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  • The Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present
  • Benjamin Kahan
The Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar Wilde to the Present. By John M. Clum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 246.

Animated by the recent political debates around gay marriage, John Clum’s recent book takes up “the paradox that, during the twentieth century, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays written in Britain and the United States about heterosexual marriage were written by homosexual men” (1). The book pits itself against the queer critique of marriage, arguing a strongly pro-gay marriage position from “the ‘gay center’” (8): “As many of us fight for the right to marry, we must also understand the contingency and variety of forms represented by the word ‘marriage.’ The works discussed in these pages see it as an unattainable ideal that we mortals continually fail to achieve, yet an ideal we also continually strive for” (16). The book reads a wide range of commercially successful British and American plays in order to demonstrate the multiplicity of meanings and historical shapes of marriage in the past and thus argue for new shapes—especially gay marriage—in the future. In the process, it also makes two claims that run throughout the book: first, that marriage was the central topic of commercially successful drama throughout much of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglo-American theatre; and second, that gay playwrights’ depictions of marriage provided a rich opportunity for representations of women, offering “the most fully rounded parts for actresses in the theater of their time” (12).

From the perspective of queer theory, several aspects of Clum’s critique seem surprising. Rather than engaging the work of well-known queer critics of gay marriage like Michael Warner, Lisa Duggan, David Eng, and Jasbir Puar, the only critic who articulates “a typical queer critique” (8) in Clum’s book is Paula Ettelbrick—a longtime fighter and advocate for LGBT rights.1 While Ettelbrick is indeed wary of gay marriage’s regulatory force, she could in no way be described as outside the “center” of the LGBT movement. More troubling than Clum’s choice of interlocutors, however, is his theoretical understanding of the sexual identities in the book’s subtitle, particularly his theorization of “straight unions.” Rejecting the categorization of “gay drama” for the works he considers (other than to say that this drama was “written by homosexuals”), Clum contends that “[t]he crucial point is that the work of these successful dramatists was also the straight drama of the time, and these artists’ portrayals of heterosexuality were the most powerful and amusing on the British and American stage during the last century” (13). In The Invention of Heterosexuality, Jonathan Ned Katz’s mapping of the invisibility of heterosexuality points toward the key problem in Clum’s formulation: “The intimidating notion that heterosexuality refers to everything differently sexed and gendered and eroticized is, it turns out, one of the conceptual dodges that keeps heterosexuality from becoming the focus of sustained, critical analysis.”2 Clum’s designation of these plays as “straight drama” falls precisely into the trap of shielding heterosexuality from the sustained analysis that Katz calls for. A andful of moments in which Clum refers to some works as containing a “homosexual subtext” (34) or as “a coded presentation of [End Page 617] . . . double life” (15) suggests that the category of “heterosexuality” remains under-theorized. While these marriages are differently sexed, Clum’s explication of their gay subtexts suggests that they are not merely straight unions.

In spite of these methodological shortcomings, the eight accessible chapters offer detailed biographical analyses and careful attention to the works of both familiar playwrights (Wilde, Maugham, Coward, Williams, Albee) and lesser-known dramatists (Emlyn Williams, Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, William Inge). For reasons of space and because it is the book’s strongest, I want to focus on Clum’s final chapter, “Gay Playwrights, Gay Husbands, Gay History.” Beginning with the teleplay That Certain Summer (1972), the film Victim (1961), and the play Love the Sinner (2010), Clum charts the evolution of the figure of the “gay husband” “from...

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