Photo Credit: Ally Schmaling

Maggie Cee, a passionate dancer and performer, shares her lifelong love for dance and the journey that led her to create the solo performance "Ladies at a Gay Girls' Bar, 1938-1969." From childhood sparkles to mishaps on international stages, Maggie's story unfolds, revealing inspirations from immersive performances and impactful literary works. Join Maggie on March 8, 2024, at atac, where she brings to life the forgotten stories of working-class butch/fem bar culture, weaving a tapestry of LGBTQ history.

atac: Hi Maggie! How did you discover your love for dance and performing?

Maggie Cee: As a child, I loved books, ballet, tutus, and sparkles, and not much has changed. I spent a lot of time making my friends and our siblings put on performances, and I kind of never grew out of it. My desire to dance and love for ballet specifically feels like it’s been part of me forever. Plenty of people love dancing but grow out of it or move on to other things, and I just never did. I thought I would move on several times in my life but I always came back to dance. My main gig is teaching dance Mass Ballet in Framingham, where one of the best parts of my job is creating a new story ballet every spring.

atac: Could you share a moment or a period in your life where you felt the strongest pull to dance?
MC: A few years out of college, I knew I wanted to keep dancing. I had opportunities to choreograph and perform in traditional dance spaces, but my choreography, ballet/modern fusion set to music with lyrics and performed in campy costumes, wasn’t always legible. Elsewhere in Boston’s arts scene, there were queer open mics for writers and musicians, drag shows with a mostly queer audience, and burlesque shows with a mostly straight one. I felt committed to continuing to dance and create performances, but I decided to make my own performance opportunities.

atac: How did “The Femme Show” come to be?

MC: In 2007 I started a touring variety show about queer femininity and femme identity called "The Femme Show." It was a multi-disciplinary show where I could create dance pieces for queer audiences and also started to incorporate text into my work. My friend Rachel and I started a comedy duo that gave me the opportunity to grow into acting. All of that laid the foundation for me to create this solo show, which combines dance with original monologues, voiceovers, props and characters.

atac: Are there any performances that specifically left a lasting impact on you?

MC: A few immersive performances stand out to me, but the most incredible one I think about all the time and feel really lucky to have experienced was “Lady Malcolm’s Servants’ Ball” by Duckie in London in 2016. It was a fabulous recreation of a real, notoriously queer party that took place in the 1920s and 30s. They explored and subverted history in really cool and intersectional ways. I dream about having the space and the collaborators to do something immersive like that.

atac: Do you have any stories of a performance that didn’t go as you expected it to go?

MC: Last spring, I was performing at the Brighton Fringe Festival in the UK. The venue provided a couple of chairs for my props, but I needed a folding chair. Normally I bring all my own chairs, but obviously, we do not have a budget to ship my props overseas. 2 days before the first show, I went all over the city hanging up posters and popping into charity shops (AKA thrift stores) looking for one. I finally found a lovely white chair, and was crossing the street with my £10 prize hoping to catch a bus, when I tripped in the middle of the road and wiped out spectacularly. I did the whole “I’m fine, I’m fine” thing but actually cut my knee badly enough to bleed right through my leggings. People think dancers are graceful, but I’m here to tell you that I am the klutziest person, especially if I’m stressed. One of the volunteers was watching my warm up and asked my wife if the big bandage on my knee was from dancing, she had to tell them it was just from falling in the road. My friends christened the chair “Deborah” and she lives in their garage north of Manchester.

atac: What advice would you give to people who want to follow in your footsteps and become a performer?

MC: There are so many paths to success and happiness. Yours might not look the way you imagined and that’s ok! Also, you should probably go to therapy.

atac: Are there specific pieces of art that continue to inspire your performances or influence your perspective on queer identity and history?

MC: I have 4 books onstage with me during my piece. Someone asked once if “The Persistent Desire” was my favorite lesbian book and I had to confess that my favorite of all time is probably “Tipping the Velvet” by Sarah Waters but that’s because I love fiction.

The first book in the piece is “We Walk Alone: Through Lesbos’ Lonely Groves” by Ann Aldrich. I first read this book in The History Project archives. It’s nonfiction but reads a little bit like a pulp novel with very over-the-top language. My teen character reacts to the outrageousness, but I also learned a lot of details here that give the piece texture and authenticity, like the queer-coded songs “Keep it Gay” and “Secret Love” that were popular in lesbian bars in the 1950s.

“Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold” is a scholarly study by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis about working-class butch-femme communities in Buffalo, New York. My piece really could not exist without this book. Just like my teen character in the show, I really did first encounter it while writing a junior term paper. In real life, I really resonated with it in my 20s when I started to understand my own femme identity and unpack what “butch” and “femme” can mean together and apart.

“Stone Butch Blues” by “activist, organizer, theorist, and writer” Les Feinberg really was being read by all the cool kids I knew through queer youth organizing in the late 1990s. It’s semi-autobiographical fiction about gender, class, and community that will make you depressed, make you cry, and make you want to storm whatever real or metaphorical barricades you have in your life. It has a visceral truth to it that stays with you. You should read this book for sure. I have a whole blog post about it.

Finally, there is “The Persistent Desire: A femme-butch reader” edited by Joan Nestle. It’s out of print, but there is a free PDF available via Open Library and the Internet Archive. This is the book that gave me words for myself the same way “Stone Butch Blues” did for many people. I quote the editor, Joan Nestle, quite a bit in the piece, but the book is full of incredible art and words from many contributors.

atac: Maggie thank you so much for your time! Lastly, can you let us know what to expect from your performance?

Ladies at a Gay Girls' Bar, 1938-1969 is a 60-minute solo performance that imagines and explores the queer past and passions between people who loved, fought, and created space to be themselves out of sheer necessity and determination.

I play myself as a teenager trying to figure out my place in the world, bringing the audience along with me as I encounter queer history. I also play 3 fictional historical femme characters, bringing the history of 20th-century lesbian bars to life, and illuminating the feminine women whose stories are too often forgotten.

Working class butch/fem bar culture of the 1940s-1950s is an important part of LGBTQ history in the United States that is well-documented in historical research, oral histories, and first-person narratives. The bars, frequented by butches and fems, gay men and women, gender variant and trans people, and sex workers served as a meeting place and refuge where these communities forged social connections and identity. These relationships supported a growing resistance which laid a foundation for the gay liberation movement that followed.

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Maggie Cee will be performing Ladies at a Gay Girls' Bar, 1938-1969 on Friday, March 8, 2024, at atac! You won’t want to miss this event – grab your tickets here.

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