Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1991–1994, etc.: ILGA, the Island Lesbian & Gay Association

The early ’90s get slippery for dates especially where the lesbian and gay awakening on Martha’s Vineyard is concerned. Complicating the chronology is that no one seems to have kept copies of Stone Walls, the handsome newsletter put out by Dan Waters and Hal Garneau for the fledgling Island Lesbian & Gay Association. I need to pay a visit to the Vineyard Gazette’s archives and also to find out what the Martha’s Vineyard Museum has in its files, but these things aren’t likely to happen till the worst of summer is over.

In late 2014, I was reminded of the importance of getting this history down where other people can find it. That summer, The Yard, a seasonal dance colony in Chilmark, claimed to have held the first public gay pride event on Martha’s Vineyard. I heard nothing about it through the usual channels, which is to say Facebook, word-of-mouth, or the bulletin board at up-island Cronig’s. No one else I know did either.

This was not surprising. A strange barrier stands between the summer island and the year-round island. It’s porous enough to see through, but only in one direction: we can see it, but it can’t see us. In June 2015 I blogged “Gay on MV” to get some of the history out there. Exactly seven years later, I had an opportunity to do it again, at the ceremonial raising of the “Progress Pride” flag in Ocean Park. “Pride Flag Flying,” another blog post, includes the remarks I prepared for that event.

So please consider this a work in progress.

When I moved back to D.C. in the spring of 1977, I knew where to find the lesbians and the feminists: through Lammas, the feminist bookstore, and through the Washington Area Women’s Center, then housed in the basement of the abandoned-and-falling-into-disrepair Sumner School at 17th and M Streets N.W.

Moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985 — for a year, mind you, just for a year — it was a different story. Where were the lesbians? I read every poster on every bulletin board and telephone pole and skimmed every story in both newspapers, looking for signs of lesbian, gay, and/or feminist activity. Nothing. Most startling was that no one seemed to be talking about AIDS, which by 1985 was a huge issue in D.C.

As recounted in “1985–86 (etc.): Adult Child of Theater,” it was much easier to find a 12-step program for adult children of alcoholics. And through that I found lesbians, gay men, and the island’s vibrant theater scene. As I wrote in “Gay on MV,” the Vineyard’s theater community was “like theater in most other places: a veritable hotbed of misfits and nonconformists, gay, lesbian, straight, both/and, and neither/nor. My people.”

But no one said “gay” or “lesbian” out loud in public. Oh no! If you did, it was assumed you were one, and that was risky. So we said “the L-word” (almost two decades later this commonly used closet phrase was appropriated for a TV series) or used the ASL sign for “L” or (gods help us) substituted “Lebanese” for “lesbian.” The island was just discovering AIDS, but to hear health-care professionals talk, you’d have assumed that HIV could only be contracted from dirty needles and blood transfusions.

The island’s lesbians and gay men knew better. Nancy Luedeman (1920–2010), theater mainstay and recovering alcoholic, created a panel for the AIDS Quilt that was included in the Quilt’s first national display in October 1987. Two of the four Vineyard men it memorialized were identified only by first name and last initial, the other two by initials only.

Around 1990 that began to change. See “Visiting the AIDS Quilt with My Mother” for what I currently recall (and have to further research) about this period. Many island gay men and lesbians realized that the time had come to go public, in part to help clear up the widespread misconceptions about gay people but also so we could find and support each other.

Me and the more discreet of ILGA’s two T-shirts in July 2014. In the early ’90s you could wear this one anywhere and hardly anyone knew what it meant.

The first meeting of what became ILGA, the Island Lesbian and Gay Association, took place in the big room at the Wooden Tent on State Road, Vineyard Haven, which was then owned by Edie Yoder and Kathy Rose. I was there, along with some 25 other Vineyarders, about half of them women and half of them men, nearly all of whom I knew at least by sight. Sitting in a big circle, we went round and introduced ourselves. When the third Kathy introduced herself, people were starting to chuckle, then when Lansing Bailey — a burly gent who was older than most of us — introduced himself as Kathy, we all lost it completely. No one there will ever forget it.

What neither I nor anyone I’ve spoken with so far can remember is exactly when this meeting took place. My best guess is 1991, either spring or fall (because no one has time for organizational meetings in the summer, and what’s more, that was the summer of Hurricane Bob).[2] Fairly early in 1992 I moved into the guest house at the Wooden Tent, and I’m 99% sure that at the time of that meeting I was still living up-island.

You could only wear this one out in public if you were willing to stop people in their tracks. Photo from July 2014.

ILGA’s primary purpose was social — our potlucks were amazing! — but it had a powerful impact on gay and lesbian visibility on Martha’s Vineyard. In the early ’90s you could wear the pink triangle shirt down Main Street, Vineyard Haven, without getting any double-takes or snotty remarks: the only people who recognized the pink triangle were friendly and everyone else thought it was just another Vineyard T-shirt. It took considerably more chutzpah to sport the “No Man Is an Island Lesbian” shirt in mixed company.

For the first time a newcomer or someone just coming out could find the words “Lesbian” and “Gay” in the organizations listing of the Vineyard phone book. Two of us, Robert Cropper and me, were out enough to have our names and phone numbers listed. (I don’t recall ever getting a crank call from that listing.)

Around this time — 1992 and ’93 — a homophobic politician, Ron Beaty Jr.[3] by name, on the Cape took to writing nasty letters to the editor equating gay people with immorality and AIDS, and pushing Gay Rights, Special Rights (1993), a video promoted by the Traditional Values Coalition.[4] A lesbian couple wrote a letter to the Martha’s Vineyard Times rebutting such fallacious fear-mongering. The editor said he’d publish it but only if their names were included. Since this couple had several kids in the school system, this was outrageous and several of us (I was the Times features editor at this point) said so, but it was the editor’s wife who got through to him: “Of course you should withhold their names,” she said, and that was that. The letter was published with the writers’ names withheld.

In the fall of 1993 two Oak Bluffs town fathers tried to get two of the earliest kids’ books about gay/lesbian families pulled from the Oak Bluffs School library: Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay? (1991). This spawned several contentious meetings and letters to the editor. I remember one meeting in particular where the town fathers were joined by a fundamentalist minister and a former marine known for striding around town in his red satin Marine Corps jacket. At one point the minister claimed that AIDS was God’s scourge of the homosexuals (IIRC he used that exact phrase), to which ILGA regular Michele Lazerow pointed out that lesbians had the lowest incidence of HIV/AIDS of any group. This was greeted with much laughter and applause, so I don’t know whether the minister responded.

The heroes of the meeting were the school librarian, Jan Buhrman, and the eighth-grade member of the school committee, Jay Borselle.[5] Their eloquence helped turn the tide, and it reassured me and others that we had allies willing to step up. At the same time, the Martha’s Vineyard Library Association was the only organization that spoke out against the attempted book banning. As a former bookseller, I expected no less — librarians are the best! — but the silence in other quarters was disappointing.

In response I took the lead in organizing a Banned Books reading at Wintertide Coffeehouse in January 1994. I read from Heather Has Two Mommies, Robert read from How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay?, and 18 or so volunteers picked a book from the American Library Association’s Banned Books list and read a short excerpt from it. The Rev. Ken Miner (d. 1997), pastor of Trinity United Methodist in Oak Bluffs, read the David and Jonathan story from the Bible. The place was packed, and we all went home invigorated.

That spring, the short-play festival at the Vineyard Playhouse included Susan Miller’s “It’s Our Town Too,” a poignant riff on Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town in which the parents of the young people who grow up to marry are a gay couple and a lesbian couple.

Several ILGA members marched in Boston’s Gay and Lesbian Pride parade that June, behind a banner created by signmaker (and musician) Tom Hodgson. I don’t remember why I didn’t join them, maybe because I’d ODed on Gay Pride in my D.C. days, but I did get to a “Celebrate Gay Cod” event on the Cape that month. That’s where the button at the beginning of this piece comes from.

NOTES

[1] The AIDS Alliance sponsored the first Crossover Ball on New Year’s Eve 1994. Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, and everyone had a blast. These continued more or less biennially till 2005. Can you imagine such a thing happening on Martha’s Vineyard in the ’80s? I can’t either.

[2] Late October of that year brought the equally memorable No-Name Nor’easter, known elsewhere as the Perfect Storm. It delayed the move of the Martha’s Vineyard Times, whose features editor I then was, from Woodland Market to Five Corners. This makes me think that the first ILGA meeting happened earlier in the year, but we shall see!

[3] Gadfly Beaty is nothing if not persistent. For a summary of his antics, see this 2018 call for his removal from his seat on the Barnstable County Council. He wasn’t removed then — the BCC doesn’t have a removal mechanism — but he was eventually defeated for re-election. Now in 2024 he seems to be running again. He has referred to himself as the “Donald Trump of Cape Cod” and once referred to activist David Hogg as a “self-promoting opportunistic rat.”

[4] I procured a copy of this so several of us could see it firsthand. This got me on some pretty disgusting right-wing mailing lists, but eventually the appeals and alerts stopped coming.

[5] By the end of the decade, Jan Buhrman had begun an ever expanding and deepening career as a cook and advocate for locally sourced ingredients: https://www.janbuhrman.com/. Jay Borselle became a journalist and is now the news director for WBZ NewsRadio in Boston.

Posted on by Susanna J. Sturgis

1990: Antigone

The second of my two show-specific shirts, unlike the first, commemorates a production mounted entirely on the Vineyard, but not by either of the two established theater companies, Island Theatre Workshop and the Vineyard Playhouse.[1]

Concerts and road races are far more likely to have their own T-shirts. Not only is this a rarity in Vineyard annals, but it even includes the essential who, what, when, and where. The image may be that of Kristina Kreyling, who had the title role.

Seen from several decades later, the late 1980s and early ’90s were a golden age in Vineyard theater, and in the grassroots performing arts in general. “The Play’s the Thing,” a July 1990 story in the Martha’s Vineyard Times summer supplement, counted no fewer than seven companies in action that summer.[2]

Essential to this flowering was available space.[3] The Vineyard Playhouse could host full productions upstairs, and smaller ones downstairs, like the late-night comedy troupe Afterwords. Island Theatre Workshop (ITW) didn’t have its own home, but it had regular access to Katharine Cornell Theatre, upstairs from Tisbury Town Hall, and, for auditions and early rehearsals, to the parish hall at Grace Episcopal Church not far away.

Once Wintertide moved into its year-round home at Five Corners in January 1991, all sorts of creativity took root and flowered there, including WIMP, the Wintertide Improv group. Among WIMP’s offerings was “Troubled Shores,” a long-running soap-opera-style satire of island life.[4] I still vividly remember Theodore Sturgeon, chief surgeon at Wing and a Prayer Hospital (Toby Wilson), Sengekontacket Vanderhoop (Lisa Elliott), and John Farmboy (Chris Brophy).

Some performers and techies were identified primarily with one or the other theater groups, ITW or the Vineyard Playhouse, but most moved between them and Wintertide depending on available opportunities. Having both space and a pool of capable actors and tech crew available made it so much easier to mount a show than it would have been if you had to start from scratch.

Not only to mount a show, but to birth a new theater company: Chiaroscuro, the company behind the 1990 production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, was born on Martha’s Vineyard. Ironically, when Yann Montelle arrived on the Vineyard to visit a friend on Chappy, he was taking a break from theater in his native France. Then fate intervened: he met, then married, Anne Cook, an artist with a long family connection to the Vineyard. Together they founded Chiaroscuro.

Chiaroscuro’s name was featured on the front of the shirt.

Yann and Chiaroscuro were active on the Vineyard for well under two years before Yann and Anne left for Portland, Maine, but the energy and quality of their activities were astonishing and invigorating to the island’s theater scene. In addition to directing, Yann ran workshops, at least two of which grew into full productions: Macchiavelli’s The Mandrake and Molière’s The Misanthrope. Of the former, he later told an interviewer[5] that “I wanted to do it to see if I could speak English. I had trouble because – you guys don’t realize it but you speak very fast!” To say he quickly became fluent is an understatement.

Yann also collaborated with fellow Frenchman Dominique Pochat (1956–2003) in the latter’s Red Nose Reviews, featuring Martin, Dominique’s clown persona. Dozens of Vineyarders, actors and non-actors, took their workshops; Red Noses started appearing in unexpected places. Red noses, by the way, have long been associated with clowns, but where did they come from? Origin stories vary: poke around online and you’ll find some of them. They’ve been described as “the smallest mask in the world.” I love this. With a red nose on, your face becomes both yours and not-yours. You’re free to become a you that isn’t seen in polite company.

And Yann directed several outstanding shows in 1990 and 1991. In addition to Antigone, I remember especially The Merchant of Venice (summer 1991) — which like Antigone was staged at the outdoor Tisbury Amphitheater[6] — and Sartre’s No Exit. I have copies of the reviews I wrote of several of these shows, so it’s not hard to remember the details. About Antigone I wrote that it was “one to see more than once, to discuss passionately far into the night over cappuccino or wine. Directed with care, graced with several outstanding performances, this ‘Antigone’ jerks you back and forth by the hair and leaves you breathless, dizzy, even awed.”

Randy Rapstine, who appeared in both Antigone and Merchant as well as other Vineyard productions (and with the Afterwords troupe), was one of several theater people who were then moving regularly between New York and the Vineyard. Asked to compare the two scenes, he noted that “in New York, you’re a small fish in a big pond,” while the Vineyard provided opportunities that were rare in New York. As a result, actors can take on a range of roles so audiences “see different parts of you.” He praised Vineyard theatergoers for being willing and able to do that.[7]

NOTES

[1] They rarely if ever created a T-shirt for a particular show. This makes sense. From auditions through rehearsals to opening and then closing night, a production’s life cycle might be eight weeks at most. Designing a shirt from scratch, then getting it printed and out on the street, would probably take at least four, by which point the run would be half over.

[2] For the record, they were the Vineyard Playhouse Company, Chiaroscuro Theatre Company, Full Circle, Island Entertainment Productions, Island Theatre Workshop, Red Nose and More, and Theater Arts Productions. The story was by yours truly.

[3] Also important was reasonably affordable housing. Year-round housing could usually be found at a realistic (for the Vineyard) price, and seasonal actors and techies could be put up in the spare rooms of year-rounders. As time went on, spare rooms became scarce, in part because young people who’d grown up on the Vineyard couldn’t afford to move out on their own.

[4] Led by WIMP veteran Donna Swift, Troubled Shores became the name of a Vineyard nonprofit focusing on theater (including improv) for young people on the Vineyard.

[5] That would be me. This was sort of Yann’s exit interview from the Vineyard: “Yann Montelle Seeks Out New Risks,” Martha’s Vineyard Times (August 29, 1991).

[6] If in warm weather, especially toward the end of the afternoon, you see vehicles parked bumper to bumper on both sides of State Road near the Tashmoo Overlook, that’s a sure sign there’s a show on at the Tisbury Amphitheater. This is a glorious clearing in the woods with a natural embankment that’s been augmented with very basic seating, e.g., railroad ties. Playgoers often bring their own beach chairs or blankets, and often a picnic. If you’ve never been there, pull off on the overlook when there isn’t a play going on, start walking down the access road, then take one of the paths on your right that leads into the amphitheater itself.

[7] Writing in the T-Shirt Chronicles about people I knew decades ago, I’m often afraid to look them up online. Randy was so talented and so motivated but the New York theater scene is so crowded and demanding. I didn’t want to learn that Randy had given it up and become a stockbroker. Good news: His subsequent career has included directing, producing, and teaching as well as acting in films as well as theater, and he’s still at it. Check out his website for details.