By Lauren Schuster
As a Catholic institution, Manhattan College reserves the right to reject proposals for campus events that do not conform with the school’s Catholic image. However, this must be balanced with students’ rights to freedom of personal expression while on campus. The way that the school’s name is publicly presented in relation to controversial topics like sex and sexuality has the potential to cause tensions between the administration and the student body.
Throughout history, performing arts communities have often served as both safe havens and outlets of creative expression for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Despite the college’s Catholic foundation, the performing arts community at MC continues to strive to be inclusive of all identities.
Junior student Gabby Kasper, who identifies as bisexual, has come to feel at home within the performing arts community at MC.
“Honestly, I feel more at home with my sexuality in Players, I feel like, than even in the LGBTQ club, because it’s not something that’s being directly addressed,” Kasper said. “It’s not like we’re here because of our sexualities, it’s just this is a part of our lives and we’re all okay with it.”
Megan Lawlor, also a junior student at MC who identifies as bisexual, has forged her own opportunities to provide representation for the LGBTQ+ community in the roles she has played.
“Once, canonically, my freshman year I played a lesbian,” Lawlor said.
This role was part of the Player’s gender-inclusive production of “Twelve Angry Men,” renamed “Twelve Angry Jurors,” which they put on in the fall of 2016. The show focuses on a jury attempting to reach a unanimous “guilty” or “not guilty” verdict as to whether or not a young man murdered his father.
“My character had a line where I said ‘my wife,’ and during the first rehearsal I read it, and we were working on changing the pronouns, but not really,” Lawlor said. “We were running it and I was like ‘I’m going to say “my wife” and see if [the director] will let me do it,” and he was super down with it and was like ‘I love it! It’s great, we’re modernizing it.’”
Lawlor’s role in “Twelve Angry Jurors” not only provided lesbian representation, but it also helped Lawlor to explore her own sexual identity in real life.
“I came out as bi my freshman year,” Lawlor said. “I’d known for a while, but the character work that I was doing for ‘Twelve Angry [Jurors]’ helped me to work on my own identity and to understand myself, and I think that I couldn’t have done a better show at a better time for that.”
For both Lawlor and Kasper, the biggest issue is finding shows with LGBTQ+ characters that are not sexually explicit in nature. The school’s Catholic image often leads to rejection of any and all shows containing sexual material proposed by Players.
“They’re just weird about sex,” Kasper said. “For example, we couldn’t do ‘Love, Sex and the I.R.S.,’ the show that we had originally picked for last year because the word ‘sex’ was in the title.”
Lawlor agreed, saying, “I feel like the issue is less about the school being homophobic but just anti-sex in any way, shape or form.”
The difficulty comes in the fact that sex itself is often inherently linked with sexuality and sexual identity, so if there is no sexual content allowed, it is likely that there will also be no LGBTQ+ content.
“I guess [the anti-sex restriction] kind of extends to the LGBT community, because a lot of it, it’s not about sex, but it’s about sexual identity and who you want to have sex with, and so it’s all intertwined. When you limit sex, you’re limiting sexuality and it just all kind of combines together,” Kasper said.
Despite the school’s restrictions on which shows are performed, the club itself remains an open and accepting place for people of all identities.
“For me [the performing arts community] has always just been a safe space,” Kasper said. “I feel like anywhere you go, theater is kind of universal in that aspect where it’s just very accepting. I knew coming to this school, I was like ‘If I go to the performing arts group, it’s going to be okay. I’m going to find people there who are gay in some way and I’m going to be able to talk to people.’”
Lawlor has also found the performing arts community at MC to be a safe space where she can be unapologetic about her identity.
“I’ve never faced any kind of discrimination in performing arts,” Lawlor said. “I’ve never even felt uncomfortable about it. When I told people [in the community] ‘oh I’m bi,” they were like ‘okay, and you’re blonde too, great.” It wasn’t like ‘oh, that’s scandalous.’”
The director of players, Marty Marchitto, also agreed that theater is usually a place where members of the LGBTQ+ community can feel at home.
“By nature, theater tends to be inclusive, and inclusive of the LGBT community,” Marchitto said.
Although Marchitto is a member of the LGBTQ+ community himself, he always tries his best to let his cast members explore their identities on their own.
“I am an open gay male, but I think it’s really important that I keep boundaries, so I really don’t get involved with the students and the students’ lives,” Marchitto said. “Certainly if a student came to me and had an issue, I’m an ally and would certainly advocate for any situation that came up, but I just keep myself separate from their personal, private lives.”
Marchitto also understands the restrictions the club is under in terms of content.
“We’re funded through student activities and so student activities has the option to say ‘no,’” Marchitto said. “We did have a case with ‘Love, Sex, and the I.R.S.,’ but again, part of it is that we are a Catholic college campus and that because we are a Catholic college campus, it’s important to understand that, you know, there’s a certain value system.”