Throughout the processes of creation, Paul and myself constantly used Queer/Crip not only as an autobiographical statement of identity, but as a compositional method.
How could we queer an already queer play? How could we bend it, straighten it? How could we break it? How could we crip it?
These are questions we creatively responded to as part of our dramaturgical process- what happens when you queer a play about queer men? What happens when you play it straight, does it become something else or does it remain the same?
Due to the script being set during the Holocaust in Dachau, (a concentration camp in southern Germany, intended for political prisoners), following the lives of two gay men, Max and Horst, it seemed natural to want to perform this play.
As both myself as a gay man, and Paul, a sufferer of Multiple Sclerosis, could have been imprisoned in a concentration camp, we felt that although there was a lot of autobiographical material we could have written alongside the play to perform or recite as spoken word, it was more effective to talk about it in terms of identity, in 1 solo section each, rather than reciting personal tales and not touching upon the material present in the play text.
Donald E Hall describes queer as an adjective;
‘”Queer” can be a lot of things, but it cannot be unwilling to affiliate with others who are uncomfortable with or oppressed by a sometimes violent, sometimes dreary and debilitating dominant culture. In Sedgwick’s words “Queer” is a continuing moment, movement, motive- recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across’ (Hall, 2003,12)
There is an interesting, paradoxical link between queer and crip theories; both appear to have very similar groundings of difference, politics of the self and the body both on and off stage, as Carrie Sandahl writes for GLQ: a journal of gay and lesbian studies:
‘As the interdisciplinary field of disability studies develops its own theoretical paradigms, it necessarily borrows from various sources. Such borrowing means that disability scholars have not had to reinvent the wheel but have been able to build on the conceptual foundations of identity-based theories that have grown out of other interdisciplinary fields, such as gender studies and critical race studies. But disability studies offers as much to its predecessors as it borrows from them. This essay explores the productive reciprocity between queer theory and disabil- ity studies, queer identity and crip identity, queer activism and crip activism.
Those who claim both identities may be best positioned to illuminate their connections, to pinpoint where queerness and “cripdom” intersect, sepa- rate, and coincide. Crip, queer, solo autobiographical performance artists, who explicitly identify themselves as both crip and queer in their work, provide us not only with a verbal articulation of these issues but with an embodied text. The the- ater scholar Jill Dolan notes that live performance offers a forum for “embodying and enacting new communities of performers and spectators, by actualizing the potential of well-meaning political buttons that two-dimensionally purport to ‘celebrate diversity.’” She reminds us that the theater is a “place to experiment with the production of cultural meanings, on bodies willing to try a range of different significations for spectators willing to read them.”
As academic corollaries of minority civil rights movements, queer theory and disability studies both have origins in and ongoing commitments to activism. Their primary constituencies, sexual minorities and people with disabilities, share a history of injustice: both have been pathologized by medicine; demonized by religion; discriminated against in housing, employment, and education; stereo- typed in representation; victimized by hate groups; and isolated socially, often in their families of origin. Both constituencies are diverse in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, and other respects and therefore share many members (e.g., those who are disabled and gay), as well as allies. Both have self-consciously created their own enclaves and vibrant subcultural practices.
Perhaps the most significant similarity between these disciplines, however, is their radical stance toward concepts of normalcy; both argue adamantly against the compulsion to observe norms of all kinds (corporeal, mental, sexual, social, cultural, subcultural, etc.). This stance may even be considered their raison d’être, since both emerged from critiques levied against the normalizing tendencies of their antecedents. Queer theorists critiqued feminist, gay and lesbian, and even gender studies for excluding various sexual constituents (transsexuals, bisex- uals, transgendered people, S/M practitioners, nonheteronormative straights, etc.) and for advocating inclusion and representation in, rather than replacement of, existing social structures. Disability scholars critiqued the fact that disability had long been relegated to academic disciplines (primarily medicine, social sciences, and social services) that considered disabilities “problems” to be cured and the disabled “defectives” to be normalized, not a minority group with its own politics, culture, and history.’ Sandahl, C. 2003.
Subsequently. what we needed to do was to make it queer but not queer, and this was done through playing it straight to undermine the homosexual attributes of the play- making Max and Horst have to pretend to be gay to survive in a world where gay is the norm and straight is the deviance. Through doing this, the work was still very queer, not just in terms of sexuality but we used queering as a compositional rule- making material out to be what it isn’t, subverting and flipping the norm on its head and creating our own norm, our own territory in which we, as 21st century, 24/28 year olds, sit, not only as artists but as people. We wanted to make a performance that explored the themes of the holocaust, of homosexuality/disability/queerness/not fitting in, but we did not want this performance to be a sob story, and we did not want the audience to come out of the performance feeling that we were lecturing them about how abhorrent the Holocaust was.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the punishment and persecution of Male homosexuals throughout the Holocaust and The Third Reich, and the burning of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s books:
‘On May 6, 1933, Nazis ransacked the “Institute for Sexual Science” in Berlin; four days later, as part of large public burnings of books viewed as “un-German,” thousands of books plundered from the Institute’s library were thrown into a huge bonfire. The institute was founded in 1919 by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 -1935). It sponsored research and discussion on marital problems, sexually transmitted diseases, and laws relating to sexual offenses, abortion, and homosexuality. The author of many works, Hirschfeld, himself a homosexual, led efforts for three decades to reform laws criminalizing homosexuality. (In 1933, Hirschfeld happened to be in France, where he remained until his death.)’
Hirschfeld’s work was monumental to the LGBT and Transgender communities; he set about trying to decriminalise homosexuality and make it clear that those who were not heterosexual were still normal human beings. However, as the Nazi party disagreed, they took further, harsher action.
‘In 1934, a special Gestapo (Secret State Police) division on homosexuals was set up. One of its first acts was to order the police “pink lists” from all over Germany. The police had been compiling these lists of suspected homosexual men since 1900. On September 1, 1935, a harsher, amended version of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, originally framed in 1871, went into effect, punishing a broad range of “lewd and lascivious” behavior between men. In 1936, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler created a Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion: Special Office (II S), a subdepartment of Executive Department II of the Gestapo. The linking of homosexuality and abortion reflected the Nazi regimes population policies to promote a higher birthrate of its “Aryan” population. On this subject Himmler spoke in Bad Tölz on February 18, 1937, before a group of high-ranking SS officers on the dangers both homosexuality and abortion posed to the German birthrate. Under the revised Paragraph 175 and the creation of Special Office IIS, the number of prosecutions increased sharply, peaking in the years 1937-1939. Half of all convictions for homosexual activity under the Nazi regime occurred during these years. The police stepped up raids on homosexual meeting places, seized address books of arrested men to find additional suspects, and created networks of informers to compile lists of names and make arrests. […] Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.’
These men were originally branded with the number 175 and a black dot on their uniform, however this was changed to the Rosa Winkel, a pink triangle patch being the identification marker for a homosexual prisoner. These men were incarcerated because they were seen as weak and useless, especially as they could not produce more of the Aryan race which the Nazi party were so desperately attempting to create.
This research was embodied throughout the creative process for myself, as an artist, my work is politically charged as well as autobiographical. This research was embodied textually during my autobiographical section;
‘Dirty. Dirty dirty dirty.
You’re so dirty. You’re clean, because you sleep with men and you’re a woman.
You’re clean, because you’re a man who sleeps with women.
You’re a little dirty, because you sleep with both.
Dirty.
I’m dirty.
One day, you’ll grow to love your dirt. Or, maybe, you’ll hate your dirt.
I love my dirt. It’s part of me, and I can’t help that.
I scrub and I scrub and I scrub and I scrub, but the dirt doesn’t wash away. It’s ingrained in me.
Maybe I’m dirty because I sleep with men, or maybe you’re dirty and I’m clean?
No. I’m dirty.
Dirty.
Dirty, Dirty.
Dirty.’
Hall, Donald E. 2003. Queer Theories Palgrave Macmillan. p12.
Sandahl, C. 2003. Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance. GLQ: A Journal for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Issue 9, 1-2. Duke University Press.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Persecution of Homosexuals. Available: https://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/homosexuals-victims-of-the-nazi-era/persecution-of-homosexuals. Last accessed 21st May 2018.