Introduction: The Politics of Gay Identity

Despite the emerging bio-medical, neurological, sociological and psychological discourses in recent decades about genetic coding, the size of the hypothalamus gland, the influence of popular culture, and the ways in which a person is fashioned by the socio-sexual pressures generated by his/her childhood environment, it remains beyond the tongue's ability to tell why, and even how, a person is gay. But what remains beyond doubt is that sexual identities, however fluid, are fashioned in political contexts and carry political consequences. Because theater is both a metaphor for the performance of sexual identity, and an actual space in which such identities are fashioned and modeled, the changing politics of gay identity during the last 70 years can be framed be a recent debate over the responsibility of the gay playwright.

In 1993, during a talk-back following a workshop production of A Perfect Ganesh, activist Larry Kramer challenged playwright Terrence McNally's choice at the height of the AIDS epidemic to write about two white, middle-aged, heterosexual women from Greenwich, Connecticut, who go on vacation to India.¹ At such a critical moment in gay history, Kramer argued, gay playwrights needed to focus all of their energy on educating the public about AIDS, on securing federal dollars for AIDS research, and on combating the homophobia inherent in American society—much as Tony Kushner had done in his two-part Angels in America (1991-2) and Kramer himself in The Normal Heart (1985) and The Destiny of Me (1992). McNally had confronted the emotional toll taken on gay men and their families by AIDS-related homophobia in his Emmy award-winning Andre's Mother (1988, televised 1990), and at the time was exploring people's inability to deal with AIDS in terms of the larger difficulties that humans have in connecting with each other in what would become an informal tetralogy: Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh (1993), and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994). But AIDS is presented in McNally's theater as one among multiple occasions for humans to ignore each other's suffering, and Kramer is correct that McNally's plays of this period are not as aggressively or overtly political as his own and Kushner's.

Kramer was reacting against the social construction of homosexuality as something shameful to which he was introduced in youth—what we may think of as the initial stage of the politicization of gay identity in recent history. As daring as Tennessee Williams's plays were for their day, Williams could deal with homosexuality only obliquely, as a secret to be exposed or a shame to be overcome—witness Blanche's guilt over the suicide of her young husband, Brick Pollitt's confusion regarding the feelings that his late friend Skipper had for him, or Catharine Holly's conflict with Violet Venable over how Sebastian's summertime sexual excursions will be remembered. The only model of a loving, socially functional homosexual relationship that Williams dared offer is the marriage of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, in whose bed Maggie and Brick sleep in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but these men are long dead and are referred to only in passing. Little wonder that, when a playwright as daring as Williams still felt the burden of the closet, New York Times theater critic Harold Taubman could charge famously that gay playwrights were unable to create persuasive female characters.² To the Cold War homophobe anxious over the subversion of American strength from within, Williams's Blanche Dubois, Alma Winemiller and Alexandra Del Lago are—in their pursuit of handsome young men— really homosexual men in disguise, and the very popularity of Williams's plays thus proves a subtle undermining of the American family. Similarly, to so rabid a champion of normalcy as Taubman, the spinster schoolteacher Rosemary's ripping off the drifter Hal's shirt in Picnic, like Lola's admiring the physique of the athlete who models shirtless for an art student in Come Back, Little Sheba, can only be a veiled...