On the night of Jan. 25, I settled into the quaint, cozy audience of Theatre Rhinoceros for a showing of local playwright Terry Baum’s “Lesbo Solo, My True Life Adventures thru 50 Years of Gay Liberation.” Surrounded by a gaggle of lesbians whose average age was hardly lowered by my presence, I noticed the crowd all seemed to know one another or Baum herself. I was a fish out of water, completely unfamiliar with Baum’s work and life story, or frankly with lesbian history as a whole. Without much pause to ruminate over my own ignorance, the lights dimmed and Baum stepped out, declaring that she’s “got a story to tell” us — and by God, she did.
Written and performed by Terry Baum, “Lesbo Solo” takes place over 50 years, beginning with Baum’s childhood and ending only a few years prior to the present day. Awarded the Best of Fringe at the 2024 San Francisco Fringe Festival, the show stars Baum as the sole narrator and presence on stage and isn’t dissimilar to a casual catch-up with a friend: trading stories over drinks and reminiscing on memories from years past. Baum is theatrical in her storytelling but never to the point of being overdramatized. There is no doubt that every instance — no matter how ridiculous it may sound — was a genuine moment from her real life. If anything, the stories proved just how rich and illustrious Baum’s experiences have been.
Armed with a singular red chair and a handful of photos projected on the wall beside her, Baum weaves the audience through the confusion of her closeted 20s. She reflects on attending the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970 and witnessing the “Lavender Menace,” a hijacking of the event which protested the feminist movement’s exclusion of lesbians. Baum reminisces on or riding on the back of a butch lesbian’s motorcycle secretly hoping she would go back to her apartment and use Baum’s restroom. She eventually realizes she is as gay as the night is long, declaring herself “finished with men” and freed from the shackles that denied her this realization, poignantly adding that she “had never known she wasn’t free.”
Though steeped in a devastating history, the show was by and large a hysterical comedy. For example, Baum cheekily reminisced about her “Lesbians for Penetration” congregation at San Francisco Pride in the ’80s, describing an outfit decked out with a belt of phallic vegetables and a blown-up latex glove affixed to her sign with two fingers poking out. She spoke about her first full-length play, “Dos Lesbos” — a show “by, for and about perverts” — and Kate McDermott’s “Places, Please!” — the inspiration for the world’s first anthology of lesbian plays — a tidbit Baum was exceedingly proud of. Baum reminded us that so many “firsts” for lesbians and the larger LGBTQ+ community have only occurred in very recent history and often gone unheard, untaught and unremembered. As such, people such as Baum sharing their firsthand experiences are exceedingly unique and necessary. When Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the first lesbian couple to get legally married in California, were wedded by then-mayor Gavin Newsom in 2008, Baum was quite literally in the room.
To the uninformed patron such as myself, “Lesbo Solo” served as an eye-opening, heartwarming history lesson. As the show came to a close and Baum opened the floor to questions, numerous audience members reminisced with her and one another about the spots across the city they used to frequent, when queer-friendly establishments were few and far between. This moment offered a stark reminder of just how far the LGBTQ+ community has come and how far we still have to go.
While it is difficult to imagine the unbearable grief embedded in this current moment lifting anytime soon, work by artists such as Baum serves as a source of hope and encouragement, reminding us, as she so aptly put it, “We have to keep fighting. We don’t have the right to give up.”