"A major fact about being gay is that it doesn't show," writes Richard Dyer in his 1993 volume of essays, The Matter of Images.1 Although Dyer's focus is almost exclusively on representations of lesbian/gay/queer life in film, his observation holds equally true for the stage."If it weren't for the Jews, the fags, and the gypsies, there wouldn't be any theatre."—Mel Brooks
The history of lesbian and gay theatre, in fact, might be divided into two periods. Up until roughly the 1960s, portrayals of lesbians and gay men on stage were rather rare, almost universally vague, and heavily "encoded." With so few conspicuous homosexual characters on stage, playwrights and producers seemed to be debating whether to show homosexuality at all-not how it ought to look if they did. In the years that have followed, however, a shift has taken place, and the chief tension in lesbian and gay theatre across the last three decades has occurred not over whether homosexuality ought to be visible, but over how that which "doesn't show" should be made apparent.
Precisely because these two periods overlap, however, arguments can and frequently do still crop up over interpreting playwrights' "true" intentions for the characters or themes in their plays. Were George and Martha, for example, Edward Albee's warring, childless husband and wife in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, actually a barren male couple in "disguise"—as more than a few scholars and critics have argued? Albee vehemently rejects such an interpretation, but the history of secrecy about homosexuality in theatre makes the argument at least plausible. On the other hand, as Stuart Kellogg writes in his essay, "The Uses of Homosexuality in Literature," "'gay readers are especially quick to discover allusions to homosexuality and to crack coded references to it, sometimes so quick that they hear a thump where no apple fell.'"2
Decoding whether or not an artist has, so to speak, dropped any apples is part of what makes the history of homosexuality in theatre so fascinating. Clearly, theatre hasn't become so liberated that the "bad old days" of homosexual insinuation are completely behind us-and yet the era of out-and-proud revelation is still comparatively young. Somewhere between those poles, in any case, lies the ground where discussion of the history (and present) of representations of gay and lesbian life in American theatre must take place.
Daring to Speak Our Name
As theatre scholars point out, intentionally visible homosexuality
did make its way onto American stages even during the early decades of
this century. Kaier Curtin, for example, notes that the first lesbian character
in an English-language play appeared in The God of Vengeance at
Greenwich Village's Provincetown Theatre in 1922, a drama that was popular
enough to move to Broadway's Apollo Theatre the next year. In 1926, The
Captive, which premiered on Broadway, renewed the lesbian theme. Paradoxically,
both plays were written by European men (respectively Sholem
Asch, a popular Yiddish-theatre playwright living in Germany and Edouard
Bourdet, a Parisian), and each play ran for years in its original language
before being translated for (and scandalizing) American audiences.3
Although The God of Vengeance and The Captive are less well remembered today, modern audiences are nevertheless familiar with the "homosexuality as dirty secret" school of theatre, as evidenced by The Children's Hour (1934), Tea and Sympathy (1953), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and even A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), in which the homosexual character is never even seen (Blanche Dubois' young husband, whose suicide helps bring about her derangement).
By the mid1960s, however, the pathetic invert was much more likely to speak her or his name in person; The Killing of Sister George (1965) and Staircase (1966) come immediately to mind. During the decade before the Stonewall revolution, moreover, an alternative, gay-centered voice was raising itself, albeit faintly.
As early as 1961, for example, the Caffe Cino playwrights had begun to produce clubstyle gay theatre for the Greenwich Village art crowd. The talents of gay playwrights Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick, William Hoffman, and Doric Wilson, to name some of the best known Cino graduates, were nurtured there.4 Cino's notable contemporaries included the Judson Poets' Theatre, where, for years, the openly gay Reverend Al Carmines wrote and produced early "rock operas," some dedicated to themes of gay liberation (Carmines' The Faggot, for instance, which coincided with his 1973 sermon, "We Are All Faggots").5
In addition to being a catalyst for the postStonewall gay theatre movement, Judson Church and Caffe Cino were pivotal in the development of the Off and OffOffBroadway scene-then, much more than today, an exuberant, vital force in American drama.
The landmark gay theatre event of the era, of course, was the 1968 stage production of Mart Crowley's Boys in the Band and the widely distributed movie that followed in 1969. About Boys, nearly everything has been said: that it helped usher in Stonewall, that its outrageous depictions set gay lib back 20 years, that it is one of the most homophobic plays of all time, that it was one of the first plays to give genuine dimension to the lives of a variety of gay characters. Whatever one's opinion, Boys in the Band is a standard by which gay theatre was often measured in the two decades that came after, and the play (and response to it) contributed to a vast stirring up of the playwriting world as authors scrambled to answer the boisterous new call for "positive" gay characters.
What was considered "positive," of course, depended upon who did the evaluating. Somewhat paradoxically, a great many gay plays of the 1970s-chiefly men's plays-represented aspects of gay life that mainstream theatre would have been pilloried for exploring. They included the loneliness that caused older men to turn to hustlers; the debauchery of innocents by urban gay life; the insularity of the gay ghetto; the (usually futile) search for Mr. Right; and the neurotic entanglements and complicated sexual victimizations that occurred among friends, partners, and frustrated would-be lovers.
By far the mainstay of 1970s-style gay men's theatre, in fact, were plays about relationships-or, perhaps more accurately, about the unlikelihood of relationship. These nearly archetypal plays, which might be summed up as lighthearted comedies about tricking, were generally set in the tasteful walkups/garden apartments/summer cottages of gay New York, and typically showed gay men to be vain, fickle, and aesthetically sophisticated but emotionally shallow. Gay men were, however, screamingly witty, and were always ready with the clever putdown or the mordant bon mot. It was a renaissance of the "repartee play" that Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward would have envied (and which they doubtless helped inspire).
The casts invariably included several handsome young men; at some point in the course of the play one of them (and maybe more) would have occasion to remove his shirt (and maybe more). Sexuality, in other words, was the play's currency-in all three senses of the word. It was the electricity, the medium of exchange, and the very latest thing. Indeed, far from tackling worldclass issues, gay theatre was monopolized for most of its first two decades by white, urban, middleclass male characters who only occasionally managed to find their way out of the bedroom.
Characteristic of the period are Doric Wilson's A Perfect Relationship, Robert Patrick's TShirts, Victor Bumbalo's Kitchen Duty, and Terry Miller's Pines '79 (the quintessential Fire Island comedy). Reflecting on those years, journalist John F. Karr, then a staff member at San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros, quipped that Rhino's entire costume department in the 1970s had consisted of a jock strap and a flannel shirt.
Gay men's ambivalence regarding the intersection of physical and emotional intimacy found its counterpoint in a number of lesbian plays of the time, including the popular summer-cottage plays of Jane Chambers. These dramas, in which the heroines fall into committed coupledom at a pace approximately equal to the speed of sound, are perhaps as dated today as are men's sex farces. Nevertheless, their significance is that they represented the gay situation as many lesbians and gay men wanted it to be seen.
Politics and Art Size Each Other
Up
After
decades in which stage portrayals of homosexuals rarely varied from stereotypes
of perversion, shame, and shadow, the postStonewall years found lesbian
and gay playwrights answering the call for an examination of gay and lesbian
life that was, if not entirely uncritical, at least ultimately sympathetic.
Gay and lesbian theatre audiences, meanwhile, had grown less and less willing
to settle for encoded, heterosexuallybiased, scandalous representations
of homosexuality; they were no longer content with what William Hoffman
called "winks across the footlights."
But if the fusion of artistic expression and political stratagems fueled a significant theatre revolution, it also meant that playwrights who wanted to bring gay and lesbian characters to the stage had to serve a number of masters. Lesbian and gay politics had been overtaken by the philosophy that homophobia could be effortlessly defeated with a procession of "positive" gay characters, and virtually every public depiction of homosexuality had to be weighed in terms of its benefit to the entire species.
Now that lesbian and gay lives could be described on stage, in other words, whom would we be willing to sanction as role models? Was it, for example, the eternally single, alcoholic dyke (A Late Snow) or the long-coupled lesbian physician dedicated to AIDS work (Falsettoland) who seemed more "universal"? Were we more likely to admit that Emory, Boys in the Band's "butterfly in heat," resembled someone we knew; or was Jed, Ken Talley's strong, silent (and very butch) lover in Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July, the fellow we'd like our parents to meet? That all of these characters are intended to be "read" as homosexual is not in dispute. Rather, it is the way in which they are made visible as gay or lesbian that consistently provokes debate (and just as consistently leads to the writing of new plays).
As early as the mid-1970s, of course, lesbian and gay characters had begun to show up, without fanfare, in mainstream hits like Michael Cristofer's Shadow Box (1977), James Kirkwood's P.S., Your Cat is Dead (1975), and even A Chorus Line (1976). Martin Sherman's Bent was a Broadway smash in 1979, and Jane Chambers' Last Summer at Bluefish Cove enjoyed a long and successful Glines production during 1980 and 1981. International Stud, the first installment of what would become Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, appeared in 1978, and the second two parts followed in 1979.6 And George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (at The Public in 1986) featured Miss Roj, a fierce and prophetic "Snap Queen" who provides a dire yet dignified warning about "the life habits of a deteriorating society."
Each of these plays received serious
attention from the mainstream media, an indication not of legitimacy necessarily,
but perhaps of "raised consciousness." In large part, however, it was the
flourishing not just of gay and gay-inflected theatre but of lesbian and
gay theaters that represented one of the major legacies of postStonewall
liberation for the dramatic arts. Gay and gay-friendly venues such as the
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club joined a growing number of American gay
and lesbian companies, including Doric Wilson's The Other Side of Silence
("TOSOS," founded in 1974); The Glines (1976); Medusa's Revenge (1978);
Ron Tavel and John Vacarro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous and, later, Charles
Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatre Company; San Francisco's The
Cockettes (1970-1972) and Angels of Light (roughly 1975 to 1980), and the
Gay Men's Theatre Collective (which broke ground with its 1977 Crimes
Against Nature).7
By various estimates, as many as two score lesbian and gay theatre companies
were operating, in America alone, at the start of the 1980s.
The Creation of a Theatre of
AIDS
There
was promise, then, that alongside an alternative, even political lesbian
and gay theatre-one that explored problems unique to gay life, illuminated
lesbian and gay history, and traded at least somewhat in "inside" jokes-the
sheer number of homosexual characters being put before mainstream theatre
audiences might simply make acknowledgment of the variety of gay and lesbian
life unavoidable. One might, in any case, have predicted such a result.
Like every other aspect of gay life, however, the trajectory of gay and lesbian theater was skewed by the onslaught of AIDS, and the "agenda" of homo-friendly theater expanded to encompass a new and unanticipated subject matter. Indeed, in the years since the health crisis began, literally hundreds of AIDS-themed plays have been produced across the country-a tribute both to theatre's ability to respond to contemporary concerns and to the struggle of artists to come to terms with the devastation of the disease.
Although gay and lesbian theatre was not the only tributary of an authentic "theater of AIDS" that began to develop after 1984, it is not too much to say that the most enduring dramatic responses to AIDS have come from lesbian and gay playwrights. One of the earliest of these was The A.I.D.S. Show, a collection of skits and monologues by some 14 writers that was conceived and produced at San Francisco's Theatre Rhinoceros in 1984. Robert Chesley's Night Sweat (1984) and Jerker (1986), first produced in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, were significant considerations of the aspect of gay men's lives that would be most profoundly affected by AIDS: the expression and experience of sexuality.
Harvey Fierstein contributed Safe Sex in 1987, a trio of one-acts that zeroed in on AIDS' impact on that time-honored motif in gay theatre, the problem of intimacy between men; and Lanford Wilson's A Poster of the Cosmos (1988) was a portrait of a man whose search for connection with his dying lover and for surcease of survival guilt leads him to expose himself deliberately to his lover's infected blood. Dystopian visions of a savage, totalitarian New York City, in which an unnamed plague has annihilated most of the population, were explored in Paul Selig's Terminal Bar (1985) and Alan Bowne's Beirut (1986).
Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, of course, which opened at The Public in 1985; and William Hoffman's As Is, which moved from Circle Repertory to Broadway just 10 days later, are probably the best known examples of what is sometimes called the "first generation" of AIDS plays. Kramer's personal contribution to the theatrical discourse on AIDS is huge, and his later Just Say No (1988) and The Destiny of Me (1992) remain major documents of an era.
Particular recognition, however, must go to Theatre Rhinoceros for its commitment to developing and producing plays that explore the lesbian and gay community's ongoing response to AIDS. Doug Holsclaw, for example, a contributor to and codirector of The A.I.D.S. Show, later wrote Life of the Party (1986), one of the first plays to be, as Holsclaw put it, "blatant propaganda for safe sex." Leland Moss's Quisbies (1988), Robert Pitman's Passing (1989), Anthony Bruno's Soul Survivor (1989), Henry Mach's Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid (1991), Holsclaw's 1992 The Baddest of Boys, and James Carroll Pickett's Queen of Angels (housed at Rhino in 1993 but first produced at Highways in 1992), are only a few of the AIDS plays that have crossed Theatre Rhinoceros's stage.
Lesbian and Gay Theatre Learns
a Queer Aesthetic
At the same time that AIDS was making its impact felt on the artistic world-and
everywhere else-theatre was also being affected by two other significant
phenomena: the arrival of performance art as a popular, more-or-less legitimate,
even mainstream dramatic product; and a profound decline in theater attendance
and in government funding for the arts.
For gay and lesbian theatre artists, accustomed as they often were to producing work in out-of-the-way, under-funded venues, performance art was almost made to order. Of course it had its practical side-the pieces were highly mobile and often low-tech, and financially strapped theaters welcomed them. But performance art also provided access to gay and lesbian theatre for artists whose work had less often been seen there (people of color and women, for example), and, because of spaces like the WOW Cafe in New York; Highways in Los Angeles; the Valencia Rose and its later incarnation, Josie's, in San Francisco; and others nationwide, small-venue, cabaret-type theatre made a kind of comeback. (Shades of Caffe Cino.)
Perhaps most important, however, performance art provided, for the emerging "queer" arts community in particular, an even more immediate venue for the telling of the stories and myths not just of the individual but of the tribe. Although performance art sometimes furnished the opportunity for an entirely new echelon of artistic self-indulgence, it had the potential to command, from the audience, a degree of attention and to disclose, on the part of the artist, an intensity of purpose that made it extraordinary. It is probably no accident that the "NEA Four"—Holly Hughes, John Fleck, Tim Miller, and Karen Finley, artists defunded by the NEA in 1990—were all performance artists and that three of them called themselves queer.
Indeed, performance art has done a great deal to create and to expand the definition of lesbian and gay theatre and of queer theatre. Among those who are literally creating today's avante garde are artists such as Kate Bornstein (whose popular shows, including Hidden: A Gender and The Opposite Sex is Neither, explore her experiences as a transsexual lesbian); Wayne Corbitt (who proclaims, in his performance poem Black Birds Boogie in the Black Moonlight—a huge success at the Eighth Annual Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival in Seattle in 1991—"What I am is a black, sado-masochistic queer with AIDS"); John Kelly (who "inhabits" characters as diverse as Maria Callas, Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, and Mona Lisa); and Holly Hughes (whose Well of Horniness, Dress Suits to Hire, and World Without End are a reflection on sexual identity that is so kaleidoscopic, instinctive, intimate, hilarious, and even perverse that her audiences are stunned).
No consideration of modern lesbian
and gay theatre would be complete, however, without a respectful nod to
Tony Kushner's Angels in America, a work so lavish and unprecedented
that it almost immediately began to establish new standards. Although nearly
six years passed between the time Angels was commissioned by San
Francisco's now-defunct Eureka Theatre and the play's Broadway debut, Angels
avoided aging in the manner of many AIDS plays. Indeed, Angels is
a watershed not only in lesbian and gay theatre but in the American dramatic
mainstream as well. Now that George C. Wolfe is at the helm of New York's
influential Public Theatre, in fact-an openly gay African-American man
who is largely responsible for bringing Angels to Broadway-a new
kind of entrée into the world of "legitimate" theatre may become
available to lesbian and gay dramatists.
The Future Begins at Home
For
many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer theatre artists, however, access
remains a significant obstacle. Although it is true, for example, that
the internationally acclaimed gay troupe PomoAfroHomos found themselves
unwelcome at the National Black Theatre Festival in 1991 and again in 1993,
it is equally true that, when Wayne Corbitt premiered his full-length,
five-character play, Crying Holy, at Theatre Rhinoceros in 1993—the
first play about lesbian and gay life by an openly gay African-American
man—The Advocate considered it "not newsworthy" enough to cover.
Not a few aspects of lesbian and gay life, meanwhile, are still waiting to appear on stage at all. Lesbian theatre, for example, has demonstrated a certain unwillingness to look forcefully at sexuality (at lesbians who enjoy uncommitted sex or SM or who sometimes sleep with men, for instance), although notable exceptions include the work of Holly Hughes and the collaborations of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver.
Theatre by gay men, on the other hand, although it has often criticized "promiscuity," has seldom explored the ways in which white male privilege seriously compromises the meaning of "community" or questioned gay men's lack of interest in social issues that do not affect them directly. AIDS hasn't necessarily changed all that.
Gay and lesbian theatre has also been reticent to take on the "villains" in our midst-the opportunists brokering careers from the health crisis; the modern Uncle (and Aunt) Toms, whose rationale is assimilation rather than timidity; the moussed and shellacked young gays whose world of conspicuous consumption threatens, if anything, to become even more desolate because sex is so often present chiefly as sublimation. Although one of Angels in America's many breakthroughs was its acknowledgement that some gay men do, in fact, turn tail and run when their lovers are diagnosed with AIDS, there remains little in gay and lesbian drama to compare with works like All My Sons or A Doll's House-theatre's great morality plays.
It is, of course, always more difficult to characterize the present than the past. If the 1980s heralded an opportunity for gay theatre not only to transcend preliberation images of psychotic dykes and pathetic queens, but to move beyond the static portrayals institutionalized by gay and lesbian playwrights themselves during the 1970s, lesbian and gay theatre in the 1990s continues to be molded (and occasionally immobilized) by conflicts between archetype and stereotype, between "otherness" and assimilation, between selfawareness and selfconsciousness.
Although gay, lesbian, and even
queer theatre cannot continue to be held hostage by the demand for "positive"
images—as if gay identity could withstand anything but a challenge—the
political and economic realities of our times also mean that the function
of theatre in everyday life is changing in complicated ways. Lesbian and
gay theater is subject to all of the forces that are shaping theater generally
across the country; and that "general" theatre, in turn, is influenced
(as it has always been) by the talents of gay and lesbian writers and by
the extent to which gay life is American life. Such a cross-pollination
is always in the process of yielding new crops, but certain continuities
remain. As Mart Crowley has Emory say in the last act of Boys in the
Band, it may still be true that it "takes a fairy to make something
pretty."
Bibliography
Barnes, Noreen C. & Deutsch, Nicholas (Eds.) (1992). Tough Acts to Follow: One-Act Plays on the Gay/Lesbian Experience. San Francisco: Alamo Square Press. [Anthology]
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Carr, C. (1993). On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
Clum, John M. (1992/1994). Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press.
DeJongh, Nicholas (1992). Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage. London: Routledge.
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Gay Plays: An International Anthology (1989). New York: Ubu Repertory Theatre Publications.
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Helbing, Terry (1993). Gay and Lesbian Plays Today. Portsmouth, NH: Reed Elsevier/Heinemann. [Anthology]
Hoffman, William M. (1979). Gay Plays: The First Collection. New York: Avon/Bard Books. [Anthology]
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Loeffler, Donald I. (1975). An Analysis of the Treatment of the Homosexual Character in Dramas Produced in the New York Theatre from 1950 to 1968. New York: Arno Press.
McDermott, Kate (Ed.) (1985). Places, Please! The First Anthology of Lesbian Plays. Iowa City, IA: Aunt Lute.
Osborn, M. Elizabeth (Ed.) (1990). The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis. New York: Theatre Communications Group. [Anthology]
Osment, Philip (1989). Gay Sweatshop: Four Plays and a Company. London: Methuen. [Anthology and essay on the London company.]
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Footnotes
1Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. London and New York: Routledge, p. 19. [Back to text]
2Kellogg, Stuart (1983). In Kellogg, S. (Ed.) Literary Visions of Homosexuality. New York: The Haworth Press, p. 3. [Back to text]
3Curtin, Kaier (1987). We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage. Boston: Alyson Publications, pp. 25-67. Largely because of plays like these, theatrical depictions of "sex degeneracy or sex perversion" became illegal in New York State in 1927 under the "Wales Padlock Law"; in New York City, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst led a "public decency" campaign that resulted in even stricter limitations on Broadway stages. These laws were not repealed until 1967. [Back to text]
4Robert Patrick's Temple Slave (New York: Masquerade Books/Richard Kasak, 1994) is a loving and more-or-less fictionalized account of the Caffe Cino years. [Back to text]
5For a history of this era, see Sally Banes' Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962-1964 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983) and Greenwich Village 1963: Avante-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). [Back to text]
6Although The Children's Hour, Suddenly Last Summer, Tea and Sympathy, The Killing of Sister George, and Staircase were all made into motion pictures, Torch Song Trilogy, in 1988, became the very first gay-positive play to make the transfer to celluloid. [Back to text]
7Thompson, Mark (1987). "Children of Paradise: A Brief History of Queens." In Thompson, M. (Ed.) Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 49-68. [Back to text]