In that vain, when I hear or see a story that in some way involves queer characters, especially queer women, I am interested. If a TV show has a queer female character, I will watch it no matter how poorly-written she is. When I read Daniel Hess’s “Menno Pause Revisited,” on The Center for Mennonite Writing, I became interested in Jim Wenger’s story. Jim Wenger was one of four editors of Menno Pause, a controversial underground newspaper published at Goshen College in the late 1960s. The four editors were eventually expelled, for both the publication and other concerns. Hess explains, “When I was finished, the president reached for his desk drawer, pulled out a Berkeley Barb, opened to a page of personals, ran his finger to one particular item and had me read it—a solicitation for a male partner from our own Jim Wenger.”
While I crave and want to see positive images and stories about the LGBTQ community, I don’t live in an idealized world where I can ignore when members of my community are faced with the burdens of homophobia and heterosexism (among other oppressions the LGBTQ community faces, such as misogyny and sexism, transphobia and cissexism, racism, ableism and others). I do not enjoy hearing stories of discrimination and oppression, but I know I need to hear them, because they are a part of the history of my community and my own history. I have experienced and continue to experience homophobia and misogyny and need to know that I am not alone in this struggle, that I am not the only body carrying these burdens. So while hearing Wenger’s story was painful and disturbing, it allowed me to place myself within a larger context at Goshen College. I know Goshen College has come far from the days of expelling queer students for being queer, but reading this story was validating and I better understand my experiences as a queer femme woman at this college as a result.
With all that said, I was expecting to hear some of Wenger’s story in Gadfly, a play depicting Sam Steiner’s life. Steiner was also one of the four editors of Menno Pause. After Steiner and Wenger were expelled, they moved to Chicago and lived together in an apartment. While I enjoyed the play and thought it was well done, I found it problematic that Wenger’s story was completely erased from Gadfly. It seemed that Wenger had an effect on Steiner’s life and as result, I left the show feeling disappointed and reminded of the ways my community has been erased and continues to be erased from history. I took the time to remember the ways the histories of Ruth and Naomi, Jael, David and Jonathan, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Rahab of the Bible, as well as the narratives of historical figures such as Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Willa Cather, James Baldwin and Bessie Smith have been understood within a white, male, cisgender and heterosexual framework and the ways I have learned to remember those histories and narratives as queer.
While I do not take this experience for granted, nor wish that I did not experience it, I worry that other members of the audience did not have the same context I had coming into the play. I knew of Wenger’s story and was expecting at least some exploration of Goshen College’s history (and continued history) of homophobia and heterosexism. Even though Gadfly was not written by members of the Goshen College community, the producers and writers of this play are still implicated and responsible for accurately portraying this community and its history. The play cannot be removed from the context of a longstanding history of queer erasure and misrepresentation. While I appreciated the themes of active pacifism and social change, I wish my community and its history would have been included in this dialogue.
You and I wrote from completely opposite perspectives. I kind of wish I had read your post before I wrote my own now, to understand better the other perspective before I wrote it. But still, even though my point of view for even beginning to look at the issue is very different from yours, I see that we both are writing about what we think is important for the audience to hear and understand in a story. For me, you bring up good points and a substantial history, but it seems like there is a line to be drawn before we assume that all controversial aspects of all stories must be addressed simultaneously. Including Jim Wenger's story would have added an entirely new focus on the play that the writers did not intend. I understand the idea that removing the entire LGBTQ community from works of art and the media only continues to discriminate against it, but the truth is that this issue is still a large one and could not be passed over in a dramatic feature without spending a great deal of time on it. For me, the issue still commands too much sensitivity to be expected to appear in all places in works of art that it appears in real life, so that artists of all kinds can use their artistic license to form meaningful works that are not constrained to divisive topics of our time.
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree with you, Kolton. From my perspective, the only way that LGBTQ issues will stop commanding such sensitivity is for people to actually talk about them and to treat them as normal in popular culture. If these stories are continuously omitted, this sends the message that these are big, scary issues that nobody should bring up for fear of offending somebody. Would the inclusion of Jim Wenger's story have offended somebody, somewhere? Undoubtedly. But given how quickly the pace of the play was, I'd argue that it would have been easy to slip in a line about that (and it could have provided another way that Sam was rebelling) without spending too much time on it. Gadfly presented many aspects that were just as "offensive" and "divisive" as homosexuality--racism, sexism, and atheism, just to name a few. The fact that an issue is divisive is no excuse for literally writing it out of a narrative the way Jim Wenger was written out of Gadfly. Divisive issues will not get any less divisive if we sit around doing nothing but erase their existence from our history books.
ReplyDeleteJake, I disagree with your comparison between racism, sexism, atheism, and homosexuality. To me personally these are all equally unfair ways to judge the character of an individual, but in the Mennonite community homosexuality is a divided issue, whereas on these other issues there is more consensus.
ReplyDeleteI wish this play would have addressed the Jim Wenger story more, but as an outside member of the community I can understand writer Rebecca Steiner's decision. To put in more about homosexuality would have been a more direct critique of the current GC administration, whereas the way the play was written, it's not really critical of anyone, but more just telling the story of Sam.
I certainly agree with you Jake, that homosexuality needs to be brought into daylight and I think Haley did so with her record article, so good job Haley. At the same time I can understand why the Rebecca Steiner did not include these ideas in the play.
Hayley, I appreciate your perspective here, and your courage to write it. I can imagine that after reading Dan Hess's essay, seeing the play would have been a disappointment for you. Rebecca Steiner took artistic license to tell a coherent story focused on Sam, but you're right--her plot structure of focusing on two couples, and thereby introducing stories of women, who had been invisible in Dan's essay, completely erased Jim Wenger's story. It's interesting how an attempt to include one group can result in the erasure of another group. Rebecca's commission was to tell Sam's story in honor of his retirement and service to the archives. Still, it was clear from the talk-back that some important parts of the story were not told. I have the feeling that Sam would enjoy your perspective here, and your desire to have more of the story told. I look forward to your project on Jim Wenger!
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