Exit Strategy (For My Grandmother,Margaret Gingrich)

1.

Sometimes life asks us some difficult questions, as difficult to face as to answer. Sometimes a loved one we have lost and mourned comes back in a memory prompted by a found object, bearing, if not an answer, at least an example about facing difficulty. In my performance Exit Strategy, created in 2005, I tell the story of the way such an artifact gave me courage in a trying time. Like much of my work, it weaves personal stories, pop culture, and politics together, hoping to point toward an engaged critique of the quotidian messages gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) people receive that we are worthy of contempt and derision. A lot has changed since 2005, but much remains the same.

This essay comes from numerous scripts, notes, and video recordings of the performance. ¹ This essay also knows that it is a conversion of a performance into something more closely resembling an article. Embracing its hybridity, it feels no shame in speaking now and then across the years, in filling in details about what happened when it was alive, in acknowledging how audiences responded. My absence of shame in this regard echoes Tami Spry’s (2011) observation that

in performative autoethnography, performance is not an added scholarly bonus. It does not operate as an interesting feature or entertaining option that one might choose after “finishing” the autoethnography. Here, performance does not “illuminate” the text, rather it assists in the creation of the text; it is in itself performative. (pp. 28-29)

If performativity involves, among other things, the stylized repetition of acts (Butler, 1990 p. 140), at least one pertinent kind of repetition is the recurrence of an image or group of words in perpetually new ways. As with many of my performances, Exit Strategy uses its title as what J. Hillis Miller (1995) described as a kernel, “some patterning or repetition of key elements, for example, a trope or system of tropes, or a complex word” (p. 75). “Exit strategy” becomes a phrase that takes on multiple literal and metaphoric meanings as the narrative progresses. In the performance itself, this reflection on the titular term begins with a story.

At the defense of my dissertation about postmodern performance, much of it treated from my queer standpoint, my beloved advisor asked, “Craig, when will there have been enough queer performance?” At first I felt a kind of outrage, enough so that I don’t remember much of anything about my answer except a general sense of protesting the question. But years later, during the presidential administration of Bush the younger, especially after his “election” to a second term, I began to see my advisor’s question differently. With all of the “Mission Accomplished” talk and years of not knowing how to end the wars, I realized that my advisor had wanted to know whether or not I thought the genre of postmodern and queer performance I had taken up as both a means and an object of study had an exit strategy. When could we say that its mission had been accomplished?

I did not know then—neither during my defense nor during the twilight of Bush The Younger—and I certainly do not know now how queer performance might achieve such a closure on its own project. While conditions have changed, to some degree, between the early nineties, the early oughts, and “today,” I still do not know a way out of religious intolerance or the ability of despots to lead the faithful around by their hate like a ring through their collective nose.

That has to sound escalating, even insulting, to many people, but at least during the Bush years it seemed as if Amerika preferred tough-talking, know-it-all deciders. Shooting from the hip feels like a style the bulk of our country has encouraged me to consider adopting, putting my calmer performing and writing persona—one my friend and fellow performance artist Elizabeth Whitney once likened to a queer Garrison Keillor—to death. Another performer friend, Ambrose Zimmerman, and I sometimes referred to this persona as always “making nice-nice.” If Amerika doesn’t respond to “nice-nice,” perhaps I should ask you to consider this performance the death notice of Craig the Nicer. Ask and tell, that is.

Talking about all of this while working on the debut of Exit Strategy, a friend told me over coffee that she was sorry I wouldn’t be performing it outside of the Kleinau Theatre, our department’s performance space. I did end up performing it elsewhere, but at the time the venue seemed limited to her. “The Kleinau audience is so sophisticated,” she said, “that it’s like preaching to the converted” (for a critique of this dismissive, see T. Miller & Román, 1995). In the performance version of this essay, I pause here to test her theory. I ask the audience to raise their hands if they’ve written a letter to their senator or another elected official asking them to support marriage equality. I do some quick math, figure a percentage of the audience—which tended to hover between 20% and 30%, indicating that, in fact, my work was not done. Twenty to thirty points out of a hundred, after all, equals an “F.” So much for preaching to the converted.

In fact, even in my remarkably warm and accepting department, the turn of the millennium still found me occasionally picking up on little “we have enough queers in the department” messages. As we filed into a prospectus meeting for one of my advisees’ dissertation on same-sex attracted Black men, a now-former colleague asked me, “Why, when we finally get to talk about Black masculinity, does it always have to be about gay men?”—as if he had been present in every room for every address of the subject; as if it was the student’s responsibility to make up lacks in other people’s experience, don’t you know, before pursuing his own research interests. I’d sat on a committee looking at graduate applications where one member protested that a student outing hirself as transgendered in hir application had offered, by virtue of this one detail, “too much information”—as if doing so weren’t a prerequisite for hir safety, never mind self-actualization. I was still routinely invited to departmental weddings without remark—as if I had never done performance work for the community about my distaste for them—especially if people did not enjoy equal access to the 1,138 special rights the General Accounting Office (GAO) identified as flowing to married couples through various federal programs (GAO, 2013). I was still hearing students say, about my queer theory course, “Oh God, I’m not gonna take that.”

And let’s not mention—no, let’s do—the wake of my gentle protestation in the defense of a dissertation that claimed that Catholicism doesn’t evangelize and allows people to come to it freely, of their own accord. I argued that the history of the missions (I’m a California boy, after all) in this and other countries, not to mention the influence on HIV/AIDS and birth control legislation exerted by the council of bishops and the Vatican, would suggest the opposite. Suddenly, I began receiving mailings from various Catholic pro-family groups describing me as a filthy sodomite and the number one threat to the American way of life. I’d get these little crucifixes in funding appeals, asking for a donation in exchange for a piece of jewelry I would never wear. Whenever I see a crucifix, all I can think about is Pax Romana, the so-called peace made possible by the Roman exercise of power. It was hard not to see a similar set of abuses in Pax Americana. At the time of the performance version of this essay, human rights groups were arguing that at least 100,000 civilian deaths could be attributed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as if “9/11,” the arguable cause of our involvement in these countries, hadn’t been enough, and we figured we’d just reenact it approximately 25 times. As Bush kept asking for more money to fight more wars, plural, I began to feel like war was his new cocaine. Who decided it was a good idea to put a former addict in charge of the guns and the money?

Still, I didn’t feel right simply throwing these crucifixes away. I spoke to a Catholic colleague about whom she thought might like the most recent one I had received, the one I used in the performance. Her first response was disbelief that I had a crucifix in the first place. I explained that I had received it in one of the mailings that began after the defense in question. She smiled and said, perfectly seriously, that I shouldn’t take it too hard, “He’s probably just concerned about your soul.” His concern would, of course, trump mine, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it trump my desire to have a department mailbox that didn’t regularly spew some hate out in my direction?

When I think back to the performance, about how I felt after working through this litany in an escalating tone, I still feel astonished about what I did next. “Well, I got your exit strategy right here,” I said, and pulled a hammer out of a little valise. I put the crucifix, which I had held up to the audience as I spoke about it, down on a little table and began hammering. The audible gasps between the hammer blows always felt strange when I did this part of the show for audiences—so much more of a reaction to it than to anything I had just said. But then I would reveal the crucifix, unharmed, to the audience—I had only hammered near it on the table. “The difference between you and me,” I’d say, “is that you can do it, crush us, and ask us to understand those who do, whereas I cannot even crush this cheap symbol.”

A little quiet would fall in the house.

I like it when that happens—it feels like we’re finally off script, beyond expectation, past the escapist normativity of performance in general and occupying a queer moment.

Enough queer performance? Did I think I could just call “Blackout!” and it’d be over? I’ve spent almost a quarter of a century doing queer performance work. Did I think it might matter, especially to the audience and community I regularly perform for, especially where I live? To quote Uma Thurman’s character, Beatrix Kiddo, from Quentin Tarrantino’s Kill Bill, when asked by Lucy Liu’s character, O-Ren Ishii, if she really thought she could overcome an entire martial arts gang by herself, “you know, for a minute there, I kinda did.” (Bender & Tarantino, 2003)

So, let’s see if just calling out can make it stop: “Blackout on the homophobia!”

2.

Yeah. That doesn’t seem to have worked. Apparently, I don’t have that kind of power.

What is sad is that I had a great affection for the Pope, still John Paul II at the time. Pope John Paul II was a poet in his youth, staunchly anti-war, and very much against the death penalty. He even had his own fill-in-the-blank mobile, and he filled in “Pope” right where Oscar Mayer fills in “Wiener.” What’s not to love? When I first did the performance, it was early in January. Over the holidays, I’d watched clips from the Pope’s Christmas speech decrying materiality and greed. I’d caught myself thinking, “You go, Pope; right on, Holy Father!” Until, that is, I remembered that he was making that speech leaning out of the window of his castle, heavy with treasure, including gold from the Americas, mined and processed at considerable loss of life among the indigenous people. When I googled “Vatican Treasures,” back then, I got 2,300 hits. The Vatican complex is 108.7 acres, with guards in rather splendid, almost comically ostentatious uniforms. Oh, the powers will tell you that all that gold and pomp is really just a tribute to Jesus as Lord and savior—as if he hadn’t himself counseled against wealth. Right. And Graceland is really just a monument to Elvis’s mamma.

The hypocrisy was killing me. And the murder weapon wasn’t just the freaking out over the possibility of marriage equality; it included the unaccountable ontology of the Bible, upon which so much hate is based. I’d been reading The Jesus Mysteries (Freke & Gandy, 1999), a book that describes the profound similarities of much Christian teaching about the life of Jesus and various elements of paganism in general and the cults of Dionysus and Osiris more particularly—their virgin births, baptisms, raising of people from the dead, rising from the dead themselves, and so on. As the church consolidated in the second century, various pagan elders accused it of plagiarism. Their outcry was so strong that the second-century apologist Justin Martyr developed the doctrine of “diabolical mimicry” to explain it. Essentially, the doctrine holds that Satan, knowing that Jesus would come, seeded the world’s religions with similar stories in advance so that the story of Christ would appear to resemble pre-existing myths and teachings (Freke & Gandy, 1999, pp. 27-60).

But even if one suspends the question of the certainty of The Bible, its incoherence with other elements of accepted practice in modern life makes the perspective taken on marriage equality seem arbitrary. There’s the story of Sodom, of course, wherein townsmen sought the right to rape Lot’s guests. It’s a hospitality story. And what does Lot do? He offers the mob his daughters. Yeah, that’s a scenario we want to endorse as rational. The Bible also prohibits people with bad eyesight from approaching the altar, but I remember seeing the bespectacled Jerry Falwell preach at a variety of them. I even remember him on the October 26, 2004 broadcast of CNN’s Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer, in conversation with the Reverend Jesse Jackson:

Let’s stop the killing and choose peace, “ Jackson replied. “Let’s choose negotiation over confrontation.”

“Well, I’m for that too,” Falwell said. “But you’ve got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I’m for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them away in the name of the Lord.” (see Allen, 2004)

Blow them away in the name of the Lord? Can you imagine how uttering the sentence Blow them away in the name of Allah on television might alter one’s life in the United States? And The Bible famously prohibits the consumption of shellfish, but I can’t remember the last time Christians gathered outside of a Red Lobster to chant God hates lobster! God hates lobster! Chant it to yourself for a minute, just to see how silly it sounds. I had a real sense of connection chanting it with audiences during the performance.

What allows this kind of thinking among those who can’t imagine marriage equality? Many straight folks can admit that science has helped us overcome the prejudice against the blind; after all, they or their children might need glasses. They can eat lobster because science has helped identify the value of refrigeration, and engineers have made it possible; besides, lobster is simply delicious. But they’ll ignore the American Psychological Association’s determination that “homosexuality” isn’t an illness. Why? Because that science doesn’t make anything possible for them; it actually gets in the way of having a whipping boy. They’ll say they “love the sinner, but hate the sin” because their worldview profits from maintaining queers as a constitutive outside against which they can rail in funding appeals. Where would Sunday morning services and televangelism be without this drama? What would I say to someone on the religious right if they asked my thoughts on the matter? (Even though it will never happen, making this a fantasy sequence). I guess I’d say, “I love the hypocrite, but hate the hypocrisy.”

Let me see, here, if it works yet: Blackout!! Blackout on the hypocrisy!

3.

Nope. I can still feel it.

Apparently I can’t get out of it that easily, the hypocrisy I have drowned in for the last 51 years.

Right after Bush was elected a second time, it would get really bad. Like many queer kids today, I grew up at the edge of the suicidal frontier. At some point in my forties, for example, my mother turned to me one evening, briefly taking her eyes off an episode of something like Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman or Touched by an Angel and said, “I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself as a child.” Out of the blue. For no apparent reason. Then she turned her attention back to the prettier world. I didn’t make an It Gets Better video because, at least to some degree, it remains an open question to me, particularly when I think about the gravity of my depression after the election. I spent a lot of time in my mind, going to Giant City State Park, near where I live. I imagined it in all seasons—the bright leaves of autumn; the white ground of winter, with inky lines of tree shadow painted on the snow; the stop-motion explosions of dogwood and redbud in spring; and those snakey-snakey lines of shadow in the summer river, bending like waves from a song trapped under the surface, crossing and uncrossing itself as if it were a kind of prayer.

I’d get out a bag from the local Walmart, my dryer hose and official NASCAR duct tape—duct tape is advisable if you really want something to stick to a tail pipe. And official NASCAR duct tape seemed like it would be a better choice than, say, camouflage or Hello Kitty! NASCAR, with its cult of speed and the promise of death. Ah, America: zoom-zoom-zoom.

I love the sound of an engine revving before something happens.

But I never did it. Thank God. I kept resisting as fast as I could.

You may be asking yourself if I’ve just indulged a little TMI, given a little "too much information," indulged in a little interpersonal terrorism by disclosing my suicidal ideation. I appreciate your concern, but it’s tragically (hilariously?) misplaced. Yeah, I’m the terrorist here. It’s not like you are trying to write me out of the constitution or anything. Oh, no? Not you? You wanna raise your hands again so we can calculate the conversion rate? We’re just standing by while other people do it?

Hmm.

That’s so much better.

Besides, I wouldn’t want to give the Right the satisfaction. It’d be like giving them a prize: “Tell the Religious Right what they’ve won, Jonny.” “Well, Craig, it’s another dead gay body in an idling car!”

At this point, in the performance I’d jump around stage clapping and imitating the theme song from The Price is Right at the top of my lungs: “Bump-ump-a-da! Bump-ump-a-da! Bump-ump-a-dum-dum-a-dum-dum-a-dum-dum-a-dum-dump-a-da!” I’d do it until I couldn’t take it anymore. In one performance I pulled a muscle a little and thought I was really going to die. I could get very enthusiastic in my embodiment of this sarcastic happiness. Finally, I’d stop, catch my breath, and try one more time, calling “Blackout!” with what little breath I could muster.

4.

Maybe it’s a good thing that blackout, the imaginary blackout in the idling car, in the forest, never occurred.

At the height of my post-election depression, when I had spent so much time in my Giant City fantasies that I could tell you how many sticks were on the ground, I was cleaning house one day. I found my box of mementos from my grandmother, Margaret Gingrich. She had died a few years earlier, fighting her emphysema for every breath for what seemed like years. I had gone to visit my mother; Grandma lived with her during those last years. I had been helping my mother clean when I found it.

For years, Grandma had kept a little diary on those dime-store scratchpads about the size of a three-by-five index card. She kept track of what she ate, her phone calls, funny things on television programs. Finding her last scratch-pad diary filled me with longing for her. I can never say enough times that, without her, I really would not have made it. She and my grandfather took me in when I left home, made sure I got through college. When I introduced her to one of my early great loves, she said, “Oh my, I can see why you fell for him: those eyes!”—as if my desire were the most understandable thing in the world rather than the life-shattering problem others took it to be. Sitting there, on the empty hospital bed she had until a few days ago slept in at my mother’s house, reading her tiny pages, I could only wonder, “how on Earth am I supposed to make it now?” Then I found the most curious set of entries:

Keep your distance. Don’t pull arm away. Instead, twist and drop. Turn

your arm then run screaming.

If encircled in arm drop twisting.

Walk on inside side of sidewalk.

Run opposite direction.

Mail Box trick [?]

Inside trunk pull out wires to back lights to stop lights. Hope Police will

pull the driver over then you can pound, kick, and scream.

In the market if someone grabs you knock things off the shelf while screaming.

In parking area grab car handles while running to set off car alarms.

I couldn’t figure it out at first, but soon decided she must have been watching a talk-show guest give self-defense instructions, which she had dutifully written down, much as she might a recipe. Grandma had meant to survive, even at the end; bed-ridden and breathless, she’d stood her ground, rehearsing exit strategies for the most unlikely scenarios. I felt pretty ashamed of myself, actually, both times I found that diary—first at my mother’s house and then years later at my own. Over and over again, Grandma had offered me ways to re-think my sense that my survival was in the hands only of others. Her love kept surfacing. I wondered in a strange way if the list of exit strategies on the tablet was for her or for me. The universe works in mysterious ways.

So, in her honor, I have been working on my own list—it can be your list, too, if you want; I’m not greedy. It just has the one item so far, but it’s a start:

When the country is taken hostage by zealots who say they love you but hypocritically make war on you, remind them that until they recognize marriage equality they have forfeited the right to speak in the name of love, for they do not profess love, but only the diabolical mimicry of love. Repeat as necessary.

Like I say, it’s just a start. It’ll take a long time to overcome inequality, less a blackout than a slow fading of the light. Steady. Up, upward, toward full.

And then I ended the performance as I have for years:

Thank you for your kind attention.