Letter on SIC

A Call to the Art World for Something, aka My Theatrical Suicide

Date: January 17, 2016
To: Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum, NYC
CC: Board of Trustees
Re: SIC Abuses During X-ID Rep

Dear Ms. Phillips,

The incidents of artistic censorship, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, character-assassination, emotional abuse, wire-tapping, secrecy, and deception described in my Research Findings below took place primarily in your institution’s basement between September 2015 and January 2016 during my residency as a playwright in a program that you sponsored and paid for called X-ID Rep, a pop-up theater company of 4 playwrights, 4 directors and 8 actors whose mission statement claimed it would support “diversity,” “research,” “collaboration,” and “a spectrum of approaches,” in order to “collectively examine” “the shifting ethical boundaries surrounding intercultural cross-play on contemporary American stages” and would “culminate in a performance presentation,” but inevitably became anything but that.

For, in the end, X-ID was gradually overtaken and shut down by the industrial and political forces of what I will call the “Segregationist Identitarian Confederacy,” or SIC. While some might identify certain facets of SIC as “political correctness” or “identity politics,” it is a far cry from the often laudatory and important actions taken by those who are too often derogatorily referenced by these phrases. Rather, SIC is an extremist movement whose overall goal is to force its political agenda onto individuals and institutions via its segregationist, identitarian, and confederate ideology.

SIC is segregationist because its primary goal is to force various forms of conceptual, cultural and physical separation upon America. This putsch for separation is engineered in the name of SIC’s “identitarianism.” Based on an enforcement of adherence to the principle of the predominance and incontrovertibility of “dogmatic identity markers” (DIMs), primarily race and gender, SIC interprets identity in a rigidly conservative manner and openly slurs, shames, suppresses, and segregates (a cluster of brutalities I acronymize to “SS”) those who oppose this conservatism. Further, SIC is a confederacy because, as its extensive anti-free speech and covert institutional take-over actions prove, it is an allied political group seeking to establish inter-American enclaves that do not abide by the US Constitution. Finally, it is important to point out that no identity is predominantly native to SIC. It is an “inter-cultural” coalition.

While SIC is active throughout American society, the iteration that I explicate in this report stems directly from my X-ID experience. In a mirror image to the conservative Christian takeover of the nation’s school boards in order to destroy educational freedom, SIC is staging a takeover of our nation’s arts institutions in order to destroy artistic freedom. One is using local elections, the other is using artist residencies. Both are religio-nationalist ideologies that utilize McCarthyite tactics to quell dissent t0 their suppressive definitional regimes, both are being carried out in the zealous name of controlling major institutions in order to privilege an exclusive social corrective agenda, and both are actively inimical to individual choice, unbiased experimentation, and non-sectarianism in their respective realms.

As the art world increasingly opens itself up to theater and performance practitioners, it must be extremely cautious. Allowing SIC agents into our galleries, museums and art fairs could be as dangerous as inviting the pillars of recent radical right art censors – Jesse Helms, George W. Bush, Robert Novack, Vladimir Putin, Rudolph Giuliani, and the invisible bureaucratic enemies of Ai WeiWei – to serve on the boards, determine programming, and assume executive positions in our art institutions. From my research, SIC is active in all the arts, but it thrives most unopposed in the theater world, as indicated by 1300 major theater leaders recently signing an American Theatre Magazine petition in favor of Broadway-produced Katori Hall’s recent “damming” letter against black director Michael Oatman, who runs the African Community Theater at Kent State. Oatman’s only crime was that he conducted a theatrical experiment with her play, The Mountaintop, by casting a white actor as Martin Luther King Jr. (and the script did not stipulate against such a choice). This case of a privileged censoring elite unanimously damming a small community theater in order to force its identity agenda is an example of how SIC will stop at nothing to slur, shame, suppress and segregate (SS) artists at any level and of any cultural identity that do not support its attempts to stifle free speech and artistic freedom so that it can foster a world run by its dictates.

My experience in particular during X-ID provides a further example of the goals and tactics of SIC. In the final week of the residency – after three months during which the actions outlined in my first sentence (and described in more detail below) were carried out on me alone – all members had a discussion from which only I was excluded. This discussion resulted in one SIC agent, whom I call Member Z, quitting the project, which led to the final performances being cancelled. I alone was never allowed to know what happened in this discussion or why it led to the performances being cancelled. After conducting my own research, however, I discovered that because 1) the last text I submitted for the project had spoken out against the damming of Michael Oatman, and 2) Member Z is an associate of Katori Hall and signed the petition in her support, then 3) the entire project was most likely shut down because my texts were deemed politically unacceptable to SIC agents both inside and outside the project.

In my Research Findings below, I spell out in detail various aspects of SIC based on my experience in X-ID:

– While pretending to be advocating for the important goal of diversity, SIC is adamantly anti-diversity and is in fact destructive to that goal, for its obsession with race and gender – in a sense, its “physiognomic prejudice” – as the sole determinants of diversity is leading to an actual homogenization of the arts as SIC agents use these determinants to put themselves in charge of dictating and thus limiting the types of practices, personas, and positionalities that artists are allowed to pursue.

– Using its primary weapon – the word “privilege” – SIC agents make blanket assertions against individuals of various means, perspectives and backgrounds that give it the ethical immunity to engage in openly biased attacks and blacklistings.

– Anyone who does not express complete agreement with all SIC principles is accused of being delusional, unconscious, racist, sexist, oppressive, unwilling to own their privilege, etc., and they are openly slurred, shamed, suppressed, and segregated (SSed).

– In the long tradition of the conservative censor and the activist agitating for the absolute politicization of art, when confronted with work that fails to comply with their social agenda and generative regulations, or that challenges their sensitivities, SIC agents invalidate the work’s aesthetic qualities and, barring sincere confession of wrong-doing and failure-consciousness by the artist, they personalize and politicize the work and launch ad hominem attacks on the artist and seek to suppress the art, i.e. both are SSed.

Because 1) X-ID involved the prejudicial actions outlined above and had its final presentations cancelled for secret reasons, and 2) you paid large sums of money for a research project whose final presentation was cancelled and whose results are being selected by a political movement inimical to artistic freedom and responsible research, I would like to ask the following:

1. I ask that you intervene now in the X-ID archiving process currently in progress and guarantee that all the rehearsal notes, as well as the emails and discussions that led to my being excluded from the project and the project’s final performances being cancelled, are preserved, especially as SIC agents are at this very moment selecting what will and will not remain in the archive.

2. I also ask that you confirm to me that this entire document – which extensively explicates the SIC activities inside the residency – be included in the X-ID archives as it was begun during the residency and presents my research findings on the residency.

3. Once you have secured and perused the full archives, I ask that you make public your findings, state your position on SIC and the events in X-ID, speak on what you will do to ensure that what happened to me doesn’t ever happen to another artist in the New Museum, and share whether or not you will be reaching out to other institutions that they might learn how to prevent similar SIC incursions.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you understand that I have sent you this letter and expended considerable effort to organize my Research Findings because I care so deeply about “new art, new ideas,” as your mission statement so eloquently states.

Sincerely,

Kirk Wood Bromley
Playwright Participant
X-ID Rep 2015

P.S. This document does not put forth the accusation that Travis Chamberlain, Associate Curator of Performance and Manager of Public Programs at the New Museum and leader of X-ID, or Amanda Ryan, his assistant, are SIC agents, and I wish to go on record as lauding them in their attempts to balance the complicated forces inherent in the residency. Further, I wish to extend my gratitude to those few X-ID members who did reach out to me compassionately, one of whom said in confidence, “I’m glad you spoke up, and I’m sorry you had to go through that.” While I would like to name them personally so they can be recognized for their kindness and decency, I don’t wish to sabotage their careers, so they shall remain anonymous.

Research Findings from the New Museum’s X-ID 2015

My participation in X-ID began when I responded to a Facebook post from Travis Chamberlain asking if anyone knew of a playwright who had written about disabilities. Having done such plays, I replied, and he interviewed me as a possible participant. The mission statement can be read here (link to: http://www.newmuseum.org/pages/view/x-id-rep). He also described my contractual commitment. Over the course of four months, I would have to be present for the audition and casting process, I would need to submit four texts, one for each director, and I would need to attend the final two performances. Being physically present at rehearsals was entirely optional for the playwrights. No mention was made of the need to engage in email correspondence or attend extra meetings. Pay was $1500.

On the up side were my texts being performed at the New Museum, the chance to contribute to a project that seemed open to a diversity of views on intercultural cross-play and cultural identity, the possibility that some of the elite theater makers in the project might want to work with me in the future, and the money. On the down side was the fact that I had given up playwriting four years earlier because after 22 years of self-producing I was $250,000 in debt, my job and family situations left me little time for creative endeavors, and I knew that given my writing style it would take me hundreds of hours to generate four texts. Nevertheless, I felt excited to do it and it seemed doable given the contractual obligations, so I signed up.

All participants were given a preliminary questionnaire to fill out so the other members could get to know their ideas on intercultural cross-play and cultural identity. My responses took me 50 hours to write and said, in brief, that 1) I found the conversation-dominating “identifications of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and ability” to be highly problematic epistemological categories and thus only interesting to me as objects of theatrical inquiry, that 2) the forms of intercultural cross-play I wanted to explore involved radical jargon in institutional jargon, expressive complexity in commercial simplicity, long form performance in short term attention, needs for emotional expression in concerns over professional viability, literary obsession in performative prerogative, and more, and finally, 3) in the questionnaire and in other related emails I made clear that the cultural identity I wanted to explore was the unproduced and marginalized playwright who felt so ignored and erased by the NYC theater industry after a 22 year career that he had not been able to step into a theater for the past four years without literally feeling nauseous.

As will soon be seen, my ideas on intercultural cross-play and cultural identity were totally ignored and, unlike every other participant, all of whose chosen cultural identities were respected, accepted, and explored in the process, I alone was consistently and singularly subjected to the dominant, prejudicial and suppressive identifiers – the DIMs – that best supported the ideological needs of SIC. I should also point out that the identity of the under-privileged playwright that I wanted to explore was rejected by people who must be counted among the rising privileged theatrical elite of their generation, with credits that include Broadway, Yale Rep, Lincoln Center, the Public, and many more major institutions.

It was at the auditions that the trouble began. I quickly learned that racist and sexist slurs and jokes about white straight people, whom one member described unprotested as “the problem” and about whom later another member said, “I mean, some people just need to be destroyed,” would become perfectly normal during X-ID. My sense is that a perusal of the rehearsal notes will produce many more such comments. When I did finally speak up about this, I was told that, “white straight men cannot be the objects of racism and sexism because they are part of the white power structure.” As I came to learn, this is a core tenet of SIC, and it is used to disguise openly bigoted statements and actions by its agents and to limit the artistic freedoms of not only white straight people, but anyone, no matter their race, who fails to abide by SIC norms (e.g. Michael Oatman).

At the auditions, each actor was asked to perform a monologue that represented a character outside their self-identified cultural identity. It was here that I finally hit upon what I wanted to do in my texts, which became the primary reason for my being singled out for malicious treatment and inevitably led to SIC agents successfully convincing the company to cancel the final two performances for reasons unknown only to me.

As a verse playwright, I always have a poetic source for my texts. First it was Shakespeare, then it was Ashbery, but in the months leading up to X-ID it had become rap. So I decided to write dramatic scenes that contained characters who were having conflicts over the very intercultural cross-play issues I was interested in and who were speaking in a kind of rap poetic, which I considered in part to be coming from a place of pain and disempowerment that felt profoundly similar to my feelings in the theater industry as an unproduced playwright.

My texts instantly became a “problem” for rep members who were agents of SIC, or, by my calculations, all but three or four of the 16 participants. The “problem” centered on the fact that I was a white straight male appropriating the language of certain black people. My appropriation could not be seen as an experiment that was true to the goals of X-ID, as a case of a playwright riffing on a certain poetic, or even as a fan paying homage to his most favorite form of contemporary genius, no, it was not allowed to be any of these even though I tirelessly described in various meetings and emails that it was in fact all of these. No, my texts, according to the agents of SIC, were simply “racist,” “troubling,” “problematic,” “demeaning,” “offensive,” and “lacking in awareness of systems of power.”

Replying to these statements, which appeared in the rehearsal notes and an email I received from the other three playwrights during the first week, I sent an email saying, in effect, I was very glad this conversation was starting, that my scenes were not meant to be offensive or racist, that I was not sure what “systems of power” meant at this point in relation to my research, but rather I was just exploring an exciting poetic culture, and that I was glad they had read my scene. I received no reply.

In response to my first text, three members, all SIC agents, had a long g-chat that was inevitably presented during the first week of X-ID Open Studios. In it I am accused of being a racist, and one agent – who I call Member Z and who will figure prominently as the SIC agent who effectively shut the project down for reasons I alone was not allowed to know – said my texts were, “So white. So straight. So male.” The conversation then took what I consider to be a rather eerie Stalinist turn: another member said, “Do you think he’s conscious?” Member Z replied, “I don’t think so. At least not in the right way.” Then, when the third member wondered if they should try to talk to me, Member Z mused that while that would probably be unpleasant for them, “I can make him talk.”

Following this exchange, SIC agents partook in the following actions to slur, shame, suppress, and segregate (SS) me over the course of the first three months of the residency:

1. Character-assassinations, accusations of malign intent, emotional abuse and rampant racism and sexism directed only toward me began immediately. I was repeatedly accused of being racist in front of my peers and the public, I had to suffer numerous jokes and slurs about white straight people, I had to listen to incessant and hurtful accusations that I am inculcated into historic and present acts of violence that I have never committed and systems of power that I do not understand or support, I had to watch as all identities other than my own were respected and provided a “safe space,” I had to suffer the constant assertion that my artistic choices were somehow indicative of a wrongfulness in my mind, and I had to sit quietly in a room where there was a rule that someone of my race and gender may not speak unless spoken to. The entire experience was incredibly demeaning, hurtful, and destructive toward my mental and physical health as well as my creative drive.

2. I experienced numerous acts of indifference to my economic situation because I did not make myself available “to come in and talk” about some members’ concerns with my scenes. I will point out that I was not contractually obligated to come in, I inevitably spent 500 hours writing my texts (putting my hourly wage at $3/hour) and could not afford to put in more, and then during one of the two times when I was able to attend rehearsals, referenced above, there was a rule in the room that “white men can’t speak unless asked a question” and no one asked me a question, so despite the claim that they wanted conversation with me, I sat for three hours in silence. Further, it was clear that I was readily available and eager for email conversations, but none were initiated beyond the first email mentioned above and none of my emails were ever responded to.

3. Several SIC agents openly dismissed the aesthetic features of my work and the labor that would be required to tease them out and instead referred to them as “bad” or “offensive” or “wrong” or “too violent,” which insults were never hurled at any other X-ID member’s work.

4. One SIC agent contacted me and said they wanted to have a phone conversation with me to discuss my text. I accepted, and this conversation was recorded without my knowledge. Then, during the meeting with the cast when I was not silenced because I’m a white man, this same SIC agent asked me to read my scene out loud so they could all “hear what I was hearing,” and this reading was recorded without my knowledge. The recording of my reading my scene was later played for the public during an Open Studio with my permission because I felt it was the only way my text might be heard, but the public was not informed that the recording had been obtained without my knowledge.

By the fourth director’s week with the actors, which was about 3 months after the start of the residency, the trauma I had experienced convinced me I had to stop writing what I wanted to write, so I started looking for a new textual approach, and I have come to believe that the one I finally settled on ultimately played a pivotal role in Member Z quitting the project and the final performances being cancelled for reasons only I am not allowed to know. This was the beginning of the end in which the SIC agents decided that they’d had enough of me, so instead of engaging in the dialogue they claimed to crave, they shut the project down without telling me why.

My fourth textual approach requires some background.

As briefly mentioned in my introduction, Michael Oatman is a black American and the Creative Director of the African Community Theater in the Pan African Studies Department at Kent State University in Ohio. In September 2015, he staged a production of Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, which depicts a fictional conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a mysterious woman in his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the eve of King’s assassination. The play has been produced around the world, and its Broadway run, which recouped its $3.1 million capitalization, starred Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. What makes Oatman’s production of The Mountaintop unique is that Oatman decided to cast a black man to play King for 5 days and a white man to play him for 3 because he wanted to investigate “issues of ownership and authenticity” by researching the question: “Can a prominent American be performed by another American or does it have to be an African-American who portrays him?” However, after more than one black actor dropped out due to family and personal issues, and there being no indication in the play’s licensing that this might be forbidden, Oatman gave the entire run to the white actor, whose name is Robert Branch. The mysterious woman was played by a black actress named Cristal Christian.

Upon hearing of this “White King” from a friend, Katori Hall published a “damming” letter to express her “rage” at Oatman’s “self-serving and disrespectful” choice. Further, she announced in the letter that she would be placing a condition on her play that states, “Both characters are intended to be played by actors who are African-American or Black. Any other casting choice requires the prior approval of the author.” In response to Ms. Hall’s condemnation of his production and his character, Michael Oatman said he was glad “as an educator…that there are certain conversations that are taking off and that are happening and that people way smarter than me are discussing how race works in the American theater.” But as for doing it again, he said he would not, because “of all the things I wanted to explore and all the things that I wanted to do, angering Katori Hall was not one of them.” Given what I experienced in X-ID, I consider this a statement of fear.

In the wake of Hall’s letter, the response by the American theater industry was absolute. Though the comments section of Katori Hall’s letter on Root.com contains lively debate that appears to be split 50/50, American Theatre Magazine published an article that contained the signatures of 1300 theater artists and administrators who supported Katori Hall’s letter. In that article, American Theatre Magazine’s Executive Director said that “there is a place for respectful disagreement and thoughtful debate—we need more conversation that leads to action, not less.” And yet, despite this veneer of wanting conversation (a typical SIC tactic), not a single American theatrical institution – not Yale, not the New York Times, not Dramatists Play Service, not Signature Theater, not 1000s more such grand estates whose very mission must ultimately be “to generate dialogue” – not a single one has voiced support for Michaeal Oatman or attempted to actually facilitate conversation on the issue, but in fact they have all either voiced support for Katori Hall, sat quietly on their hands, or (in the case of the SIC agents in X-ID) actively suppressed that debate, while a massive cabal of elite theater makers publicly race-shame, character-assassinate, and creatively stifle three provincial, small-time, unprivileged theatrical experimentalists – Michael Oatman, Robert Branch, and Cristal Christian – whose only crime was that they dared do anything against SIC ideology.

This seemed like a great thing to write about in a residency that claimed it was interested in open conversation about intercultural cross-play and cultural identity in the theater, so I decided to ask “what would Martin Luther King Jr. do?” in a theatrical way and the result is the one-person speech, “The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Returns from Heaven to Preach upon the Topic of Who Shall Be Allowed to Play Him,” which I submitted as my final text and which can be read here. (link to: http://kirkwoodbromley.com/thekingreturns/).

On one of the fourth week’s rehearsal days I went in and experienced the “white men can’t speak” rule I described above. To be honest, I had thought that my appearance, which I had told the director of several days prior and was in deference to the members wanting to converse with me about my scenes, might mean my speech would be read out loud. Instead, theater games about “stepping into someone else’s shoes” were played and a different playwright’s scene was worked on. After I left, I felt completely dejected because it seemed like my text would never even be read by the company. And in fact it never was.

So I did what playwrights do, and I decided to find someone to read my scene. Thus, on December 19, 2015, I announced an event wherein anyone could read my speech out loud on Martin Luther King Day to honor his legacy, support artistic freedom, and foster discussion of the issues. I also tweeted at Katori Hall, messaged Michael Oatman, and emailed or messaged around 40 theater directors asking if any of them would be interested in reading my scene. Within 10 minutes, Katori Hall blocked me. Michael Oatman never got back to me. And of the 40 theater directors, many of whom I later learned signed the American Theatre Magazine petition in support of Katori Hall, only 3 got back to me and respectfully declined, and they were each someone I’d worked with in the past. A few friends actually contacted me and said they’d like to peruse the scene, and when I suggested to one, who is an actor, that he read it out loud in front of the Cherry Lane Theater where Katori Hall is in residence, he said, “Yeah, I was thinking I’d just do it under my covers with a flashlight.” Another statement of fear.

On December 29, all X-ID members, including me, received an email from Travis Chamberlain, the project’s director. It started:

“As some of you know, one of the company members of X-ID REP (who has requested to have their correspondence on the subject kept private) has resigned from the project…Thank you to those of you who have reached out to express your concern and thoughts on the matter.”

“As some of you know.” Clearly some people had been included in a conversation, but not me. So I was left to wonder – Who had dropped out? Why had they dropped out? Who knew and who didn’t know?

Travis also said in his email that, “I do not think we should move forward with the Final Presentations on January 8 and 9 as originally planned, but should take a moment to discuss how and if the project can move forward.” When I showed up at a meeting with the other members to hear their views on how to move forward, I immediately discovered that Member Z had dropped out, and, as far as I could tell, I was the only person in the room who didn’t know why. In that meeting, I gave a short speech, which included many of the things you’ve just heard. I said I felt that the performances should go on as planned, that I deserved that because the performances had always been billed as the culmination of the residency and that the performances were central to respecting the identity of the “unproduced playwright” that I had brought into the project, and that if the members of X-ID chose to cancel the performances simply because one member dropped out – a playwright, not an actor member, proving the decision was political and not practical – they would be exposing the entire project for what it had eventually descended into: not an attempt to openly research and hear all sides about cultural identity and intercultural cross-play, but a process of slowly slurring, shaming, suppressing, and segregating me.

After saying this, there was silence. One person finally said, “We tried to engage with you about the politics in your scenes, Kirk, but you were unwilling to do that.” This is a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam by SIC agents as well as by a SIC-sympathetic journalist writing for Culturebot. I had replied to emails and received no reply back. I had come in to talk and had a three hour discussion with the actors. I had come in to talk again and was met with a rule that prevented me from speaking unless asked a question and no one asked me a question. Finally, I had attended several social events and was always kind and talkative with other members. In a common SIC move, what these agents mean by my unwillingness to engage with them is in fact my unwillingness to roll over and agree with everything they say.

By the end of the meeting, the final performances had been cancelled.

After I left, I took to the web to see if I could find any connection between Member Z and some reason why I was the only one who was not allowed to know why they had dropped out. What I found now forms the basis for a conjecture that I hope will be proven wrong at some point, but until then is all I have.

As it turns out, Member Z had signed the American Theatre Magazine petition in support of Katori Hall. Member Z has received some of the same awards, fellowships, and residencies as Katori Hall. Theater is a small world. Katori Hall and Member Z know each other. The email announcing that Member Z had dropped out came only a few days after I had contacted and been blocked by Katori Hall and had contacted but never heard back from 37 theater makers. The only residency-relevant thing that had happened between December 19 when I had gone in and sat in silence because I was a white man and December 29 when I received an email saying that Member Z had dropped out was that I had announced my Martin Luther King Day speech event, a speech that supported Michael Oatman and sought to broaden the discussion on intercultural cross-play and cultural identity.

During the “archiving week” of X-ID that replaced the cancelled performances and included not a single reading of any of my texts, I took Travis up on his offer for members to come in and “tell their story.” Next to me I placed an empty chair on which I taped a piece of paper that read “Michael Oatman.” I said I felt that Michael Oatman was an American hero who had been unjustly SSed by a politicized theatrical elite that would go to any length to enforce its anti-intercultural cross-play and proscribed cultural identity ideology, and that he therefore deserved and indeed needed to be present with me in the context of X-ID. After my speech, the four members who were there to hear me clarified some of their actions, voiced some regrets, and expressed empathy for some of what had happened to me, which moved me deeply and I told them so. But still, the majority of the conversation centered on how I had failed to hear them throughout the process and how my status as a “white straight male” not only prevented me from saying many of the things I had said and written but that it had led me to quite typically do what I had just done: “take center stage, talk for 45 straight minutes, and make it all about myself.” How one is supposed to present one’s story otherwise, especially when one has been singularly excluded from the group, remains beyond me. Finally, when I asked why I alone was still the only member not allowed to know why Member Z had dropped out or why that had led to the performances being cancelled, everyone was silent until one of them summed it all up by making a gesture of bondage and saying, “my hands are tied.” Given the constant practice by directors and actors during the X-ID process of upending hierarchies in the theater, it is curious that this is the one time that anyone’s hands were tied and, in my opinion, points both to higher agents of power having moved into the space in a secret manner and, again, an atmosphere of fear.

So having been lured into what was supposed to be an opportunity to freely explore intercultural cross-play and discovering that it was instead a SIC-controlled convention, I finish with a question: Where is the X-ID member who is going to stand up and say “I will not be silenced, I will not be hand-tied, I will not allow our residency to be influenced by outside forces, so here’s the truth about what happened and why Kirk alone was excluded!”? The answer sadly appears to be that that person does not exist, because career suicide in an industry controlled by SIC.

Conclusion

In the early 1800’s, French philosopher Victor Cousin declared that art should not be held accountable to a moral mission; that its purpose is not “to make us better and to elevate us to God.” For putting forth an insistence on art’s independence from politics, which he felt compelled to do in the face of rampant conservative government censorship, he lost his position at the Sorbonne. His controversial principle, however, deemed far too liberal for the establishment, became a cri de guerre for Romantics in the 1820’s and 30’s.

Now, in the early 2000s, Junot Diaz has said, “if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” This sentiment is at the heart of numerous attempts in recent years by those who feel their “identity” has been excluded from being “represented” in “culture” so they have set out to remedy that “problem.” In my view, there is nothing wrong with this attempt, and I support it as a beautiful and important manifestation of American freedom.

However, I have placed “identity,” “represented,” “culture” and “problem” in quotes because it is via certain definitions of these words that a destructive transformation has taken place from this beautiful and important manifestation of American freedom to the suppressive and segregationist actions of SIC. This transformation has everything to do with the kind of censorial actions that led Cousin to argue for the autonomy of art from ethics. And it is my central hope in putting forth this document that in calling out this transformation I can incite a new generation of “romantics” to take the frightening vocational, yet invigorating ideational, leap into true liberalism.

For the attempt to have more black writers in a residency is categorically different from censoring a white writer in the residency for writing from an imaginary black perspective. Working to have more Asian actors have the opportunity to play Asian characters is categorically different from trying to prevent one ethnicity of actor from playing roles of a different ethnicity. Encouraging institutions to let a certain gender of person tell their own story is categorically different from blacklisting someone if they try to live the fantasy of the story of a gender not their own. Pushing for a greater diversity of people who identify with dogmatic identity markers (DIMs)– race, gender, class, ability, nationality – to have access to institutions is categorically different from openly or covertly shutting down projects in those institutions that contain individuals who don’t wish to identify with those DIMs or who refuse to have their actions dictated by moral imperatives that have been generated out of political movements that enforce those DIMs as the only ones worthy of consideration due to social or historical analyses whose validities are not allowed to be questioned. Holding vigils, talk-ins and events to express dislike for certain types of Halloween costume is categorically different from trying to institute rules that go against the First Amendment so one can prohibit such costumes. And this categorical difference is probably best described as taking a step out of liberalism and into conservatism.

The increasing prevalence of actions that typify this categorical difference has led many to claim that SIC agents are primarily “anti-free speech.” But there’s much more to it, for as history shows us, those who engage in “anti-free speech” activities are always motivated by definitional paradigms that inform political goals (“anti-flag burning” is nationalist, “anti-defecation on crosses as art” is religionist, “anti-explicit sex” is puritanist, etc.). The definitional paradigms of SIC revolve around the words identity, culture, representation and problem.

In terms of identity, SIC is rigidly conservative, and like other bigots before and around them, is saturated with a physiognomic prejudice. If a person is born of a certain race, most attempts to live outside that race via surgery, cosmetics, fantasy, behavior or creative representation is deemed as inappropriate appropriation or a reprehensible lack of pride. SIC’s conservative essentialism also means that certain identities must predominate over others. For instance, if a person has Asian features and was born in America then that person is an Asian-American, and any attempt to identify as something else, for instance as a “Gaian” or a “primate” or an “Avatar of Christ” is deemed delusional or recalcitrant. If someone wants to be accepted by SIC as a different gender than they were born with, they need to undergo surgery to change their essential features. Finally, since so many SIC activities revolve around issues of increasing diversity, SIC solely defines diversity via DIMs, mostly race and gender, and would oppose or view as laughable at best and subversive at worst the suggestion that identity markers like “vegetarian,” “on anti-depressants,” “believes porn is a social good,” or “has severed all ties with family” might be also used as identities and thus to determine diversity.

In terms of culture, SIC adheres and attempts to force others to adhere to a conservative idea of culture that negates three elements that are central to culture and cultural production: artistic choice, organizational hierarchy, and the free market. Three examples clarify the point.

On the issue of artistic choice, SIC agents would assert – and slur, shame, suppress, and segregate (SS) anyone who doesn’t agree – that DIMs need to be taken into account when doing any creative activity. If five white artists who have gone to college together, spent 1000s of hours collaborating on projects, and feel a deep aesthetic affinity want to do a play that they love together and that play contains characters that are non-white, they will be SSed. If a college drama teacher wants her students to do a play for which she does not have the exact proper ethnic make-up, she will be SSed if she fails to acquire actors outside her student body. If a curator holds open call for artists and finds none of color that satisfies her curatorial objectives or tastes, she will be SSed. If a writer or film-maker wants to explore the voices or experiences or works of an ethnicity or gender outside their own, they are SSed.

Organizational hierarchies, many of which are in place to simply assure that products make it through the pipeline, are also of no concern to SIC agents. If an actor starts to have serious differences with a director’s choices and that actor is of a different DIM than that director, that actor can drop out, claim that the differences were based on one DIM oppressing another, and they will be lauded by SIC agents who were not even present to witness the actor/director interactions. If a member of a writing collaboration objects to the political ideas purportedly inherent in another member’s contributions to that collaboration, the objecting member can drop out and hopefully even derail the project and they will be praised for standing up for SIC’s ideals. If a film director hires a crew that in his opinion will be most effective in fulfilling their costly duties, SIC agents will support the SSing of that decision if the identity consistency of that crew does not meet its political objectives.

Various factors of the free market are also consistently derided and ignored by SIC, which is perhaps why they are focusing so heavily on non-profit organizations. SIC agents see nothing questionable about SSing production companies that make calculated market driven-decisions as to what will sell and what won’t sell to their target market (which calculations, of course, could easily turn out to be wrong) if those decisions are not guided by SIC’s political views. If an art dealer determines that his collector base is interested in artists whose DIMs don’t satisfy SIC, that dealer will be SSed. If a writer determines that he might make a good buck writing about a topic deemed unacceptable to SIC, that writer will be SSed by SIC agents. I’m reminded of something said by a sex worker friend who has suffered the wrath of conservative feminists: “They want to stop you from making money.” Economic disempowerment of its enemies is a standard SIC tactic.

A specific and enforced definition of “representation” is another core concept in the SIC arsenal. Again, based on the irrefutability of the importance of the DIMs, SIC agents, similar to the racists and sexists they claim to oppose, view all representation through the conservative lens of these markers. Certain identities are allowed to represent other identities via certain forms of expression, while others are not, but the rules are always very unclear in advance as to which identities can represent which via which expressive forms, and failure to understand these directional biases – failure to in effect “read SIC’s mind” – is met with SSing. Another interesting form of representation that SIC purports to “own” involves hypotheticals surrounding identity. It is quite common to hear SIC agents saying, “if someone of my identity did what someone of that identity did, the outcome would be vastly different.” Of course, this is a pure hypothetical, but because SIC agents purport to know how representation plays out in real life, asserting the absolute truth of a hypothetical does not seem to them at all intellectually dishonest. Finally, the strictness of identity that SIC adheres to means that representation is always only viewed through the DIMs. It is mere folly or obstruction to their cause to imply that a human being can “relate to a representation” that is not directly reflective, primarily visually, of their DIMs. In other words, satisfactory “representation” is only properly determined through the visual cues of race or gender, not the less visual cues of emotional, political, national, or psycho-sexual similarities, just to name a few.

Any SIC agent reading this far in the document will more than likely have one response: “you don’t get the problem.” What they mean by “problem” is that due to the DIMs of race and gender, a large number of people have been in the past and are being in the now excluded from their “identity” being “represented” in “culture,” and that is how SIC agents fully justify the acts that were visited on me in X-ID and are visited on countless others every day: artistic censorship, racist and sexist slurs, racially and sexually-based actions, economic exploitation, character-assassination, emotional abuse, secrecy, deception, and blacklisting. However, it is possible to agree with the assertion that this is a problem but disagree with the methods used by SIC to rectify this problem (though, of course, not according to SIC agents, who will assert that the person who disagrees with their methods disagrees that there is a “problem”). I support the beauty and importance of diversity, but I do not agree with the methods SIC is using to attain it, and I would encourage anyone who cares about true diversity to call out SIC agents, to argue against SIC agents, and to conceptually differentiate SIC agents from the larger diversity movement as a whole, because in my opinion SIC is destructive to the overall goal of diversity. Instead of working to economically and educationally empower all people so that the market begins to favor their creative presence and consumer habits, SIC agents prefer to spend their time SSing others’ creative presences and consumer habits. Instead of encouraging all persons to freely take on other identities so that intercultural cross-play opens up new opportunities for all identities to learn about each other’s humanity, SIC forces people to identify with whatever identity serves their agenda. Instead of supporting an expansion of what “identity” actually means, SIC enforces the DIMs – mostly race and gender – as the only ones that matter.

In conclusion, SIC utilizes the following terms and tactics:

– It imperiously espouses the concept that certain people cannot be the objects of racism, sexism, or abuse due to a history of suppression which makes it conveniently possible for them to feel ethical when suppressing those people via acts of racism, sexism, and abuse.

– It didactically presses the dominating discourse of “privilege,” which, highlighting SIC’s roots in American puritanism, is essentially a demand that every individual deemed to have “privilege” must feel and express guilt, contrition and submissiveness for the abuses of an abstract “power structure,” no matter that individual’s history or psychology, and while this demand is conducted under the guise of making people “aware,” it is primarily carried out in the inquisitionist spirit of identifying those who oppose SIC so they can be SSed.

– Anyone who does not openly profess a belief in every SIC tenet is deemed obstinately unwilling to take part in discussion and “own their privilege,” and as a result they are shut down or the process of discussion itself is shut down. For instance the common SIC phrase for white people who attempt to defend dearly held principles is “white tears,” which is a demeaning and dehumanizing phrase that implies white people have no right whatsoever to feel hurt when they are slurred, shamed, suppressed, or segregated.

– It openly espouses the concept that people of a certain DIM should stop creating (e.g. Eileen Myles in the NY Times: “I think men should stop writing books…making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.”), which is in effect saying to certain children, based on a sexist agenda, you have no right to be yourself.

– It demands that all creative and scientific practitioners expend considerable time discussing their “positionality,” which refers singularly to one’s sociological position vis-à-vis one’s subjects according to the DIMs, but if a creator or researcher attempts to discuss positionality via other determinants, such as emotional, political, sexual or psychological positionality, they are chronically accused of avoiding “the issue.”

– Like all conservative censors before them, when faced with art that depicts aspects of the world that they find painful or frightening or problematic, instead of engaging with that art as an objective expression seeking to explicate elements of that pain, fear or problem, SIC agents SS the work.

– SIC agents claim to be interested in open research, diversity, exploration, and equality, but in fact they use these claims to hide their conservative obsession with predetermined outcomes, homogeneity, forced concurrence, disempowerment of artists, and inequality.

At the very center of SIC’s conservative dogma is a prejudicial reparationist ideology that preaches a “guilt by association” philosophy that is conceptually akin to the principles that have fomented many of humanity’s most heinous large-scale crimes. Other than willful disregard toward the dangers of these historical precedents, there are several problems with this approach:

– It is repressive rather than creative. No one needs to eat less for others to get more. Instead, others need to make more and buy more. The cultural pie is not a static quantity; the bakers are also the eaters, and new technologies, new broadcast channels, and alternative methods and venues of expression are available to all people to bake more pies so everyone can eat. And many people are doing exactly this to the great benefit of American culture. But SIC agents are doing something categorically different – they are seeking to limit others from eating, and that is a repressive, regressive, vicious political tactic.

– It disenfranchises rather than empowers individuals. Artists who are alive right now, waking up every day and working hard to get their creations heard, should not be expected to suppress their creative efforts, or accept their creative efforts being suppressed, because other artists who “look like them” are having their works represented. No individual must ever be expected or forced in any way to pay or answer for the actions of other people, and suppressing one’s creativity is the ultimate suppression. It is disempowerment based on guilt by association, and it is the slipperiest slope humanity has ever devised.

– It is blatantly bigoted. While SIC agents claim immunity from bigotry because they direct that bigotry at people who “look like someone who did something wrong,” it is obvious to anyone who has studied history or ethics that this claim, based on a physiognomic prejudice, is so glaringly self-serving, logically flawed, and ethically reprehensible that it will be laughed at, if not scorned, as incriminatingly ignorant in under a generation. Nothing justifies treating someone differently because of their identity.

Ultimately, the SIC agents in X-ID who attempted to negate my individual experience and subsume it into the overarching rubric of “privileged white cis-gender male” in order to slur, shame, suppress, and segregate me encountered a far more complicated entity: a person who grew up on welfare; who has worked a full time job since he was 14; who is $250,000 in debt from self-producing his plays; who has been the object of various acts of white violence; who when young was the constant victim of the incessant slur of “fag” and “pussy” because he was in drama club and marching band and played soccer; who supports cultural diversity but opposes censorship; who has worked with, befriended and supported a wide identity-array of artists; whose work has long experimented with various forms of intercultural cross-play in a loving and respectful way; who has written close to 1,000 characters in over 30 plays and has never utilized a dialect for the sole purpose of demeaning or mocking; who also believes so adamantly in the beauty and power of alternative casting that he has written characterless plays wherein the director can assign any actor to any line; who has frequently spoken out against racism and sexism over the past four decades; who moved to NYC to live amidst diversity; who has voted for a wide array of progressive public officials of various identities; who, unlike his fellow residency members, has received almost no institutional support for his work and has no status or privilege in the industry or institutions of his chosen ambition; and who, because he has nothing, has nothing to lose. Encountering the cognitive dissonance of such a complex character in the midst of an uncontrollable discussion on intercultural cross-play and cultural identity in the theater, the SIC agents did what all oppressive ideologues do: they shut it down.

While many who support SIC fret openly about Trump due to what they consider the racism of the candidate and his followers, Trump and SIC are basically the same angry mob staring at itself through a mirror fogged by the heavy breath of impractical wrath. The agents of each feel excluded and demeaned by the other, and they think the solution to that feeling is less respect and discussion and more shaming, slurring, suppressing, and segregating. Both are wrong. And while I am fully aware that many SIC agents will probably respond to this document as just another iteration of a white straight male’s inability to understand his own inherent complicity in the white racist power structure and thus link me with Trump, I can only say this: I am neither SICite nor Trumpite, but am in the party that believes the only way to bring true progress to American is by supporting artistic freedom, radical experimentation, creative integration, open conversation and a giant “NO!” to the segregationist, identitarian and puritanical forces that in one form or another have always had their sights on personal expression, and there are many who stand with me and they are of all “cultural identities.”

Call us Oatmanites.

Oatmanites believe that no person should have an other-determined cultural identity forced onto them due to any political or historical analysis or exigency and that every person should be free to choose the cultural identity they do or do not identify with. This is the principle of freedom of identity.

Oatmanites believe that no individual should be implicated into a larger cultural identity group in order to determine their motives, limit their freedoms, or obligate their expressions to remedy wrongs they themselves have not directly committed or openly supported. This is the principle of freedom of individuality.

Oatmanites believe that allowing everything to be said and done, excluding what causes physical violence to another, is always better than suppressing it. This is the principle of freedom of expression.

Oatmanites believe that segregation in any form is inimical to a healthy democracy. This is the principle of freedom of association.

Toni Morrison once said:

The essence of great art is tension without bloodshed. Art binds communities without mandating hierarchy or adversarial relationships. Its necessity is not confined to aesthetics or pleasure but extends to imagination, enlarging our understanding, giving context to our behavior, raising questions rather than issuing agenda. Art is not a palliative, nor an ambassador with a portfolio of good will, pacification, or distraction from persecution. Art is incendiary and properly so. It sharpens us, makes us vulnerable, makes us fierce, coherent, and it can even frighten us. All of which is to say that the practice of great art is the practice of knowledge unseduced by its own beauty. We should understand it as rational because whatever its origin, masque, or style, it is memory, it is perception, it is imagination, it is knowledge. There is no combination more powerful than these four, and there is no void more dangerous in the human project than their loss.

SIC is on the move. As indicated by the American Theatre Magazine petition and the stifling “you’ll never work in this town again if you disagree with us” ethos that it represents, the battle for the theater world is, at least for now, all but lost. The universities and literary worlds, where some still openly speak out against SIC, hang in the balance. But the war is far from over for the museums, galleries and fairs of the art world, which has often stood as the last bastion of artistic freedom. I urge all art world leaders to review my research, to look for signs of SIC in their own institutions, and to work to prevent SIC from stifling artistic freedom. Little less than the preservation of memory, perception, imagination and knowledge in the human project is at stake.