Homosexuality is criminalized in more than 60 countries around the world, and for the past five years, an annual theater festival in New York City has elevated the work of playwrights from countries where their queerness can land them in prison, or worse.
Adam Odsess-Rubin founded the National Queer Theater in May 2018 to promote queer storytelling, community and representation. But later that year a play submission arrived and opened a new chapter in the organization’s queer advocacy.
The play was “Drowning in Cairo” by Egyptian playwright Adam Ashraf Elsayigh. It chronicled the way a 2001 police raid of the floating gay nightclub Queen Boat affected the lives of the 52 men aboard who were arrested and publicly humiliated. Elsayigh wasn’t able to produce the play in Egypt, where queerness is criminalized and stigmatized, lest he and everyone involved in the production be arrested. Elsayigh had previously only had a reading of it in his apartment, and everyone in attendance kept looking at the door, fearful of encountering a police raid of their own.
“It really struck me that something as innocuous as a play reading could be so dangerous,” Odsess-Rubin said.
He began talking with Elsayigh about producing a festival for WorldPride, a series of events held in New York in 2019 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, to feature “queer plays that would otherwise be censored in their home countries,” Odsess-Rubin said. And in June 2019, the Criminal Queerness Festival was born, giving voice to work that may have had to remain silent elsewhere.
This week, the festival celebrates its fifth anniversary as it arrives at New York’s new Perelman Performing Arts Center from June 21-29. Since its first incarnation, the festival has featured playwrights from countries where homosexuality faces varying degrees of illegality and danger, from Syria to Venezuela and China to Ukraine.
This year, the plays in the festival are “She He Me” by Raphaël Amahl Khouri, thought to be the first Arab transgender play; “The Survival” by Ugandan playwright Achiro P. Olwoch; and “Waafrika 123: A Queerly Scripted Tragic Rise to African Fantasia” by Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko, a Tanzanian American playwright raised in central and East Africa. Each of the works have has produced by the Criminal Queerness Festival previously, although in more limited scope because of the pandemic.
“This year is kind of a ‘best of’ the Criminal Queerness Festival,” Odsess-Rubin said.
“Waafrika 123” was part of the inaugural festival in 2019. The play follows a lesbian and a trans man who fall in love and come face-to-face with tradition in Kenya, a place where “queerness ‘doesn’t exist.’” For Mwaluko, the festival expands the conversation between queer art and politics to an international audience.
“What I love about National Queer Theater and Adam’s vision, and this particular festival, is that it highlights that the experiences differ, and how so, on a global scale,” he said. “The nature of the global experience is not just doom and gloom, but it is also a testament to the levels of resilience and creativity that people do have, given support.”
Mwaluko’s hope, he said, is that people coming to the festival will see how that strength gives birth to art, to “see the multiple ways in which people who are so-called Third World or poor or off the grid or marginalized have this incredible capacity to re-create themselves and therefore re-create the world for not just the better but for the divine.”
The journey for Olwoch’s “The Survival” began in 2016, when she wrote the play about the life of a young Ugandan woman faced with a decision to be a surrogate mother for a gay couple. As a queer woman living in Uganda, Olwoch said, she was assaulted in 2017 for the perceived promotion of homosexuality in her work. The attack left her unable to walk the entire following year.
Anyone writing about politics or LGBTQ issues was being hunted, she said, and anyone who even comes into contact with queerness becomes a victim of the country’s laws against homosexuality.
Olwoch, who said she is currently living in exile in New York, fled to the U.S. in 2021 and first presented her play at the Criminal Queerness Festival in 2022.
Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which remains in effect, criminalizes “consensual same-sex conduct with penalties of up to life imprisonment, attempted homosexual acts with penalties of 10 years in prison, and the death penalty for those convicted of ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ which includes repeated same sex acts and intercourse with a person younger than 18, older than 75, or a person with a disability,” according to Human Rights Watch.
The title of Olwoch’s play points to the reality that everyone has to survive.
At the Criminal Queerness Festival, “The Survival” is different from its original incarnation; it was previously much more watered down out of fear, Olwoch said. This is the case for many artists who join the festival, Odsess-Rubin said, though he leaves the decision to change the work to the playwrights and works to ensure they feel safe.
“Scenes where the gay guys hold hands or actually say, ‘We’re gay,’ or things like that, I had to take out that too, because then not only would I be criminalized, it will also affect the whole festival and organizers and everything,” she said of her play, which resulted in controversy and threats after a November 2016 reading in Uganda.
Now in the U.S., the play is performed in its fullest expression.
“There’s no fear of [getting] into trouble for actually having written this play or the actors will be in trouble for acting in it,” Olwoch says. “People who are homophobic … do not have the power to actually hurt us, as compared to Uganda, where it’s open season.”
Olwoch said she is not interested in pity and hopes people come to the festival with an open mind.
“I do appreciate the empathy, but I’d like it to come more from a place of learning something new and understanding something new about another part of the world,” she said, adding that she wants those who see her play to realize how real homophobia is in some parts of the world. “It’s almost a reminder that the struggle for freedom goes on.”
While the state of queerness in America experiences innumerable challenges of its own, and the rights of so many are still not guaranteed, there exists the opportunity to provide platforms to artists who may not have them elsewhere.
“We still have to fight and be vigilant. We’re not just looking at countries on the other side of the world saying, ‘Oh, these poor people, look how bad it is over there.’ It’s also like, ‘This can happen here, and it will happen here if we don’t stay vigilant and don’t stop fighting,’” Odsess-Rubin said, adding that he sees the festival as part of that fight.
“I hope one day we start to see more and more countries decriminalizing homosexuality, decriminalizing LGBTQ people, ending censorship for queer artists, and I hope this festival can have the tiniest impact on that.”
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