Personal life
Paula Vogel had two brothers: Mark, and Carl, who died of AIDS in 1988. Carl
is namesake for the Carl Vogel Center in Washington, D.C., founded by
their father Don Vogel. The Center is a service provider for people
living with HIV.

Vogel was married to Brown University professor and author, Anne Fausto-Sterling, in Truro, Massachusetts on September 26, 2004

This is the forty-forth  post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

In her work, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel has tackled
difficult topics, including AIDS, incest, and prostitution.
Born November 16, 1951 in Washington, D. C., Paula Vogel grew up in the
Maryland suburbs of the city. Her parents divorced when she was eleven,
and the break-up of the family led to "a very painful adjustment," as
she stated in a 1999 interview. Vogel and her older brother Carl
remained with their mother while the eldest sibling, Mark, lived with
their father, who remarried.


Vogel said that her stepmother "didn't want [her] around" and that, in
any event, her mother discouraged her from communicating with her
father.
It was Vogel's brother Carl who became her protector and guide after
their parents' divorce. Only thirteen years old at the time, he
declared, "I'm her father," and proceeded to encourage her to do well in
school so that she could attend college.

Vogel later commented, "In a working-class family, college is extremely
alien. It's almost as if you are leaving your class and repudiating your
family." Nevertheless, with her brother's support, she won a
scholarship to Bryn Mawr. She left after two years, however, because the
college ruled her concentration in dramatic literature "not
academically valid" and consequently reduced her scholarship so much
that she could not continue there.
She transferred to Catholic University, earning her bachelor's degree in
1974. She pursued graduate studies at Cornell for the next three years.

Vogel's brother Carl also went to college and graduate school. During
his student days he became a gay activist, for which he paid a heavy
price: he was beaten up; some faculty members shunned him; and his
apartment was broken into and ransacked.

Carl Vogel fell ill with AIDS in the late 1980s, and the family rallied
around him. Paula Vogel was impressed with the "incredible generosity"
of their brother Mark, who was accepting of the homosexuality of both of
his siblings. Their father also showed a positive attitude. For their
mother it was more difficult to come to terms with her children's sexual
orientation, but eventually, said Vogel, she "came to a point where she
was personally proud."
Carl Vogel died in 1988. In his memory, his father founded an HIV/AIDS
counseling and treatment facility, the Carl Vogel Center, in Washington,
D. C.

Paula Vogel commemorated her brother with a play, The Baltimore Waltz
(written in 1989, first produced in 1992). The off-Broadway production,
which starred Cherry Jones, won an Obie Award for Best New American
Play.

Vogel received a playwriting fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Arts in 1979 and another from the MacDowell Colony in 1981. During
this time she authored a number of plays, including The Oldest
Profession (1981), which concerns four prostitutes rather well up in
years and their madam, who plied her trade in New Orleans's Storyville
before transplanting herself to New York City.
Vogel is no stranger to controversial themes. It was a play about
incest, How I Learned to Drive (1997), that won her the Pulitzer Prize.

In the play, which was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), a
middle-aged woman known as Li'l Bit relives the days when she was
learning to drive as a teenager. Since her father is gone, her alcoholic
Uncle Peck becomes her teacher. The man is obsessed with his beautiful
young niece and uses the driving lessons as a strategy for being alone
with her. Though the play in no way condones Peck's pedophile behavior,
he is seen more as a tragic figure than simply a villainous one.

There were more than fifty productions of How I Learned to Drive in the
year that Vogel received the Pulitzer Prize. She also won Obie, Drama
Desk, New York Drama Critics' Circle, and Outer Critics' Circle Awards
for the play. Vogel's road to success was not without its bumps. Subsequently, however, she has enjoyed a string of successes.

After the highly acclaimed How I Learned to Drive came The Mineola Twins
(first performed in Juneau, Alaska in 1998, then in New York in 1999).

Both twins are played by the same actress, and, in a gender-bending
twist, a single actress plays both Myra's partner and Myrna's husband.

Critic Charles Isherwood commented that through The Mineola Twins Vogel
showed that "it's human lives that are fractured and real people's
psyches that are torn apart by the good-and-evil poles that remain such a
mysteriously powerful part of American culture."

In 2000, Vogel contributed a segment to the anthology movie, directed by
Donna Deitch for Showtime, Common Ground, which examines attitudes
toward homosexuality in a fictitious small town in three different
decades. Vogel's segment, "A Friend of Dorothy's," is set in the 1950s,
and explores the predicament of a woman who has been dishonorably
discharged from the U. S. Navy after her lesbianism is discovered.

Gerard Raymond of The Advocate stated that the play "bears all the Vogel
hallmarks: humor, compassion, unflinching honesty, and a political
voice filtered through family drama."

Vogel herself commented that in the play she was "revisiting one of
[her] primary concerns, which is that it's homophobia, not so much as
AIDS, which kills in this country."

In addition to writing her own plays Vogel has taught playwriting for
many years. With a three-year fellowship from the Pew Charitable Trust
she served as writer-in-residence at the University of Alaska and the
Perseverance Theater in Juneau beginning in 1981. She joined the faculty
of Brown University as director of the graduate playwriting program in
1985 and has been named the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of
Creative Writing.


Since 1990 she has been the artistic director of the Theatre Eleanor
Roosevelt in Providence, Rhode Island. She is also
playwright-in-residence at New York's Signature Theater Company, which
put on three of her plays in 2004.

On September 26, 2004 Vogel married her long-time partner, Anne
Fausto-Sterling, in Truro, Massachusetts. Fausto-Sterling, the author of
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
(2000), is a Professor of biology and gender studies at Brown.


In an interview a month after the wedding Vogel stated, "What is
surprising is the emotion of it being legal--to realize that marriage is
not just a personal commitment. It's a commitment from a larger
community to embrace a couple."

With characteristic humor, she said that she would miss having
Fausto-Sterling's mother refer to herself as her "mother-in-love or
mother-out-law," but, on a more serious note, she added that
Fausto-Sterling "is a very remarkable person, and I have been happy
every day of my life living with her."
Linda Rapp



Honors and awards
Subsequent to her Obie Award for Best Play (1992) and Pulitzer Prize in
Drama (1998), Vogel received the Award for Literature from The American
Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004.
She won the 1998 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
In 2003, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival created an
annual "Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting" for "the best student-written
play that celebrates diversity and encourages tolerance while exploring
issues of dis-empowered voices not traditionally considered
mainstream."

Bibliography
Swan Song of Sir Henry (1974)
Meg (1977)
Apple-Brown Betty (1979)
Desdemona, A Play about a Handkerchief (1979)
Bertha in Blue (1981)
The Oldest Profession (1981)
And Baby Makes Seven (1984)
The Baltimore Waltz (1992)
Hot 'N Throbbing (1994)
The Mineola Twins (1996)
How I Learned To Drive (1997)
The Long Christmas Ride Home (2004)
Civil War Christmas (2008) [10]