Performing Lesbian Care and Enthusiastic Consent: An Interview with Lisa Sloan

“TO ME, THE LESBIAN TRADITION OF PERFORMING AGAINST CENSORSHIP IS KEY.”

In the wake of the culture wars and the AIDS pandemic that ripped its way through the US in the 1980s and ’90s, affecting largely gay communities, artists took action, drawing upon this sociopolitical and biopolitical climate to inform their work. The urgency of responding to AIDS, at that time largely a death sentence, propelled much of the era’s activism and the scope and tenure of queer and feminist performance. The primacy of these fights and the devastation the disease wrought on gay men meant that—at the time and also in retrospect—much of the work of the era has been defined through men. Lesbian and feminist artists, though, were an important part of the arts ecosystem and created work that reflected on their own care labor to friends living with HIV and on the shifting political stakes of the feminist movement.

In a wide-ranging conversation, queer scholar and community activist Lisa Sloan discusses the era through the impact of lesbian performance with Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, the current exhibit in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture. Sloan, whose research examines lesbian performance art and theater, is the program director of the Staten Island Pride Center.

GWYNETH SHANKS (GS)

Thank you so much for talking with me, Lisa. The exhibit I’ve been working on, A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, is focused on queer and radical performance practices from the 1980s and ’90s in the US. As someone who has written extensively on this period, particularly on queer and lesbian performance, what does it mean to look back at this moment now?

LISA SLOAN (LS)

I think it’s so important in this contemporary moment to look back at the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s because the dynamics of our current political moment are remarkably similar. I think there’s a great tension and divide between the left and the right in this country, in terms of our politics, that we’re feeling now which was also very palpable then. What’s also really interesting about the culture wars is their relationship to the feminist movement. The 1970s was regarded as this golden age of feminism, and it came to a screeching halt just as the

culture wars might be said to be beginning. In some ways, it was anti-porn feminists who were really adding fuel to the fire of the conservative new right agenda. So, the 1980s have often been narrated as this moment in which politics took a sharp turn and this sense of progress came to an abrupt end. In very broad strokes, I think we’re in a similar political moment, nationally: this sense of a progressive left coming to an abrupt end. We’re left with the question of how to move forward.

GS

So maybe the content, so to speak, of our political climate now versus the 1980s is different, but the affect or the divides feel similar?

LS

Yes, absolutely. It also feels remarkably similar that we have someone in the Oval Office who seems so out of touch with everyday life in the United States, now as then. Reagan, for instance, was unable to utter the words HIV or AIDS until the epidemic was well under way.

GS

I recall, as I was conceptualizing the scope of this exhibit, thinking about why it felt needed to return to this particular moment. What was useful about re-engaging or surfacing these artists now?

LS

I think that’s a question a lot of artists are also asking. I’m thinking about how all of these breakout gay plays are being revived right now on Broadway. Torch Song Trilogy was revived as Torch Song in the fall of 2017. Boys in the Band is being restaged now. There’s a lot of work from the ’80s and ’90s about LGBTQ lives and experiences that are coming back:

Falsettos was revived recently; The Normal Heart (1985) was made into an HBO film a few years ago. Angels in America is on Broadway right now.

GS

I’m also thinking, as you’re talking, about the recent revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. What do you think the interest in these plays is about?

LS

Some plays like Boys in the Bandare celebrate how far we have come. But that and other plays—Angels in America and The Normal Heart—are, in some ways, mourning a lost generation of people and helping young people understand LGBTQ history. I work at the Pride Center of Staten Island, and I work with LGBTQ young people. We have a computer lab there at the center, and on the wall, we have a picture of Reagan, a kind of reminder. Sometimes youth come in and say, “Who is that?” They don’t know who Ronald Reagan is. There’s this urgency to educate the next generation so they are aware of the struggles that came before.

GS

As you were talking, I was thinking about some of your own research. I know you’ve written about Pride parades and the way they initially served as a sort of marking of presence and claiming of visibility. Now, though, so many of them have become quite commodified in a particular way.

LS

It’s a complicated relationship, certainly. Before I began working at an LGBT center, I was very much of the mindset, “Oh, we’re commodifying Pride, and that’s terrible. We need to march and resist, and it’s not a parade; it’s a march actually.” But my perspective has changed now that I’ve seen how Pride events are organized from the inside. Those types of corporate sponsorships that can be framed as the commodification of Pride,

are necessary to achieve the scale to which audiences have become accustomed. The center was asked a few years ago to show these Pride videos that have been created by Budweiser. There was some financial incentive attached to sharing these videos on social media. We said no because LGTBQ communities are still disproportionally affected by substance abuse. As a nonprofit, we’re not really in a position to turn down money, but we did in that instance because it felt like participating in the problem or somehow supporting this thing that is against our interest as a community.

GS

Going back to performance for a minute, this period—queer activism, art making—was so defined by the AIDS epidemic, and there’s a way in which the image-making practices of gay men, and particularly white men, become so central to this history. I wonder, though, if you could talk about some of the women making work in this moment? And how that work fit into these larger conversations around AIDS?

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  Publicity photo of Holly Hughes for Clit Notes, a 1996 collection of her monologues
  
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  Promotional photo of Holly Hughes for Preaching to the Perverted, 1999
  

LS

I think the work Holly Hughes was making in this period is so important because she uses her performance practice to speak back to power. In Preaching to the Perverted (1999), for instance, she talks about her experience of having her work supported by the NEA, but then rejected by John Frohnmayer and the NEA at large because “Holly Hughes is a lesbian and her work is of that nature.” I’m paraphrasing here, but the line is something like that. She was attacked by so many different kinds of people for making work, and they made all these assumptions about the content of her work, without actually seeing it. People decided it was dangerous simply because she was a lesbian. They decided that she was naked

and displaying her body in certain “obscene” ways, when in fact that wasn’t going on at all in her work. That critique, in fact, is something that she takes on in the promotional materials for Preaching to the Perverted. She’s holding the American flag around her body, almost like a toga. But you can kind of see her underwear peeking through, so she’s not even as naked as people assume she is. But she’s like, “Oh, you think I’m naked all the time? I’ll show you.”

GS

This kind of policing of women’s bodies and sexualities, right? And this fear or disregard for female same-sex desire, intimacy, or even, right, the word “lesbian”?

LS

To me, it’s the same question that we often have to think about whenever we’re thinking across the letters L-G-B-T-Q or about queerness, right? Gay white men are the most visible in those kinds of conversations. But we always have to think, “Well, what about all these other letters and other kinds of people?”

GS

I guess the question becomes, to think about Holly Hughes’s work, how do you create work in relationship to those types of perceptions? In relationship to censorship?

LS

Certainly censorship and these types of aesthetic assaults that were actually not-so-thinly veiled identity-based assaults were common. I’m thinking of Janice Perry who was part of the WOW Café scene [WOW Café, or Women’s One World, was a feminist and queer performance space in the East Village that started in the 1980s]. One of her performances is based on seeing Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography exhibit before it was censored.

She says to her audience, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Oh, I feel so lucky. I got to see everything before it was censored or restricted. I wish I had brought my camera, and because I didn’t, I will use my body instead to show you Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs.” She takes out this giant, many-feet-long, red dildo and straps it onto herself and uses her body to create the poses from some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs.

GS

Oh, wow—there is so much there, in regards to censorship, but also really drawing forward the differences between the queer men of color who were the subjects of so many of Mapplethorpe’s photos and Perry.

LS

Yeah, very much so: her white, lesbian body as kind of proxy for these questions over censorship. A lot of lesbians were providing care labor in this moment, nursing men living with HIV. I really think of Janice Perry’s performance as a kind of care labor around the censorship of Mapplethorpe’s work. Likewise, I think Holly Hughes is doing that labor in her work. To me, this lesbian tradition of performing against censorship is key.

GS

Can you say more about this notion of performing against censorship?

LS

Across the border in Canada, women were creating work in response to the censorship of lesbian pornography and other kinds of printed materials. The collective, Kiss and Tell, put together Drawing the Line, which was a photography exhibit of women making

love in all these different ways. As you went through, the SM aspects of the sexual relationship grew and grew and grew. So, Kiss and Tell asked visitors to write on the wall and graphically indicate where they draw the line, so to speak, in depictions of sexual encounters. Where is it sex, and then when does it become pornography or violence against women? At that moment, these latter two categories were really collapsed together. Sadomasochism was also quite vilified, as well.

GS

How far were the lines? Where did they cluster?

LS

That’s the thing. I don’t think there was a cluster. I think everyone had such different responses. I think Drawing the Line, and a host of other art pieces or performances, were trying to stage a dialogue of some kind, or were trying to get people to wake up to some kind of social issue. I think you can say this about all of this work that we’re talking about, right? This ties back to the idea I started with: the notion that the second wave feminist movement was really coming to some kind of screeching halt. So, artists were asking, “What are other channels where we can get these ideas out into the world?”

GS

I think what’s so important about what you’re pointing out is the links between deeply lesbian and feminist performance and activist histories and how they informed this era more broadly, and, I think, really impacted the formation of queer studies, queer thought.

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  Photograph included in Drawing the Line, 1990. Pictured are Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones. Photo: Susan Stewart
  
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  Photograph included in Drawing the Line, 1990. Pictured are Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones. Photo: Susan Stewart
  
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  Photograph included in Drawing the Line, 1990. Pictured are Persimmon Blackbridge and Lizard Jones. Photo: Susan Stewart
  

LS

Although, I think in the academy those roots are not acknowledged nearly enough. What we now call Queer Theory really has its roots in feminism, particularly postcolonial feminism and feminists of color. I think of someone like Carmelita Tropicana [the Cuban-American, queer performer], who was really engaging these ideas in Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1994). In the piece, she’s sort of making fun of Queer Nation [an LGBTQ activist organization founded in 1990 by HIV/AIDS activists, known for its confrontational tactics,

slogans, and outing] but at the same time, she’s also modeling, or asking, “What would a different kind of coalitional politics look like?” In part of the film, Carmelita Tropicana and the other actors take part in a pro-choice action, but if you look at the women who are standing outside the clinic—trying to keep people from getting in and shutting it down or performing some kind of violence—it’s these two lines of people that include women from a variety of racial and ethnic groups, that includes straight women and lesbian women, that includes people of different abilities. And it’s like, “Wow, what if we could—what if we could do that?” So when we look back at work from that period, it has so much to teach us. I don’t know that we’ve still achieved that model that Carmelita Tropicana proposes.

GS

It seems like an artist like Carmelita Tropicana really was pointing to the deep shortfalls of coalition politics in that moment, right? That lack of a focus on people, artists of color, on cis-queer women, and on, for instance, trans rights. It does seem, though, like a lot of what you’re getting at is trying to understand lesbian performance of the period as a type of coalition building, a kind of performance of care that draws different solidarities together.

LS

Yes, absolutely. I think that’s also another reason why it’s important to look back, especially in this moment where it’s like, a lot of people who have not had to think

about their immigration status ever are scratching their heads, saying, “What do immigrant rights have to do with me?” Or, “I’m not undocumented. Why should I care?” But we’ve got to think intersectionally, across difference.

GS

As we’re discussing the political or activist resonances between our current moment and the 1980s and early 1990s, are there other lessons to be learned or parallels to be drawn do you think?

LS

I keep talking about immigration, but I think it’s also important to look back, especially at queer women’s performance from the ’80s and ’90s in relationship to this #MeToo moment. I keep calling everything a moment, but I guess because it’s a convenient turn of phrase.

GS

I think that word also gets at what historical exhibitions are doing, or aim to do, right? Those sorts of exhibitions are about, sometimes even retroactively, calling something “a moment” and foregrounding it as somehow significant.

LS

It’s somehow crystalizing it into something, which is, of course, what we do when we historicize in general.

These issues, relating to immigration, relating to sexual abuse and harassment, are not new but we—and here I mean the mainstream political and media establishments—are paying attention to in a new way, right?

GS

In part we have a villain to attach these narratives of sexual abuse to.

LS

Like Trump and Harvey Weinstein. I think the danger, though, is that we’re able to very clearly say, “Oh, those are two really bad men,” right? But we’re not necessarily thinking about these issues in a larger system. I think the recent news story about Aziz Ansari and the young woman identified as “Grace” really gets at how we’re still grappling with these larger questions around gender, power, desire, and the agency we have—in big and small ways—over our bodies, as cis-women, as queer women, as trans women, as straight women.

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  Dykes on Bikes ride down Market St. during the San Francisco Pride Parade, 1989
  
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  San Francisco Pride Parade, 1987
  

GS

As you work in social services and work so much with young people, I wonder how you grapple with those questions? Does performance practice offer you a way into some of these issues?

LS

We need to keep teaching everybody about consent—and not just consent, but enthusiastic consent. In my work with LGBTQ and allied youth, I encourage them to work out a social script for negotiating consent, condom usage, etc. Sometimes we come up with different scenarios—I might bring one or two scenarios in, but I try to generate the rest from the questions the youth ask—and the youth have to sort of talk their way through them. I introduce the activity as a dress rehearsal for their sexual future—that it’s not just an exercise, but that they should be having conversations like these with a sex partner. I also try to give them a rule of thumb: if you’re not comfortable talking about sex, you probably shouldn’t be having it. Giving my participants a chance to actually practice this kind of dialogue changes their perspective sometimes. They say things like, “Oh, I didn’t know I could say that.” I am hoping that helping my youth participants develop a social script ultimately empowers them to make informed decisions.

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