 out tonight. I am sorry about the toasty conditions in here. This building is so old. It can't get it straight. When it's warm outside, it should be cooler inside and vice versa. So tomorrow when it snows, if you stop by, it will be 20 degrees in here. But I apologize. In case you don't know me, I'm Tara Stratton. I'm the Director of Education and Outreach here at the Dramatist Guild. And it's my great privilege to put together these events for you. We try to do two a month for the fall and spring semester. On the back of your program you'll see the next two events. Unfortunately Tuesdays is full, but please feel free to watch it online and we'll send you that link tomorrow. But there is still space available for the Monday, December 8th event on tax information for artists, which is going to be very interesting. We will have two playwrights on the panel who have actually been audited by the IRS and have been going through protracted negotiations over the whole hobbyist thing. So that will be something I think that you will allow me to take a look at. If you have ideas for other seminars, please feel free to email me at Pirat the Guild or call me. Let me know what you're interested in seeing. If you could please put your phones on vibrate. You don't need to turn them off. We'd be happy if you tweeted throughout the event or posted on Facebook or sent text to your friends, hey, please watch this great event right now. If you're watching online, hi, welcome. If you'd like to tweet questions, please send them to atdramatiskild, hashtag new play. And starting tomorrow or maybe next week, since it's a holiday week, you'll be able to watch the entire archived version of this event on the Guild's YouTube channel. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce an old friend who I'm so happy to see again, Sylvan Oswald. I actually feel like I need to take a quick poll because when Terry asked me to do this, it was in the framework of a series of, it came out of this idea that there needs to be more dialogue around representing people other than outside of your own experience. How many people are here tonight because they haven't yet and plan to try to represent LGBT characters in their work? Okay, okay, cool, okay, good. So that's interesting to see that we're in a, there's lots of different, I would love to actually ask everyone all their reasons for being here, but I should probably conduct the panel first. But anyway, thank you to the Dramatiskild for setting this up and holding this important series of talks. And thank you to you guys for being here and being so awesome, and I can't wait to get into it with you. And Terry Stratton, thank you for setting this up. So our charge tonight as a panel and as a roomful of people is to get beyond the stereotypes of angry lesbian and gay best friend or any of the other stereotypes that you can think of that come up when we talk about gay and queer representation in the 21st century. So we're, we are the inheritors of a substantial body of work by writers who came before us, who brave the struggles of getting meaningful LGBT representation on stage in the first place. But since we are playwrights and not historians, I'm gonna try to relieve us of the burden of having to like know everything and also to kind of answer for everybody who came before. So I'm gonna try to frame this in relation to ourselves and our own work. And hopefully by hearing some of what we've all the kind of deals we've made with ourselves and the world to make our work that might prove inspirational or informative to you guys slash the internet. So before we start, I actually want to do something that's kind of somewhat educational, which is that you know what I'm here representing the T and the LGBT tonight. And as and because of that, I just wanted to have a moment where we introduce ourselves briefly and our preferred gender pronouns. So my name is Sylvan and my preferred gender pronouns are he, his and him. My name is Christina Anderson and my preferred gender pronoun is she, her. Yep. Yes. Yeah. I'm Madeline George. I also use she. I'm David Grim and I usually answer to he but I have been known to answer to she. Thank you guys. I appreciate that. So there might be some vocabulary that we throw around, but I'm assuming a lot of people will be familiar with things. Let's just make a deal that if there is vocabulary that comes up that you guys don't know, you can just we'll take questions at the end, but maybe raise your hand in the middle and we'll check in on vocabulary if anything comes up that people are unfamiliar with. So we are prepared for the uninitiated as well as the initiated here. So let's just get started with where we're coming from on all of this. How did you guys, did you when you first started writing plays, were you writing about gender and sexuality from the get go? The oldest one on the table. I think, yes. Yes, I was. I don't know that it was necessarily. I think my work, I came out when I was 15. And I started writing plays, I guess when I was 13. So there wasn't a lot of lag time between writing when I started writing plays and when I accepted and came out with my sexuality. In the same way that people often sort of hedge and don't answer questions directly, or at least for me, you know, a lot of things like, do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend? And I'd say, yeah, I'm seeing someone, they and use all those vague pronouns. So my plays also had that sort of vagueness and what wouldn't really stake its claim. But then once I did, my work did. And so I think my development as a human being and my development as my work sort of pretty much mirrored each other in their openness, I suppose. Well, I mean, you know, I was a young playwright, you know, the Young Playwrights Festival, which happens in here in New York City. So when I was 17 and 18, I had short plays done off Broadway, and one of them was a sort of kind of a choreopoam monkey about these four women in the waiting room of a liposuction clinic. And I thought it was about four straight women in a liposuction clinic. And then I found a review of it in a zine. And the reviewer was like, describe this little play. And then said at the end, obviously, Madeleine George has no idea that she's a lesbian, but someday soon will enjoy the fruits of her home. And I was just like, Oh, this is horrifying, you know, rip, rip cut to a few years later when I was writing, you know, plays about so were you were you out when that? No, no, that is not okay. No, I guess I mean, I don't know how to explain it. But I had a boyfriend whom I loved very much. But I looked exactly like I look now. So I feel like many people often would say, you know, things make assumptions about me. And then I would be like, indignant. You know, like, there's a lot of ways to be a straight person, you know, like, including being a lesbian. broad spectrum. Let me see. I also sort of dabbled in the Creole poem. Territory. And I was also a young playwright. There's other two panelists that I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. So we have four young playwrights up here. Um, no, but you were in age, you were young playwright. Yes, but I wasn't a young playwright. Yeah. Okay. And so yeah, when I first started, or when I first got introduced to theater, I will say that there's a children's theater in Kansas City, Missouri, called the Codery. And one of the earliest plays I remember going to see was my children, my Africa. And it has a male protagonist who's African. And all of my friends, we were all like, Oh, you know, he's so cute. And the curtain call came we all like, oh, he's so cute. And I found out a year later, it was actually a girl who played that part. And that sort of transformed a lot of things for me at the time I didn't know it. But in hindsight, it was just like, Oh, okay, so this is how gender can work on stage, how casting can work on stage, how did the play change, depending on who plays a part who plays a role. And I was also reading a lot of like black women's literature. So in Tizaki was big in my life, Terry McMillan novels were big in my life. So there were a lot of like black women gender issues going on. Unfortunately, with a lot of Terry McMillan's early novels, even though they were fantastic, they always had the, the, the lecherous lesbian who would wait until her girlfriend or like her straight girlfriend got drunk and we tried to climb on top of her. So like sometimes it's a tactic. I'm not, you know, but in terms of like literary tropes, you know, it had been exhausting a lot of that literature. So it wasn't really until college, you know, when I studied with Elmo Terry Morgan at Brown, and he introduced us to, you know, because at the time I didn't know Lorraine Hansberry was queer, Essex Hemphill, Jewel Gomez, Sharon Bridgeforth, we just started reading a lot of like queer black people. And that definitely sort of influenced and really broadened my spectrum of how to look at sexuality and gender and all these other politics and drama. So, so I guess it didn't, it started early on in a certain shades, but it didn't really start to bloom until college. You segwayed nicely into the next thing, but I want to share my experience with this, which is that, and actually what you were saying, I had forgotten about this, my actual first play, I was thinking of, I also had young player, the young playwrights organization in my school, the Philadelphia, there was a Philadelphia entity, but it wasn't like a branch of it, it was like its own thing, but it inspired by, and it was quite strong. And they came into my junior high school. And at 13, I wrote a play about a young man coming out as gay. But it was like, you know, it was like, there's like so many levels of inversion going on there to use a historically potent word. But yeah, so that I totally forgot about it. And they actually brought in kids from the high school to act it. And it was directed by the like high school drama guy, because they didn't trust the junior high school students to do it justice. Yeah, just my play because it had like, it was like, you know, hot bone topic. But yeah, so actually, I did want to talk about like, who are the people who, and but maybe this is different than the list of people who ultimately inspired you to write plays, but who were their artists or what, what, what did you encounter culturally, maybe playwrights, maybe not, that freed you up to write the character, the like queer characters? Well, it's interesting listening to the influences because what it occurred to me, one of the things that was a big turning point for me was when my queer characters, when I made the conscious decision, because the, the, the culture and society in which I grew up in, those characters, if represented at all, were tragic or disastrous character. I mean, they usually killed themselves or got killed or, you know, got people drunk, were evil. And when I made the decision that this was not going to be a tragic character, which is also a way of saying, I'm going to look at myself differently. I'm going to look at my own engagement with, because that you're engaging with the material, you're engaging with issues of identity. So when am I going to stop seeing myself as some sort of tragically flawed being? And because the kind of writing I do, which it basically came down to this, I grew up reading the classics. And I loved all these, whether it's novels or, or, or, or the plays of Shakespeare, Elizabethan playwrights, and I would read them and I would feel a great kinship with the, with the use of language and imagery and so forth. But I always felt locked out because of an identity issue. And so I said to myself, okay, so I'm going to write all those plays that belong on that damn shelf, that I'm not included in. So it's sort of, I've sort of looked at my work in that respect as trying to make change from within the structure, the pre-existing literary structures. Yeah. So a lot of the, my influences were not necessarily, I mean, there were influences of gay and lesbian writers who, who made a great deal of difference to me, but mostly I, I, I would go towards the, the, the, those writers who it was unheard of. And I would sort of study that and then try to undermine it. Yeah. Infiltration. Yeah. Exactly. I love that. It was a spy. I love that. That's great. Well, it's funny because my sophomore year at Brown, I had written a play that was loosely inspired from Lorraine Hansberg's life and how, you know, she was this black activist during the civil rights movement, but she was also like fairly active in lesbian culture at the time too. So I had written a character of this black woman who was a part of the black arts movement, but she also had a white lover and very pro black militant boyfriend that she was keeping two separate lives. And it was interesting. I learned a lot about playwriting from that structure, just like traditional structure. But after writing that play, I made this decision that I would never have the gossipy crew ever again at any of my plays. So like, you know, those people would be like, did you see someone so at the da da da da? Oh, I think he's funny, you know. I ban those people from my play worlds. I don't include them in the talk. I don't include any gossip, you know, in a lot of, and I just sort of made a decision after that, that everyone was included. The only times they weren't included was when they were just a bona fide jerk, but it was a very individual characteristic. It wasn't speaking to the larger, you know, culture or any kind of identity. So, you know, because I do think that there can't be queer people who are jerks, you know, and they are flawed characters in general, regardless of, you know, any kind of identity or a preference in any of those things. So yeah, so it's sort of a different kind of infiltration in that, you know, I guess in a weird way, if those plays decided not to include me, then I wouldn't necessarily make room for them in my work either. So, yeah. Yeah, so like were there artists who you were like when you encountered them, you felt empowered even more to write queer characters? I mean, I was extremely affected by seeing Claire Chafee's Why We Have a Body at the Women's Project in 1993. It was very, that play is very beautiful and worth looking at again, if you haven't looked at it in a long time or if you've never heard of it. And partly, you know, I think at the time I wasn't so necessarily aware of how influential the openness of the queer sexuality was on me. I felt it formally influential and it's very, it's rather dreamlike and it blends sort of monologue with scene and moves around in time in an interesting way. And I really kind of glommed on to those things and I think probably it was actually a fusion of the kind of electricity of that erotic charge in the story plus the, I mean, this was true for me with Paula Vogel's work as well. But what I was thinking at the time was that the formal innovations of that playwriting were what was so attractive to me about it. And I think it was that plus this sort of other sensibility. But it's not like I was looking at, you know, E&Sco and being like, ooh, you know, it was the, there was some blend of nothing against E&Sco, nothing against E&Sco. I knew I wouldn't have anything articulate to say as you guys should have just gone. That was very intimidating. Are you kidding me? No, it's great. I mean, and for me it was, I don't really know how I started to imagine myself. Like before I came out as trans, it took, my plays always knew more about my burgeoning gender and sexuality than I did. So there were always like these plays kind of going before me out into the world that were kind of displaying something that I didn't know how to explain. And so I started writing these roles for women to play men or boys. And it was, later on someone was like, this is a pants role, like referencing the device in opera. But I didn't know what that was. Like somehow I started to kind of allow myself to imagine that for myself. And as you were saying, as a reflection of myself. But it took me a really long time to know what I was doing. And in fact, it wasn't until I was in graduate school and had a fight with my mentor, I was like, what the hell is this? You know, that I was like, I don't know. You know, and my mentor was like, this can't be a pants role because the convention is that it gets revealed. And I was like, well, it just doesn't. Okay, I don't know, leave me alone. And I think that that was way, way, way before I knew that I was trans. And I think that's what I was trying to represent without knowing it. And what actually freed me to start to write those things more intentionally was seeing performances by Split Bridges and Five Lesbians Brothers and actually meeting actors. Like one time I wrote Dominique DeBell of the Five Lesbians Brothers, like a letter to address to New York Theatre Workshop during the run of Oedipus at Palm Springs because I saw her performing and I was like, oh my God, there's the butch grown up actor that I've been looking for. Partly it was a matter of casting. Like there's, I mean, we can get into the casting issue, right? At some point, but you know, there frankly were not the actors for me to be writing for. So I actually thought that it wasn't even a possibility that these, well, I was actually trying to, I kept doing what I would call like school for butches. So like every time I would try to have these plays and you know, I would have to like train some poor straight cis girl how to do it. Or maybe it was a queer cis girl. The cis meaning someone who doesn't identify as trans who's, the gender that they were assigned at birth lines up with the one that they experienced themselves to be. And so I would constantly be having to like train them like how to walk and like what to wear. And I was like, please don't have a ponytail and like all kinds of things like that. I mean, then seeing those actors, I was finally like, oh my God, this is possible. And then I ran into, I saw Becca Blackwell performing who's like one of my muses performing in Circus of Muck and Union Square. And Lord knows what year 15 years ago or something. And I was like, and I like went over to them and like climbed over the fence and I was like, who are you? Like I have to know who you are. Because I have to. And weirdly it was like kind of tracking, finding the people. And then I was like, all right, I can do this. And seeing Peggy Sean things like that. But it's so fantastic too that you like saw everybody out, you know. And it wasn't just sort of like this far away admiration that you were like, hey, come here. I want to do these things and make this community and make this art. So that's pretty cool. I mean, I think it was life or death. Like I don't think that I could have continued. There was no way to continue because it couldn't be. There was, you know. I think in the sort of fluidity of sexuality and how writers explore that, I think transgender issues really are, that's the front line of these issues. Yeah. And I think it's, I find it tremendously exciting. Because it really makes us confront the fluidity of sexuality and that it isn't, you know, this box and this box and that, anyway, sorry, continue. No, that's great. I'm actually happy for you to kind of like jump in and stuff. It doesn't have to be me feeding us conversation topics at all. I was just so caught up in that story. You like writing letters. It was so charming. I wrote it on pink paper too. And I knew that was gonna be like dorky and adorable. So I like printed it out on pink paper. But didn't it work? Also, didn't you have Dominique in one of your readings? Dominique wrote me an email back and was like, I'll be in your reading if you still have it. And I wanna jump on the bandwagon with Becca Blackwell, who read two or three readings of this new plan working on and is amazing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Becca is a great artist. I mean, has made my work possible for the last 10 years, you know. I mean, I don't think, I mean, I don't think I could have written most of the plays that I have written recently without knowing that they were out there to do the role. Yeah. The reading of my dreams was I had a play where I had, my dream was to see a kind of family tree of like transmasculine identity. And it was like Peggy Shaw, Becca, and Jess Barbagallo in the one reading. And that was like, I was like, die and go to heaven. It was really cool. But yeah, so many of these amazing people. It's interesting that there's a mix of both like queer influence, but also not queer influence and thoughts about like, kind of joining a community versus, kind of infiltrating the canon and trying to kind of reimagine ourselves within it. I think that's, I mean, it's really interesting also because as for queer playwrights, we are not people, we're not very rainbow flaggy, the four of us. And we aren't sitting there writing gay, gay, gay plays, right? We're kind of, we're, I mean, all of us are really interested in history and also engaged in questions of language. So I just find that in a way that the gay is not always like the leading reason to be writing. Sometimes. What do you think? I mean, I wrote this play that's called Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England. And it's, I mean, it's a play that's sort of ostensibly about marriage, you know. It's about the premises that a woman of a certain age, her ex-girlfriend, who they were together for many years, has a recurrence of cancer and moves back into the house that they shared for a long time. But now there's a new much younger girlfriend and the three of them have to live in the house together. Then there's other shenanigans that are happening in the play, it's comedy. And it's, and it drives a lot of its dramaturgy from the sitcom Friends, which in my opinion is a great literary achievement of the 20th century. So, and I wrote it, I didn't do it consciously necessarily, but I think I was in a way, and I feel like this is maybe controversial from a more radical standpoint, but I was interested in, unproblematically, just taking forms from sitcoms. Not, I mean, forget Molière, you know what I mean? Like, or whatever. Just like forms that are, people are trafficking with no thoughtlessly, you know what I mean? That just feel very second nature and natural to Americans and just stick the lesbians in there. And there's like, you know, whatever, there's a joke about the chlesmatics in there and there's some lesbian stuff. And in principle, I feel like there's a lot of queer people who arrange their families in an unusual way like that, who don't, who have at least in the past because they didn't have the stricture of traditional marriage. They have been more flexible about who's allowed to come in and out of a house, for example. So those things were sort of specifically queer about the play, but then at the same time, I was just like, I just want to, I want to write a play that will feel funny and sort of like relatively well-made and comfortable for people. And you know, I think it has kind of worked. You know, it's been done in four regional theaters and there've been no gay or queer actors in any of the productions to my knowledge. And you know, although that there's been, you know, there are little bumps and whatever and I've had some great experiences of like, there's a scene that is also taken structurally from friends where the young girlfriend and the new, the old girlfriend and the new girlfriend bond over their shared derision of the girl, the woman they have in common because she claims that she's handy around the house and they make fun of her for not being handy around the house. So I was at one point sitting in a preview in a regional theater in New Jersey watching this scene take place and there had been this couple, an older straight, I assumed straight couple watching the play and they had been uncomfortable. You know, the guy was sitting there kind of like, you know, the whole time, like, what does this have to do with me, basically? And in the scene where the hippie girl and the ex-girlfriend bond about the girlfriend's unhandiness, I watched him go like this, like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, well, like, you know, like, oh, she's really hoisted on her own pattern on that one. I know what that's like. I was like, this warms my heart, you know, this guy. And by the end, he was like in it. You got through to him. Yeah, he was like, right, these people are people, they have, you know, human relationships. Well, for me, it's less about, it may have started off as with a specific interest in writing gay characters or queer characters, but I slowly realized that my interest, my scope of interest is wider than that and that really what I'm drawn to, what I write about is authenticity, is a sense of how do we be, how do we live in the English language? I can use it. How can we be authentic to who we are? How can we be truthful to who we really are and what is that? What constructs that? Are we, because so many different influences impact that notion of identity and so what does it mean to live an authentic life? And sexuality is a big part of that. So I will oftentimes go there, but the main focus tends to be this concept of authenticity, which I think I share with all of the wonderful writers I'm up here with. And because sexuality and gender are such important cornerstones to identity, to overlook that you don't, it's like creating a Barbie doll. You know, it's fake. It's not real. You know, you want a real human being and the human being includes all those troublesome, hard to define and the more hard to define, the more interesting and the better they are, qualities of identity. Yeah. I find it so problematic when there are awards that are like, we seek, you know, award for LGBT play rating. We want to see positive representations of gay characters. And I always think I'll never get that. Because what is the kind of drama is that? Yeah. Really, honestly. It's just like, that's just, you can't have a play that's like good times all the time. That's just not what, you're just not possible, right? Yeah, that's what I was saying before about like, you just have to have complex people in a play. Yes, it's just someone talking. It's just a big party. It's just a big like cocktail party for two hours, you know. Not that Pajama game is a bad musical. Come on. You're supposed to have the troublemaker in me who whenever people are saying, oh, we need to have positive role models and positive images, I'm like, yeah, but I'm going to give you the dirt. I want to give you all the stuff that's the nasty stuff that you mean, you know, the not made for family viewing. Well, I actually don't think it helps anyone. No, it doesn't. It would be like, yeah, yeah, everything's fine, Lottie. It helps politically. Politically it helps. For instance, you know, you talk, they talk about how I find it debatable, but they say, you know, Will and Grace paved the way to gay marriage becoming a near national thing. If that's the case, Mazel Tov, God bless you, great, you know, but that's where positive role model images help in the political arena so that the heterosexual majority can stop feeling threatened, you know, oh, they're not going to come and rape my son in high school. Oh, I wouldn't be too sure of that, but you know, politically it helps put a positive spin on things so that we're invited to the table. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to talk too much. I was just going to say that just in terms of this question of negative and positive, when I saw the title of this event, I was like, oh, beyond angry lesbians. Oh, that's too bad. I'm writing about an angry lesbian right now. I'm really, I'm interested also in looking at, you know, as the sort of landscape of queerness diversifies and gets more and more complex, I've been sort of nostalgic for the kinds of strident, shrill, abrasive lesbians that I grew up loving, you know, who were separatists and who were, you know, difficult. And so I've written one into a Backeye adaptation that I'm working on now. And so, and so maybe it's, you know, there's a chance for there to be a little full circle thing in terms of those stereotypes. I mean, obviously not to deploy them unproblematically, but to think about them, to have them back so we can look at them a little. Yeah, or you could adapt Last Summer at Bluefish Cove. Oh, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, by Jane Chambers, amazing. Tragic, tragic, dying lesbians. Very sad it happens. Yeah. What about you? Do you feel like, I mean, you've already spoken about kind of like having certain formal projects that drive how you work, but do you ever have projects that are related to sexuality and gender that go along as you're writing? Yeah, I mean, I do. This is really fantastic essay by Jewel Gomez and she talks about her relationship to black men, particularly like, you know, she talks about her father but she also talks about straight black men and also other queer black men. And there's this really gorgeous passage where she talks about bumping into Essex, him fooling the train, who was this amazing black gay poet who's from DC. And she was saying how like, you know, our connection, the way that we talk, our laughter, our spirits were in conversation with each other and it sort of transcended any kind of sexual attraction. And I just thought that was such a beautiful image. And so in a lot of my most recent work, I've been looking at connection and friendship and relationship and inclusion among black people that sort of transcends any sexual, you know, attraction or like judgment or any of those things. I'm working on the play now with the commission with ACT. And the protagonist is this black gay man who, no, he's straight actually, this black straight man who just came out of prison. He was wrongfully convicted and his case was overturned. And while he was in prison, while other black men were converting to black Islam, he found black feminist literature. So he transformed into a black feminist while he was in prison. And so he comes out after serving almost 30 years and because he went in when he was 18, he comes out 18, 20 years later and he wants to have a child. He wants to be a single parent. And the only person who stayed in his life passed upon his grandmother passing was his black queer friend who was a painter who was an intellectual. She sent him a lot of black feminist literature and they have a very deep and profound friendship that they created that was all based on text, literature, and history. And so a lot of the scenes are very, very intimate. And then when you get to the scenes where she's like sexually connected with a woman, at least with the workshop that we had, it was just a really interesting conversation because everybody was like, oh, the chemistry between the man and the woman is so profound but then the chemistry that she has with the woman is profound too, but in different ways. So I think like a lot of my work right now is just really looking at black people and intimacy and there's so many different facets of it and how it doesn't have to be in competition or it's not a hierarchy at all, you know? It really is about just like connection and spirits and all the other mushy, hippie, hippie stuff. That made me think about your play Good Goods, which has one of my favorite scenes of all time in which a woman is possessed by the spirit of a man and a man is possessed by the spirit of a woman and then they have to wrestle. They're like, they have a big knockdown blowout fight. Yes, like exorcism. It's like, oh my God, when that happened, I didn't even see it coming. Like I kind of, once that started, I was like, Christina Anderson, like get out of here. Like I couldn't believe that you made that happen. It was like, it was a really incredible like wrestling with the angel moment I mean, so it really encapsulates all these questions of transcendence and spirit and being with one another. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in that play too, like I had an ingenue character who was this young girl who's 18, who's queer and she was sort of a betrothed to marry this man and she ran away during the wedding party and during the engagement party, she ran away. She got on the bus and just went across town and she just kept going on the bus. So anyway, so the side story is that there's this super sexually straight, aggressive black man who she gets possessed by and he starts catcalling her body, you know, and be like, oh, you know, these titties are great and like, I don't know if I can say titties. Sure. You know, this body is great. Oh, and this girl is so sexy, you know, and then the person who comes in to do the exorcism is this man who's sort of, this very like burly man in coveralls and he meant the love of his life who was a spirit woman. And when she passed away, she joined him. She joined his body so they could be one. So when she comes in, so when he comes in, he comes in as her and he commits the exorcism in the play. So yeah, it was sort of like this battle of like, you know, to outwardly, you know, this very burly man and this very ingenue girl who was possessed by this burly man who was embodying this like female spirit. So it was like a question of, you know, performance and like gender and like love and like relationship and like all those things to happen at our stage. And is that play published or can people read it? Okay, great. Yeah, awesome. So people can find out. What about the new, that new play you were describing? What's that called and when can we go see it? Well, it's not done yet. But still. And this, in this early stages, it's called How to Catch Creation. And everyone, yeah, like the male protagonist in the play is having a hard time getting the key, but everyone else in his life through serendipitous ways of becoming parents. So that's the play. Fantastic. So you guys, what, I mean, I feel like we've touched on this in certain ways, but I'm interested also in specifically zooming in on our own use of gay queer representation. What is it that you feel like is, you feel called to represent and where do you, what gaps do you feel called to fill in in terms of American drama? Like when you sit down, are you like, you know, we, like you were saying, like we really need to bring back the angry lesbian. Actually, Lisa McNulty's reply to my email inviting her was like, I only want to produce plays by angry, about the anger lesbian that gave us, she's now the artistic director of the women's project. But I think she was kidding. But anyway, what do you feel like you guys are working to fill in? That's been, I mean, obviously for you. I don't know that it's a conscious working to fill in because I don't think I ever set out to find a niche and write about it. I think it's more along with this concept of authenticity I was talking about, I find myself drawn to writing about characters who I don't see on stage, that I'm interested in, that I don't see other people writing about, giving voice to characters who don't have voices or aren't heard. This new play I'm working on right now has a lesbian couple in it who are right wing Republicans. And, you know, I don't know many, I have, at least I don't see on stage a lot of LGBT characters who aren't crunchy lefty nice. You know, they're very right wing and it's completely outside of my personal experience. Couple members of my family I draw on from time to time. But so it's more, there's a sense of perversity, I think, that leads me to where I write about. I always, you know, for instance, take any given subject, rather than attacking it head on, I will sort of walk around it and find the thing that people are trying to overlook or trying to forget about. And that's what I will keep picking at. So rather than finding a particular niche and approaching it, it's, yeah, it's like finding that little bit of sweater that's hanging out and pulling on that yarn and pulling on that yarn until you've realized you've taken the whole damn sweater apart. That's kind of my process, I suppose. Yeah. What about you, Beth? I don't know what you're talking about. I was so ready for you. Sorry. We had an order, we had a rhythm going. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, for me, when I was a undergrad in college, when I was a freshman, I had the opportunity to sit in this workshop class in Tizaki Shange, and we helped her, we watched her translate her novel Lillian into a stage piece. And I think I learned a lot from watching Tizaki about not necessarily focusing so much on reflecting the world that you see, but really trying to write what's possible or what could be possible, and envisioning, and even if that what could be or what's possible isn't idyllic, there's also that freedom to say what if. So I think also, too, with a lot of my pieces, I always try to include that what if possibility as much as possible. Sometimes it's the engine of the entire play, sometimes it's just sort of a thread that lives in it. But yeah, that's sort of like a real gift that I was given to stay, to keep in mind like the realities of situations, and because I think, not that I think, I know that there are a lot of like queer black people who are struggling with class issues and like economic disparities and such, and like all those things are real realities, but it's also about like what if, what are these possibilities? How can you reshape the world and have a conversation in that level, too? So those are things that I'm interested in presenting on stage, too. In terms of those characters, yeah, I think it's great. Any thoughts on this question? I mean, I think it's wonderful that these are the answers to this question, that we're not just saying that in a way like to approach writing LGBT characters is to kind of approach our entire humanity and our entire project as writers to really think about, because ultimately I do think that's the best advice one could give is consider the entire humanity of the person whether you're writing an LGBT character or someone outside of your own race or class or something like that. So I'm loving these answers so much. Did you wanna say? Well, I mean, I was talking to my partner before this and talking about this question of representing people who are not like oneself. And she was reminding me that the sort of rule of thumb is that someone who is in a different group from you is not necessarily measuring themselves against you. So if you're writing about somebody outside of your experience and that person keeps looking, like if you're writing about a gay person and they keep comparing themselves to straight people in some way in the narrative, that's how you know that you're not addressing their full humanity. She was like, you know, gay people think they're better than straight people. They're not always, but I would say it maybe differently. Like gay people are pursuing their own objectives. They're not like measuring against the center in that way necessarily. Let's talk for a second about who's doing a great job of these days. Like who are our allies and who are we excited about? Who's doing a great job representing LGBT? I would say people on this panel. We are amazing. Yeah, I mean, you know, excluding myself, but yeah, I'm really excited to be here on this panel, but yeah, I think all of you have been really excited. I'm fast. I have to throw Taylor Mack in the mat. Yes, yes. Just going back to politics for a moment, one of the things that I find a little disappointing in our sort of all the political advances that LGBT people have that we've made over the last few years is that while great strides have been made in terms of civil rights, gay marriage, the overwhelming movement is in this heteronormative very conservative approach that that is the image, that is the identity that people tend to embrace. And I've never felt comfortable in that camp. It's sort of, if you want to look at gays, queers, the homosexuals have won. And Taylor Mack, the reason I mentioned him is that I think he's waving that queer flag loud and proud for all of us and doing some amazing work in an epic scale. And really reminding us that the size and the scope that theatricality that we can bring to things. But absolutely, this panel, I'm incredibly honored and flattered to be part of this. Yeah, you guys are bad asses. But actually, that makes me think about Aaron Markey actually. When we start going, putting that Joe's pub hat on for a second, Taylor does his work in all kinds of amazing venues. But Aaron Markey's a cabaret performer who just keeps it so weird. She's such an amazing, incredible, genius freak and incredible voice. I'm really excited to see how she develops and kind of how her project grows. There's so many great writers also. Lucy Thurber writes extraordinary plays and is really unafraid to kind of just like throw questions of identity in with questions of class and violence and regional specificity. I also really like Sarah Gubbin's work. Sarah is a playwright out of Chicago. She's written a number of plays that maybe, you could maybe term them well-made. They're really funny and sharp and fighting and very, very good plays. Yeah, I would say Daniel Alexander Jones is fantastic. Sharon Bridgeforth, who I talked about earlier, she's fantastic. Tracy Scott Wilson is great. A Ray Pamatma is fantastic. Mashuk Dean. Oh, Dean. This is an amazing writer. Yeah, I was thinking also Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, Christine Haruna Lee, who may be lesser known, but she has a show coming up called War Lesbian, which is just an amazing title. She's an incredible triple quadruple thread singer, composer, director, maker, writer. I'm really excited to see this show. I think I'm gonna totally miss it because I don't live here anymore. But if you guys could go and report back, I would appreciate it. Basil Cremendahl, MJ Kaufman. Yep. Yeah, I think that's a good list. I'll still be right down earlier. Yeah, those are the, I think that's pretty good. Jordan Harrison. Jordan Harrison. It's fantastic. Hell yeah. Okay, that's pretty good. I feel like we've covered kind of like, we've moved through time in a satisfying way that's satisfying to me anyway. I'm very curious how you guys are doing. It's so hot. Are you with us? And what are your questions? Yeah? I actually want to question your interpretation of the positive. Sure. I've been writing historical plays about LGBT, real life people for the last 20 years, and the Archiverse Ground Foundation has been a major supporter. And their definition is positive. And I never took that as fun, shallow. I always took it as honest. And that they, their effort is to create, is to help us create a body of work that counteracts those dishonest representations that came before. So that my characters have not always lived by the end of the play. And they've had other issues and so on. So I just wanted to sometimes, I think, be careful with how we define ourselves and how we sometimes cut ourselves off because we think, oh, they mean this. I'm not gonna deal with them. Yeah. And I think we're losing out on a lot of opportunities that way. One of the characters in my latest plays, Butterfly and Lee, who actually performed in the first play I ever wrote. Oh, awesome. And she says, she explains to this other actor that Shakespeare wrote a lot of characters for Negroes. And he says, you're kidding. And she said, where does it say that Puck is Caucasian? Where does it say that this one is, you know, and she starts naming all of these characters? And he gets very upset when he says, well, we've got the kings and queens of England. She just walks off. So, you know, we have to, I think we'll often watch our own interpretation. That's good. I mean, I think that's a useful distinction. Positive reading, honest versus positive reading, like booster-ish or somehow trying to be like up with people. That is significant. Well, it's just a matter of not, both the positive and negative, where one's gender or sexuality or sexual identity is either a virtue or a vice. The that in and of itself is what defines the virtue or vice of the character. So those plays that say, oh, they're wonderful because they're gay, which there's all those after-school TV specials from when would it be, like the early 90s or something that sort of says, you know, there are people too. As a, which is pushed back against a lot of plays from, I guess, from the 20s through the 60s, which is they're gay, they must die because they're evil. So I think that's a differentiation is that, you know, the story, the plot or the character can run the gamut as long as, because the gender has no, we as a society are who are imprinting the values on the gender. Gender itself has no moral value in and of itself. I think that's a differentiation between a positive and a realistic or a artistic approach to it. Great. Any other questions or discussion points? Yeah. I was referred by a classmate of mine. I'm writing a play that was set in a poor activist house and it's about how someone in the house was trans goes missing. And it's based on someone that I know that I have this personal experience. And there was a question when my pages were read about, because this person uses the pronouns per and the, which I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with. And there was a question of using she to help the audience in my stage direction. And I've been trying to figure out how to, I see this person, right? And I'm just curious as to how, I'm still trying to figure out how to be generous and explaining to my viewers like, this is not a she situation. So I'd love to hear your thoughts when you've like faced that. Oh, moments where we've faced having to, issues of translation. Yeah. And how do you stick to your guns or move the conversation forward in a room full of people who haven't had that conversation before? I feel like that happens a lot in terms of casting. But do you guys wanna, what are your thoughts about this? I have a play that's set during the Great Depression and the city is segregated. There's a black neighborhood and there's a character in the play who is a white woman, trans woman who's living in the black neighborhood. And she used the pronoun she, like I labeled or created her based off of Rosalind Russell and share for Moonstruck. She sort of like flowed through the play like that. And casting is a nightmare for this play because I often get people who say, when we have this fabulous actor who's a fabulous drag queen and he can come in and perform. I've always just wanted a trans person to play the part. And it's interesting because I've had it both ways. I've had a man play the part and I've had a biological female male. I've had it both ways. And when it's someone who people can identify as male, that character's laughed at a lot more is what I noticed. There's a lot more humor in it. At the end of the play, she falls in love with this guy and a lot of the audience questions are like, but when he finds out, he's gonna hurt her, right? Or is he gay, you know? But then when it's someone who people identify as female, it's just like, oh, that was such a great story. It was so interesting. I felt like she was black. Like all of a sudden she becomes black. Even though she's like white. So it's been like, so I was sort of wrestling about when I'm not in the room, like how are these conversations gonna happen with like casting? Oh yeah. So the authors know, initially it was two pages long. And it was just like, hey, if you wanna read this material, if you wanna look at this historical context. And I don't know how you all have handled these things, but I still haven't found a way to, I mean, hopefully people will Google and watch this archive and hear me talking about it, but it's a really tricky thing to have to figure out how to educate an audience, but also just have your play live, you know? All these old times. I think if you just leave the way, rather than trying to reach and educate, just leave the way with your boys. And hopefully my experience has been in seeing other writers do things like that, is that people hear you and they follow. So rather than reaching back and trying to educate and how do I communicate back, no, if you're forceful enough and you're honest enough and you're truthful in what you're telling, people will hear that truth and follow you. There's no, I mean, I'm sure you're gonna, you can speak more specifically to this question of language, but like, I mean, you should never write anything to help someone in your play, right? I mean, there's no reason to have help in a piece of art. And I'm telling you that. Right, right. I'm so kind of taken aback by it. That's just another way of saying what you just said. No, absolutely, absolutely. At least I don't have training wheels. Right. But I don't know. I mean, it's like, and then the question of how to constrain future productions after you've left is a totally separate terrifying question that I handle through copious amounts of denial. So I don't know how to. I struggle with, I struggle, I've struggled for years with how to, how to identify the gender of the character because for many years I didn't, actually I think I tried to write that someone was butch or that it was a, before that they were trans to me, I would be like, this is, this role is to be played by, like this male role is to be played by a woman. And my classmates would be like, what? Why? You know, why say that? Like it's hard to understand that. And so then at one point, someone counseled me to write, at this play's premiere, all of these roles were played by, or these male roles were played by women. And I was like, all right, that's okay. But that's like me not necessarily naming it or owning it, you know? And as time has gone on, I've tried different things, but I still don't feel settled, but partly it's because I still, I'm very worried. Like if Becca Blackwell is booked on another job, what am I gonna do? You know, I mean, I know one other trans masculine actor who's the right age for, I know one or two other people. So it actually scares me about the longevity of the work. I mean, actually luckily, there's generations coming up that are much bigger. Who identify as trans and genderqueer, gender non-conforming, who are gonna be able to take that up, but they, you know, they're coming up. They're not there yet. So that worries me. What you're talking about there is breaking down the barriers in teaching audiences and even actors what you need to do, which is an interesting problem. But a little while ago you brought up at the first time really this drag idea and audiences being more accepting if they can see the underlying absolute gender distinction and then deal with it that way. I was wondering, I think I'm having trouble getting theater companies seeing my place because they don't use that model of it's got to be a man underneath pretending to be a woman or a woman underneath pretending to be a man. And they don't like the idea that it's not that you're all nodding. I was gonna ask, how do you get through that barrier? How do you get the director? Tell me. I don't know. I don't know. And accept what you're doing. I think that's the answer I got. We're in the process of trying to knock loudly on the door. I think I struggle with this all the time and I don't know. I don't, I've been underwhelmed with the people's... But there have been people who have been supportive of my work and have been like, all right, let's just do this. But partly it's because I'm like, yeah, and let's call Becca because I have this person who is starting to be widely acknowledged as like, you know, awesome. And so I know in some ways it's a little bit of like, maybe if there is an ideal performer that you can do a reading with that person to kind of show people what you mean. And as you begin to show people what you mean, then it kind of enters the vocabulary a little bit more. It's a voice that has not been represented on stage. And to start giving voice to those characters is difficult. It is knocking on the, it's knocking that door down. It's, I mean, Becca read a role of, it's not a transgender role. It's a role in this new play that I've been working on of a very stereotypically masculine lesbian. There's just not, I mean, I looked around like, where are the actors to play this role? And I was lucky enough to meet Becca who is incredible. This is gonna be the Becca panel. I know I have to tell them to watch the thing. But the bottom line is that because these voices have not been represented, that's why a lot of these theaters, it's like going to them and saying, I wanna write a play in Pig Latin. Yeah. What? It's just, it's outside the scope in the same way that a couple of decades ago, going and saying, I want to write a gay character who's not a drag queen and does not commit suicide and is not evil and they'll say, well, what's his purpose? Or is the protagonist? Right, I mean, that very notion. And that's why I said earlier that this is really, these are the front lines of the battle. Because these are voices that have not been represented before and that need to be. Yeah, working on it. I mean, we've been through, Madeline and I have a long history of talking about the casting of Butch characters in a variety of different grassroots groups that have been trying to work that out. And there is a kind of underground network, Butch casting network. Yeah, there is an underground network. But it's still, we still have to, like scrape around every time we have the conversation. Well, there was, my partner is Lisa Crone who wrote the book and lyrics for Fun Home, the musical. And, you know, that musical, like it's sort of, it's insane, but there was an article that came out in a major publication when that musical was having its premiere off Broadway last season. The headline of the article is, was is America ready for a Butch lesbian protagonist? Oh, wow, you know, that is like, still, that's the question. Now, my hope is once that thing opens on Broadway, no longer will that headline run. Maybe it'll still be, people will still sort of feel panicked around these questions, but at least it will have happened. Because, I guess, up until now, with the exception of what's her name, who runs around West Side Story, there's not really been a Butch lesbian. Remember, she's so sweet, she doesn't have a song or anything. No. There's a lot of kick and gravel. There's like a, there's a Zed teacher in Harrisburg or something, I can't remember anyway. Oh, that's Sister George. Wow, Sister George. Well, but camp is a separate, I mean, like, it's a separate question in a way from what we're talking about. But you know, also too, you know, I've had these kind of parts where, you know, I have, I'm assuming straight Black women play the part. And if it comes up to be Butch or anything, like their definition of masculinity is actually like quite narrow, too. Or like how to perform it or what to tap into. You know, all of a sudden, it's just about like, you know, why it's taking up as much space as possible and like, you know, slam and fist on the chest and stuff too. And I think it's actually more complicated than that. You know, I mean, I know a lot of fantastic men. You know, I mean, I know David, yeah, I have cousins, you know, I mean, who just like, who just like, you know, I mean, the spectrum is really broad too, just in the same way that like, you know, women like the spectrum is broad as well. So, you know, sometimes I come up against, you know, people even stereotyping, you know, masculinity or what a man does or what a woman does or how they walk or how they look. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, even that's a frustration too. Yeah, I mean, I really think of representation as everybody's business. I've started to get on students lately about like, are you gonna write that play where the man kills the woman? Are you? Like, I mean, I've never really questioned that kind of thing before, but lately I'm like, I can't anymore. I can't sit by while you write a play where a man kills a woman. Like, let's talk about that. Is that the only option here? You know, what, like getting deeper into those characters and things like that. Really asking everybody to think about, I mean, I think that these questions really ask everyone to think about their own, their responsibilities to representing anyone. Yeah. Yeah. Are we giving everyone full access to humanity? Yeah. Oh, here. Oh yeah, and we have a Twitter question. Yes. You know, straight after being gay dads, they have a surrogate and they have this son, who's very, who's a championship wrestling champ, the wrestler, and he's very fast. He's this big guy, he's very fast. I'm kind of examining all of those and putting it on their head. And, you know, but my thing in writing is like, I have to be straight after being asked in a new game and to make my point. Yeah. And this kid has to be an overly effeminate big guy wrestler to make my, to kind of go in a spectrum of what I'm, you know. Yeah. It's uncomfortable because I have to, I mean, I write in the dialogue, but these are traits that are, this is what I'm examining these traits, not the gender, but the traits. Yeah. So it's like, you know, going with this, it's like I need to make sure, I mean, I'm being director, but I would like for this to sort of be the, or what is presented. How do you make sure you get what you want? Yes. Is that the question? I mean, I think what, my first thought was like, when you were saying the thing about your, like you're trying to embed it into the dialogue, I think, I find that, you know, play texts are way more contractual than we think when we're writing them. You know, I've had arguments with people where it's like, but it's not in the text, you know, such and such, whatever the question was. And I'm like, but I'm telling you, and they're like, mm-mm, you can't just tell me just because you're the playwright, like put it in the play. And I'm, you know, I can't make that argument, but just because I say it that it's, so if it cannot be disputed because of the language that you're using, you know, actors go through plays and look for everything that the character says about themself and that other people say about them. So if you have that going, like there's, I don't know, maybe people in the audience can speak to this, but yeah, like part of what their job is is to kind of mine the scripts for those clues. And if those clues are there, then no one can argue with you. Although I would say that, well, I mean- But things can be ignored, you're saying? Yeah, I mean, I feel like I have had the experience of having, let's say, a seduction scene between two women that's written for there to be some butch-femme dynamic of some kind in the scene. To me, it's perfectly obvious that it's incomprehensible without it. And then you see two people who it's not their fault, but they don't tap into that dynamic and they read it and the scene is like absurdism. You know, it's like, and there's no there there, I can't see the scene, where's the scene? And it's because it's, you know, they don't know what the objectives are. The objectives, which seems so clear to me in the language, are not clear. So I don't, I mean, that's not helpful, that's just complaining. Sometimes, no, that's helpful. I've had that exact experience and sometimes I wonder, I'm like, well, can I say that they haven't done their jobs fully? I don't know. But I don't wanna, you know, but it's like, but yeah, to what degree, it's the same thing of like, where do I have to give you help? Like, well, this is, cause I just said that thing about help and art and, but I actually wrote, I realized that in the play that I'm working on now that has the Shrill Stride and Lesbian in it, I wrote, I wrote this little, like a kind of like a mash note to the imaginary actor who I imagine doing the thing. Let's say Becca's not available. And also she's too young for the part. So let's say some actor is gonna encounter this who doesn't naturally come to this naturally. And I just wanted to be like, imagine that this happened to you when you were young. Imagine you felt like this when you were eight. Imagine you felt like this when you were 12. Imagine when you walk, you feel like you move from your shoulders, not from your hips. You know, imagine you are, you think of yourself more like a dragon than like a bear. You know, like what, just like what ways could I talk to a person who I may never meet about what kind of like, she would move through her as this former lesbian separatist turned landscape gardener. You know what I mean? Like where, where might she have found herself in the world? You know, how does she, you know, how does she feel about killing a bug? Like, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I know that's like some of those cheesy exercises, like, you know, 12 things about your character or something. But I didn't mean it that way. I wrote it as a letter, like dear person I may never meet. And I did it as a free right. And then I was like, you know what, I'm putting this at the back of the script when I send it out. Cause I just feel like maybe there'll be some, you know, some piece of sort of like lyric or something in there that will get, because you just say, you know, butch or even straight acting or, you know what I mean? Like you can really trigger people cause they feel like they're, they have to make sure they don't, whatever, either from the left or from the right. They feel like they have to make sure they don't fall into some trope. Yeah, that's great. It's endless. The Twitter question was, did any of us see the nant with Nathan Lane? I didn't see it. I didn't see it. Yes. That was the end of the question. That's the answer. Is there anything that has bearing on this conversation from that show? I'm sure there is. Okay. Okay. Unfortunately we have, yeah. No more on this topic. Yeah. So you just mentioned fun home and I've really been enjoying this conversation. I'm, all right, musicals when I'm working on a very gay theme musical, my first one. And so I was wondering if you guys had any thoughts on musicals, just because I know you're all, I was about to say straight as my answer, but that's not my turn. You're playwrights. So, you know, I don't know one thing I've been learning about musicals, just the dramaturgy character, all of that is so different from playing without music. So I was just wondering. Well, I have been working on, I have worked a little bit with music and I've been working on this musical, writing the book for this musical for a number of years now with Harry Connick Jr. running the music. And it's set in, right after the stock market crash in 1929 in Manhattan. And in it, there are these two characters who are both sort of schemers. And one is a closet lesbian and one is a closet gay man. And they think that in order to achieve their goal, they need to fall in love with each other. Which leads to disastrous results. That wasn't the answer to your question though, what was that? Is this a comedy? Yes it is. Yeah, yeah. Is the question like, what's the difference? Is there a difference between representing gay characters in straight plays versus musicals? Yeah, that's what, like all the different themes you've been talking about, like I'm not familiar with a lot of the writers that, almost any of the writers you're mentioning, but the themes make a lot of sense in their stuff. I'm really interested in. So I'm just wondering exactly what you just said. I don't know. One thing that pops to mind and I don't, in a way I wonder if in a musical you have to work harder to avoid convention. Cause you're just maybe more heavily in dialogue with convention while you're trying to make the book work. I don't know. That might be vague and I don't know. What are the gay musicals that you like? I'm sorry. Well, Hedwig. Hedwig? Yeah, like that. Is it the wonderful thing, the difference between Hedwig or a lot of sort of the conventional musicals rely so much more on type. Right. A musical like Hedwig or, which I think is a lot more, is a lot closer to a play with music than a musical. Please don't, I don't want to get in trouble with it. But because it's a lot more, it goes so much deeper into character. It doesn't, so many musicals rely on stock types to get the narrative moving forward. So there isn't that much time, you don't have that much time to set characters up so you can get the mechanism of the story going, which will then release the music and create the musical. Whereas Hedwig or plays, which you have a lot more time to get into and explore an indulgent character, the complexity, the contradictions, the nuances. It's tricky then to be able to do that and balance the music, find those moments where it releases the music. So you haven't gone so far into character that you have to then come back to be able to deliver the music. That's the tricky balance, I'd imagine. Do you know Todd Alman's musical Girlfriend? That's a dream, it's a fantastic, but very unusual in terms of its book and structure and musical. I don't know if you could get your hands on it because I don't know that it's been recorded, but that's worth looking up. It was at Berkeley, and then they did a concert of it at Joe's Pub, which I happened to see. Let's take this question back here. I have a question about the use of queer and what that means in contemporary days because I believe you can see LGBTQ, so Q is something different than the G. And I wonder, I'm asking this also in a larger sense, how politically ideologically tolerant is theater within this, I mean, called sexual identity community, or sexual gay community? How politically or ideologically tolerant and diverse can this be? Because, David, you are writing a play I was interested about conservative gay women, and they exist because they're my neighbors. So are they the bad guys? Are they the bad guys? I mean, can we be right with passion and understanding? And I mean, I'm not saying that in a condescending way. Can we understand political diversity? Can I write a pro-zionist speech today and have that presented? Or is that gonna be shouted down? So I'm saying, how ideologically diverse and tolerant is this community today? And I can be back to what is queer. Right, that question, that question, and the repetition of that question, I think, is all of our duties to constantly ask, are we living up to our ideals? Are we actually living up to the things that we believe in? Or are we just finding another safe camp to live in and say, we're the good guys, they're the bad guys? I think that's absolutely necessary to what you were saying before about finding the humanity in the characters. That's first and foremost, I think, I don't wanna speak for others, but at least for me, that's first and foremost, my goal is to stick up for the humanity of these characters, of all the characters that I write, and to constantly ask that question, to challenge the assumptions. I'm not supposed to say this these days, and to say it, and to find out, oh yeah? Why shouldn't I? Were you asking us to define queer? Yeah, could you do that? Could you open the panel with a question that's with you, I mean, how do you wish to be called by gender? And I think you're perfectly right to do it though. So what is queer to be gendered because that's up to the generation that didn't use it from where it was a majority. Yeah, I think that's exactly what I was going to, that was going to be my answer, which is I think that it's, there's a generational shift away from the words lesbian and gay, and into, I don't even know where it begins exactly, but it started to be that people were reclaiming this word because it allowed there to be more multiplicity, and it also, within the description of themselves, and it also was able to incorporate both sexuality and gender. Somehow like lesbian and gay alone didn't encompass the complicated mix that some individuals were feeling themselves to be. I know that when I was coming up, I was definitely like lesbian, I don't know, you know? And partly it was because I felt, I actually felt like it was a historical term that applied to, I mean, I don't think I knew enough to say this, I say it now, but I certainly felt uncomfortable with it for many reasons, both historically in terms of my generation and because of my burgeoning gender identity issue that I was discovering but didn't know had a name. So I was like, I don't know why this doesn't feel right, but it also doesn't feel right to hang with the women in my family or go to the women's room and be kind of tossed out of it. Like, there's, so there's like so many ways that, so I think that queer started to evolve as people became more articulate and more accepting actually, less internally transphobic about the nuances of their gender expression. So they needed a word that could encompass all of those things. That's my thought. There's also a political, there's also a political aspect to it in that with the whole, I mean, the way I define it personally, and this is just me, no one, I'm sure there's other people who might agree with me that, I define it as gays and lesbians or homosexuals who want to say to the world that they are just like heterosexuals in all but who they sleep with. Queer people such as myself aren't actually interested in being just like straight people. I'd rather find out who I really am and live that authentic life. And that means, if that means a polyamorous relationship, so be it, if that means marriage, so be it, if that means having fun, so be it. But that it's about finding the truth in your identity a lot more and that that's a lot harder to pin down in a political arena and a lot harder to represent in a political arena because it doesn't fit into these strict categories of what your objectives are, what your political or sociological objectives are. I think this is great. We've had awesome questions. We've covered a lot of territory. Is there any last thing that people are wanting to raise? Yeah. Well, I just want to talk about anger. I don't want to get too far away from the anger button because I think being gay is still a political act. We're in this little bubble of talent right now that we do not fool yourself in clothes like that. We're getting our work done, yes. But sometimes, like your beautiful letter about the character, you have to, when you're in rehearsal, even in the New York City with tolerant people, you have to fight, fight, fight. Yeah. Just get the things you want to see on stage with. Smart actors, beautiful actors, your beautiful noted actors, they know. I'm sorry, scratch. So you still have to be prepared to fight every second as a gay person, even in the New York City in 2014. Just, let's not forget that. Yeah, I think that's true. And there is a lot of work to be done just in terms of knocking on the door and raising these conversations from casting to, I don't know, what gets put on stage. Yeah. So thank you guys for your thoughts and words and thank you all for your attention and your feedback and engaging with this conversation. Cool, thanks guys. There is some questions.