Sprawling cat-like on top of a podium in Emerson Hall last night, performance artist Holly Hughes described for more than 200 people how she fled the working-class Michigan town of her youth, "a world of E-Z Care Fabric and Hamburger Helper" and became a "separatist lesbian."

Hughes' performance, the kick-off event to Queer Harvard Month, came one day after she and three other artists defended their claim before the Supreme Court that Congress should not be able to deny funding to art that affronts "general standards of decency."

Hughes and the three other artists successfully challenged the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1990, after their individual grants were rescinded. But the Clinton administration appealed the federal appeals court ruling that the decency clause violated the First Amendment and could lead to "arbitrary and discriminatory" restrictions.

Yesterday, Hughes' blend of in-your-face lesbian sexuality and humor did not appear to shock anyone in the audience, which ranged in age from about 20 to 35, except for a pair of 60-somethings.

The audience laughed throughout the performance, which Assistant Professor of English Ann Pellegrini, who introduced Hughes, billed as "dangerous" to conservatives and life-altering.

"If you didn't come in the door queer," Pellegrini said in the opening, "we guarantee you'll be queer when you leave or your money back."

Sensuously licking her fingers and clutching her breasts, Hughes called performance art "a matter of creating your own reality and forcing other people to sit through it."

When a man in the front row guffawed loudly, she quipped, "I've had you before. You had to take this class again, didn't you? You'll never be a lesbian."

It was impossible to tell if Hughes was joking when she said theater is "a tool of social change," and straddled a chair to show how she passionately made out with her mother as a teenager.

"I was surrounded by people who were suffocating under the burden of a normal life," she said. "I realized I had a life of my own."

The most serious moment of the evening camewhen an audience member asked Hughes about thecase before the Supreme Court.

Hughes criticized Justice Stephen Breyer, whoquestioned whether funding for racist art shouldalso be protected by the First Amendment.

She called the NEA, which no longer has moneyto give individual grants, a "decimatedinstitution."

"That this case was even brought is anotherbetrayal by the Clinton administration," she said."It's a lose-lose situation for progressives.