The Slow and Painful Process of Change

Dorothy Dean at Max’s Kansas City

I’ve experienced the truth of this warning myself, moving precipitously from Boston to New York decades ago to improve, I imagined, my chances of being published; moving from Boston to back to Louisville with equal ill-advised haste, and finally moving impulsively to New Mexico to shed some of the strictures and prejudices of my earlier years, this last move proving to be a blessing. Of course such moves, when not in pursuit of jobs, depend on a financial independence that doesn’t necessarily coincide with wisdom.

Now as those who are able flee the fires in southern California, fires that are inevitable here too—it’s not a question of if, but when—due to the same lack of foresight and wisdom that allows all of us liberation seekers to build houses in the wildlands interface, I am reminded of how hard it has been for me, not to move physically, but to move psychologically and spiritually.

An article in a recent New Yorker reminded me of how unable to change I was as a college student in the late 1950s when the old rules were breaking all around me. As the author of the article, Rosemary Quinn, states, quoting the black star Jefferson Lewis, “The American upper class had its last dance in the fifties and early sixties.” I was definitely a member of that class, desperately trying to escape that prison.

The New Yorker article focuses on a woman I’d met briefly in the fifties in Cambridge, an African American named Dorothy Dean. There was only one other African American (as far as I knew) in my college class at that time, the light-skinned offspring of a celebrity whom I also failed to get to know, and at Harvard, the polished son of an Atlanta minister whom I did know within the confines of our supposed shared Southernness—and in terms of caste, we did have something in common.

But Dorothy Dean offered me a different kind of challenge. She was a darker-skinned rebel, a protector and supporter of gay men as they emerged from their closets; she called them “The Lavender Brotherhood,” which most certainly did not include Lesbians. In the early sixties, when I too was living in Manhattan, Dorothy, a few years older than me, was becoming known as a member of Andy Warhol’s downtown scene, a sharp-tongued critic of everything she deemed hypocritical in the society around her. But, having also graduated from Radcliffe, as I had, she was drawn to the upper-class parade, and became friends with a man I knew, Arthur Loeb, whose physical impairment seemed to symbolize his marginalized status in a still deeply anti-Semitic culture. His monied background didn’t seem to offer him much purchase.

Arthur made me uneasy but Dorothy terrified me during our brief acquaintance. She was willing to scold, cast out and excoriate in a way that I knew would lead to destruction, of her rather than of the society she was criticizing which was changing, slowly, according to rules that would always enshrine white privilege. I knew, even at that early stage in my development, that Dorothy, who was a fury herself, was also courting the furies.

The men she was close to then were still-closeted gay men I also knew without recognizing their sexual identity.

The young man who seemed most admired by my friends was the preposterously-named Knight of Glin, whose later life was based on his championing of Irish arts during the vexed period of English ascendancy. Good looking, with his upper-class British accent, he entranced some of the young men I knew, to my bewilderment. Later I learned that the castle he would inherit in Limerick was not a castle but a humble Georgian house, medievalized in 1820 with pasteboard battlements, arrow slits and castellated gate lodges, saved from ruin by his stepfather, a Canadian millionaire.

At the same time, I knew a young man named Jean-Claude van Itallie whom I watched from afar as he, an openly gay and fervid anti-war playwright, began the transformation of the New York Theatre with his experimental plays. I have written plays since childhood but this world was only opened to me with the establishment in the 1980s of The Women’s Project, an off-Broadway theatre that is flourishing to this day. Very few revolutions, in the arts and elsewhere, welcome the leadership of women.

Any dream I had in the late 1950s of continuing the play directing I had loved in high school was scotched by my exposure to another of these young white men, Arthur Kopit. He persuaded me during our Freshman year to play a role in his first play, which I hadn’t read, titled, On the Runway of Life You Never Know What’s Coming off Next.

It was the most humiliating experience of my life. As a “retarded”—as we said then—southern stripper who carried a stuffed animal I addressed as “Jefferson Davis Bear,” my grotesque appearance and stumbling dialogue brought down the house—our college theatre.

I didn’t know how to protest. I only wanted to run and hide. My father, who’d brought my three brothers to the performance—they sat in the front row, guffawing—used the occasion to introduce Arthur to Roger L. Stevens, a prominent New York producer who sponsored Arthur’s successful career.

Later the Women’s Movement of the 1970s gave me access to change, personal and political, which continues to shape my life.

Now, as I briefly skim Mr. T’s (as I will call him) all-white, all-male cabinet appointees, which Congress, if it has any backbone, will question, I know we are heading into a period when the gains of the Women’s Movement, so essential to me and many others, are at risk of being undone.

And yet there is always hope. Southern California will be rebuilt, perhaps with a little more attention to the values of conservation which women had so often championed. Perhaps a woman architect will be hired whose principle value is protecting the earth. And, as insurance companies abandon the state and the affluent flee to New Mexico, “The Land of Enchantment,” perhaps the many women in the government here will begin to work on new limits to development.

Perhaps.

And, even more far-fetched, if I, entrenched in the white Southern upper class have been able to change slowly and painfully, even Mr. T., ostracized during President Carter’s recent funeral in Washington, will have heard something in the eulogies addressed to this excellent man a hint, a reminder, that there is a better way.

In Theater, Women Feminism Jefferson Davis Bear LGBTQ New York City Radcliffe The Women's Project