Gay theatre: g out or gog back? | Culture profsnals work | The Guardian

Contents:

• A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS
• 1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER
• GAY THEATRE: G OUT OR GOG BACK?
• RACG TO PRERVE THE HISTORY OF MAE’S 1ST GAY RIGHTS ANIZATN

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.

1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY 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.

GAY THEATRE: G OUT OR GOG BACK?

But so heavy and lgerg was the perfume of gayns g off the project that even a heterosexual actor like Luckbill was thought to be mtg theatril suici to book . 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.

RACG TO PRERVE THE HISTORY OF MAE’S 1ST GAY RIGHTS ANIZATN

”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.

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.