In July 2017 Harrison David Rivers's play And She Would Stand Like This was performed, as directed by David Mendizabal, in New York by the Movement Theatre Company, an organization devoted to promoting talents of people of colour.Footnote 2 Based on Euripides’ Trojan Women and inspired by Michael Cunningham's article on Angie Xtravaganza and her family, ‘The Slap of Love’ (1998), and Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris Is Burning (1990),Footnote 3 the play focuses on a transmother, Hecuba, and her children as they battle with an unknown illness affecting their queer family and community. The action follows different stages of grief, aggression, miscomprehension and discrimination, leading Hecuba and her children to an act of resistance through grief when burning the hospital to which they have been confined by the mysterious illness – although unmentioned, the allusion is most certainly to AIDS, which ripped through 1980s and 1990s New York, particularly fiercely in the Harlem ballroom scene.
By casting a queer family of colour in late twentieth-century Harlem under AIDS's shadow as the Trojan women awaiting their upcoming subjection into slavery, the play and performance underline many of the tensions at the heart of the story: a united and traumatized community stands behind a resilient woman in the face of horrible fate, the clarity of Cassandra's knowledge contrasts with everybody's bewilderment, the choice between death and hope in the face of adversity, and an onstage othered unity confronted by an offstage group of dehumanizing power are but some of the themes shared by both plays. These are explored in And She Would Stand Like This through the resistance of a queer-of-colour family and through an on-/offstage dichotomy marking the sources and targets of intersectional discrimination in the context of AIDS in the US, explored in the first and second sections of this article respectively.
Through a version of an ancient Greek tragedy, inspired by the queer-of-colour community portrayed in Paris Is Burning and ‘The Slap of Love’, And She Would Stand Like This is able to skilfully and expertly promote a mode of cultural and queer disidentification with many of the cultural precedents, contexts and registers it contends with, as will be explored in the last section of this article. Through its disidentificatory appropriation, redeployment and recontextualization of heteronormative and homonormative cultural hegemonies, of high, underground and mainstream cultural registers and of cultural products on AIDS and the queer-of-colour community, the play and production are able to provide a cultural, queer and communal platform on which and through which to reflect upon, celebrate and vindicate the past and present lives of queers of colour in the US, and of a queer-of-colour future yet to be walked.
These pages provide a reading, analysis and contextualization of the intersectional marginalization and discrimination endured by Hecuba and her children in facing AIDS through the framework of Euripides’ Trojan Women in And She Would Stand Like This,Footnote 4 through three main perspectives: chosen family, normative discriminations and tragic disidentifications. The potency of And She Would Stand Like This and the resilience and power of the community it places centre stage will surface as a poignant, skilful and effective theatrical vehicle with which and through which to tell the story of, and thus pay tribute to, the larger community of queers of colour in Harlem and the US who have suffered, survived and fought against AIDS and all its concomitant injustices, as well as their heirs today.
Queer Trojan family: mothers, children, absences
Euripides’ Trojan Women places at its centre a female community of disenfranchised victims of war at the hands of an offstage male community of victors. These women, now at the forefront of their agency, gather around their most senior member, Queen Hecuba of Troy, who emerges as spokeswoman and interlocutor. The gradual process that they endure from protective active grouping to enforced disbandment is underscored by a sense of unknowing suspension, dispossession and survival, all ultimately and gradually dissolved into imposed separation, slavery and forced marriage to the very people who destroyed their homes and families.Footnote 5
The creation of community by marginalized individuals, survivors of violence and those dispossessed of kith and kin is also at the centre of And She Would Stand Like This. By telling the story of a community of queers of colour in the late twentieth century, the play transposes the necessary union of the Trojan women under their queen into the house system in US ballroom culture. Houses in ballroom culture are nuclear communities of kith and kin, established by socio-affective association, as alternatives to biological families, to protect, care for and support their members.Footnote 6 Houses, as units of chosen family, are headed by mothers and/or fathers in charge of children, toward whom they fulfil their parental responsibilities. Houses acquire a name that identifies and distinguishes them from other houses, as well as providing familial surnames to members. In this way, the choral community at the centre of Euripides’ Trojan Women is transposed in And She Would Stand Like This into the queer community of colour headed by Hecuba as mother of the family constituting what I hereafter call the House of Hecuba.
In the 2017 production of And She Would Stand Like This, Hecuba was performed by black trans woman Julianne ‘Mizz June’ Brown, while her children were played by black-Latinx non-binary actor Ashton Muñiz as Cassandra, black cis female actor Cherrye J. Davis as Andromache, black cis male actor Cornelius Davidson as Baby, black cis male actor Darby Davis as Miss Scott, and black trans woman actor Tamara M. Williams as Grace. Although it could potentially be differently composed, the House of Hecuba onstage in New York in 2017 was unquestionably black, Latinx and queer. This family celebrated and honoured its queer-of-colour identity and legacy onstage through ballroom walking, a black and queer performative language that served to mark entrances, exits and changes of scene in the performance, as choreographed by Kia Labeija (Fig. 1).Footnote 7
Fig. 1. And She Would Stand Like This (2017). Photograph by Ahron R. Foster.
The importance of chosen family and of Hecuba as transmother is powerfully voiced by the two choral interventions in the play, which function similarly to the testimonials in Paris Is Burning.Footnote 8 Baby, Miss Scott and Grace, as the three queer children of the House of Hecuba that comprise the chorus, explain the reactions of their biological families and contexts of origin to their queerness, whose rejection was confronted by the subsequent embracing protection of mother Hecuba, echoing the lives described in Cunningham's article,Footnote 9 and the lives of many in the house system. In their first choral intervention in scene iv, Grace remembers how her mother would dress her in male clothing and how poverty brought her to prostitution while, ironically, wearing her biological mother's own Sunday best: ‘That's Where Hecuba Found Me. Black And Blue And Bleeding In The Street. The Aftermath Of A Blowjob Gone Bad. (I Still Don't Know How They Go Bad.)’Footnote 10 Baby explains how his consensual – and he suspects loving – relationship with a forty-five-year-old man at the age of sixteen was soon discovered, resulting in his biological mother kicking him out, only for him to find out, when he knocks on his lover's door, that he is married and has a daughter. Thankfully, ‘Hecuba Took Me In’,Footnote 11 he explains. Miss Scott remembers that one of the ‘queens’ he had as hairdressing clients invited him to a ball, where he shone: ‘And At The End Of The Night They Asked Me Back. No, Hecuba Asked Me Back. And I Wasn't About To Say No.’Footnote 12
In their second intervention in scene vi, Miss Scott first explains how other mothers remarked, with backhanded compliments, on his playing with dolls at home as a child.Footnote 13 Grace talks about how, as a kid, her biological mother often compared her to her camp uncle: ‘Thats How Yall Move, With Grace’;Footnote 14 while others admonished her, ‘And My Titi Edith, Who I Think Likes It When People Die, Say “Boys Aint Got No Need For Grace. Yr Uncle Found That Out The Hard Way.”’Footnote 15 Baby recalls how his biological mother would ask him never to lose his head and always listen to his heart until one day, as a child, she cupped his genitals in her hand and said: ‘This Aint No Weapon. Yr Daddy Aint Figured That Out Yet. He Might Never Figure That Out … No Matter How Big It Gets It Aint No Weapon.’Footnote 16 In Hecuba, her family and community, these children have found an accepting, encouraging and liberating house in which to be themselves, away from the discrimination of poverty, hypocrisy, nosey housewives, bigoted aunts and hetero-toxic masculinity. Hecuba has chosen them as children and they have chosen Hecuba as mother. As Danny, from the House of Galiano Atlanta, states, ‘The most important thing for a house to have is a legendary mother’,Footnote 17 and Hecuba, as mother of her house, is tough and loving, unflinching and caring; the stuff of ancient epics, if not legends (Fig. 2). She is, after all, there to ensure their survival and future in a world that is set on oppressing them and, with disease, on killing them:
A mother does all she can to equip her children. To give them the tools they need for survival. For LIFE. A mother uses whatever means necessary. Whatever she has at her disposal. Her tongue. The back of her hand. The heel of her shoe … Tough love. The toughest. It's the only way.Footnote 18
Cassandra's powerful lucidity, as in Euripides (ll. 308–461),Footnote 19 regarding the siege suffered by Hecuba's children, is one of the most powerful scenes in And She Would Stand Like This. Referred to as they/them, Cassandra, maddened, speaks, just as their Trojan model, in agitated riddles, not entirely clear to their interlocutors, although somewhat more intelligible to their audience (Fig. 3). They remember a recurring dream in which they fell from a different tree every night. Interestingly, Hecuba herself has already confessed to sensing this falling in her dreams, proving Cassandra's clairvoyancy. Cassandra is now about to fall too: they also have the mysterious illness. Cassandra can see what doctors have not: ‘All he knows, All he can deduce, Is that I am going to die.’Footnote 20 Cassandra also demonstrates extremely sophisticated and level-headed appreciation of moral behaviour in relation to sexually transmitted disease. Taking over the Euripidean revelation of Cassandra's rape by Ajax, voiced by Poseidon and Athena, that sets in motion the divine punishment of the Greeks (ll. 65–97), Cassandra clearly sees the origin of their current fate: their lover Ajax. The rape seems not to stem only from Ajax's sexual brutality, of ambivalent effect on them: ‘To be violated so brutally. And yet to feel such pleasure. One could be driven mad from the incongruity.’Footnote 21 Ajax's rape seems, partly, to stem also from his recklessness in infecting them without due warning: ‘The first time Ajax … I knew. I knew then. Even while he was… While he was taking what he wanted from me. Scraping my insides with his tool. Releasing himself.’Footnote 22 Consent could only have been given with Cassandra's full knowledge of Ajax's infective status, and its concealment partly constitutes his rape of Cassandra in the play. For his crime he is to pay: ‘I will kill him’ (cf. Trojan Women, l. 359).Footnote 23
Fig. 2. Grace, Baby, Hecuba and Miss Scott (left to right). And She Would Stand Like This (2017). Photograph by Ahron R. Foster.
Fig. 3. Cassandra's maddened appearance. Grace, Miss Scott, Cassandra and Baby (left to right). And She Would Stand Like This (2017). Photograph by Ahron R. Foster.
Hecuba feels her child's pain but does not understand it. She dismisses their words in response to the chorus’s concern: ‘My child is touched and lives their life as if in a dream. There is no substance to their threat. No substance. There is no substance to any of it.’Footnote 24 But we know Hecuba is fatefully wrong. Cassandra's words are full of substance. They clearly point the way to the excruciating sorrow that is to fall on Hecuba and her children. This is, sadly, no dream.
After the maddened appearance of Cassandra, one of the issues at the centre of Euripides’ Trojan Women comes to the fore: how must one deal with the harrowing horrors of life and the fickleness of fortune? Two positions are clearly delineated: one which calls for the oblivion of death and another which calls for the hope of survival, dramatized, respectively, by Andromache and Hecuba in Euripides. Andromache clearly envies Polyxena's misfortune: ‘in dying she has met with a happier fate than I have in continuing to live’ (ll. 630–1). Hecuba, although having already stated that ‘[t]hose who die forget their sorrows’ (ll. 606–7), attempts to dissuade Andromache: ‘while there is life, there is hope’ (ll. 632–3). There ensue two long speeches by each character defending their position; Andromache insists that ‘it is better to die than to live in misery’ (l. 637), while Hecuba insists that she must survive for the future of Ilium (ll. 704–5). But the indescribable pain and crippling horror of having to bury Astyanax, her only surviving grandchild and the hope of Troy, is of such depth that Hecuba finally relinquishes all hope as they are taken away to the ships: ‘Come, let us run into the pyre. For it is best for me to die together with this my country as it burns’ (ll. 1282–3).
How to face the horrors of AIDS, particularly from the assailed vantage point of queers of colour, was indeed a pressing issue throughout the height of the epidemic,Footnote 25 as dramatized in And She Would Stand Like This also by Andromache and Hecuba. Mother Hecuba offers, from the beginning, a position of resilience and resistance: ‘Tears will not bring anything back. Tears are not much good for anything at all.’Footnote 26 Death is not even an option for Hecuba: ‘I cannot. I will not. I do not accept death.’Footnote 27 However, Andromache states her contrary position, despite Hecuba's reluctance: ‘Yes, mother! Polyxena died. And it is as if she never saw the light of day. She knows nothing now of what she suffered. While I, still living, Which I have been told time and time again is an enviable condition, am in constant pain.’Footnote 28 Hopeless death is all around her, provoked, it seems, by her unfaithful husband Hector:Footnote 29 ‘The loves of my great love have now loved me into a living death … That one thing left always while life lasts, hope, is not for me.’Footnote 30 In contrast, Mother Hecuba, as in Trojan Women, still sees hope in the future, in Astyanax, and finds it imperative to resist for his sake:
There is plenty of time to be dead. A lifetime in fact. But until then, hold yr child. Raise him up. Be his mother and father. And when you depart, when that time comes, and only then, he will carry on. Yr lessons ringing in his ears.Footnote 31
But, as in Euripides, the resilience of this family is still to be put to the test: the doctors suspect Astyanax has the illness. Doctor Talthybius convinces a reluctant Andromache to sign a consent form to further test him. Astyanax is taken away with his toy horse. Despite ample protestation, Elena, the hospital administrator, reminds them of the legally binding document Andromache signed. Astyanax cannot be returned. He will never be returned. An apologetic Talthybius will appear with only his toy horse, provoking the rage, despair and wailing of Andromache and Hecuba's children. Hecuba chooses, however, unlike her Euripidean namesake, to keep on pushing for survival and resistance. She is no victim; she is a mother, and a survivor. She will take no more from the gods on Olympus and the fickleness of fate. She will burn the bridges, burn the Troy that the illness has destroyed. She asks her children and the audience to pile up chairs. She smokes a last cigarette and puts it out on Astyanax's toy (Trojan) horse, making it burn, and throws it on the chairs (Fig. 4). But instead of wanting to join the pyre, as in Trojan Women, she is adamant for her children, her house, to survive. And so, with the closing words of Hecuba in Euripides, now stripped of slavery, the House of Hecuba walks on and away:
hecuba: Oh children, hear me. For it is yr mother who calls. We will no longer be subject to the whims of the gods. Or to the dictates of administrators. Or the diagnoses of doctors. We will not accept the fates that they have picked out for us. We will determine our own ending. No. Not ending. We will determine our own beginning … I go forth from my country and a city lit with flames. Oh shaking tremulous limbs. This is the way. Forward. AND WALK!Footnote 32
Fig. 4. The House of Hecuba prepares the fire. Baby, Hecuba, Grace and Miss Scott (left to right). And She Would Stand Like This (2017). Photograph by Ahron R. Foster.
Othered community under siege: hetero-white capital and AIDS
‘O you Greeks, you have devised atrocities worthy of barbarians’ (l. 764), Andromache cries out just as her son Astyanax is taken away to be killed by the Greeks in Euripides’ Trojan Women. One of the pressing questions set by Euripides’ tragedy is the extent to which the apparent ‘civilized’ distinction can be used for the Greeks given their war crimes, while the apparent barbarians, the Trojan women, demonstrate far more compassion, understanding, sense of community and bravery than any Greek. One way in which this is skilfully dramatized is by using the on-/offstage dichotomy as a vehicle for interpretation and behaviour. The civilized victims of barbarian oppression and violence appear on stage, while the barbarous Greeks are always offstage, aloof and uncaring, as underlined by the two exceptions, the Greek herald Talthybius and the Greek king Menelaus. The community of Trojan women, headed by Queen Hecuba, suffer, at the centre of the tragic action, the horrors inflicted by its all-surrounding periphery. This scenic and moral distinction is broken, precisely, when the Trojan women are dragged offstage into slavery at the hands of the conquering, pillaging and barbarous Greeks.
And She Would Stand Like This also dramatizes a similar on-/offstage dichotomy along ethno-racial lines: the queers of colour suffering the horrors of the illness appear at the centre, onstage, while the managers and administrators of the disease, its diagnosis and its treatment appear offstage, in the periphery, with their active absence underlined by the intermediaries Talthybius and Elena. As the Greeks in Euripides decide on how the women are to be shared out into slavery, so the offstage – one suspects wealthy, white, heterosexist and male – doctors, informed by their own biases, interests, priorities and prejudices, decide how to manage and explain the diagnosis and its treatment that affects, afflicts and kills the black queer family onstage. They represent what Hill Collins and Bilge term ‘the structural domain of power’,Footnote 33 and substantiate Cohen's reminder: ‘While heterosexual privilege negatively impacts and constrains the lived experience of “queers” of color, so too do racism, classism, and sexism.’Footnote 34 When Hecuba, at the beginning of the play, moves offstage for clarification, she is forced back into the waiting room, thus expelled from the place of decision making. This offstage power is most clearly demonstrated in one gesture common to both Doctor Talthybius and the hospital administrator Elena: they demand silence in the waiting room, thus eliminating Hecuba's family's speech, identities and independence. The doctors offstage thus appear as very much the they in opposition to the family's we: ‘I don't believe in they’, Hecuba sentences.Footnote 35 Mistrust of they is understandably ripe in her family.
The figure of the black Doctor Talthybius may seem, at first sight, a reason to discredit the reading of the on-/offstage dichotomy along racial lines. How can the doctors offstage be white when the doctor appearing onstage is black? Indeed, Talthybius is proof that black doctors exist, but not that all doctors in the play are black.Footnote 36 As a doctor, Talthybius is clearly set as one of the they offstage. Talthybius makes no concession or understanding with his patients on racial terms, remaining in his position as doctor, as the fateful and apologetic messenger of the power offstage. Talthybius reluctantly assures Hecuba and her family, no less than three separate times, that he has drawn the short straw, an insistence that may evidence that Talthybius was chosen to take a blow and a burden that the white doctors are unwilling to endure. ‘I'm a good person’,Footnote 37 he exclaims, perhaps betraying his own feelings of guilt.
Despite a brief capitulating burst: ‘HE HAS IT, OK! That is the news. Yr son Astyanax Has it. This … thing’,Footnote 38 Talthybius remains in his position as impassive doctor: ‘It is all in the document … I entreat you to read and to sign.’Footnote 39 Andromache must decide whether to legally release her child to the offstage doctors under the harrowing shock of not only having lost her husband Hector to the hateful and murderous disease, but also having just learned that she and her son also have it. She decides to sign; Astyanax is taken away. That she signed under duress is later the basis for Hecuba and Andromache's reclamations of Astyanax, which Elena, as hospital administrator, soon dismisses: ‘Astyanax was not stolen. He was given. You gave him. Freely.’Footnote 40 In Euripides, Andromache agrees to give Astyanax to Talthybius also under duress, for although she knows that he is to be killed, the Greeks have threatened her with leaving his body unreturned and unburied (ll. 710–79). I do not intend to imply that the doctors offstage are consciously attempting to replicate the eugenic infanticide committed by the Greeks in Trojan Women. But I do believe that the complete and heartless disregard for victims of war and of illness in each case and for the deep-rooted bond and duty of care of a mother to her child responds, in both plays, to a dehumanizing objectification of the subjects under their power, be these medical or enslaved, which in both plays have substantial racial and ethnic implications. This, barbarously disregarded, bond of love and care, paramount in the case of a chosen and committed family such as the House of Hecuba, is precisely the humanizing issue with which both Hecuba and Andromache appeal to the compassion of TalthybiusFootnote 41 and Elena,Footnote 42 and thus of the doctors, to no avail.
We find perhaps the most pernicious agent of this process of dehumanizing objectification in Elena, the Latina hospital administrator, here a fusion of the Euripidean Menelaus and Helen. She appears as the nice face, caring smile and helping hand of established power, with its racial, economic and heteronormative discourses. She enters the stage from the offstage and in its name – as an agent of the ‘cultural domain of power’.Footnote 43 This is even more important because she knows Hecuba from childhood. That Elena has moved in her life from a context of poor people of colour to one of white hospital doctors and that, in doing this, she ultimately chooses to side with her colleagues and bosses has clear racial implications that add to the already racial connotations of the character of Talthybius. However, Elena's position, role and words place her more clearly on the side of economic and gender systems of oppression. Wearing ‘her [white] power suit like armor’,Footnote 44 as the stage directions explain, she is very keen to underline her successful climbing of the social, economic and gender ladders: ‘Oh no. I don't work here. All of this is mine. I run here … It was only a matter of time before I got what I wanted.’Footnote 45 The socio-economic gap that separates Hecuba and her children and the hospital establishment, here represented by Elena, is made clinically clear (Fig. 5).Footnote 46
Fig. 5. Elena and Hecuba (left to right). And She Would Stand Like This (2017). Photograph by Ahron R. Foster.
The implications of this are not only important for their dramatic and performative effect. Elena stands in for the socio-economic discrimination that intersects with racial and trans-/homophobic discriminations that the onstage queer family of colour endure, made even more haemorrhaging by the nature of the siege that they are suffering. Socio-economic discrimination derived from racist structures and private health insurance has meant that access to essential health care, prevention and treatments in the US has been challenging for the vast majority of people of colour with HIV during the height of AIDS and still today.Footnote 47 In contrast, wealthier white patients in the US could more easily afford the costly experimental or established treatments to survive the disease, if lucky, as well as campaign more effectively for support and resources in groups like Gay Men's Health Crisis, historically not devoid of racial tensions.Footnote 48 African Americans did not even enjoy the – alleged and largely fictive – joys of the ‘end of AIDS’ in the latter years of the 1990s: ‘AIDS isn't over. For many in America, it's just beginning’, said the black AIDS activist Mario Cooper in 1999.Footnote 49 In this way, the health and welfare systems in the US have been clearly skewed towards the preferential treatment of white wealthier patients, to the detriment of non-wealthy patients of colour, as here demonstrated in the decisions and stances of the white wealthy doctors and powers that be offstage:
hecuba: The gods meant nothing except to make life hard for me. I can picture them Gathered together on Mount Olympus. With bowls of popcorn and bottles of wine. Watching our lives like an episode of Scandal. Amused at our misfortune. They will not have the last word. Not today.Footnote 50
Another tool of Elena's representation of offstage normativity is transphobia – which is why I warn readers of what follows in the next three paragraphs. Despite her own empowerment in having apparently overcome gender discrimination, she not only is neglectful of other discriminations that she herself enacts as heteronormative agent, but also becomes the embodiment of disciplinary power.Footnote 51 Elena recognizes Hecuba only after deadnaming her when reading from a clipboard, pointing towards the systematic medical discrimination of trans people already confirmed by Doctor Talthybius when referring to Hecuba and her children as ‘These men’.Footnote 52 Elena insists on deadnaming Hecuba, until she relents to Hecuba's insistence. But this concession is just another façade of niceness. Elena continues to insult Hecuba by asking whether she has had gender reconstruction surgery in a most insulting manner, as she grabs Hecuba's crotch: ‘Tell me … Derrick. Has Everything Changed?’Footnote 53 It is after discovering that her own queer child, Honesto, has embraced Hecuba as mother and her house as chosen family that Elena fully displays her transphobia in – what I warn readers is – the vilest of tirades, encompassing in her dramatic persona the full intersectional oppression she brings onto the stage inhabited by the House of Hecuba:Footnote 54
ELENA: Fuck you, Derrick. Hecuba. Whoever you are. Fuck. You … YOU DON'T GET TO SAY SHIT ABOUT MY SON. YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT. You think you can squeeze yrself into a dress and be a mother? Tweeze yr eyebrows? Put on a wig? Shave yr legs? Cut off yr dick? Take hormones? Call them children? You think that's all it takes? Well, let me tell you … Until you have carried and labored. Until you have pushed and pushed until yr body has been ripped apart. By love. In love. For love. Until then. Until you have experienced THAT, SHUT THE FUCK UP.Footnote 55
In the face of this violent tirade, Hecuba's children come to her defence: ‘BABY –. Biology does not a mother make. Ms. Delossantos, I have a mother.’Footnote 56 There ensues a list of how their biological mothers could not/would not/did not understand, support or embrace them as queer children, a list that is generously pedagogic toward Elena and which Hecuba wraps up with a motherly statement: ‘Sometimes, Elena, we decide to be the mother we didn't have.’Footnote 57 The message is clear: what makes a mother is not biology; it is love for your children. Motherhood is to be chosen, not imposed. It is not up to Elena to decide what makes a woman.
Unbeknownst to Elena, Hecuba and her children have already identified her child Honesto as Helen: ‘I remember now. Helen's arrival. It was Paris who brought her to us. She was lovely. And lithe. And shy. She smiled and I … And I made an exception’,Footnote 58 Hecuba recalls. Elena's child thus becomes the casus belli, the patient zero, in the infective siege on the House of Hecuba. Accordingly, after a debate between Hecuba and Honesto/Helen on who is responsible for their present circumstances,Footnote 59 echoing that between Queen Hecuba and Helen in Trojan Women (ll. 895–1059), Mother Hecuba sentences Honesto/Helen as the (partial) culprit of their familial decimation:
hecuba: Perhaps the Gods have dealt you a cruel hand. Yes, a hand that men have abused. And perhaps … Perhaps my son was one of those men. (She feels a way about this, but presses on.) But the fact is that before you came to us we had no need for diagnoses. Before you there were no hospitals or waiting rooms. No doctors or tests. Before you, Helen, there was none of this. Before you There was no death.Footnote 60
According to Hawkeswood, his informants in the mid-1980s Harlem community of gay black men, precisely when Paris Is Burning was being filmed, believed that AIDS was allegedly brought into Harlem via those socializing in the white gay communities of downtown New York,Footnote 61 a suspicion coincidental with that of other black gay men elsewhere in the US.Footnote 62 And so, in the same way as, in ancient Greek literature, Helen is the Greek who has entered the Trojan royal family, only to be reclaimed by the Greek king Menelaus and the other commanders, thus causing the war, so is Honesto/Helen a member of an apparently heteronormative, wealthy family who has chosen to enter the black and queer family of Hecuba, potentially bringing in the illness, only to be violently reclaimed by Elena, and, given her position, by the heteronormative, wealthy, white offstage.
However, once Astyanax's death has been announced, Elena returns, after giving some thought to her own child's queerness: ‘Hecuba? What can I do?’Footnote 63 Interestingly, Hecuba uses Elena's own mother as example: ‘Yr mother was fierce, Elena … Mother him like that. Like that. Like yr mother mothered you. Mothered me. THAT'S what you can do.’Footnote 64 It is this type of resilient, caring, loving and powerful motherhood that Hecuba advises, a model that has shaped her own style of mothering. Their sorority in (queer) motherhood and sisterhood has united them and reversed Elena's own transphobic defence of biological motherhood. But they are now united in pain too: Honesto/Helen is invited by Talthybius to be tested.
In the face of the excruciatingly gradual horrors thrown by the illness on Hecuba and her children, worsened by the decisions, biases and prejudices of the white heteronormative wealthy doctors offstage, Hecuba stands firm, resilient, resisting, loving. Her final act of defiance and resistance is to burn the waiting room in which they have been at the impending mercy of those offstage. But this is not only an act of resistance; it is also a solemn act of remembrance. She puts her cigarette out on the toy horse Astyanax carried, thus incinerating the loving object of her dead child and remembering, in turn, all the children she has lost. Flames purify the painful trauma and honour the memories of those who have fallen, as the House of Hecuba walks on and away.
Tragic disidentifications: Greeks out there
Given the powerful ways in which And She Would Stand Like This explores its themes, performance and plot, as well as its relation to Trojan Women, I believe it productive to briefly reflect on the structures of cultural production and reception of Graeco-Roman tragedy it deploys, in order to best understand how And She Would Stand Like This seeks its own positionality with, on and against cultural and discursive hegemony.
And She Would Stand Like This demonstrates a disidentificatory rewriting, restaging and repurposing of Greek tragedy's centrality to normative cultural discourse,Footnote 65 since, as Muñoz explains, ‘disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology … a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within’.Footnote 66 The New York production at once interpellates, exposes, criticizes and defies the discriminations, biases and prejudices that established heteronormative and racist culture and discourse have historically promoted and provoked by using, adapting and recontextualizing a renowned piece of the larger hegemonic system, a Euripidean tragedy. Instead of either openly confronting and disregarding the hegemonic cultural object or attempting a process of assimilation and identification with said object and discourse, And She Would Stand Like This takes on board and exploits the cultural capital of Trojan Women and its internal structures for its own cultural production within its US context. It redeploys the tragedy's own reputation and performance history as a space of cultural interpellation, as well as reconfiguring Trojan Women's own questioning of civilized conduct, its spatial dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, its dehumanizing crescendo and its exploration of community in a time of crisis, to stage and focus on the horrors and discriminations faced by a community and family of queers of colour enduring the death sentence of AIDS. But in adapting the Euripidean text, it is also able to shift the positionality of the community from one of victimhood in Trojan Women to one of resistance and survival in And She Would Stand Like This. This disidentificatory appropriation, redeployment and recontextualization of one of the classics of Western theatre and cultural history lie at the centre of the potency, skill and contestation of And She Would Stand Like This.
Despite the extensive use of Graeco-Roman antiquity as source and exempla for heteronormativity, the sexual and gender difference of Greece and Rome have served many LGBT thinkers and activists in the defence and vindication of their own identities, affections and desires – an endeavour that has proven relatively successful and has played its part in successive waves of gay and lesbian liberation in the US, the UK and Europe.Footnote 67 However, this disentanglement of antiquity's alignment with heteronormativity has not often been accompanied by a dismantling of its other established alignments with racism, colonialism and class. As a result, Graeco-Roman antiquity has become a locus for the normativity establishing white gay cis man as the queer subject by default. Greece and Rome indeed often appear as queer utopias, but utopias which are too white, too middle-/upper-class, too cis and too male.Footnote 68
Homonormativity is manifest not only in its use of Graeco-Roman antiquity but also in many other areas. For example, cultural products relating to AIDS also propose a homonormative stance in alignment with the sociocultural reality of the discrimination of queers of colour with HIV during the AIDS epidemic and the emergence of the white gay male as AIDS victim by default, exemplified in the case of Rock Hudson, or in the racial oblivion of mainstream filmic cultural memory of AIDS that Jih-Fei Cheng discusses.Footnote 69 Perhaps a most poignant example of this is the film Philadelphia (1993), in which Tom Hanks plays an HIV-positive gay man at the height of the AIDS crisis, to great critical and public acclaim, but theatrical examples can also be mentioned here, such as The Normal Heart (1985) or Angels in America (1991, 1993).Footnote 70 Stagings and versions of Greek tragedy have participated in this phenomenon,Footnote 71 as was the case of Jan Ritsema's Philoktetes-Variations (1994), in which Philoctetes was played, with visible Kaposi sarcoma, by the actor and gay activist Ron Vawter – incidentally part of the cast of Philadelphia.
Given the focus points and blind spots created by homonormativity, And She Would Stand Like This thus appears as a disidentificatory redeployment and contestation of another system of normativity in its own take on the dramatization of the AIDS crisis and the staging of Greek tragedy to this end. The play skilfully revisits the AIDS epidemic and its devastation as a plot and theme to move an AIDS-enduring community of queers of colour in New York headed by a trans woman from the displaced periphery to the cultural centre, with a tool also used by homonormative culture: Greek tragedy. And She Would Stand Like This thus reconfigures the dramatic commonplace of a hospital drama set in the AIDS epidemic by establishing queers of colour as its protagonists and focus points, in similar ways as in the subsequent television series Pose (2018–21). By doing so, the play takes the framework of Trojan Women to expose the intersectional challenges and discriminations faced by queers of colour with AIDS in a way that mainstream homonormative culture has been unable or unwilling to do. In its skilful changes to the tragic plot, the play is also able to reflect on important issues regarding AIDS, such as criminal infection and hetero-/homosexual, genetic and communitarian transmission of HIV and bereavement within the House of Hecuba, as well as critiquing the offstage systems of oppression, shifting the status of the community from one of victimhood to one of survival and resilience. And She Would Stand Like This thus also exhibits a disidentificatory appropriation, redeployment and recontextualization of homonormative cultural products by placing queers of colour with AIDS at the centre of cultural discussion and representational visibility.
Another aspect of the disidentificatory work done by And She Would Stand Like This that I wish to explore here is that of its migration and hybridity among different cultural registers, primarily those of high, mainstream and underground culture.Footnote 72 Here I want to establish these categories not as levels in a hierarchical value system, but instead as cultural registers established by cultural critique and reception. And She Would Stand Like This travels through these registers in ways that, in conjunction, establish a multifaceted, multitargeted and multidimensional channel through which and with which to perform the themes and story at the centre of this production.
Greek tragedy provides a high-culture framework with which to interpellate those who consider themselves to be the intellectual and cultural elite via the recognizable dramatic structure of Trojan Women. In doing this, it is also able to appeal to the universalizing ideas, values and mores established by different normativities in charge of high culture, which, via its disidentificatory appropriation, redeployment and recontextualization, it can contest, reformulate and subvert.
Paris Is Burning, by contrast, in its subject matter – but not in its production – alongside Cunningham's ‘The Slap of Love’, provides an underground culture framework, ballroom culture in the US, with which the play is able to establish its own cultural and identificatory genealogies and thus reinforce, expose and vindicate the legacies, forebears and communities belonging to queers of colour onstage and among the audience – somewhat reminiscent of the benefit event Voguing Against AIDS (1989). In doing this, the house system, ball walking, intersectional identities and cultural potency portrayed and referred to in Paris Is Burning become a vehicle in And She Would Stand Like This for the empowerment and celebration of queers of colour in the US. In addition, And She Would Stand Like This also transits the popular appeal of ballroom to mainstream culture through cultural products such as Madonna's ‘Vogue’, therefore basing itself on a system of popularly recognizable codes.
By walking these cultural registers, the performance is able to appeal to its variety of audiences, and thus unite, galvanize and intelligibly express the combination of its high and underground registers, as well as executing its work of subverting the established normativities, prejudices and biases developed by normative mainstream culture. Therefore, by a disidentificatory combination of these three cultural registers, And She Would Stand Like This is expertly able to question the universalizing principles of high culture, vindicate the legacies of underground culture and subvert the familiarity of mainstream culture in order to expose, perform and convey the lives, struggles, challenges, communities, families, experiences and survival of queers of colour at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and, as a result, to vindicate the dignity, heritage and validity of queers of colour today.
The use of Trojan Women and Paris Is Burning served primarily as framework and reference for a performance staging the lived realities of a community which, in facing difficulties, challenges and discriminations, has provided chosen families and houses in which and with which to express self-worth and dignity, be this in spectacular balls or in networks of care, protection and love. Unlike many other cultural products on queers of colour that prescribe a violent, tragic and destructive outcome, And She Would Stand Like This provides an enactment of a queer life of strength and power, as the actress playing Hecuba, Mizz June, herself celebrated: ‘Often we have narratives of Black trans-women that are prostitutes or villains. This story, without giving too much away, is actually loving, and it's affectionate, and it talks about family, which I think is missing in the media … This story is really really important.’Footnote 73
Through its performance, And She Would Stand Like This enacted these queer lives of resilience and survival with a cast, team and audience in the present of 2017 New York, thus establishing a performance of queer past in queer present through which to vindicate cultural and queer genealogies as well as setting the challenges and power of the past in dialogue with those of the present. The performance was purposely conceived to activate its audience both as an exercise in vindication and remembrance and as a physical and actorial involvement in the performance: ‘Audience members danced on the set to … acknowledge the radical visibility of underrepresented voices being present onstage’, one review informs us.Footnote 74 According to its director, David Mendizabal, audience participation culminated in the final fire, made up of their own chairs, thus shifting their positionality into an active ritual of resistance and remembrance.Footnote 75 The separation between stage and audiences, and thus of queer past and its present, was further blurred by the involvement of some key characters: the choreographer of the performance was Kia Labeija, also mother of the House of Labeija, which many consider the first established house, who has been HIV-positive since birth; in attendance was Hektor Xtravaganza, legendary grandfather of the House of Xtravaganza, member of the Ballroom Hall of Fame, HIV-positive since 1985, AIDS activist and founder of the House of Latex and the Latex Ball; and one could also find RuPaul Andre Charles, an internationally recognized queer star of colour, among the audience. And She Would Stand Like This was thus able to merge the onstage play and the offstage audience into one and the same enactment of past and present community, challenges and resilience. The performance thus summoned many of ‘the ways in which gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people of color devise technologies of self-assertion and summon the agency to resist’, which Johnson explains as quare strategies.Footnote 76
It is precisely in this activation of performance and audience, of queer past and queer present, of former and current resilience and power of queers of colour that And She Would Stand Like This can enact a queer futurity that overcomes, vanquishes and surpasses the historic intersectional discriminations suffered by queers of colour. After all, ‘The future is queerness's domain’, as Muñoz asserted.Footnote 77 It is the poetic nowness and communal activation of theatrical performance that can propel those gathered into living, acting out and sharing a queer futurity whose dreams can be lived in the here and now, as part of the ‘temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity’, as Muñoz theorizes.Footnote 78 In this way, And She Would Stand Like This appears as a queer communal ritual of poetic empowerment with which and through which to pay homage to queer forebears of colour, celebrate queer lives of colour now and galvanize those who are to walk a queer futurity of power and liberation, all marching to the call of Mother Hecuba: ‘Forward. AND WALK!’Footnote 79
