20 Imag From the Naked Age of Erotic Gay Theater

Contents:

• A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS
• WHAT’S WH GAY MEN AND MIL THEATER?
• 1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER
• ALL GAYS LOVE THEATER
• THE 5 BEST MOSW GAY CLUBS & BARSGAY CLUBS & BARS MOSW

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS

In wrg , Crowley had liberately taken up the challenge tossed down by the theater cric Stanley Kffmann, who a 1966 New York Tim say headled “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguis” asked why that era’s most famo gay playwrights — meang Edward Albee, Tennsee Williams and William Inge — didn’t wre about themselv and leave straights alone.

Nor do homosexuals suffer om an “emotnal-psychologil illns, ” as he sually mentns — for this was an era which such public slurs were chic and permissible, pecially the guise of lerary cricism.

”) Still, there was no nyg that ank plays about gay male life had never reached the mastream, never perated the circl which Kffmanns and Roths and social Crowley wrote the bt and funnit and gayt play he uld, about ne gay men (or maybe eight and a half) at a birthday party. Though some of the men fse the ambient homophobia of the time better than others, almost all of them suffer om the self-hatred that seemed then, and maybe now, to filtrate even the bt-fend personaly.

WHAT’S WH GAY MEN AND MIL THEATER?

It is also an acknowledgment of a larger urgency about the reprentatn of gay men popular entertament: a moment that, the theater at least, is both sprgboard and logy. At a time when many of the classic gay plays are returng to the Broadway stage — “Boys the Band, ” “Angels Ameri” and “Torch Song Trilogy” among them — almost no new on are on the horizon to jo them. When Luckbill, then 33, agreed to play Hank — the “straightt” of the gay men, who’d left his wife and children — his agent said he might as well bid goodbye to his reer.

William Friedk’s fahful movie versn, released 1970 and starrg the entire stage st, turned to a touchstone of gay style and sufferg for gays and straights well beyond New York. I wre that admirg many of s spirual forebears, om Tennsee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” 1945 to Robert Anrson’s “Tea and Sympathy” 1953 to the early works of Doric Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick and many others who helped spark an efflorcence of downtown gay drama centered at Caffe Co, wh s makhift k-crate stage, startg while buildg on those — and, Crowley says, on Arthur Lrents’s screenplay for Aled Hchck’s 1948 film, “Rope, ” which two gay men murr a classmate for sport — “The Boys the Band” has had the more nsequential gay trajectory. They and the rt of the starry st are succsful, openly gay men, as are the producers, Ryan Murphy and David Stone, and the director, Joe was a liberate statement, meant to acknowledge how far the world has e sce 1968.

“The guys that are the leads, ” Murphy says, “are the first generatn of gay actors who said, ‘We’re gog to live thentic liv and hope and pray our reers rema on track’ — and they have. Mantello pots out the startlg paradox that all the gay members of the origal pany felt pelled to stay the closet “even though they were a groundbreakg play about gay men. ”But the way the world se gay people and the way gay people see themselv have changed so much, and of late so fast, that plays om even jt a few years ago n seem like Ken Burns documentari.

1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER

In one sense, then, the classic gay plays are tnal: remdg a placent generatn of the stggl and tragedi (and fabulons) that unrlie the glossy image of rapid progrs. In the aftermath of the Stonewall rts of 1969, while the play still ran, s portrayal of gay male life me to be seen as unterrevolutnary, which was exactly backward, if unrstandable light of the rebrandg unrway. The characters’ promiscuo, boa-flgg, “Oh, Mary”-spoutg, drown-your-troubl--a-vodka-bottle histrnics were distctly off-msage durg the years when gay men were tryg to cultivate lawmakers and police wh their new imag as activists or pillars of the muny, not of Sodom.

Even Albee, who Crowley spects vted secretly the origal productn, once tarred the play as “a highly skillful work that I spised” bee “did ser damage to a burgeong gay rpectabily movement. And bee I’m wrg about plays that have shaped gay male life, ’s not surprisg that all the playwrights I name are gay hardly needs argug that one of them is Tony Khner, whose play “Angels Ameri: A Gay Fantasia on Natnal Them, ” opened on Broadway 1993.

ALL GAYS LOVE THEATER

It is also, s more timate scen, so funny and argumentative, so vatic, so sharp and so unncerned wh gay rpectabily that you n see a straight le leadg back to “The Boys the Band. Emphasizg that, the set sign by Eugene Lee and Keh Raywood featured on the theater’s walls a nng list of the nam of the ad, along wh the mountg ath toll, subtotaled by by Martha Swope / the New York Public LibraryThe actn largely tracks Kramer’s fur battle to get the ernment, the medil tablishment and gay men themselv to pay attentn to the disaster that was jt begng to engulf them. For gay playwrights wrg before 1960, the lk between self and society was severed by homophobia: The self uld not engage openly wh society, or not, at least, ont of society.

THE 5 BEST MOSW GAY CLUBS & BARSGAY CLUBS & BARS MOSW

An ventory of my tongue yields nothg that looks like my mother the remblance stops at the mouth She is fluent a language I am only ever ugly she falls asleep ont of the tv her show muted I wonr if her dreams I n speakThe actor reads "Translatn" by Julian the efficy of the nonil gay plays did not pend, or pend only, on gay dienc. Like other margalized groups — Jews of an earlier generatn who objected to the tenement soap operas of Clifford Ots; blacks who found Uncle Tomism Lorrae Hansberry’s “A Rais the Sun” — many gays saw betrayal hont, let alone exaggerated, portras. “Jefey, ” too, may be theater huntg; a recent readg starrg Urie and Rsell Tovey was part an experiment to see how lands eper reason this material holds up spe beg so tied to s tim is that gayns, even now, do not operate as other mory inti do.

So whatever advanc have been ma supportive parentg, the procs by which a gay man fds himself and his people is much the same as ever was: Ontogeny repulat phylogeny.