Had to sneak in a post about the upcoming Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, sponsored by Lambda Literary Foundation.
I am astounded, thrilled and just a little bit frightened that it starts this Saturday—one week of intensive, immersion with queer writers, established authors and publishing gurus.
LLF created a web page for its 2011 Fellows, so you can see little ol’ me, in the genre fiction track, amidst a very impressive list of writers.
This was a tough one, which I submit with a heavy caveat.
When it comes to theatre, musical theatre in particular, I think any work could be considered queer.
Beyond the clichés—gay men love show tunes, stage divas, and melodrama—what I mean to say is that it’s a medium in which performance can trump the playwright’s intention. A queer character can be played as villainous, heroic, insipid, wise, stereotypical or multi-textured, depending on the actor’s point of view. Queer subtext can be suppressed or inserted based on the director’s or the actors’ preferences.
The same choices are there for film or television screenplays, but I find there to be a greater degree of nuance and experimentation in theatre.
Theatre has also been a welcoming community for queer artists, all the way back to its creation in ancient Greece. Sophocles, one of the greatest Greek tragedians (e.g. Oedipus, Antigone, etc.), has been biographized as queer by historian Thomas Hubbard in Homosexuality in Greece and Rome. While queer themes were not commonly overt in the time period, we know of plays that told the stories of male/male relationships, including Sophocles’ intriguing title: “The Lovers of Achilles.”
Furthermore, theatre is a queer concept in itself: you can wear a mask and take on a completely different identity from your real life.
So, enough of taking myself too seriously, here’s what I came up with.
Per Jurgen, I put some thought into Shakespeare, a steady source of queer and non-queer literary debate, and picked out two plays which present queer themes in different ways.
Of course, there’s lots of cross-dressing in Shakespeare productions, and the steady device of a woman falling in love with another woman who is disguised as a man. The Merchant of Venice is one example.
Here, I chose Twelfth Night. But I put Twelfth Night in the Queer Content/NonQueer Sensibility quad because all the fun, experimental stuff gets sorted out in the end, with Viola marrying the Duke. Heteronormativity wins out again.
In contrast, I’ve always thought of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as queerly ambiguous, even though all the characters are in opposite-sex couplings. There’s Puck, the fey master of ceremonies, and a disintegration of social conventions—characters falling in love with people they shouldn’t. I couldn’t quite put it on the upper half of the Matrix due to Puck’s famous apologetic Act V speech:
“If we spirits have offended, think but this, and all is mended…”
But a lot has to do with the delivery, I think. Is he really sorry that he interfered with the young, starchy aristocrats’ lives?
andrewjpeterswrites.com goes dark next week while I’m attending Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2011 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices!
Hoping not to prove you can have too much of a good thing, I’m continuing my queer ponderings this week, visual arts-style, with new Queer Matrices.
I spent way more time on these than I’d like to admit, but the results are quite a bit more polished than last week’s laughable mock-up. I guess I was the last to know: you can’t do diddly in Paint.
Some definitions first…
The X axis is Queer Content, which could include portrayals of same sex love and relationships, homoeroticism, gender bending, trans experiences, drag, or any representation of queer culture, politics and/or community.
No Queer Content is the absence of any of these.
The Y axis is Queer Sensibility. The way I define it is looking at the world with a queer lens, through which homoeroticism and same sex love are celebrated, transexuality is transcendent, queer oppression is illuminated and indicted, and heteronormativity is challenged, subverted, and asked to please leave the building.
Non Queer Sensibility is the opposite, meaning looking at the world with a non queer lens, through which heteronormativity is centralized, traditionalized and/or assumed, a gender binary is de rigueur, and opposite sex relationships are the default setting.
Now we’ll take a look at Queer Matrices through the decades…
I recently had a discussion with another writer about the concept of a queer sensibility.
Our conversation brought up profound questions that have been heavily considered and debated elsewhere–quite smartly in this article I found by poet/filmmaker Charles Jensen.
What is a queer sensibility?
Can a work of fiction, art, or film be queer, if it doesn’t portray queer sexuality?
Is there a non-queer or heteronormative sensibility?
Can a work of fiction, etc. that portrays queer sexuality be considered non-queer?
I believe a queer sensibility exists, and it goes beyond a homoerotic aesthetic or an explicit portrayal of same-sex love. For me, it’s the kind of thing I know when I see it.
I respect that many queer and non-queer folks disagree with me. There’s an argument to be made against labeling creative work queer, or non-queer; and it’s not my purpose to elevate one over the other. Sensibility is by definition personal and subjective. But here’s what this got me thinking about just for fun.
What creative works have little to no queer content, but I still consider queer?
What creative works portay queerness, but still feel essentially heteronormative?
These ponderings led to—I present—the QUEER MATRIX.
Certain to piss off lots of people, the Queer Matrix is a way of understanding popular media from, well, a lens of queerness. It’s a take on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix, which is the first thing I check out whenever I have a copy. But it’s a rather piteous derivative, artistically. I made it in the only graphics program I know: Paint.
We get lazier as the week progresses. The first few days were excursions on ATVs, shopping in town, and late nights out at the clubs. Now we arrange morning meet-up times to get the free hotel breakfast before 10:30, and we order lunch by the pool.
We are loud, unmannered Americans, and the European guests glare at us from their chaise lounges. Until we are upstaged by the arrival of the Australians.
We take a ferry to Delos, an archeological site. Everyone has their vouchers, courtesy of the Germans. They made arrangements with their local travel agent, and they have timetables and tour information loaded on their smartphones.
Delos was an important religious and trading center from the ninth century BCE to the first century CE. Apollo, the Sun God, was born here. We visit his birthplace, which was once a lake, but it was dredged by French archaeologists because of malaria. The area is now a boggy pine forest, but there is still a towering palm tree that the ancient Greeks planted to commemorate Apollo’s birth.
We walk through the city streets guided by Joanna, a diminutive tour guide with a voice that carries. She shows us the House of Dionysus. There is a mosaic in the atrium pool depicting the god returning from the Far East, saddled on a lion.
Lions are a common motif throughout the ruins. They’re in tile patterns on walls, and there are famous marble lion statues warding Apollo’s birthplace. There were no city walls or military defenses for Delos. It was sacked by Greeks in 88 CE as part of a revolt against the Romans.
There is an amphitheater that seated 5,000, and a plumbing system that brought water to all parts of town. Delos was a multicultural community, and tolerant of many religions. Egyptians built temples here, and Delos was the site of the first synagogue on Greek soil. Today, there’s a snack bar that serves fresh squeezed orange juice, but not much anything else.
Everyone wants to browse the gift shop, but the woman who runs it is on vacation so the shop is closed. In the middle of tourist season? We are surprised and a little bit ticked off.
This is the principal difference between Europeans and Americans. To Europeans, working is something you do between vacations. To us, vacations are what you do between working.
Mosaic from Delos’ House of Dionysus
Another Delos mosaic depicting the myth of Apollo and Daphne
