Onstage Intimacy: How Queer, BIPOC Actors Navigate Intimate Performance

Abstract

the Bay Area theater community found itself at a critical juncture. What many BIPOC, queer, and femme artists had been discussing, writing about, and organizing around for decades suddenly flooded the cultural zeitgeist, encouraging more people-especially white people-to contend directly with racism, coloniality, and their own complicity in those systems. Motivated by the national civil unrest over police brutality, a group of self-identified BIPOC theatermakers collectively published a testimonial titled, "We See You White American Theater," expounding on the injustices these communities of artists faced. The collective, thereafter known as We See You White American Theater or WSYWAT, wrote about the ways in which American theaters profit from Black people while continuing to marginalize those same artists by gatekeeping leadership positions, producing very few BIPOC stories, and avoiding accountability after harming BIPOC employees. Within 24 hours, the letter was circulated through various social media outlets and signed by over 50,000 artists (About, n.d.).More signatories are still being added. WSYWAT's powerful testimonial served as both an indictment and a rallying cry. Understanding that the systems that enabled police to murder George Floyd in Minneapolis were the same systems enabling the marginalization, exploitation, and mistreatment of artists of color, theatermakers across the country joined local movements to address a longstanding rot within the industry.As the Movement for Black Lives-a coalition organizing for Black liberation in the United States-led to demands for structural change within theater institutions, it unearthed many