Feminism is famously the belief that women are equal to men; that women are the moral and legal equals of men; that every woman, like every man, has the right to dream and to achieve her dreams. If this notion of equality before the law seems so obvious as to hardly be worth stating, recall that the right “to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was not orginally extended to African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and women of any ethnicity; that the struggle to realize for all the freedom initially claimed for a few defined our history for over two centuries, and continues to define it today. Slavery was once legal and constitutional; not only legal and constitutional but considered natural, and, therefore, inevitable, moral and good. Slavery and racism were the basis for a huge, richly complex, enormously productive economic and social system. Likewise, to discriminate on the basis of gender was not only legal and constitutional, but natural, therefore, inevitable, moral and good. This discrimination structured families, schools, jobs, religion, politics, war, shopping, clothing, entertainment. You name it sexism and racism were there and not only present, but fundamental. Now things are different. Now, we live in the ruins of legally sanctioned racism and sexism. You cannot legally discriminatte on the basis of gender or race. That changed--not without a great of struggle, even bloodshed and death, but it changed. Yet, just as there was no historical necessity for slavery, there is no historical necessity to feminism, to civil rights, to freedom of any kind. Democracy is not inevitable. The good guys do not always win. The way things are is not the way things have to be; nor is it the way things will be. Change is a constant and it’s not always for the best. That hundreds of people could be arrested and jailed and that for weeks, and, in many cases, months we not be told who they were or what crimes, if any, they had committed would seem impossible in America. Yet, this is exactly what happened after September 11th. Lucky for us, our system corrected itself. A federal judge in Cincinatti recently declared that kind of secrecy to be both anti-democratic and unconstituional and ordered the government to reveal the names of those it had arrested, what their crimes were, and where they were being held.

I think I came to feminism through children’s theatre. I grew up in Arkansas, in and around Little Rock. In Little Rock there was an institution called the Arkansas Arts Center Children’s Theatre, a group I was lucky enough to be affiliated with as a teenager. This theatre was the organizing principle of my social and intellectual world. When I was working on a play, I was happy. If I wasn’t working on a play, I was hanging out at the theatre, wishing I was working on a play. I worked on the shows, on the tech crews, helping build sets, hang lights, run the lights, stage manage etc. The tech crews were overseen by two guys named John, John Cook and John Pagan. Most of the people on the crews were young women, very bright young women, who were also my friends. Mr. Cook and Mr. Pagan gave these young women a lot of responsibility. That is to say, they respected them. The result of that Mr. Cook and Mr. Pagan’s respect for these women was that I became accustomed to working with and for women. By “for” I mean that my friend Julie or Lori might be the stage manager for a show and the stage manager effectively runs a show once it opens. The stage manager is the boss backstage. Mr. Cook and Mr. Pagan were very good about stepping back and letting us run things, but they were also good about letting people know that they did not tolerate any sort of disrespect of Julie or Lori or anyone else. I got used to the idea of women not only being equal, but in a hierarchy, more than equal. At the children’s theatre four things were prized: talent, beauty, creativity, and intelligence. None of these things are given to people equally. Nor is the theatre democratic about the opportunities it affords people. A talented actress is probably going to get more parts than one not; beauty may win over talent. The best actress might not be the smartest person as measured by grades or standardized tests. Creative kids thrived more in the theatre than those who weren’t. And so on. There were plenty of young women far more talented than I in a dozen ways; their were fiercely intelligent young women who were better than I at say, math or chemistry, or could read French and so on. And they weren’t shy about their accomplishments. I learned, often with pain to my ego, that depending on the room I was in the smartest or most talented or wittiest or best read person in it might be named Carabeth or Julie or Lori not Bill. On the other hand, this fact taught me not only respect women, but to compete with them and earn their respect. In this way I became used to the idea of women as equals. What you get used to is what you assume. I have all my adult life worked with and for women and, generally, happily so.

Theatre also exposed me to another idea that has had profound importance to me: life is a kind of theatre; that even in what passes for normal life people are always acting out scripts; scripts they write; scripts they have been given; scripts they love; scripts they hate; scripts they don’t understand or don’t want to understand, even scripts which admit of no understanding: this doesn’t prevent people from playing them perfectly—not understanding the script is the point. Moreover, that people are in dozens different plays with many different scripts, i.e. the school script; the work script; the home script; the relationship script; the by myself script. In short, that there is no such thing as normal. Rather there are popular and unpopular scripts. The popular scripts we call normal. The unpopular ones, “deviant.” Even more subversively, the idea that are no true scripts, no script that is not a script. Everything is in some sense made up. Theatre taught me this in a number of ways. One of the goals of theatre is to imitate life, through acting or at creating a life-like set or natural lighting, etc. This means studying “normal” life to learn its tricks, i.e. how to appear normal or, if you like, “real.” Do this long enough and you start have an ironic distance from “normal.” Even real life looks staged, sometimes very badly staged. You become conscious of how you and other people shape situations, environments to appear normal, be normal. We all do this, but theatre can give you a heightened sense of it. And it may be one reason that theatre people often transgress the bounds of what is considered normal; they do it because they realize that normal is just another play and often not a very interesting one; that there are many other possible scripts. For me this was born home in a very personal way when I had my first crush on another boy. That was clearly not normal. It was in fact very upsetting. But over time I came to see that heterosexual relations were not so much natural and, therefore, inevitable, as normal and, therefore, scripted. Heterosexual love is a very popular script and can be a very good and meaningful one. But it is only one script. Homosexual love is another, equally good and meaningful. Likewise, what is masculine and what is feminine and appropriate to men the relations between and among women is almost entirely scripted. Once you believe that, the idea that women are naturally inferior to men seems absurd.

Being gay is something you experience in your body, i.e. sexual desire. Sex is something you do through your body and the body of another. Feminism is very much concerned with women’s bodies. This is because for so long women were defined by their bodies, i.e. as the means of reproducing children and as the means of sexual pleasure for men. Rape is violence done to a woman through her body; it is an attempt to use her sexuality to degrade her. Calling a woman a slut or a whore is a means of degrading her by claiiming that she is using her body inappropriately or illegally or both. Likewise, gay men and women have been defined by our bodies, e.g. calling a guy a cocksucker is to degrade him by making claims about how he uses his body. I was once chased by a bunch teens in a car and threatened to be beaten up, etc. because I was holding my boyfriend at the time’s hand on a late night walk, e.g. I was doing something with my male body (holding the other guy’s hand) and another male body that I was not supposed to do. What these guys in the car were claiming, the argument they were making, was that the only appropriate way for a male to touch a gay male is to beat them up. This is called fag bashing, a not uncommon way for heterosexual men to use and abuse the bodies of gay men. Likewise, when someone derisively calls me a fag, they are attemtping to degrade me by alluding to something I do with my body: sexual, or simply the way I am walking or talking, but, finally, it’s about what I am doing with my body. It can’t be about what I’m thinking. Likewise, It used to be illegal for men to dress in women’s clothing, e.g. to put a certain kind of cloth, cut and sewn in a certain way, on their bodies. It is still illegal in many states for two consenting adults of the same sex (and in some states of different sex) to have oral sex. A lot of the hysteria around AIDS was rooted in loathing of gay bodies—because AIDS was transmitted sexually; because it manifested itself in so many and so horrible ways in and on the body. What these guys hated, really, was that I was two things: one that I was using body as a woman, i.e. as the object of male desire. Two: that I could turn my gaze on them and simply by looking at them, turn them into women. I gradually came to see that women’s fight to control their bodies was my fight, too. That if a woman did not have the right to control access to her body, I certainly wouldn’t have the right.