1990, Lizzie, Outweek, Pride.

The beginning of Pride season, combined with Sarah Schulman’s new book about ACT UP and my current writing/rabbit hole, had me thinking about Outweek. Life, for a few years there, revolved around Outweek, the magazine that kept us all up to date on the epidemic, queer life, ACT UP and Queer Nation and WHAM and all the other AIDS and queer activism, as well as arts and culture in fin de siècle plague-era New York. I can’t think of another example of any media that so shaped my life and world view. Everyone I knew devoured it every week.

I loved Outweek so much that this nasty little diatribe by a pseudonymous lesbian music “critic” about the very first version of what is now LIZZIE in 1990 didn’t put me off the magazine as much as it put me off pseudonymous lesbian music “critics.” And pseudonymous non-lesbian music “critics.”

This is probably self-evident, but it’s not a super great idea to send a letter to a magazine protesting a negative review. They will win. They have a magazine. (But the thing about Outweek is that it felt like our magazine, everybody’s magazine, and in many ways it was. The “Letters” section was long and probably the most read.)

Anyway, I should say that — though it retains its spirit and volume, the story, the core idea and some of the songs, its queerness and wild feminism, its reason for being — 1990’s Lizzie Borden: An American Musical is not 2021’s LIZZIE. It was 45 minutes long, started with the murders, and contained 4 songs. It was rough and some of the criticism in this review is legitimate. That was the beauty of the downtown experimental theater scene, that you could work stuff out on stage in front of a supportive audience that understood that creating serious, provocative, original work is a process. There would be no LIZZIE, in the full-length, narratively coherent, every beat completely thought through, professionalized form it takes today if we hadn’t had the freedom and support of that community.

I miss how wild you could be back then though. I miss the low commercial stakes that allowed artists to take crazy aesthetic risks.

LIZZIE in Barcelona, coming in fall 2021.