DEI — Blahg — Timothy Huang [dot] net

Recently an article in Playbill announced that Actors' Equity Association would be renaming the Gypsy Robe ceremony, "which celebrates ensemble members of Broadway shows, after the current season. The decision—a response to the cultural implications of the term—follows a vote by AEA’s National Council." Following this, and an e-blast from AEA to its members asking for name suggestions was a hailstorm of snarky comments from friends and enemies alike on my social media feed.

I've spent the better part of the morning thinking about this. Asking myself what traditions do I hold that are SO important to me that renaming them would fundamentally change what they were. I confess, I don't have that many traditions. Or, at least, my traditions are pretty malleable. I'm okay with getting a Christmas present on December 26th. Frankly, I'm happy to have a present at all. (I'm notoriously hard to shop for.) But I get off topic. This thought exercise led me to the below. I know this will probably irritate some of you. I really... wish that mattered. You're on the wrong side of this if you think it shouldn't change. And people are going to remember it. So maybe re-evaluate? Here's why:

1. Nomenclature matters

Anyone who has gotten an email from me in the last two weeks may have noticed I changed my signature from a quote by Maxine Hong Kingston (“Breathe. Pay attention. Tell the truth.”) to something a little bit simpler: he/him/his. I admit, I should have made this change the moment I made my first trans friend. The moment that struggle ceased to be an idea and started to be a person. But I am a stubborn mother-fucker and generally slow on the uptake. But if the price I pay for learning empathy late is that I actually learn it and hold it, then sign me up. Nomenclature matters. It matters not just to the people who are asking for clarity and respect, but to people who do not know that their bias harmfully affects someone else. Not a single person I know would ever question that my gender identity and gender representation is male. That’s never been my struggle. But I include those pronouns now because I allow for the possibility that it is someone else’s. And personally, I’d prefer my privilege to betray me in the way I complain about Moviepass on Facebook then something that actually matters. Nomenclature matters.

2. We can actually care about more than one cause at one time.

I am a feminist. I am a queer ally. I believe Black Lives Matter. And I have spent the better part of sixteen years representing Asian men and women on stage by writing almost exclusively for them. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in a 1936 issue of Esquire “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling myself a first-rate intelligence. I’m actually calling YOU a first-rate intelligence. Because you are. And you can do this. Just because a little bit of time is being spent considering the consequence of re-appropriating a culture doesn’t mean less time is being spent discussing fair wage on stage. One might even argue that these conversations are all tributaries to a greater river of equality. Don’t bite off your nose to spite your face.

Which brings us to:

3. Just because it doesn’t benefit you doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit you because it actually does.

But Tim, you ask, we don’t even know any Gypsies. Who even is this affecting? The answer is, whoever proposed the name be changed to begin with. The conversations happen when the conversations happen. When someone is finally ready to be a squeaky wheel about them. We don't get to decide if they are trivial, for every time someone has, it has only resulted in their downfall. As recently as fifty years ago our LGBTQ forefathers started a riot because they knew that the systems of power in place at the time would never elect to consider their humanity. They rioted because literally everyone else on the planet was saying “why do I have to respect someone else’s perversion? Who even is this affecting?” Without Stonewall, there is no SCOTUS decision. Who is this affecting? History would answer “literally everyone.”

4. Old comics are lazy. And you are not an old comic.

This has been going around a lot. Where middle-career comedians are saying they can't go to universities anymore to do their stuff because university students are snowflakes and take everything too seriously. The students themselves would counter that their awareness is impossibly high, and jokes about rape aren't funny anymore. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. (Not that bit about rape jokes, which are not my kind of funny.) You can extrapolate this to, let's say, white male playwrights lamenting that they lose out on opportunities because of the inclusion of women and writers of color. That's one that's in my orbit right now. I'm going to stick with comedy though because it's something I like, and something I am wholly outside of.

What the comics seem to mean when they say this though is when they started out, people were allowed to be misogynistic and racist, and now they aren't, and they don't have the skill set to find humor where none existed before. They can only re-iterate, not innovate. For better or worse, this is the path of progress. It starts with a resentful conversation about something no one has ever considered before, and in the face of that tension and adversity, results in some of us becoming irrelevant before our time and others of us realizing that someone we didn't know was there, has been there all along. The thing these old comics don't know? They can choose either.

5. How we choose to respond to discussions like these is the benchmark of our civilization

Dostoevsky says “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” But prisons are more than just cells and yards. And he didn’t mean it literally anyway. We allow ourselves to be trapped within social confines on a daily basis. And within those confines, we allow ourselves to value people differently. There are websites alive today that still maintain that the Three Fifths Compromise in the Constitution of 1787 does not inherently devalue a human being. Many things we think are givens are actually not, and rolling our eyes at something we deem unimportant only demonstrates our own privilege. What is the actual harm in having the conversation? What about this name change threatens the actual tradition it represents? For a community whose benchmark is inclusion, whose union name boasts the word EQUITY itself, being resistant to a discussion about a name change essentially says: This tradition is for us. Not for you..

It’s getting on midnight on a cold November Wednesday and I’m sitting at the Brooklyn Diner in midtown with my good friend Em. We’ve just come from an original new musical that might not have been for us. We’re both okay with it, except I am totally not okay with it. I’m actually kind of infuriated. She’s confused as to why. I start in.

“If this playwright wanted me to sympathize or identify with his protagonist, as all playwrights do, I think all he needed to do was acknowledge that his character was inherently privileged. That the very belief they can leave their latte on a counter and walk away is an act of privilege. Because where I come from, leaving a latte on a counter isn’t something people take lightly. And acknowledging that there are places in this world, no- this country where leaving a latte on a counter is unheard of, would have made me feel a little more included.”

Obviously, I’m not talking about an actual latte. I am talking about a much larger, much deeper action around which someone could, and effectually has, structured an entire theatrical narrative. But this is a real show, with a real writer, so for anonymity’s sake let’s just pretend I am talking about a latte. (It’s still not about the latte.) Em fires back.

“Okay first of all, this isn’t Broadway. This is a forty show run and a fifty seat house, and the contracts are different. Slow your roll. There are no names above the title here, no swings, no understudies, and I don’t get to ask for my money back if someone calls out.”

“Just because it’s Off-Broadway doesn’t give it license to be ill-considered. In fact some might argue it has to be even better considered if it’s going to be Off-Broadway.” I reply. She ignores me, continues.

“Second of all, are you saying it’s unrealistic that a college aged character would be insensitive to the magnitude of sacrifice involved in leaving a latte on a counter? You’re surprised by this?”

“No,” I say, “I’m saying that addressing that privilege, in some way, in ANY way does not compromise the narrative or the character. Why leave it out? It only adds to the inclusivity of the piece as a whole. And conversely, not addressing it at all, suggests that either the writer was blind to it or only wrote for people to whom leaving a latte on a counter is commonplace.”

Em stirs her black and white milkshake with the straw that very well may be her last. We’ve been friends since college but she’s heard this speech about twenty five times. In her defense, she doesn’t disagree- she just doesn’t see how my problems are her responsibility. This would probably be fair, except they aren’t just my problems, and that’s exactly why I think they’re her responsibility: Are you living in America in 2018? Do you have a social media account? Know anyone who is gay, Black, Trans, Asian, Latinx or CIS female? (That last part is particularly apropos.)

“In my world, you simply couldn’t walk away from a latte. Your parents worked too hard for you to leave that latte for someone else. And you certainly couldn’t make that sacrifice as if the only thing at stake was your own time, money and future. For many people, this is a reality. Our lives are not wholly our own. And to not have that acknowledged is the same as having invalidated it.” We’re worlds apart now. Em knows it too, and I see what’s coming next.

“Yeah,” says she. “But that was your world. This writer doesn’t come from your world. This writer doesn’t even claim to be from your world. It’s unfair you should expect them to include you. Isn’t it? Like, why can’t they write their show, you write your show?”

Em poses an interesting question, and one worth addressing, but first it needs a little unpacking. For starters, she is conflating inclusion with representation, but more on that in a minute. I reply in the only way I know how.

“Because when I write my show, people call it ‘an Asian show.’ When they write their show, people just call it ‘a show.’” What I’m getting at, and she knows this, is that in every case where an under-represented artist seeks to represent a marginalized people or experience, the mainstream marginalizes it further by giving it a qualifying descriptor. It is defined by its relation to what is assumed is the norm. Therefore it only ceases to become “other” when someone within the mainstream takes it upon themselves to integrate it into their own work.

“The question we should be asking,” I continue, “is ‘who within the mainstream will identify it as their problem if every time they stare it dead in the face, they refuse ownership over it?”

“So… what?” Asks Em. “Make the character walking away from the Latte an Asian person? You’d just say that’s unbelievable and a misrepresentation.” She’s not wrong there…

“Okay. Let’s go back to definitions. This conversation isn’t about representation so much as inclusion. The former is the act of putting someone ‘other’ in a show or film because that other exists in the real world and as such, should be seen. Should be represented. This is a personal choice for any writer and one I can do for myself. The latter is far simpler, less costly, and should be on everyone’s to-do list: making sure no one in your audience has to work any harder than anyone else to experience your show. Because right now friend, the contracts are different, and they shouldn’t be.” I’m on a roll.

“You posit that this writer should be free to write this show and this show should be free to be what it wants without the responsibility of including me, the guy who’s never left a latte on a counter. Let’s look at that model for a moment. The thing that happens when writers, producers and artistic directors in the main stream take a pass on being responsible for inclusion is a thing that has actually happened. Slowly and surely no one else gets represented. Or, as you hypothesize, people like me get represented poorly. You with me so far?”

Em slurps her black and white, the irony lost to her.

“But then when someone like me writes for faces like mine, as I have perpetually and without apology for the past fifteen years, if I’m not writing with an eye towards including you, I’m simply writing an unworthy script that no one ever sees. That seem right to you? We finally put a name to this phenomenon. It’s called institutionalized racism. Perpetuated by something else we didn’t know had a name until recently: unconscious bias.”

“That is pure conjecture.” Says Em. “No offense Tim, I think you’re really talented, but what if your earlier work in those days just wasn’t good enough?”

“Em, my work from yesterday wasn’t good enough. It can always be better. But the numbers are documented, and historically, the ratio of produced work is hugely disproportional in favor of white men. Do you really believe that whenever ‘those days’ was, that the work of every single person of color, every single female, every single intersection was simply not good enough? Is it that hard to believe they were systemically overlooked?”

This hits a little close to home. Of course she knows what it is to be systematically overlooked. She might not ever wonder why in a five show season at a regional theater company two shows about Chinese people can’t co-exist. Or two shows about Gay people. Or two shows about Trans or Gay or Black or Latinx people… but she does know what it feels like to have her own experience invalidated. And if I were inside her head (which I am) I would tell you what pisses her off more than anything, is the knowing that she has no control over it. Except she does. Her half empty milkshake, now a murky gray, is actually half full.

“Yes, the contracts are different. Some people get to walk in, and take ‘leaving a latte’ on its own terms while others have to adapt. The great news is you don’t have to put up with it. You can choose to see exclusivity for what it is, and not endorse it. You can be openly critical about any show that runs counter to the ideology of a living and inclusive theater! You can also share that Youtube of Neil Patrick Harris opening the 2013 Tonys where he basically says it in a rap penned by Lin Manuel Miranda, because it really holds up.”

“It was actually James Corden in 2016.” She fires back. And just like that, we’re back into it.

“Nuh-uh, sorry, NPH did it first, and did it better.”

“Are you kidding me?” Says Em, flicking her straw wrapper my way. “That part when the rainbow kids become that year’s nominees is magic.”

“Fine, share them both. They’re both great.” I say, just as our waitress comes by, checking in.

“Do you want anything else?” I ask, “It’s on me.”

“No,” says my good friend. “It’s on me.”