Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama by John M. Clum (review)

Book Reviews · JOHN M. CLUM. Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press 1992. Pp. xviii. 317. illustrated. $29.95. Surveying more than fifty years of representations of male homosexuality on the stages of the United Stales and Britain, John M. Clum finds problems with the problem play. "Other forms are more suited to convey the gay experience as something richer than a social problem to be solved or a domestic intrusion to be expelled," he concludes. "Realism defines and reinforces limits" (276). It's all the more ironic, therefore, that Acting Gay is strong on both aspects of modernist drama: problem and plot. The prob· lern is binaries; the plot is liberation. Heterosexual/homosexual, pre-SlOnewalVpost-Stonewall, public/private, pathology/ liberation, play/society: the argument in Acting Gay turns on a series of binaries. The most important of these is pre-Stonewall/post-Stonewall. Before the Stonewall riots of 1969, male homosexual identity was scripted by the dominant culture; since Stonewall, Clum contends, gay men have increasingly learned to speak for themselves. .(The equivalent turning point in Britain is taken to be the repeal of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship in 1968.) The problem for homosexual playwrights, actors, and audiences has been how to negotiate these binaries, in particular the binary of helerosexual /homosexual in which "heterosexual" has always been trumps. Despite the prominence of Stonewall, the plot of Acting Gay is not strictly chronological . Of the book's three parts (each consisting of two chapters), the first anatomizes "Bodie~and Taboos," what a more jargon-happy critic might caU the semiotics and the politics of "acting gay." Only then, after the stage signs of homosexuality have been set in place (two men kissing, frontal male nudity, drag) and the political issues have been put on the table (the challenge of representing AIDS), does the book ta:.