November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Media Diet: Holly Hughes

(Page 2 of 3)

July/August 1996
By Rebecca Scheib, Utne Reader 
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Which authors have had the most influence on you?
I like most anything by Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark, her book of literary criticism, is particularly smart. Her language is so exquisitely dense and rich that it makes me laugh when right-wingers complain that she's replacing Shakespeare in the canon. As if Toni Morrison is Highlights magazine! I also love Tony Kushner's play Angels in America and his book of essays and plays Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. I admire the way he doesn't see a contradiction between being an artist and being an activist, and the way that he views his celebrity as a soapbox, without any apologies.

Is there a film you'd like everyone to see?
Desperate Living, by one of the world's greatest lesbian artists, John Waters. How does he manage to take every stereotype in the world and use them in ways that are deliberately offensive--and yet give me this great sense of hopefulness? Dare I say it?: I walk away from John Waters movies, and this one in particular, with a warm fuzzy feeling.

What performance artists are currently influencing you?
I love most everything that has come out of the WOW Cafe in New York City, also known as "the Home for Wayward Girls"--for refugees not just from mainstream culture, but from lesbian feminism too. There's Carmelita Tropicana, who describes herself as "the national songbird of Cuba," who has done several pieces about being an immigrant to the U.S. and a lesbian. She takes on all of the signifiers of Latinas--hairstyles, big fruit on the head--then reshuffles the deck and attaches new meaning to the images. Or the Five Lesbian Brothers. They deconstruct and subvert stereotypes of lesbian life--like the fact that it is always represented in the popular imagination as a tragedy--in hilarious ways. I had a great interest in self-expression before I stumbled into WOW in 1983, but it was only after I'd been there a while that I started to develop a self that was worth expressing.

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