At 7 pm Saturday 17 June 2000, the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) performed The Mass Psychology of Fascism in front of a privately owned surveillance camera that faces the street (and so surveills more public space than private property). Presented as part of "Gay Shame 2000," which is an annual event designed to counter the increasingly mainstream and commercialized event known as "Gay Pride Week," the SCP's performance took place across from the event's host, the Dumba performance space at 57 Jay Street in the Fulton Ferry neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. For this performance, the SCP consisted of Bill, Susan and Kate of Rebel Fux. SCPer Scott took still photographs. He was also one of the event's organizers, and was one of the editor's of the event's photocopied magazine, which reprinted the flyer about racial profiling the SCP made out of an article published in the New York Post. Scott and the other members of the SCP are sure surveillance cameras are being and will continue to be used for sexual profiling (the harassment and selective prosecution of women, gays, lesbians and transsexuals) as well as racial profiling (the harassment and selective prosecution of people of color). As a result, the SCP has committed itself to making contact with radicals in all of the "profiled" communities. One could say that the groups' trip to Peekskill was to race relations what the group's Gay Shame 2000 performance was to sexuality.
The group chose to perform its adaptation of Wilhelm Reich's book of critical theory in part because it explicitly concerns sexual repression, which is brought to bear upon gays and lesbians and transgendered folk even more than upon heterosexuals, and in part because the SCP's version rejects Reich's homophobia and offers a vision in which both heterosexuals and gays and lesbians will be free to live and engage in sex as they please. About 30 people watched as the group performed the 14-board-long play at a leisurely pace, confident that it would not be interrupted by either security guards or police officers. The response was quite positive; most of the boards received bursts of knowing laughter or shouted comments.
Contact the Surveillance Camera Players
By e-mail e-mail:notbored@NOSPAMoptonline.net
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998
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