Edgecomb StillRidiculous 2017

University of Michigan Press
Chapter Title: Still Ridiculous: Queering Legacy
Book Title: Charles Ludlam Lives!

Book Subtitle: Charles Bush, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the
Ridiculous Theatrical Company
Book Author(s): Sean F. Edgecomb
Published by: University of Michigan Press. (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.6706550.6
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Chapter one
Still Ridiculous
Queering Legacy
Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité.
—Jean Cocteau, Opéra (1927)
Reviving Charles Ludlam
Charles Ludlam was queer—a queer. He was a playwright, actor, director,

designer, painter, and essayist, as well as a control-freak, diva, liberator,
homeopath, inventor, rebel, visionary, and iconoclast. As this list con-
veys, Ludlam thrived on enigmatic contradiction. He is best known for
refining the Ridiculous theater, a distinct genre that is one of the earliest
forms of gay theater in the United States. The Ridiculous originated in
the 1960s in the filmic and theatrical works of Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel,
and John Vaccaro. It carried with it a ubiquitous spirit of midcentury gay
liberation that was both enterprising and irreverent.1 Tavel claims to have
coined the appellation “Ridiculous” to define a genre that he saw mov-
ing beyond the absurd to the “absolutely preposterous.”2 As a distinctly
American form, it unapologetically juxtaposes high culture (canonical
literature, grand theatrical traditions, and icons of Western history) and
low pop culture (American popular entertainments, B movies, television,
and icons of celebrity) with homage, travesty and Camp. Ludlam took the
early conventions of the Ridiculous, introduced by his predecessors, and
perfected them, creating a sophisticated theater that perfectly represented
the spirit of the times. Though Ludlam was a force to be reckoned with in
the downtown New York City theater of the mid-twentieth century, today
startlingly few people outside of the theater community have ever heard
his name.
30
Edgecomb, Sean. Charles Ludlam Lives! Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, Taylor Mac, and the Queer Legacy of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.6706550.
Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Still Ridiculous 31
Figure 3: Charles
Ludlam as Mar-
guerite Gautier in
Camille with Bill
Vehr as Armand.
(1976). Photographer:
John Stern. Author’s
collection.
Though Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company were hugely

popular with audiences and critics, artists and scholars have largely un-
dervalued his posthumous influence on the genre. Following Ludlam’s
death, a Theatre Week article reduced his unique praxis and rich body of
work to a mere drag act, and the genre risked being neglected evermore,
but the irrepressible spirit of the Ridiculous theater has survived.3 Lud-
lam saw his work as a sphere of influence. Of this he wrote, “The world
outside of theatre is changing and you reflect it. One does act upon the
world when the work has an incredible impact on the lives of the people
who see the play.”4 The decades that have passed since Ludlam’s death have
been filled with fundamental cultural shifts, political developments, and
global events that have radically altered the position of gay identity in
American culture. Although theater scholars such as Rick Roemer, Gau-
tam Dasgupta, Bonnie Marranca, and John Clum and biographer David
Kaufman have provided excellent analyses of the playwright and his work
32 charles ludlum lives!
under the banner of the countercultural, Ludlam is more accurately a gay

phenomenon. In an effort to combat homophobic readings by “rescuing”
Ludlam from the categorization as a practitioner of gay theater, such anti-
identitarian work has inadvertently diluted the original intention behind
the Ridiculous—to create experimental secret spaces that were exclusive
to the gay community, but also capable of extending gay identity into the
public sphere toward liberation. This formula generates a pastiche that
reflects and ridicules contemporary societal hegemony in support of a
distinctly queer sensibility, communality, and a cohesive identity with re-
spect to public visibility; an alternative view from the queer side of the
looking glass. This formula is inherently paradoxical, pulling in opposite
directions that seemingly render social constructs of gayness/queerness
contradictory and potentially futile. If Ludlam was only speaking to a mi-
nority within a protected space, how did his theater generate any kind of
effective and lasting political message? On the other hand, if his theater
was truly universalizing, how did it employ queerness as a mode of au-
tonomous individualism that wasn’t diluted by its widespread breadth?
The answer lies within queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s dissentient
theory built around the deadlock between “minoritizing” and “univer-
salizing” definitions of homosexuality—simply stated, it’s both.5 From a
queer perspective, it is the gap between the minoritarian and universal
that acts as a fecund breeding ground for queer legacies to propagate and
mature. The seemingly inimical components that make up this construct
need not be assumed counterproductive when read as points of a the-
oretical strategy that reveal hidden paths when read in context. In this
sense, the ambivalence created by the tension between the minoritarian
and universal acts as a springboard for queer identity-making (in both a
collective and individual sense) and its resultant legacies. The still emerg-
ing (and, I hope, potentially fundamental) concept of queer ambivalence
stems from Freud’s psychoanalytic (and undeniably patriarchal) notion of
ambivalence, where one side tries to overcome the other through an act of
repression. Sociologist Deborah B. Gould extends the Freudian notion of
ambivalence to explore the line between LGBTQ radical activism and the
avoidance of confrontational politics. I would add, however, that queer-
ness renders ambivalence as a powerful force that refutes the Freudian
binary and allows both side of queer contradiction to coexist, intervene
in, and formulate an alternative sense of being that belies the notion of a
concrete, singular choice.6
Ludlam’s Ridiculous was created in an alternate, ambivalent gap that
Still Ridiculous 33
eschewed normative hierarchies and values for a “queer collectivity”—a

queered version of the world that demonstrated its live-and-let-live creed
through live performance.7 This practice of queer cultural production
seeks to “build” and “do” in response to the status of “nothing assigned to
[queers] by the heteronormative world.”8 From these performances social
bonds were formed that assisted in recruiting the numbers that would
make the gay liberation movement a highly visible and united front—a
force to be reckoned with. In short, the Ridiculous helped to bring gay
culture into the public eye. It was the sense of productive ambivalence, a
refusal to be pinned down and labeled into half of a concrete binary that
allowed Ludlam’s Ridiculous to thrive both in the theater and beyond, and
admittedly in very different ways.
Ludlam used his distinct interpretation of Camp to metamorphose the
Ridiculous genre into his own unique form. Ludlam’s Camp was not merely
an aesthetic, but a secret language, an argot that he used to communicate
exclusive codes to his gay audience. This self-protective approach allowed
for subjugated cultural production and dissemination among his particular
subculture, in this case the urban gay community at the watershed of an
organized liberation movement. Ludlam drew inspiration for this mode of
Camp language from French novelist Marcel Proust (an influence that is
traced and unpacked in the introduction of this book), distinctly setting
his work apart from other Ridiculous artists of the period. Ludlam’s cul-
tural significance rests not only in twenty-nine distinct plays that he left
behind after his death in 1987, but also in his queer legacy through neo-
Ridiculous performers who have found inspiration in Ludlam and his plays
via personal relationships (whether amicable, competitive, professional, or
sexual), academic study, or aesthetic contexts. The Ludlamesque Ridiculous
theater may be read not only as an ongoing cultural event but also a viable
alternative account with which to trace a specific gay social history of late
twentieth-and early twenty-first-century urban America, a queer legacy.
Queer legacy can be best summed up in queer performance scholar
David Román’s concept of “provisional collectives,” where “certain artists
mark themselves as historical subjects whose genealogies might be found
outside of traditional systems of identification and belonging.”9 In this
sense, Ludlam’s collective genealogy was self-constructed and intricately
developed through various kinds of performance: his knowledge and pas-
sion for theater history as well as his sexual identity, challenging the tra-
ditional systems to which Román refers. This self-made queer genealogy
continues to inspire Ludlam’s legacy through his heirs.
When mapping the terms “gay” and “queer” onto a specific period (in
this case NYC from the period just before gay liberation until the advent
of the AIDS crisis) it is key to note the complex and oftentimes forgotten
relevance of the applied concepts in specific relation to time and space. As
queer scholar Annamarie Jagose suggests, queerness moves “simultane-
ously forward and backwards as not only the evolutionary extension of a
more conventional lesbian and gay studies but also its bent progenitor.”10
Perhaps unknowingly, Jagose has rather poetically set up a formula for
queer legacy, wherein time runs amok with a Ridiculous spirit. Though in
an institutional context queerness as a theoretical model implies a post-
1990s “zone of possibilities,” it seems too easy to be overcome with an
anti-identitarian politics-driven amnesia that cancels out modes of queer
self-awareness that existed two decades before the introduction of queer
theory as a discipline.11 I strategically use “gay” to refer specifically to the
insular network of men who have sex with and openly engage in romantic
relationships with other men. In midcentury New York City a particularly
exclusive community of gay men developed, creating a self-constructed
figural ghettoization and the resultant culture. Examples of this may
be seen in other contemporary works such as Mart Crowley’s play The
Boys in the Band (1968), Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the Dance
(1978), and Donald Vining’s memoir A Gay Diary: 1967-1975.12 When us-
ing “queer” I strategically refer to a collective body including all mem-
bers of society that are outside the boundaries of the cultural mainstream,
a mainstream defined by heteronormative constructs of time and space
that are ruled by biological reproduction. While my application of “gay”
is intended to bracket and unpack a specific community at a given time,
my use of “queer” is also inclusive of this group and allows for a certain
amount of slippage and what Sedgwick refers to as a “crisscrossing of the
lines of identification.”13 This approach allows for queer theater scholar Jill
Dolan’s rich and complex theory of “multiplicity” to manifest itself into
what gender and sexuality scholar Robin Bernstein propagates as a sort
of actively harmonious disagreement (one again, queerly ambivalent).14
Halberstam speaks to the diversity of people within such a contempo-
rary queer construct, stating that “all kinds of people, especially in post-
modernity, will do and opt to live outside of reproductive and family time
[and] perhaps such people could be productively called ‘queer subjects.’”15
The neo-Ludlamesque is demonstrative of Halberstam’s theory as a form
of performative evidence that seeks to include all self-professed queers,
while also advocating for disenfranchised communities with less repre-
Still Ridiculous 35
sentation such as the transsexual, transgendered, or disabled. Thus, the

queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where art-
ists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive
directions. Admittedly the concept of gayness that I employ for this close
reading is narrowly focused, speaking to a distinct time (the period of gay
liberation), place (NYC), and group (gay men)—an identity that is shaped
from the inside out as a self-mediated projection of positionality and loca-
tion. In a historical context, the gay theater community of the West Vil-
lage in the 1960s and 1970s was primarily composed of poor, bohemian
communists who had been shunned from American society. They found
solace in the Village, escaping from a hegemonic pathology of taboo and
shame where and when homosexuals were largely seen a social pariahs,
deviants, or sexual predators—black marks on any respectable family or
community. This dichotomy is clarified by the relocation from rural areas
to the urban, a commonplace migration by gay men of the period. Before
queer was a theory, it was common ground on which the disenfranchised
could build community on the margins of society.
Because queer theory emerged from the work of feminist scholars16
dedicated to post-Foucauldian radical dissections of socially constructed
genders and identities, narrative strands of queer legacy (such as this one)
inherently take into account a critical restructuring of historiography
drawn from a feminist perspective.17 My suggestion for a reconsidera-
tion of legacy in a queer context is directly inspired by James Harding and
Cindy Rosenthal’s “feminist orientation” of legacy in context to radical
theater of the 1960s. In this mode legacy becomes a “site of conceptual
evolution rather than of uncritical repetitious presentation.”18
Ludlam’s particular genealogy and legacy is situated at an intersec-
tion of queer theory and queer lives, arguing for honest examples that
are practically driven and honor queer individuals for their differences as
much as their similarities, putting an end to the accusatory, feckless, and
divisive hierarchy of “I’m more oppressed than you” rhetoric that so often
accompanied identity politics in the 1970s. Dolan inadvertently supports
this stance, warning: “The insistent anti-hegemonic pose of ‘queer’ can be
a ruse for not taking responsibility for the vagaries of a movement, a style,
a life.”19 I’m moved by Dolan’s caveat that seems to stand in opposition to
a homogenization that renders queerness apathetic. By extending queer
theory and honoring it for its diverse and even contradictory strands
(what Sedgwick originally theorized as “an open mesh of possibilities,
gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances”), I hope that we may begin to
recognize and deconstruct the very identity politics that shaped queerness
in context to their diverse origins without resorting to them as finite signi-
fiers.20 Moreover, I propose fighting against the dilution of queer theory as
a catchall that loses relevance and denies its roots in gay/lesbian histories
and feminist discourse.
In the climate of its origin, Ludlam’s theater was a catalyst for change,
but in using a codified language to speak exclusively to a gay audience in
an ontologically queer space, his work was also separatist and esoteric.
Since Ludlam’s death, advancements in civil rights paired with commu-
nity visibility have forever altered marginalized gay identity in America
and beyond. Ludlam was an inheritor and transmitter of classical theat-
rical traditions as he created original work through a pastiche of queer
themes and culture. Although largely forgotten to time, the style of work
that Ludlam created has continued in the work of new artists who honor
his work through metamorphosis and subversion: queer legacy.
Toward (a) Queer Legacy
In order to focus on the post-Ludlam Ridiculous as a critical strand of

alternative history, it is essential to reposition the concept of legacy as a
queer discourse.21 French philosopher Michel Foucault presents the no-
tion of genealogy as both a search for origins and a deconstruction of
truths. This approach is a solid foundation for the formulation of queer
legacy as a viable paradigm with which to examine systematically sub-
versive practices and disseminate sociocultural traditions that are passed
from generation to generation through the medium of performance, with-
out buying into ideological narratives of normative biological continu-
ity. I’m intentionally using “generation” to help frame different temporal
shifts in the development of post-Stonewall LGBT identity, rather than as
a marker of biological reproduction. Simply stated, queer generations are
created, not born. While it has been a historical tendency to laud legacy as
the transmission of prescriptive traditions that are bound to the past with
nostalgic reverence, a queer legacy is different. It rejects the act of Aris-
totelian mimesis and comparison as a form of violence, instead favoring
subversive actions, which are creative and productive.22 In other words, a
queer legacy is liberated from traditionalist approval-seeking, such as a
son attempting to ape his biological father as a sign of respect/affection.
When queered, a conservative act such as this is replaced with ridicule,
Still Ridiculous 37
where the son honors his queer father by reinventing himself in an act of
courage, autonomy, and independence; virtues at the core of gay libera-
tion philosophy. This act of mimicry lies close to literature scholar Homi
Bhabha’s postcolonial interpretation of the term as a “complex strategy
of reform” but is made queer through its liberal application of Camp as a
defense mechanism.23 Queer legacies may appear to borrow traits and for-
mulas of patriarchal and essentialist constructs at first glance (such as the
father/son model), but the queer version of this model is antiprototypical
and taboo (the “father” may be romantically/sexually/incestuously linked
to his “son”). Busch’s Ridiculous legacy perhaps resembles this model the
closest, as his origins with Ludlam were directly interpersonal (as when
he briefly played the role of Hecate in Ludlam’s Bluebeard), but Louryk
and Mac also queer normative family models in their works, notably in
Louryk’s cutting and pasting of Ludlam’s essays in Klytaemnestra’s Unmen-
tionables and Mac’s autobiographical monologues like “Mornings” in The
Be(a)st of Taylor Mac. All of these performers converge to create a larger
legacy of queer performance that operates through mimicry and ridicule.
Ludlam’s lasting cultural impact on contemporary Ridiculous the-
ater in New York City is the prime example of a queer legacy in action,
because Ludlam’s unique take on the Ridiculous generated a largely un-
touched legacy that is rife for excavation. The idea of a queer legacy is in-
scribed in Ludlam’s own account of his work and practice. Ludlam spoke
to this implicitly in his essay “Envoi” when asked about the future of the
Ridiculous on his deathbed, stating, “You must continue the theatre . . .
the art of playwriting can be passed on from father to son . . . it’s not
genetic, it’s technology.”24 For Ludlam “technology” means innovation:
a catalyst for social change. The continuance of the Ludlamesque Ri-
diculous thrives not on reverence and revivalism, but rather anarchic re-
inventionist approaches that synonymously honor and deconstruct the
original intentions and characteristics of Ludlam’s theater of the era of
post-gay liberation. This subversive practice allows the Ridiculous genre
to transform as a medium that is a direct reflection of and reaction to
shifts in contemporary queer culture.
Traditionally legacy is defined as an act of bequeathing or an object
given to another by will. The notion of this objective passing down of his-
tory suggests a static account of the past that belies progress—an attempt
to maintain what was as what is. Halberstam equates this practice of the
traditional-in-action with Foucauldian notions of disciplinarity that de-
pend upon “normalization, routines, convention and . . . regularity” for
deployment as a technique of power and suggests that in its place we must

seek different forms that delink the processes of history making.25 The
neo-Ridiculous artists studied in Charles Ludlam Lives! connect to several
other legacies as well, both ubiquitous and discrete, with the largest, of
course, being the gigantic web that attempts to illustrate a global history
of theatrical performance. All are committed to retaining the conventions
of Ludlam and moreover the grand historical praxis of theater as tradition,
though this tradition is queered through deconstruction and reconfigura-
tion as corroborated by interviews with the artists themselves.
Becoming part of a cultural legacy (whether theatrical or of queer cul-
ture) is a conscious effort, honoring the vision of the originator in order
to develop new work that is created from the perfect balance of ingenuity,
influence, and innovation. As a distinct subculture within the larger gay
liberation movement, the queer legacy of the Ridiculous theater tradition
is delinked from more traditional forms of genealogical trace by its na-
ture, hovering between a self-motivated exclusivity and socially imposed
abjection (another gap created in the mode of Sedgwick). At its origin the
Ridiculous manifested a safe space that allowed for freedom of expression
without the fear of homophobic discrimination, but as a theatrical form,
it also broke down the walls of concealment through the act of public per-
formance. Ludlam achieved this, in part, by securing a permanent space
for his repertory company that could securely shut its doors as easily as
open them. Moreover, a normative legacy is dependent on the continual
success of its succession, whereas a queer legacy ebbs and flows in a state
of constant flux and experimentation and does not necessarily move in
an unbroken line, existing in the “in-between spaces” of visible cultural
consumption.26 This instability allows for queer legacy to circumvent the
normative formula of “trying and trying again,” for unmitigated success
and instead allows for a layered state of discursive success and failure. As
Halberstam suggests, such “queer failure” helps to form the alternative
identities that create a surrogate standard of progression if not progress.27
The equilibrium of success/failure in the Ridiculous theatrical tradition is
directly dependent on the time and place in which it is revived. As chapter
4 corroborates, Mac pointedly and explicitly refers to his early failures in
the underground East Village scene as the catalyst for the creation of bet-
ter, more meaningful work.
The Ridiculous legacy is not broadly accessible because it is dissemi-
nated and transformed through internal channels of self-formulated kin-
ship. Although kinship, as introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss has been a
Still Ridiculous 39
highly criticized topic by queer theorists like Judith Butler (and admit-
tedly Butler’s criticism of Lévi-Strauss is not without bias), there is, if you
look closer, a loophole. Lévi-Strauss defined the kinship system as the key
to the structural analysis of generational lineage through male/female al-
liances (both legal and sexual). He also suggests, however, that beyond
the heteronormative model provided by the natural world, “other” models
may exist, like homosexuality, “which brings about an integration of [a]
group on a new plane.”28 It is on this new plane that queer legacy persists
and exclusively normative representations of kinship are made arbitrary.
Thus, according to queer scholar David L. Eng, this new construct of kin-
ship can be held together steadfastly through a system of affective feeling
(and I would add desire and belonging) as much as biology.29 Literature
scholar Elizabeth Freeman sees this alternative legacy of the nonreproduc-
tive as a construct of kinship that is dependent on the formation of dis-
tinct community and what anthropologist Kath Weston names in the title
of her groundbreaking study of queer kinship: Families We Choose (as is
demonstrated by Ludlam’s aforementioned selection to use the father/son
construct to embody his desire for a continuing legacy).30 Sex and gender
theorist Gayle Rubin extends the argument by suggesting that kinship is
in the process of losing its “obligatory status,”31 and queer ethnographer
Esther Newton calls for an applicable extraction that dismisses normative
and traditional connotations based on biological lineage and consanguin-
ity.32 Muñoz supports this emerging concept of queer kinship as a building
block for the construction of queer legacies by identifying it as “an alter-
native chain of belonging, of knowing the other and being in the world.”33
I suggest that said construct also introduces distinct modes of internal
communication, both linguistic and cultural, as evidenced by Ludlam’s
layered texts, while also serving to delink from normative traditions of bi-
ological continuance. Cultural anthropologist Corinne P. Hayden defines
this as “kinetic kinship” rather than “genetic kinship.”34 Ludlam’s collagist
theater follows this mode of queer kinesis not only through reinvention-
istism, but also by being blatantly exploitative of previous works and even
of itself, thus consistently introducing new concepts and genres within the
Ridiculous framework—a genre that evolved by constantly falling back on
itself. This falling back is illustrated by the fact that many of Ludlam’s dra-
matic texts self-referentially reemployed dialogue and from earlier works.
Elizabeth Grosz defines this concept as “a folding [of] the past into the
future, beyond the control or limit of the present.”35 In a queer context I
argue that this allows for a kind of queer growth that stands apart from
biological modes of reproduction. This is further illustrated by embedded

references to Ludlam in neo-Ridiculous plays, whether through Busch’s
historification, Louryk’s channeling via lip sync, or Mac’s postmodern
clown/fool character. My envisioning of queer kinesis as mode of move-
ment within abstract genealogical structures of queer legacy is closely in
line with the Aristotelian rendering of kinesis as anything with potential
or possibility. A shared trait of Busch, Louryk, Mac, and Ludlam is the
desire to create timely work inspired by queer experience, both personal
and shared. I cling to the optimistic notion of queer possibility as a pro-
ductive force that moves through time and hopefully acts as a harbinger
for queer continuance (both culturally and theoretically) if not growth.36
This ties into theater scholar Joseph Roach’s suggestion that culture is de-
rived from kinetic/frantic “surrogate” processes. He argues that as culture
begins to take shape from a perpetual void of motion it begins to propel
itself toward a predetermined direction (what he defines as “kinesthetic
imagination”), forging a connection that surpasses traditional notions of
time and space.37 My concept of queer kinesis is also clarified by perfor-
mance scholar Ramón H. Rivera-Servera’s concept of queer subjects as
“traveling subjects,” first as he uses it to trace the urban migration of rural
homosexuals seeking solace and community, and second as I extend it to
suggest a traveling through alternative modes on nonlinear temporality
and subsequent legacy.38 This dualistic notion is demonstrated more lit-
erally by the continued immigration and convergence of queer artists in
places like New York City. In this mode, the success of queer kinesis is reli-
ant on its ability to weave between, under, behind, over, around, through,
and even beyond these normative networks of social transmission forged
by the kinesthetic imagination, leaving traces of influence behind without
necessarily revealing their presence or purpose. My interpretation of trace
is a self-professed naive interpretation French deconstructionist Jacques
Derrida’s use of the same term—where that which is “always-already hid-
den” inadvertently leaves an impression that can be reconstructed into an
archive that represents both a self-directed fiction, and its own truth.39
Taylor Mac, for example, excavates the tangled lines of his own queer
personal narrative (much of which was previously hidden by means of
trauma or grief), weaving them together with Ridiculous precedents, cre-
ating a new, interconnected, and arguably even stronger version of the
genre for a contemporary audience.
As an interpreter of queer legacy, I take it as my responsibility to bring
into conversation such contrasting, lateral, and ambivalent perspectives of
Still Ridiculous 41
history, and in this case reveal the Ridiculous theater as a practical exam-
ple of this applied theory. This methodological approach takes inspiration
from feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed’s significant work on movement as
product of human emotion, wherein “what moves us, what makes us feel,
is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place,” a place
for the past to live.40 Ludlam lives on in the recollections and interpreta-
tions of his heirs as driven by their emotions, regardless if these feelings
are exaggerated, misunderstood, or even fictional.
A queer legacy is made manifest less by its framework than by its ex-
clusivity of participation and reception, reprojecting arch images back
onto a world where they were originally created. Using the lens of affect
or emotion to produce such a new history is a daunting task, and the rosy
hues of nostalgia and romanticism may quickly be dissipated by feelings of
jealousy, resentment, and bitterness. I have tried to retain the role of such
contentiousness within the Ridiculous as a “counterpublic” (for example,
John Kelly’s dismissal of Busch in chapter 2, or Louryk’s wry lack of inter-
est in Mac in chapter 3) to demonstrate how such emotional reactions can
serve to shift, bend, or even break certain legs of a specific history.41
The notion of legacy is still largely undertheorized, and the model of
queer legacy is nascent in form. Several scholars have inadvertently begun
to foster the idea of a queer legacy in studies focusing on queer temporal-
ity and space. Román contributes largely to the conversation through the
introduction of “archival drag,” which refers to “that nature of contempo-
rary performances that draw on historical embodiment and expertise.”42
When brought into conversation with Freeman’s “temporal drag,” which
she defines as “a kind of historicist jouissance, a friction of dead bodies
upon live ones, [and] obsolete constructions upon emergent ones,”43 drag
is extended beyond early utopian notions introduced by seminal queer
theorist Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and favors particular acts of drag
drawn from social history.44 If the Ludlamesque legacy is presented as what
contemporary performers figuratively drag behind them as a connection
to the past, then I suggest that it is the acknowledgment of this trailing
history that allows performers like Busch, Louryk, and Mac to then cut
the ties, creating a momentum that propels them forward into new per-
formative manifestations of the Ridiculous; an example of queer kinesis
in action. This kind of lineage belies “positivist notions of historical prog-
ress” through cross-temporal connections that social and cultural analysis
scholar Carolyn Dinshaw calls “touch.”45 This idea of touch, or perhaps
more accurately “contact,” makes for a performative link between the past
and the present that perpetually moves in all directions and across vari-
ous planes—following the kinetic model and Roach’s surrogate. Echoing
the Derridean reading of Heraclitus on fire, where the identity of flame is
“preserved in its changes,” the past stays in habitual contact with the pres-
ent and vice versa, combining to form a dualistic ontological and affective
construct of Western queer identity.46 Again, drawing insight from Der-
rida’s retro-futurist theory and specifically his neologism hauntology—or
the “paradoxical state of the spectre,” I say that contemporary Ridiculous
performers are consciously haunted by the ghost of the original Ridicu-
lous, but rather than as men possessed, they act as a medium to the spirit,
which, in the words of Roach, allows them to “bring forth, make manifest
and transmit.”47 In simpler terms, this is an act of being and continuance.
The works of Busch, Louryk, and Mac all channel Ludlam’s ghost, though
I’d like to think their success is propagated by the ability to tame that spec-
ter by entertaining him through new, innovative works. Derrida, after
all, suggests that hauntology may be best employed as “an interpretation
that transforms the very thing that it interprets.”48 Literary critic Fredric
Jameson reminds us that the hauntological is less about the spirit of the
past directing the present than it is a reminder that the living present is
scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be.”49 In contemporary Ridiculous
performance the past and present continue to “haunt” the other, but only
as an extension of the gay history that paved its way. I suggest that this
transitive and cross-temporal connection may act as the modus operandi
by which to create an alternative account of social history constituting a
queer legacy that, as David Savran suggests, is “located on the threshold
between two worlds and two temporalities.”50 This follows Muñoz’s sug-
gestion that “queer art from the past [may be] evoked for the purpose of
better understanding work made today . . . [and how] contemporary work
lines up with the historical archive.”51 Because Ludlam’s unspoken mission
was to constantly evolve, his heirs must continue to develop work that
honors the Ludlamesque tradition while also “exploiting” his work. Thus,
the inertia of this queer legacy is managed through a sort of resuscitative
transformation and what historians James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal
title a “creative response.” Such a response “is a product of the terms of
its transference,” and in this case the transference is grounded within an
exclusively queer network that seeks to “excavate, propagate, and recon-
struct.”52 The creative responses of Busch, Louryk, and Mac are highly in-
dividualized and personal and also very likely to continue transforming,
but all are rooted firmly in the histrionic mythology of the Ludlamesque.
Still Ridiculous 43
In fact, as the case studies will demonstrate, each of the artist thinks about
Ludlam quite differently.
Pansexual artist Nayland Blake suggests that “the legacy of prophetic art-
ists is not to give us specific ways of doing something but, by their example,
the permission to be fearless in our own search for a way to do something.”53
The very notion of theoretically unpacking any concept of legacy is a com-
plex one, with transformation, revision, and patchiness as potential factors
of transmission. A queer legacy differs in its generative source: transcendent
momentum is activated through mimicry and ridicule and propelled by its
very indeterminacy and inability to be understood.
Lateral Historiography
My original concept of lateral historiography is a method with which to

construct alternative queer genealogical (nonbiological) narratives. Lateral
historiography extends and provides alternate perspectives that intersect
with primary first-person historical accounts (“truths” in the patriarchal/
normative tradition of legacy), offering alternative and even contradictory
opinions driven by human emotion and subsequent effects shaped by af-
fect. This formula follows Ahmed’s reinterpretation of Karl Marx’s notion
that temporal periods are shaped by accumulating emotional response
and what queer scholar Sara Warner terms “a nuanced avenue of feelings”
(jealousy, trauma, joy, gaiety, shame, or any other form of human emo-
tional response).54 The concept of lateralizing historiography also finds
inspiration in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notions of horizontalized history,
latitudinal fictions, or “growing sideways.”55 The theory at the core of this
study maintains Stockton’s embrace of malleable queer history-making
that allows for affective fictions as the ground on which to forge alternate
nonnormative identities and legacies. In lateralizing the methodological
process, I allow for the analysis of queer intersections with the normative
world, particularly when the market becomes involved in the shaping and
dissemination of products consumed beyond the queer community. Al-
though my carefully selected subjects ground the framework of my study
(Ludlam and thereafter Busch, Louryk, and Mac), I unapologetically al-
low for tangential explorations of contemporary performers who laterally
intersect the constellation of the Ridiculous legacy at particular points in
time: lateral historiography in practice.

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University of Michigan Press

Chapter Title: Still Ridiculous: Queering Legacy

Book Title: Charles Ludlam Lives!

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

Reviving Charles Ludlam

Charles Ludlam was queer—a queer. He was a playwright, actor, director,

Though Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company were hugely

under the banner of the countercultural, Ludlam is more accurately a gay

eschewed normative hierarchies and values for a “queer collectivity”—a

sentation such as the transsexual, transgendered, or disabled. Thus, the

Toward (a) Queer Legacy

In order to focus on the post-Ludlam Ridiculous as a critical strand of

deployment as a technique of power and suggests that in its place we must

biological modes of reproduction. This is further illustrated by embedded

My original concept of lateral historiography is a method with which to

You might also like

Edgecomb StillRidiculous 2017

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Edgecomb StillRidiculous 2017

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Edgecomb StillRidiculous 2017

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

University of Michigan Press

Chapter Title: Still Ridiculous: Queering Legacy

Book Title: Charles Ludlam Lives!

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

Reviving Charles Ludlam

Charles Ludlam was queer—­a queer. He was a playwright, actor, director,

Though Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company were hugely

under the banner of the countercultural, Ludlam is more accurately a gay

eschewed normative hierarchies and values for a “queer collectivity”—­a

sentation such as the transsexual, transgendered, or disabled. Thus, the

Toward (a) Queer Legacy

In order to focus on the post-­Ludlam Ridiculous as a critical strand of

deployment as a technique of power and suggests that in its place we must

biological modes of reproduction. This is further illustrated by embedded

My original concept of lateral historiography is a method with which to

You might also like

Charles Ludlam was queer—a queer. He was a playwright, actor, director,

eschewed normative hierarchies and values for a “queer collectivity”—a

In order to focus on the post-Ludlam Ridiculous as a critical strand of