-The Other Paper
Sixty-two years ago, I was shepherded out of an elementary school classroom and into church to pray for the assassinated President Kennedy. Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” was on the radio. In high school, I protested at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention.
Fifty-two years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to New York to pursue my dream of becoming a dancer. I found community with other gay men, although we had no legal protections; we could be fired from jobs and evicted from apartments. Our sexual activity was criminalized.
Forty years ago, I managed Trisha Brown’s dance company with a rotary phone and rolodex. With press kits in my backpack and a Eurail pass I knocked on doors of theaters and opera houses across Europe introducing the company’s work.
Thirty-one years ago in Minneapolis, I was inundated with hate mail during the Culture Wars. The AIDS pandemic was obliterating an entire generation. My artwork eulogized and mourned. Later, complications from spinal surgery left me paraplegic.
Twenty years ago, I worked in arts administration and philanthropy in San Francisco while creating disability-inflected videos and essays. I married my husband and rekindled a childhood love of Shetland ponies. With equine in tow, we moved to Vermont in 2010.
Seven years ago, I retired from running the Flynn Center and served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. Writing and media projects continue, along with exercise and daily chores at the barn. I am steeped in the realities of aging.
In each of these decades, optimism raged during boom times and despair in downturns. While political, demographic and environmental forecasts appear dystopian, I am buoyed by the grass-roots resistance and resiliency experienced in my lifetime.
As an artist and activist, I learned to trust the process, improve on what worked and drop what didn’t. Failures and mistakes fueled advances. I made work to survive and thrive in darkest times. From lived experience, I am certain cultural investments now will better prepare us for whatever cataclysms lay ahead.
Even in our Trumpian hellscape of eliminating the arts, humanities, DEI initiatives and trans identities, I dream of inclusive communities revitalized, people sharing common ground through artistic engagement, children finding voice with arts education, and artists providing succor.
The arts are where hope lives. And we need buckets of it right now. Artists create vivifying metaphors, define space (real and imagined), commemorate losses and victories, and articulate the unconscious, engendering a safe space for unsafe ideas — a necessary role in our profane world.
Recently, I worked with a community of artists to claim our corporeal agency. Joining me were cisgendered and trans folks, queer and straight with varying abilities creating a meditative video about our bodies that have been damaged, feared, demonized, weaponized, politicized.
The project felt necessary; this is my offering. Will it change hearts and minds? That’s not my call. As Marcel Duchamp said, “A work of art is completed by the viewer.”
Five years from now, I will have reached my average life expectancy. In the near-term I focus on what my service can be today, believing a society we conjure together will flourish. The future is now.