In act three, scene five of Tony Kushnerâs Perestroika , the second play of the Angels in America diptych, there is the following extraordinary exchange between Belize, the African-American nurse and erstwhile drag queen , and his patient Roy Cohn, the ferocious Republican lawyer, mover and shaker, now in the final stages of AIDS :Oneâs notions of heaven and hell are clearly matters of perspective: for Belize , aka, Norman Arriaga , gay and often flamboyantly feminine , gender confusion is a function and feature of godliness, while for Roy Cohn , deeply closeted, profoundly racist and sexist and aggressively masculine , itâs a hellish nightmare. That such deep divisions represent moral, political, and aesthetic codes worth fighting and dying for is evidenced by thousands of years of oppression, strife, and violence, often lethal, that has arisen from conflicts over matters of race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender, the core building blocks of subjectivity. These are, of course, fundamental categories of being: what is the first question we ask on hearing of the birth of a baby?
Belize: And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion .
(Roy laughs softly, delighted.)
Belize: And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers.
(Roy laughs again.)
Belize: Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ainât there.
Roy: And Heaven?
Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.
Roy: The fuck it was. (76)
I am a gay, white, natal male, able-bodied, middle-aged theatre artist and academic who has no experience whatsoever of many forms of discrimination, such as those suffered by members of racialised minorities. However, growing up as a queer child and youth in Canada in the 1960s entailed a powerful shaping of the psyche. My recollections of those painful years chime consistently with the pioneering work of various scholars in the area of queer studies , which I acknowledge and with which I engage in this book. âIdeas are not bloodless,â proclaimed a memorable professor of mine from my undergraduate years. It is thanks to the work of scholars such as Judith Butler , David Halperin , D.A. Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that I am able to make sense of my experienceâto rescue it from chaos and accident, and to connect it to larger spheres of consideration. With scarcely a word being uttered on the subject, it was nonetheless thoroughly understood in my childhood and youth that being a homosexual was among the worst misfortunes that could befall one, so thoroughly binarised were gender expressions in the social world of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in the 1960s. It was an âopen secret,â as anatomised by D.A. Miller in his essay on Alfred Hitchcockâs Rope , a paradoxical condition of simultaneous knowing and unknowing: âone couldnât be sure whether homosexuality was being meant at all, but on the chance it was, one also learned, along with the codes that might be conveying it, the silence necessary to keep about their deploymentâ (125). As Foucault claimed, regarding the nature of silence, âthere is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; ⊠There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discoursesâ (27). In Ottawa in the 1960s, most gay and lesbian people were, I believe it is safe to say, locked firmly in the closet. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted that this condition itself necessitates a kind of âperformance initiated as such by the speech act of a silenceâ (3). Diana Fuss wrote, in her introduction to Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, published one year after Sedgwickâs Epistemology of the Closet , âany identity is founded relationally, constituted in reference to an exterior or outside that defines the subjectâs own interior boundariesâ (2). The paradox of this condition is that any articulationânever mind enforcementâof reliable boundaries in such matters is doomed to failure: âThe homo in relation to the hetero, much like the feminine in relation to the masculine , operates as an indispensable interior exclusion ⊠a transgression of the border which is necessary to constitute the border as suchâ (3, emphasis added). Heterosexuality and homosexuality thus mutually and internally demarcate and exclude one another; the latter is the shadow of the former, the reverse to its obverse, proscribed, forbidden, existing only as a dark, fleeting ripple, barely breaking the surface of consciousness.
Perhaps every exploration of an artistic discipline, including its pedagogy , requires one to do some basic groundwork in philosophy. In order to frame this condition, wherein a set of social codes is both made possible and enforced by means of its implied opposite, one invokes metaphysics, âthe branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things or reality, including questions about being, substance, time and space, causation, change, and identityâ (âMetaphysicsâ), and that may be traced all the way back to Plato . Much closer to our own time one encounters theorising on this subject by such figures as linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher Jacques Derrida . According to Saussure, âthe units of language have value or meaning only in terms of opposition to another unit; each unit is defined against what it is notâ (115). However, in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida argued that âan opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordinationâ (195). Homosexuality is thus not merely the opposite term of heterosexuality , but the negative by means of which it is in part defined, its subordinate and proscribed reversal.
Like every other work on matters concerning sex and gender , this one is consistently informed by the foundational work of Judith Butler, who proposed in Gender Trouble that in a regime of compulsory heterosexuality , gender and desire must line up in a coherent relationship of causality, where the first term produces and necessitates the second, and the second the third (30â31). In the tyranny of this system, one can not only not be âmasculineâ if one is not heterosexual ; oneâs claim to being âmaleâ is itself in doubt. (It is important to note in passing that the concept of gender to refer to a psychological construct distinct from biological sex was âinventedâ âas Terry Goldie arguesâby controversial psychologist and sexologist John Money [6].)
While this is not a work of âauto-ethnography,â I need to note the visceral investment I have in this project. I spent many hours in high school classrooms trying to concentrate on the subject matter at hand while being assailed by paralysing thoughts: why had this devastating fate befallen me? I recall having the impression that a huge boulderâan asteroid, I supposeâhad plummeted from the sky and crushed the work in progress, so recently begun, that was the framework of my life. It all seemed enormously unfair. I could see nothing but darkness ahead and made a pact with myself: if I could not somehow become ânormallyâ heterosexual I would commit suicide. In one memorable conversation with my distressed parents, I tearfully demanded to see a psychiatrist. I remember that our family doctor, who had to refer me to a specialist, actually said that there was probably nothing to worry about, that these irregularities were the result of the âchemical imbalances associated with puberty.â (Every clichĂ© it seems has its basis in the actual uses of language.) The psychiatrist to whom I was referred, of a Neo-Freudian persuasion, concurred with my fifteen-year-old self that homosexuality was a serious aberration, but he believed that it might be a curable condition. I recall that in some of the conversations we hadâalarming and lamentable in retrospectâI tried to frame a different view of the matter. When I proposed at one point that, when it came down to it, it didnât matter whom one loved, anticipating one of the slogans of the marriage equality movement, âLove is Love,â the good doctor emphatically disagreed, and stated plainly that homosexuality wasâand I recall these were his exact wordsââpsychologically destructive.â My early experiences with discovering the predictable consequences of my sexual and affective preference, and with my proscribed psychosexual identity in general, marked me indelibly, like many others of my generation.
In addition to a personal investment in this topic, I have considerable experience of and interest in matters of gender-based difference and bias, having spent my career in the realms of professional dance and theatre , as a dancer, choreographer, and maker and performer of âphysical theatre,â writer and director, in which themes of gay identity and sexuality , in particular in response to the AIDS epidemic , were frequently addressed. Wild Excursions Performance, the company I founded in 1995 and of which I was artistic director for many years, described itself by means of this mission statement:
Our productions address subjects that are central to the human journey: issues of relationship, gender and power, and the nature of the performance event itself. They often address issues of relevance to a particular constituency, the community of gay men . The companyâs work is often subversive, interrogating conventional theatrical procedures and forms. These include works that are dance-based but make significant use of theatrical elements; works that are theatre-based but contain significant movement or other non-naturalistic components; and works adapted from the standard play repertoire and staged in innovative ways. The company employs dancers and/or actors, depending on the nature of the creative project. (Alexandrowicz, About Us)
And since the early 2000s, I have worked in the academy as an instructor in the problematic pedagogical area called âmovement for actors .â I became a faculty member in the ...