O Solo Homo

The New Queer Performance

Holly Hughes, David Román, Holly Hughes, David Román

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802196637
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"Fresh, funny, sad, and sexy... [A] diverse collection of good, honest, and soundly structured monologue writing" (David Drake, Obie Award–winning actor and playwright). O Solo Homo is a diverse, definitive, and hugely entertaining collection representing the cutting edge of queer solo performance. The pieces in O Solo Homo touch nerves that run deep—from sex, politics, community, and health to the struggles and joys of family, friends, and lovers. Peggy Shaw, of Split Britches, revisits how she learned to be butch. The late Ron Vawter, of the Wooster Group, juxtaposes the lives of two very different men who died of AIDS: diva filmmaker Jack Smith and Nixon crony Roy Cohn. Tim Miller, one of the NEA 4, surveys the landscape of gay desire before and after the advent of AIDS. And Carmelita Tropicana, the "national songbird of Cuba, " makes an unforgettable, hilarious return to Havana. "A funny, personal, powerful primer of identity, performance and politics. O Solo Homo is a must read." —Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of How I Learned to Drive "Naked passion, fiery intellect and dissatisfaction with the status quo mark all good performance art. This collection embodies those elements at their best. Each piece makes you sit up and listen." —Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories " O Solo Homo represents the most significant and vibrant cross-section of queer solo performance since the gospels. A must-have field guide for the amateur and professional alike. Ten thumbs up!" —The Five Lesbian Brothers

skin & ornaments

CRAIG HICKMAN

Notes on skin & ornaments

skin & ornaments, cover & artifice, cocoa & gold, cells & bangles …

I do that quite often, actually. Play the game of word association with titles, ideas, lines of poetry. It keeps me connected to the language of the experience, the feeling, the fleeting thought. So much of what ends up in my performative writing comes to me in flashes. So much more of what ends up in my performative writing comes to me in full waves, crashing over my body like surf. I feel like I’m drowning. The only way out, the only way to fight the waves, is to move up from under them, twisting and contorting, grasping and reaching. With each movement, a new idea, with each new idea, another phrase … or word. And I’m back, again playing word association games, and before I know it, boom!, a verse appears, a character emerges, a story unfolds.

Where does this all come from? The Universe. My experience. Someone else’s experience. I do not believe that the imagination is as limited as it may seem to those who believe it can only rearrange bits and pieces from one’s own experience and spit that out as something resembling novelty. I believe artists—all artists, but especially we performative artists—are rearranging bits and pieces of not only our own experience, but those experiences that come through us from the richness of a vast Universe. Through some almost inexplicable properties of theoretical physics, my body, my imagination, my performance, can know something that is unknowable. Unknowable to me in this realm, but not to the wavelengths in the all-knowing Universe. My own wavelengths vibrate with those “unknown” wavelengths until my wavelengths get familiar with them. Maybe they have coffee, maybe they fuck. Whatever they do they do get familiar. From this, I have something—so much more—to offer the reader, the seer, another revelator.

When I started writing skin & ornaments, I did not know this. I thought that the most I might accomplish was the bold, daring act of telling my story. Putting a voice to my experience. Letting those who would come to see/hear/feel me know what it’s been like for this particular black queer artist. I was encouraged to do this, you see. By Brian Freeman, Thomas Grimes, Essex Hemphill, Djola Branner, Eric Gupton, Patricia Smith, Lamont Steptoe, Jeff Armstead, Vance Deare, and so many more mentors and friends, whose names I sometimes forget, but never their spirits, many of whom are now ancestral.

So I did what I was encouraged to do.

And out came Strange Fruit, named after the title of the song included in the piece. And Strange Fruit became school boys & brothers & juneau park & private storms. Still, there was something missing. But before it became those pieces with that something still missing, it was just Strange Fruit. And clinging to the peel of the fruit was masks. And they were both included in the original choreodrama Through the Fire by Brothers du Jour. Brothers du Jour. Another title that rolled off my lips during a game of foreplay, I mean, uh … wordplay. Thomas Grimes, the late Jeff Armstead, and me (or is it 1?): Brothers du Jour. We took Boston through the fire in June of 1992, and again in April of 1993. In between that, we burnt up New York and Louisville. In May of 1994 AIDS burned out Jeff, and Brothers du Jour became legendary, if I may use that word in this context. But Thomas said, “Craig, between Strange Fruit and masks, you’ve got yourself a one-man show!”

I did not know this, you see, but the Universe did.

And the Universe whispered into my ear, and out came April Marie Lynette Jones, who couldn’t stop talking her shoptalk. (And she’s still talking. Look for the novel SisterGirl! sometime in the near future. As soon as I can get her to shut up!) And then I dreamed childless mother, had a psychic vision of a boy beating drums, and along came the virtuoso. I guess the vision was so psychic, you see, that the first time I performed it, someone accused me of plagiarizing the author of the poem “A Woman Is a Drum.” (I’d never heard of the poem or the woman. A year later I received as a birthday gift a volume of her poetry, which included that poem. Don’t you know who I’m talking about? If not now, you will soon.)

But before all this, I bought Ebony magazine one cold October day. I never buy Ebony magazine. And there on page seventy-nine was an announcement about a literary award to be decided from a competitive short-story writing contest. And I thought, I can do that. I’m gonna win an award! Even though I’d never written a literary short story in my life! I guess the Universe spoke through me again. For after three intense weeks of writing, naked at the keyboard, daddy’s boy was born. And win an award he did. Out of more than 2,500 submissions. But, before the award came (a lovely piece of change, I might say), I shared the story with Tim Miller, who just happened to be performing in town the very week after I completed the story. And he said, “You can perform that.”

I did not know this, you see, but the Universe did.

And the Universe whispered into my ear once again, and out came Jeffrey Dahmer, still alive at the time, and his need to make some sense of his unconscionable crimes—for himself, if no one else—in deliverance. With two packs of cigarettes (all smoked up by the time I was done—and I do mean done, as in roasted), a shaky hand, and tear after tear raining down, sitting at a bar in a Cambridge poetry-slam lounge, I channeled Dahmer. The cannibal. The killer. The man. Why? Because the Universe said so.

And so I did what the Universe said.

Then, after years and years and years, I saw my Jonathan, and out came this is not your monologue! and post coitus interruptus. We took some liberties with those two, but hey, when your waves are mingling with so many other waves, a few liberties are bound to be found up in the mix.

During, at the same time, while (whichever word fits most appropriately) this was all happening, I was performing different versions of skin & ornaments around New England, with the help of Michael Harrington, a brilliant “script structurer.” (He’s a writer and director, but his primary role in my process was “script structurer.” He tossed the pieces in the air, and the order in which they fell became the overall piece’s structure. He was also a good “movement editor.” Don’t ask, don’t tell. Let’s just say that whatever movement he didn’t edit, I imagined or dreamed. And whatever movements I had imagined or dreamt, I placed ever so delicately into the performances. And if I didn’t imagine or dream a movement, I used mirrors. Lots of mirrors. In every room of my house, and everybody else’s house, and restaurants, and public bathrooms, and well … you get the picture, don’t you?) It’s been a while since 1967, and my memory fails me sometimes. All that brewery smoke in Milwaukee got to me at a really early age, so it’s hard to know for sure which version was performed where. Not that it really matters, anyway: jazz is jazz—you never get the same interpretation twice.

But I do remember this: In 1996, the National Black Arts Festival invited me to perform skin & ornaments in Atlanta. I was floored. But wait—there’s more. They asked me to consider presenting my work as a tribute to Essex Hemphill, who had read at a previous festival.

Essex Hemphill. Mentor. Friend. Diva. Warrior. Fallen Brother. Angel.

How could I say no?

But before I got to Atlanta, the Universe whispered in my ear yet again: “It’s not finished.” And in walked the visual artist boyfriend-at-the-time who photographed divas and masks and trees, and cast wax sculptures (votives, actually, complete with wicks that I lit during the performances) of my body, and traveled to Atlanta with me in order to operate the slides and help me get it right.

For Essex.

We did.

And it was finished.

The sense of completion that took over me when I finished the first of those two performances is indescribable. Well … let me try: Floating? Washed over by a warm waterfall? Whole? Integrated? Blessed by a Voodoo priestess? Visited by Ed McMahon on sweepstakes-winner-announcement day?

Nope. I was right: indescribable. Only the Universe knows how I felt. Or maybe, if you open up and channel well enough, you can know, too.

Since Atlanta, skin & ornaments and I have been to the 1997 Gay & Lesbian Performance Festival at Oak Street Theater in Portland, Maine; the 1996 Ways In Being Gay Festival in Buffalo, New York; the 1996 CSPS New Performance Festival in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the 1996 OUTCharlotte Festival of Lesbian and Gay Culture in Charlotte. (Now I remember! Before Atlanta, we did the 1994 T.W.E.E.D. New Works Festival in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1994, and the 1995 Out...