Chely Wright is a country music singer who debuted in 1994 and achieved her life’s dream by becoming part of the Grand Ole Opry tradition, recording several Top 40 and number one songs, including “Shut Up and Drive” and “Single White Female.”  In 2010, she publicly came out as a lesbian, after 20 years of maintaining the secret of her sexuality from her fans and even from those closest to her.  In Wish Me Away, the documentary filmed during the three years before her public coming out on the Today Show and Oprah, among other national media venues, Wright narrates her story, which focuses on her emotional trauma over whether she has the personal strength to make her sexuality public.

In addition to the film shot for the documentary by directors Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf, Wish Me Away includes clips from Wright’s personal video diary, unexpurgated moments of real despair, fear, and ambivalence over the major public announcement she works toward for those three years.  If Wright hadn’t decided to come out, she most likely would have died.  In her memoir, Like Me, and in Wish Me Away, she describes contemplating suicide when living her life as a lie became utterly untenable.

Wish Me Away is a coming out story, but it’s also a testament to a woman willing to trade her music industry success to finally be able to tell the truth.  In the conservative world of country music, Wright was the first major performer to openly self-identify as gay or lesbian.  On the occasion of Wish Me Away’s release earlier this summer, Wright reported that Nashville has frozen her out since her announcement two years ago.

Just as one of her song-writing collaborators predicted in the film, the country music community didn’t denounce her; they simply leave her name off of invitation lists to visible, influential events.  But Wright says she has no regrets; she knew her career might take a hit, but decided to trade certain aspects of her success for a real life.

Two weeks after she came out publicly in 2010, Wright met Lauren Blitzer, an LGBT rights advocate who she married a year later in Connecticut.  Wright now serves on the Board of Directors of GLSEN—the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network—and also established The Like Me Organization to advocate for gay and lesbian youth by preventing bullying and teen suicide.

Wish Me Away constructs a teleological narrative, returning to stories of Wright’s childhood and sharing photographs of her family from her early life in a very small town in Kansas.  With a population of 1600, Wellsville didn’t provide many options for a girl who knew she was gay by the time she was eight-years-old.  Wright grew up very religious, and says she prayed, literally, that her uncomfortable difference from other kids would go away.

Though her god never saw fit to make that happen, Wright says that at her lowest moment, when she contemplated putting the barrel of her gun in her mouth, she did feel suffused with a warmth that persuaded her she was being cared for and looked after by the higher power in which she continues to believe.  She came out to her father shortly before her televised announcement; she let her mother, who’s divorced from her father and from whom she’s estranged, find out that her daughter is a lesbian by watching the Today Show.

I watched Wish Me Away on video-on-demand, prepared to be slightly diverted.  I didn’t know Wright’s music, although I’m a selective country music fan, but I’m always interested in how people tell their coming out stories.  I was quickly entranced by Wright’s integrity and honesty and by her determination to make her personal struggle matter to a larger public, especially to young people who feel the same desperate pain she did as a kid.  The film is also an important reminder that despite or perhaps because of all the political rhetoric about same-sex marriage and other LGBT issues fought over in the public eye, many queer people remain in circumstances that require them to be silent about their desire.  Wright’s story demonstrates how much is still at stake for so many people in the choice to come out.

Wright’s anguish over her false life is palpable and authentic throughout the film.  After obligatory footage of the early years of her career in the 90s, when her big hair and sexy feminine style hid her desire for women, Wright spends a lot of screen time speaking openly about what she fears and how she feels as tears roll from her eyes.  Her performance of herself in the documentary is raw and vulnerable and becomes surprisingly captivating.  The film is also dialogic; that is, except for the short video diary entries, Wright mostly talks about her emotions and her choices with other people.  We watch her learning from the team she assembles to stage her announcement; we see her interacting with her sister, Jennifer, and her supportive aunt; we watch her writing songs and talking to managers; and we see her in a rather confessional but earnest conversation with her “spiritual adviser.”  Although she’s obviously aware she’s being filmed, Wright projects an openness and honesty that makes her powerful and appealing.  Wish Me Away demonstrates the importance of learning from communities; that is, once she decides to come out, Wright carefully educates herself by talking to others.

Wright also lets viewers see how her persona as a performer is constructed.  Scenes of Wright filming a music video and preparing for appearances on television include make-up artists and hair stylists fussing with her face and her hair extensions and her clothing.  These images contrast starkly with scenes of Wright leaving her house in Nashville to move to New York, driving herself across the country with her two dogs to an apartment that she paints while her sister lends a hand.

Wright seems happy to be filmed without her star mask.  In a poignant moment from her video diary, she cries because her book editor, a native New York feminist, criticized her for the sexy, revealing pose of one of her pre-coming out photographs.  Wright insists that she’s not hiding her lesbian sexuality in the photograph, but that the image with the come-hither expression and lots of bare skin is a version of herself.

The film includes several moments like these, when Wright comments on the malleability of her own gender performance.  She says that as a kid, seeing Billie Jean King on television in her masculine outfits and learning that the tennis star was gay made Wright fear that her own tomboy style would “blow her cover.”  She knows early on that gender performance signals something about her sexuality.  The film shows her performing comfortably across a continuum of masculinity and femininity.

Wright is as beautiful without the feminine glamour as she is with it, but seeing her without make-up, in jeans, t-shirts, and reading glasses, underlines that she’s also an ordinary woman.  She worries that when she comes out to him, her brother-in-law will reject her and won’t let her see her niece and nephews.  In two of the film’s moving scenes, her sister Jennifer’s children express their regret that Chely didn’t come out earlier.  Her nephew, in particular, says how sorry he is that he made fun of gay people before he knew about his aunt.  When Jennifer and the boy later ride with Wright in the convertible that escorts her as the Grand Marshall of the Chicago Gay Pride parade, the moment feels like a personal as well as public achievement, given how much Wright had to lose.

Wright hires a team of publicists and managers to stage her coming out announcement, and writes her autobiography to prompt and coincide with her television appearances.  When Chely’s handlers lob her hostile practice questions about her motivations and her personal life, it’s clear  from her answers that Wright is a smart woman who truly wants to use her platform to speak not just for herself, but for the kids like her with whom she empathizes deeply.  She wants kids growing up in religious environments like she did, who’re told that being gay is evil, to know that there are others like them, that they’re not demons.  Once she put down the gun she contemplated turning on herself, she wants to reach out to kids who are like she was and smooth their way.  She quickly becomes a fervent, articulate activist.  And she winds up being a wonderful role model, too.  What can I say?  I’ve become a Chely Wright fan.

When CNN broadcaster Anderson Cooper confirmed the open secret of his sexuality, the media reacted by dissecting how little reaction there seemed to be to his announcement.  It’s almost as though the mainstream media has decided that queer people coming out is no longer really a story.  I assume if Tom Cruise, who’s long been rumored to be gay, decided to come out, his story would make headlines.  But the media seems to pride itself on its current unflappability about sexuality.

Even during the Olympics this week, an NBC feature on U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe saved its reveal that she’s a lesbian for the last few moments instead of leading with the athlete’s sexuality.  [Update:  Likewise, I just learned on like that U.S. Women’s Basketball player Seimone Augustus is a lesbian with plans to marry her partner.  Hadn’t heard anything about this until today . . .]

More interesting is how many of the female Olympic athletes wear make-up when they compete, and how they femme themselves up for television interviews and features.  Is it really still necessary for them to perform non-threatening femininity?  These women are so physically adept and strong, with their six-pack abs and cut biceps, that they seem to need make-up to reassure people (fans and potential endorsement dealers?) of their heterosexual femininity.  I really wish that weren’t the case.  (See also Amanda Marcotte’s smart Salon essay, “Athletes Don’t Wear Heels,” which takes on this issue.)

Wish Me Away and all the internet sites I trolled after I saw the film construct a happy ending for Chely Wright.  The filmmakers flash on her marriage to Blitzer at the film’s end.  Although I wish marriage weren’t the sine qua non of relationships–LGBT or straight–I admit thinking it’s cool that a deeply religious Christian woman married a New York Jewish girl.  Blitzer in fact worked at one point for Faith in America, a non-profit dedicated to ending religious bigotry in the LGBT community (Wright now serves on its board).

Does it still matter, then, that personalities like Chely Wright, Frank Ocean, Anderson Cooper, Jane Lynch, Neil Patrick Harris, Wanda Sykes, Zachary Quinto, and Cherry Jones, for only several examples, come out publicly?  Yes, I think it does.  If these announcements become commonplace and the media affects boredom with their revelations, so be it.  Because somewhere in Wellsville, Kansas, or in other small towns or religiously conservative communities around the country, there are still more eight-year-old girls or boys like Chely Wright, who recognize their difference and are terrified that they’re on their way to a hell not of their own making.  If they can look to someone as talented, smart, articulate, and genuine as Chely Wright and see the role model they need to grow up proud, I think that still matters quite a lot indeed.

The Feminist Spectator

Dael Orlandersmith’s poetic two-hander Yellowman was Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, after she spent many years as a solo performer (touring with, among other performance work, the Nuyorican Poets Café).   Her work powerfully describes an American underclass, people marginalized by race, class, and often, addiction.  The lives she narrates are often lived at the edges of an economy to which their needs, as the very bottom of the 99%, are utterly invisible.  Orlandersmith’s art serves as advocacy, if not activism, as she recounts the particular contradictions and constraints of such lives, the squandered hopes, the straitened circumstances, and the sadly predictable tragedies.

Orlandersmith’s recent performance at California’s Berkeley Rep, Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men, returns her to the solo form that first called her to public attention, while her play Horsedreams, performed at New York’s Rattlestick Theatre last fall, breaks stride by telling the story of a white, middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction.

In Black n Blue Boys, Orlandersmith wrote and performs all the characters’ stories, monologues presented in direct address to unseen interlocutors.  Director Chay Yew sets the production on a simply raked stage with a wooden floor (under Daniel Ostling’s unobtrusive scenic design), adorned only with a wooden chair and pools of light (designed by Ben Stanton) through which Orlandersmith moves as she follows the narrative arcs.  She cycles through stories told by various boys and men whose names are projected on both sides of the wall beside the thrust stage.  Each of the stories riffs on similar tales of sexual and physical abuse and the drug addiction or prostitution that allows these boys and men to survive economically or spiritually the degradations and depravations of their lives.

Perhaps the most chilling story comes from a perpetrator of sexual violence, who relates almost proudly how he seduced and then raped an 11-year-old boy in his car.  His self-righteous, frankly self-explanatory story, which Orlandersmith embellishes with graphic sexual details, stands out in a night that otherwise narrates victims’ experiences.  The 90-minute performance offers disturbing evidence of young men exploited and objectified by a broken social and economic system in which it’s nearly impossible to survive.  Although the characters’ class and race vary—all performed with clear vocal and physical distinctions by Orlandersmith—the stories begin to sound similar, as they proceed through a structure that becomes sadly, quickly familiar.

Because Orlandersmith performs each monologue, they’re also tonally similar.  And because her presence as a performer is insistent and powerful—that is, she hardly disappears behind her characters, and never changes costume—her editorial style sometimes overwhelms the lives she narrates.  In her role as a social chronicler of the dispossessed and as an advocate for the marginalized, Orlandersmith’s presence sometimes feels moralizing, even as she works hard to bring new voices into public discourse.

But while she dares the (mostly white, at the performance I attended) audience to look away, to shut their eyes and ears to these lives, what she wants the audience to do with what they see and hear is unclear.  Her performance comes with an implicit ethical imperative embedded in an explicit critique of a ruined social system in which white people with class privilege are clearly complicit.  But Orlandersmith never articulates the challenge to action that her critical, urgent gaze seems to bear.  I left the performance feeling chastised and chastened but rather emotionally remote and surprisingly unmoved by what I’d seen.

That disapproving moralizing makes Orlandersmith’s Horsedreams a similar cautionary tale without a clear activist stance.  The play displaces the iconic addiction story from people of color living in impoverished circumstances to an upper-middle-class white family, who employ an African American nanny.  In the one-act play, Desiree (Roxanne Hope) and Loman (Michael Laurence) meet in a club at which both of them do lines of coke to garnish their drinks.  Their attraction pulls them into a relationship neither of them are equipped to manage.  His money and her desire keep them in the drugs that sharpen their lives.  When she gets pregnant, they marry, move precipitously to Westchester, and both try to go straight.  But their abstinence doesn’t last.  Orlandersmith implies it can’t, that club-going, and coke-snorting, and trying so desperately to get out of your body by inhabiting it on the cutting edge of a meat-market nightclub life is a slippery slope to devastation.

Loman continues to move up the ranks of his law firm and Desiree begins to suffer a fatal boredom that makes her crave the party life she gave up too soon.  They celebrate the birth of their son, Luka (Matthew Schechter), with deep ambivalence, and then fall back into the clutches of addiction.  Desiree soon dies from getting high on cocaine mixed with heroin cut with quinine (an ingredient in rat poison).  Loman tries to go straight, moves back to the city with Luka, and before long, is once again snorting cocaine, which leads him again to use heroin.  Loman’s friend also dies of an overdose, as Orlandersmith implies that history will continue to repeat itself and that the cycle of addiction is impossible to break.

Throughout the inevitably tragic story, Orlandersmith lurks like a disapproving Cassandra.  Through the play’s first third, she stands by the stage left wall, watching pensively as Desiree and Loman begin their descent into addiction.  She eventually enters the story as Luka’s nanny, Mira, who lives in the Harlem neighborhood where the couple go to score, and who has lost her own father and brother to drugs.  Mira is studying to be a nurse, determined to improve her own circumstances and, metaphorically, to heal others (and herself).

The simple set boasts a few chairs, a bottle of Macallan 12 and a shot glass, an ironing board, and long tubes of fluorescent lights hung diagonally over the playing floor like the harsh light of reality. The back drop of the small stage resembles a stormy grey sky, cut apart into jagged pieces of a puzzle that can’t seem to be put back together.  Against this bleak setting, the four actors move through a story that’s as inevitable and predictable as a Greek tragedy.

Hope, Laurence, Schechter, and Orlandersmith perform beautifully, subtly charting each character’s dawning understanding of their hopeless situation.  But we know where the play is going by the first scene, even though we don’t know much about the characters and their commitments.  Desiree and Loman are too one-dimensional and uninteresting and privileged for us to really care about their downfalls.  Only Luka is sympathetic, and he’s a small child gradually understanding the seedy lives being ruined in his presence.  But it’s hard to feel empathy or even compassion for people who have money and jobs that they throw away for drugs.  Because of their privilege and wealth, this family represents the flip-side of the characters Orlandersmith writes in Black n Blue Boys.  But the story she tells about all these people is oddly the same.

Orlandersmith’s character strikes the same note of disapproval throughout Horsedreams that guides her performance in Black n Blue Boys.  Mira accuses the white people for whom she works of an awful moral depravity, given what they’re doing to their child.  She won’t call the authorities because she knows what will happen to Luka in the system.  But Mira is too mired in her role as the one who sees but can’t change anything to be an interesting character in her own right.

Although Horsedreams is a more conventional play than Black n Blue Boys, with multiple characters, a bit of dialogue, and separate scenes, Orlandersmith writes it as a set of interlocking monologues.  Some of the writing evokes her trademark poetry.  But the direct address makes it difficult for the characters to build relationships with one another, even though director Gordon Edelstein does a lovely job creating stage pictures that draw out their feelings with subtlety and nuance.

Orlandersmith demonstrates that rich white folks suffer the drug abuse for which poor people of color are too often demonized.  She also clarifies how racism threads through this scene.  Desiree and Loman revel in their cocaine use, but both consider heroin too “ghetto,” until they try it themselves and recognize its sensual appeal.  Desiree dies in part because she calls her dealer an “ape.”  Her racism is so overt that he stages his revenge by giving her bad drugs.  She dies with a needle stuck in her arm on the floor of her Westchester bathroom, the victim, in many ways, of her own racism.

As a performer, Orlandersmith is a galvanizing presence, and in Black n Blue Boys her performances of masculinity are sharply observed and virtuosic.  Both Horsedreams and Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men tell stories that need to be heard more often at the theatre, stories that look askew at what our culture insists is the truth of poverty v. opportunity, drug addiction v. moral purity.  Orlandersmith’s vision complicates how we align race and class with the devastation of drug use and sexual violence, and reminds us that these social scourges cut across identity positions and communities.

The Feminist Spectator

Horsedreams, Rattlestick Theatre, New York, November 2011; Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, June 2012.