Writer, performer, and social media maven Dave Awl has been a presence in the Chicago fringe theater scene for over two decades, since moving to Chicago from his hometown of Peoria in 1988.
An early member of the Neo-Futurists experimental theater company and founder of the groundbreaking Pansy Kings, he also created and hosted a series of eclectic events called The Partly Dave Show. Awl's interest in social media was an outgrowth of his theater and nightclub experience. An expert in social media communication, he is the author of Facebook Me! and has written regular articles on social media topics for CreativePro.com . In recent years Awl has worked as a consultant for arts groups, businesses, and individuals to help them build their social media presence; he also teaches workshops on Social Media Marketing for Small/Local Businesses, Artists, and Entrepreneurs.
Windy City Times: What was the Chicago fringe performance scene like in the late '80s and early '90s?
Dave Awl: One of the best things about those days was that space was cheap and plentiful. That meant that if you had a crazy idea for a show, you could put it together on a shoestring budget and make it happen. Late night theater was a new concept, so a lot of great theater spaces were sitting empty after 10 p.m. And if you didn't need a full-fledged theater space, you could usually find a bar or a cafe that would let you put on your show for a cut of the door. That allowed so much strange, wonderful, and inventive stuff to happen and it made Chicago's theater and performance scene really special in those years.
WCT: How did you get involved with the Neo-Futurists?
DA: Through my friend Lisa Buscani. Lisa was a reigning champ at the Green Mill poetry slam before she got cast in the Neo-Futurists' show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in the spring of '89. Too Much Light has been running continuously since December of 1988, so it's celebrating its quarter-century anniversary this year. Which is downright surreal to contemplate.
Lisa invited me to see her in this odd new show and I got hooked on it. The cast performs "30 plays in 60 minutes"—a fast-paced barrage of short pieces in a random order that's different every time. I started writing scripts for it in 1989, and officially joined the ensemble in June of 1990. I performed in Too Much Light regularly for the next 10 years.
The last time I was in the show was the fall of 2002—I can't believe it's been eleven years now. I've been thinking about going back and performing in it again. Hopefully, it'll happen sooner or later.
WCT: Were LGBT issues tackled in the show in the early days?
DA: The first year or so that Too Much Light was running, there weren't any gay cast members yet. Ted Bales joined the cast in late 1989, and I followed a few months later. We really wanted to put the show on the map in the LGBT community, and let it be known that it was gay-inclusive. The Neo-Futurists marched in the Pride parade for the first time in 1991, and we started the annual tradition—still going strong—of doing a special Queer Pride edition of the show for Pride week, "30 Queer Plays in 60 Straight Minutes," as a benefit for a local LGBT organization.
I made it a point to out myself to the audience in every performance. In the early 90s you didn't see a lot of openly gay people on TV or in movies, and it was still considered risky for actors to come out. I always had in mind Harvey Milk's idea that we have to come out because when people realize that someone they know and like is gay, that's when they start to support us.
One piece I wrote for the show was called "Introduction"— it started with Diana Slickman asking the audience to raise their hands. Then she asked them to lower their hands if they personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian. There were always a bunch of people who still had their hands in the air. So then she would ask those people to keep their hands raised while Anita Loomis, David Kodeski and I—the three queer cast members at the time—went around and introduced ourselves to them. We'd go over and shake their hands and say hello in a very friendly and earnest way. Simple, but the audience loved it.
WCT: What was the genesis of The Pansy Kings?
DA: In early 1994, there was a night when David Kodeski and Edward Thomas-Herrera (David's boyfriend) and I were talking about what a great job the women performers in town had done of creating vehicles for themselves like the Big Goddess Powwow. The Powwow was a huge event created by Lisa Buscani and Paula Killen that featured a lineup of Chicago's best female performance artists, and they played to packed houses. We agreed that it would be great to have something similar for Chicago's gay male performers. So I went away and thought about it and came up with the name The Pansy Kings' Cotillion. We called it "the ultimate sampler pack of Chicago's gay male performance scene."
I created, curated and produced the first few Pansy Kings shows myself. We had the first Cotillion in October 1994 at the Neo-Futurarium and it was a sold-out hit. In addition to David and Edward and myself, the bill included Robert Rodi, Kurt Heintz, Honey West, Patrick Trettenero, and John S. Connors, among others. And our emcee was Nightlines' "Fey Ways" columnist Dominic Hamilton-Little at his absolute campiest.
We held the cotillion for a couple more years after that, and had a couple of holiday shows, too. There was a core group of performers along with guests rotating in to keep the lineup fresh. Eric Lane Barnes, director of the Windy City Slickers, was another key player. Jimmy Doyle from Second City and Murray McKay as the "drag elf" Dingle Barrie were favorites too. I went on to host a cabaret variety show called The Partly Dave Show. We had Pansy Kings reunions in The Partly Dave Show in 2003 and 2004.
As a side effect of being in The Pansy Kings, I got asked to be on an early episode of Ira Glass's NPR radio show This American Life—an episode called "Sissies" that also featured Dan Savage.
WCT: What led to your deep interest in social media?
DA: When the Internet arrived in my life in 1995, I got involved in a bunch of communities online that were organized around specific interests—bands, or authors, or subjects like vegetarianism or lefty politics that attracted people who were on a similar wavelength. I loved the way it would take a bunch of fans and network them into an organized community.
In those days, mailing lists were the main tool—you'd subscribe to a mailing list and then a listserver would let members post messages to the whole group. Around 1997 I started a mailing list for The Neo-Futurists, to give us a way to communicate with our fans and share news with them. That was a lot of fun, so I started a community for my favorite author, Russell Hoban, and another one for people who went to Planet Earth—a weekly New Wave dance night started by DJs Dave Roberts and Kristine Hengl (who later went on to open Late Bar in the Avondale neighborhood).
Planet Earth took place at several different nightclubs around town over the years, and it's still going—these days it happens every Saturday night at Late Bar. Planet Earth always drew a very diverse and LGBT-inclusive crowd. The people there were fascinating, but we didn't really know each other at first, even though we saw each other on the dance floor every week. So the geek part of my brain realized that an online community could be the ultimate icebreaker. I started a Yahoo! Group called Planet-Earthlings and passed out little invitations to join it at the nightclub. Within a few months, I could look around on the dance floor and I knew everyone's name.
A very close-knit group formed out of that—and in fact a few years later, when I had some trouble with a moving company I'd hired, I posted an emergency message to the Planet-Earthlings group and 13 people turned out on a Monday night to help me finish the move before I had to be out of my old apartment. When people say that Internet friendships aren't "real" friendships, I think they're full of beans. I've seen firsthand how online communities can create powerful bonds between people.
So a few years ago, when Facebook and Twitter began to take off, they felt like the next step forward in that regard—and I was interested enough to start writing about social media. Last year I started offering a three-week class on social media marketing at Late Bar in the early evening before it opens for business. I teach a new session of the class every couple of months.
WCT: The expansion of social media has clearly helped LGBT people to find each other and support each other's causes in ways we couldn't before the Internet.
DA: I think LGBT people tend to be early adopters where technology is concerned. We tend to be communicators, too. At any rate, I think our community has used social media to great advantage.
Just look at HRC's Marriage Equality campaign on Facebook earlier this year. More than 2.7 million people changed their profile pics to some version of a red equals sign during one week at the end of March, after HRC asked their members to start it off. My Facebook News Feed was a sea of red equals signs that week. That's really powerful. And part of what made it so powerful is that our straight allies joined in, to support their LGBT friends and family members. It used to be that gay media was something separate, and my straight friends would be shocked when I told them some of what was being reported in the gay newspapers—hate crimes and so forth. But now our various media sources are all woven together in our Facebook and Twitter feeds. Stories that start out in the LGBT community can reach a much more mainstream audience through that amplification.
WCT: What are some LGBT examples of effective use of social media that you bring up in your class?
DA: Armistead Maupin is an example of a gay writer who successfully uses Facebook to communicate with his fans. Doug Brandt of Pie Hole Pizza Joint is an example of a local business owner in the Chicago LGBT community who uses social media very effectively.
Another good example is George Takei, who I grew up watching play Sulu on Star Trek and is now the Queer King of Facebook. He's created a phenomenal following for himself—his Facebook page currently has more than 4 million fans—by mixing activism with a mischievous, geeky sense of humor. His audience now reaches way beyond Star Trek fans and the LGBT community. And he's been credited with playing a key role in helping the Marriage Equality profile pic campaign succeed, too—it really started to take off when he shared it with his fans. So he uses his platform to not just share silly jokes, and raise his profile as a celebrity, but also to advance important messages.
In general, it's great to see the lightbulbs going on for my students when I show them techniques for reaching a wider audience. Even people who've been on Facebook for years aren't aware of some of the hidden functionality you can take advantage of. I love those little gasps I get when I show people how to do something they didn't know was possible.
Dave Awl can be reached at hellothere@awlpoint.com . His next three-week class in Social Media Marketing for Small/Local Businesses, Artists, and Entrepreneurs begins Aug. 6. For more information, visit Dave's website at awlpoint.com .
