The new off-Broadway play June and Nancy explores a lesbian relationship taking place in Manhattan during that same year. June Michelle Ramoni , an aspiring visual artist, is struggling to market her work while dealing with a decade-long unfulfilled marriage. The time spent with her husband is seen through a tense June Cleaver veneer.
Meanwhile, Nancy Gabrielle Maisels is worlds more independent. But unlike Joyce, Nancy is successful in winning June over :. Nancy is a lesbian who met June, a woman married for ten years, at an art museum, where she worked as a volunteer guide. June has had two miscarriages and is in a frustrating marriage to a man who only sees her as the woman who provides meals, housecleaning, occasional sex and nothing more.
She has no love and no future and has started to hit the bottle. Nancy, for her part, is out of work, has no partner and is thinking about moving to San Francisco.
Additionally, as an out-of-the-closet cisgender lesbian in , there is something remarkably fascinating — even erotic — about the idea of a closet. Discreet affairs between women behind closed doors are illicit, and rife with tension. This is only heightened by the cultural and aesthetic period in which June and Nancy is set. The stageplay is the lesbian equivalent of a Mad Men affair, but with less misogyny and so much more at stake.
On the eve of the Sexual Revolution, the intersection of womanhood and unorthodox sexual desire was still a very slippery slope. Female sexuality was still a largely misunderstood concept. The rigid femininity of the s reassured the rest of the world that you were heterosexual and obedient. Blending in was esteemed. Queer women frequently walked a fine line between bringing too much attention to themselves, or none at all. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the late 50s, Mildred Dickemann experienced this nuance firsthand :.
