Love's Labors Lost: Dear Straight Ally

September 29, 2012

Dear Straight Ally

(When you check your mail, you find a sparkly rainbow envelope with balloons attached. It's from Gay Agenda and addressed to Straight Ally. What could it be? Is it an invitation to be a guest speaker at an HRC Gala? An offer to be on a panel for Straight Allies? A million dollars? As you open the neatly folded letter, you find a letter that reads as follows . . . )

Dear Straight Ally*,

After careful review, the Gay Agenda has decided the following traits no longer qualify an individual for Straight Ally status:

Having an LGBTQ friend/co-worker/relative
Not beating up an LGBTQ person
Refusing to use slurs referring to LGBTQ people
Supporting gay marriage or ENDA
Taking a course in queer studies
Using the appropriate gender pronoun for a trans* person
Any honors or endorsements received from Gay, Inc.

After much consideration, the Gay Agenda has determined that the above characteristics (except the classwork and endorsement by Gay, Inc.) meet the bare minimum criteria for Decent Human Being. Although we appreciate all the Decent Human Beings in our lives, for organizing purposes, we realize that simply being decent is not enough considering all the things affecting our community, particularly those of us who are not affluent, photogenic, cisgender White guys.

Fortunately, this doesn't mean your Straight Ally status is in jeopardy! There are a few other determining factors, including, but not limited to:

Demonstrating your commitment to unlearning your own internalized heterosexism/homophobia and cissexism/transphobia
Using your voice and your resources to uplift LGBTQ voices rather than talking over us
How mindful you are about the ways you participate in and benefit from LGBTQ oppression
Going beyond personal attitudes to challenge the institutions and structures that exploit, abuse, oppress, and erase LGBTQ people
Responding to critique by LGBTQ people not with defensiveness but with an effort to better understand
Remembering LGBTQ organizing beyond HRC and GLAAD

We appreciate your understanding.

If you are still uncertain about your status as a Straight Ally, please contact us for more information. In the meantime, you can't hurt your chances by striving to do better.

Sincerely,

The Gay Agenda

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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932