Gender Performance Reconsidered

Soon after I met Richard Elovich in the late 1980s, we became friends and collaborators within the AIDS activist groups ACT UP and Gran Fury.  In 1991, I designed a card for Richard’s Bessie Award winning one-man show, Someone Else from Queens is Queer, and he memorably embodied Doctor Hulbert (a psychiatric trial witness that examined murderers Leopold and Loeb) in my first feature, Swoon (1992), which was filmed during this same time. In the summer of 1991, Richard invited me to guest edit and design the Movement Research Performance Journal, Issue #3. He had been the Executive Director of Movement Research and stepped down to serve as Chair of the Board. Cathy Edwards and Guy Yarden became MR’s Co-Directors. Guy was also a wizard in the (then) rare, dark arts of desktop publishing and was a key player in the issue’s production.  

I’m amazed, now, by those crowded months of summer and autumn 1991, at how many things seemed to happen at once.  After three decades in NYC, I now live in a tiny Catskills hamlet, and I wonder at the thousands of acres of meadow cleared by hand, or the miles of stone walls laid in the 18th and 19th centuries. People paradoxically seemed to have more time in an era of simpler technologies. The same now appears to be true, looking back at 1991.  Without cell phones, social media, or email, we lived analog, not digital, lives. We used phone trees, or fax and copy machines to get the word out; we found information on fliers posted in the street, or by word of mouth. Lo-fi, old school turned out to be remarkably effective. 

ACT UP protests were becoming ever more corporeal, with a massive die-in staged at Bush’s Kennebunkport summer home that Labor Day weekend. (A year later, on October 11, 1992, ACT UP staged a political funeral in Washington D.C., culminating in activists dumping the ashes of loved ones, dead from AIDS, on the White House lawn.) And exactly a year before that, on October 11, 1991, Anita Hill began her testimony against Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Joseph Biden. The world had only recently been swallowed by the 24-hour news cycle. I finished Swoon in my sixth-floor Attorney Street walk-up with the TV constantly on, leaning against the outrage I felt while I edited. 

If memory serves, we moved very quickly on Issue #3, gathering texts and images over a month or two, and putting the issue together in an intense stretch of about a week. Richard, Cathy, and Guys’ collaborations made it possible for me to connect with people I admired but didn’t know, including Jill Johnston, John Kelly, Kate Bornstein, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver.  I decided to title the issue “Gender Performance,“ inspired by the recent writing of Judith Butler, who asserted 

If gender is drag, and if it is an imitation that regularly PRODUCES the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (that array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation) the illusion of an inner depth.(1) 

Butler’s visionary writing mirrored what surrounded me already in my daily life or at night in the Pyramid Club, BoyBar, the Clit Club, or Meat: the inventive theatrics of dazzling friends like Mona Foot, Trash, or Ryan Landry. To me, these friends were so dazzling, I put them in a movie: superstars, all. The dance and performance world also seemed remarkably…queer to me, and I naively imagined a receptive reaction to what I also understood was a very provocative publication.  I think about 15,000 copies of the journal were printed and mailed. 

And then a bomb dropped.  Twenty days after the Anita Hill hearings began, on October 31, 1991, the notorious bigot, homophobic Senator Jesse Helms, waved a copy of Issue #3 on the Senate floor, declaiming, “I'm gonna hold it up briefly…and it is a blown-up picture of a vagina with some of the crudest language I ever saw…I was in the Navy for four years during World War II and I've heard it all and I've seen most of it, but I've never seen such rottenness as is being supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.”(2) 

I’m describing this moment as if I witnessed it in person, or saw it live on television, but no. I have, finally, watched dear, despicable, dead Jesse, now in 2024, through the miracle of C-Span. Without a readily accessible archive, citizens back then had a challenging time seeing exactly what their government was doing.  Helms was having a hissy fit since the NEA had granted Movement Research $4400 and some of that money had been spent on Issue #3. He complained bitterly about “NEA-funded porn star Annie Sprinkle—remember her?”  And then he hauled out his censorious laundry list: 

Pictures of surgically created hermaphrodites, that is to say, people with both male and female organs. It features nude photographs and articles featuring a variety of so-called gender-confused people including transvestites, transsexuals, crossdressers – and a new one on me: transgenderist, whatever that is. And then there's a fictional story written in the first person by Lazarus describing his homosexual liaisons with Jesus Christ both before and after the crucifixion. And there's a full-page devoted to what I briefly held up at the outset of my remarks, that says, “Read My Lips Before They're Sealed.” And then there's another ad urging readers to join a Washington, D.C. protest against President Bush's ‘murderous inaction on AIDS,’ quote unquote.(3)

Helms was enraged on multiple levels by the collective GANG’s piece Read My Lips (1991). Shocked by its cheeky escalation of Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), Helms lashed out, freshly sulking from criticisms of his Helms Amendment and defensive about the recent Rust v. Sullivan Supreme Court decision.(4) GANG’s pleasure-centered, affirmative outlook in the face of the Supreme Court’s legislation was too much for Jesse to bear: “Our bodies should be playgrounds, not just battlefields.” Helms failed to tack his amendment that restricted NEA funding onto a bill when the Senate voted 73-25 against him. 

The second bomb dropped soon after, in a public town hall at Judson, called in the wake of the NEA funding scandal and the pushback from Philip Morris, who was also a Movement Research funder. I remember my pulse racing, sitting next to Richard, facing an angry room. I don’t remember much objectively about that day, honestly. I was nervous as hell and felt like an interloper who had accepted a dinner invitation and then puked all over the sofa. Many in the audience challenged Richard and me. I do remember Bill T. Jones’s generosity and open reaction. Beyond my nerves, I was also disappointed, and angry, that what I thought was an amazing, even visionary, publication had been treated like inconvenient porn, best left stashed under the bed. 

With no traditional editor’s letter in Issue #3, some of the individual and collective contributions were more visible, or legible, than others. The project about Lazarus and Jesus that Helms scorned was created by Powers of Desire, a collective formed by artists John DiStefano, Renee Edington, and her husband Mat Francis.(5) When I recently wrote John about this issue, he told me Renee and Mat had died, two of the people who contributed that aren’t still with us.  John Lindell provided a whisper-thin column of text on the left margin, in counterpoint to a Kate Bornstein interview.(6) John’s work frequently reconfigured porn texts in the découpé or cut-up style pioneered by William Burroughs with surreal and sexy results. Five members of Gran Fury contributed to Issue #3. Artist Jeanne Dunning, who I knew from Chicago, contributed a series derived from her untitled project, here presented as “Engagements” and masquerading as a series of matrimonial announcements.(7) Dunning’s potential brides all sport ghostly mustaches, applied by the artist herself, and an uncanny touch that echoes Duchamp, while remaining distinctly Dunning’s own. 

It's exciting to revisit this vital time capsule. Jill Johnston describes how she became a dancer because she fell in love with her college teacher who later introduced her to choreographer José Limón.(8) Johnston describes how she didn’t fit in with Limón’s company, “stranded between the sexes,” and “sure I wanted to be one of his boys.” My own essay considering criminal Ed Gein connects to a piece by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver considering their work-in-progress Lesbians Who Kill (1992).(9) Intrigued by “female serial killer” Aileen Wuornos, Deb Margolin (the third member of Split Britches along with Peggy and Lois) wrote the script. A lesbian couple in the South, May and June are suspected of Wuornos’s crimes. June explains, “[w]e look to where our own images and histories intersect with the issue and find our own impulses in that intersection. In other words, looking for our own desire and impulse to kill that comes from our own image of abuse in our daily lives.” Chris Martin’s interviews and Annie Sprinkle’s photographs “shake up these categories, opening up new spaces for identity” and articulate a vision of a world we would later call nonbinary.(10) 

In October 2010, there was a panel that considered MRPJ @ 20, held at the Judson Memorial gymnasium. This time, instead of outrage, there was celebration. Again at the 30th Anniversary of Movement Research, celebration and reflection reigned. And here we are, generation to generation, still considering the complexities and implications of Issue #3.  What an honor it is to be part of this conversation. 

One of my favorite contributions in Issue #3 comes from writer Donald Woods, who captures the encroaching frailty of age, seen and experienced across gender. At very nearly 62 years old, these observations carry new weight: 

I am aging fast in the sixth-floor window. Travelling with the woman instead of windswept on the motorbike with my arms circling his waist. I am with her on the stairs stopping for air and hearing sounds in the night that I used to doze through and sleepwalking to the toilet to pee. …I walk slowly like a dignified old man and see my self as this woman struck by young vital endless traffic, snap flash movements and jolting taxicabs. (11) 

1. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubortination,” ed. Diana Fuss, INSIDE/OUT: LESBIAN THEORIES, GAY THEORIES (New York: Routledge, 1991), 28. 
2. "Funding for National Endowment for the Arts,” October 31, 1991. https://www.c-span.org/video/?22442-1/funding- national-endowment-arts. 
3. Ibid.
4. Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173, was a case in the United States Supreme Court that upheld Department of Health and 
5. Human Services regulations prohibiting employees in federally funded family-planning facilities from counseling a patient on abortion.
6. John Lindell, untitled, 16.
7. Jeanne Dunning, untitled, 18–19.
8. Jill Johnston, “How Dance Artists and Critics Define Dance As Political,” 2–3.
9. Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, “May Interviews June,” 4–5. Tom Kalin, “Gender Performance,” 5. 
10. Chris Martin, “World’s Greatest Cocksucker,” 6–7. Photographs by Annie Sprinkle, 6–7, 14–15. 
11. Donald Woods, untitled, 15.