What’s so bad about being a lesbian, anyway?
Anne Murray, set to be interviewed next Friday at the authors festival by her own co-writer Michael Posner, has made a point of using her new autobiography to say she’s not queer. I believe her, actually, even if she does love Dusty Springfield and Olivia Newton-John.
And I believe Scottish writer A.L.Kennedy, too, who in her strangely unfocussed one-woman show Words, performed at IFOA on Saturday, proclaimed loudly as part of the performance that she’s not a lesbian, either.
But why did she have to ridicule her dyke fan base at the same time?
It’s one thing to joke about being programmed for an LGBT tent at a book fest – “Oh you have to rewrite the program to change that? I have to rewrite my whole life” – but referring to being cornered by an “earnest-looking woman” at a festival party, which in turn, prevented her from meeting some interesting men, is a bit much. There are so many interesting stories she could have told about not being a lesbian – being hit up by a hot one, for example, but still having no interest – to make her point without putting down an entire population.
The rest of Words was disappointing. Kennedy, who has some drama training that did show, told some amusing anecdotes about her path to becoming an author but she didn’t have a strong enough throughline. The show is supposed to be about the power of words – nothing new there – but few of the observations were illuminating and the whole thing had a not entirely deserved self-satisfied air to it.
Good idea to include performance of this kind in the festival, though. New kinds of programming are always welcome.[rssbreak]
