to find an agent who’ll sell it to a publisher.”
Critics have honored Donoghue with the highest praise in a numbed social media-driven world: “Donoghue’s great strength—apart from her storytelling gift—is her emotional intelligence” (Irish Independent, 2010). The BBC Radio Ulster called her 2012 full-length play, The Talk of the Town, “mesmerizing.” The NY Times lauded Room: “This is a truly memorable novel, one that can be read through myriad lenses—psychological, sociological, political. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live.”
The most amazing thing about Emma Donoghue is how she is responding to this new-found fame. Co-creating this indie film with the Irish and Canadian Film Boards and working closely with fellow Dubliner, Director Lenny Abrahamson, Donoghue holds no illusions about the film’s uncommon success. She does hold to the truth of her novel, an exploration of the mother-child bond, written when Donoghue was the mother of a four-year-old boy and a one-year-old girl. She considers Room an extraordinary love story. As for how this independent, small-budget, nuanced film reached such commercial heights against a backdrop of big-budget films, she reacts in a 2016 TVO interview with Steve Paiken, “Who needs ‘em—car chases, special effects—they do not touch the heart.” That’s why Donoghue kept the rights to her novel and wrote the screenplay herself. Her only complaint now: “The perverse thing about success—it leads to lots of interviews.”
“I think the most important way to resist pigeonholing is to write about LGBTQ matters without apology, but also without coziness—assuming an LGBTQ readership—or crankiness—lecturing a straight readership. It also helps if you concentrate on some big life-or-death topics that matter to everybody. But you know, I’ve never objected to being called a lesbian writer, that would be bad manners, like badmouthing your own ethnic group.”
Emma Donoghue
Sean Dorsey Breaks Ground: Transgender and Queer Choreographer and Dancer
Founder and Artistic Director, Fresh Meat Productions (2001-Present)
First Nonprofit in the US to create, present, and tour year-round multidisciplinary transgender arts programs
Produces annual Fresh Meat Festival of Transgender and Queer Performance each June
Artistic Director, Sean Dorsey Dance (2005-Present)
Four-Time Izzie (Isadora Duncan) Award-Winning Company
One of the world’s first openly transgender professional choreographers and dancers creates powerful dances that combine full-throttle movement and storytelling to bring transgender and queer stories to the stage. Sean Dorsey has won four Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (Izzies)—the San Francisco Modern Dance equivalent of the Academy Awards.
Sean Dorsey gives voice to longtime survivors of the early AIDS epidemic in his award-winning work THE MISSING GENERATION—which he created after traveling the US for two years to record oral histories with LGBT longtime survivors. Dorsey reminds audiences of the homophobia, transphobia, secrecy, police brutality, and discrimination trans and queer people experienced decades ago—but also how they found love and community—in The Secret History of Love, the result of his oral history interviews with LGBT elders.
But Dorsey came to dance late. He took hobby courses, a summer jazz workshop, jazz and modern dance classes at the University of British Columbia, while studying political science and Women’s Studies. “Before that point, I’d never seen anybody like me in dance. When I was in high school, there was no Gay-Straight Alliance. There was nobody who was out in my high school as queer or trans, so it was unthinkable that somebody like me would be in dance, let alone in choreography. It wasn’t until these hobby classes I took during grad school when ballet and modern dance professional teachers suggested to me that I could be a professional dancer that the possibility even entered my mind,” said Dorsey.
Sean is from Vancouver, Canada, and his mother is a feminist and lesbian. His mom was a very out feminist. So, Sean grew up with a fire for social justice; in high school, he was given an award for social responsibility because of his activism as a teen. When Sean came out, all his family was very loving and supportive. While he was afraid to tell one grandmother and a great aunt in their early 90s, both separately said something like, “Oh, honey, I always knew you were trans. I was just waiting for you to feel comfortable enough to let me know. I love you very much.”
After immersing himself in professional dance training at age twenty-five for two years, dancing for eight hours a day at a dance school called Main Dance in Vancouver, Sean came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001, founded Fresh Meat Productions and the Fresh Meat Festival in 2002, and Sean Dorsey Dance in 2005. He also danced with Lizz Roman and Dancers, a daring site-specific dance company, for six years.
“Every transgender person has a unique journey. Most of us have stories that don’t fit the mainstream ‘I was born in the wrong body’ narrative. Generally, it’s not our own feelings about our trans bodies and identities that cause us the most pain—it’s the discomfort and discrimination we endure from the rest of the world! I was out for seven or eight years as transgender before I had chest surgery, and for ten years before I chose to take hormones. I danced professionally with Lizz Roman and other companies and was out as trans. Because I chose not to take testosterone, for ten years I didn’t have the low voice I have now, so I wasn’t always read by the world as male and was often mis-gendered—which is painful.”
“The hardest part of being a trans dancer is not having peers or mentors. Simple things like walking into a new dance studio, going into gendered bathrooms, using a gendered changing room and changing clothes before class are very difficult. Modern dance is a profoundly gendered field and very few people have done the work necessary to make their studios, companies or theaters welcoming or safe for trans people. This is part of the work I do now on tour, teaching classes and workshops across the country—creating safe dancing spaces for trans and gender non-conforming people,” said Sean.
Sean Dorsey is the Artistic Director and choreographer of Sean Dorsey Dance (he also performs in his work) and the Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions, one of the first year-round transgender multidisciplinary arts nonprofit organizations in the world. In 2012, Fresh Meat Productions became the first transgender organization to be awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Sean Dorsey is young, but is well aware of the groundbreaking and heartbreaking work that his LGBTQ elders and ancestors have done before him: “This is what drives me as an artist and an activist: our trans and queer stories aren’t recorded in mainstream history—and are often left out of the family album. My work as a trans artist is to bring our stories to light—in a way that is accessible and resonant for trans, queer and straight audiences alike. This is why I recorded oral histories with trans and queer elders to create my last two productions, THE MISSING GENERATION (currently on a 20-city tour of the U.S.) and The Secret History of Love (which recently completed a 20-city tour).”
Sean Dorsey and Shawna Virago.
Photo by Lydia Daniller
At performances of THE MISSING GENERATION, sold-out audiences of young and old, straight and queer, dancer and non-dancer, sit next to one another in the theater, tears rolling down their faces. For those caregivers, survivors who escaped AIDS, and longtime survivors living with HIV/AIDS, THE MISSING GENERATION
