In This Issue:
Featured Feminist
Crash Course in Queer History
Ray's Column: Queer Representation in Film and TV
7 Must-See Queer Films
Featured Feminist:
Spotlight on Carolina Xique
Taking on Racism in the CSULB Theatre Department
Perspective Piece
I remember November 8th, 2016 like it was yesterday. It was my sophomore year in my CSULB Theatre career and I had just closed “Stop the World, I Want To Get Off!” in the Studio Theatre. That evening, the country watched as Donald Trump took the Electoral vote for President of the United States, despite Hillary Clinton’s obvious glaring lead in the popular vote. I was stage managing a Theatre Threshold rehearsal, keeping up with the news on my social media while my actors rehearsed. The sight of the news made my heart sank. After midnight, I sulked back to my dorm. I called my mom. I cried to myself as my roommate slept. I started writing because I didn’t know what else to do.
A few days later, we had a Town Hall to talk about the election and how we felt about the outcome. The majority of people in that room were white men. So, it’s no coincidence that the majority of people who spoke were those white men, expressing outrage for the state of the nation and contempt for their fellow white, male counterparts who allowed this to happen. For the first 30 minutes of the conversation, I watched as Anthony Byrnes, Josh Nathan, and Jeff Janisheski maintained a steady dialogue. I saw (a Black student) Nicole Royster’s hand raise between finishing sentences, waiting for her turn to speak, while these men simply interjected and pounced on top of each other.
I thought I was the only one who noticed. However, at a certain point,, Chrisanne Blankenship, Alex Billing’s wife, stood up, knees bent and arms out to put the conversation at a full stop.
“Before we continue,” she said firmly, “I would just like to point out that the only people speaking right now are Cis, straight, white men. And this young lady has had her hand raised for about 15 minutes to get a word in.”
She began sitting, shrugging on her way down. “I’d just like us all to notice that.”
Josh and Anthony became embarrassed very quickly. Jeff called on Nicole, who finally got time to say what was on her mind. And I was changed seeing that happen in real-time.
It’s the small instances like that point BIPOC students toward the conclusion that even our small, progressive bubble of a Theatre department isn’t exempt from implicit bias.
I remember the day Stephon Clark was killed in Sacramento in 2018. At least 7 shots flew through his body in the city where my little sister was attending university. I remember because I was in a production called “Woke!” the semester before, where I performed several poems about growing up Black and being fearful of being ripped from my family. I remember because even months after that show, I couldn’t watch another video of a Black person being killed without sobbing uncontrollably. I cried for him and his children. I cried for Black folks everywhere.
But I went to school that day. Not once did I hear about it from my professors. Actually, maybe once in my acting class. Maybe it was something like, “Stephon Clark died today. Which is why I say to come into the room as if it’s the first and last time you’ll be here.” As if Stephon died so that we could understand what truly living in the moment meant.
The fact of the matter was my non-Black classmates could live in that freedom. But for someone like me, when I step outside of the Theatre building, it would still be my reality.
These instances on top of countless others confirmed my suspicions of “fake wokeness” in our department.
When “We Are Proud to Present” premiered that same semester, during the talkbacks, I witnessed as my fellow classmates and other audience members asked the white actors how they could embody the hatred of a racist person and if it was difficult for them. I also saw how the traumatized Black actors who had just experienced a lynching on stage were almost completely disregarded. Throughout my 4 years, I watched as faculty and staff completely ridiculed, villainized, and unjustly punished Nicole Royster time and time again. All the while, I saw known predatory male classmates and faculty protected by teachers or simply never dealt with. They still got to do shows. They still were admitted into classrooms where women often relayed their sexual assault experiences in front of everyone. I was there when BIPOC students were called back in department shows or in grad school auditions and were overcome with joy. Meanwhile, white students said to their faces, “You’ll probably get in because they want people who look like you,” completely denying BIPOC students’ inherent disadvantage as theatre artists compared to white actors. I saw as the only BIPOC acting faculty had come, taught, and left in less than the 4 years I was there, and how their non-Westernized theories about theatre were overlooked. I saw the distinct lack of BIPOC directors taking on BIPOC shows like “Woke,” and “Dreamers.”
I wasn’t the only one. Other students saw it, too.
So it comes as no surprise that, when former students, Ryan Chiu, Victoria Melkonyan and I, started a conversation on the CSULB Theatre Facebook Callboard about the way the department perpetuates anti-blackness, past and present students unloaded everything they saw, noticed, and experienced. This came after Cal Rep released a statement about standing in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
The statement itself isn’t what made us upset. It was the distinct lack of owning up to anti-black behavior that incited the movement within the department.
You can’t say you’re “Woke” and still allow a white gay man to direct “The Colored Museum.” You can’t put on “diversity shows” that make a spectacle of generational trauma without giving your BIPOC students the tools and emotional agency to step into and release their roles in a healthy way. You can’t teach Black students how to access that deep-seeded trauma within themselves if you don’t also recognize that they can’t walk away from that when they leave the room, and provide an open space in all classrooms to talk about the Black experience. You can’t mandate BIPOC performance majors to be cast in a show that exploits their trauma but then allow white performance majors to opt out of shows because they didn’t get the role they wanted, or it wasn’t the show they wanted to be in that semester.
The department’s “wokeness” should not be about filling a diversity quota. It should be about asking,
“Does the implicit bias in our current practices prolong the suffering, obstruction, or villainization of our BIPOC students’ experiences?”
In the coming week, we will be releasing to the Dean of the CSULB College of the Arts (COTA) a document that contains several student accounts of anti-black behavior, some going as far back as 2005 and some as recent as Spring 2020. My hope is that because of this movement, the Theatre Department will be able to have a place to start in making changes so that future BIPOC students will not have to endure the macro- and micro-aggressions so many of us had to face alone.
To be clear; overall, I loved my time at CSULB. I wouldn’t be so invested in the future of CSULB Theatre students if I didn’t love this department as much as I did when I attended. I also acknowledge that my experience at CSULB comes from a place of privilege. I was a student representative and part of many orgs while I was there. I’m light-skinned, mixed, and generally more submissive. I was fairly fearful of creating conflict with the administrators and mentors I often met with.
After reading and hearing experiences from other Black, dark-skinned, female colleagues as well as other students who may have had more traumatizing moments than I did, Ryan, Victoria, and I decided that enough was enough. Although we didn’t start the conversation with the intention of overseeing it ourselves, we have privilege in our alumni status. We have privilege as former leaders in the department. We have privilege that many other current students don’t and we feel it’s necessary to exercise it in a way that benefits future CSULB Theatre students as well as the faculty and staff who we respect but need guidance in the right direction.
When Black folks wake up and see another video of a Black person killed at the hands of racism, our grief can often surround us for days. It’s our reality. We don’t get to escape it. And that’s not specifically CSULB’s fault. But, as an institution that claims equity and empathy, it is CSULB Theatre Department’s duty to open these conversations, listen to the mistakes they’ve made, and give BIPOC students and faculty the right to explain how they’d like to be supported.
Crash Course in Queer History: Three Activists You Should Know
By Rory Smith
Many American children learn little to nothing in history class about the queer activists who shaped the movement for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. Alternatively, you may have learned a short, whitewashed history, where your teacher briefly glossed over Harvey Milk’s contributions while leaving out Stonewall icons of color. This Pride month, let’s look into the actual history of Pride, and direct our attention to some fearless queer trailblazers.
Marsha P. Johnson was a trans Black woman who was at the forefront of the Stonewall riots in 1969. While she denies the legend that she “threw the first brick,” saying she didn’t get there until two o’clock, when fires were burning and riots had already begun, she was a pivotal figure in the movement. Johnson had a glittering personality and sense of humor, often joking that the “P” in her name stood for “pay it no mind.” She and fellow trans activist Sylvia Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), an organization that supported homeless queer and trans youth and sex workers in New York City by providing housing and resources. They became surrogate parents to youth who had been disowned or disregarded by their biological families, contributing to a long tradition of chosen family within the queer community, especially within queer communities of color. She also became an organizer with ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in the 1980s. In 1992, shortly after that year’s pride parade, Johnson was found dead in the Hudson River. Law enforcement ruled her death a suicide, but those close to her insisted that while she did struggle with mental health issues, she was not suicidal. There was also a large wound on the back of Johnson’s head that suggested foul play. To this day, many questions about Johnson’s death remain unanswered.
Stormé DeLarverie was a biracial butch lesbian, drag king, bouncer, and activist. During the 1950s and ‘60s, she performed as a “male impersonator” in the Jewel Box Revue. This was the era’s only racially integrated drag troupe, and she was its only drag king. She attests that on June 28, 1969, she threw the first punch at Stonewall as police roughly beat her and tried to put her in the police wagon. She sought help from the crowd: “Why don’t you guys do something?” This, it is reported, is when the riot broke out in full force. However, DeLarverie rejects that descriptor:
“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience––it wasn’t no damn riot.”
DeLarverie also became a fashion icon for New York City lesbians of her time, as she often wore her drag king suits as streetwear, which may have inspired other lesbians to experiment with androgyny and menswear at a time when it was still dangerous and taboo to cross-dress. She worked as a bouncer at lesbian bars in New York City well into her eighties, and patrolled the streets with a legally owned firearm, on the lookout for “ugliness,” any sort of violence or intolerance towards queer people. She died in 2014 at age 93.
Sylvia Rivera was a Latina gender non-conforming activist who spent her life fighting for trans and queer people’s rights. She was abandoned by her father and orphaned by her mother by age 3, forcing her to live with her grandmother who disapproved of her feminine tendencies. By age 11, she was living on the street as a child prostitute. She was taken in by a group of drag queens, who gave her the name Sylvia. She started STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, with her friend Marsha P. Johnson to protect trans and queer youth from having to perform survival sex work as she once had. In 1973, she was banned from the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade by organizers who didn’t want her gender identity and sex work history to “give the movement a bad name.” She stormed the stage anyways, suffering a broken nose before giving her incendiary “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech, where she condemned the white, cis queer community that wasn’t willing to fight for all queer people’s rights, and urged the audience not to forget the many queer prisoners locked up at Riker’s Island. She was forced to retire from most activist spaces due to transphobia and her own issues with substance dependency, but she made a vocal return in 2000. She was enraged by the murder of trans woman Amanda Milan and the lack of support given by Human Rights Campaign, an organization which tended to champion cis queer issues while ignoring trans issues. Rivera continued to fight for trans rights up until her last days. Her final essay, “Queens in Exile: The Forgotten Ones,” was published posthumously. She wrote, “I will not give up because I won’t give the mainstream gay organizations the satisfaction of keeping us down. If we give up, they win. And we can’t allow them to win.” Rivera died in 2002 of liver cancer, and is survived by her partner Julia Murray.
Sources:
https://www.afterellen.com/people/77167-an-interview-with-lesbian-stonewall-veteran-storm-delarverie
COLUMN: How Film and TV Has Shaped My Queer Identity
By Rachel Post
Film and television, especially within the last 20 years, has undoubtedly become one of the most influential means of shaping culture, especially when it comes to young minds and perspectives. For queer youth in particular, the internet and popular media has proved to be an invaluable resource for seeking out community and support for whatever aspect of their identity they wish to explore. As a person born at the cusp of the millennium, I have been privy to a rising popularity of queer narratives in TV and film all throughout my childhood and young adulthood. As I transitioned into high school and then college, my critical eye became more and more trained and I began to see some of these narratives for what they were: Stories about queer characters written by and for straight, cisgendered people. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but there are very few narratives that I have found which entirely escape the influence of the male gaze. By the time I had realized this, however, these stories and characters, even the toxic ones, had already incorporated themselves into my identity and the way I navigated relationships. I was and am negatively affected by the greater expectations of a heteronormative society that have somehow found their way into the queer community through popular media.
While in recent years, there seems to have been a boom in the creation of queer content and the introduction of queer characters into TV and film, when I was coming to terms with my sexuality around 2013, popular media was experiencing a great lull in LGBTQ narratives. Shows like The L Word and Queer as Folk were no longer on the air, and no shows had taken their place with the same magnitude. A few shows had adopted queer characters and storylines, like Grey’s Anatomy and 90210, and I ate those stories up in no time, but they never truly satiated me because there was no real sense of what I needed to see as a young, gay person, which was the presence of a queer community. As I plowed through the canon of lesbian cinema my freshman year of high school, I came to find out that most of the narratives were very similar and possessed one key trait I couldn’t get around: they all seemed to be about women who were conventionally attractive (meaning attractive to the male gaze), who seemed to feel deep shame about their identity, and whose stories all seemed to end in heartbreak and solitude. I could hardly believe that all the material I could dig up from the last decade or so was so morbid when these were supposed to be love stories. As far as I knew from my research into heterosexual narratives in popular media, love stories all had happy endings.
Of course, if I had been born a decade earlier, I would likely be ringing my praise of these narratives for the work they have done to progress the national and international perception of LGBTQ individuals. This fact is undeniable. Without the existence of these characters, tragic or not, I most likely wouldn’t be seeing the gradual improvement I do see in recent years. The existence of queer stories in media interpretations are so fundamentally important and, in comparison to the vastness of straight stories, rare. As a result, it is the tendency of the queer community to overlook the more problematic aspects of these interpretations out of desperation for representation. However, this brings with it some serious issues. Where, for gay men, there has been a slight uptick in characters that challenge existing stereotypes and plotlines, the vast majority of lesbian content is still about characters who retain feminine traits and qualities that further fetishize lesbianism in service of male pleasure. Gay men have Love, Simon but what do lesbians have? Where is our quirky and heartfelt romcom with a happy ending? Even beautiful films that have been welcomed with open arms by the lesbian community like Portrait of a Lady on Fire are not about modern people falling in love who happen to both identify as female, without the societal pressure to present as feminine. Often these characters and stories are tailored to fit perfectly into the pre-existing heteronormative structures of the world instead of going on a journey of discovery about the rich history and culture of the LGBTQ community.
If gender roles are upended for a given queer character (i.e. a feminine male or masculine female) the relationships these characters explore often times still fall into heteronormative structures of love with partners whose gender expression is their opposite in order to reinforce gender roles. By forcing a non-traditional couple into traditional roles and tropes, the stories are made more palatable for cisgender, straight audiences. However, this also teaches a new generation of youth that they have to live up to these ideas of love rather than create new ones and break away from the controlling hand of the binary.
I have never identified as an “either or” type of person. I am attracted to females who present in all sorts of different gender expressions, I eschew the binary when it comes to gender, and I believe that relationships should consist of equals, not dominant and submissive. Both as a young human in the digital age and as an actor, I look for roles in TV and film that reflect me and I do not find them. It is rare for me to find any type of queer narrative in mainstream media that makes me feel seen and affirmed the way good representation should. Instead, I have found this in online forums and social media communities, which is why I do feel affirmed in my identity. If my queer education had been entirely left up to cinema, I would not have come out at age 14, much less felt comfortable being a resource to the young people in my life who have questions about their own identity.
What we as a community truly deserve, especially as access to diverse narratives and content increases, are more stories that are created for queer youth which add to the discourse in a meaningful way and remain untainted by the greedy hand that is big money in entertainment. We deserve to tell our own stories and to be the main characters in these stories. When we are constantly being shown as implanted into straight society, we lose a sense of our own community, which is and should be a crucial part of any young person’s development. Every day we see steps in the right direction, but I will not be satisfied until I can watch a piece of queer content without feeling as though it was made to fit the confines of a binary world into which the spectrum of human identity will never truly be welcome.
7 Must-See Queer Films
By Rachel Post
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma
This gothic romance set in 1770 France is the lesbian equivalent of Pride and Prejudice. A deeply romantic and sensual relationship builds between a young woman in turmoil about to be married off and the artist hired to paint her portrait for her soon-to-be husband. Although the ending is not a conventionally happy one, these characters and this story are still worth a watch.
Pariah (2011) dir. Dee Rees
A cross between a coming of age and family drama, this story follows young lesbian Alike, who is beginning to experiment with her sexuality and gender presentation as she becomes a young adult. This film masterfully captures family dynamics and features a majority BIPOC cast. This is an uncommon story to enter the mainstream, but this movie proves that stories like this should be more common.
But I’m A Cheerleader (1999) dir. Jamie Babbit
Cheerleader Megan does not know she is gay, but all her family and friends seem to think so. They intervene and send her to a gay conversion camp, “True Directions” where Megan meets Graham, another recovering lesbian, along with a band of kooky queers. The camp-y feel to the movie satirizes the whole experience, but Megan’s budding sexuality and new frenemy-ship with Graham are at the forefront of the story.
The Way He Looks (2014) dir. Daniel Ribeiro
A charming look into the life of a young student in Brazil who yearns for adventure, love, connection, but happens to be blind. His parents keep a stronghold on him in fear that he will hurt himself as he gradually tries to wriggle out of their loving but firm grasp. His best friend, a girl, has deep love for him, but when a new student comes to the school, the new boy and the young student forge a connection and find more than friendship.
Holding the Man (2015) dir. Neil Armfield
This film follows a gay couple through the entirety of their relationship, spanning the majority of their lives and ending in the highest point of the AIDs crisis. Not a heartwarming watch, but an important look into queer history and the way it affected the individual relationships; we mainly talk about the time in the abstract rather than the real.
Paris Is Burning (1990) dir. Jennie Livingston
This documentary gives the viewer a peek into drag and ballroom culture in New York City in the 1980’s. Many queer historians use this film as a reference point for the period, which directly influenced much of today’s queer culture and language. If you are curious as to the types of people whose existence and efforts gave us the right to celebrate Pride the way we do now, this movie is for you.
Love, Simon (2018) dir. Greg Berlanti
This movie has become the quintessential coming-of-age classic for today’s queer youth. It acknowledges the hardships of coming into one’s identity and coming out to one’s friends and family while still managing to weave a compelling romance and result in a happy ending. If you haven’t already seen it and classic rom coms are right up your alley, then give it a try.
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