Gay-Gazing at The Lisbon Traviata, or: How Are Things in Tosca, Norma?

Gay-Gazing at The Lisbon Traviata, or: How Are Things in Tosca, Norma? Steven Drukman Twenty years ago, Laura Mulvey wrote the groundbreaking Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, reformulating Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Lacanian gaze theory into a theory of feminist film spectatorship. Her essay is considered something of an old chestnut these days, but as Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane point out in a 1989 issue of Camera Obscura, "it often still seems that every feminist writing on film feels compelled to situate herself in relation to Mulvey's essay" (9). Feeling similarly compelled, I wrote on the concept of the "gay gaze"1—a restructuring of Mulvey's taxonomy of fetishism, voyeurism, ego-identification—filtered through a homosexual awareness. To summarize briefly, I concurred that traditional narrative is often phallic-driven but (citing Mary Ann Doane's writings on women's sexual response to narrative ) concluded that the gay male spectator is capable of a "transvestic" identification: i.e., identifying with the usual object of scopophilic pleasure while objectifying the intended subject of ego-identification. These oscillating subject positions are crucial to understanding the gay gaze, and unique to a gay male way of viewing film, theatre, etc. Moreover, I posited that a common response for the gay male spectator is a hyper-empathic response to the female object: something I called "divaidentification ." One aspect of diva-identification relies on the gay man's awareness of the theatricalization of any identity, due to his innate awareness of the constructedness of gender roles.2 Furthermore, as Michael Bronski points out in Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility, The cult of the diva has had an important place in the relationship between gay men and opera. Even stauncher than the fans of Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand are the claques of Maria Callas (la divina). In a world that persecutes homosexuals, gay men easily identify with love-torn, victimized heroines who populate most operas. (136) In a similar vein (and in one of the earliest essays on gay male spectatorship) Robert Patrick writes: 23 24 Steven Drukman Gay people have for so long been without characters to 'identity with' that most of us 1) went either cynical or esthetic [or] 2) we identified with our oppression and fitted ourselves into 'feminine' roles. This is perhaps the origin of . . . 'opera queens' and their passion for screaming harpies. (68) Finally, Wayne Koestenbaum's recent The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire is the first book-length exploration of the imbrications of gay male culture and opera.3 He devotes a chapter, "The Codes of Diva Conduct," entirely to diva-worship, wherein he attempts "to trace connections between the iconography of 'diva' as it emerges in certain publicized lives and a collective gay subcultural imagination" (84). While any totalizing statements about a "collective gay subcultural imagination" are now under scrutiny in the academy, there seems to be ample evidence of diva-identification inflecting the lives of many modern gay men. For theatre scholars also involved in the burgeoning field of "Gay and Lesbian Studies," decisions about which works constitute the genre of Gay Drama are central to this new genre's formation. Too often, the question of reception is factored out of the decision process: e.g., How do marginalized sexualities "read" certain texts? How is gay experience enunciated in certain dramatic texts, and how is traditional (read: heterosexual) reception obviated? See, for example, Sam Abel's thoughtful examination of "Gay and Lesbian Studies and the Theatre Curriculum" in the March 1994 issue of Theatre Topics; here, Abel tackles many issues of immediate relevance for educators concerned with Gay and Lesbian Drama—canonization, recovery of "gay" texts, balancing gay men with lesbians when forming syllabi—but never deals with gay reception. This essay will, I hope, provide a first step in that direction. I would like to turn now to Terrence McNally's Lisbon Traviata (1986), a play more or less about opera queens, to show how gay male address may be encoded within the play's narrative and, as a result, the gay spectator's reception may be uniquely affected. I would suggest that there...