Theatre Rhoceros: A Gay Company on JSTOR

Contents:

• 1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER
• A BRIEF HISTORY OF LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
• WHY WE STILL NEED GAY THEATRE
• GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT
• A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS
• THE GAY AND LBIAN THEATRIL LEGACY

1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER

Queer theatre is the accepted generic term for the gay theatre movement: one that embrac both men and women, that vers plays, mils, baret and jt about everythg else, and which has been gog strong Bra and Ameri for well over 40 years.

But dramatists at the time were obliged to work : when the hero of Emlyn Williams's superlative Acla (1950) is acced of havg sex wh an unrage girl Rotherhhe, I tomatilly assume Williams was really talkg about 's been hearteng to see gay wrers explog the eedom that me wh the aboln of censorship and the relaxatn of the law. And Bra over the last 20 years wrers such as Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy (who is Amerin by birth), Kev Elyot, Alexi Kaye Campbell, Samuel Adamson, Mark Ravenhill and many others have all alt openly and explicly wh gay what is there to pla about an era when plays cludg Ravenhill's Mother Clap's Molly Hoe and Alan Bent's The Hab of Art occupy the stag of London's Natnal Theatre, when mils such as La Cage x Foll be prof wh preachg sexual tolerance and when specialised ftivals, offerg gay plays to primarily gay dienc, ntue to thrive?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

It's also a ltle-noticed fact that when Gregory Doran assum ntrol of the Royal Shakpeare Company 2013 two of our big natnal pani will, for the first time ever, be n by gay I would like to see, however, are more plays on the Khner-Ravenhill mol which al wh sexualy a wir polil ntext. I jt wish more gay dramatists would rise to the challenge, so eagerly grasped by fictn wrers, of relatg personal dilemmas to public read: Not In Front of the Audience: homosexualy on stage by Nicholas Jongh (2002) Le of Bety by Alan Hollghurst (2004), for the nnectn mak between sexualy and the state of the natn. In 1964, spe a social climate of homophobia that pervad Amerin life for the send third of the 20th century, two one-act plays prented Off-Off-Broadway at the Caffe Co revolutnized how gay characters uld be reprented theatrilly.

WHY WE STILL NEED GAY THEATRE

We uldn’t jt log on to the ter or turn on the televisn to fd reprentatns of ourselv, we had to triangulate and hypothize om half-hts and sual pretory remarks by New York wrers about Greenwich Village parti and ffeeho that wh an only half-discerned arty Bohemian environment there might possibly be a ltle more acceptance of homosexuals. In tanm wh the work of activist polil groups, which had begun anizg the late 1950s, the wrers at the Caffe Co—wh their wild talents for turng fantasy to theatril realy for their untercultural dienc—metaphorilly gave birth to the ncept of “gay liberatn.

GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT

LANFORD WILSON and Robert Patrick were not unaware that their impulse to wre plays about openly gay characters was chartg new terrory, as wns Wilson’s “thor not” to “The Madns of Lady Bright”: “I believe the ia of the play shocked me.

By reversg the prumptn of heterosexualy as origal tth, and puttg the “straight man” a posn which he mt expla his “foreign” sexualy to a gay man, the playwright language to unrme the heterosexist perceptn of realy. However, throughout 150 years of homosexual social movements (roughly om the 1870s to today), lears and anizers stggled to addrs the very different ncerns and inty issu of gay men, women intifyg as lbians, and others intifyg as genr variant or nonbary.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS

Such eyewns acunts the era before other media were of urse riddled wh the bias of the (often) Wtern or Whe observer, and add to beliefs that homosexual practic were other, foreign, savage, a medil issue, or evince of a lower racial hierarchy. The European powers enforced their own crimal s agast what was lled sodomy the New World: the first known se of homosexual activy receivg a ath sentence North Ameri occurred 1566, when the Spanish executed a Frenchman Florida. Biblil terpretatn ma illegal for a woman to wear pants or a man to adopt female drs, and sensatnalized public trials warned agast “viants” but also ma such martyrs and hero popular: Joan of Arc is one example, and the chillg origs of the word “faggot” clu a stick of wood ed public burngs of gay men.

Their wrgs were sympathetic to the ncept of a homosexual or bisexual orientatn occurrg naturally an intifiable segment of humankd, but the wrgs of Krafft-Ebg and Ellis also labeled a “third sex” generate and abnormal. The blu mic of Ain-Amerin women showsed varieti of lbian sire, stggle, and humor; the performanc, along wh male and female drag stars, troduced a gay unrworld to straight patrons durg Prohibn’s fiance of race and sex s speakeasy clubs.

This creasg awarens of an existg and vulnerable populatn, upled wh Senator Joseph McCarthy’s vtigatn of homosexuals holdg ernment jobs durg the early 1950s outraged wrers and feral employe whose own liv were shown to be send-class unr the law, cludg Frank Kameny, Barbara Gtgs, Allen Gsberg, and Harry Hay. Awarens of a burgeong civil rights movement (Mart Luther Kg’s key anizer Bayard Rt was a gay man) led to the first Amerin-based polil mands for fair treatment of gays and lbians mental health, public policy, and employment.

THE GAY AND LBIAN THEATRIL LEGACY

In 1951, Donald Webster Cory published “The Homosexual Ameri, ” assertg that gay men and lbians were a legimate mory group, and 1953 Evelyn Hooker, PhD, won a grant om the Natnal Instute of Mental Health to study gay men. Fstrated wh the male learship of most gay liberatn groups, lbians fluenced by the femist movement of the 1970s formed their own llectiv, rerd labels, mic ftivals, newspapers, bookstor, and publishg ho, and lled for lbian rights mastream femist groups like the Natnal Organizatn for Women. And polil actn explod through the Natnal Gay and Lbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, the electn of openly gay and lbian reprentativ like Elae Noble and Barney Frank, and, 1979, the first march on Washgton for gay rights.