i’m working on a play about 65-year-old lesbians, and my dramaturg is an older gay man who has been helping me with historical context and research, and also just in general giving me advice based on his own personal experiences.
fav thing he told me so far, said with a lot of love: “dyke drama was specific. it was always so specific. it was precise and narrowed and pointed. and also so dumb.”
also spoke to an older lesbian professor. i was asking her all these questions about marches and protests and summits and infighting and rallies and “what was it like what did this mean to you what was it like to experience that?”
and she kinda stared at me for a bit and said, “you know, it was a lot. and it was big and it did feel revolutionary. but also at that time i was mainly focused on getting my heart broken in a bar.”
and like. yeah.
another thing my dramaturg told me, from the perspective of a gay man who lived through the 80’s, was that whenever a young gay person asks him what the dating and play scene used to be like, he answers:
“we went to rallies and funerals.”
our persistence in our continued existence is big and scary and revolutionary, and the grief stretches on and the losses hit hard.
and because of that, i think it’s important to remember the dumb drama, and the first loves, and the first heartbreaks over beer. i think it’s important to go to rallies and vigils, and also dive bars and game nights.
at the start of every month everyone reblogs some insane poetry that’s like “august has arrived and again I swallow my bones in the burning sun” and every time I’m like damn that makes no sense. but kind of true.
I’m so tired of work. I’m so tired of the concept of work. Why must 90% of my life be getting ready for work, commuting to work, working, and doing errands after work?
Am I not allowed to just be silly? And lounge naked with other gays? Why do I have to be slutty and silly on The Man’s schedule?
you have to understand that there is an overlap between drag queens and trans women and between trans women and cis lesbians and between lesbians and drag kings and between drag kings and trans men and between trans men and cis gay men and between gay men and drag queens and between lesbians and bisexual women and between gay men and bisexual men and between lesbians and asexual women and between gay men and asexual men and between all sexualities and nonbinary people and between butches and transmascs and between binary trans people and genserqueer people.
basically what I’m saying is that we’re all family. there aren’t clear divides or walls that separate us. and that’s the point. being easily separated into perfect neat little boxes is exactly what queerphobic people want. don’t let your oppressers trick you into thinking your family is your enemy.
if you tried to map out our community, you wouldn’t get a bunch of neat circles that don’t touch or overlap or have any relationship with each other at all. you’d get this.
