“Debutante Balls” lecture challenges gender stereotypes

Emma Epstein Guest Writer

On March 29 at approximately 8 p.m., the lights in the Villard room dimmed. The audience peered around the room, waiting for performance artist Scott Turner Schofield to walk in the door. Instead, Schofield surprised the audience by emerging from behind the white frilly dress hanging on stage, spotlighted, as he told the audience, “I only did this whole debutante thing so that I could get in a debutante’s dress.”

Schofield’s performance, sponsored by The Women’s Center, Campus Life, American Culture, PEACE, Students Activist Union, and Women’s Studies program, discussed transgender issues and southern United States culture in a humorous one-man show.

Schofield shared many personal anecdotes about coming out, from his first love to a hysterical encounter with elderly CVS employees at a make-up counter. He used music, costume changes, and dramatic lighting to enhance his stand-up comedy performance.

Schofield merged the two topics by highlighting his three experiences at debutante balls, which he described as “homecoming on steroids.” By describing himself as he attended the three balls: as a scared lesbian teenager, an angry feminist college-student, and finally as a transgender adult spokesperson, Schofield showed how the two types of “coming out” paralleled each other in his life.

Schofield described the attitude of most southerners towards queers as negative compared to that of northerners. “I sensed a resistance in the South to people being really out,” he said.

He demonstrated, however, that even in the South, tolerance and understanding are always possible. “People don’t like things put in their face, but if you offer it to them on a platter, they’ll take it,” he said.

Schofield also addressed race and class issues during the show. “The main thrust of the show is to come out as whatever you are,” he said. “I think it’s important that we do that from whatever stance we are from, recognizing that there is a history and social background behind what ideas we have. We’re blinded to what we’re doing, why we’re thinking what we think. We need to be more able to listen to and understand other people’s stories. Coming out is about standing in our truth and allowing us to be each other’s allies.”

Schofield began his performance art career by assisting Holly Hughes, a lesbian performance artist whose work as part of the “NEA 4” became a Supreme Court case when the funding by the National Endowment for the Arts was challenged due to “indecent” material. He also assisted Carmelita Tropicana, a Cuban performance artist who speaks about Latino stereotypes. Schofield also performs in a performance art piece entitled “Underground TRANsit.”

Schofield said that “Underground TRANsit” is more typical of performance art as it utilizes more sounds and visual images. While “Debutante Balls” was similar in style to a stand up comedy act, Schofield labeled it performance art in order to utilize music and images in the show.

Audience reactions to his show differ greatly. “Different people laugh at different parts,” he said. “When queer people laugh, it’s really raucous. And you can always tell when there are southerners in the North. They die laughing at the sweet tea thing.” He seemed especially surprised when a comment that “rich kids buy used clothes too” elicited a huge burst of laughter from the Vassar audience.

While working as head counselor at La Vida del Corazon, a free summer camp in Costa Rica privately funded for at-risk youth from the Bronx and Harlem, from June to August of last year, Schofield received a two-week writer’s retreat as part of his salary.

“I was thinking about how to tell that story for two years,” he said. “Finally I had time to sit down and write [Debutante Balls].” He is constantly adding new components to the show, and debuted six new pages of material at the Vassar performance.

In 1997, at the age of 16, Schofield came out as a lesbian, but no one paid him much attention. “I am a performance artist partly because of that reaction,” he said.

While attending Emory University he created his own major called Interdepartmental Studies in Society and Culture. “I studied the history of marginal groups since the civil war, how they used performance as a source of identity and expression,” he said. He minored in theatre.

When he was 19, Schofield began working in New York City and met people who were transgender, a category he had not known existed. “I realized that it fit my identity,” he said.

By the time he was 21, Schofield had fully come out as transgender. He began to use the name Scott Turner Schofield in September 2004 when “Debutante Balls” opened and officially changed his name this February. In January he started undergoing hormone therapy to become male.

Schofield said his parents, although originally distraught by his decision to come out, are now very supportive. “They’ve definitely had a hard time,” he said. “They had to reconsider their idea of who I am. But they have started to be great allies.”

Schofield has chosen to use a slower acting treatment than usually prescribed for his hormone therapy and is already planning a new show about his experience, entitled “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps.” “I want to take the process slower, take that ride, see what it’s like,” he says. “The process of undergoing hormone therapy is a very important story that I want to be able to tell. I look at things as the value they have as stories. In the end, they write themselves.”