2009, http://planetgroupentertainment.squarespace.com/the-nat-finkelstein-interview/
(accessed January 2010).
95. Robert Heide’s The Bed premiered at the Sullivan Street Theater in March 1965
before moving to Caffe Cino on July 7, 1965, where it ran for 150 performances. War-
hol filmed the play in the fall of 1965. According to Heide, “[T]here followed a quarrel
with FuFu Smith, the producer, about who owned the film. Andy put The Bed into his
secret vault though he later spliced portions of it into Chelsea Girls” (Robert Heide,
“Village ’65 Revisited,” letter to the editor, Village Voice, July 27, 1982). The film ver-
sion of The Bed opened on April 26, 1966, at Jonas Mekas’s Filmmakers Cinematheque
on 41st Street.
96. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Mariner
Books, 1990), 190.
97. Ibid.
98. This letter is in the Valerie Solanas collection at the Warhol Museum archives.
Solanas mailed it to Andy at his home address, 1342 Lexington Avenue, as she did on
every known occasion she wrote to him. Her return address is listed as the Village Plaza
hotel.
99. Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Se-
lected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962–­1987, eds. Goldsmith, Wolf, and Koestenbaum,
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 91–­92. This interview, considered by many to be
“the most important that Andy Warhol gave in the ’60s,” was first published November
1, 1966, in East Village Other.
100. Krassner, “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,” 87.
101. Goldsmith, Wolf, and Koestenbaum, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 92. Some of the dia-
logue attributed to Warhol in this interview is actually the reporter’s questions and
comments converted into responses. For example, “I guess she thought that was the
perfect thing for Andy Warhol” is something Gretchen Berg said to Andy during their
conversation. I realized this when I saw a rerun of Ric Burns’s Andy Warhol: A Docu-
mentary Film (PBS, 2006), which incorporates part of the audiotape of the Berg-­Warhol
interview. Anyone who has participated in or viewed an interview with Warhol knows
that he actively tried to seduce his interlocutor into the position of speaking for him.
102. Mary Harron suggests that Warhol saw in Solanas a kindred spirit. She writes,
“When Andy Warhol looked into the eyes of Valerie Solanas, he would have seen
much more of himself than when he looked into the eyes of a beautiful debutante like
Edie Sedgewick [sic] or one of the gorgeous male hustlers who decorated the Factory.
Warhol and Valerie had much in common: both were Catholic, born into blue-­collar
families; had spent their childhood in poverty; were intellectually precocious; and had
experienced being tormented at school. Perhaps, most importantly, both claimed to
have rejected sex, although for different reasons: Valerie had too much sex; Warhol, too
little” (Harron, “Introduction,” xix).
103. After it became clear that Warhol had lost Edie Sedgwick to Bob Dylan, he said
to Robert Heide, on the sidewalk at the site where dancer Fred Herko had jumped to
his death from his apartment window, “I wonder if Edie will commit suicide. I hope
206 Notes to Pages 51–55

she lets me know so I can film it.” Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol
(London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 236.
104. Catherine Lord cites this ad in the version of “Wonder Waif Meets Super Neu-
ter” published in The Art of Queering in Art, ed. Gavin Butts (Birmingham, UK: Article
Press, 2007). She was also the first person to cite Solanas’s letter asking Warhol to re-
turn the script. The Village Voice ad offering “photo offset copies” of the play might ex-
plain the existence of a partial script (starting with page 30) in the hands of a New York
art dealer named Margo Feiden, who claims Solanas gave her the play on the morn-
ing of the shooting. Glenn O’Brien, who viewed the document in Feiden’s possession,
wrote, “It seems to be the original typescript. It’s not a carbon copy.” Feiden declined
my request to examine the script. See Glenn O’Brien, “History ReWrite,” Interview,
April 24, 2009, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/history-rewrite/ (accessed
January 2010).
105. This ad appeared in the Village Voice, February 2, 1967, 5.
106. That Solanas was a terrible typist is corroborated by the fact that the New York
NOW chapter’s president, Ti-­Grace Atkinson, had SCUM Manifesto retyped before she
issued it in a press release after Solanas’s arrest. See the transcript of Ti-­Grace Atkin-
son’s press release, delivered June 13, 1968, at the New York Criminal Court, in the
Florynce Kennedy Papers at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. Solanas clearly had a deep-­
seated aversion to secretarial labor of any kind. Her prison records indicate that she
refused to take clerical courses as part of her rehabilitation training, opting instead to
study cosmetology and work in the kitchen.
107. Phone conversation with Mary Harron, March 24, 2011.
108. Up Your Ass opened for previews in November 1999 at George Coates’s Per-
formance Works Theater on McAllister Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
Coates learned about the play from his assistant director, Eddy Falconer, who after
seeing Harron’s film suggested that they stage Up Your Ass. Coates was less interested
in exploring the play’s relevance to feminist and queer history than he was in using
Up Your Ass as a vehicle through which to talk about censorship in the wake of the
National Endowment for the Arts’ recently instituted decency clause. He staged the
play on a double bill with The Archbishop’s Ceiling by Arthur Miller, whom Solanas had
met in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel in the 1960s. Because Up Your Ass was ineligible
for funding, based on the new NEA guidelines, Coates produced it on a shoestring
budget, double and in some cases triple casting many of the roles, which he filled by
capitalizing on the abundance of talent in the Bay Area’s underground (i.e., “amateur”)
performance community. Worried that he would have trouble pitching the play as a
comedy, not just because of its subject matter but because of the author’s reputation
as a humorless, homicidal dyke, Coates staged Up Your Ass as a musical, setting it on
a sidewalk in front of a karaoke bar. To increase the camp factor, Coates went with an
all-­female cast featuring many members of the drag king community. The show ran at
Coates’s theater in San Francisco January 12–­April 8, 2000, and again January 18–­21,
2001, traveling between these dates to PS122 in New York, where it played February
7–­25, 2001. Conversation with Eddy Falconer, May 26, 2004.
109. The copy of the script Billy Name found in his lighting trunk, which is now
housed in the Warhol Museum, is missing both the front and back covers as well as
the final pages of the book, which consists primarily of the conclusion of the Cavalier
article. In addition, the Name/Warhol copy includes corrections, in Solanas’s handwrit-
ing, on the bottom of page 4, another on the top of page 8, and it also shows the phone
number of the Chelsea Hotel scribbled on the front. None of these edits appear in the
Hofstra script, which is otherwise full and complete and includes the covers and manu-
script pages the Name/Warhol copy are missing. In a 1996 article by Paul Morrissey in
 Notes to Pages 55–58 207

Vogue magazine, he confirms that the 1967 version of the play circulating at the Factory
had, at one time, a cover. See Paul Morrissey, “Pop Shots” Vogue, May 1996, 152.
110. Harron, “Introduction,” xviii. In 1996, Harron stated that she would not be sur-
prised if other copies of the (1967) script existed. See Donny Smith, “Valerie Is Good
and Bad . . . Crazy and Sane: An Interview with Mary Harron,” in Solanas Supplement
to Dwan, Number 2, May 1997.
111. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-­Gardes
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 215–­16.
112. Harding, “The Simplest Surrealist Act,” 143.
113. Ibid., 158, 151.
114. Ibid., 154.
115. Ibid.
116. Harding cites Freddie Baer’s essay “About Valerie Solanas” in the 1996 AK Press
edition of SCUM Manifesto as evidence that there are two different plots of Up Your
Ass. Baer’s source is Donny Smith’s Solanas Supplement to Dwan, a queer poetry zine
(March 1994). Smith’s account is drawn from Ultra Violet’s fictionalized memoir, Fa-
mous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol (1988). Ultra Violet’s “evidence”
is an ambiguously worded paragraph in a New York Post story by Judy Michaelson,
“Valerie: The Trouble Was Men,” which ran just two days after the shooting. The article
states that Solanas “wrote a play with an unprintable title whose hero or heroine was
a man-­hating hustler and panhandler named Bongi. It ends with a mother strangling
her son—­woman killing man” (57). It is clear from this sentence that Michaelson had
neither read nor seen the play, as she does not know Bongi’s gender.
117. As part of their routine maintenance, archivists at the Library of Congress
purged the script of Up Your Ass that Solanas submitted as part of her 1967 copyright
application. Because the library retains unpublished manuscripts for a longer period of
time than it does published ones, the 1965 script is still on file.
118. See Pati Hertling’s interview with Bettina Köster, a former student of Bob
Brady’s, in Girls Like Us, no. 2 (Spring 2006).
119. E-­mail correspondence with Norman Marshal, November 16, 2010.
120. This ad appeared in the Village Voice on February 2, 1967, 22.
121. Carolee Schneemann, “Solanas in a Sea of Men,” in Imagining Her Erotics: Es-
says, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2003), 90–­94.
122. The ad appeared in the Village Voice on February 9, 1967, 24. Tony Scherman
and David Dalton cite this ad in Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, but they make no ref-
erence to Solanas’s other ad in the same issue (in the book section), nor do they men-
tion the notices she placed on February 2, February 16, and February 23. See their Pop:
The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: Harper, 2009), 374. The February 2 ad suggests
that the staged reading was originally scheduled as a single evening’s performance but
was extended. The February 9 notice states that the show would “Beg. Feb. 15.” The
fourth and final Village Voice ad for the script appeared on February 23 in the Bulletin
Board section, on page 2.
123. The February 9 ad also mentions the Randy Wicker radio show, but it does not
include the cast list. Unfortunately, Wicker cannot remember the date on which the in-
terview with Solanas took place, and I have been unable to locate a tape or transcript of
her appearance on the show. Phone conversation with Randy Wicker, February 7, 2011.
From 1967 to 1971, Wicker operated Underground Uplift Unlimited, a head shop that
sold slogan buttons, posters, and books. This is one of the shops Solanas lists as loca-
tions selling her play in a companion ad in the book section, which I cited earlier.
124. This ad appeared in the Village Voice on February 16, 1967, 22. An ad for the
script appears on page 2.
208 Notes to Pages 58–62

125. Albert Williams, “The Quintessential Image/In Her Own Words,” Chicago
Reader, January 18, 1990, http://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-quintessential-im
agein-her-own-words/Content?oid=875070 (accessed January 2010).
126. Gary Tucker is best known for his personal and professional association with
Tennessee Williams. He directed Williams’s A House Not Meant to Stand at the Good-
man Theater in Chicago, and he also worked with the playwright at the Alliance The-
ater in Atlanta. Tucker died of AIDS in 1989. See Kaufman, Ridiculous!, esp. 134–­41.
127. See Ellen Stern, “Best Bets,” New York, April 10, 1978, 62.
128. Actress Phyllis Raphael recalls auditioning for Solanas’s Up Your Ass. She told
me, “I’m pretty sure it was for La MaMa as I had done some work there before and
I suspect that’s how I knew about the audition. I recall the audition being held in a
large space somewhere in the East Village . . . not an orthodox theater.” E-­mail cor-
respondence with Phyllis Raphael November 14, 2010. From Raphael’s description,
the location sounds as if it could have been the Directors’ Theater. Raphael admits her
memory is cloudy: “It wasn’t exactly a highlight of my acting career and my best sense
of it was that the material wasn’t of very much dramatic value or importance nor did
the audition appear to me to be on the up and up. I can tell you that she came on to
me and called the next day to offer me a part but I wasn’t interested. The experience
slipped completely from my memory until three or four years later when I read about
the Warhol shooting and recognized the shooter as the woman I’d auditioned for.” E-­
mail correspondence with Phyllis Raphael, November 12, 2010. See also her book, Off
the Kings Road: Lost and Found in London (London: Other Press, 2006). It seems likely
that Solanas would have pitched her play to Ellen Stewart at La MaMa, but I have not
been able to find any evidence of this.
129. Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the
Counter-­Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 122.
130. The Evergreen Theatre, located at 53 E. 11th Street, served as the home of
Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company in the mid-­1970s. Strapped for cash,
Evergreen’s owner, Barney Rosset sold the building to the Baha’i Foundation, prompt-
ing the troupe to move to One Sheridan Square. For an analysis of Solanas’s turn in
I, a Man, see Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
131. Letter from Geoffrey LeGear to Andy Warhol, December 3, 1968, Warhol Mu-
seum archives.
132. Maurice Girodias, Publisher’s preface to S.C.U.M. Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas
(New York: Grove Press, 1968), vii–­viii.
133. Solanas took issue with changes Girodias made to her text, including the title,
which he printed as S.C.U.M. Manifesto. Solanas issued a corrected edition in 1977,
after she was released from prison.
134. Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 420. Feist does not give the date Solanas came to
the Roundabout. Scherman and Dalton state that the encounter took place in “mid-­
1967” (419).
135. Robert Patrick, “Caffe Cino Pictures,” Caffe Cino blog, http://caffecino.word
press.com/1915/01/01/issues/img_0004_2-2/ (accessed January 2010).
136. E-­mail correspondence with Robert Patrick, November 10, 2010.
137. Ibid.
138. Patrick, a self-­described “temple slave,” his term for Cino devotees, played a
primary role in the Caffe’s scheduled productions and the improvisational performanc-
es that took place behind the scenes. His semiautobiographical novel about a fictitious
Greenwich Village coffeehouse describes in salacious detail the hedonistic pursuits and
homoerotic activities of the inner circle, including rampant drug use and casual group
sex. See Robert Patrick, Temple Slave (New York: Masquerade Books, 1994).
 Notes to Pages 63–67 209

139. Magie Dominic, The Queen of Peace Room (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 56.
140. Ibid.
141. Ibid.
142. Ibid.
143. Ibid.
144. Ibid.
145. Ibid. Dominic writes, “There were no Xerox machines in the ’60s and she’d
trusted him with the only copy of her manuscript” (60). As I have shown, Solanas had
multiple copies of both editions of her play.
146. Koutoukas’s Medea premiered at La MaMa (October 13–­17, 1965) before mov-
ing to Cino (October 19–­31). See Wendell C. Stone, Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-­
Off-­Broadway (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 89.
147. E-­mail correspondence with Robert Patrick, November 10, 2010.
148. Unsuited for the management position in which he had been cast, and caught
in a spiral of drug addiction, Charles Stanley almost ran Caffe Cino into the ground.
Were it not for Michael Smith and Wolfgang Zimmerman’s assumption of the financial
and clerical responsibilities, the Caffe would not have survived into 1968.
149. In an interview with Village Voice reporter Howard Smith, conducted after So-
lanas was released from prison, she says about the Society for Cutting Up Men, “It’s
hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It’s just a literary device. There’s no
organization called SCUM—­there never was, and there never will be.” Pressing Solanas
on her statement, Smith interjects, “It’s just you.” To which Solanas replies, “It’s not
even me. There’s no organization. It’s either nothing or it’s just me, depending on how
you define it. I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who
think a certain way are in SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxil-
iary of SCUM.” See Smith and Van der Horst, “Valerie Solanas Interview,” 32.
150. This ad appears in the Village Voice’s Bulletin Board on page 2. The Farband
House served as the international headquarters of the Farband Labor Zionist Order. It
housed many groups, including the Jewish National Workers Alliance of America. The
building consisted of meeting rooms and an auditorium/theater space.
151. “Valerie Solanis [sic] Interviews Andy,” an undated transcript of an undated au-
dio file in the Warhol Museum archives. The events discussed, including Solanas’s ejec-
tion from the Chelsea Hotel and the production of Tavel’s Vinyl at Caffe Cino (which
opened October 31, 1967), suggest that the audiotape was made in early November.
The title of the document and the artificially structured way in which Solanas begins
asking Warhol questions about SCUM suggest that the interview may have been an
assignment Andy paid Valerie to do or that it was a story she was preparing in the
hopes of selling it to a newspaper or magazine. Any “formal” interview Solanas may
have been conducting was interrupted by the arrival of several superstars, including
Viva, Brigid Polk, and Lou Reed, all of whom, interestingly enough, were arguing with
Warhol about money.
152. This ad appeared in the Village Voice, May 18, 1967, 2.
153. “Valerie Solanis Interviews Andy.” A copy of this edition of SCUM Manifesto is
housed in the Warhol Museum archives.
154. This letter to Andy Warhol, dated August 1, 1967, is housed in the Warhol
Museum archives. Solanas began selling the complete edition of the Manifesto in the
Village Voice on October 19, 1967. I, a Man was shot in July and opened at the Hudson
Theatre near Times Square on August 24.
155. “Valerie Solanis Interviews Andy.”
156. E-­mail correspondence with Judith Martinez, January 22, 2011.
157. The copy of SCUM Manifesto in the Judson Memorial Church Archives in New
210 Notes to Pages 67–71

York University’s Fales Library is housed with all of the scripts that were sent to the
theater for consideration.
158. Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 115.
159. Candy Cane, aka Candy Darling (né James Lawrence Slattery), was a theater
actress who met Warhol in 1967. She starred in several Factory films, including Women
in Revolt (1971), a satire of Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, in which she plays a Long Is-
land socialite drawn into a woman’s liberation group called PIGS (Politically Involved
Girls). According to Mary Harron, Solanas knew Candy from the Hotel Earle, an SRO
that served as “a kind of terminus for deviants, with separate wings for lesbians and
drag queens” (Harron, “Introduction,” xv).
160. “Valerie Solanis Interviews Andy.”
161. This original “Silver” Factory (1962–­68) was located on the fifth floor of 231
East 47th Street. The building no longer exists.
162. “Long involved story” is the phrase Solanas used to describe her relationship
with Andy Warhol during her intake interview at Westfield State Farm, New York State
Department of Corrections, in Bedford Hills on June 13, 1969. I received a copy of this
intake interview through the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).
163. Girodias, Publisher’s preface to S.C.U.M. Manifesto, 17.
164. Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–­1975
(San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 119.
165. Ibid., 120. Dunbar-­ Ortiz flew from Mexico to Boston, the site of early-­
nineteenth-­century feminist and abolitionist activism. She met a woman named Dana
Densmore at a Draft Resistance meeting, and together they placed an ad announcing
the formation of “the FEMALE LIBERATION FRONT FOR HUMAN LIBERATION.”
At the meeting, the group “read the ‘SCUM Manifesto’ as a sacred text while laughing
hilariously at Valerie’s wicked satire,” and they emulated Valerie by writing and selling
their propaganda on the street, charging men more than women (128). Dunbar-­Ortiz
and Densmore founded Cell 16 and the journal No More Fun and Games.
166. Bender, “Valeria Solanis a Heroine to Feminists,” 52; Lennox, “The Martyriza-
tion of Valerie Solanas,” 20.
167. Ti-­Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey: The First Collection of Writings by the Po-
litical Pioneer of the Women’s Movement (New York: Link Books, 1974), 14. In fall of
1967, Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen founded New York Radical Women. Early
members included Ros Baxandall, Carol Hanisch, Pat Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Irene
Peslikis, Kathie Sarachild, and Ellen Willis. In Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in
America, 1967–­1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), Alice Echols
notes, “Radical feminists in NYRW knew next to nothing about Solanas until she shot
and nearly killed Pop artist Andy Warhol in June 1968” (105).
168. Lennox, “The Martyrization of Valerie Solanas,” 9.
169. Dunbar-­Ortiz, Outlaw Woman, 123.
170. Ibid., 138.
171. Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz, “From the Cradle to the Boat: On the Occasion of the
World Premiere of Up Your Ass, a Feminist Historian Remembers Valerie Solanas,”
San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, January 5, 2000, http://sfbg.com (accessed January
2010). Dunbar-Ortiz states in this article, which she published after seeing the George
Coates production of Up Your Ass in San Francisco, that Solanas charged her and Dana
Densmore with “a big task—to get a copy of Valerie’s play, Up Your Ass, for her. That’s
the only regret she seems to have about shooting Warhol, that she didn’t get her play
back. He had the only copy of the play for two years and kept putting Valerie off, then
he either lost or stole it. . . . the document itself is important to her, her own type-
written copy.” E-mail correspondence with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, November 15–16,
 Notes to Pages 72–76 211

2010. As I have demonstrated, Solanas appears to have always been in possession of a

copy of the script. If Warhol lost her original or a mimeograph, it was not her only copy
of the play.

Chapter 2
1. Ti-­Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey: The First Collection of Writings by the Po-
litical Pioneer of the Women’s Movement (New York: Link Books, 1974), 9. The Feminists
(1968–­73) included Sheila Michaels, Barbara Mehrhof, Pamela Kearon, Sheila Cronan,
and Anne Koedt (author of the influential “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” who left the
group in 1969 to cofound New York Radical Feminists). Atkinson parted with The
Feminists in 1971.
2. Ibid., 41.
3. Ibid., 132.
4. Ibid., 134.
5. Ibid., 99.
6. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–­1975 (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 178.
7. The Feminists, “Women: Do You Know the Facts about Marriage?,” in Sister-
hood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed.
Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 601.
8. Ibid., 602.
9. See Sara Davidson, “An ‘Oppressed Majority’ Demands Its Rights: The Cause
of Women’s Equality Draws a Growing Number of Active—­and Angry—­Female Mili-
tants,” Life, December 12, 1969, 66–­78.
10. The Feminists, “Women,” 603.
11. Sheila Cronan, “Marriage,” in Radical Feminism, eds. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine,
and Anita Rapone (New York: Harper Collins, 1973), 219.
12. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Jour-
nal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980). A critique of marriage was
integral to first-­wave feminism. Although suffrage was the primary goal of this movement,
marriage reform was of central concern, as is evidenced by one of the founding documents,
the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, delivered at the first women’s rights convention
in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 and signed by sixty-­eight women and thirty-­two men.
See “Report of the Women’s Rights Convention,” http://www.nps.gov/wori/historyculture/
report-of-the-womans-rights-convention.htm (accessed January 2009).
13. Barbara Smith, Preface to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara
Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), xiv.
14. Pat Parker, “Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,” in This Bridge Called
My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa
(San Francisco: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 241. Parker’s poem
“Womanslaughter” (1978) chronicles her sister’s death at the hands of her estranged
husband, who was convicted not of murder but of manslaughter. Outraged by this
travesty of justice, Parker went to Brussels in 1976 to file a complaint with the Interna-
tional Tribunal on Crimes against Women.
15. Beverly Smith, “The Wedding,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed.
Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 166–­67.
16. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Spinsters and Aunt Lute, 1987), 22.
17. Marianne Moore, “Marriage,” in Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1994),
69, 68.
212 Notes to Pages 77–81

18. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-­and Post-
modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 1.
19. The very first WITCH zap took place on Halloween 1968 when a group of
protesters hexed Wall Street. In covens across the country, protesters targeted sexist,
racist, and imperialist corporations such as the United Fruit Company, AT&T, and
Traveler’s Insurance Company. One of the cells showered the Sociology Department
at the University of Chicago with hair and nail trimmings after it denied tenure to a
feminist professor.
20. WITCH, “WITCH Documents,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of
Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1970), 610.
21. Ibid., 610, 613.
22. Ibid., 613.
23. Ibid.
24. Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com (accessed January 2010).
25. See, for example, The Zap Gun, a 1967 science fiction novel by Phillip K. Dick.
26. Tom Dalzell, ed., The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Un-
conventional English (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1075.
27. Tom Hayden, Port Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the 1960s Revolution
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 53.
28. Ibid.
29. Zaps share many features of actos, Luis Valdez’s term for the short, comical skits
created by Teatro Campesino, which blend Brechtian tactics with elements of the com-
media dell’arte, folk plays, and agitprop that were staged, from 1965 on, in union halls,
churches, and on flatbed trucks in fields in order to educate farmworkers about their
rights and inspire action, specifically to strike against the growers. See Jorge Huerta,
Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). See
also Yolanda Broyles-­González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Actos may have directly or indirectly influ-
enced the Yippies’ zap actions as Teatro Campesino and the Diggers both have roots in
the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
30. Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women’s Experience
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 42.
31. Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 59.
See also Jerry Rubin, Do IT! Scenarios of Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970).
32. Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It, 81.
33. Other Yippies who participated in WITCH were Nancy Kurshan, Sharon Krebs,
and Judy Gumbo. Noteworthy members who were not Yippies but were active in the
New Left include Jo Freeman, Florika, Peggy Dobbins, and Naomi Jaffe.
34. Organized by New York Radical Women (NYRW), the 1968 Miss America zap
protested women’s enslavement to beauty standards. Hundreds of demonstrators pick-
eted the pageant, tossed implements of patriarchal oppression and female torture (in-
cluding bras, high heels, Playboy, and Ladies Home Journal) into a Freedom Trash can,
and called for a boycott of all commercial products supporting the beauty industry.
Activists took turns parading a live sheep up and down the boardwalk before crowning
it queen in a mock ceremony. A handful of radicals posing as pageant viewers infiltrat-
ed the convention hall, smuggling in banners, which they unfurled from the balcony
the moment the beauty queen was announced, shouting, “No More Miss America!,”
“Freedom for Women!,” and “Women’s Liberation.” As riot police descended on the
demonstrators, camera operators panned from the stage to the commotion, giving
 Notes to Pages 81–86 213

viewers across the country their first glimpse of the women’s liberation movement, live
on network television. The Redstockings’ online archive contains photographs, press
releases, and newspaper reports from the 1968 and 1969 demonstrations (http://www.
redstockings.org), as does Jo Freeman’s web archive (http://www.jofreeman.com/pho
tos/MissAm1969.html). See also Carol Hanisch, “What Can Be Learned: A Critique of
the Miss America Protest,” originally published in Notes from the Second Year, archived
on her website (http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/MissACritique.html).
35. Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the
Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 603.
36. Ibid., 605.
37. Ibid., 604.
38. Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York:
Random House, 1977), 64.
39. Judy Klemesrud, “It Was a Special Show—­and the Audience Was Special Too,”
New York Times, February 17, 1969, 39.
40. Ibid.
41. Morgan was married from 1962 to 1983 to Kenneth Pitchford, who would go
on to become one of the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front and the Ef-
feminists.
42. Morgan, Going Too Far, 78.
43. Ibid., 79.
44. Ibid., 72, emphasis original.
45. Morgan and her fellow WITCHes identified as “self-­styled politicos” rather
than “radical feminists,” the term used by the Redstockings and groups that privileged
consciousness-­raising and the development of theoretical tracts over direct action. De-
spite Morgan’s efforts to separate WITCH from the Redstockings, both groups shared a
common origin, the NYRW, and both aimed to make visible the relationship between
the personal and the political. See Morgan’s “Three Articles on WITCH” in Going Too
Far, 71–­81.
46. Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A., 43. For additional accounts of the
WITCH Bridal Fair protest, see Echols, Daring to Be Bad; Karla Jay, A Dyke Life: From
Growing Up to Growing Old, A Celebration of Lesbian Experience (New York: Basic
Books, 1995); and Susan Brownmiller, in Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York:
Dell, 1999).
47. Morgan, Going Too Far, 122.
48. Ibid., 81.
49. Ibid., 122.
50. Ibid., 123.
51. Ibid., 10, 72.
52. Ibid., 127.
53. Ibid., 126, emphasis original.
54. For more on How to Make a Woman, see Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh
Jenkins, Women in American Theatre, 3rd ed. (New York: Theatre Communications
Group, 2006), 275–­77; and Canning, Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.,160–­61.
55. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York:
Vintage Books, [1952] 1989), 267.
56. See, for example, David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New
York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2006); Vern L. Bullough, Before Stonewall: Activists
for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park
Press, 2002); and Steve Capsuto, Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and
Lesbian Images on Radio and Television (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000).
214 Notes to Pages 87–91

57. Early GAA members included Arthur Evans, Arthur Bell, Jim Owles (the first
president), Marty Robinson, Kay Lahusen, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Brenda
Howard, Vito Russo, and Morty Manford. The group was most active from 1970 to
1974, when its headquarters (the Firehouse on Wooster Street in Soho, an important
LGBT community center) was set ablaze by arsonists. The collective published the Gay
Activist newspaper until 1980.
58. For accounts of GAA from founding and early members, see Donn Teal, The
Gay Militants (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971) and Arthur Bell, Dancing the Gay Lib
Blues: A Year in the Homosexual Liberation Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1971). For a less celebratory, more critical history, see Toby Marotta, The Politics of
Homosexuality: How Lesbians and Gay Men Have Made Themselves a Political and Social
Force in Modern America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 71–­195.
59. Larry P. Gross, Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 46.
60. GAA zapped conferences by the Association for the Advancement of Behavior
Therapy and the American Psychological Association where motions to change the
classification of homosexuality as a psychopathology were hotly debated.
61. Michael Durham, “Homosexuals in Revolt: The Year One Liberation Movement
Turned Militant,” Life, December 31, 1971, 65.
62. Quoted in Gross, Up from Invisibility, 46.
63. Eisenbach, Gay Power, 157, emphasis mine.
64. Eric Marcus, Making Gay History: The Half Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay
Equal Rights (New York: Harper, 2002), 154.
65. Randy Wicker filmed the zap and the GAA meeting at the Firehouse in which
activists plotted precisely how they would execute the protest, including who would
serve as spokesmen for the event and what they would say. Whereas many political
organizations in the 1960s and 1970s avoided archiving their material, for fear it would
fall into the hands of government agencies, GAA recorded most of its protests. It used
these tapes to rehearse for future events but also as recruiting tools. Members often
played footage of zaps during community meetings, conferences, and dances at the
Firehouse.
66. Father Clement founded The Church of the Beloved Disciple (1968–­1986), the
first major urban apostolic and sacramental house of worship serving the LGBT com-
munity in New York. He performed “Holy Unions” for couples, and took part in this
ceremony himself. In 1970, he was joined with his partner John Noble by the Revered
Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church in a service at the Performing Ga-
rage Theatre.
67. During the planning meeting, GAA members agreed that it was best to avoid
the topic of gay marriage and to focus instead on the issue of gay rights, specifically the
right of gays to their own relationships. Thus the decision to call the action an “engage-
ment party.” Once the zap began, however, both the activists and the employees at the
Marriage Licensing Bureau referred to the event as a “wedding reception.”
68. David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of
Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
69. Bruce Voeller, the third president of GAA, was a biology professor and a di-
vorced father of three. He used his charisma and movie star good looks to achieve im-
portant legal and social reforms such as child custody rights and encouraging health of-
ficials and politicians to use the name AIDS instead of the more stigma-­inducing GRID
(Gay-­Related Immune Deficiency). Voeller disapproved of more militant gay activists,
whom he often disparagingly referred to as “trolls” (Eisenbach, Gay Power, 243).
70. Diana Cage, “Up Close with the Iconic Holly Hughes: Video Interview,”
SheWired, October 15, 2010, http://www.shewired.com/box-office/close-iconic-holly-
 Notes to Pages 92–95 215

hughes-video-interview (accessed January 2011). I saw Holly Hughes’s Let Them Eat
Cake at Dixon Place on December 4, 2010.
71. While I did not have the opportunity to see State of Marriage, I have enjoyed
many conversations with Joan Lipkin about its creation and staging. Performance art-
ist Tim Miller also toured a show with a pro-­marriage platform in 2010. Like Let Them
Eat Cake and State of Marriage, Lay of the Land was inspired by Proposition 8, though
Miller, whose partner is a foreign national, has long supported the cause of gay mar-
riage. I saw Lay of the Land when it played at the Kitchen Theater in my hometown of
Ithaca, NY.
72. The State Supreme Court of California ruled four to three that denying same-­
sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. This case
was prompted by the city of San Francisco’s decision to issue marriage licenses to gay
couples in 2004.
73. While many African Americans supported Proposition 8 on the grounds that
same-­sex marriage does not constitute a civil rights issue, this response is complicated
by the complex relationship many African Americas have with the institution of mar-
riage, which was outlawed during slavery. Even after it was legalized, racist miscegena-
tion laws dictated who blacks could and could not wed. See Frances Foster, Love and
Marriage in Early African America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007).
74. Dan Savage, “Black Homophobia,” Slog, November 5, 2008, http://slog.the
stranger.com/2008/11/black_homophobia (accessed January 2011).
75. Urvashi Vaid, “Beyond the Wedding Ring: LGBT Issues in the Age of Obama,”
Texts and Speeches, August 16, 2010, http://urvashivaid.net/wp/?p=344 (accessed Jan-
uary 2010).
76. Ibid. See also Vaid’s essay, “What Can Brown Do For You: Race, Sexuality,
and the Future of LGBT Politics,” Texts and Speeches, November 24, 2010, http://
urvashivaid.net/wp/?p=709 (accessed January 2010).
77. Many members of ACT-­UP and Queer Nation were opposed to same-­sex mar-
riage, including Michael Warner, who engaged in heated public debates on the matter
with both Larry Kramer and Andrew Sullivan. See Michael Warner, The Trouble with
Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). National
debate about the legal status of LGBT partners began prior to the AIDS epidemic, of
course, and lesbians have been the subject of a number of important court cases, in-
cluding In re Guardianship of Kowalski, in which Karen Tompson filed a successful law-
suit for the right to care for her partner, Sharon Kowalski, who suffered a brain injury
in a fatal car crash with a drunk driver in 1983. See Casey Charles, The Sharon Kowalski
Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial (Topeka: University of Kansas Press, 2003). See
also Nan D. Hunter, “Sexual Dissent and the Family: The Sharon Kowalski Case,” in
Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, eds. Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 99–­104. There have also been a number of lawsuits filed by
lesbian mothers over custody of their children since the 1970s.
78. Founding members of the Lesbian Avengers include Ana Maria Simo, of Medu-
sa’s Revenge, playwright and novelist Sarah Schulman, Maxine Wolfe, Anne-­Christine
D’Adesky, Marie Honan, and Anne Maguire. The group, which began in Manhattan,
soon sprouted cells across the United States. See Sarah Schulman, My American History:
Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994).
79. In 2008 and 2009, small bands of women in California and Texas marched in
support of same-­sex marriage under the banner of the Lesbian Avengers. This position
is antithetical to the groups’ foundational principles.
80. Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberal-
ism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, eds. Russ Cas-
tronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 25.
216 Notes to Pages 96–100

81. Jesse McKinley, “Theater Director Resigns amid Gay-­ Rights Ire,” New
York Times, November 12, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/arts/13iht-
13thea.17797780.html (accessed January 2011).
82. Dave Itzkoff, “Marc Shaiman on Prop 8—­The Musical,” New York Times Art
Beat, December 4, 2008, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/marc-shaiman-
on-prop-8-the-musical/ (accessed January 2010).
83. Many out lesbians openly support same-­sex marriage, including Ellen DeGe-
neres and Rosie O’Donnell, both of whom have been married twice, and Jane Lynch
and Wanda Sykes, both of whom recently tied the knot.
84. The ensemble is comprised of Jordan Ballard, Margaret Cho, Barrett Foa,
J. B. Ghuman Jr., John Hill, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, Rashad Naylor, and Nicole
Parker.
85. Jenifer Lewis stars as Riffing Prop 8’er; Craig Robinson plays A Preacher; and
Rashida Jones, Lake Bell, and Sarah Chalke form a chorus called Scary Catholic School
Girls from Hell.
86. Justin Ewers, “Same-­sex Marriage Is Expected to Add Millions to California
Coffers,” US News and World Report, June 11, 2008, http://www.usnews.com/news/
national/articles/2008/06/11/an-economic-boost-from-gay-marriage (accessed January
2011). The study’s authors, Brad Sears, an adjunct professor of law at UCLA, and Lee
Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, based
their calculations on the assumption that half of the 103,000 same-sex couples living in
the state would marry by 2011 along with 70,000 same-sex couples from other states.
87. Ibid.
88. Vaid, “Beyond the Wedding Ring.”
89. Adam Bouska and Jeff Parshley, NOH8 Campaign, http://noh8campaign.com
(accessed January 2010).
90. Only a few photographs deviate from this formula. Lieutenant Dan Choi, who
was instrumental in the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy,
is featured in camouflage (with fist raised in a defiant salute), and celebrity attorney
Gloria Allred is shot all in red, her signature color.
91. For Cindy McCain’s photo, see http://www.noh8campaign.com/photo-gallery/
familiar-faces/photo/5722; for Meghan McCain’s photos, see http://www.noh8cam
paign.com/photo-gallery/familiar-faces/photo/5566. Meghan posed for several shots,
including one with her mother and one in which she holds her fingers, tips painted
black, to her lips in a gesture of silence.
92. Republicans were responsible for New York’s marriage equality victory, which
was financed by an elite group of gay, white, male billionaires. See Kenyon Farrow, “Gay
Marriage in New York: Progressive Victory or GOP Roadmap?,” Alternet.org, June 27,
2011, http://www.alternet.org/story/151444/gay_marriage_in_new_york%3A_progres
sive_victory_or_gop_roadmap/ (accessed July 2011). See also Michael Barbaro, “Be-
hind N.Y. Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces,” New York Times, June 25, 2011.
93. The plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger were Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, a
lesbian couple from Berkeley who have been together for ten years and are raising
four boys, and male partners from Burbank, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, who have
cohabitated for nine years. The case was financed by the American Foundation for
Equal Rights (AFER), which was created by political consultant and Washington in-
sider Chad Griffin, the youngest member of President Bill Clinton’s White House com-
munications team, on May 26, 2008, the day after the Supreme Court verdict uphold-
ing Proposition 8. Griffin’s official bio boasts that his “experience and expertise have
made him a go-­to resource for reporters on the intersection of Hollywood and politics”
(http://www.griffinschake.com/chadGriffinBio.html). The case, now Perry v. Brown,
and the appeals it will undoubtedly generate, continue as this book goes to press.
 Notes to Pages 100–106 217

94. Theodore Olson, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage: Why Same-­Sex
Marriage Is an American Value,” Newsweek, January 8, 2010, reposted on the Daily
Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/01/08/the-conservative-case-for-
gay-marriage.html (accessed January 2011).
95. Ibid.
96. Carl Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto,” in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Libera-
tion, eds. Karla Jay and Allen Young, twentieth anniversary ed. (New York: New York
University Press, 1992), 333.
97. Ibid., 334.
98. Duggan, “The New Homonormativity,” 8–­9.
99. Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation
(New York: Anchor Books, 1996).
100. In 1984, Berkeley, California, became the first city to offer a “domestic partner-
ship” to same-­sex and opposite-­sex couples. Other cities and counties soon followed
suit.
101. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Introduction to Performativity and
Performance, eds. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge,
1995), 10. Marriage, the authors remind us, is J. L. Austin’s primary illustration of
the speech act he calls explicit performatives in How To Do Things With Words (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Antimarriage zaps fall under the category
of “negative performatives” in Austen’s schema. As Parker and Sedgwick note, “The
fascinating and powerful class of negative performatives—­disavowal, renunciation, re-
pudiation, ‘count me out’—­is marked, in almost every instance, by the asymmetrical
property of being much less prone to becoming conventional than the positive perfor-
matives” (9). My aim in this chapter has been, in part, to show that promarriage zaps
are indeed the most prone to becoming conventional. On the “weird centrality of the
marriage example for performativity,” see chapter 2 of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touch-
ing Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
which was originally published as “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the
Novel” GLQ 1 (1993): 1–­16.

Chapter 3
he epigraphs are from Jill Johnston, Mother Bound: Autobiography in Search of a Father
T
(New York: Knopf, 1983), 132; and Jill Johnston, “Writing into the Sunset,” Village
Voice, September 27, 1972, 44.
1. Andy Warhol’s Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963) is considered one of his finest portraits.
2. Jill Johnston, Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years, 1970–­75 (Lon-
don: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), x.
3. Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973), 118.
4. Alisa Solomon, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: The ‘Voice’ Reports the Queer
Revolution,” Village Voice, October 18, 2005, http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-10-18/
specials/our-hearts-were-young-and-gay/ (accessed October 2009). Years later, John-
ston claimed to have publicly come out in the winter of 1969, prior to the Stonewall
uprising. See “Writing into the Sunset,” 44. To put Johnston’s coming out in perspec-
tive, we need only remember the waves Ellen DeGeneres made when she did the same
in 1997. Prior to the 1990s, the only time lesbians graced the covers of national pub-
lications was when they felt the need to publicly denounce rumors that they were gay,
as Martina Navratilova did in 1982. See Martha Gever, Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity,
Sexuality, and Self-Invention (New York: Routledge, 2003).
5. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 120.
218 Notes to Pages 106–11

6. Ibid., 121.
7. Ibid., 123.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 19.
10. Charlotte Curtis, “Women’s Liberation Gets into the Long Island Swim,” New
York Times, August 10, 1970, 32.
11. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 16.
12. Ibid., 17.
13. Ibid., 39.
14. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 11. One of Berlant’s primary
interlocutors here is Wendy Brown’s States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Moder-
nity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
15. Ibid., 264, 11.
16. Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in
Transformations: Thinking through Feminism, eds. Sarah Ahmed and Jane Kilby (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 34. See also Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished
Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008);
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom
to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Jill Dolan, Utopia
in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2005).
17. Suzan-­Lori Parks, “Elements of Style,” in The America Play and Other Works
(New York: Theatre Communications Group [TCG], 1995), 15.
18. Mady Schutzman, “Jok(er)ing: Joker Runs Wild,” in A Boal Companion: Di-
alogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics, eds. Jan Cohen-­Cruz and Mady Schutzman
(New York: Routledge, 2006), 140. The joker occupies a pivotal role in Augusto Boal’s
dramaturgy, in both his Joker System and his Theatre of the Oppressed. Victor Turner
employs the phrase “joker in the deck” to characterize the subjunctive mood of play.
Comprised of elements of paidia (free play) and ludus (structured play, games), the
joker is an animating and unpredictable force that “reveals to us the possibility of . . .
restructuring . . . what our culture states to be reality.” See Victor Turner, “Body, Brain
and Culture,” Performing Arts Journal 10, no. 2 (1986): 26–­34. Illustrative of the ani-
mating force of the joker is a passage in Roland Barthes’s Leçon, in which the author
writes about wanting to convert his Chair of Literary Semiology into a wheelchair so
as to be perpetually in motion, “the wildcard [joker] of contemporary knowledge.” See
Jonathan Culler, Barthes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 58.
19. Johnston’s mother, Olive Marjorie Crowe, had her only child out of wedlock,
the result of an affair with a British bellfounder and clockmaker named Cyril F. John-
ston. Rather than admit to her indiscretion, Crowe told everyone, including her daugh-
ter, that she was a widow. Johnston grew up believing that her father was dead.
20. Johnston, Admission Accomplished, v.
21. Johnston wrote for Dance Observer beginning in 1955 and for Art News from
1955 to 1966. From the mid-­1980s until her death in 2010, she was a regular contribu-
tor to the New York Times Book Review and Art in America.
22. Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), 194.
23. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 40, 39, 58.
24. Ibid., 48.
25. Ibid., 80.
 Notes to Pages 111–15 219

26. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge,
1993).
27. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 54, 56.
28. Ibid., 70, 66, 75.
29. Ibid., 64.
30. Ibid., 70.
31. Ibid., 19.
32. Ibid., 44.
33. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). See, in particular, chapter 11.
34. Schutzman, “Jok(er)ing,” 143.
35. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an
Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 32.
36. Ibid.
37. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 79.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 117.
40. Of Music Walk with Dancer, Johnston writes, “I managed to present together my
three female travesties: the hoyden, the dancer, and the wife-­and-­mother. Wearing my
loud red dress and my stockings, I executed a number of household chores—­cleaning
a baby bottle, vacuuming, frying bacon, pulling a vehicular toy dog on a string, and
so on—­stopping long enough downstage to perform a slinky sort of dance plastique”
(Mother Bound, 141). In Inside Originale, Johnston played the part of a free agent trick-
ster. She recalls, “Five nights in a row, I appeared quite drunk in outlandish female
accoutrements and hung upside down from a scaffolding and did my best to disrupt
the performances of the other artists involved. Several sensitive artists were offended
or outraged” (142).
41. Sally Banes, Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1994), 7.
42. Johnston, Admission Accomplished, vi.
43. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1997), 311.
44. Ibid., 310.
45. Johnston, Admission Accomplished, 201.
46. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 79.
47. Johnston, Marmalade Me, 83; Johnston, Admission Accomplished, vi.
48. Melissa Deem, “Disrupting the Nuptials at the Town Hall Debate: Feminism and
the Politics of Cultural Memory in the USA,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2003): 621.
49. Johnston appears as a marginal figure in Mike Sell’s Avant-­Garde Performance
and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the
Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). She receives
only scant attention in both Alice Echols’s Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in Amer-
ica, 1967–­1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); and Lillian Fader-
man’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century Amer-
ica (New York: Penguin, 1999), where she haunts the chapter titled “Lesbian Nation,”
but is discussed only in relation to mainstream publishers poaching texts from lesbian-­
feminist presses and anxiety about bisexuality. Johnston does not appear at all in Sarah
Evans’s Personal Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); or Ginette Castro’s American
Feminism, a Contemporary History, trans. Elizabeth Loverde-­Bagwell (New York: New
York University Press, 1990). The only anthology that includes Johnston’s work is the
220 Notes to Pages 115–20

one she coedited. See Phyllis Birkby, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, and
Jane O’Wyatt, eds., Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology (New York: Times
Change Press, 1973).
50. Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary
History 31, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 728.
51. Johnston, Admission Accomplished, 145.
52. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 79, 119.
53. Jill Johnston, “Of This Pure but Irregular Passion,” Village Voice, July 2, 1970,
29–­30, 38–­39, 55.
54. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 79.
55. Johnston, “Of this Pure but Irregular Passion,” 29.
56. Ibid., 29–­30.
57. Ibid., 38.
58. Ibid.
59. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 119.
60. Ibid., 118.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 183.
63. Ibid., 267.
64. Banes, Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism, 8.
65. Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), 114. Johnston’s coming-­out column was reprinted
in The Ladder.
66. María Irene Fornés, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Lisa Kennedy, and Barbara
Smith, “On the Beginnings of Lesbian Literature,” in Queer Representations: Reading
Lives, Reading Cultures, a Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Book, ed. Martin B. Duber-
man (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 349. These comments were made
on a CLAGS panel in 1993, which was structured as a moderated conversation among
María Irene Fornés, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Barbara Smith, and Lisa Smith.
67. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 39.
68. Ibid., 19.
69. Ibid., 314.
70. Ibid., 25.
71. Ibid., 26.
72. Ibid., 25.
73. Ibid., 24.
74. Ibid., 25.
75. There were a number of feminists and lesbians in the audience, including Betty
Friedan, Susan Sontag, and Cynthia Ozick, who asked questions of the panelists during
the Q&A session.
76. Steinem came to be a political ally of Mailer’s. She encouraged and endorsed his
candidacy for mayor of New York City in 1973.
77. Germaine Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” Esquire 76, no. 3 (1971): 92–­93, 214–­
16.
78. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 40; Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (New York: SCUM
Book, 1967), 19. According to Johnston, Valerie harassed her and sent her death threats
for misspelling her name in Lesbian Nation as Solanis (a common error that stems from
Warhol listing her as Valeria Solanis in the credits of I, a Man, which is, incidentally,
how the press referred to her after the shooting). See Deem, “Disrupting the Nuptials
at the Town Hall Debate,” 643, n. 30.
79. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 17.
80. Ibid., 22.
 Notes to Pages 120–27 221

81. Johnston claimed that had she actually read “The Prisoner of Sex” before she
agreed to participate in the debate, she might have approached the event “with more
righteous indignation and intent to murder if not simply destroy” (ibid., 26).
82. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1977),
412–­54.
83. Johnston, “Writing Into the Sunset,” 44.
84. One month after Town Hall, Germaine Greer would grace the cover of Life
magazine (May 1971) alongside a caption proclaiming her a “saucy feminist that even
men like.”
85. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 266.
86. Ibid.
87. Town Bloody Hall, dir. Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, 1979, Pennebaker
Hegedus Films, New York, DVD. All quotes from the debate not attributed elsewhere
are taken from this film.
88. Johnston identifies her costars as Robyn and SK (Lesbian Nation, 36).
89. Victor Turner coined the term liminoid to denote cultural performances and
leisure activities that have characteristics of liminal rites but are optional and don’t
involve the resolution of a crisis. Play is integral to these post-­industrial, secular
phenomena, which fracture social relations, expectations and mores and “ludicly”
recombine them. “One works at the liminal, one plays at the limonoid.” Victor
Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ,
1982), 27, 55.
90. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 165.
91. Ibid., 26.
92. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 15.
93. Ibid., 36.
94. Johnston writes that Town Hall “was accorded the kind of front page attention
you might expect to see for a new episode of alice crimmins or the sinking of the queen
mary” (ibid., 23).
95. See Rita Mae Brown, “Leadership v Stardom,” Furies 1, no. 2 (February 1972).
96. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1.
97. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 171.
98. Ibid., 96.
99. Ibid., 156, 277.
100. Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Nationality,” in The Queen of
America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, by Lauren Berlant (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 1997), 168.
101. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 122.
102. Becki Ross, The House That Jill Built: A Lesbian Nation in Formation (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1995). Aside from the title, Ross does not discuss Johnston
in this text.
103. A few examples of the many separatist collectives that existed at the time John-
ston compiled Lesbian Nation include the Revolutionary Lesbians, the Gutter Dyke
Collective (Berkeley), CLIT (the Collective Lesbian International Terrors in New York
City), the Radicalesbians (New York), the Gorgons (Seattle), the Flippies (Feminist
Lesbian Intergalactic Party in Chicago), and the Furies (Washington, DC).
104. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 210–­11.
105. Ibid., 224.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., 235.
108. See Grace Lichtenstein, “Women’s Lib Wooed by Publishers,” New York Times,
August 17, 1970, 32. See also Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, chapter 9.
222 Notes to Pages 127–33

109. Jill Johnston, “Write First, Then Live,” in Queer Representations: Reading Lives,
Reading Cultures, a Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Book, ed. Martin B. Duberman
(New York: New York University Press, 1997), 350.
110. Ibid.
111. Many lesbian feminists saw working with the mainstream as a form of selling
out and chose only to publish with women’s press collectives or to self-­publish. Others,
like Morgan and Johnston, saw this as a way to reach a wider audience.
112. Jill Johnston, “Was Lesbian Separatism Inevitable?,” Gay and Lesbian Review
13, no. 2, (March–­ April 2006), http://www.glreview.com/issues/13.2/13.2-johnston
.php (accessed August 2009).
113. Johnston, “Write First, Then Live,” 350.
114. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 11.
115. Lesbian Nation is comprised of selected reviews published in the Village Voice
from 1970 to 1972 along with excerpts from the author’s diary and other writings.
116. Johnston, “Was Lesbian Separatism Inevitable?”
117. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 76.
118. Ibid., 76.
119. Ibid., 271.
120. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Double-
day, 1959), 252–­53.
121. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 6.
122. Erin Hurley, National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Celine
Dion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 24.
123. Ross, The House That Jill Built, 16.
124. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: New York University Press, 2009), 18.
125. Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 158.
126. Deem, “Disrupting the Nuptials at the Town Hall Debate,” 641, n. 10.
127. Temporal drag is inherent in all weddings. Part of what makes this event a tra-
dition is “restored” or “twice-­behaved behavior,” its connection to and replaying of the
past. See Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Pittsburgh: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36.
128. Geoffrey Hendricks has been associated with Fluxus since the mid-­1960s.
Known as “cloudsmith” for his extensive exploration of sky imagery in his art, Hen-
dricks taught at Rutgers University, my alma mater, from 1956 to 2003, where he
worked closely with his colleagues Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, and Lucas Sama-
ras. See Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Interme-
dia, and Rutgers University, 1958–­1972 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2003). See also Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
129. Jill Johnston, “Wedding in Denmark,” Art in America 82, no. 6 (June 1994): 76.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid.
133. In 1978 Hendricks performed his first Fluxwedding. George Maciunas, dying
of liver cancer, asked Geoff to serve as Fluxminister at his marriage to Billie Hutching.
The event took place at the Grommet Art Theater (now the Emily Harvey Gallery).
Maciunas died three months later, and Hendricks served as Fluxminister at his Fluxfu-
neral.
134. “Call me a Fluxus artist,” wrote Johnston, who considered herself not simply
 Notes to Pages 133–44 223

a critic but a partner in performance. See “George Brecht, the Philosopher of Fluxus,”
Art in America 94, no. 4 (April 2006): 112–­18.
135. Estera Milman, “Introduction: Fluxus: A Conceptual Country,” Visible Lan-
guage 26, nos. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 1992): 13. Milman acknowledges that her descrip-
tion of Fluxus as a conceptual country was influenced by Ken Friedman and George
Maciunas’s Visa TouRistE: Passport to the State of Flux, a work first proposed by Fried-
man in 1966 and realized by Maciunas in 1977.
136. In addition to Johnston, Fluxus women include Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Ali-
son Knowles, Carolee Schneemann, and Sara Seagull. The queer dimensions of Fluxus
go back to John Cage and his coterie. In addition to being popularized by Eastern
Europeans, in both Europe and the United States, Fluxus found a home in Asia, espe-
cially in Japan. See Midori Yoshimoto, “An Evening with Fluxus Women: A Roundtable
Discussion,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 3 (November
2009): 369–­89.
137. Johnston, “Wedding in Denmark,” 75.
138. Ibid., 76.
139. Mary T. Conway, “A Becoming Queer Aesthetic,” Discourse 26, no. 3 (2004):
178.
140. Michael Rush, New Media in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 24.
141. Kristine Stiles, “Between Water and Stone: Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics
of Acts,” in In the Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Janet Jenkins (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center,
1993), 77.
142. Johnston, “Wedding in Denmark,” 75.
143. Ibid., 76.
144. Johnston, Admission Accomplished, viii.
145. Ibid.
146. Robert, Pincus-­Witten, “Fluxus and the Silvermans: An Introduction,” in Flux-
us Codex, ed. Jon Hendricks (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 26.

Chapter 4
he epigraph is from John Waters’s gay rant on “I Advocate,” episode 103-­I, The Advo-
T
cate On-­Air, http://www.advocate.com/Video/?pid=XO5uBRfc6aOX1A4aScdU5K1z4qR
UjKri (accessed January 2011).
1. Diane DiMassa, Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, http://
hotheadpaisan.com (accessed June 2008). Ariel Levy, “Lesbian Nation: When Gay
Women Took to the Road,” New Yorker, March 2, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/
reporting/2009/03/02/090302fa_fact_levy (accessed March 2012). See also Jill Dolan,
“Feeling Women’s Culture: Women’s Music, Lesbian Feminism, and the Impact of
Emotional Memory,” in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26, no. 2 (Spring
2012): 205–19.
2. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007), xi.
3. Ibid., xiv.
4. K. Martin and G. Moon, “Hothead Goes Musical: Agitate, Agitate, Agitate,”
Velvet Park, no. 8 (Winter 2005): 15.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (Boston: Beacon, 1985).
8. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 71–­72.
224 Notes to Pages 145–50

9. Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1994), x.
10. Born in Flames, dir. Lizzie Borden, 1983, New York, First Run Features, VHS;
Five Lesbian Brothers, The Secretaries, in Five Lesbian Brothers: Four Plays (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 2000), 117–­91; Split Britches, Lesbians Who Kill, in
Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance, ed. Sue-­Ellen Case (New York:
Routledge, 1996), 185–­224; Set it Off, dir. Gary F. Gray, 1996, New Line Cinema, Los
Angeles, DVD; Staceyann Chin, “Dykepoem,” in Wildcat Woman: Poetry (N.p., Stac-
eyann Chin, 1998). For a history of the Lesbian Avengers, see Sarah Schulman, My
American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan//Bush Years (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1994), 283–­319. One might be tempted to ally the bicurious heroines of Ridley
Scott’s 1991 film Thelma and Louise with homicidal lesbian terrorists, but this narrative
is a (failed) revenge fantasy that ends with the women committing suicide by driving
off a cliff rather than facing a showdown with the authorities.
11. Diane DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999), 11. Cleiss Press reassembled early issues of the zine,
and DiMassa added additional content to produce a more coherent narrative for the
anthologies.
12. Ibid., 16.
13. Terrorist drag is the term José Muñoz uses to describe the disidentificatory
performance style of Vagina Crème Davis. See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications:
Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), 97.
14. The labrys is a double-­headed ax associated with Amazon warriors and resur-
rected as a symbol of lesbian feminism in the 1970s. It serves as the cover for Mary
Daly’s Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).
15. Dana Heller makes this point in “Hothead Paisan: Clearing a Space for Lesbian
Feminist Folklore,” New York Folklore 19, nos. 1–­2 (1993): 157–­83.
16. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alterna-
tive Culture (New York: Verso, 1997), 2.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Dykes to Watch Out For began in 1983 and ran until 2008, when Alison Bechdel
put the strip on hiatus to complete her award-­winning graphic novel Fun Home. That
year, in celebration of the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the comic, she published The Es-
sential Dykes to Watch Out For (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).
20. Cleis Press, founded in 1980 by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste, is
the largest independent queer publishing company in the United States and the only
organization of its kind still run by its founders. The first anthology, Hothead Paisan:
Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1993), consists of the first nine issues along with twenty
pages of new material. The second, The Revenge of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian
Terrorist (1995), contains issues ten through eighteen with thirty new pages, and the fi-
nal volume, The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1999), includes
all twenty-­one issues with a ten-­page introduction.
21. Kathleen Martindale, Un/Popular Culture: Lesbian Writing after the Sex Wars
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 59.
22. This issue originally appeared in the fourth quarterly publication of the zine,
published in 1992. It is included in the Cleis anthologies of 1993 and 1999. See Heller,
“Hothead Paisan.”
23. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press,
2006), 3.
 Notes to Pages 150–54 225

24. The Robespierre of feminism is what Norman Mailer called Valerie Solanas
after she shot Andy Warhol. See Dana Heller, “Shooting Solanas,” Feminist Studies 27,
no. 1 (2001): 167–­89. Robespierre defined terror as “nothing but justice, prompt, se-
vere, and inflexible.” If the basis of a popular government in peacetime is virtue, he
reasoned, then its basis in a time of revolution is virtue and terror—­virtue, without
which terror would be barbaric, and terror, without which virtue would be impotent
(quoted in Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 3). Of course, terrorism as a political program
existed long before Robespierre gave it a proper name.
25. During the Reign of Terror (1793–­1794; sometimes called simply The Terror),
an estimated 300,000 people were arrested and 17,000–­40,000 were guillotined, a fate
Robespierre himself would eventually suffer.
26. Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-­First Century (New
York: Continuum International, 2004), 4. See also Walter Reich, Origins of Terrorism:
Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson Press
Center, 1998); Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, eds., The History of Terrorism: From
Antiquity to al Qaeda (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Martha Cren-
shaw, ed., Terrorism in Context (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995);
and Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religion’s Violence
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
27. Jean Baudrillard, “Our Theatre of Cruelty,” trans. John Johnston, Semiotext(e)
4 (1982): 108. See also Herb Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York:
Performing Arts Journal, 1982); and Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
28. Jean-­François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 60–­70.
29. Anthony Kubiak Stages of Terror: Terror, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre His-
tory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 157.
30. DiMassa, Hothead Paisan, (1993), 9.
31. Ibid.
32. John Orr and Dragan Klaić, “Terrorism and Drama: Introduction,” in Terrorism
and Modern Drama, eds. John Orr and Dragan Klaić (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1990), 8.
33. The attacks by al-­Qaeda included bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and
Kenya in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000; the thwarted shoe bombing of an American
Airlines flight in 2001; and simultaneous attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon,
and a third Washington location, most likely the White House or the Capitol. One
could add to this list the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center.
34. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge,
1997), 12.
35. Keely Savoie, “Hotheaded and Bothered: A Chat with Artist/Pen-­Wielding Vigi-
lante Diane DiMassa,” Bitch: Feminist Responses to Pop Culture, no. 25 (Summer 2004):
36.
36. Lauren Berlant, “’68 or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994):
128.
37. Ibid., 126.
38. Ibid., 130.
39. Ibid., 133, my emphasis.
40. Sally Munt, Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (New York: New
York University Press, 1998), 112.
41. DiMassa had very little to do with the musical aside from creating sets and
props. Since retiring Hothead, she has put her energy into a number of artistic projects,
226 Notes to Pages 155–60

including painting. She has illustrated several books, including Kathy Acker’s Pussy-
cat Fever, Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, and Anne-­Fausto Sterling’s Sexing the
Body. DiMassa is coauthor of the graphic novel Jokes and the Unconscious with slam
poet Daphne Gottlieb.
42. The founders of Bitch and Animal met at the Theatre School at DePaul Univer-
sity (formerly the Goodman School of Drama) in Chicago.
43. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 154.
44. Ibid., 172.
45. Folksinger and Michfest regular Ferron, along with Tribe 8’s Lynn Breedlove,
were scheduled to star in the musical but were unable to participate.
46. Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 17.
47. David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 13.
48. For an interesting documentary film about Michfest, see Radical Harmonies,
dir. Dee Mosbacher, 2002, San Francisco, Woman Vision, DVD.
49. Margaret Coble, “Hothead Does Michigan,” Advocate, July 20, 2004, 56–­57.
50. See Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris Exposure, “The Woman behind the
Camera at Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, March 24, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/
reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_gourevitch (accessed July 2009). Sabrina Har-
mon was charged with seven counts of mistreating detainees and convicted of six. She
was sentenced to six months in prison. Harmon was one of eleven soldiers, most of
whom were young, low-ranking service personnel, charged with dereliction of duty
and other relatively minor offenses. Reservist and Gulf War veteran Charles Graner
received one of the stiffer sentences: ten years in prison, demotion to private, dishonor-
able discharge, and forfeiture of pay and allowances. Both England and Ambuhl were
romantically involved with him. England gave birth to Graner’s child in 2004, and
Ambuhl married him in 2005, while he was incarcerated. England’s attempt to play
the victim card is evidenced by her authorized biography, Gary S. Winkler, Tortured:
Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, and the Photographs That Shocked the World (Keyser, WV:
Bad Apple, 2009).
51. Viral Chaos: The Makings of an Animal Artist, dir. Susan Powter, 2004, San Fran-
cisco, Animal’s Farm, DVD.
52. Judith Butler, “Quotes,” European Graduate School, http:www.egs.edu/faculty/
judith-butler/quotes/ (accessed November 2011).
53. The subject of lesbian terrorism caused a stir at Michfest in 1994 when queer-
core band Tribe 8 performed “Frat Pig,” a revenge fantasy song about gang castration.
During the set, the band’s lead singer, Lynn Breedlove, castrated the strap-­on dildo she
was sporting with a large knife. The incident prompted much discussion about sexual
abuse, as some of the festival attendees objected on the grounds that it caused and/or
enflamed past trauma. Ann Cvetkovich discusses this episode in An Archive of Feeling:
Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
in the chapter titled “Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Thera-
peutic Culture,” 83–­117.
54. Sarah Pebworth, “Interview with Animal Prufrock,” Lavenderlips, March 2004,
http://www.lavenderlips.com/articles/animal.html (accessed May 2009).
55. “Letter from Diana DiMassa,” July 2004, http://eminism.org/michigan/
20040700-dimassa.txt (accessed July 2009). Michigan Women’s Music Festival ex-
cludes MTF’s, male-to-female transexuals but it allows pre-operative FTM’s, female-to-
male transexuals.
 Notes to Pages 160–67 227

56. DiMassa, The Complete Hothead Paisan, 34.

57. Martin and Moon, Hothead Goes Musical, 16.
58. Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla, eds., The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian
and Gay Theater (New York: New York University Press, 1992).
59. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011), 3.

Chapter 5
1. Holly Hughes, “Preface,” in Five Lesbian Brothers: Four Plays, by Five Lesbian
Brothers (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000), xi.
2. Five Lesbian Brothers, playbill, The Secretaries, New York Theatre Workshop,
1994, n.p.
3. Five Lesbian Brothers, Five Lesbian Brothers: Four Plays (New York: TCG,
2000), 3.
4. Mark Blankenship, “‘Oedipus’ Gets Complex in Updated Classic,” Variety, Au-
gust 4, 2005, http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117927829?refCatId=33 (accessed
September 2005).
5. Christopher Isherwood, “When Sappho Meets Sophocles in a California Hot
Tub,” New York Times Art Beat, August 5, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com (accessed
September 2005).
6. Jill Dolan, “The Return of the Five Lesbian Brothers,” The Feminist Spectator,
August 26, 2005, http://feministspectator.blogspot.com/2005/08/return-of-five-lesbi
an-brothers.html (accessed December 2005).
7. Hilton Als, “A New Age Oedipus: The Five Lesbian Brothers Update a Myth,” New
Yorker, August 25, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/22/050822crth_
theatre (accessed December 2005).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. All of the Brothers’ collaborations, save Brides of the Moon, incorporate
Brechtian-­style musical interludes into the dramatic action. So integral is song to their
work that the Brothers published the lyrics and music in the anthology of their col-
lected plays. With no music in Oedipus, the Brothers have fewer alienation effects in
their arsenal and fewer tools with which to promote critical thinking and thwart audi-
ence absorption in the theatrical spectacle.
11. Five Lesbian Brothers, Five Lesbian Brothers, 2.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 14.
14. Ibid., 9, 17. The troupe’s members had heated discussions about Brad—­whether
or not to have him appear onstage, but also how to dispose of him, by leaving him at
the altar or killing him. As Brother Healey notes, “Interesting, with five lesbians on
stage and Brad nowhere to be seen, merely a name on our lips, he some how managed
to get into the reviews” (3).
15. Peggy Phelan, “The Serious Comedy of Hope: Introducing the Five Lesbian
Brothers,” in Five Lesbian Brothers: Four Plays, by Five Lesbian Brothers (New York:
Theatre Communications Group, 2000), xvii.
16. See Sara Warner, “Rage Slaves: The Commodification of Affect in the Five Les-
bian Brothers’ The Secretaries,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23, no. 1 (Fall
2008): 21–­45.
17. Lisa Kron, “Work with the Five Lesbian Brothers,” http://www.lisakron.com
(accessed June 2009).
228 Notes to Pages 167–72

18. Alisa Solomon, “Five Lesbian Brothers: No Whining!” American Theatre 15, no.
7 (September 1998): 62.
19. Five Lesbian Brothers, Five Lesbian Brothers, 44.
20. Phelan, “The Serious Comedy of Hope, xvii.
21. Five Lesbian Brothers, Five Lesbian Brothers, 46.
22. Holly Hughes, a WOW Café veteran, was one of the famed NEA Four artists
(along with Karen Finley, Tim Miller, and John Fleck) whose grants were rescinded
in 1990 due to the controversial and objectionable content of their work. See Richard
Meyer, “Have You Heard the One about the Lesbian Who Goes to the Supreme Court?
Holly Hughes and the Case against Censorship,” Theatre Journal 52, no. 4 (2000):
543–­52; Peggy Phelan, “Serrano, Mapplethorpe, the NEA, and You: ‘Money Talks,’”
Drama Review 34, no. 1 (1990): 4–­15; and Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory
and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2001), 47–­64.
23. Kate Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the
WOW Café Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 9.
24. Preaching to the Perverted is the title of Holly Hughes’s solo performance piece
about her NEA ordeal. See also Tim Miller and David Román, “Preaching to the Con-
verted,” Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (May 1995): 169–­88.
25. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
26. Dolan, “The Return of the Five Lesbian Brothers.”
27. E-­mail correspondence with Kate Davy, December 12, 2007.
28. Five Lesbian Brothers, Five Lesbian Brothers, 197.
29. During the run of Brides, Molly Smith was named artistic director of Arena
Stage.
30. Peter Marks, “Encounters of the Sexual Kind,” New York Times, December 11,
1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/11/movies/theater-review-encounters-of-the-
sexual-kind.html (accessed June 2008).
31. Some members of the Brothers had experience in television. They wrote three
short films for HBO, and they were invited to host, along with Kiki and Herb, episodes
of Showtime’s “Late Night Out,” which never aired.
32. Lisa Kron, Well (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006), 16.
33. After twenty-­three previews, Kron’s Well opened at the Longacre Theatre on
Broadway, where it ran from March 3, 2006, to May 14, 2006 (for a total of fifty-­two
performances). Lisa Kron was nominated for a Tony for best leading actress (she lost
to Cynthia Nixon in Rabbit Hole), and Jayne Houdyshell was nominated for a Tony for
best featured actress (she lost to Frances de la Tour in The History Boys). For more on
Well, see Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, especially chapter 1.
34. Love! Valor! Compassion!, directed by Joe Mantello, opened at the Manhattan
Theatre Club on October 11, 1994, and ran for 72 performances. It reopened at the
Walter Kerr Theatre on Valentine’s Day the following year, after 28 previews, and ran
for an additional 248 performances. The play was nominated for a total of five Tony
awards. It won numerous other accolades, including a pair of Drama Desk awards (out
of the six nominations it received), a pair of Obies, and the Evening Standard award for
best play.
35. Oedipus at Palm Springs was cowritten by all members of the troupe with the
exception of Babs Davy, who did not participate in the retreat.
36. Charlotte Stoudt, “Oedipus Resexed: The Five Lesbian Brothers Reveal Why
They’ve Gone Greek,” Village Voice, July 26, 2005, http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-
7-26/theater/oedipus-resexed (accessed June 2008).
 Notes to Pages 172–85 229

37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Five Lesbian Brothers, Oedipus at Palm Springs (New York: Samuel French,
2010), 7.
40. Ibid., 8.
41. Ibid., 23.
42. Ibid., 87.
43. Ibid., 88.
44. Ibid.
45. Dolan, “The Return of the Five Lesbian Brothers.”
46. Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Act without Words (New York: Grove, 1958), 18.
47. Five Lesbian Brothers, Oedipus at Palm Springs, 88.
48. Ibid.
49. Stoudt, “Oedipus Resexed.”
50. Ibid.
51. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Peter Gay
(New York: W. W. Norton, [1905] 1969), 133.
52. Ibid., 131. When Freud said “the wishes and desires of men,” he meant males
(not humans), as he believed women were fulfilled, sexually and emotionally, by mar-
riage and childbirth.
53. Kate Clinton, What the L? (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005), 241.
54. Ibid.
55. The Five Lesbian Brothers, Oedipus at Palm Springs, 43.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 66.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 49.
62. Ibid., 48.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 47–­48.
65. Sue-­Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-­Femme Aesthetic,” in Feminist and Queer Per-
formance: Critical Strategies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 32.
66. The Five Lesbian Brothers, Oedipus at Palm Springs, 77.
67. Ibid., 87.
68. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argen-
tina’s “Dirty War” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 123.
69. Ibid., 123–­24.
70. André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco:
City Lights, 1997), xiv.
71. Louise Kennedy, “‘Oedipus’ Deftly Mixes Comedy, Tragedy,” Boston Globe, Oc-
tober 27, 2007, http://articles.boston.com/2007-10-27/ae/29226516_1_oedipus-palm-
springs-comedy (accessed June 2009).
72. Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, 212, xvi.
73. Ibid., xix, xiv.
74. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove, 1994), 48.
75. See Mary Whitlock Blundell, “Ethos and Dianoia Reconsidered,” in Essays on
Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 155–­
76.
76. Five Lesbian Brothers, Oedipus at Palm Springs, 87.
230 Notes to Pages 185–92

77. Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, xviii.

78. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexu-
ality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (New York:
routledge & Kegan, 1984), 13.

Afterword
1. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 180.
2. Lisa Duggan, “On Queer Failure,” Bully Bloggers on the Failure and the Fu-
ture of Queer Studies, Bully Bloggers, April 2, 2012, http://bullybloggers.woodpress.
com/2012/04/02/bullybloggers-on-failure-and-the-future-of-queer-studies/ (accessed
April 2012).
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Index

Page references in italics indicate an illustration.

a: A Novel (Warhol), 60 142, 148, 154–­57. See also Bitch and

About Face Theatre, 91 Animal; riot grrrls
Abu Ghraib, 157–­59 “cosmic tranny,” as, 160
Actors Studio, 58 Hothead Paisan (DiMassa zine), first
ACT-­UP, xiv, 24, 93–­94 encounter, 143
die-­ins, 108 Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Ter-
Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation rorist (musical), 29, 140, 142, 154–­57,
Years (Johnston), 136 159–­62
Advocate, 157 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 75–­76
Ahmed, Sara, 9 Borderlands/La Frontera, 76
Alabau, Magaly, 10 Aristotle, 184
Albee, Edward, 51 Armstrong, Louis, 13
Algonquin Hotel, 120 Art in America, 136
Allied Farces, xix Art News, 111
Als, Hilton, 165 Assassins (Sondheim), 140
Amaya, Mario, 69 Astraea, xxi
Amazon Odyssey (Atkinson), 75 At the Foot of the Mountain (ATFOTM)
“Amazon [Woman Rise]” (Feldman), 131 (feminist theater collective), 11, 46
Ambuhl, Megan, 157 Atkinson, Ti-­Grace, 28, 72, 74, 75, 117,
American Indian Movement (AIM), 143 119, 125
Andersen, Eric, 132 Amazon Odyssey, 75
Anderson, Benedict, 130 Johnston, Jill, and, 116–­17
Anderson, Harold, 60 Solanas, Valerie, and, 69–­70
Angelos, Maureen (Moe), 91, 162. See also Attom, Patches, 139
Five Lesbian Brothers Audre Lorde Project, xxi
Let Them Eat Cake (with Carney, Avery, Gwen, 14, 139
Hughes), 91
Oedipus at Palm Springs, in, 173, 174 Bacall, Lauren, 60
Secretaries, The, in, 167 Bacchae (Euripides), 167
Angels in America (Kushner), 171 Bachmann, Michelle, 7
“Angry Atthis” (Feldman), 139 Baker v. Nelson, 91
Animal (AKA Prufrock, Animal), 29, 140, Baker, Jack, 91

249
250 Index

Bambi (Salten), 132 Black, Jack, 96

Banes, Sally, 118 Blackeagle, Suhir, 156
Bannon, Ann, 130. See also Brinker, Beebo Blankenship, Mark, 164–­65
Basie, Count, 13 Blau, Herb, 151
Basso, John, 89 Bloolips (drag troupe), 24
Baudrillard, Jean, 151 Precious Pearl, character, 24
Baxandall, Rosalyn, xvii Blow Job (Warhol), 50
Beat poets, 16 Boies, David, 100–­101
Beauty and the Beast (Split Britches), 24 Bolt, Molly (character in Rubyfruit Jungle),
Bechdel, Alison, 149 108
Beckett, Samuel, 61, 165, 175, 184 Bond, John C., 89
Malone Dies, 61 Bongi Perez. See Perez, Bongi. See also Sola-
Molloy, 61 nas, Valerie; Up Your Ass
Unnamable, The, 61 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), 75–­76
Waiting for Godot, 186 Bornstein, Kate, 144
Watt, 184 Boston Globe, 184
Bed, The (Heide), 49 Bourne, Bette, 24
Beebo Brinker. See Brinker, Beebo Bouska, Adam, 99
Bell, Arthur, 87 Boys in the Band, The (Crowley), 8–­9
Belle Reprieve (Split Britches), 24 Bradbury, Ray, 48
Ben, Lisa, 12, 15, 16 Brady, Bob, 57
Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine Brantley, Ben, 170
(editor), 12, 16 Bratmobile (riot grrrl band), 154
Bennett, Joan, 68 Brave Smiles . . . Another Lesbian Tragedy
Bennett, Tony, 60 (Five Lesbian Brothers), 167–­68, 169
Bentham, Jeremy, 120 Brecht, George, 135
Bentley, Gladys, 20 Breton, André, 183–­84
Berg, Gretchen, 49–­50 Bridal Fair (Madison Square Garden). See
Berlant, Lauren, xxii, 108–­9, 191 WITCH Bridal Fair Protest; zap actions
“Queer Nationalism” (with Freeman), Bride (magazine), 78
126 Brides of the Moon (Five Lesbian Brothers),
“’68 or Something,” 153–­54 157, 168–­70, 172
Bernstein, Robin, 8 Bridgforth, Sharon, 14
Bersani, Leo, xiv Bright, Susie, 23
BETTY RULES!, 140 Brinker, Beebo, 37. See also Bannon, Ann
Bevier, Suzanne, 116 Brooks, Mel, 170
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Po- Broughton, Shirley, 118
likoff), 103 Brown, Rita Mae, ix–­x, xvii
Big Hotel (Ludlam), 57 Rubyfruit Jungle, 108
BIGLovely, 140 Brown, Trisha, 111
Bingham, Mark, 152 Brownmiller, Susan, 119
Bitch (Warhol), 50 Bryant, Anita, 139
Bitch and Animal (riot grrrl band), 140, Bullins, Ed, 51, 75
155–­56. See also Animal (AKA Pru- Burning Bed, The (film), 108
frock, Animal) Burroughs, William S., 61
formation of duo, 155 Busch, Charles, 10
“Pussy Manifesto,” 155–­56 Bush v. Gore, 100
Sour Juice and Rhyme (album), 156 Bush, George W., 152–­54
What’s That Smell? (album), 156 Butchies, the (riot grrrl band), 155
Black Mountain artists, 16, 113 Butler, Judith, xix, 3, 7, 158
Black Panther Party, 19, 75, 87, 130, 143 Buzil, Debi, 156
 Index 251

Café Bizarre, 67–­68 Clement, Father Robert, 88–­89

Caffe Cino, 10, 16, 49, 51. See also Cino, Clinton, Bill, 91
Joe Clinton, Kate, 179
Up Your Ass (Solanas), potential produc- Coates, George, 53, 161
tion, 62–­64 Colette, 116
Cage, Diana, 91 Come Out! (GLF newsletter), 21, 116
Cage, John, 111, 134, 137 comedy of terrors. See lesbian comedy of
Music Walk (and Music Walk with terrors
Dancer), 114 Communist Party, 15
Califia, Pat, 23 Congress to Unite Women, x
California Musical Theater (CMT), 95–­96 Congressional Budget Office, 98
Camhe, Pamela, xix “Conservative Case for Gay Marriage: Why
camp, xi, xviii, 8, 9, 37, 47, 58, 63, 164, Same Sex Marriage Is An American
166, 182 Value” (Olson), 100
Camp Trans, 160. See also Michfest (Michi- Conway, Mary T., 134
gan Womyn’s Music Festival) Corinne, Tee, 23
Campion, Sheila, 60 Coss, Clare, 10. See also Daughter’s Cycle
Cane, Candy, 68 Trilogy, The; Women’s Experimental
Canning, Charlotte, 80, 83 Theater (WET)
Caravan Theatre, 85 Cottrell, Honey Lee, 23
Carnegie Tech, 61 court cases
Carney, Megan, 91 Baker v. Nelson, 91
Let Them Eat Cake (with Angelos, Bush v. Gore, 100
Hughes), 91 In re Marriage Cases, 92
Carter, David, 14 Lawrence v. Texas, 188
Case, Sue-­Ellen, xix, 181–­82 Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 100
“Toward a Butch-­Feminist Retro Future,” Crawford, Joan, 60
xix Cronan, Sheila, 74, 75
Casselberry, Judith, 139 “Marriage,” 74, 102
Cavalier (magazine), 35, 48, 52, 53 Cronkite, Walter, 87
Ceballos, Jacqueline, xvii, 118 Crowley, Mart, 8
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Boys in the Band, The, 8–­9
(CLAGS), 10 Cruising (film), 87
Ces Plaisirs (Colette). See Pure and the Cruising Utopia (Muñoz), xiv, 111, 131
Impure, The Crumb, Robert, 79
Chambers, Jane, 10 Cunningham, Merce, 114
Chase Manhattan Bank, 79 Curtis, Charlotte, 107
Chelsea Hotel, 48, 51, 63 Curtis, Jackie, 50
Cheney, Dick, 98, 104, 153 Cut Piece (Ono), 135
Cheney, Mary, 98 Cvetkovich, Ann, xx
Children’s Hour, The (Hellman), 167–­68
Chin, Staceyann, 14 D.R.E.D. (AKA Gerestant, Mildred), 7, 39
“Dykepoem,” 145 Dada, 115, 137
Cho, Margaret, 96 Fluxus comparison, 133
Christian, Meg, 139 Johnston, Jill, as exponent, 115, 133, 137
Christopher Street Liberation Day March, DADT (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), xii, xxi, 2, 20,
21 99, 101, 141, 153, 188
Cino, Joe, 57, 63. See also Caffe Cino Dance (magazine), 111
suicide, 64 Daughter’s Cycle Trilogy, The (Coss, Segal,
Cleaver, Eldridge, 81 Sklar), 10. See also Women’s Experi-
Cleis Press, 149 mental Theater (WET)
252 Index

Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), x, 15–­17, 19, Dominic, Magie, 63

112, 117 Queen of Peace Room, The, 63
Ladder, The (newsletter), 16, 118, 148 Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. See DADT
Davis, Ernestine “Tiny,” 13–­15 drag, xi, 6, 20, 24, 43, 78, 120, 146. See also
legacy, 14, 16 temporal drag
Tiny Davis and Her Hell Divers, 14 lesbians and, 9, 39
Davy, Babs, 162. See also Five Lesbian drag club, 156
Brothers drag queens, 17, 50, 144
Oedipus at Palm Springs, in, 172, 174 Cane, Candy, 68
Secretaries, The, in, 167 Curtis, Jackie, 50
Voyage to Lesbos, in, 166 Up Your Ass (Solanas), in, 28, 31, 40–­41
Davy, Kate, xviii–­xix Woodlawn, Holly, 50
Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, xviii Duffet, Judith, 78
“Day into Night” (Hendricks retrospective), Duggan, Lisa, 76, 99, 102, 191–­92
132 homonormativity, definition, xi
de Beauvoir, Simone, 117 Dunbar-­Ortiz, Roxanne, 69–­71
Second Sex, The, 85 “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social
“Declaration” (Dyketactics), 75 Revolution,” 75
de Lauretis, Teresa, 1 Duncan, Isadora, 44
de Rham, Edith, 105 Duncombe, Stephen, 148–­49
Deem, Melissa, 115 Duprée, Jaque, 139
Defense of Marriage Act. See DOMA. See Dworkin, Andrea, 23
also marriage, same-­sex; Proposition 8 Dyke March, 22
Deleuze, Gilles, 5 “Dykepoem” (Chin), 145
Dell’Olio, Anselma, xvii Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel), 149
Democratic National Convention (1968), Dyketactics, 4
81 “Declaration,” 75
Densmore, Dana, 71 Dylan, Bob, 67
Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone), 75
Diamondback, The (Solanas), 31, 34 Eckern, Scott, 96
Dibbell, Dominique, 163–­64, 166. See also Edelman, Lee, xiv
Five Lesbian Brothers Eggena, Donald, 60
Oedipus at Palm Springs, in, 173, 174, 176 Eichelberger, Ethyl, 20
Secretaries, The, in, 167 Electric Circus, 67, 68
Dick Cavett Show, The, 87 “Elements of Style” (Parks), 109
DiFranco, Ani, 140, 156, 161 Eleven. See Tucker, Gary
DiMassa, Diane, 29, 142, 154, 158–­62. See Eng, David, 2, 89
also Hothead Paisan (character) England, Lynndie, 157
Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terror- Erickson, Claris. See Nelson, Claris
ist (zine), 29, 108, 140, 142–­52, 146, Eros (Ginzburg), 48
147, 158–­62 Euripides, 167
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 3, 77 Evans, Arthur, 87–­88, 90
Directors’ Theater, 57, 59, 60, 66, 67 Evergreen Review, 60
Dirty, Sexy, Politics (M. McCain), 99 Evergreen Theatre, 60
DOB. See Daughters of Bilitis Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 49. See also
Dobkin, Alix, 139 Warhol, Andy, self-­marketing
Dolan, Jill, xix, 7, 170, 185
Oedipus at Palm Springs, on, 164–­65, 175 Facebook, 95, 99
DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), 91, 179. fact: a magazine (Ginzburg), 48
See also marriage, same-­sex; Proposi- Factory, The, 16, 33, 55, 56, 64, 68, 113. See
tion 8 also Warhol, Andy
 Index 253

Faderman, Lillian, 16 Foucault, Michel, 114–­15

Farrow, Kenyon, xxi Free University of New York (FUNY), 48,
Feel Tank Chicago, 23 57
Feist, Gene, 61 Freeman, Elizabeth, 27, 115. See also tem-
Feldman, Andrea, 50 poral drag
Feldman, Linda, 74 “Queer Nationalism” (with Berlant), 126
Feldman, Maxine, 131, 139 temporal drag, theory of, 27
Female Eunuch (Greer), 118 Freeman, Jo, 81
“Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Freud, Sigmund, 30, 165, 177–­78, 184–­85
Revolution” (Dunbar), 75 tendentious jokes, 177–­78
Feminists, The, 28, 72–­75, 74, 84–­86, 94, Friedan, Betty, x, 70, 72, 105–­6. See also
117 NOW
New York Marriage Licensing Bureau zap fröhliche Wissenschaft, Die (Nietzsche). See
action, 73–­75, 79, 88 Gay Science, The
Ferrell, Will, 96 From the Cradle to the Boat, or Up from the
Finis for Oscar Wilde (Molloy), 60 Slime (Solanas). See Up Your Ass
Firestone, Shulamith, 117 Fuller, Loïe, 44
Dialectic of Sex, The, 75 Furies, The, 4
Fitzgerald, Ella, 13 Furies, The (periodical), 148
Five Lesbian Brothers, xv, xix, 24, 30. See
also Angelos, Maureen; Davy, Babs; GAA (Gay Activist Alliance), 86–­90
Dibbell, Dominique; Healey, Peg; Kron, GLF splinter group, 86
Lisa; Oedipus at Palm Springs LLC and, 88
Brave Smiles . . . Another Lesbian Tragedy, pro-­gay marriage zap action, 86–­90
167–­68, 169 Gardner, Kay, 139
Brides of the Moon, 157, 168–­70, 172 Garland, Judy, 8
humor in work, 162–­71 Gay Activist Alliance. See GAA
Oedipus at Palm Springs, 30, 164, 171–­88, Gay Liberation Front. See GLF
174, 176 “Gay Manifesto, A” (Wittman), 102
Secretaries, The, 145, 169–­70 gay marriage. See marriage, same-­sex
Voyage to Lesbos, 166–­67 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 113
Flamboyant Ladies, 46 gay theater, history, 6–­11
Fleischman, Barbara, 85 gay, history of terminology, 11–­17, 19–­20
Fluxdivorce (Hendricks), 133 Geertz, Clifford, 120
Fluxus, 132–­36 Gender Outlaw (Bornstein), 144
Cut Piece (Ono), 135 Gerestant, Mildred. See D.R.E.D.
Dada comparison, 133 Giant Ass Publishing, 149
definition, 133 Ginsberg, Allen, 81
Fluxdivorce (Hendricks), 133 Ginzburg, Ralph, 48–­49
Fluxwedding (Johnston, Nyeboe), 132–­ Eros, 48
37 fact: a magazine, 48
Sky Car (Hendricks installation), 133 pornography conviction, 48
Viet-­Flakes (Schneemann), 135 Girodias, Maurice, 61, 68–­69, 184. See also
Fluxwedding. See Fluxus; Hendricks, Geof- Olympia Press; SCUM Manifesto
frey; Johnston, Jill; marriage, same-­sex; GLF (Gay Liberation Front), x, 4, 16, 17,
Nyeboe, Ingrid 18–­21, 24, 94
Fornés, María Irene, 10, 51 Come Out! (newsletter), 21, 116
“For, 2¢: Pain, the Survival Game Gets GAA and, 86–­87
Pretty Ugly” (Solanas). See “Young “Gay is Good” slogan, 19
Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Johnston, Jill, and, 116–­17, 126
Leisure Class, A” (Solanas) Godzilla Rainbow Troupe, 58
254 Index

Goffman, Erving, 129 Hill, Anita, 154

Goldman Emma, 137 Hoffman, Abbie, 80
Gomez, Jewelle, 23 Revolution for the Hell of It, 81
“Goodbye to All That” (Morgan), 84 Hofstra University, 56
Goslar, Lotte, 111 Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (ed.
Gran Fury, 99 Smith), 75
Greer, Bonnie, 58 homoliberalism, xi–­xiii, xx–­xxii, 4–­5, 26,
Greer, Germaine, 118 162, 188–­89
Gregory, Dick, 48 Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terror-
Grosz, Elizabeth, xiv ist (musical), 159–­62
Grove Press, 60 HRC (Human Rights Campaign), xxi
Guattari, Félix, 5 Normal Heart, The, 25
Guérillères, Les (Wittig), 127, 143 Oedipus at Palm Springs as parable of, 30,
guerrilla theater actions. See zap actions 165, 178–­87
Prop 8—­the Musical, 97–­98
Hairspray (Shaiman), 95 same-­sex marriage and, 86–­104
Halberstam, Judith, 2, 38, 155, 162, 192 War on Terror and, 30, 140, 142
Queer Art of Failure, The, 192 homonationalism, 132, 141–­42, 152
Halley, Janet, 2 Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terror-
Hand Job (Warhol), 50 ist (Animal musical), 159–­62
Hanna, Kathleen, 154 homonormativity, xiv, 29, 132, 145, 162,
Hansberry, Lorraine, 14, 16 185, 186. See also marriage, same-­sex
Harding, James, 55, 69 DOB and Mattachine as proponents,
Harman, Sabrina, 157 15–­17
Harpers, 118 Duggan, Lisa, definition, xi
Harris, Bertha, 1, 118 punk as critique of, 155
Harris, Neil Patrick, 97 sentimentalized mode of political equal-
Harron, Mary, 53, 55, 62 ity, 5
Hart, Lois, 116 Hot Peaches (cabaret group), 24, 166
Johnston, Jill, and, 117 Hothead Paisan (character), xv, 26, 29–­30,
Hart, Lynda, 145 108, 142–­44, 146, 147, 148
Hay, Harry, 15. See also Mattachine Society Animal, compared to, 158
Hayden, Tom, 81 as terrorist, 153–­54
Healey, Peg, 162, 168. See also Five Lesbian Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terror-
Brothers ist (Animal musical), 29, 140, 142,
Brides of the Moon, in, 168 154–­57
Oedipus at Palm Springs, in, 173, 174, Abu Ghraib and, 157–­58
176 DiMassa zine, comparison, 158
Secretaries, The, in, 167 homoliberalism in, 159–­62
Voyage to Lesbos, in, 166 homonationalism in, 159–­62
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell), 156 lesbian comedy of terrors, 156
Heide, Robert, 49 Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist
Bed, The, 49 (DiMassa zine), 29, 108, 140, 142–­52,
Hendricks, Geoffrey, 132–­34 146, 147, 158–­62
“Day into Night” (retrospective), 132 Animal musical, comparison, 158
Fluxdivorce, 133 characters, 145–­48
Fluxwedding (Johnston, Nyeboe), 132–­ controversies, 149–­50
34 lesbian comedy of terrors, 151, 160
Sky Car (installation), 133 House of Pan Kakés, 172
Highsmith, Patricia, 112 How to Make a Woman (Caravan Theatre),
Hildebrand, Lucas, 26 85
 Index 255

HRC (Human Rights Campaign), xxi, 94–­ picara, as, 114

95, 102, 153 Scull pool incident, 105–­7, 133
Hughes, Fred, 69 separatism, 126–­27
Hughes, Holly, xix, 24, 39, 91, 163, 169 temporal drag, acts of, 115
Let Them Eat Cake (with Angelos, Car- Town Hall debate, 118–­25, 122
ney), 91 Village Voice, association, 111, 114, 115,
Human Rights Campaign. See HRC 118, 128, 129, 130
Hyde, Lewis, 112 Join the Impact (JTI), 95, 97
joker citizenship, xv, xx, 29
I Remember Mama (television series), 81 Fluxwedding (Johnston, Nyeboe, 132–­37
I Shot Andy Warhol (film), 53, 62 Johnston, Jill, proponent of, 107–­10,
I, a Man (Warhol), 60, 67–­68 118–­25
In re Marriage Cases, 92 Scull pool incident, 105–­7, 133
Indiana University, 56 Town Hall debate, 118–­25, 122
International Sweethearts of Rhythm, 13–­14 Jones, LeRoi, 51
Isherwood, Charles, 164–­65 Judge, Father Mychal, 152
It’s All Right to Be Woman Theater Judson Poets’ Theatre, 16, 51, 67
(IARTBW), 10–­11, 46
Katz, Herman, 89
Janney, Allison, 96 Kearon, Pam, 74
Jay, Karla, ix–­x, 20 Kennedy, Adrienne, 51
Out of the Closet: Voices of Gay Liberation Kennedy, Florynce, 72
(Young, co-­ed.), 20 Solanas, Valerie, and, 69–­70
Jigsaw (riot grrrl zine), 155 Kitchenette (Tavel), 57
Jill Johnston Dancing (film), 114 Klaić, Dragan, 151
Joan of Arc, 140 Klecka, Edie, 156
Johnston, Jill, xv, 16, 29, 105–­8, 109 Klemesrud, Judy, 82
Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Na- Koedt, Anne, 117
tion Years, 136 Koutoukas, H. M., 63
Atkinson, Ti-­Grace, and, 116–­17 Kramer, Larry, 25
coming out, 111–­15, 114, 116–­17 Normal Heart, The, 25
Dada influences, 115, 133, 137 Krassner, Paul, 48–­50, 57, 60, 80
Fluxwedding to Ingrid Nyeboe, 131–­38 Kron, Lisa, 162, 166, 176. See also Five
GLF (Gay Liberation Front), and, 116–­ Lesbian Brothers
17, 126 2.5 Minute Ride, 171
Hunt, Lois, and, 117 Oedipus at Palm Springs, in, 172, 174
joker citizenship, proponent of, 107–­10, Secretaries, The, in, 167
118–­25 Voyage to Lesbos, in, 166
Lanham, Richard, marriage to, 112 Well, 171, 172
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, 29, Krotz, Steve, 89
75, 110, 117, 125–­31, 131, 139 Kubiak, Anthony, 151
Mailer, Norman, and, 118–­25 Kurshan, Nancy, 80
Marmalade Me, 128 Kushner, Anita, 80
marriage views, 131–­32, 136–­37 Kushner, Tony, 169, 171
Marxist doctrine, resistance to, 115
“New Approach,” 120–­21 L Word, The (television series), 140
New York art scene, in, 113–­15 La MaMa E.T.C., 16, 51
Nyeboe, Ingrid, and, 131–­37 Ladder, The (DOB newsletter), 16, 118, 148
“Of This Pure but Irregular Passion,” 116 Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers (Davy),
“On a Clear Day You Can See Your xviii
Mother,” 124–­25 Lambda Legal, 90
256 Index

Lange, Jessica, 170 Lohengrin (Wagner), 132

Lanham, Richard, 112 Lolita (Nabokov), 61
Laqueur, Walter, 150 Lorde, Audre, 4
Larson, Jonathan, 169 “Uses of the Erotic, The,” 4
Latifah, Queen, 145 Los Angeles Times, 15
Lavender Jane Loves Women (Dobkin), 139 Love! Valor! Compassion! (McNally), 171
Lavender Menace, ix–­x, xvi–­xviii, 9, 18, 19, Love, Heather, 2, 27
106. See also Radicalesbians Lucas, Ruby, 13–­15
Lavery, Michael, 90 Ludlam, Charles, 46–­47. See also Play-­
Lawrence v. Texas, 188 house of the Ridiculous; Ridiculous
Le Tigre (riot grrrl band), 155 Theatrical Company; Theatre of the
Leary, Timothy, 48 Ridiculous
Leech, John, 12, 13 Big Hotel, 57
Lennon, John, 127 Turds in Hell (with Vehr), 47, 58
Les Guérillères. See Guérillères, Les Lyon, Phyllis, 15, 135
Lesbian Avengers, xviii, 93–­94, 145 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 151
Lesbian Body, The (Wittig), 127
lesbian comedy of terrors, 29, 142, 151 Maciunas, George, 133
Hothead Paisan (Animal musical), 156 Mädchen in Uniform (film), 168
Hothead Paisan (DiMassa zine), 151, Madison Square Garden, 78
160 Mailer, Norman
Secretaries, The (Five Lesbian Brothers), Johnston, Jill, and, 118–­25
167 “Prisoner of Sex, The,” 118
Lesbian Concentrate: A Lesbianthology of Village Voice editor, 120
Songs and Poems (record album), 139 Majority Report, 70
Lesbian Feminist Liberation. See LFL Malone Dies (Beckett), 61
Lesbian Liberation Committee. See LLC March on Washington, 22
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (John- Marcus Welby, M.D. (television show), 87
ston), 29, 75, 110, 117, 125–­31, 131 Marcus, Eric, 12–­13
separatist tract, as, 110, 126–­27, 139 Marcus, Joan, 174, 176
Lesbian News, 148 Margolin, Deb, xix, 24. See also Split
lesbian separatism. See separatism Britches
Lesbians Who Kill (Split Britches), 145 Mark, Jordy, xix
Let Them Eat Cake (Hughes, Carney, Ange- Mark, Mary Ellen, 74
los), 91–­92 Marks, Peter, 170
LFL (Lesbian Feminist Liberation), 88 Marmalade Me (Johnston), 128
Library of Congress, 32, 52, 56 “Marriage” (Cronan), 74, 102
Lichtenstein, Roy, 79 Marriage Licensing Bureau. See Feminists,
Life (magazine), 73, 74 The; GAA; New York Marriage Licens-
Life of Juanita Castro, The (Tavel), 57 ing Bureau; zap actions
Lindsay, John, 87 marriage, same-­sex, xii, xxi, 2, 20, 25, 29,
Linich, Billy. See Name, Billy 76, 77, 86–­104, 141, 178. See also
Lipkin, Joan, 91–­92 DOMA; Proposition 8
Liquid Sky (film), 57 Fluxwedding (Johnston, Nyeboe), 131–­
Little Robin Morgan Show, The (radio pro- 37
gram), 81 Oedipus at Palm Springs, as theme, 178–­
Little Women: The Tragedy (Split Britches), 83
24 Republican Party support, 98–­101
Living Theatre, 85 Marshal, Norman, 57
LLC (Lesbian Liberation Committee), 88 Martin, Del, 15, 135
Log Cabin Republicans, 99 Marx, Karl, 95, 117
 Index 257

Mattachine Society, 15, 17, 19 Pitchford, Kenneth, marriage to, 82

Communist Party, links to, 15 RAT: Subterranean News, feminist take-
Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally over, 84
Insane, 71 Sisterhood Is Powerful, 84, 127
Mayo, Lisa, 11. See also Spiderwoman WITCH co-­founder, 81
Theater WITCH manifesto co-­author, 82–­83
McCain, Cindy, 98–­100, 104 Morrissey, Paul, 50, 68
McCain, John, 99–­100 Muñoz, José Esteban, 2
McCain, Meghan, 98–­100, 104 Cruising Utopia, xiv, 111, 131
Dirty, Sexy, Politics, 99 Music Walk (and Music Walk with Dancer)
McConnell, Michael, 91 (Cage), 114
McDarrah, Fred W., 122 My Hustler (Warhol), 50
McKay, Adam, 96
McKenzie, Jon, 33 Nabokov, Vladimir, 61
McKinnon, Catherine, 23 Najimy, Kathy, 96
McNally, Terrence, 171 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 61
Meaker, Marijane, 112 Name, Billy, 55, 56
Medea or Maybe the Stars May Understand national gaiety, 29, 110. See also joker
or Veiled Stranger (a ritualistic camp) citizenship
(Koutoukas), 63 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. See
Medusa’s Revenge, 10 NGLTF
Mehrhof, Barbara, 74 National Liberation Front, 130
Michfest (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festi- national sentimentality, xxii, 5, 108–­10,
val), 29, 140, 156–­61 115–­16, 137
admission policy, 159–­60 Neal, Larry, 51
Camp Trans, 160 Near, Holly, 139
Miguel, Gloria, 11. See also Spiderwoman Negro Ensemble Company, 58
Theater Nelson, Claris, 63
Miguel, Muriel, 10, 11. See also Spider- Nestle, Joan, 5, 23, 38, 112
woman Theater Restricted Country, A, 5
Mike Douglas Show, The, 87 Neuman, Molly, 154
Millett, Kate, ix, xvii, 119, 127 “New Approach” (Johnston), 120–­21
Sexual Politics, 75, 118, 127 New Feminist Repertory Theater, xvii
Millington, June, 139, 156 New Republic, 25
Milman, Estera, 133 New York (magazine), 60
Miss America protest (1968), 81 New York Marriage Licensing Bureau
“Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (Stein), 12 Feminists, The, anti-­marriage zap action,
Mitchell, John Cameron, 156 73–­75, 74
Mo B. Dick, 39 GAA pro-­gay marriage zap action, 86–­90
Möise, Lenelle, 14 New York Post, 88–­89
Molloy (Beckett), 61 New York Radical Feminists, xvii
Molloy, Edward A., Reverend, 60 New York Radical Women, 117
Moore, Marianne, 76 New York Stock Exchange, 81
Moran, Frank “Red,” 33 New York Theater Workshop (NYTW),
Morgan, Robin, 81–­84, 119. See also 169–­70
WITCH; zap actions New York Times, 82, 107
acting career, 81 Brides of the Moon review, 170
“Goodbye to All That,” 84 Oedipus at Palm Springs review, 164
Madison Square Garden Bridal Fair zap Secretaries, The, review, 170
action, 77–­86 New Yorker, 157
Miss America protest (1968), 81 Oedipus at Palm Springs review, 165
258 Index

Newsweek, 100–­101 Orr, John, 151

NGLTF (National Gay and Lesbian Task Orton, Joe, 37
Force), 90, 94–­95, 153 “Our Passion Shook the World” (Shelley),
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 113 21
NOH8 photo campaign, 95, 99–­100, 102 Out of the Closet: Voices of Gay Liberation
Normal Heart, The (Kramer), 25 (ed. Young, Jay), 20
Notes from the Second Year (ed. Firestone,
Koedt), 117 Palin, Sarah, 7
“Notes on ‘Camp,’” (Sontag), 9 Palmer, Alyson, 140, 156
NOW (National Organization for Women), Parker, Andrew, 2
ix–­x, xvi Parker, Pat, 14, 139
Solanas, Valerie, and, 69–­70 Parks, Suzan-­Lori, 109
Nyeboe, Ingrid, 131–­37. See also Fluxwed- Parshley, Jeff, 99
ding; Johnston, Jill Pashalinski, Lola, 46
Patrick, Robert, 62
O’Leary, Jean, 88 Pellegrini, Ann, 3
O’Leary, Timothy, 81 Pennebaker, D. A., 123
Obama, Barack, 92 Perez, Bongi (character in Up Your Ass
Obie Award, 24, 170, 171 (Solanas)), 31, 36–­46, 56, 60, 69, 108,
Observer, 111 140, 164
Oedipus at Palm Springs (Five Lesbian Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 100
Brothers), 30, 171–­88, 174, 176 Perseverance Theatre, 170
analysis, 177–­88 Peters, Bernadette, 63
critical response, 164–­65 Phelan, Renei. See Lucas, Ruby
homoliberalism, as parable of, 30, 165, picaresque, 40, 71
178–­88 Johnston, Jill Village Voice columns, 114
incest in, 173–­75 origins, 40
Oedipus Rex, adaptation of, 164 Perez, Bongi as picara, 40
Oedipussy (original version), 171–­72 Solanas, Valerie, as picara, 71
plot synopsis, 172–­77 Pigasus the Immortal (1968 presidential
same-­sex marriage theme, 178–­83 candidate), 81
tendentious joke in, 165, 177–­78, 183–­ Pincus-­Witten, Robert, 137
86, 188 Pitchford, Kenneth, 82
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 164 Playboy (magazine), 39, 48
“Of This Pure but Irregular Passion” (John- Play-­house of the Ridiculous, 10, 16, 51,
son), 116 57, 58. See also Ludlam, Charles;
Olivia Records, 139 Ridiculous Theatrical Company;
Olson, Theodore, 100–­101, 104 Tavel, Ron; Theatre of the Ridiculous;
“Conservative Case for Gay Marriage: Vacarro, John
Why Same Sex Marriage Is An Ameri- Poetics (Aristotle), 184
can Value,” 100 Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos,
Olympia Press, 61, 70. See also Girodias, and the Avant-­Gardes (Puchner), 55
Maurice Police Woman (television show), 87
“On a Clear Day You Can See Your Mother” Polikoff, Nancy, 103–­4
(Johnston), 124–­25 Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, 103
On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Poor Little Rich Girl (Warhol), 50
Adventurous Lesbian (lesbian erotica Powter, Susan, 140, 156, 160–­61
magazine), 23, 148 Precious Pearl (AKA Shaw, Paul), 24
Ono, Yoko, 127 Pride Commission, 23
Cut Piece, 135 Prison (Warhol), 50
Open Theater, 10–­11, 85 “Prisoner of Sex, The” (Mailer), 118
 Index 259

Prop 8—­the Musical (Shaiman), 95–­98 Bitch and Animal (band), 140, 155–­56
Proposition 8, 29, 76–­77, 90–­98 Bratmobile (band), 154
Prufrock, Animal. See Animal Butchies, the (band), 155
Puar, Jasbir, 2, 141–­42 Hanna, Kathleen, 154
Terrorist Assemblages, 161 Jigsaw (zine), 155
Public Theater, 25, 171 Le Tigre (band), 155
Puchner, Martin, 55 movement, history of, 154–­55
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, Neuman, Molly, 154
and the Avant-­Gardes, 55 “Revolution Grrrl Style Now” (Vail), 155
Punch, 12, 13 Riot Grrrl (zine), 154
Pure and the Impure,The (Colette), 116 Sleater-­Kinney (band), 155
“Pussy Manifesto” (Bitch and Animal), Smith, Jen, 154
155–­56 Tribe 8 (band), 155
Vail, Toby, 154–­55
Queen of Peace Room, The (Dominic), 63 Wolfe, Allison, 154
Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam), 192 Rivera, Sylvia, 16
Queer Nation, xiv, 93–­94 Roach, Joseph, xix
“Queer Nationalism” (Berlant, Freeman), Román, David, 6
126 Rondo, Flavia, 16
queer theory, 1–­5, 25–­26 Roundabout Theatre, 61
Queers for Economic Justice, xxi Rourke, Mickey, 170
Routledge Dictionary of Modern American
Radicalesbians, x, 16, 20. See also Lavender Slang and Unconventional English, The,
Menace 79
“Woman-­Identified Woman, The,” xvi–­ Rubin, Gayle, 187–­88
xvii, 4, 75, 117, 131, 143 Rubin, Jerry, 80
Rainer, Yvonne, 111 Rubyfruit Jungle (Brown), 108
RAT: Subterranean News (periodical), 84 Rudolph, Maya, 96
Rauschenberg, Robert, 111 Rumsfeld, Donald, 153
Réage, Pauline, 61 Russo, Vito, 89
Reagon, Toshi, 140, 156
Realist, The (magazine), 48, 60 Salome (Wilde), 43
Red Scare, The, 15 same-­sex marriage. See marriage, same-­sex
Redstockings, x, xvii, 83, 106 Sarria, José, 16
Reilly, John C., 96 Savage, Dan, 92
Reno, xix Savran, David, 156
Restricted Country, A (Nestle), 5 Schneemann, Carolee, 57
Revolution for the Hell of It (Hoffman), 81 Snows, 57
“Revolution Grrrl Style Now” (Vail), 155 “Solanas in a Sea of Men,” 57
Rhiannon, 156 Viet-­Flakes, 135
Rich, Adrienne, 75 Schutzman, Mady, 110
Richter, Andy, 96 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 98
Ridge, Marcia Sam, 60 Scull pool incident, 105–­7
Ridiculous Theatrical Company, 58, 166. Scull, Bob, 105, 107
See also Ludlam, Charles; Play-­house Scull, Ethel “Spike,” 105, 106
of the Ridiculous; Tavel, Ron; Theatre SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), 64–­68
of the Ridiculous; Vacarro, John SCUM Book, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 64, 66–­67
riot grrrls, xviii, 154–­56, 158, 162 SCUM Manifesto (Solanas), 28, 32, 53, 55–­
Animal, 29, 140, 142, 148, 154–­57 56, 64, 66–­68, 72, 75, 117, 119, 143,
Bikini Kill (band), 154 147, 148, 184
Bikini Kill (zine), 154 authorized edition, 71
260 Index

SCUM Manifesto (continued) Sky Car (Hendricks installation), 133

dramatic work, intended as, 32, 67 Sleater-­Kinney (riot grrrl band), 155
publication history, 61, 66, 70 Smith, Barbara, 75
Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir), 85, 117 Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
Secretaries, The (Five Lesbian Brothers), (ed.), 75
145, 162, 167 Smith, Beverly, 75
lesbian comedy of terrors, 167 “Wedding, The,” 75
New York Theatre Workshop run, 169–­ Smith, Jack, xxii, 16, 46
70 Smith, Jen, 154
Sedgwick, Edie, 50 Smith, Molly D., 170
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, xv Snitow, Ann, xvii
Touching Feeling, xv Snows (Schneemann), 57
Segal, Sondra, 10. See also Daughter’s Cycle Society for Cutting Up Men. See SCUM. See
Trilogy, The; Women’s Experimental also Solanas, Valerie
Theater (WET) “Solanas in a Sea of Men” (Schneemann),
sentimentality, national. See national senti- 57
mentality Solanas, Valerie, xv, 16, 26, 28, 31–­71, 72,
separatism, xix, 26, 29, 160 84, 119, 180. See also SCUM (Society
Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terror- for Cutting Up Men); SCUM Manifesto;
ist (zine), in, 147, 159 Up Your Ass
Johnston, Jill, and, 126–­27, 129 biographical information, 32–­36
Lesbian Nation (Johnston), as separatist Biondo, Dorothy Marie (mother), 33
tract, 110, 126–­27, 139 Blackwell, David (son), 34
Michfest admission policy, 159–­60 copyright applications, 28, 31–­32, 46,
Set it Off (film), 145 48, 52, 56
Sexual Politics (Millett), 75, 118, 127 death, 71
Shaiman, Marc, 95 Diamondback, The, 31, 34
Hairspray, 95 Dominic, Maggie, and, 63
Prop 8—­the Musical, 95–­98 Dunbar-­Ortiz, Roxanne, and, 69–­71
Shange, Ntozake, 14 Hothead Paisan and, 150, 159
Shankman, Adam, 95 I, a Man, appearance in, 60
Shaw, Paul (AKA Precious Pearl), 24 Martinez, Judith Solanas (sister), 34, 46,
Shaw, Peggy, xix, 10, 24, 39. See also Split 67
Britches Matteawan State Hospital for the Crimi-
Sheehan, Stacey, 149 nally Insane, in, 71
Shelley, Martha, 19 Moran, Frank “Red” (stepfather), 33
“Our Passion Shook the World,” 21 NOW and, 69–­70
Sieber, Jami, 156 Perez, Bongi (character in Up Your Ass),
Silence = Death Project, 99 31, 36–­46, 60, 69, 108, 140, 164
Silverman, Leigh, 172 SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men),
Simo, Ana María, 10 64–­68
Simon and Schuster, 127–­28 SCUM Book, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 64,
“Simplest Surrealist Act, The” (Harding), 55 66–­67
Singer, Aili, 85 SCUM Manifesto, 28, 32, 53, 55–­56, 61,
Sisterhood Is Powerful (Morgan), 84, 127 64, 66–­68, 66, 71, 72, 75, 117, 119,
Situationists, the, 80, 95 143, 147, 148, 184
“’68 or Something” (Berlant), 153–­54 “SCUMMY things,” 28, 32, 64–­68, 69
60 Minutes, 157 self-­marketing, 32, 48–­55
Sklar, Roberta, 10, 63. See also Daughter’s Solanas, Louis Joseph Florent (father), 33
Cycle Trilogy, The; Women’s Experi- Theater of the Ludicrous, 28, 32, 37,
mental Theater (WET) 46–­47
 Index 261

Up Your Ass, 28, 31–­32, 36–­47, 54, 75, cal Company; Theatre of the Ridicu-
161 lous
Warhol, Andy, and, 32–­33, 49–­50 Kitchenette, 57
assassination attempt, 68–­71 Life of Juanita Castro, The, 57
“Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain Taylor Mead’s Ass (Warhol), 50
the Leisure Class, A”, 35–­36, 48, 52, Taylor, Diana, 169, 183
53, 54, 58, 60 Taylor, Lili, 62
Sondheim, Stephen, 140 Taylor, Paul, 114
Sontag, Susan, 9. See also camp Tea Party, 98
Sophocles, 165 Teena, Brandon, 8
Sour Juice and Rhyme (Bitch and Animal), temporal drag, 27, 115
156 Johnston, Jill, acts of, 137
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2 Terrorist Assemblages (Puar), 141, 161
Spiderwoman Theater (Mayo, Miguel, Terry, Megan, 10, 51
Miguel), 11, 24, 46 That Uppity Theatre Company, 91
Women in Violence, 11 Theater of the Ludicrous (Solanas), 28, 37,
Split Britches (Margolin, Shaw, Weaver), 46–­47. See also SCUM Manifesto; Up
xix, 24 Your Ass
Beauty and the Beast, 24 writings as examples, 32, 71
Belle Reprieve, 24 Theatre of the Ridiculous, 46–­47. See also
Five Lesbian Brothers comparison, 163 Ludlam, Charles; Play-­house of the
Lesbians Who Kill, 145 Ridiculous; Ridiculous Theatrical
Little Women: The Tragedy, 24 Company; Tavel, Ron; Vacarro, John
Upwardly Mobile Home, 24 Third World Gay Liberation, 4
Squeezebox (punk drag club), 156 13 Most Beautiful Women (Warhol), 50
St. Denis, Ruth, 44 Tillery, Linda, 14, 139
Stafford, Kate, 170 Tinkerbelle, 50
Stanley, Charles, 62–­64 Tony and Tina’s Wedding, 91
STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolu- Tony Award, 95, 140, 171
tionaries), 4 Torrey, Jonathan, 57
State of Marriage, The (Lipkin), 91–­92 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick), xv
Stein, Gertrude, 111 “Toward a Butch-­Feminist Retro Future”
“Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” 12 (Case), xix
Steinem, Gloria, 105, 119, 127 Town Bloody Hall (documentary), 123
Stiles, Kristine, 135–­36 Town Hall debate, 122
Stonewall (Carter), 14 transexual, 17, 189
Stonewall uprising, 17–­18 Transforming Stonewall 40/Pride 2009, 77
Transforming Stonewall 40/Pride2009 transgender, xi, xxi, 1, 2, 144
(40th anniversary), 77 Animal, 160
zap action, as, 18 Michfest separatist admission policy,
Story of O (Réage), 61 159–­60
Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 24 transvestites, 37
Student Homophile League (SHL), 19 Tribe 8 (riot grrrl band), 155
Sullivan, Andrew, 25, 94 Trilling, Diana, 118
Virtually Normal, 25 Troyano, Alina (AKA Carmelita Tropicana),
Sweet Honey in the Rock, 140 xiv–­xv, xix, 24
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, xxi Five Lesbian Brothers, comparison, 163
Symbionese Liberation Army, 143 Trull, Teresa, 139
Tucker, Diane, 53, 55
Tavel, Ron, 46–­47, 49. See also Play-­house Tucker, Gary (AKA Eleven), 58
of the Ridiculous; Ridiculous Theatri- Turds in Hell (Vehr, Ludlam), 47, 58
262 Index

Twitter, 95, 99 Vehr, Bill

2.5 Minute Ride (Kron), 171 Turds in Hell (with Ludlam), 47, 58
Whores of Babylon, 58
UCLA School of Law, 98 Velvet Underground, 49
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 108 Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine, 12
University of Arizona, 56 Viet-­Flakes (Schneemann), 135
University of Maryland, 34 Village Voice, 15, 49, 51–­52, 53, 56–­58,
University of Michigan, 23 59, 64–­66, 66, 87, 105, 111, 114–­18,
University of Minnesota, 34 128–­30
University of Pennsylvania, 2 Mailer, Norman, editor, 120
University of Virginia, 56 “Of This Pure but Irregular Passion”
Unnamable, The (Beckett), 61 (Johnston), 116
Up From the Slime (Solanas). See Up Your “On a Clear Day You Can See Your
Ass Mother “(Johnston), 124–­25
Up Your Ass (Solanas), 28, 31–­32, 36–­47, Virtually Normal (Sullivan), 25, 94
54, 75 Viva, 50
author’s production efforts, 48–­55 Voeller, Bruce, 90
Brechtian sensibility, 40 Vogel, Lisa, 157
comedy of manners, as, 40 Vogel, Paula, 170
copyright applications, 31–­32, 48, 52 Voyage to Lesbos (Five Lesbian Brothers),
“Dance for Turd,” 43 166–­67
“Dance of the Seven Towels,” 43–­44
drag queens in, 28, 31, 40–­41 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 186
original manuscript, 31, 32, 52, 55–­56 Walidah, Hanifah, 7
Perez, Bongi (character), 31, 36–­46, 56, War on Terror, 30, 140, 142, 152–­54, 157–­
60, 69, 108, 140, 164 58, 161
picaresque drama, as, 40 Warhol Museum, 60
production history, 28, 47, 49–­51, 53, Warhol, Andy, 28, 32, 79
56–­66, 161 a: A Novel, 60
publication history, 28, 48–­49, 51–­55 Berg, Gretchen interview, 49–­50
published edition (1967), 51–­55, 56 Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 49
self-­dedicaton, 36–­37 Factory, The, 16, 33, 113
self-­published version (1965), 51–­52, films, 50, 67
56, 64 homoeroticism, male, 50
synopsis, 36–­46 Jill Johnston Dancing, 114
Theater of the Ludicrous, example of, 71 self-­marketing, 49
Upwardly Mobile Home (Split Britches), 24 Solanas, Valerie and, 32–­33, 49–­51
US Supreme Court, 48, 91 assassination attempt, 68–­69
“Uses of the Erotic, The” (Lorde), 4 Up Your Ass (Solanas), and, 49–­50
Velvet Underground and, 49
Vacarro, John, 46–­47. See also Play-­house of Waters, John, 139
the Ridiculous; Ridiculous Theatrical Watkins, Mary, 14, 139
Company; Theatre of the Ridiculous Watt (Beckett), 184
Vaid, Urvashi, 76, 93, 103 Weather Underground, 143
Vail, Toby, 154–­55 Weaver, Lois, xix, 24. See also Split Britches
“Revolution Grrrl Style Now,” 155 “Wedding, The” (Smith), 75
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (Busch), 10 Well (Kron), 171, 172
Vanderbilt, Gloria, 105 Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 168
Vannucci, Susan, xvii What’s That Smell? (Bitch and Animal), 156
Varied Voices of Black Women, 14 Wicker, Randy, 57, 68
Variety, 164 Wilde, Oscar, 43
 Index 263

Williams, Albert, 58 Young Lords, 143

Williams, Raymond, 4 Young, Allen, 19
Williams, Tennessee, 24 Out of the Closet: Voices of Gay Liberation
Williamson, Cris, 139 (Jay, co-­ed.), 20
Wilson, Doric, 18, 51 “Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the
Wilson, Lanford, 51 Leisure Class, A” (Solanas), 35–­36, 48,
WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist 52, 53, 54, 58, 60
Conspiracy from Hell), x, 4, 26, 86, YouTube, 95
94, 102
Bridal Fair protest, 77–­86 Zap (Crumb), 79
manifesto, 81–­82 zap actions, 28–­29
Wittig, Monique, 127, 143 definition, x–­xi, 79–­80
Guérillères, Les, 127, 143 history, 79–­81
Lesbian Body, The, 127 internet, effects on, 95
Wolf, Julie, 156 Lavender Menace, ix–­xi, xvi–­xviii,
Wolf, Kate, 156 18
Wolf, Stacy, 156 New York Marriage Licensing Bureau
Wolfe, Allison, 154 anti-­marriage action (Feminists, The),
“Woman-­Identified Woman, The” (Radi- 73–­75, 74
calesbians), xvi–­xvii, 4, 75, 117, 131, New York Marriage Licensing Bureau
143 pro-­gay marriage action (GAA),
Women in Violence (Spiderwoman Theater), 86–­90
11 Prop 8—­the Musical, 95–­98
Women’s Experimental Theatre (WET), 10, Proposition 8, against, 76–­77
11, 46 Scull pool incident, 105–­7
Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy social media used in, 95
from Hell. See WITCH Stonewall uprising, 18
Women’s One World. See WOW Café WITCH Bridal Fair protest, 77–­86
Theatre Yippies, 80–­81
Women’s Strike for Equality, 105, 107 zines
Woodlawn, Holly, 50 Bikini Kill, 154
Woronov, Mary, 63 definition, 140
WOW Café Theatre, xix–­xx, xix, 24, 30, 39, Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terror-
169–­71, 187 ist (DiMassa), 29, 108, 140, 142–­52,
Five Lesbian Brothers comparison, 163 146, 147, 154, 158–­62
Wright, Doug, 169 Jigsaw, 155
Wuornos, Aileen, 140 precursors, 148
Riot Grrrl, 154
Yippies (Youth International Party), 80–­81, riot grrrl, inspiration, 148–­49
84, 86, 95 Zap (Crumb), 79