Child's Play As Archival Act in Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto

Hide and Go Seek Child’s Play as Archival Act in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto Sara Warner and Mary Jo Watts [Solanas had] no political comrades and no close friends, or none that Diane [Tucker], and I knew of. That left the archives. We moved on to the main reference rooms of the New York Public Library along with the other obsessives: the conspiracy theorists, the old men with shopping bags stuffed full of newspaper clippings, the nervous girls researching the Celestine Prophecies. Diane sometimes found herself sitting next to a woman who held metal kitchen utensils over her head to ward off harmful vibrations as she was reading. — Mary Harron, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996:x–xi) The SCUM Manifesto is an extraordinary document, an authentic love-hate child of its time [...] — Vivian Gornick, Introduction to S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1970:xv) Queers have a desire for history, a yearning to access, document, and conserve the hidden pasts and lived experiences of sexual dissidents, gender outlaws, and erotic nonconformists. That something like queer history even exists continues to be a hotly contested topic, and this despite the tremendous proliferation of queer archives in recent decades. These include traditional repositories — collections, museums, and libraries — as well as alternative methods of amassing and preserving “the ephemeral evidence of gay and lesbian life” (Cvetkovich 2003:243). Valerie Solanas’s parodic and polemical tract, SCUM Manifesto (1967), is about archives; it concerns and critiques the operational logics governing the structuring and preserving of knowledge by insti- tutions seeking to influence, if not determine, who and what a society remembers and what it forgets. As a dramatic composition, a script performed by Solanas for and with public audiences, SCUM Manifesto also enacts the work of archiving by staging actions that literally engendered radical feminism and lesbian separatism while simultaneously documenting the antics, affects, and aspirations of society’s most maligned and marginalized.1 A satirical diatribe lambasting the cesspool men have made of the planet, SCUM calls for all “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females to overthrow the government, eliminate the 1. In a press release delivered on 13 June 1968, just hours after her initial meeting with Solanas, Ti-Grace Atkinson made the “first public use of the concept of ‘radical feminist’” in describingSCUM Manifesto (Atkinson 1974:14). When dealing with acts, such as Solanas’s SCUM Forums, we do well to follow Diana Taylor’s lead in considering “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones)” alongside “the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge” (2003:19). Sara Warner is Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She received the 2013 ATHE Outstanding Book Award and an Honorable Mention for the ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award for Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (University of Michigan Press, 2012). Mary Jo Watts is an independent scholar, blogger, and instructional technologist at Ithaca College. She’s the founder of f_minor, a Glenn Gould email list, the author of the website, A Connoisseur’s Guide to The Silence of the Lambs, and a BBC Sherlock fangirl whose interviews with filmmakers and composers can be found on wordpress.com under her nom de plume MidOnz. TDR: The Drama Review 58:4 (T224) Winter 2014. ©2014 80 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00400 by guest on 30 September 2021 Valerie Solanas’s Valerie SCUM Manifesto Figure 1. A flier for a SCUM Forum, the first in a series of performance events in which Solanas developed the script of SCUM Manifesto. This initial production was held on May 23, 1967 at the Directors’ Theatre. The address listed, 222 West 23rd Street, is the Chelsea Hotel. (Private collection of Mary Jo Watts and Sara Warner) 81 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00400 by guest on 30 September 2021 money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex” (1967:1).2 Solanas developed the manifesto in and through performances over a seven-month period. What was perhaps the first of these dramatizations took place on 23 May 1967 — at an event she called a “SCUM Forum” — at the Directors’ Theatre, an off-off Broadway playhouse located in the same building as the Free University of New York (FUNY) where Solanas both guest lectured and took classes and where three months prior she launched the world premiere of her satirical one act play, Up Your Ass (1965), which tracks the amorous and anarchic exploits of an impudent hoyden named Bongi Perez. The catalyst for the inaugural SCUM Forum was Solanas’s disas- trous appearance on The Alan Burke Show, the confrontational TV talk show, in a segment on lesbians that never aired. A right-wing provocateur, Burke was offended by Solanas’s demeanor and vulgar mouth and literally chased her off the set (Harron 1996:xvi). Solanas staged SCUM Forums throughout 1967 and 1968 at various venues in the East and West Village (at theatres, lecture halls, and city parks). In addition to advertising these SCUM Forums in the Village Voice, Solanas distributed fliers and broadsides, which contain the earliest (two paragraph) incarnation of the SCUM Manifesto and which feature the same graphic, a hand flipping a middle finger, that she used as the cover art for the published script ofUp Your Ass.3 Solanas sold the Manifesto — on the street, by mail order, and at underground bookstores — to finance productions of her work and to solicit members for her two (largely hypothetical) rev- olutionary organizations: SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men; and the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM, for “those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves” (1967:17; see Warner 2012). SCUM provides a welcome corrective to the conservative program of social assimilation that passes for contemporary LGBTQ politics. Driven by sobering images of sexual hegemony, exemplified by the push for marriage equality, today’s homoliberal agenda is coercively norma- tive, increasingly privatized, and shamelessly consumerist. The scummy subjects who populate Solanas’s work are important to revisit now, when queer integrationists overly invested in a politics of respectability disavow the abject identifications and stigmatized practices of their non- conforming kin on the grounds that these profligate degenerates threaten the socioeconomic enfranchisement of “good” gays eager to prove that they are just like everyone else. Solanas’s art has the capacity to generate what we might call scummy archives — caustic chronicles of nasty girls, hateful bitches, and gutter dykes — as well as scummy archival practices — fugitive strategies and low-down dirty tactics that flip a middle finger at socially conservative memory-making processes that censor and sanitize history. Scummy archives are offensive annals that give foul utterance to the voices and visions of society’s abject under- classes: the revenge fantasies and unrepressed rage of the dregs and dross of capitalist exploi- tation; the erotic yearnings of the delinquent and the debased; and the perverse political aspirations of the most wretched and revolting among us. Rummaging through trash heaps, landfills, and mountains of personal clutter, scummy archivists are experts at waste manage- ment. We concentrate our efforts less on rescue and recovery than on remediation, on salvaging the wreckage, re-membering the ghosts of the past from degraded copies of degraded copies of absent originals long ago lost, buried, and shamed into silence. As a scummy archive, Solanas’s Manifesto offers a much-needed counterpoint to celebratory chronicles of queer history that attempt to whitewash the past by erasing disturbing characters from LGBTQ genealogies and 2. All quotes are from Solanas’s self-published edition of SCUM Manifesto (1967). 3. Solanas first published this two-paragraph iteration of (and outline for) SCUM Manifesto in an ad she placed in the Village Voice in the Public Notices section on 30 March 1967. Solanas completed the script of SCUM Manifesto in October 1967 and filed for copyright registration on 4 December 1967, noting in her application that this work was first sold and publicly distributed on 18 May 1967, the week before her first SCUM Forum. She developed the script in and through performance over the next seven months, completing it in October. Solanas wrote Up Your Ass in 1965 and published it, with the graphic cover, on 10 February 1967. Warner/Watts 82 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00400 by guest on 30 September 2021 ignoring unsavory legacies, such as Solanas’s pestiferous philosophizing and felonious deeds. Valerie Solanas’s disturbing political desires — disturbing as in emotionally troubling and men- tally unstable but also disruptive of the queer status quo — call our attention to a lack of grit in the sterile sexual politics of homoliberalism. Driven by an obsessive desire to archive scummy lives — lives lived at or just below the margins of legibility and legitimacy — Solanas’s art documents the flagrant and filthy acts of brazen sexual deviants. She shared this penchant with Andy Warhol, who recorded on film and audiotape thousands of conversations — public and private, with and without the permission of his interlocutors, in staged and improvised settings — over the course of his lifetime. A number of these exchanges featured Solanas, his would-be assassin. A frustrated scientist, thwarted play- wright, and occasional actress in Warhol’s Factory films, Valerie shot the prince of Pop at point blank range on 3 June 1968. To categorize the shooting as a desperate act by a deranged dyke craving 15 minutes of fame, as both Factory denizens and the mainstream media have, grossly oversimplifies events.

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