No Lesbians Allowed
How Mainstream Theatre Excludes the Voices of Queer Women
If someone asked you to name an example of happy, healthy relationship between two queer women whose story does not end in violence or death, could you? How about five? Without utilizing a search engine, you’re probably stumped. The lack of representation for queer and lesbian women in film, television, and theatre is incredibly disheartening. As a queer woman and theatre practitioner, I have been searching for women that I identify with in my media for as long as I can remember. Only recently, characters like Stef and Lena from ABC’s The Fosters and Elena Alvarez from Netflix’s One Day at a Time are appearing in mainstream television.
In theatre, there are even fewer commercially successful productions that present the queer woman’s experience. On the rare occasion they are present in a play or musical, queer women are either secondary characters that serve to forward the main character’s plot, like in William Finn’s Falsettos or Jonathan Larson’s Rent, or their queerness is left entirely to subtext so as to avoid isolating the audience, like in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. According to Trish Bendix from Logo’s NewNowNext, the last two years of Broadway have celebrated shows like Lisa Kron’s Fun Home, which centers on the life of lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and Vogel’s most recent work Indecent, about the censorship of the 1923 lesbian-themed production God of Vengeance. She hopes that the success of these shows will encourage further support of shows that center around the queer female experience.
As a theatre practitioner myself, it is incredibly important to me that there is more representation for queer women. In all of the shows I have had the opportunity to act in, I have only once had the chance to play a woman falling in love with another woman. This production was Diana Son’s play Stop Kiss, which centers on the relationship of Callie and Sara. These two initially straight-identifying women meet, fall in love, and are subject to a violent hate crime immediately after their first kiss. I was incredibly excited to play Callie in this show, as I felt this would be my chance to portray a woman I personally identified with. The play beautifully develops the exploration of attraction and formation of love between Callie and Sara, and this gradual discovery grips the audience as they follow the women’s journey. However, despite my love for the play, Callie and Sara are never given the chance to find a deep, healthy, long term romantic relationship with each other due to the violent actions of a man who felt their existance was soley for his benefit. This attack drastically cuts short the trajectory of their story, and forces Callie to grapple with the choice of leaving Sara with her family or becoming her caregiver. Son, who is not a gay woman herself, chose to write this play as a way to explore issues of identity “without having to be race specific.”
Stop Kiss premiered at the Public Theatre in New York in 1998, never made it to Broadway, and is still one of the most successful plays that focus on two women falling in love. This is incredibly disheartening, as it not only never explicitly states the identities of these women, but also subjects them to horrific violence. Because of this, there is a entire demographic of people who are being completely ignored in the mainstream theatre experience. In an environment that serves to uplift both the stories of women and of gay men, why is there a gap in the presentation of queer women’s stories?
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color brings to light why this discrepancy is happening on Broadway stages through her explanation of representational intersectionality. In this text she explores the intersectionality between race and gender, specifically that experienced by black women. This example of representational intersectionality would explore the way that the images of black women are produced through the merging of the issues of racism and (white) feminism, and recognize that racist and sexist rhetoric both marginalize women of color. Most representation focuses on either the experience of racism for men or the issue of feminism only for white women, thereby ignoring the experience of black women.
The same argument can be applied to the the intersectionality between the representation of straight women and that of the LGBTQ+ community. By choosing either to focus on women or on the queer experience, media is overlooking the voices of queer and lesbian women. This continuing issue leaves young girls searching for any representation they can find, whether or not it is positive. Often what they find, and what I found growing up, is women who are marginalized, victimized, or sexualized for the male gaze. It is vital that more content focusing on queer women is produced, and it is preferable that it comes from queer women. Without creators willing to build a library of representation covering the diverse experiences of queer and lesbian women, our voices will remain unheard.
