But Hughes' work is meant to create controversy, to shake audiences out of their complacency, and to provoke movement and thought.

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Hughes began her career as a painter of abstract art, and she brings that same sense of abstraction to her work in the theater. Her plays deconstruct common realities and then reorder them to provide a fresh perspective. They combine satire, silliness, and camp to explore serious issues of contemporary life. The result is always exuberant, usually hilarious, and frequently disturbing.

Hughes was born on March 10, 1955 into an upper-middle-class family in Saginaw, Michigan. She has remarked that her parents "taught me how to imagine a life different from theirs. They gave me stories." She graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1977.

Hughes moved to New York in 1979 and began to work with WOW Cafe, a lesbian theater group and storefront that was committed to experimentation. Working with such active lesbian theater artists as Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, Hughes infused the sophisticated East coast theater scene with her Midwestern brashness.

Some of Hughes' plays, such as Well of Horniness (1983) and The Lady Dick (1984), delve into the contradictions within the lesbian community itself. They are ribald satirical romps that deftly explore such deeply lesbian themes as butch/femme relationships and mistrust of bisexual women.

Other of her works tread the heavily mined territory of the family. World Without End (1989), for example, is about the death of her mother, while Clit Notes deals with her relationship with her father. These works are poignant, describing the isolation of the queer individual within the heterosexual family with heartbreaking and incisive wit.

Hughes' work has often provoked hostility in the lesbian community because of her determination to shatter taboos. In Clit Notes, for example, Hughes explores her own developing sexuality by revealing her attractions to her father, to her mother, and to butch lesbians who remind her of her father.

Even queers in her audience have sometimes felt that Hughes pushes the boundaries between eroticism and pornography, and some have called her work oppressive to women.

Hughes gained national notoriety in the early 1990s as one of the "NEA Four," artists who received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 but whose grants were then cancelled. In a climate of political conservatism and right-wing religious zealotry, the cancellations were justified on the basis of a clause in the organization's charter requiring that funded art be within "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public."

Hughes and the other artists--Karen Finley, John Fleck and Tim Miller--sued the NEA not only to have their grants reinstated but also to change the wording in the charter. They argued that the vagueness of the clause allowed it to be used politically to limit the artists' freedom of speech. The grants were eventually reinstated, but the "decency clause" remains part of the NEA charter.

Since Stonewall, lesbian artists in America, from installation artists to filmmakers and photographers to performance artists and painters, have become increasingly diverse and visible.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

Many gay and lesbian artists who have defied the legal and social prohibitions against explicit or sympathetic depictions of homosexuality have seen their art censored or suppressed.

Contemporary Art, which designates new currents in art since 1970, is identified with postmodernism; during this period an art addressing gay and lesbian identity emerged.

Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.

Performance art has been embraced by queer artists as a means of challenging the very idea of traditional in art and culture.

Performance artist Tim Miller presents shows that are rooted in his own life experiences, but that are also a powerful form of glbtq activism.

Having created a unique style, the Split Britches theater company has led the way in innovative lesbian performance.