The Love Booth and Other Plays

Director: Jenny Salisbury
Playwrights: Tara Goldstein with contributions by Jenny Salisbury & Alec Butler

The Love Booth and Other Plays is a set of seven short plays about queer and trans activism in the early LGBTQ liberation movement. We plan to perform the plays at the 2023 Toronto Pride Festival to mark the 50th anniversary of homosexuality being taken out of the American Psychology Association (APA)’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973. The first play in the set, The Love Booth, tells the story of their activism.
The other six plays tell the stories of other moments of activism taking place in the 1970s and early 1980s by queer and trans Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activists and their allies. They include stories of activism undertaken by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black women to run for President in the United States in 1973; the work done by Iris de la Cruz to challenge the stigma and shame of living with HIV; the creation of Kitchen Table- Women of Colour Press by Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde and Black scholar and writer Barbara Smith; the poetry writing of Two- Spirit artist and activist Chrystos, and the activism of trans activists Marcia P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Chelsea Goodwin to support homeless young drag queens, gay youth and trans women living in New York.