You Can’t Bring Gay to the Corn

My early memories of queer stories are mostly white, male, and very urban. The few rural examples (The Laramie Project, Brokeback Mountain, and even To Wong Foo) seemed to confirm what their urban counterparts made clear: You can live a fulfilling-if-not-dangerous queer life in New York City or Los Angeles, but travel dirt roads at your own peril. As an Italian kid growing up in a suburb of Rochester, New York (six hours northwest of the big city), I wanted the liberated metropolitan life. I had it for a while. Then I unexpectedly found liberation in rural living. Now I have options.

In 2015, my now-husband and I left our home in Chicago. I moved to Boston for graduate school, and he moved seventy miles west to teach at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in DeKalb, a town of forty thousand people surrounded by expansive fields of soy and corn. This town has become our home over the last decade. I have taught and directed at NIU and joined local community efforts while periodically working in New York and Chicago.

This essay explores unexpected resonances, all refracted through that prism of privilege, intuition, and chance. I’m no spokesperson for small-town life. Some people in cities have houses with gardens, and some in the country live in yardless apartments. There are no monoliths.

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As an artist, I am drawn away from realism, which feels limiting and (increasingly) unrealistic. I trust that audiences—like readers—are meaning-making machines. Presented with abstract, nonlinear, stylized material, they’ll come up with questions and ideas about how it all connects.

With time, I’ve come to question many principles laid out in Aristotle’s Poetics, that bedrock of Western theatre history that I have traversed as both student and instructor. I’m circumspect of concepts like representation, rising/falling action, and catharsis, particularly when they become ends rather than means. As I read Augusto Boal’s argument in Theatre of the Oppressed, “Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy” deprives a populace of their inherent power. Catharsis, that purgation of emotion central to Aristotle’s system, can exhaust viewers and subdue their inclination toward action to address social needs and undermine the ruling class. (We see Boal’s fear of media-wielded-to-subvert-resistance born out in our era of studio megamergers and collusion between tech-media giants and elected officials.)

With this orientation, I recently directed Antígona Furiosa, an adaptation of Sophocles’ classic by Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro, at NIU. The text is disjointed and repetitive, with characters speaking past one another and moments superimposed anachronistically, set tenuously against Argentina’s Dirty War. Entering the space, audience members were given manila envelopes in which to seal their silenced phones. During a battle scene, they received balled up paper “bombs” and were told to fire at the opposing army (the audience across the alley stage). When Antígona defied the king, the chorus incited the viewers to join them in chanting, “Lock her up!” After the final, painful moment, when Antígona slowly pantomimed hanging herself in the tomb (accompanied by a digitized heartbeat, accelerating before disappearing altogether), the actor dragged herself upstage to hit a big, glowing button. An alarm sounded, and the closing étude began. A voice instructed the audience: “Take out your phones. Document History.” A rock dirge began to play, with my voice, distorted, speaking the steps and counting, intermittently, over the music. The actors danced with newspapers from the day of the performance, each headline an unknowable collaborator, unique to the day of this event, happening here, now. They stapled the papers to a piece of raw OSB, tagged with the five freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, in Spanish, before taking a bow and exiting.

In Antígona Furiosa and in all my work, I’m trying to create conditions to get audiences “thinking-feeling,” a phrase borrowed from Gail Shapiro, my college acting teacher. Feeling without thought and thought without feeling are no match for polycrisis. In this benumbed era of social isolation, dehumanization, and state violence, shared experiences of humanity are essential. Our moment calls for supple hearts and critical minds. “Both-and”—a queer salve for the wounds of a heteronormative world. 

I aim to present a piece boldly, informed by rigorous historical/contextual research and literal/interpretive analysis, full of whatever provocative/evocative images/moments our company has created, without stitching it all together. It matters less that an audience “gets what we’re going for” and more that they’re “thinking-feeling” throughout and after the experience. Symbolism, an invitation to curiosity, has been a useful tool for me as both artist and educator.

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A rhizome grows horizontally and can extend in any direction, with roots below and stems or leaves above. Ginger, with its asymmetrical knobs and bulges, is a classic example, along with many irises and lilies.

Twentieth century French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari utilized the rhizome to explore non-hierarchical meaning-making and to resist the idea of constant or stable significance. They contrast the rhizome against “arborescence,” or the more traditional, tree-like model of learning. Imagine arithmetic as the tree trunk, the primary principles you must grasp before journeying out onto a branch of physics and making it to the leaf of, say, quantum mechanics. Arborescence is unidirectional, as opposed to the omnidirectional rhizome. (Some trees reproduce rhizomatically, further undermining our reliance on false binaries and showing that “both-and” is a natural phenomenon.)

Through collaboration with the choreographer Dr. Molly Shanahan, I experienced how the theoretical rhizome can inform creative work. While the arts include hierarchies of their own, art making can benefit from a counterhierarchical approach. So can education and community organizing. According to Deleuze and Guattari, any two points in a rhizome are connected (although the path between them is constantly shifting). Audiences of even the most avant garde productions, served striking yet seemingly disconnected elements, will strive to find resonance between them. Students may receive contradicting instruction from different teachers, but by trusting the interconnectedness of knowledge-building, they can find meaning in seemingly conflicting lessons. Community groups, divided by powerful interests, often find commonality and establish lasting solidarity, when given the space to do so.

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When I first moved to DeKalb, I noticed my core muscles engaging to steel myself in public, artificially depressing my vocal resonance and pitch. I was experiencing a nervous, physical kind of code-switching, driven by a reaction somewhere in my amygdala. My insecurity around how I would be received in this new, sparser environment surfaced as an altered way of presenting myself to the world, an example of how anxiety can live in the flesh as much as the mind. Less fluid, puffed up, unsteady.

I understood this experience more fully when I read the Movement Advancement Project’s 2019 report, Where We Call Home: LGBT People in Rural America, which states that over 3 million LGBT individuals live in rural areas, facing particular challenges:

The lower population of rural areas means that anyone who is “different” can be more noticeable—and that when someone is different, more people know it, particularly in tightly-knit communities…experiences in one area of life can create ripple effects that touch many other areas of life.

Before moving, I nervously joked that we were “bringing gay to the corn.” Of course, it turns out that’s impossible: The corn was gay long before we arrived. In recent years, NIU has consistently ranked among the “Best of the Best” according to the now-defunct Campus Pride Index, and DeKalb Pride 2026 broke records, attracting over two thousand attendees. Since 1995, the university has granted the Eychaner Award to individuals who make “outstanding contributions that enhance the lives of people who are LGBTQ+.” The Eychaners, DeKalbians and parents of two openly gay sons, founded the Northern Illinois Chapter of PFLAG in the 1980s and volunteered with and advocated for people living with HIV/AIDS. Their visible support ripples from the past to this very moment, an example of how sometimes the mechanisms for marginalization can be repurposed for supportive means.

My expectation that rural Northern Illinois was a new frontier for queerness reflects a combination of my internalized queerphobia, urban narcissism, and what Jack Halberstam calls “metronormativity” in the book In a Queer Time and Place. This prevailing bias toward urbanity over ruralism reinforces binaristic thinking and suggests an inevitable pilgrimage queer people must make toward cities. To be sure, the world can be a dangerous place for many of us, made more so by geography, politics, and intersecting identities. But statistics reveal only the broad contours of a story: Rhythm without melody, harmony, dynamics.

In both the city and the country, these days I occasionally catch myself nervously bracing in the core and manipulating my voice. It happens less often than it did. (Sometimes I even do it intentionally.) By learning about trauma responses and frequently recalibrating embodiment between rural and urban living conditions, I’m developing the ability to soften more—enough at least to listen to impulse. I’m trying to trust that there’s more wisdom and power in the swirling universe within me than in some reactively assumed “masc” mask. 

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Early in the pandemic, I directed Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information for NIU on Zoom. The play, which deals with relationships and technology in abstract and disjointed ways, was a good fit for virtual presentation. To solve for entrances and exits, I built physical slides to hang over the students’ cameras. When “offstage,” they closed the slides, which were made from a variety of materials that allowed audiences to watch the offstage actors watching their colleagues work. This was when I first began to muse about the power of being seen seeing.

In an alley arrangement or the round, the audience can see fellow theatregoers watching the play across the stage. In the vacuum of virtual production, the offstage actors’ responses to their onstage colleagues served a similar function. This triangulated exchange creates a chain reaction: At the speed of mirror neurons and tempered by etiquette and restraint, observers can witness two bodies resonate in shared (and, as it turns out, virtual) space.

Similarly, each of us is perceived by our communities. When we encounter people who, in the language of the MAP report, are “different,” our communities will observe whether we remain present with them, receive their stories and, regardless of whether we agree or not, recognize their humanity. When seen seeing in public, we can foster empathy and humanism. In settings with lower discursive density (my term for the saturation of narratives being shared in a community ecosystem)—like performances, classrooms, or some rural towns—there is even more power in striving to fully see “the other,” given greater visibility and the ripple effect. Presence, in this way, functions as a sort of embodied solidarity that, when witnessed from outside, has the potential for inter-community bridge-building at the neural level.

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In this part of the yard, I have midnight purple irises. Their early, blousy blossoms have just begun to fade. I’ve heard many writing teachers reiterate the missive that you have to “kill your darlings” to spur something novel and beautiful. I start to deadhead so that new buds will open. I repeat aloud part of an old journal entry: I ebb toward despair. Nature ferries me back. One of those small yellow birds, the ones whose name I always say I’m going to look up but never do, lands nearby.

At the top of my director’s note for my adaptation of Edward II at NIU, I included a quote from singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco: “Alla this was just someone’s idea; it could just as well be mine.” Edward, upon inheriting the throne, recalls his exiled lover Gaveston and refuses to hide their relationship, threatening the established system and leading, ultimately, to his vicious assassination. Troubling the status quo of our world’s restrictive conventions around gender and sexuality, I cast both male characters with female actors.

As a young artist, I believed there was a single key for unlocking “good work.” The yellow bird has single a name (if only I’d ever look it up). However, that name was coined by a human with language, another system we inherit from bygone generations. “Just someone’s idea.” In the realm of art, there are infinite ways to accomplish anything successfully. The dynamic rhizome doesn’t just encourage “new takes” on extant texts but suggests that you can never accomplish a project the same way twice anyway.

I often tell students, “I have a high tolerance for not knowing the answer.” It’s a way to stave off prematurely defining something at the expense of in-the-moment discovery—a reaction, perhaps, to those early, skewed depictions of queerness. Artistically, there’s equal value in both the known (text, history, context) and the unknowable (ourselves, scene partners, and audiences, each with ever-shifting energies and perspectives). Pedagogically, all frameworks for learning are somewhat limited to the known and therefore to the past, an important consideration as we continue to respond to rapidly changing technologies.

An overgrown rhizome, I remind myself, stops flowering.

While much of rehearsal and tech is spent trying to “solve” the play, the ultimate arithmetic happens in the imagination of each audience member. They experience the sum total of what we’ve prepared, filtered through their priors and the present moment, resulting in something greater than we could have imagined. When we make peace with the limits of our control, we can more fully enter bell hooks’s “field of possibility” or Rebecca Solnit’s “spaciousness of uncertainty” or adrienne maree brown’s “emergent strategy”—conceptual clearings in which infinite movements and meanings may spring forth, informed but not predestined by what came before.

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On the wall of my in-laws’ guest room in rural Alabama hangs a sign with a quote by Emerson: “Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.” Over the years, I have found it comforting. Yet, in writing this, I hesitate to uphold patience as virtuous, particularly when we see civil and human rights violated across the country, genocide and famine around the globe, mounting climate crises, failing institutions, and chasmic wealth inequality. Who can demand patience from a child violently separated from her mother, or a forty-year United States resident denied habeas corpus rights, or a family whose home lies in rubble, or worse?

Still, nature’s pace informs me. What appeared patience to Emerson may in reality be something simultaneously humbler and more impressive: the synchronous work of resilience and adaptation, from moment to moment, through drought and deluge. Lilacs blooming after Moscow winter. The baby bird surviving the fall from the nest. Nature perseveres without certitude. Called upon to do the same, we do well to lead with curiosity, to remain open to unexpected connections, and to keep exploring the ever-shifting landscapes beyond and within our work, our communities, and ourselves.