The Other Tennessee: Staging Queer Counterpublics at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (original) (raw)

The Queer Tourist in ‘Straight’(?) Space: Sexual Citizenship in Provincetown

The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations: Annual Review

Provincetown, Massachusetts USA, a rural out-of-the-way coastal village at the tip of Cape Cod with a yearround population of approximately 3,500, has 'taken off' since the late 1980s as a popular GLBTQ tourist destination. Long tolerant of sexual minorities, Provincetown transitioned from a Portuguese-dominated fishing village to a popular 'queer' gay resort mecca, as the fishing industry deteriorated drastically over the twentieth century. Today Provincetowners rely mainly on tourists-both straight and gay-who enjoy the seaside charm, rustic ambience, and a healthy dose of non-heternormative performance content, in this richly diverse tourist milieu. As Provincetown's popularity as a GLBTQ tourist destination increased throughout the 1980s and '90s, new forms of "sexual outlaw" lifestyles, including the leather crowd and the gay men's "tourist circuit," have appeared in Provincetown, which challenge heteronormative standards, social propriety rules, and/or simply standards of "good taste," giving rise to moral outrage and even at time an apparent homophobic backlash. This conduct interrogates how far citizens are willing to go to tolerate non-heteronormative (and at times outlaw) sexual conduct, produced by sexual minorities whose lifestyle is on the edge of the law and sometimes outside it altogether. This paper will analyze sexual tourism in Provincetown, to interrogate sexual citizenship, and both contradictions and possibilities for overcoming the sexual divide.

Political Stages: Gay Theatre in Toronto, 1967 - 1985

2014

This dissertation constructs an analytical history of gay theatre in Toronto from 1967 to 1985, a period that saw the radical reformation of the city’s gay community and its not-for-profit theatre industry. It undertakes this research using a cultural materialist theoretical frame that enables it to recover the history of gay theatre in Toronto and connect this history to the contemporary development of gay community and theatrical production in the city. By recovering the history of gay theatre in Toronto, this dissertation demonstrates its seminal importance to the history of gay culture in Canada, and to Canadian theatre history. To construct its narrative of gay theatre history in Toronto, this dissertation focuses on three pioneering gay playwrights, John Herbert, Robert Wallace, and Sky Gilbert, historically contextualizing these within three distinct eras of contemporary gay history and Toronto theatre history. Chapter one addresses the years prior to the decriminalization of...

Geneva M. Gano, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos

American Literary History

Reviewed by Kathryn S. Roberts, University of Groningen Geneva Gano's account of literary modernism is one for our classrooms: richly situated in local history and global flows, and ever shadowed by racialized violence. We learn about a 1916 benefit performance in the Cape Cod village of Provincetown, which included a play by the radical writer John Reed and a minstrel show, in which eminent painters from the art colony "sang and danced in blackface" (151). Later, we glimpse John Sloan's gorgeous 1927 etching, "Indian Detour," lampooning the "busloads of smartly dressed tourists" who smoke and gossip over a ceremonial corn dance in a New Mexican Pueblo (187). And this 1934 scene, from the end of the second chapter: Langston Hughes flees Carmel after hearing that his life is threatened by anticommunist old timers at the California art colony (86). Minstrel shows, etchings, and Red Scares are artifacts of a museum past-yet, in different costume, these scenarios could be ripped from our headlines. Like the best literary historical scholarship, this study plunges us into a past that is starkly other, but, at the same time, uncannily familiar, and thus confronts us with our own historicity.

Travelling in Time to Cape Breton Island in the 1920s: Protest Songs, Murals and Island Identity

London Journal of Canadian Studies, 2015

Islands are places that foster a unique sense of place-attachment and community identity among their populations. Scholarship focusing on the distinctive values, attitudes and perspectives of ‘island people’ from around the world reveals the layers of meaning that are attached to island life. Lowenthal writes: ‘Islands are fantasized as antitheses of the all-engrossing gargantuan mainstream-small, quiet, untroubled, remote from the busy, crowded, turbulent everyday scene. In reality, most of them are nothing like that. …’ 1 1 D. Lowenthal, ‘Islands, Lovers and Others’, The Geographical Review 97 (2007): 203. Islands, for many people, are ‘imagined places’ in our increasingly globalised world; the perceptions of island culture and reality often differ. Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in eastern North America, a locale with a rich history of class struggle surrounding its former coal and steel industries, provides an excellent case study for the ways that local history, collective me...

Mother Goose’s Map Tabloid Geographies and Gay Male Experience in 1950s Toronto

This article is an exploration of the ways that gay men negotiated and created urban spaces in 1950s Toronto. A significant part of this everyday encounter was the proliferation of tabloid journalism that exploited and mapped out transgressive domains of same-sex erotics for its readers. Using a variety of sources, such as oral histories, government documents, and these local newspaper tabloids, the author traces the contours of same-sex urban spaces, their conceptual and geographical linkages, and their relationship to the larger society within which they are set. Ultimately, the author shows how the securing of these spaces was deeply implicated in existing class and gender hierarchies that simultaneously served as places of resistance and domination.