ΜΑ, ΚΑΛΑ, ΥΠΑΡΧΟΥΝ ΛΕΣΒΙΕΣ;

Where are all the lesbians?
Yesterday Michael Billington asked why UK playwrights aren't writing gay comedies. Because nobody's asking, says Stella Duffy

The Guardian, 6-12-2006
So Michael Billington wonders why British playwrights aren't writing more gay farces, when the gay comedy of manners is proving so successful on Broadway. There are two answers to this. One, because British theatres aren't commissioning them, and most writers have a hard enough time making ends meet without writing work just for the hell of it. And two, if gay writers write gay stories, we're told we're "ghetto-ising" ourselves; if straight writers write about gay themes, they're told they don't know what they're talking about.
My novels have lesbian protagonists, which means they are sometimes described as "cult successes" - something I can live with. Novels with straight leads are called "mainstream". As a sometime-writer for theatre, I know that I can just about get away with writing gay male characters, as it's not seen to be about me. But when I write gay women, I am accused of writing about myself, and, as is the way with any material seen as disguised autobiography, it's not taken seriously.
So you can't win. For years, gay writers have been told to shut up, stop moaning and get on with it. And anyway, apparently everything's fine now. We've got civil partnerships - Elton and David, George and Kenny, Matt and Kevin, and even Adam and Ian in Ambridge (yes, they're all men) - so we've made it. And if we're accepted in our very many facets, what's our problem?
We know there are plenty of gay stories still to be told, but the truth is we are tired of being the only ones telling them, and tired of being told that no one wants to hear them anyway. What kind of stories? There is the rise of homophobia in schools, the continued evidence of violent, even murderous, gay-bashing, and of course the lovely Chris Moyles's use of the word "gay" to mean rubbish - defended by the BBC.
The Drill Hall and Oval House theatres in London have been staging any number of gay plays, farces among them, for decades: successful work from Bryony Lavery, Neil Bartlett, Clare Summerskill, Jackie Clune and Nona Shepherd among very many others. And it's a shame the critics and literary managers from larger, better subsidised, venues don't - or won't? - go and check them out. These farces and comedies often have women writers, and women directors, and women performers: gay does not mean male, no matter how much the (male) theatre hierarchy and the (male) theatre critics might think so.
This is something the (largely female) theatre-going audience know only too well. We rarely see straight women leads on stage as it is, and as long as that continues, the chances of seeing gay men - or God forbid, normal (as in, not insane/man-hating/child-killing) gay women - is still a long way off. Yes, there are far fewer high-profile "out" lesbians in theatre (and outside it) than gay men. Yes, women do need to come out more. Yes, we need to take more responsibility for our own visibility - for the younger gay women who come along and ask, Where are all the lesbians?
Maybe we'll write these new farces when we don't have to write a screaming queen and a hatchet-faced dyke to get a laugh. Maybe we'll write them when there are so many non-stereotypical gay characters in everything else that our own gay characters can be any number of shades of everything, instead of all standing for one viewpoint, with one political perspective. Maybe we'll write them with a cast of four women and one man, instead of yet another cast of four men and one woman. Maybe we'll write them when we can do so without being accused of mining our own lives, or hiding ourselves in a ghetto. Or maybe the straight writers will dare to write them, without fear of being told they don't know what they're talking about because they haven't lived it. Maybe we'll write them when the theatres ask us to. And then we can all have a really good laugh.