Afterword

Abstract

I started thinking about the conjunction of ‘queer’ and ‘performance’ and ‘dramaturgy’ before I knew what any of these three keywords would come to mean to me. ‘Queer’, in the early 1970s when I was a teenager, sounded like a curse from some horrible time and place that could only mean violent disparagement. ‘Dramaturgy’ was a word I heard in relationship to the mystifications of Lessing’s Hamburg, never realising that this word would signal an intellectual paradigm for unpacking and detailing the ways performance moved me. ‘Performance’, on the other hand, was something I did at the local Pittsburgh Playhouse, in my hometown in Pennsylvania, where acting equated to freedom, to the kind of ‘movement’ that I couldn’t yet articulate politically. But I understood in my bones that the doings of my body in that Playhouse theatre freed me from social constraints that otherwise disciplined my desire and myself.