CARNAL NATION

Once upon a time, there was an entity called community. It evolved out of the retro notion that people needed one another both to survive and thrive. It began with blood ties, since in the old days most of the support network around an individual happened to have a biologically-related component. But as people ventured out of these clans and the world became more global, communities became more fluid. Those whose blood ties fell short of support suddenly began to band together to form new families. These new outsider families were given labels—Beat, hippie, punk, queer—and often overlapped in their membership. But then a strange thing happened. As those communities grew, they began to splinter into ever more niches until identity suddenly required the individual to choose sides against oneself and family. Were you a lesbian first and a black woman second? And why would a black lesbian set foot in a white gay male bar? Where once there was a GLBT community that felt unrepresented in the media and in society at large, there's now a queer silent majority reeling from the over-saturated mainstream images of a cookie-cutter gay life they don't conform to or recognize at all.

When I was growing up in a small town in Colorado, there weren't enough outsiders for us to have any factions. We all coalesced around a collective punk/new wave/goth scene that trumped race, sexuality or gender as a defining aspect of identity. We defined ourselves by the community first and black/white, straight/gay, boy/girl not much at all. I thought about this as I was watching Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan. The show is a brilliant, five-hour, five-part, passionately homemade extravaganza featuring six directors and over forty performers steeped in this same race/sexuality/gender-blind communal tradition. Though the story revolves around a flower who must destroy "The God of Nostalgia," nostalgia is exactly what I felt while being dazzled by the seamless combination of parade float costumes, puppetry, music and dance. A longing for a time when we all not just got along but actively engaged in truly bonding with one another.

For part of this elaborate "experiment" involves intermissions in which we're admonished to keep both cell phones and Blackberries turned off, and instead to talk to our neighbors about the show. Or we could visit the dressing room/"discussion disco" and chat with the performers as they applied mounds of glitter and bees' wings, or with one another as we shook our groove thing on the dance floor opposite the tables and mirrors. Indeed, we were encouraged by our happy-go-lucky guide through the proceedings, (biological female) drag queen The World Famous Bob who handed out "conversation mints," to bring food and beverages into the theater—in other words, to form a community right there in the space! The beauty of The Lily's Revenge lies not just in its transcendence of race, gender and sexuality. It actually reveals the societal constructs, including queer, that confine us. The lily, played by a real-life fag, wants to become a man in order to marry his beloved, played by a real-life dyke, turning the notion of both heterosexual and gay marriage on its head. Both guys and gals dressed as flowers camp it up to the point where one is not quite sure of the actors' gender. The concept becomes as irrelevant as it is to the plants they're playing. But the one image that still lingers in my head occurred offstage on the disco during the second intermission. I watched as a tall black actress wearing a giant sunflower costume danced to the (white gay male) music of Bronski Beat while simultaneously knitting like a grandmother. It was a subversively gorgeous impromptu sight to behold—and one that has become a rare flower in our current Internet age of pseudo-communities, of facsimiles of heartfelt connection.