The historical imagination of a myth of how queer people were cast out, became cursed, for helping a goddess of light escape from the subjugation of her grieving sister. Cursed to be strangers in our own families, etc. We were watching the re-enactment of our downfall without even realizing it... until it happened. Totally fucking brilliant.
Loved the ritual of sugar and spice, and snakes and puppy dog tails. And Barbie’s head.
Loved the ritual of the disco, the invocation of the houses of NYC, the re-imagined vogue.
Loved Pearl Lin’s sword dance.
Loved the skeleton castration scene.
Loved the kiddie pool communion ritual preceded by the sexiest dance ever.
Loved the dancing, set, music and costumes.
At the end of the mythological re-enactment was a healing ceremony where our pains were confessed and we were healed... it made me want to run up to the stage and get healed too! The people being healed were the actors in the play but their confessions of pain freed them from character as they described their personal experiences of discrimination, rejection, shunning and violence. I wanted Justin Bond to heal me. I wanted to confess how the spectre of the predatory lesbian has always kept me from touching and complimenting women, from expressing any form of admiration or from speaking any depth of love. It blocks me from acting on my desires. It chokes down the least impulse of tenderness and it keeps my hands strictly to myself. I fight back every chance I get. Sometimes I even win. It gets larger, it gets smaller, but it never goes away.
The confessional ritual contained a repeated litany of femme-phobia, homophobia, trans-phobia. Why not name misogyny? Or sexism? In the simplest of terms, part of the reason it is so bad to be a feminine man or trans woman or anywhere on the feminine spectrum is because it is bad to be a woman, period, and a person called male at birth who behaves in a way that is associated with women, well, that's demeaning. Patriarchy was named by one of the confessors, and patriarchy is a big daddy of the -isms that were named. A body with many heads. But I am still stumped over the absence of the word "sexism." Hatred of femininity is misogyny, so coining a new word here seems too small and a failure to make an easy connection.
Loved the ritual of sugar and spice, and snakes and puppy dog tails. And Barbie’s head.
Loved the ritual of the disco, the invocation of the houses of NYC, the re-imagined vogue.
Loved Pearl Lin’s sword dance.
Loved the skeleton castration scene.
Loved the kiddie pool communion ritual preceded by the sexiest dance ever.
Loved the dancing, set, music and costumes.
At the end of the mythological re-enactment was a healing ceremony where our pains were confessed and we were healed... it made me want to run up to the stage and get healed too! The people being healed were the actors in the play but their confessions of pain freed them from character as they described their personal experiences of discrimination, rejection, shunning and violence. I wanted Justin Bond to heal me. I wanted to confess how the spectre of the predatory lesbian has always kept me from touching and complimenting women, from expressing any form of admiration or from speaking any depth of love. It blocks me from acting on my desires. It chokes down the least impulse of tenderness and it keeps my hands strictly to myself. I fight back every chance I get. Sometimes I even win. It gets larger, it gets smaller, but it never goes away.
The confessional ritual contained a repeated litany of femme-phobia, homophobia, trans-phobia. Why not name misogyny? Or sexism? In the simplest of terms, part of the reason it is so bad to be a feminine man or trans woman or anywhere on the feminine spectrum is because it is bad to be a woman, period, and a person called male at birth who behaves in a way that is associated with women, well, that's demeaning. Patriarchy was named by one of the confessors, and patriarchy is a big daddy of the -isms that were named. A body with many heads. But I am still stumped over the absence of the word "sexism." Hatred of femininity is misogyny, so coining a new word here seems too small and a failure to make an easy connection.
Is it too much to expect queers to connect the dots between the hatred of effeminacy and the hatred of women? And if it is, isn’t that a problem for our movement? Feminism shouldn’t be news to queer people, and actually I imagine that everyone in the show would agree. The show was an awesome, gender-bending, beautiful blessing and really tapped the vein of all the is magical in our community, our movement, our history and our identity. The failure to articulate the link between women’s oppression and gay oppression created a conspicuous absence in an otherwise awesome work of art.
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