A Home for Wayward Girls: New York City's WOW Cafe

NYC’s WOW Cafe, (Women’s One World) was founded in 1982 by a small band of lesbian performers who shared not only an unruly proto queer feminism, but also a set of aesthetic commitments that set them apart from their contemporaries in other feminist and lesbian theatre projects – such as comedic experimentation and an unfettered exploration of erotic material. WOW’s ethos was evident in their earliest graphics, which described the place a “home for wayward girls,” and members proudly described themselves as “feminists who had been kicked out of feminist spaces for having the wrong haircut.” The founders of WOW were the first generation of artists to come of age after the advent of television, and in the first decade, productions drew from and commented on the medium, as well as gay male camp traditions, filtered through a lens of feminist sensibility and lived lesbian experience. From Split Britches’s reworking of “Beauty and the Beast,” to Carmelita Tropicana’s epic historical parodies such as “Memorias de la Revolucion,” to the entire body of work of the Five Lesbian Brothers, the women of WOW’s first generation took comic forms seriously and used them as a springboard for forging new work. In this presentation, I’ll discuss how such comedy informed and shaped the group’s organization and politics.