The furious comedy of Valerie Solanas

UP YOUR ASS. BY VALERIE SOLANAS. Sternberg/Montana, 2022. 104 pages.

“MY ONLY CONSOLATION’S that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and a queer,” quips Bongi Perez, the intrepid antiheroine of Valerie Solanas’s Up Your Ass. Written between 1962 and 1965, the play incorporates a wisecracking masc lesbian panhandler and intercourse employee who sounds loads like the author herself. Infamous for capturing Andy Warhol and his affiliate Mario Amaya in 1968, Solanas’s best-known textual content is her SCUM Manifesto (1967), outlining a program of male elimination. However it was Up Your Ass, a lesser-known dramatic work, that lay on the coronary heart of her battle with Warhol. Till now, the bawdy and rollicking play has by no means been printed by a serious press. This month, it seems by way of Sternberg’s sub-imprint Montana.

It’s an apt time for the discharge of Up Your Ass, an absurdist one-act poking enjoyable at post-Tablet, pre-Roe Sixties sexual politics from all instructions. Though SCUM Manifesto grew to become a fringe basic, many feminists have debated its worth as a humorous work vs. a lethal critical homicidal screed. A contrarian who alienated main figures from the ladies’s liberation motion, Solanas’s well-known combativeness led critics to distance themselves from her work. However curiosity in Solanas has intensified over the past decade, due partly to new scholarship. (In 2014, for example, Breanne Fahs printed an excellently researched biography of the author by way of the Feminist Press.) The US’s excessive rightward shift has additionally forged rageful radicals like Solanas in a extra sympathetic mild. Because the rights of queer and trans folks, intercourse employees, and other people able to being pregnant develop into additional endangered, Solanas’s ribald play fascinates as a relic of taboo-busting sexual content material, if not at all times essentially the most cogent assault on the patriarchal established order.

Up Your Ass has arguably loved its widest pop-cultural visibility by way of Mary Harron’s 1996 biopic I Shot Andy Warhol. Starring a younger Lili Taylor, the movie follows the aspiring author as she infiltrates the Pop artist’s social circle within the hopes that he’ll produce her play. Between first sending her script to Warhol in 1965 and capturing him three years later, Solanas wandered out and in of the Manufacturing facility scene. When she was significantly exhausting up for money, Warhol paid her a measly $25 to play a lesbian character in his 1967 movie I, a Man. In an improvised scene in a stairwell, Solanas shifts between mild flirting and sparring with Tom Baker earlier than turning down his advances. The strain in I Shot Andy Warhol escalates as Solanas, after signing a doubtful contract with writer Maurice Girodias, enters a psychosis fueled by public humiliation and paranoia over the possession of her works. She makes an attempt to assassinate Warhol and his studio employees after claiming that he misplaced the “solely” copy of her play. Within the ensuing a long time, there’s been a mistaken conflation between Solanas’s life and artwork: Up Your Ass as a forgotten dry run of the SCUM Manifesto, SCUM as a handbook for lethal violence towards males, and Solanas’s assault on Warhol. Like all occasions involving Valerie Solanas, the truth is extra sophisticated.

Warhol did lose his copy of Solanas’s manuscript, which was later recovered in a silver-painted trunk belonging to Billy Title. It’s unfaithful, nonetheless, that it was Solanas’s solely copy. The author had excessive ambitions for the play, submitting a number of copyrights for the manuscript, staging small readings, and producing mimeographs of it on the market. As the novel feminist activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz recalled, Solanas spoke unceasingly concerning the play throughout her psychiatric holds and incarceration following the capturing. Within the early Seventies, she carried out a one-woman model of it whereas imprisoned for first-degree assault at Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Regardless of Solanas’s insistence on its inventive significance, the play was eclipsed by her strident SCUM Manifesto, printed by Girodias’s Olympia Press instantly after her arrest. In actual fact, Up Your Ass has solely been staged as soon as by an expert firm. In 2000, George Coates Efficiency Works mounted a model with an all-female forged in San Francisco, simply blocks from the SRO the place Solanas died alone, a dozen years earlier, on the age of fifty-two. In 2001, the manufacturing noticed a brief run at New York’s P.S. 122. “Removed from being a museum piece, ‘Up Your Ass’ is a clarion name,” wrote one reviewer. The present was heralded on the time for its forward-thinking tackle genderbending and homicidal frustration with male chauvinism. Right now, it stands out as a lot for its punkish irreverence—Solanas spares nobody from her primary character’s acid tongue.

Up Your Ass follows Bongi Perez, Solanas’s stand-in, on a mean day hustling within the streets of “a big American metropolis.” (Solanas wrote an early draft whereas residing in Berkeley, California, and revised it in New York.) Stuffed with clapbacks and one-liners, the script celebrates the fantastic artwork of gutter-talk whereas providing a parodic send-up of misogyny in the course of the swinging ’60s. Over the course of Bongi’s wanderings, she catcalls girls (“You bought a twat by Dior?”); shoots the breeze with two single males (Black Cat and White Cat) about pickup methods; hustles a john for dinner earlier than giving him a fast hand job in an alley; and engages in banter with two drag queens (“Have you learnt what I’d like greater than something on the planet to be?” one muses. “A Lesbian. Then I might be the cake and eat it too”). Bongi then meets Ginger, a demented Helen Gurley Brown kind who brings her personal turd to a cocktail party (“Everyone is aware of that males have far more respect for girls who’re good at lapping up shit,” Ginger says), and her faux-intellectual colleague Russell, whom Bongi cajoles into screwing behind a bush simply minutes after he declares her a “desexed monstrosity.” As an absurdist palate cleanser, Solanas shifts the scene to a Artistic Homemaking class. There, an teacher advises aspiring wives to combine fucking into home chores—by ramming a soaped-up bottle brush up one’s husband’s ass, recalling the play’s titular expletive. In Bongi’s remaining encounter, our protagonist befriends a bicurious housewife who murders her penis-obsessed toddler. The grand finale exhibits the pair strolling off into the proverbial sundown, aggressively propositioning girls collectively.

The manuscript’s épater la bourgeoisie sensibility, shot by way of with clichés about race and sexuality, locations it squarely within the twentieth century. However the textual content additionally outlines an area of genderqueer risk that wouldn’t be theorized for years, advocates for intercourse employees’ rights, and sketches the darkish way forward for reproductive expertise by way of allusions to organic determinism. A line will be traced instantly from Bongi’s offhanded political musings—“Perhaps being president wouldn’t be such a nasty thought . . . I may remove the cash system, and let the machines do all of the work”—to SCUM’s opening sentence, which urges “civic-minded, accountable, thrill-seeking females” to “overthrow the federal government, remove the cash system, institute full automation and destroy the male intercourse.” Simply as importantly, Bongi expresses a want that Solanas, who claimed to be asexual, typically hid in her public life. The fictional character longs for “actual lowdown, funky broads, nasty, bitchy hotshots, the type that when she enters a room it’s like a blinding flash.” Such heated, determined makes an attempt at speaking need—in tonally mischievous dialogue that slides between screwball comedy and apocalyptic tirade—crackle all through Solanas’s script.

Up Your Ass is fascinating, however is it feminist? In Andrea Lengthy Chu’s Females, (2019) her gender-transition-memoir-cum­-theoretical-provocation, the identical query is posed, however turned inside out. Chu writes that “one might be forgiven for questioning if Solanas’s artwork, not in contrast to that of the male artists she despises (and infrequently shot), might need represented its personal type of try and repress the very femaleness she hoped to unleash, like a organic weapon, upon the world.” The “at all times egocentric, at all times cool” imaginative and prescient of femaleness that Solanas specified by SCUM merely reversed the normal poles of misogyny. Chu, for her half, embraces Solanas as an avatar of the self-negation she argues is intrinsic to the feminine situation. “Everyone seems to be feminine,” Chu declares, “and everybody hates it.”

Up Your Ass reveals Solanas as an equal-opportunity roaster, a job that locations her outdoors of latest feminism’s tendency towards self-examination. Fairly than shared vulnerability, this sexual comedy is shot by way of with a tart taste of camp capable of deflect earnest political criticisms directed on the writer. Solanas takes purpose on the sexual expectations of positioned on “groovy,” liberated-but-docile chicks. (In SCUM, she would later damningly time period these girls “Daddy’s Ladies.”) The reader can sense a rigidity within the play, Solanas knotting her rage right into a tightly coiled spring, able to launch at any goal that will get in her approach—because it did, appallingly, at a fellow queer artist that she as soon as seen as her potential producer. However we additionally glimpse traces of Solanas which can be extra advanced and contradictory than her manifesto, or her tried murders, may counsel. Because the previous saying goes, girls’s biggest concern is that males will kill them, whereas males’s biggest concern is that ladies will snicker at them. Fairly than programmatic gendercide, her play affords the prospect to snicker with her on the grotesqueries of a patriarchy that enmeshes and implicates us all.

— Wendy Vogel