Front matter

Acts ot Gaiety

LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure

Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety: LGB E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: Universi Downloaded on behalf of Unive

Preface ix Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction 1 1. “Scummy” Acts: Valerie Solanas’s Theater of the Ludicrous 31 2. Guerrilla Acts: Marriage Protests, 1969 and 2009 72 3. Expatriate Acts: Jill Johnston’s Joker Citizenship 105

4. Terrorist Acts: The Maladapted Hothead Paisan, a Lesbian Comedy of Terrors 139

5. Unnatural Acts: The Tragic Consequences of Homoliberalism in the Five Lesbian Brothers’ Oedipus at Palm Springs 163 Afterword 189 Notes 195 Bibliography 231 Index 249

Preface

At approximately 7:00 p.m. on May 1, 1970, just moments after Kate Millett, chairwoman of the National Organization for Women (NOW), called to order the second annual gathering of feminist groups from across the country, the lights in the auditorium at Intermediate School 70 on West Seventeenth Street in Manhattan went out, plunging the audience of three hundred activists into total darkness. One of the conference coordinators fumbled her way to the podium to ask everyone to remain calm and seated while they determined the cause of the power outage, only to discover that the microphone, too, had gone dead. A commotion erupted in the back of the room, and a group of people, some emitting rebel yells, ran down the aisle toward the stage. The lights came back on to reveal a phalanx of women, fists raised, wearing purple T-shirts with “Lavender Menace” stenciled across the front. Some held placards that read “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot,” “Take a lesbian to lunch,” and “We are your worst nightmare, your best fantasy.” The audience, visibly shaken, denounced the demonstrators for commandeering the meeting to promote their lesbian agenda. Millett, who had been informed in advance of the protest, urged the crowd to listen to the women.

One of the insurgents, Rita Mae Brown, stepped forward and addressed the assembly. A well-known firebrand and philanderer, Brown had recently staged a public resignation from her position as the NOW newsletter editor in response to the organization’s attempt to purge lesbians from its roster. Surveying the spectators as if she were cruising a Greenwich Village bar, Brown asked, “Does anyone want to join us?” This was the cue for Karla Jay, who was planted in the audience, to jump up and scream, “Yes, yes, sisters! I'm tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement.”! As

Never one to be upstaged, the mercurial Brown approached the podium a second time. Grinning and flashing her best “come hither” look, she, too, began a striptease. As Brown was already wearing her protest uniform, it appeared that she actually was going to disrobe. When she peeled away the Lavender Menace T-shirt, however, she revealed another one just like it underneath. This burlesque was met with “more laughter,” Jay recalls.> The audience, initially hostile, was now firmly on the protestors’ side. When Brown asked again, this time more seductively, “Who wants to join us?” a bevy of women, none of whom had anything to do with the demonstration, rushed the stage, to thunderous applause and shouts of support from the audience. The swelling ranks of the Lavender Menace collective stood before the crowd with their “arms in solidarity around one another's shoulders” and explained how upset they were that lesbians had been excluded from the conference.* They called out Betty Friedan, cofounder of NOW, the sponsor of the event, for orchestrating animosity and promoting discrimination within the feminist movement. In a statement to the press, Friedan had accused lesbians of “creating a sexual red herring that would divide the movement and lead ultimately to sexual McCarthyism.”°? Friedan publicly denounced dykes as a “lavender menace” that threatened the future of women’s liberation by warping the public image of feminists and alienating heterosexuals who wanted equality but also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children. When word got out that Friedan planned to deny lesbians a platform at the Congress to Unite Women, for the second year in a row, a group of activists from the Radicalesbians—a coalition of dykes from various organizations, including the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Redstockings, and Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH)—began plotting the Lavender Menace zap.

A zap, or zap action, as it is sometimes called, is a highly performative, nonviolent mode of social protest that uses guerrilla theater, irony, and satire to expose the ruses of power and catalyze public response to political events. First staged by anarchist hippies associated with the antiwar and

Preface xi free speech movements, zaps combine physical comedy, symbolic costumes, expressive gestures, and farcical timing in brief, improvised skits that are designed to shock and awe people, jolting them out of their complacency and fixed frames of reference. Zaps serve as paradigmatic examples of what I call “acts of gaiety” throughout this book. The term refers to playful methods of social activism and mirthful modes of political performance that inspire and sustain deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change.

Acts of gaiety are comical and cunning interventions that make a mockery of discrimination and the experience of social exclusion. These antics provide a creative outlet for the outrage, alienation, and sorrow that attend queer lives in the form of dramatic displays of revelry and rebellion. As the Lavender Menace action shows, sexual minorities are expert at poking fun at the physical dangers and bad feelings associated with being queer in a straight world, transforming them through jokes, humor, and parodic inversion in the service of liberatory practices. Gays and lesbians have developed an extensive repertoire of acts of gaiety, which includes but is by no means limited to zap actions, pageants, parades, spectacles, kiss-ins, camp, kitsch, and drag. These anarchic, indecorous, and amusing exploits target the contingent foundations of homophobia and the arbitrary assumptions that allow both publics and counterpublics to function in painfully constraining ways for bodies branded by the stigma of sexual transgressions.

Thanks to the daring exploits and tireless efforts of the Lavender Menace and other activists, homosexuality and same-sex desire are no longer historical impossibilities in many parts of the world. As the exigencies of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) movement have changed substantially in the past fifty years, sexual politics has devolved from a grassroots struggle for liberation into a conservative program of social assimilation that I term homoliberalism. By homoliberalism I refer to the economic, political, and social enfranchisement of certain normative-leaning, straight-acting homosexuals at the expense of other, inassimilable sexual minorities. A coercive and oppressive form of political optimism that tethers individual fortune and social progress to the workings of the nation-state, homoliberalism is indicative of what Lisa Duggan calls “the new homonormativity,” a trend characterized by a “demobilized . . . constituency and a privatized, depoliticized . . . culture anchored in domesticity and consumption .. . that does not contest dominant heteronormative forms but upholds and sustains them.”’ Premised on an increasingly visible and lucrative brand of massmediated citizenship, homoliberalism endorses the passage of integrationist

Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4845841 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xii Preface legal reforms that are profoundly undemocratic and antiegalitarian, including same-sex marriage and the right to serve in the military. These issues form the core of a consumer rights agenda that is advanced by a proliferating homosexual mainstream opposed both to conservative claims that gays pose a threat to the social, moral, and political order and to progressive calls for a more radical restructuring of society.

Homoliberalism regulates intimacy by linking it with institutions of reproduction predicated on the accumulation and transfer of wealth. It calls on gays and lesbians to invest their time and energy in the American dream—in the nuclear family, the armed forces, and a Puritan work ethic— in order to earn political capital, receive dividends of social equality, and accrue interest in the form of economic prosperity. In this redemptive narrative of progress and upward mobility, citizenship is understood as a form of volunteerism organized around private interests rather than the collective good. Banking on the promise of personal advancement, homoliberals have relinquished their struggle for revolutionary change and the emancipation of all people. Previous historical efforts to challenge state oppression, redistribute wealth, and create alternative kinship structures have given way to a normative politics of liberal inclusion exemplified by the push for state legitimacy, an unabashed embrace of global capitalism, and an uncritical celebration of traditional “family values.”

Not surprisingly, homoliberals see gaiety as antithetical to their quest for legitimization. These are individuals whose pride consists in being “normal” and who desire to assimilate into existing structures and institutions, not challenge the discriminatory logic and repressive architecture of straight society. Eager to prove that they are “just like everyone else,” these homosexuals refrain from any behavior that might draw attention to their differences. Since acts of gaiety involve a flamboyant and flagrant flaunting one’s sexuality, those seeking accommodation within the system do just the opposite; they practice and promote acts of conformity. Believing that the faithful and earnest rehearsal of nonconfrontational displays of niceness, politeness, respectability, and dignity will confer on them the recognition and validation they crave, homosexuals have renounced gaiety in order to be taken seriously by mainstream society. This pragmatic approach to social change constitutes a hastened retreat from the pleasure principle advanced by activists in earlier decades, and it leeches the joy out of sexual politics.

The purpose of Acts of Gaiety is to investigate the historical emergence of homoliberalism and to reanimate gaiety as a political value for progres-

Preface xiii sive social activism. I argue here that homoliberalism’s precipitous rise in the United States is fueled by the increasing influence of LGBT communities’ individualizing and monetizing precepts, a condition buttressed by two interlinked forces: the mainstreaming of homosexuality and queer theorists’ amnesiac relation to gay history and lesbian feminist structures of feeling. This book examines alternate relations of affects and desires dissonant to neoliberal values, disciplinary regimes of the nation-state, and the circulation of capital. It asks how, and under what conditions, a renewed investment in gaiety might subtend the profound structural inequalities, economic disparities, and sobering images of sexual hegemony that accompany the normalization of lesbian and gay lives.

While this book seeks to counter the stultifying pragmatism of homoliberalism, it also serves as a rejoinder to the long-standing romance with mourning and melancholia in queer theory. Hurtful emotions, and the desire to avoid or eradicate them, play an important part in the creation of political worlds. Injury serves as a constitutive element of any disenfranchised group's identity; it is the experience of a traumatic past that gives the present meaning and provides the motivation to create a better future. This is especially true of feminism and queer theory, two utopian projects that are constituted by potent histories of violence, stigma, and suffering. One effect of sex and gender studies’ focus on loss, abuse, and abjection has been the privileging of negative affects, emotions that make us feel bad (e.g., shame, despair, and alienation) but are politically efficacious, as they move disenfranchised citizens to recognize, contest, and alter the social, legal, and cultural circumstances that cause them pain. This study redirects our attention to other aspects of the history of queer life by documenting and affirming the role of pleasure, humor, fun, and frivolity in shaping the ways sexual minorities come to understand ourselves and the roles in which we have been cast.

(Un)Adulterated Glee

Once an epithet for homosexuals and a derogatory term of phobic abuse, queer became, in the 1990s, the name of a militant political movement and trenchant theoretical critique of the normal, the normative, and disciplinary regimes of normalization. When activists and academics reclaimed the term queer, they did so to distance themselves not only from identity politics

Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4845841 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xiv Preface but from the positive and cheerful associations of the word gay and the rosy rhetoric of pride that came to characterize much of post-Stonewall era LGBT activism. Not surprisingly, AIDS organizations such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation were some of the first groups to take up and resignify this insult. Eschewing the affirmative orientation of gay liberation, queer theorists advanced a politics of radical negativity. This approach has achieved its most extreme articulation among so-called antirelational theorists (e.g., Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman), who view queer sex as imbricated with the death drive rather than an exuberant life force. Allergic to any kind of political teleology, including the notion that queer practices of life are, or should be, oriented toward a better tomorrow for sexual minorities, antirelational theorists are deeply suspicious of any forward-looking, hopeful, or utopian ambitions. They are skeptical of any praxis that advocates feeling better as a goal, as feeling better is too often tied to saccharine forms of sanguinity, normative notions of happiness, and capitalist models of accumulation and reproduction.

As intellectually stimulating as I find this polemical mode of scholarly inquiry—with its unsparing critique of homonormativity—I find its wholesale rejection of futurity untenable. As José Muñoz notes in Cruising Utopia, minoritarian subjects need the future, for it is how we stay attuned to desire.° He rejects the antirelational thesis on the ground that it cedes all articulations of futurity to a normative, white, reproductive sociality, and he advocates instead for a more expansive notion of futurity on behalf of those to whom it is systematically denied. This position resonates with Elizabeth Grosz’s assertion that an “indeterminate future,” a conceptual space created by “folding the past into the future, beyond the control or limit of the present,” is essential to any transformational political project.!° While Acts of Gaiety takes issue with what this author views as antirelational theorists’ overinvestment in negativity, it does not deny the constitutive nature of injury to LGBT history or the intrinsic value of bad feelings to queer activism. Like Muñoz, I see “a potentiality in negative affects that can be reshaped by negation and made to work in the service of enacting a mode of critical possibility.” !!

Gaiety is a technology of endurance and agency for “arranging grief” that enables sexual minorities to accept but also to alter our painful existence.!* What I am calling acts of gaiety are those performances and modes of performative activism that enable subaltern subjects, in the words of that fruity vixen Carmelita Tropicana, to “cry in one eye and laugh in the oth-

Preface XV er.”!3 While the case studies in this book all exhibit an antagonistic, menacing, or hostile reaction to oppression and are vehemently opposed to the social order as it currently exists, they all believe a better future is possible. The acts of gaiety that I survey here—Valerie Solanas’s “scummy” events, anti-marriage zaps by lesbian feminist collectives, Jill Johnston's gestures of joker citizenship, Hothead Paisan’s terrorist threats, and the Five Lesbian Brothers’ cynical tendentious jokes—offer alternative strategies to the dominant arrangements of feelings and relationships that govern and organize national life today. Allying these examples is the actors’ fierce commitment to mining the negative for pleasure and politics. Employing alternating tactics of menace and merriment, anger and affection, these acts of gaiety transform the space of negativity that shadows homosexual identity and suffuses lesbian lives with a performative force that gives rise to dreams of a better future. Arising as they do from tarrying so intensely with the negative, these dreams are as redolent with dark humor—violent imagery, homicidal fantasies of retributive justice, and psychotic breaks from reality—as they are with levity, hilarity, and (un)adulterated glee. Even the most misanthropic member of my archive, Valerie Solanas, insisted that “the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music—all with love. In other words, create a magic world.”'*

Highlighting the curative, as well as the corrosive, effects of lesbian feminist cultural production, Acts of Gaiety responds to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for a reparative praxis, and in particular to her sense that queer theory’s once productive, but now protracted, engagement with shame and suffering has contributed to a paranoid praxis so preoccupied with identifying new and ever more nefarious forms of injury and abjection, lurking in even the most hospitable places, that it has ceased to be a source of healing and sustenance. Sedgwick’s turn to the happy and autotelic affects (in her last book, Touching Feeling) expresses her desire for an erotic and ecstatic mode of critical engagement that can balm the wounds of homophobia, not to mention other forms of discrimination, and create possibilities for a pleasurable and sustainable life. My project advances a restorative hermeneutic that exposes the limits of traditional queer inquiry by conjuring, performing, and producing acts of gaiety, those embodied practices that are imbued with and generative of affective experiences of joy and jubilation, wishing and longing, felicity and good cheer.

Taking its cue from Sedgwick, Acts of Gaiety invites us to consider several questions. What has been sacrificed in privileging bad feelings to the

Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4845841 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xvi Preface exclusion of more positive affects? What has been lost in sex and gender studies by queer theory’s preoccupation with abjection, abuse, and sorrow at the expense of more euphoric emotional registers? How might reclaiming gaiety enable us to create new modes of resistance, new forms of community, and new opportunities for inquiry into LGBT history and culture? What does or might gaiety do, how, when, and for whom? Do all social agents have equal access to gaiety or does it constitute a form of privilege stratified by differences of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and able-bodiedness? Do queers who are clinically depressed, incarcerated, homeless, or in the hospital have anything to be cheerful about? What do we do when situations seem so dire that we cannot muster a smile? What use is gaiety when we do not feel like laughing? What are the consequences of acting “as if’ we are gay when we are not?

Grin and Bare It

Gaiety signifies a jocund and waggish response to the absurdity of the political, ideological, and environmental scenarios in which homosexuals have been cast. The Lavender Menace action showed members of the women’s congress just how ridiculous homophobia is by responding to a hateful and discriminatory situation with wit and a sense of amused indignation. This zap was performative in both senses of the term: it was “staged” and consequential. Protesters created a safe and inviting space for dykes to come out of the closet and for heterosexual women to openly support their homosexual colleagues. Through their comedic performance, lesbians seduced spectators into the drama of political change by staging a scenario of what a better world might look like and inviting the audience to play along. The ludic register of the event enabled the protesters to show that the real menace to the women’s movement was not the presence of lesbians but their absence. The goal of the zap was not simply to make lesbians visible or secure a place in the congress’s program but to challenge NOW’ integrationist logic and radically reconfigure the constitution, commitment, and priorities of the women’s liberation movement.

As part of the Lavender Menace demonstration, lesbians distributed copies of “The Woman-Identified Woman” manifesto.'® Hailed as one of the founding documents of radical feminism, “The Woman-Identified Woman” is a ten-paragraph political powder keg that defines sexuality as a political

Preface xvii choice rather than a biological imperative. The manifesto insists that a commitment to lesbian liberation is essential to the success and fulfillment of the women’s movement. The audience, won over by the demonstrators’ act of gaiety and compelled by the persuasive rhetoric of the manifesto, not only listened to the collective’s grievances, but they voted to make immediate and substantive alterations to the conference program, adding impromptu workshops on heterosexism and a women’s dance.!’ In addition, the congress assembly voted to adopt several resolutions advanced by the Lavender Menace, including the following motions: (1) whenever the label lesbian is used against the movement collectively or against women individually, it is to be affirmed not denied; (2) in all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as a legitimate method of contraception; and (3) all sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form of sexual expression and love.

The Lavender Menace’s zap catalyzed real and significant change. This action empowered individuals and groups that felt marginalized by the proceedings to speak out, and it fostered solidarity among various factions at the congress. Black women expressed their anger at the lack of attention paid to cultural and ethnic differences and to the unacknowledged and seemingly intractable racism within feminist circles. Working-class women also voiced concerns about the proceedings. They railed against the elitism of the event, which, like most feminist organizations, was dominated by middle-class constituents. By the end of the zap action, workshops on multiple forms of discrimination had been added to the program.!®

Kate Millett attributes the success of the action to the mood of gaiety it engendered. “There was fun in the Lavender Menace ‘zap,” she recalls, “impudence and humor. ”!° Redstockings’ Rosalyn Baxandall remembers the protest as “funny and wonderful,” while Ann Snitow, a founding member of the New York Radical Feminists, commented on the “wit and vaudevillian charm” of the demonstrators.” “It was great theater and good fun, and defused a potentially divisive issue,” remarked Anselma Dell’Olio, a founding member of New York NOW and the New Feminist Repertory Theater, which she started in 1969 with Rita Mae Brown, Jacqueline Ceballos, and Susan Vannucci. “In the end the innovators won,” Dell’Olio reminds us, “and the movement was not annihilated because of it.”*! The Lavender Menace zap “completely reshaped the relationship between lesbians and feminists for years to come,” and it is considered by many historians and activists to be one of the single most important actions of the feminist movement.” Yet, in

Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4845841 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xviii Preface spite of its historical import, many queers have never heard of this zap action or many of the other acts of gaiety I detail in this book. This is due, in part, to the fact that much of what was innovative, radical, and sex positive about lesbian feminism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s has been ignored, obscured, or absorbed by subsequent waves of activism.

The queer canon is almost devoid of representations of lesbian sexuality, and it is sorely lacking in depictions of women laughing, joking, or camping it up. This absence reinforces the stereotype that dykes are dowdy and dogmatic, solemn and strident, and that lesbians were incapable of thinking playfully or positively about sex and politics until the 1990s when queer men showed us how. The Lavender Menace zap manifested most of the attributes of queer activism and third-wave feminism decades before the Lesbian Avengers commandeered public space with their Dyke March and Riot Grrrls hijacked the alternative music scene. This act of gaiety challenges the notion that second-wave feminists did not engage in public forms of sexual expression, experiment with hilarious and hyperbolic self-fashioning, or explore the theatricalization of identity, as many queer theorists, both male and female, have charged. The Lavender Menace transformed spoiled identities, histories of abuse, and everyday outrages into resistant political practices through humor, wit, and parody. They confronted the deadly effects of homophobia through a resignification of injurious speech—lesbian, like dyke and queer, is an insult, a slur—and they countered stigma by reclaiming and celebrating it with in-yer-face displays of eroticism. Through acts of gaiety, the Lavender Menace and groups like it transformed wounds into weapons, pain into pleasure. The protesters’ seductive striptease made the shunned and shamed bodies of dykes visible within a symbolic order that not only devalues but pathologizes them. Lesbian sexuality was dramatized excessively as an oppositional strategy, creating an affective economy of dyke desire—a euphoric and sensuously charged atmosphere that permeated every dimension of the congress. Members of the Lavender Menace disrupted the drama of heteronormativity through the corporeal instantiation, in a public place, of a different modality of pleasure and political affiliation.

Allied Farces

In Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, Kate Davy argues that the suppression of dyke humor was essential to the emergence of queer theory as a novel idea

Preface xix in the 1990s. Drawing on Joe Roach’s assertion that cultural memory “is a process that depends crucially on forgetting,” she writes, “Eclipsing salient features of lesbian cultural production was the necessary precondition of a process that valorized queer as an entirely new phenomenon—a phenom-

»23 enon ostensibly antithetical to feminism. ””? “Such revisionist history,” notes

D e

Sue-Ellen Case in “Toward a Butch-Feminist Retro Future,” “promoted queer ascension through a valorization of gay male practices, arising from lesbian feminist ashes.”** Davy and Case suggest that there is something, if not insidious then certainly opportunistic, about the elision of lesbian gaiety from the annals of queer theory. The sex radicalism and ludic play of bar dykes, working-class butches, and lesbian separatists have been obscured to make it seem as if queers were making new discoveries, engaging in innovative practices, and developing unique tactics to combat age-old problems, even as they were rehearsing and recycling critical methods and political maneuvers pioneered by lesbians and feminists decades earlier.

“Gender deconstruction and parody and everything else Judith Butler ever wrote,” Jill Dolan has suggested, “were achieved with great orgasms of inventive, hilarious performance . . . at WOW Café.””? The WOW Café Theatre is an off-off Broadway performance space and social club that has served as a laboratory of lesbian and feminist gaiety for over three decades, though it rarely appears in mainstream or avant-garde histories of queer performance. An important, though often ignored, precursor to queer theory, and to Butlers scholarship in particular, Women’s One World (WOW) grew out of an international women’s theater festival organized in 1980 by a group calling itself the Allied Farces. Long before queer reentered our critical lexicon, “the wayward girls of WOW”—Split Britches (Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and Deb Margolin), Jordy Mark, Pamela Camhe, Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), Holly Hughes, Reno, and the Five Lesbian Brothers—were dramatizing the performative dimensions of theater and sexuality through their recognition that identities are transformed in real time by actors and spectators, in electrifyingly close proximity, who produce alternative, subversive interpretations of bodies and how they matter onstage and off.*°

Just as gender is ineluctably linked to performance, so, too, is desire. The women of WOW, writes Dolan, “insist upon the importance of desire as history, desire as future, on our importance as bearers and shapers of different, necessary cultural meanings, through the presence of our desire.”” These artists encourage us to indulge in and share “the pleasure we take in queer performance, because on some level, our pleasure is our resistance.”**

XX Preface

At WOW, pleasure is a hot commodity, a valuable and progressive form of political currency. While scholars of the WOW Café fully acknowledge that the collective is a direct descendent of a radical lesbian feminist sensibility that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, scant critical attention has been paid to mapping this influence, and precious little has been written about humorous and playful forms of lesbian art and activism in earlier decades. Before there were safe and welcoming spaces like WOW in which to act out lesbian plays for lesbian audiences, the figures in this study created sexual vernaculars for speaking lesbian desire in/as performance. These women understood the radical potential involved in the articulation and embodiment of lesbian desire in visible and public places.

Acts of Gaiety traces the impulses, desires, influences, and exigencies that conspired to make WOW an artistic possibility and material reality. While by no means an exhaustive or definitive history, this book brings to light lesbian performance and performative activism from the 1950s to the present that have been overlooked, occluded, and underdocumented by the amnesiac underpinnings of the queer turn and the historical selectivity of homoliberalism, both of which are characterized by an inattention to, if not a complete disregard for, satirical and subversive interventions staged by feminists and dykes in earlier epochs of sexual activism. I am not arguing for an unmediated or uninterrupted lineage from the performers in this book to the actors at the WOW Café; rather I am tracing a pattern of contagious laughter that reflects the infectious nature of a particular mode of political performance I term acts of gaiety. Through careful examination of a range of social and theatrical performances, I focus attention on several facets of lesbian gaiety (e.g., lavender menacement, ludicrousness, anarchic tendencies, practices of joker citizenship, and gallows humor) that serve as obverse values, political tactics, and aesthetic styles to those in common circulation today. Taken together, the acts of gaiety that populate this study constitute what Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of feeling,” one that constellates and crystallizes a radical and utopic social vision that could refocus and reinvigorate LGBT performance and activism.”°

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