Building Theatrical Bridges in Queer and Trans Ohio

On my commute to teach, amidst the soybean fields and crystalline ponds of Ohio I see a slew of political signs. “Trump save America” appears with a photo of the President surviving an assassination attempt. “Protect life” hovers on plywood in hand-painted red and blue letters. I drive from my queer suburb of Cleveland (rumored to have made it into Trivial Pursuit in the eighties as the United States city with the highest per capita rate of same-sex couples) to Oberlin College (one of the first racially integrated and gender inclusive institutions in the country). In between, I pass rural communities, exurbs, and de-industrializing steel towns. My electric car crosses bridges over the political signs below.

Here, I make queer and trans theatre. I have fun doing it. Over the past few years, I’ve directed Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play, which is about queer adoption, a transmasculine boxer, and Asian American experience in white places. I staged Stonewallin’, my original nonbinary coming-of-age story set in the American South as millennial witches accidentally bring a Confederate monument to life and confront painful histories. I teach queer and trans performance history, and I mentor a stellar group of undergraduate playwrights, many of whom write about queer and trans experience. It’s a great place to be. But the political signs from my commute linger in my imagination, even if they disappear when I step onto the quads of my lefty liberal arts campus.

I often think about whether my work at Oberlin is in dialogue with the rural and exurban communities surrounding my college. In Ohio, the state legislature has launched a siege on queer and trans life, from a bathroom bill applied to college campuses to rollbacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at public universities. Being at a private institution, I am relatively sheltered from censorship, and I feel a commitment to support my queer and trans students and to give them context about the communities around them. At the same time, I want to make theatre that supports the communities around Oberlin and gives them context about my queer and trans students. I feel like a bridge.

At Oberlin, which has some of the lowest rates of Pell Grant recipients in the state (a metric for measuring financial need), many students come from wealthy, urban, Democratic strongholds. How might my teaching and directing cater not only to students from big cities (often with a fluency in queer and trans vocabularies) but also to students and audiences—rural or not—newer to an evolving lexicon of gender and sexuality? I want to show that there are grounds for political solidarity with Ohio’s rural and exurban communities.

The framework I keep coming back to is a just transition, a phrase used in the environmental justice movement. A just transition captures the idea of transition away from fossil fuels that still supports the lives of those who may have been involved in the fossil fuel economy. We want a transition that gives jobs to former coal miners, supports farmers to make shifts in a changing climate, and does not leave behind those who can’t afford electric cars. How might our transition to a more queer and trans world similarly empower those who fumble around pronouns or who have a narrow definition of the family? What can queer theatre offer those whose economies rely on normative heterosexual reproduction to support labor power? A just transition builds alliances across socioeconomic status to protect the vulnerable. How might theatre build a similar bridge?

Consciously or not, I’ve directed plays that place trans politics alongside class politics and show multiple forms of vulnerability. Wolf Play, for example, shows the difficulty of queer adoption and the challenges that Ash, an amateur boxer entering the men’s division after transitioning to a nonbinary identity, faces. The play uses boxing as a metaphor for a custody battle, and the fight is real. At the same time, we see Peter, a man from Arizona who placed the child for adoption and is now biased against the queer couple who adopted him. We see him wanting to be a father but facing the one-two punch of 1) the economic costs of childrearing and 2) his wife’s postpartum depression, which leaves Peter as effectively the sole caretaker. The person who suffers most amidst it all is Wolf, the five-year-old who they’re all fighting for, played by an adult actor with a cardboard puppet.

While some might see Peter as the villain in Wolf Play, the play gives him a nuanced and human portrayal. Our nonbinary student actor who portrayed Peter said that acting the role “made [them] a much more empathetic and self-confident individual, more in touch with [them]self and more in touch with those who feel far from [them].” Part of that was reckoning with bias. Peter gets Ash’s pronouns wrong, stereotypes Asian Americans, uses a homophobic slur, and generally lashes out, yet we had many conversations in rehearsal about Peter’s own wants and grievances and the challenges of parenting for cis or trans folks alike. As we navigated how to support our actors playing Ash and Robin on the receiving end of aggression, we also asked where that aggression came from. The play’s feminism and exploration of Ash’s transmasculinity exists alongside a developed exploration of cisgender masculinity.

This student, who is an actor of color, describes, “Despite feeling relatively distant from the experience of a conservative cishet middle-aged man (who is usually played by a white actor), by the end of the run I felt closer to him than any character I had played before.” In fact, it was in this creative environment that the student felt safe enough to start using they/them pronouns. They could find similarity and difference at the same time.

A similar play I teach in my queer and trans performance course is MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa. The play centers a nonbinary millennial returning to their hometown in rural Washington state as their father is in the throes of illness. While the protagonist, Archer, is not out to their family (who use the wrong pronouns and their previous name), the play shows the whole family in a state of transition, alongside the Ponderosa Pine forests of their environment. As the forest must go through periodic burns for new growth, the family reinvents itself in hardship. Archer’s father takes on a new name in a Jewish tradition he learns from his doctor, and Archer’s grandmother finds love for herself as she tries unsuccessfully tries to get Archer married off. While the family does not fully understand Archer’s transness, the play shows all of them in a state of transition. With the idea of a just transition around gender and sexuality, I think about how individual gender transitions can model the possibilities for societal transitions.

Gestures like these in Wolf Play and Sagittarius Ponderosa perform acts of bridgebuilding, showing that queer and trans futures can also include justice for binary, cisgender folks. A world with greater trans thriving does not mean we are post-gender; manhood and womanhood still affect people, particularly as economic categories for labor. One of my graduate school professors, Cherríe Moraga, edited with Gloria Alzaldúa This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a trailblazing anthology with many queer contributors like Moraga herself. In it, they argued that feminists of color cannot wholly abandon their home communities of color nor neglect the largely white feminist spaces they encounter. They often find themselves being a bridge.

Although my upbringing as a white artist was different than those in This Bridge Called My Back, I still find myself serving as a bridge between my home and found communities. I spent some of my childhood in Lexington, Virginia, a college town in the rural Shenandoah Valley, which is like Oberlin in a lot of ways.

I come from a community where at playdates kids would mix up their shoes because their families all bought the same kind from Wal-Mart. My theatrical life took me to Washington, DC; Durham, North Carolina; and San Francisco, California; I made a life writing about intimacy directing, teaching theatre history to undergraduates, and presenting myself as sophisticated critic of queer art and the latest Off-Broadway play. But a part of me will always still be that person searching for the right shoes on a Southern welcome mat, and now that I teach at Oberlin, which has an often urban and wealthy student body, I feel a need to bridge my students’ experiences with the rural and working-class community I grew up in.

Some queer folks feel love and loss for where they’re from. Others stay and make home in rural places. I’m moved by the oral history project Country Queers, which documents queer life in rural places, and Samantha Allen’s book Real Queer America, which chronicles queer lives in red states. In his memoir Exile and Pride, Eli Care describes his journey from a small logging community in Port Orford, Oregon to the queer enclaves of Oakland, California and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Clare describes his journey from Oregon as “exile”: “a big word, a hard word. It implies not only loss, but a sense of allegiance and connection—however ambivalent—to the place left behind.”

Staging a play about this ambivalence at Oberlin was unexpectedly one of the toughest parts of my teaching career. In a playwriting class in grad school, Young Jean Lee threw down the gauntlet, challenging us to write about topics that scared us. I opted to write a play about growing up in the shadow of Confederate monuments in Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson’s Virginia hometown. I wrote a freewheeling comedy about two millennials who learn witchcraft from Tumblr and decide to cast a spell calling on their ancestors to protect them from the forces of bigotry in their small, Southern town. Thinking they’re calling on those of the Stonewall Riot, they end up bringing to life a statue of their ancestor Stonewall Jackson. Stonewall meets Stonewall, and queers confront the ghosts of their racial pasts.

This play, Stonewallin’, confronts bias head-on and shows how queers might still love a place despite its flaws. In it, I included the protagonist’s grandmother, Mamaw, who, in contrast to the falsely innocent Mamaw in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, shouts “All Lives Matter,” refuses her grandchild’s gender-nonconformity, and organizes her Civil War Reenactment group around conservative causes. Stonewallin’ attempted to place her in context and show how others attempted to sway her to more anti-racist views. When the play had its first production in Richmond, Virginia, audiences recognized this character (and some even nodded along to her lines). Voices like Mamaw’s had been part of the political discourse. On opening night, the city even took down the pedestal from its old monument to Stonewall Jackson. That’s how fresh the topics were.

Directing on the Oberlin campus, however, I felt like I was building a bridge that few wanted, getting pushback from left and right alike. Some students liked the play but said that it didn’t have a place at Oberlin. Some audience members described to me (understandable) discomfort at the Mamaw character especially, and there were vocal responses and grunts when she spoke during the show. I heard through the grapevine that some students felt that including her was an endorsement of her views. Was showing Mamaw “platforming” racism or transphobia? In some critiques of Mamaw’s voice, I heard an expression that movements for queer and trans justice should not consider where conservative views come from. We’ve been hurt so much that finding care is hard. Certainly, the Midwest is a different world than the South, but drive a few minutes down the road from Oberlin, and you’d meet some Mamaws and people who agree with them.

The truth is that I feel an ambivalence toward Mamaw, just as I feel an ambivalence toward my hometown. I recognize her biases and still feel a love for her. I’m not ready to give up on the Mamaws of the world. At a time when Ohio was passing anti-trans bathroom bills and trying to ban the teaching of racial history, we staged a fiercely queer show with a nonbinary protagonist, Dolly Parton drag, and a Confederate monument defaced in glitter. There was a place for Mamaw in that world. A just transition recognizes that if we give up on people, they will probably give up on us, too.

I’m moved by a cohort of trans feminists pushing for liberation that finds hope for all of us. Poet and therapist Kai Cheng Thom has a brilliant book I Hope We Choose Love, which argues that queer and trans social movements should not respond to harm by building an ever-growing list of enemies. Actor and writer Jacob Tobia recently recent released Before They Were Men, which looks at masculinity from a nonbinary perspective and argues that trans feminism has a lot to teach cis men. The poet and activist Alok has begun replying “I love you” to those who post hateful Instagram comments. Obviously, not all of us have the bandwidth to take such giving approaches. Sometimes, our safety is more important. Sometimes, when we transition to different futures (either individuals in our own genders or socially in our political beliefs), people won’t change with us. But sometimes, queer and trans theatre can also choose love.

On my drives through the fields of Ohio, I’ve watched more Trump signs coming down over the past few months. The photo of Trump surviving an assassination attempt is gone, replaced simply with an elephant labelled “Republican.” This probably has much more to do with rising gas prices then it does with art, let alone the queer and trans theatre I make in a college black box. Yet I find hope in this possibility that people can change. Sometimes it takes economic shifts as much as cultural ones to make change happen. As we attempt to shape more liberating worlds for queer and trans folks, let us remember that we have the potential to let others change with us. I’ve been scared of bridges in my life—of being one, of taking one. Changes can be daunting at first, until they feel normal. At the end of the day, they’re just transitions.