Queer artists are first queer people. Queer people, for a majority of American history, had to communicate to one another both their queerness and their desires in code. The practice of queer-only communication is older than the cliché solo show in New York about a gay man’s sexual history or a lesbian’s love of their own vulva—which in today’s climate seems just as radical as loving someone else’s vulva. That communication—operating with secrecy and exclusivity—was necessary to survival. So, why should our art be different? Miller and Román argue it should not be in, “arguing for preaching to the converted… (however much it historically has been deployed as derogatory) [works as] a descriptive essay for community-based, and often community-specific, lesbian and gay theatre…” The phrase “preaching to the converted” works for the queer community specifically because of the subversive potential affinity that Miller/Román note between a queer performer recounting a particularly horrifying blowjob and that interaction’s reflection on the queerscape as a whole to a group of raging fags and dykes with a priest delivering an easter homily centered on Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Christ post-resurrection to a congregation of well-to-do Catholics. That
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We believe that the work of those who commit to the ‘new cultural politics of difference’ will unsettle the force of the systems that sustain the regulatory regimes of power which insist on positioning us as marginal, abject, and in light of AIDS, disposable.” (222 The Queerest
We believe that the work of those who commit to the ‘new cultural politics of difference’ will unsettle the force of the systems that sustain the regulatory regimes of power which insist on positioning us as marginal, abject, and in light of AIDS, disposable.” (222 The Queerest