Queering the Archives (WMST 219) Interview Transcript: Prof. Gabrielle Cody (interviewed by Cassidy Hollinger ’13)
Cassidy Hollinger ’13: Okay, this interview is for the Queering the Archives class, Women's Studies 219, Spring of 2013, taught by Professor Hiram Perez. It is April 26, 2013. We are in the Vogelstein Center of Drama and Film at Vassar College. I am interviewing Vassar Drama professor Gabrielle Cody; Gabrielle, could you just briefly introduce yourself?
Prof. Gabrielle Cody: Hello, Cassidy. My name is Gabrielle Cody, as you have said so well. And I'm delighted to be here to talk with you.
CH: Great, thank you. So, you mentioned that you had a story that you wanted to begin with?
GC: Yes I --. Because we've never really spoken about Anne's visit here, and your great fondness and her great generosity, and --. Oh this must have been about 10 years or so now; my girlfriend and I had a little shack on the beach in Orient, Long Island, and as you might know this is --it's kind of a colony of gay women from the 40's and 50's, and we were lucky enough to rent this little --wonderful little cabin on the water. And Anne MacKay, who, as you know, was unbelievably generous, and very, very kind-hearted, found out through the grapevine that this, at the time, you know, young woman and her and her friend were renting this cottage, and she very sweetly got in touch with me and said, “You know I'd like to introduce you to my friends, and I'd like to have a cocktail party and invite you and Hillary to come and join us, and meet people, and have you meet them.” So she was so happy that a Vassar professor was there, and to meet the younger generation, so I said, “Of course.” And she said, “But, before this party, you have to go clamming with me.” And I said, “Great, I would love to do that.” So off we went. She told me to meet her on the dock somewhere – some place where she had her boat, and we went, and I met her, and she gave me my clam-digger-thing, and off we went, and we spent three and a half hours clamming. It was getting really hot, and I’d never really clammed before – I’ve fished, but I – you know, those things are pretty intense. So, anyway, by --. And she’s, I mean, just going strong, and – so, anyway, I get home, and that evening is this little party, and I get home, and my back just totally goes out. I mean, totally goes out, I couldn’t walk. And, I had to call her and say, “Sorry, we can’t be there” [laughs] You know, the person of honor just never made it to her cocktail party, and I always, always felt bet about that, but she did speak to me after that, and, you know, was very dear, and--. Did you ever go to her little place?
CH: I never made it, no.
GC: It was so romantic and beautiful and simple, but gorgeous, with this amazing view of --. I mean, what I love about that area is just, it’s very agricultural, and very European. It’s like you could be in Greece, you know, agriculture, vines, and then the sea, and it’s –
CH: Wow. Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 2
GC: Anyway. That’s Anne MacKay.
CH: [laughs] So, my first question, to get us in the mood, is ‘what is your earliest memory/”
GC: My earliest memory – wow, what an incredible question. You know, the one that I think of as my earliest memory is of my father, who died when I was eleven months old. And I have a memory of a man in a brown pinstripe suit, standing in a doorway, and I’m --. I’ve always thought of that as an infant’s moment of some – letting it into the unconscious somehow, and it staying there.
CH: Wow.
GC: Yeah.
CH: So, tell me a little about your schooling.
GC: My schooling, well, as I just told you, my biological father died when I was eleven months old, and my mother, who had gone to France in 1947 – right after the war, with a friend, just to visit England and Ireland and France – went to Paris, and thought she would be there for a couple weeks, and stayed ten years [CH laughs]. Worked for the Marshall Plan, and then when she came back, and met my father and had me and he died, she decided that she wanted to live in Europe. That it would be – I think she felt that she would have a better life in Europe with this tiny child, so I did all my schooling --I mean, French is my first language, I did all my schooling in France, in Paris, and --up until Baccalaureate. So, then, I went, in those days, when you – because we have thirteen years in France --you go in as a sophomore. So I went to a women’s college, to Mount Holyoke College, as a sophomore. Which was a big shock. Still don’t quite understand what --because it is such a different world, but I’m still here in this country, so --.
CH: What made you decide to go to a women’s college?
GC: Quite honestly? It was the picture on the catalogue, of women in high boots, fishing in a river, and I thought, “I want to go there.” I think part of it was just the fatigue of having finally done the Baccalaureate exams, and part of it was just sheer delight at -that that could be my life.
CH: Did you have any big influences on your life, while you were in college?
GC: What kind of influences, intellectual?
CH: Yeah, intellectual.
GC: Yes. I started out as a political science major, I had always wanted to be a journalist. And, so, political science was clearly a pathway, and, yeah, Stephen Ellenburg who was my political science professor, was a very big influence. He was an enormous kind of -Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 3
enormous human being. And he missed New York so much that he and his wife – who was a painter, I think she taught at Smith – would actually play recordings of traffic jams in their South Hadley house [laughs]. But then I became very interested in feminism and in women’s studies and I took a number of classes --I took a number of classes at Smith with Helen Chinoy, who was a great feminist historian, and she sort of introduced me to, really, what was happening in terms of theatre. Then, Penny Gill, political scientist at Mount Holyoke, and it was a while back so I’m not remembering a lot of names, but mostly I was influenced by the reading. Reading Mary Daly, reading Kate Millett, reading Adrienne Rich, meeting Adrienne Rich, meeting --. We had a women’s theatre group, and we invited various people to come, Honor Moore and other women. So that was enormous, that moment when feminism took root in theatre.
CH: How did you get involved in the theatre?
GC: I think out of sheer loneliness. I was --as I said, I was studying political science, and I was just writing these papers alone in a room, and it just felt very sad and I wanted to be more a part of some kind of community, and so I auditioned for a play. I auditioned for Waiting for Godot, and I was cast as Estragon – “Gogo” – and it was an all-female cast that was done in the chapel, it was kind of wonderful. And then I just thought, Well, I really enjoy this so that’s --. And, you know, I had always been interested in theatre; in France, I was very serious about going to plays and reading plays, but, yeah, I think it was doing it. For most of us, it’s doing it. And then you kind of --that’s what you want to study.
CH: So how did you come to be a professor of Drama?
GC: Oh, goodness. Serendipity, you know. I never ever thought I would be a professor at a liberal arts college, I always thought that I would be a journalist, that I would be traveling the world and covering stories, and then when I sort of shifted from political science to drama, I became very interested in directing, and I decided after college to get an MFA in directing. I was in Minnesota, I taught at Macalester College for a few years, by accident, actually. This professor had a stroke two weeks before the beginning of school and I got a call, just saying, “Would you be interested?” And I had --. Of course, it was steady income, and I had been directing freelance. And then I realized I really liked the academic life. I liked --I loved teaching, I loved being with young people, I loved the fact that I could always be learning new things, and reading, and then I became very interested in going to graduate school further. And I really wanted to write, and I really wanted to read, and so then I applied to the Yale program and went there. And that was another revelation, because then I thought, Well, then I’ll just be working in a regional theatre and that will be my life. And I realized very quickly at Yale that I wanted nothing to do with professional theatre, and then suddenly it was apparent that teaching could be a path. And I applied to two positions: one at Smith and one at Vassar. And I happened, at Vassar, to --one of my mentors at Yale, Leon Katz, had taught here for years and was good friends with Evert Sprinchorn, and somehow it worked out at Vassar, and I’ve been here twenty years, so --. You know, nothing could have been Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 4
further from my imagination when I was your age, not that I had anything against it. I just --it just never occurred to me.
CH: Can you talk a little bit about how you felt first coming to Vassar? Your first impressions?
GC: Well, my first impressions were how beautiful, how feminine, this campus is. And I don’t even know – I hesitate to use that word. I just felt that there was an architecture here that was very female, that was very --I mean coming from Yale, and prior to that, University of Minnesota, which was very --concrete buildings and very massive. So I loved that, I was very intrigued by just the space and how the space is laid out. But I have to tell you, my first years here were really horrible. I felt very isolated, I was a lot younger than the other members of the department, it was a department in, to say the least, in transition. The old guard and the new guard. And it was a very isolating experience, actually, and, a lot of unhappy students. And I remember teaching “Sources”
– which was then “Sources of Western Drama,” it was just “Sources,” there was nothing about world drama – to both Drama and Film students, because film students in those days were required to take the class, and I had something like 55 students in this tiny little classroom, most of whom were really, actively not wanting to be in that class. It was horrible, it was a horrible experience of just, being so enthusiastic and bringing all of my grad school passion to bear on the class, and, you know, it’s a monster of a class to teach. It takes years to learn how to teach a class like that. And then things got better when the disgruntled students finally graduated, and I figure I started --I always look at the year when I had my first class of freshman and sophomores, and then things got a lot better, but it was not a very --. Vassar was, for younger, junior faculty, a very strange place, because you had the older generation, and then you had the sort of medium generation who mostly had families and children, and there were not that many people just coming out of graduate school.
CH: So what changes have you noticed within the Vassar community? This could be students, faculty, everything.
GC: Corporatization. In terms of the place where I come to work at every day, has become corporate, the way faculty are dealt with has become corporate. The reason I get up every morning is because of the students, I --they’ve always been extraordinary. I do find students much more conservative, in general, than they were twenty years ago. I think a lot of that is economics, more pressure from their parents. We’re in Drama here, so we live in a culture that doesn’t, I think, really, seriously respect the arts as foundational, essential to our lives, and so, naturally, often parents are concerned. You know, “What will you do with a Drama degree?” But I think those would be the two major changes. Yeah.
CH: Have you noticed anything specific changing, or just general observations about the queer community at Vassar? Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 5
GC: I wish I had more connection to the queer community. Of course, twenty years ago you didn’t say “queer,” it was a big thing to even say “gay” and “lesbian.” I think what I’ve noticed is a much greater presence. I hear students talk about queer issues, I am aware of --. I mean, every day I get some fabulous email about what’s happening in the LGBT community here, which is, I think, extraordinary. When I went to college, if you were lesbian you were expected to live off-campus. So for me to see students today being embraced, and their --not just their sexualities but their interests, their courage, nourished and respected, is really, I think it’s wonderful. It’s less white than it used to be, and of course, transgender issues were --. I studied with --what is her name, Janice, Janice Raymond, and she wrote the book The Transsexual Empire, which was sort of a lesbian separatist perspective on, I’m sure you know it well, on transgender culture, and it was not very encouraging. So, yeah, that’s what I’ve noticed, greater visibility, greater presence, an integration of those interests into the curriculum in ways that I find deeply moving and deeply wonderful. Really, the absolute opposite of what my experience was as a young gay person in college.
CH: Would you mind talking a little bit about that?
GC: Yeah. I was very --. In part, you know, through political science, I met a lot of -quite honestly, the women who were, to me, who were articulate and smart and strong and dynamic, happened to be lesbian. And I was very drawn to that, certainly. I was very --. I didn’t speak much. For one, English was my second language and I was very, sort of, afraid to misspeak. And then I was in the presence of these incredibly smart women, and little by little I just got introduced to that community, and it was absolutely revelatory, because it was also on a national level; internationally, at that time, there was just a lot of --. I mean, I remember going to U Mass and seeing the Word is Out, one of the first documentaries ever made about gay and lesbians in this country, and it just seemed like a moment, really a moment in history that was --that was risky, and --but really, it was like an ecstatic experience of discovering the connection between sexuality and politics, and reading and going to concerts. And Meg --what was her name? --Meg, big lesbian singer --. Well, I forget her name, but, you know, these women would come and sing at these colleges and there was always this sense of, you know, just this moment where things were changing. But it came at great cost to me personally because my mother got wind of this newly --this interest of mine, which she, of course, prayed was a phase, and was very, very, very deeply traumatized by it. And it was really, several horrible, horrible years of being threatened, of having girlfriends threatened, of being really violated. I mean, having my privacy violated, having my young --. Just such a tender time just completely --I don’t even know how to put it. It’s still [crying] --it’s extraordinary how it stays with you.
CH: We have read and heard something that’s, I would say, fairly well-documented, that for a long time here at Vassar, faculty were closeted.
GC: Umm-hmm. I can tell you all about that [CH laughs]. Because when I got here, that was the legacy of this department --. That it had been run by, essentially, closeted gay men, one of whom was Bill Rothwell, and I can tell you that for whatever reason – and I Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 6
have to assume that he suffered tremendously from shame and from all sorts of fears himself --. But, it was really perplexing to be literally accosted at a party at the president’s house by this man who --. I was wearing what I thought was a really beautiful pantsuit, and I looked very elegant, and I think I probably even had pearls, because I always thought pearls were Vassar-drag, you know. And he came up to me and he was drunk and just so rude, and he said, “Why do you want to be a man so badly?” And I just thought, Who the f-are you to talk to me that way? For years --. And this is someone that Meryl Streep thanks when she gets an award, so clearly he had --. But he was a racist, he was a misogynist. I mean, it was a horrible legacy to come into, because everyone on campus would say, “Oh, you’re in that Drama Department, oh my god, how can you survive?” And he had been supplanted, he had been removed from the department over the course of a weekend, and the dean at the time – this wonderful woman who’s now the president of Oberlin, I can’t remember her name – but, anyway, she had brought in Denny Partridge --. I’m not remembering right now, but she was a big physical theatre person, you know, San Francisco Mime Troupe --. And she was the opposite of Bill Rothwell; Bill Rothwell was all about Victorian, decorative theatre, pronouncing things, and projection and diction, and his female students had to wear skirts and pearls, you know, this whole kind of “world.” And Denny Partridge was this hippie, liberal feminist who --I think one of the first things she did was a piece from Bangladesh. She was absolutely loathed by the powers that be when she came in. She didn’t stay for a number of reasons, but she really burst that bubble. Yeah, so. More about the closeted people --. Yeah, I think a lot of the people here, from what I hear, were bisexual, and a lot of men were married and they, really, in fact, wanted to be with men. And I imagine women were married who wanted to be with women. It’s sad that they had to go through all of that, but I’m sure there was community, even in those bearded marriages.
CH: Absolutely. Do you --can you pinpoint a moment when things started to shift, and when faculty members became more open?
GC: Well, I have to tell you that Fran Fergusson usually would not make a speech at Commencement or at Convocation without talking about homophobia. She was really fantastic about getting that word in circulation. She, I think, was very committed to people not feeling that somehow they had to be in the closet. I think it’s also just culturally [CH: “Umm-hmm”] when --even when I first got here, it j--. I never really felt that I had to hide anything. I just think the world had already changed quite a bit, and it wasn’t necessary to fear that. But --but I, I had a number of gay male students --. I --for instance, I never had you in a class, so I wasn’t that aware --. Occasionally there would be a couple, you know, women, and Rachel --Rachel Lee and her wonderful girlfriend, who is now in law school, were just wonderful to have around. But I think I’m probably much more aware of my students feeling a little freer than they used to. And again, a lot of students come out when they leave Vassar. They just --. It’s too much of a fishbowl, it’s too hard to make that leap here.
CH: Absolutely. So, you sort of answered this, but I just want to throw this question out there: how has your life been different than you imagined it growing up? Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 7
GC: Because of being non-heterosexual, or --?
CH: Just the journey that you’ve taken.
GC: The journey. By the way, when I adopted my daughter, I had to sign something called a “letter of heterosexuality.” [CH gasps] So, you know, these things continue, for the Guatemalan government. How is it different? Gosh. Well, I think it’s different because I never really assumed that I would live in this country my whole life, so that’s a big difference. It’s different because I am a professor at a small liberal arts college and I hadn’t --that had never entered my mind. I think I probably have a calmer life than I had imagined. I mean, I think one becomes a little calmer with age. You go through the tumultuous thirties and in your forties, you kind of --I don’t know --you kind of get to figure out who you might be, a little bit. Yeah. Nothing is what I expected it to be, pretty much. Which I think is wonderful, really, because I can’t say that I --that all my fantasies were broken or something. I’ve had --. I feel very, very lucky. Very lucky. Every day I feel lucky. But --. Yeah, that’s all I can think of.
CH: Okay, so, my last question for you: what is the best advice you have ever received?
GC: Oh, the best advice I have ever received. Well, oh boy. Because there have been so many really good little advices. I mean, I think my parents, and my mother despite her -aspects of her behavior that were difficult for me --were incredible, because my mother remarried, ended up remarrying --. I think the advice was given to me in the form of incredible encouragement to pursue what interested me, and that’s why it was so difficult when my mother was, you know --when it appeared to her that I was moving in a direction that was so antithetical to anything she had possibly imagined for me. But I think the best advice was given to me by them, and many times afterwards by her, which was really “Be who you are. Don’t ever second guess yourself, just be who you are, and be proud.” Just really very contradictory, but I think she eventually came around to an understanding of my choices, which is great. Eventually. In [laughs] later years [CH laughs]. Through the help of a Catholic priest, by the way.
CH: Wow.
GC: Which is very strange [laughing].
CH: Alright!
GC: I’m sorry I’m not able to find --. And I’m sure when we stop this interview I’ll be able to find – I’ll be thinking, Oh, that was that great piece of advice! [CH laughs] Yeah, I can only think of it in the shape of great --. I was encouraged to really have an appetite for life and the world, and to be courageous. I think they were both --had traveled the world and were very romantic people, and they really loved the arts, and I was surrounded by artists when I was growing up, so I think the best advice they gave me was, “Do what you love.” Yeah. Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.” 8
CH: Absolutely. Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you --?
GC: Yeah, why is it interesting to you, to talk to people like myself? What benefit do you find in these narratives?
CH: I think that the most obvious, to me, benefit that I find in these narratives is --we spend so much time thinking about history – world history, US history, political history – in Philosophy, just the trajectory of Western philosophy, and that great history there. And I think that it’s very important for those of us who identify as queer, I guess, or in any way, sort of, living a life that’s non-normative, to try and find our own histories, and our ties to that. And, you know, for me especially, because I didn’t feel like I could come out until I came to Vassar --.
GC: Really?
CH: So.
GC: I also --I love --. I really enjoyed your questions, and I really like that --because I think that in courses, there’s a lot of theorizing, and queer studies has become, you know, the Olympics of intellectual gymnastics --.
CH: Abstraction.
GC: Abstraction. And gorgeous thinking going on. I think I really appreciate the validity of just personal narratives, that don’t have to be all, kind of, Butler-ized, they’re just what they are, you know. They’re people’s lives.
CH: Absolutely. Well thank you so much.
GC: You’re welcome. Transcription style inspired by http://www.ucaconline.org/docs/TranscriptionGuide.pdf, “Stylistic Notes.”