Diana Son's STOP KISS

My favorite time in college was when a short play I had written in a playwriting class was selected to be part of a directors' showcase at the college. Mine was one of four student written-plays that was chosen. The director did a wonderful job, seizing the essence of my better scenes and cutting most but not all of my indulgent "ham and cheese." In fact, many of the students and some of the staff even complimented the effort. Unfortunately, some of the other playwrights were less than enthusiastic because they believed that our play got more attention because their plays included homosexual characters and themes.

Their arguments would be valid if it weren't for the fact that my play had two female bisexual characters also. The difference was that I didn't use their relationship as the major theme or as a shock-effect. If I'm not going to make a big deal of the heterosexual relationship, why should I, or anyone else, have to make a shock out of the homosexual one?

Getting Our House In Order

I'll try to keep my philosophy here brief before I discuss the reasons I enjoyed reading Diana Son's Stop Kiss and the internet journal Blithe House, but I think we should get our house in order first. The Civil Rights Movement in America-and I refer to movements for everyone's equal rights-appears in some ways like the building of a house. When you start building a house, you use big tools. We need big hammers, nail guns, tractors and such heavy machinery in the beginning. Once the structure is built and the sheetrock is hung over the plush carpet, the big tools have to go away. It's time to fine tune, and you don't fine tune with hammers and tractors.

Thank you, Thoreau and Douglas for recognizing what the rest of the world would take years to understand. Thank you, DuBois and Garvey, who, even in your opposition to each other, presented the thrust of our national decision. Thank you, Steinem and Malcom X for erecting the clear windows to the world. Thank you, Ginsberg for not compromising.

These, our predecessors, are the heavy machinery that have made my generation (13) more egalitarian than any before it. The problem is that my generation of equality constructionists are still using the big hammers and tracking mud on the carpet when we need fine tuning, patience, plumbing, and wiring. When our only reaction to bigotry is screaming and ranting, we shove Tocqueville's pendulum so that all our efforts come right back against us. For example, why can't we have more African American literature that does not gratuitously involve white culture just to get a jab in here or there? In her Wine in the Wilderness, Alice Childress presents what I consider the fine tuning of the African American struggle with very little mention of white people because the play is not about white people. In other words, "fine tuning" to get our house in order requires the new multiculturalism to be an action caused by our view of the way things are, not a reaction against the way things shouldn't be.

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