Archive - Carolyn Gage

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Published on

December 21, 2014
Game!

Lesbian Feminism
My recent housemate was graduating from a program that would launch her into the world of corporate law... and from where I sat, for better or worse, it appeared to me that her education was deficient in the arena of "game"-- and specifically game for women who are infiltrating networks of good old white boys.

Being a witch and all, I decided to sew her a power object... something with thousands of stitched iterations of intention. So I embroidered the word "Game" and my housemate chose the white rose to underscore it... a white rose with thorns.

... and I gave her this:

"Game is a term used to describe a “design of action,” played with charisma and gumption, angled for a specific purpose."

No resentment. It kills your game. Ditto self-righteousness. Doesn't matter if you're entitled to them. They will still kill your game. Focus on your part.
“When people have inadequate information, they tell themselves stories.” This will kill your game, also… or else put you into the wrong game. One of the best things to do in ANY situation is to interrogate your assumptions. What do I actually KNOW about this person or situation? What am I assuming? On what are those assumptions based? Stories are based on previous data, prior trauma—sometimes generational, etc. When people resort to stories instead of collecting more information, they pretty much live the same story over and over. It’s good game to change the game.
It’s not very good game to attempt to leverage sex appeal into anything at all. It usually is a dominance move on the part of the person who is responding to it, and for that reason it will never leverage into respect or promotion, and it is far more likely to morph into resentment and obstructionist behaviors. It’s good game not to ever identify with your appearance. Identify with your character and your intelligence. When they try a dominance move like noting how pleasant it is to have such a pretty boss, be able to say with honesty, "I have no idea what you're talking about." Which one of the very few moves you can make when they do that.
Losing a round will often put you in a position to win the game. Your graceful or skillful comeback from a loss can set you up for success even more than winning an early round. It’s like ice skating in competition. They penalize you mostly for losing your focus, not for the fall itself.
Lying and all its permutations are terrible game. That includes editing the truth, omitting pieces of the truth, glossing over aspects of things. People nearly always can tell when you are attempting to hide something or manipulate them, and often, even if they are not conscious of it, they will still register it on a visceral level. They won’t trust you. In my experience, once trust is lost, it’s over. It may take a while to play out, but basically, the game is over. Avoid doing anything that puts trust at risk. It’s not going to be worth it. When you lie, you forfeit your spiritual power. And when you do that, you are in a very dangerous game.
True humility is a beautiful thing and it will allow all kinds of flexibility and options that rigid pride will not. False humility and false modesty, however, are not good game. They are a set-up. If you send a message that you are not aggressive or competitive or ambitious, people will resent it when your actions communicate otherwise. Be clear and upfront about who you are and that you are in it to win it. Then they will roll up their sleeves and engage. Unless they are weak and petty… but never cater to weak and petty people.
Own your choices. Unlearn “But I have to…” Or “they make you…” Learn to start sentences with, “I am choosing to…”
Trying to be one of the boys is not game. They love women who try this. They play along, laughing behind their sleeves the whole time. You will never be one of them. They will never for one second forget you are female. Own your gender and own the differences… which are significant. Men secretly respect loyalty to one’s own sex. What men approve of and what they actually respect are frequently two different things. Choose respect over approval.
Learn to make friends with rejection. Practice makes perfect, so ask for things you probably won’t get, just so you can make friends with rejection. This is a discipline. And it’s fabulous game. See the next one down…
Attempting to control or limit rejections is not game. Many women “protect” themselves right out of the game. Be ready and willing to hear “no.” Consider it a victory to hear no, because it means you asked! Great role modeling for other women.
Avoiding other women is not game. Actively, aggressively look for the women. Ask them to mentor you. Cultivate friendships with them. Especially older women. We know things you can’t know, because we have been here longer. And help younger women. Never fear that your mentoree might supplant you. If they do, up your game.
Lack of vulnerability is not game. The tree that cannot bend will break. Have safe people in your personal life with whom you can be honest. Share early and often. Do not share this stuff in the workplace. You are human, and if you are not sharing stuff that bothers you, I guarantee it will come out sideways to the wrong people and in the wrong places. This is an either-or. Either you get your issues out in healthy ways or they will find their way out in unhealthy ones. There is no such thing as healthy repression.
Self-sufficiency is not game. It’s a total boondoggle and one that women frequently fall into, trying to prove that we are not weak and dependent. Interdependence and mutuality are big-time game. It’s how the boys got where they are. Make yourself practice interdependence and mutuality until they become habits. Ask others for help, advice, feedback, and access to resources. When people offer you something, there is NO GAME in refusing or only taking half. Receive with enthusiasm and gratitude. Yes, you will need to reciprocate… and that is how it is done. That’s The Game. People do not admire you when you refuse them. They pull away. They feel hurt, and they get very clearly that it is important to you not to need them, maybe even a source of pride. Terrible game.
It’s never too late to correct impressions, set the record straight, confront something that made you uncomfortable, or take responsibility for something. It just takes communication skills and those can be learned.
The best game in the universe is to be playing your own game, one that is about spiritual growth. Too many women get caught up in games not of their making or working for goals they really don’t care about. If you play your own game, even if you lose, that loss will be rich in meaning.
“Rising above” unacceptable behavior is not game. Confront, big and small. When you “rise above” something, you are the only person who believes that is what you are doing. Everyone else sees you being victimized and letting someone off the hook (enabling). They also see you "acting like a girl." Which means acting the way the patriarchy would train and discipline us into doing. So, instead, do a functional confrontation and, if there is no accountability, detach. But do not “rise above.” Never “rise above.” Because none of us are “above.” The stronger, better players are direct and they confront. Women traditionally “rise above.” Resist the temptation.
Never owning mistakes is miserable game. You are not your behavior and be so very happy that you are not. You can own mistakes with joy, with glee! You are not your behavior. And it frees up everyone else in the environment. They aren’t going to be identified with their behaviors either! Everyone can relax and make the mistakes that are necessary for creative and successful endeavors. Be a leader.
Communication classes and assertiveness classes are good game.
Published on

December 15, 2014

Award Acceptance Speech at Venus Theatre

Women And Theatre Women's History

On December 13, 2014, Venus Theatre in Laurel, Maryland, held an event to celebrate the production of their 50th play. At this celebration they gave out their first ever "Lifetime Achievement Award" and I was lucky enough to be the recipient. What follows is an attempt to recap my acceptance speech. (At the event, I spoke off-the-cuff, using a few notes.)

In the lobby of Venus Theatre with my award!

Eva Le Gallienne in Liliom, schooling her daughter in the fine art of enabling domestic violence.

I began by telling the folks at Venus that I was going to tell three stories, and that the first was about the actress Eva Le Gallienne. She was twenty-three years old and starring in her first Broadway role. She was the lead in Liliom, which was the play from which the musical Carousel was adapted. This play, which you know, if you know Carousel, is a sentimentalizing of domestic violence. It has lines like “When some men hit you, it feels like a kiss.” The role that Eva was playing was that of the victim. During this run, she was battered and raped backstage by an actor who was in the show. She left the theatre and checked herself into a private sanatorium. She never named the rapist, aware that this would be the end of her career. And in case people are thinking that this was because it was 1923, I say look at all the actresses only coming forward now about the Bill Cosby drug rapes they suffered decades ago… and the dozens who are still afraid to come forward.

Anyway, she stayed in the sanatorium for three days and then returned to the show. It ran for another year. After that, she had a breakdown. And then she came back and founded her own professional theatre. She founded it away from Broadway, figuratively and literally. She produced plays of her own choosing… plays with powerful roles for women. She produced the work of women playwrights. Her theatre was run by lesbians… a lesbian artistic director (herself) and a lesbian administrator. She hired lesbian actors, lesbian set designers, lesbian costumers. And after shows, the cast and crew would go over to the lesbian nightclub, the Cosmo, where Spivey, the lesbian proprietor, would cook them all scrambled eggs. And she did plays in repertory, which is tougher than long runs and more expensive, but better for the actor who gets to play all kinds of different roles. This was the Civic Repertory Theatre, and it was one of the legendary theatres in American history.

And then the Depression hit and Eva and everyone else lost their funding. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in a lesbian relationship and in networks of power lesbians, approached Eva about heading up the Federal Theatre Project that was just being set up under the New Deal. This would enable Eva to keep the doors of the Civic Rep open. But Eva was very well aware that government and art are a bad mix. She was also very aware of her vulnerability as a lesbian. She turned it down and closed her theatre.

As a footnote, Hallie Flanagan took over the Federal Theatre Project, and sure enough, it was the first program to be witch-hunted by political enemies of the New Deal. She was called to testify before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. At the end of her life Hallie developed dementia, and sadly, she would relive this nightmare over and over, wandering the halls of the nursing home and still defending herself against hallucinatory interrogators from these hearings.

Deb Randall, following in the footsteps of Eva Le Gallienne, makes the connection between the cultural narratives about women and the victimization of women in real life. Like Eva, she privileges the work of women playwrights and chooses the roles and stories that tell the truth, that unmask the perpetrators and the institutions that oppress women, and that offer radically different roles and scripts for women and for girls.

The second woman that I talked about was the African American actor Henrietta Vinton Davis, who was born, actually, in Baltimore. [Note: Venus Theatre is located just outside of Baltimore, in Laurel, Maryland.] Davis was born in 1860, during the last days of legal enslavement. She actually worked for former captive Frederick Douglass, and, under his encouragement, she realized her vision and calling to perform. At this time, African American theatre took the form of minstrel shows and, later, what were called “plantation musicals,” which were post-war sentimental and nostalgic white fantasies about the lives of enslaved people in the South.

Henrietta did not want to participate in these forms. Instead, she went out on the road solo, performing monologues from Shakespeare and poems by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The last African American Shakespeare theatre in New York had been burned to the ground by racists, and the actors who founded it had fled to London. There were no African American companies performing serious work.

Henrietta’s career was spent touring to cities where she could not stay in the hotels or eat in the restaurants. She had to endure reviewers who never failed to make mention of the shade of her skin color, the lightness of it being considered an endorsement as important as her acting talent.

She was well aware that the classical canon was by and about white people and she embraced the work of contemporary Black playwrights attempting to write new epic plays. She produced and performed in plays about the successful slave rebellion in Haiti, and she co-wrote a musical called “My Old Kentucky Home.” Unlike other plantation shows, Henrietta’s play included the war, and the entire second act portrayed formerly enslaved people taking over the plantation of their former captors. Not surprisingly, her theatre company ended up broke and stranded in Denver, but good for her. Henrietta was so far ahead of her time, she has largely been written out of the history of Black theatre.

Deb Randall, like Henrietta and Eva, has turned away from the popular theatre of her time, because it supports a dominant culture that degrades people of color and women. She cultivates the artists who are working to subvert that dominant narrative… and she pays the price of marginalization and isolation. Like Henrietta, Deb and her work are considered an anomaly. Women of the 21st century, like African Americans in the late 19th century, have not achieved enough financial or cultural autonomy to demand and create our own narratives and forms. It was enough for Blacks in the 1880's to perform in the minstrel shows that were so reassuring to and so well-remunerated by their oppressors. And for many women today, it is enough to perform the princess/whore stereotyped roles that are so reassuring to and so well-remunerated by the patriarchy. It takes a room of one’s own, a theatre of one’s own, an audience of one’s own, to decolonize the imagination, and Eva, Henrietta, and Deb understood this.

The third woman I want to talk about is Minnie Maddern Fiske. She is one of the greatest actresses of the American stage, and yet she spent many of her prime years performing in church basements and grange halls around the country. This is because a group of men who called themselves the Theatrical Syndicate, had taken control of all the major theatres in New York and on the touring circuit across the country. They specialized in highly commercial “girlie” shows. Minnie Fiske was interested in serious work with strong roles for outspoken women. She was producing Ibsen. She was producing an adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a play about a woman who had been raped. One by one, professional producers and actors sold out to the Syndicate, but Minnie never did. She paid a very high price for her art and her resistance. But one of my favorite quotations is something that a theatre critic wrote about Minnie during this period of her career. He said, “Wherever Mrs. Fiske sits, that’s the head of the table.”

Me and Deb and the Goddess.

And I want to say to you tonight, wherever Deb Randall sits, that’s the head of the table. In this storefront, on C Street, in Laurel, Maryland. That’s the head of the table for women’s theatre.

Deb Randall and Venus Theatre are in a long and proud tradition of feminist pioneers who refused to compromise themselves or their art. And the price we pay for this integrity is tremendous.

I am so proud to have received Venus Theatre’s first Lifelong Achievement Award, and I am very proud to have had thirteen of my plays read or produced by Venus. Gertrude Stein was once asked what artists need most, and she answered “appreciation.” We don’t need criticism. Subsidy is nice, but it’s not essential. What we need is appreciation, and this is what Venus Theatre offers. Appreciation. And it is mutual: Thank you, Deb, and thank you, Venus!
Published on

November 1, 2014

In Which the Playwright Attends a Séance

Incest

Not what I did.

I went to a séance last night. Well, not actually a séance… It was officially billed as a Night of Platform Mediumship. But, like a séance, it was about communication with the dead. And what a great night for it, too: Halloween! In the pagan tradition, this is the night when the veil between the living and the dead is supposed to be the thinnest. I think that means semi-permeable. And the event was held at a lesbian B and B.

Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. I was there to research a play I am working on, where the plot turns around the use of “planchette,” a nineteenth-century prototype for a Ouija board. Frankly, I was a pretty solid skeptic.

So here’s how it went: At seven o’clock, the guests at the B and B came downstairs and settled around the fire on sofas and easy chairs. The medium was already set up with a vase of white roses, a candle with a skull on it, and a huge Dunkin Donuts glass of iced coffee. She put us all immediately at ease, explaining the protocols and how she worked. She advised us of the difference between ghosts and spirits. As best I understand it, ghosts have not quite made it over to the “other side” yet, but are still hanging around and haunting specific places associated with their lives. In other words, they are not evolved. Spirits, on the other hand, represent those who have successfully crossed over.

I sensed some relief from the more paranormally literate that we would only be dealing with spirits. Myself, I was up for either.

The medium began to sense someone attempting to “come through.” She pointed to a section of the audience and told us that she thought it was attempting to reach someone seated in that corner. She began to describe a woman in her forties who died a somewhat slow death from cancer. One of the women seated in that section raised her hand to indicate that this spirit might be someone she knew. The medium began to relate more and more details, asking questions like “Do you understand the month of October?” Which meant, “Does October ring a bell?” And then the audience member would nod and say, “Yes, that was when we held the memorial service.” It was interesting, somewhat specific, and the message was one of gratitude to the friend for the quality of care she had offered through the end-of-life ordeal.

Well… okay. One down. Jury still out. About two hours left to go.

And then the medium begins to describe a man. A man with a military history. He died in his sixties, she thought, and he died suddenly. My mind is wandering toward my father. He served in the Navy for World War II. He had a heart attack on a golf course. But he was in his mid-70’s when he died. However, he was youthful. Most folks would have probably thought he was a decade younger. But I’m not raising my hand.

She’s going on. He is a father figure. Okay… He was a disciplinarian with his family… or, at least, that’s how he saw himself. Well, maybe. “Sadist” and “control freak” would have been more apt, but of course, he wouldn’t say that. Still not raising my hand.

And then she said something that really struck me. She said that he did not know how to exist outside a specific paradigm. That lit up the board for me. He was a judge, totally… on and off the bench. In fact, my brother and I had called him “the Judge” years before he actually became one. He was infallible like the Pope. He never made mistakes, was never wrong. Ever. I would not say that he lied. It was more like he corrected discrepancies in the record.

But I’m still not raising my hand. I left home at eighteen, because of him and moved halfway and then the whole way across the country. I would only return home for a day or two every three or four years. I disliked the man intensely. And then, at thirty-two I recovered memories of child abuse. I realized that I was actually terrified of him. I cut off contact. He somehow found my address and my phone number and attempted to stalk me. I hung up on him and we never spoke again. About twelve years later he died. I was disinherited.

This is why I’m not raising my hand. It feels like another stalking. But she’s saying something…

She says he’s very religious. He goes to church every Sunday. Yep. He did that. Taught Sunday School, was a “lay reader,” donated buckets of money to the church. It was his cover.

And then she said “family dinner.” That’s when my hand goes up. I can’t help it. The family dinners. Where I learned it was unsafe to eat. Where he would sit nightly at the head of the table and begin to interrogate my learning-disabled brother, emotionally battering and humiliating him for his difficulties in school. Then he would turn his attention to my mother, sometimes hurling the plates against the wall. I have no memory of what he would say to me. The family dinners. A daily, dreaded torture ritual.

My hand is up. This spirit is mine. The medium turns to me. She wants me to know that he is aware of a conflict with me... that he sees it as a function of our operating from different points of view. Yep. That would be exactly how he would frame it. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” That’s a line from the film Cool Hand Luke, after the prison warden has punched Steve McQueen down a hill.

The medium is looking at me. She must be feeling that I am being invited to dialogue. I look at her, intensely uncomfortable. There is a long silence. Finally, I say in a very low voice, “He was violent.” The room freezes.

At this point, I don’t know what I believe, but I am lost in the past. Someone I do not want to speak with ever again in my life appears to be attempting to contact me in a room full of my sister lesbians. And he is attempting to frame me as the one who is being unreasonable and hostile. Just as he did in real life. I am again the ungrateful hippie daughter, the brainwashed therapy patient with “False Memory Syndrome.” Or, as he put it in his will, the daughter who chose to estrange from both parents for no reason.

The medium is talking again. She senses there is a sibling, a brother. Is he younger? I hesitate. He was a year older, but because of learning disabilities and behavioral idiosyncrasies, I always experienced him as being younger, and most people who met us assumed I was the big sister. I say, “Yes.”

The spirit wants to acknowledge that my brother attempted to appease him. I am remembering a conversation I had with my brother when I was about twenty. I had left home by then and was living half a continent away. We were discussing the abuses of our childhood, and I told him my strategy was to get as far away as possible. He told me that his strategy was the opposite. My father was a very wealthy man, and my brother felt that sticking around to get the money was the best form of revenge.

Why is this spirit wanting me to know that he understands my brother was appeasing him, and not really agreeing with him, all those years? Could he really have been so narcissitic as not to have noticed? I am not interested in anything he appears to be communicating. And I am, as I have noted, intensely uncomfortable. I am extremely unwilling to be doing this in front of a room full of strangers, and my sense of violation is palpable to everyone in the room.

The medium tells me that the spirit is sorry, but it’s a qualified sorry. Perhaps he is sorry for a misunderstanding or our inability to share points of view. Not sorry for the horrendous physical, financial, emotional, sexual, and criminal abuse of his wife and his two children. I have nothing to say. There is no closure. I’ve known that for decades.

The medium appears to be at a loss. She asks me if I understand, which is her way of asking if the message is consistent with my experience of the dead person. I mumble, “Sounds like more of his usual BS.” There is another awkward silence. I feel that every women’s stomach is as knotted as mine.

Mercifully, the medium moves on to a lighter spirit.

As I sit there I try to figure out what just happened. One thing is unmistakeable: She absolutely described my father and she also modeled the language and perspective that was representative of my last interaction with him, which was thirty years ago.

If people do hang out in a spirit world after death, wouldn’t they be changing and growing there? Otherwise, what would be the point? I began to watch the interactions in the room. It was phenomenal, the accuracy of the images and the details that the medium “brought through.”

But, I am a dramatist and what struck me the most was how frozen in time these voices were. The spirits coming through were like screenshots from the last interaction with every person being contacted. There had been no growth, no changes, no surprises, no new information.

I had a sudden thought: This woman is a psychic. She’s picking up on images and memories and mental vibrations of the women in this room, not voices from entities from “the other side.”

I felt immediately better. I was not being ectoplasmically stalked. I was experiencing only the externalizing of the contents of my own mind. A relief, but also disturbing. The memory of my father is encased in amber. It cannot be subject to revision, but this means that parts of myself must also be encased in amber. My responses in this room of lesbians were as stuck in time as the representation of my father.

And I am terrified at the thought of releasing either of us. It reminds me of those moments in comedies about the Wild West, when the two opponents draw on each other at the same time, and then they stand there, afraid to shoot and afraid to put down the gun. How much energy must that take, to freeze in that posture?

So, in short, I got my money’s worth. Whether or not the spirit of my father came through, there is no mistaking the fact that I met the ghost of myself. Emily Dickinson says it better than I:

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.

The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
Published on

October 25, 2014

An Apology to Misty Upham

In Memoriam

I just saw the film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ monstrously successful play August: Osage County. The thing that struck me the most about the film was the exploitation of the Native American character who has been hired to be the cook and caregiver for the family matriarch, whose cancer and prescription-drug addiction have rendered her incapable of taking care of herself.

A caveat: In fairness to the playwright, it appears that the screenwriters reduced the role of Johnna Matevata, the caregiver, considerably. It may have been that the play was less offensive. I understand that the selling of film rights rarely, if ever, entails rights of approval for the author.

Guess who's not coming to dinner...

In the opening, there is an attempt to ridicule the ignorant racism of the matriarch, but then director John Wells spends the next two hours perpetrating the same arrogance and erasure with his camera. If the racism of the family is supposed to be a “thing,” then there would need to be at least a token effort to present the impact of this racism from the point-of-view of the character who is the target. In fact, I kept waiting for that scene, but it never came.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the depiction of the family’s behavior was an example of “hipster racism.” And, yes, hipster racism is a thing. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

"Hipster racism… is described as the use of irony and satire to mask racism. It is the use of blatantly racist comments in an attempt to be controversial and edgy. Its irony is established in a somewhat post-racial belief that blatant expressions of genuine racism are no longer taken seriously and are an outdated way of thinking, thereby making the use of such overt expressions satiric."

I can’t seem to get past the “somewhat post-racial” part. Apparently, neither can Wikipedia:

"Despite its ironic intent and context, hipster racism still appears to perpetuate prejudicial racial ideologies."

The most egregious example of the exploitation and erasure of the Native character occurs in one of the film’s most climactic scenes, one that involves an attempted child rape. The adult boyfriend of one of the family members is attempting to seduce his girlfriend’s teenaged niece. The predator and the niece are both potheads. Ms. Makevata overhears the interaction, and she races out of the house to intervene. On the way, she picks up a shovel, which she uses as a weapon, knocking the perpetrator to the ground and hitting him repeatedly. The family, alerted by the shouting, comes running and there is a showdown. Interestingly, they believe Ms. Makevata, and even though the perp’s girlfriend stands by him, the perp and girlfriend understand they are banished from the remainder of the gathering. They slink away at dawn.

Now, here’s the thing: The Native, working-class caregiver has assaulted a middle-class white man with a potentially deadly weapon. The family’s word could have sent her to prison for decades, if not life. She could have counted on, at the very least, losing her job. But they don’t fire her or report her to the police. They don’t thank her either. They act as if the perpetrator was stopped by divine intervention. They treat her as a bystander. They ignore her completely.

For me, as a viewer, this was a huge disconnect. The family (and filmmaker) validate her interpretation of events, and then they fail to acknowledge her role in saving the child. The camera tracks the perspectives of the white stars, apparently no longer interested in Ms. Matewata's responses now that her function as a plot device has been fulfilled. What that leaves viewers with are stereotypes of the caregiver: the strong, silent, noble Native American who keeps her emotions to herself and the stereotype of the domestic servant of color for whom no sacrifice for the white family is too much.

This dynamic is repeated when everyone abandons the matriarch to her abusive, addictive ways. In the sentimental final scene, the drug-addled, lonely, old woman manages to crawl up the stairs and into the receiving arms of the caregiver she has taken so for granted. Ms. Matewata takes her abuser in like a child with no recriminations, forgiveness implicit in her bountiful compassion for the race that continues to colonize her people.

I hated the film. I hated everyone who treated Ms. Matewata that way… most of all the filmmaker. I thought about it for days… probably because so many of my own plays are centered on the experience and perspective of female domestic workers.

And then last week I read of the death of Misty Upham, the Native American actor who played the role of Johnna Matewata in the film. Her body was found eleven days after she was reported missing. It took five hours and ten men to recover it from the bottom of the ravine where she had fallen, been pushed, or jumped… depending on whose version you read. Myself, I think it was a suicide. Her purse had been left at the top. Her family had reported that she was suicidal the day before they filed the missing-person report. Her father claimed she had stopped taking her medications for anxiety and bipolar disorder. And, finally, there are elements of pushed/jumped/fell to all suicides.

What I want to say is that I am sorry. I am sorry that such a talented actor is no longer here. I am sorry that so many of the roles offered to Native American women suck. In an interview for the indie film Frozen River, Upham spoke passionately about her desire to play a Native role that was not stereotyped and to work for changes in the industry. I am sorry that she will not live to continue that work. I am sorry for all the ways in which Native Americans have been and continue to be colonized by my white culture.

Her last Twitter posting is a haunting image of a bird she found on the Muckleshoot Reservation. It had been tied by its leg, and must have died exhausted from beating its wings in vain. An outspoken animal rights activist, Upham had characterized the act as “barbaric.” For me, it reads as a painful metaphor for the treatment of talented women of color in film.

Barbaric.
Published on

August 26, 2014

A Review of Drive All Night by Jamie Anderson

Reviews

I met lesbian singer-songwriter Jamie Anderson around 1989. She was playing at a house concert in Southern Oregon. I am sure she thought I was a complete asshole.

The truth was I was scared to death. I had just come out, both as a lesbian and as an artist, and I was terrified.

In moving to Southern Oregon, I felt I was infiltrating the Big Girls’ Club of fiercely independent, wildly creative, and deeply political 1980's lesbians. And here was Jamie, younger than myself by several years… and already "out" longer and traveling around the country alone, making money off her art. She was obviously one of the Big Girls, and I was completely intimidated.

Fast forward twenty-five years, and I am reading Jamie’s memoir Drive All Night. It is an astounding testament of passion: passion for lesbian culture and community, passion for music, and—let it be said—passion for driving, sometimes all night.

So many stories, so many miles, so many songs… How does she do it?

I found a clue in the chapter “Beware of Middle-aged Folksingers in Pickup Trucks.” Jamie is telling stories about crossing out of Canada. In 2009, the U.S. border guard asks her purpose, and she tells him she has been visiting her fiancée. He says, “I’ll bet he was happy about that.” Jamie, without hesitating, firmly corrects him: “She.”

She is immediately selected for a “random check,” her passport is confiscated, and she is told to step inside. She is questioned, cracks a few more jokes, and is finally released while her vehicle is supposedly searched.

Later, she has occasion to pass back into the US again, and again they ask her purpose, again she tells them, again she corrects the pronoun… and again the delay for a “random check,” or as she puts it, for being “a Big Lesbo.”

See, that’s the thing. She didn’t change her story. Because that’s how they do in the Big Girls’ Club. Even when nobody’s watching.

Jamie and Teresa Trull at the Ohio Lesbian Festival

Jamie’s stories make great reading for womyn’s music fans: She rubs shoulders with the likes of Chris Williamson, Holly Near, Nedra Johnson, Ronnie Gilbert, Sue Fink, Zoe Lewis, Barbara Higbie, Melissa Ethridge, and Amy Ray. And comedians Kate Clinton and Suzanne Westenhoefer.

She is a delightful story teller… but then we know that, because of her songs. And, by the way, it’s fun to hear how she strategically deploys some of these favorites, like the time she sang “Menstrual Tango” in a Bible Belt venue, or “I Wanna Be a Straight Guy” in a round-robin of heterosexual women at the famed Bluebird Café in Nashville.

Jamie’s road stories are as hilarious as they are horrendous: rude patrons, arrogant techies, lazy producers… and her hosts! Lordy, her hosts! People, do not offer to put up a touring artist in your home if it is haunted by ghosts or inhabited by a free-range pig!

And, of course, there are the vehicles. This woman has driven herself and her guitar 500,000 miles, mostly solo. That’s a HALF A MILLION MILES! Yeah, literally, to the moon and back again. And she only went through four pickup trucks to do it. I think my favorite truck story was the one about how she was desperate enough to tape a crystal to the top of her air filter… with the point facing forward. Hate to think what might have happened had it been facing backwards.

And then there are the motels. Here’s a little jewel:

"At another hotel, I was sleeping soundly after a long day of driving when at midnight the people in the next room awakened me. A young kid was singing loudly out of tune as the adults laughed. I banged on the wall to no avail. When I got up at six a.m. the next morning, I phoned them. I’m not proud of my behavior, but it sure felt good to hear that groggy “Hello?” on the other end of the line. I should have sung for them. At least it would have been in tune."

So many stories… stalking the Shakers, auditioning for Canada’s Got Talent, singing to the stranded in airports, the square tires of Alaska, bras and bellydancing...

Jamie Anderson, you intimidated me twenty-five years ago, but now you positively scare the crap out of me. You are a complete badass. Oh, and a Big Lesbo.

Get this book. Read it. We are not worthy.
Published on

July 25, 2014

Review of Baby, You are My Religion

Lesbian History Reviews

Baby You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars and Theology Before Stonewall
Acumen, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-84465-649-3
Dr. Marie Cartier
Price $74.14

[Originally published in Sinister Wisdom, July 2014]

“The Catacomb Culture of Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights History”

Baby You Are My Religion is a fascinating book in which Dr. Marie Cartier, a historian and theologian, argues her case that the pre-Stonewall lesbian bars, especially the 1950’s bars, constituted a form of sacred space. She makes repeated comparisons between the bars of this era and the catacombs in Rome, where early Christians met in secret, underground venues, practicing a form of civil disobedience necessitated by their taboo beliefs and rituals. This comparison appears less hyperbolic in light of the stories of the women interviewed for the book.

One of Cartier’s interviewees, Falcon River estimated that she was raped—vaginally, anally, and orally—at least once a month during the five years that she patronized the bars in and around Roanoke, Richmond, and Norfolk, Virginia. In the words of Falcon:

There was not one other place that I could fit. That’s why I went back after the police raped me. Over and over they raped me and over and over I went back. There was not one other place that I existed; or that my gay friends, the queens, could exist. It took all the courage I had to walk as a butch from the car to the bar…(p.14)

Psychologist and Dachau survivor Victor Frankl stated, “Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.” The pre-Stonewall lesbians risked arrest, rape, battery, public exposure, loss of family, and loss of career when they walked into these lesbian bars, but it was worth it, because the bars were the only place where, in the words of River, they existed. The bars were where they found identity, community, love… meaning. And this is why Cartier names the bars sacred ground.

For bar culture women then, I believe the gay women’s bar was that proverbial mountaintop—the place where they began the search that would lead to self-definition. (p.195)

This is a radical and significant reframing of an era of lesbian history that was rejected in the 1970’s lesbian-feminist construction of lesbianism as “the rage of all women condensed to an explosion,” rather than the “persistent desire of butch-femme.” (P. 106) The masculinity valorized in the butch-femme relationships of bar culture was not welcome in lesbian-feminist communities, nor was it welcome in mainstream feminist organizations.

The reality, however, was that, in 1961, the national membership of the Daughters of Bilitis was 115, but lesbians by the tens of thousands were flocking to the bars.

Cartier makes the case that not only did the bars constitute a form of sacred space, but that this era marks an important missing link in lesbian history. Cartier contends that the women who were publicly out in bar culture from 1945 to 1975 were the actual mothers of contemporary lesbian-feminism:

I believe however that the missing historical link between the past and the 1970’s is the butch-femme couple, the true “point of connection” between the two. ( P. 115)

Throughout the book, Dr. Cartier practices “deviant historiography,” an intriguing double-vision approach to history that combines a contemporary perspective with a respectful deference to the historical realities of the population being considered… in this case, the women of the bars.

For the book, she interviewed ninety-three self-identified gay women who attended the bars between 1940 and 1975. Her book devotes a chapter to each decade, and also includes a chapter on the 1980’s.

Thea Spyer and Edie Windsor in the 1950's

Before Stonewall, the great majority churches rejected homosexuals and homosexuality, and, according to Cartier, the bar was the only place where gay women could find the community and the recognition of friendship that made self-identification. In order for one to envision God as “friend,” it would be necessary to have friends and to be a friend. Not surprising the organizer of the first LGBT church, the Metropolitan Community Church, began by recruiting from the gay and lesbian bars in the late 1960’s.

Cartier examines how feminist theologians challenged the hierarchy of traditional theology, positing a “thealogy” rooted in experience as the source of insight into the Divine. But even this feminist thealogy was inaccessible to gay women in the mid-twentieth century. Only in the bars could they exist in relation to others as homosexuals, and not be cast as criminals, sinners, or mentally ill. And, as Cartier notes, the women’s spirituality movement was not welcoming of butch-femme.

Cartier creates her own word for the spiritual experience she discovers with her informants. The word is “theelogy:

A new word or house is needed to articulate what these women were doing for each other. I call this new word theelogy, in honor of the concept of friendship, and friendship’s ability to see the humanity, or the sacred, in each other and in our shared community members.(p. 190)

As a lesbian who came out in the era of lesbian-feminism, I found Cartier’s ideas did provide me with a missing link. I agree with her that bar culture was not “proto-political,” but political and revolutionary. Certainly these women were practicing freedom of assembly.

Baby You Are My Religion is packed with fascinating first-person narratives, a radical reframing of butch-femme history, and a fascinating contribution to evolving LGBT spiritual and religious history… but there is more than that. I am reminded of the words of African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara:

I’m entering my forties with more simplistic criteria—anyone with a greater capacity for love than I is a valuable teacher. And when I look back on the body of book reviews I’ve produced in the past fifteen years, for all their socioideolitero brilliant somethingorother, the underlying standard always seemed to be—Does this author here genuinely love his/her community?

And in the case of Dr. Cartier, the answer is a resounding yes.

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Review of Baby, You are My Religion