CW: Self-harm
Award-winning radical queer playwright, director and musician Gina Young (she/they) visited Scripps College’s Communities of Research and Empowerment’s (SCORE) living room for an intimate reading of her work, reminiscing on two decades of queer history and theater.
In an event hosted by Family at Scripps on Feb. 1, Young performed monologues from six of her plays from the past 23 years. She fielded questions on everything from her creative process to coping with negative reviews to seeing her music from 2002 gain new popularity on TikTok.
An intimate event, Young guided the audience, who were seated on couches around the living room, through a collective deep breath before beginning the performance.
Young introduced each monologue with anecdotes that painted a picture of her life, leaning forward more emphatically each time she introduced a new character. She first performed an excerpt from her first play, “she cuts herself / she likes to write,” based largely on her experience navigating queer adolescence and self-harm at Catholic school in the 1990s.
“[The excerpt] is a monologue for two voices because it was written for the two lead characters … to overlap as if speaking with one voice,” Young explained.
Young’s performance sounded like a conversation with an echo, each train of thought layered on top of the last. By the end, the distinction between the two characters’ words was hazy.
Every piece she presented at the event was centered on gay and gender-nonconforming characters, but for Young, that aspect is only half of what goes into making radically queer art. She emphasized the importance of not just “queering the content,” but also “queering the form”: subverting the typical modes of storytelling in theater. For Young, that looks like a ballet with locker room roughhousing instead of dancing, or a stream-of-consciousness monologue that spirals out into freeform poetry.
Unable to express her queerness at Catholic school in the ’90s, Young was drawn to the Riot Grrrl scene, a DIY feminist punk subculture based around music that centered womens’ anger and sexuality. Local punk and goth shows were the only places she felt comfortable holding hands with her girlfriend in public.
“[Riot Grrrl] artists were not necessarily always queer themselves, but [they] had a majorly queer aesthetic and queer inclusion was the norm,” said Young.
In Young’s 2002 song “So-Called Str8 Grrrl”, she gleefully addresses a girl with a boyfriend: “If you think you’re straight, how come I know how you taste?” The song is both tongue-in-cheek and serious, acknowledging the pain of familial rejection that can accompany coming out, but encouraging the girl to “come join the party” anyway.
Twenty years later, the track went viral on Spotify and TikTok among a new generation of queer kids.
“I was so surprised and happy to find out that my music [became] so popular on Spotify … and that it means something to people, especially, as Spotify told me, to a lot of young people in countries where it’s illegal or really dangerous to be queer,” Young said.
“My need to write is inextricably linked with my queerness, my mental health, anything central to who I am. So they are bound together and I end up creating art that is influenced by what my community and I have experienced.”
Several attendees were initially drawn to the event because they had connected with Young’s music, including Janie Fingal SC ’26.
“I’m really fascinated about queer history,” Fingal said. “Also hearing [these plays] — one of them was from 2002 — and hearing issues going on in these plays from before I was born and resonating with the queer issues and experiences that she was going through.”
Young draws inspiration for her work from her real experience building queer community spaces, like SORORITY, which Young founded in 2016 as a venue to highlight the work of female, trans, nonbinary and queer artists.
“The important thing about community is that everyone has a voice,” Young said. “I’m also a huge fan of ‘calling in’ rather than ‘calling out’ people we disagree with if we know they’re part of our community and that the relationship is worth salvaging.”
During the Q&A, Young emphasized the importance of finding creative collaborators whom you can trust and work alongside rather than micromanage.
“BUTCH BALLET,” Young’s movement-based tribute to female masculinity, was created collaboratively with five butch, transmasc and gender nonconforming performers, who used personal stories about butch lesbian culture to inform a series of choreographed vignettes.
“When I build community, like with ‘BUTCH BALLET,’ I am always trying to foster a group that is as diverse as possible, in every way,” said Young. “ I love to direct as more of a facilitator, not as a full-on ‘leader.’”
Young concluded with a final message to marginalized artists.
“We need your voice. Do it. Make your art, write, sing, whatever the thing is that you want to create,” Young said. “Remember that the world is not a just or fair place, so our ideas of what is ‘good’ or who deserves to make art are actually extremely unjust and unfair.”
Attendee Cate Brownhill-Slatore SC ’26 took Young’s advice to heart.
“I’ve never had the confidence to think of myself as someone who can write or create art,” Brownhill-Slatore said. “And I feel like any opportunity to get some sort of motivation or to hear from someone who is an artist is cool.”
Young has many creative projects lined up for 2024, including new music and a full-length rework of “BUTCH BALLET.” She will also continue her Feminist Acting Class, a workshop devoted to dismantling the patriarchal dominance of the craft.
Young posits that she would likely be more successful if her work was less explicitly queer or less experimental, but she doesn’t regret choosing the more radical path.
“My need to write is inextricably linked with my queerness, my mental health, anything central to who I am,” Young said. “So they are bound together and I end up creating art that is influenced by what my community and I have experienced.”
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