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Dan Kennedy (2:12)

To the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This week we have two stories for you and both of them involve fighting back. One against the US Congress and the second story against a bully on a school bus. Our first story is from Holly Hughes from a show that we did in Berkeley at the Bay Area Science Festival that I hosted. That was a really that was a fun night. The theme was the Big Bang. Here's Holly Hughes.

Holly Hughes (2:45)

I went to college in the Midwest and as soon as I got Out I headed right to New York City to become an artist. Well, not right out of college. There's those couple of years we don't talk about. They don't show up on the resume. The lost years, waitressing, you know, when my life just felt as big and empty as an August sky. But I did make it to New York. I didn't have a plan. That didn't matter. It was 1979, and orange shag was everywhere. Quiche was a health food. John Travolta was thin and hot. Feminism was a song on the radio. You could dance to it. And we did. So that was kind of my plan. And it was enough to get me to the East Village to a small storefront theater called the wow Cafe. And what I saw there that night was not so much a play as a whole world. It was a weird little rabbit hole that opened, and I wanted to go down it. I did. Never wanted to leave that theater. So after the show, I went up to the woman that seemed to be in charge, or at least she was the tallest person there. And she also looked a lot like James Dean. And I think she is James Dean. And I said, I really like it here. I'd like to help out. And she says, so when do you want to do your show? And I said, no, no, no, no. I'm a visual artist. I want to help out backstage. And she just looks around the room, which is one room, and there is no backstage. And in fact, I am already on stage. She says, how about April? I'm like. Which she takes as a guess. And so now I've got to try to make a play out of the only story I have at this time, which is about trying to come out while I'm waiting tables at the Red Lobster. I'm worried that this isn't going to work very well as a play. I'm worried it's been done. I mean, maybe it's a cliche. I mean, maybe there's lots and lots of plays about gay waitresses and fast food. So I decide I've got to get out of the box. I've got to mix it up. I've got to get avant garde. And I decide I'm going to tell it from the standpoint of the lobsters. And my first play, Shrimp in a Basket, is a giant hit. It's amazing. I sell out the entire run, Both nights. All 20 seats. Yeah. And it leads to more opportunities. Like three nights, 21 seats. And, you know, four nights, 22 seats. You know, not immediately, but you have to build up to it. And in a few years, I write a play that runs for almost a year, off Broadway, and it earns really nice reviews and some awards. It does not earn very much money. And it's really late to ask my friends to work for free. I've got to figure out a way to pay. Pay my friends in the show. And so I decide to apply for a grant, and I get a grant, and that's exciting. And I decide to apply for another grant, which I also get, and that's really exciting. So I decided to go for a really big grant, the national endowment for the arts grant. And it's a big deal. I mean, it's really prestigious. I don't think I'm going to get it. And it's also kind of a big idea, you know, about America with art at the center of it. And it's all about trying to open up the arts to as many people in America as possible. But BY now, it's 1990, and this is what America looks like in 1990. The AIDS epidemic casts this big shadow over the entire country, and it's 100% fatal. There's no effective treatment, and it just burns the flesh off you. It takes you down to your skin and bones, and you can't hide when you have aids. And it hits the gay community very hard. And those of us who aren't sick are helping our friends who are. And we're making a lot of art. We need to make a lot of art, because art has to do the job that the media and the government don't seem to want to do, which is, first of all, just say the word aids. And we're using art to demand treatment, to mourn. The government decides to respond this way to aids, they don't attack the disease. They attack the people who have the disease, who they blame for having the disease. And they pass a law banning the funding of gay art. I don't really know what gay art is. I mean, is anything slightly stylish done by a gay person automatically qualify as gay art? I mean, I wonder if the art itself is somehow gay. You know, like paintings that sleep with other paintings instead of dating sculptures, which is another form. So usually when you get a grant, you get a letter that tells you yes or no. And I get a call from lawyers, a bunch of lawyers, who tell me I got the funding, but then it was revoked because of political pressure, and pretty soon I forgotten about art. Because we're talking about something much bigger. We're talking about a lawsuit against the federal government. We're talking about a cause. And the next morning, I am on the front page of the New York Times, my name above the fold, along with the names of three other artists who are in the same boat. Although mostly, the New York Times doesn't like to use our names. They like to call us Karen Finley and the Three Homosexuals, or even more, they like to call us the NEA4, which I think sounds kind of like a bad cover band that might have played your middle school promise, but, you know, there's no such thing as bad publicity. And a few days later, I get invited to be on a panel on subversive humor at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. And oh, my God, that is so cool. I mean, this is the Grand Old Opry of American arts and culture. I mean, this is where Toni Morrison reads, Tony Kushner, Tony Danza, all the Tonys are there. And now I'm there. I can't believe it's happening. I'm so excited, I don't even bother to check out who else is on the panel with me until the day of. And then I notice, well, I am the only woman. In fact, I am the only person who does not already have their own TV show. But I figure it's going to be great. The host has a little bit of trouble introducing me. He can't quite bring himself to say the word lesbian. There's this pause before he says it, and I mean a pause beyond the wildest imagination of Harold Pinter. He somehow creates a vast tundra of silence that opens up over the audience. And then when he finally says it, he adds syllables to the word. He embellishes it. He makes lesbian bigger. He makes it into a landscape full of forbidding peaks and valleys that Nobody at the 92nd Street Y is going to want to visit. And then the panel starts, which is my way of saying, five men stand up and start trying out some new lesbian material. And the first man says, so my wife and I moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, and it was great. And then came the lesbians. Everybody is cracking up. I mean, they are cracking up. There are tears in their eyes. They are like. Things are flying out of all of their orifices. They're laughing so hard. I am the only person who isn't laughing. I mean, I think, what's the punchline? And I realize. I think that's me. And I feel the blood and any witty remark just drain from my body. I never say a thing. At the 92nd Street Y. I'm completely silent. I'm just the topic of conversation. But there's no such thing as bad publicity. I get lots and lots of work being part of the NEA4. It doesn't pay anything, but it takes over my life. I stopped making other kinds of theater. I just do the NEA4 thing all the time. But there are people that make money with the NEA4. Groups like the Concerned Women for America who have about a million piece mailing list. And they use it to send out a plea, to ask people to send them money so they can protect the country from the onslaught of the gay artists. And they also publish our home mailing addresses. And I get a lot of hate mail. Most of it is not very well spelled. I get some death threats like, I have a gun. I know where you live. I'm coming to New York this summer. P.S. jesus loves you. And then it's signed with his return address. So the court case of the NEA4 makes its way through the federal system. We win, they appeal. We win, they appeal until over a decade, it ends up at the United States Supreme Court. And weeks before that happens, my lawyer calls to say, hey, if you want to go to this thing, you better let me know right away because the tickets are going fast. And I'm like, this is a long way from storefront theater in the East Village. And my friends are calling, hey, it's sold out. Can you get me in? Now when you go to the Supreme Court, you get escorted to your seat by members of the Secret Service and they put you in these pews. And I'm not talking about seats that recall pews, seats that resemble pews. No, I am talking about honest to God. Onward Christian Soldiers. Faith of our Fathers pew pews. But big, really big. Like Pee Wees Playhouse big. So big that when you sit in them, you are very small and your feet just dangle. So the court rules we get the grants, but the restrictions on funding stand. Is that it? Is that the end of the story? I mean, the Supreme Court rules is now what do I do? This has been my life. If you're an artist, you get used to a lot of no's. No, we're not going to give you a show. No, you're not going to get money. You get bad reviews. You get kind of used to it. But sometimes the nos are harder than others. Sometimes they really knock your breath out. And sometimes you wonder, what am I doing? Why would I want to be an artist? And I have to remember, the first artist I knew was my College drawing teacher, and I was a freshman, and we would be sketching, and he would talk to us about the sculpture that he was making in the studio that he had built out of his garage. And we'd hear about the cigarettes, the whiskey, the jazz spilling out into the night. And then this sculpture that he was working on for years, and he just couldn't figure out how to finish. He loved it. It was beautiful, but he just couldn't figure out how to finish it. And one night he realized, that's the problem. It is only beautiful. So he gets into his truck and he drives it into the sculpture and he smashes it. And it is no longer beautiful, but now it is art. And I thought, yeah, yeah, I could do that. Yeah, I want to do that. I wanted to be everything in this story. I wanted to be the man. I wanted to be the cigarettes. I wanted to be the whiskey. I wanted to be music. I wanted to be the knight. And I wanted to be the sculpture that had to be broken before it could shine with the difficult truth of art. Thank you.