Against Chronology: Intergenerational Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Theatre and Performance Histories

Our intention with this essay is to demonstrate that chronology is not the most effective approach for teaching queer theatre and performance histories. While it is a common practice to map out significant theatrical events through presenting a linear progression of history, especially in larger survey courses, the essay proposes an alternative model that seeks to uncover the intergenerational connections and queer temporalities embedded within queer history. US-focused LGBTQ+ theatre courses taking a chronological approach tend to begin with landmark gay and lesbian plays and performances from the beginning of the twentieth century, including Sholem Asch, Mae West, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson, Mart Crowley, Jane Chambers, Terrence McNally, Paula Vogel, Harvey Fierstein, Larry Kramer, Martin Sherman, Moisés Kaufman, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlam, Split Britches, Carmelita Tropicana, Charles Busch, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Cherríe Moraga, the NEA 4, Pomo Afro Homos, Taylor Mac, Diana Son, Justin Vivian Bond, Vaginal Davis, Robert O'Hara, and Donja R. Love, among many other possibilities. The works of these artists are framed by key moments in LGBTQ+ history such as censorship and anti-gay legislation; gay rights movements; the Stonewall Riots; the AIDS epidemic and the rise of Act Up and Queer Nation; the culture wars; marginal to mainstream representation on stage, film, and television; transgender rights; the passing of hate crimes law; and gay marriage, to name some of the most prominent. But without impinging upon the importance of positioning these queer texts within their appropriate cultural and political moments, we would like to challenge the strict adherence to chronology and embrace the potential for cross-temporal connections between historical and artistic movements. This would serve to highlight the intergenerational linkages among queer artists and communities through a nonlinear clustering of works that would highlight influences and legacies unfolding outside and beyond linear progressions of time. Importantly, this move is not a proposal for an unhistoricism as identified by Valerie Traub, but rather to show the queer potential of an anti-chronological arrangement of queer performance history that challenges the implications of straight time and heteronormative life course models. This methodology, as elucidated below, is influenced by critiques of chrononormativity advanced in both queer studies and age studies.

While linear frameworks assist in creating seemingly coherent narratives for students less familiar with the field of study, we argue that chronology creates a false linear-progress narrative that does not value or underscore the dynamic exchange of aesthetic ideas, activist values, and alternative communities embedded in queer history that offer the potential for new perspectives and critiques of the present. Both queer studies and age studies challenge linear approaches to temporality, disrupting static perceptions of the life course that reinforce compulsory heterosexuality for the perceived "good life" and emphasize the false binary between youth and age as well as "peak-and-decline" ideology surrounding the aging process, which positions mid-to-later life as both an undesirable and burdensome position for the supposedly nonproductive older individual within society.¹ These homophobic and ageist cultural assumptions, combined with heteronormative standards, undermine the important contributions and lineages of queer elders across theatre and performance histories, while reinforcing the fallacy that creativity dwindles with age. Age studies theorist Cynthia Port draws important connections between queerness and aging: "the old are often, like queers, figured by the cultural imagination as being outside mainstream temporalities and standing in the way of, rather than contributing to, the promise of the future" (3). Taking an intergenerational approach to LGBTQ+ theatre and performance histories allows students to perceive creativity across the entire life course without privileging youth over age, and also challenges decline ideology by highlighting the continuously developing aesthetic in an artist's later years as well as their direct influence on younger generations. Calling attention to such forms of intergenerational queer kinship and collaboration complicates the notion of progress that serves to displace the old in favor of the young (a reality often unconscious to our college-age students).

While we do not suggest privileging the work of the old over the young or the...