First published 1996 by Westview Press
Published 2018 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Staging gay lives : an anthology of contemporary gay theater / edited by John M. Clum.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8133-2504-8 (hardcover).ISBN 0-8133-2505-6 (pbk.)
1. American drama20th century. 2. Gay men's writings, American. 3. Gay men's writings, English. 4. English drama20th century. 5. American dramaMen authors. 6. English dramaMen authors. 7. Gay menDrama. I. Clum, John M.
PS627.H67S73 1996
812'.540809206642dc20
95-23652
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-2505-7 (pbk)
Foreword:
Notes Toward a Theater of the Fabulous
TONY KUSHNER
Queer Nation, a group born out of ACT UP and the AIDS militant movement but concerned primarily with issues of lesbian and gay enfranchisement and power, used to have a slogan: We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous, get used to it. Fabulous became a popular word in the queer communitywell, it was never unpopular, but for a while it became a battle cry of a new queer politics, carnival and camp, aggressively fruity, celebratory and tough like a streetwise drag queen: " FAAAAABULOUS! " Fabulous was roughly the gay equivalent of that indefinable, ineffable thing young African Americans used to identify as soul, and later perhaps as badness and def and phat, and which Jews identify as menschlichkeit. If you possess it, you don't need to ask what it is. When you attempt to delineate it, you move away from it. Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular, usually oppressed, subculture's most distinctive, invigorating features.
What are the salient features of Fabulousness? Irony. Tragic history. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding Fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The Fabulous is not delimited by age or beauty. Style has a dialectical relationship to physical reality. The body is the Real. Style is Theater. The raw materials are reworked into illusion. For style to be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, physical insufficienciesand just as importantly, one's audiences must be made aware of the degree of transcendence, of triumph; must see both the triumph and that over which the triumph has been made. (In this the magic of the Fabulous is precisely the magic of the theater. The wires show. The illusion is always incomplete, inadequate; the work behind the magic is meant to be appreciated.)
Gay theater artists, including the talented writers of this volume, are collectively shaping the next chapter in the history of American gay theater, which has at times been inseparable from the history of American theater in its entirety and which is now becoming increasingly distinct. Our great antecedent is Charles Ludlam, who died of AIDS in the early '80s and who was, in addition to being the funniest man who ever lived and a brilliant consumer and regurgitator of theatrical style and legend, the founder and chief arbitrator of the Theater of the Ridiculous.
The Ridiculous as a category is brilliantly defined by Ludlam in his "Manifesto: Ridiculous Theatre, Scourge of Human Folly," with such maxims as "If one is not a living mockery of one's own ideals, one has set one's ideals too low." The Ridiculous, with its roots stretching back into the 1950s, became the first openly gay aesthetic. Perhaps its defining moment was not a theatrical one but rather the political act that began the modern gay liberation movement, the Stonewall riots, which took place on the night of Judy Garland's funeral in 1969 and which began in a spirit of both rage and parody as drag queens, consciously and with considerable irony, hurled bricks and abuse at cops in imitation, even parodic imitation, of the Black Panthers, chanting "Gay is good!" as the queer version of "Black is beautiful!" At the threshold of community, of liberation, at the threshold of transforming closet drama from tragedy into comedya step beyond Genet because it's funnierhomosexuals learned the essential strategy of divesting ourselves of furtiveness. We dragged and I do mean dragged the trappings of the underworld, the demimonde, onto the avenues in broad daylight. And yetand yet we hadn't fully arrived at being capable of seeing ourselves as subjects. We were, by our own self-report, the Ridiculous, perhaps a mirror of the larger ridiculousness that is the world, but still inescapably Ridiculous, not yet able, I think, to take ourselves quite seriously enough. Certain locutions are forbidden the Ridiculous because they collapse the distance irony provides between pain and its articulate expression, a distance that can only be safely collapsed after coming into real power, when the hope, even the remote hope, of the redressing of injustice is at hand.
The tensions between the comic and the serious are fraught with peril. Taking ourselves too seriously, we cease to be gay. Becoming subjects cannot mean becoming unfabulous. Becoming people must mean becoming gay people, not straightmen. Becoming humorless, we lose connection to the most vital parts of our culture. The Fabulous incorporates the Ridiculous. It is the next step, not a rejection. It is a necessary corrective to the dead earnestness of the butch, corporate, Gay Republican assimilationist camp, if you'll pardon the expression. The Fabulous is the assertively Camp camp, the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, and disliked, and Other.
The Fabulous is the recovery of the power of the Bakhtinian, the magic of the grotesque, the carnivalesquepolitics as carnival, as Halloween, as theater. You can see this in the amphibious nature of the gay pride parade, a form our community invented, simultaneously angry demonstration, identity assertion, and Mardi Gras. In part Fabulousness is a bestowing of power by merely believing in it: If I dress like a nun I become invested. And this is true. I would rather be blessed by Sister Dementia Praecox than by Cardinal O'Connor. This is also true of Art; Art is like that: There may be nothing there, but that nothing has power; it grows to something of great constancy, but howsoever strange and admirable.
If we are moving from a Theater of the Ridiculous to a Theater of the Fabulous (and I propose such a development purely for the fun of doing so, unsure and even skeptical of its use value), I would guess that this movement also has something to do with telling stories, of having arrived as a community with a history of both oppression and liberation. One of the gifts of liberation, of even an incomplete liberation such as the one we now enjoy, twenty-six years after Stonewall, is an expanding, more detailed, more coherent collective memory. The past is liberated as well as the present. We are now fabulous in part because we are fabulists, fabled, organized and powerful enough to have the luxury to begin to examine the past and interpret it, and to pass it along to our descendants openly. For homosexuals to work to create a history is for us to say that there will be those who come after, to say to the straight world: Some of your children will be queer.
