Towleroad's Bobby Hankson celebrat the legacy of the inic mil RENT this week's 'Gay Inography' lumn.
Contents:
- GAY INOGRAPHY: IT’S TIME TO PAY ‘RENT’ PRAISE
- THEATERGOER WALKED OUT OF 'RENT' BEE THE 'SHOW WAS ABOUT GAYS'
GAY INOGRAPHY: IT’S TIME TO PAY ‘RENT’ PRAISE
“Bisexuals, Trisexuals, Homo Sapiens”. There’s no qutn that when Rent opened on Broadway April 1996—wh a pair of gay love stori, a narrative that put the AIDS crisis at s heart, and one of Broadway’s first openly queer romantic duets— was a tone of queer reprentatn.
Of the, two (Joanne and Mimi) are cis women, and another (Angel) uld be read ( morn parlance) as eher a trans woman or a genrfluid/femme-prentg gay man.
THEATERGOER WALKED OUT OF 'RENT' BEE THE 'SHOW WAS ABOUT GAYS'
That two of the romantic subplots (between Angel and Colls and Joanne and Mreen) are queer—and queered, given that Larson drew on Pucci’s La Bohème as source material—is stris ahead of the more faiar “token gay iend” narrative more faiar across theater, film, and televisn still today. * In this, Colls is particularly signifint: He is Mark and Roger’s bt iend and a gay man livg wh HIV, but he is also much more than that: a profsor of philosophy (formerly of MIT, later NYU) as well as a self-scribed anarchist. Mimi close, but miraculoly revers, and so, Rent do at first glance seem to be fallg to the “bury your gays” trope.
The characters reflect a iend group of filmmakers, micians, actors and anarchists of all kds of sexuali and genr exprsns, cludg gay, lbian, bi and drag queens.