Charles O’Malley // Oct. 15, 2019

A Specific Anarchy: The Cockettes, Genderfuck, and the Beginning of the 1970s

Charles O’Malley, Oct. 15, 2019 2-3pm. 220 York Street, Room 100.

This talk comes from Charles O’Malley’s current project, a critical history of the genderfuck performance collective the Cockettes, a group of mostly queer artists working in San Francisco from 1969-1972. Situated between the rise of the New Left and the opening of the queer liberation movement, the Cockettes worked to blur the line between performance and the everyday, all while constantly needling at definitions of gender and asking which walls needed to come down. Drawn from interviews and performance detritus left by members of the group, this talk analyzes the use of “genderfuck” as a tool and considers the group’s legacy.

Charles O’Malley is a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Drama; his dissertation focuses on queer radicalism in 1970s San Francisco. At Yale, he co-convenes the Performance Studies Working Group and is the Artistic Fellow at Yale Repertory Theatre. His writing has appeared in the New Republic, Lambda Literary, Indiewire, and in the journal QED. He has taught at Yale College and Connecticut College.

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