Gay Plays

THROUGHOUT MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY, homosexuality did not exist. Of course, homosexual acts have always existed-they are found even among animals-but not the idea that there are special human beings inherently attracted to members of their own sex, even when partners of the opposite sex are available. Thirty years ago, Michel Foucault argued in his massive History of Sexuality that "the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology."1 Of course, "sodomy" had previously existed as a sin, and sometimes as a crime, but you became a "sodomite" because you had committed sodomy, rather than the other way around. There was no such thing as being a latent sodomite.

The word "homosexual" was not even coined until 1869, when a German-Hungarian named Kàroly Maria Kertbeny came up with it as an attempt to normalize same-sex love, which he felt was natural and private, and thus should be beyond the interference of law. Following up on an idea in Plato's Symposium, Kertbeny felt that male homosexuals are simply more masculine than ordinary men. Later in the century, sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing turned that around, deciding that homosexuals are more feminine. (For Plato, like seeks like; for us, now, only opposites can attract.) In any event, now, instead of being a sin (or, for more conservative thinkers, in addition to it), homosexuality is a state of being, an aberration or an affliction rather than an action.

Since the 1920s, American playwrights have created a number of plays dealing with homosexuality. Until late in the century, however, the gay characters were usually a variation on the Romantic notion of the sensitive, suffering artist. The plays were appeals for tolerance. Misunderstood and despised-sometimes even by himself, as with Brick Pollitt in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-the homosexual had to come to grips with an excruciating problem, so that homosexuality became a metaphor for self-knowledge, a growing awareness of the weaknesses and mortality that we all have. The gay characters were presented as suffering from an affliction, or if not, at least as being pitiably different. They ended up miserable and even suicidal, like the lesbian in Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), or Blanche Dubois's husband in Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Even Brick Pollitt is drinking himself to death.

Most of these earlier playwrights were heterosexual, although Williams was not. In the last two decades, however, there have been a number of outstanding gay American playwrights who present homosexuality not as a metaphor for something else, but simply as a fact of life. Although these writers bluntly depict the problems of gay life in America (there have been any number of AIDS plays, for example), homosexuality is not depicted as a moral dilemma per se, nor as a weakness or affliction. The best of these, Tony Kushner's matchless Angels in America (1992), does include a latent homosexual, Joe Pitt, who is in the traditional, angst-ridden mode, but rather than kill himself, he comes to terms with his sexuality. The other gay characters, including the outrageous political boss Roy Cohn, simply accept themselves. They are neither to be pitied nor censured.

This past winter in New York, I saw no fewer than five gay plays in four days. In only two was the characters' sexuality presented as an affliction or a moral dilemma, and then only because the characters were pedophiles. (Nor was there any hint of the bogus idea that homosexuals naturally tend to prey on children.) Otherwise, the fact that the principal characters, all males, were attracted to others of their own sex was presented as no big deal, just part of a complex overall makeup in which other psychological forces were usually much more important than sex.

Terrence McNally's latest piece, The Stendhal Syndrome, is actually a pair of one-acts on the theme of the transformational power of art. The title refers to the writer Stendhal having noted that women fainted at the sight of great works of art in Florence. The first play, Full Frontal Nudity, is set in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, where a tour guide is explaining Michelangelo's statue of David to three American tourists. One of them is a retired professor of English, a sensitive soul whose wife and son have both recently died, but the other two are grotesques, out to prove all the stereotypes about the vulgarity of Americans. Staring at the statue, the young man proudly announces, "I've got a bigger dick!" The young woman outdoes him by asking, "How old was David when he posed for Michelangelo?" The two know nothing of art or history, showing interest only in sex, food, and that universal tourists' obsession, the location of the toilets. Yet in the end, the sculpture works its magic; just as the biblical David defeated the ancient Philistines, his statue conquers the modern American philistines. They do not faint, but the art work heightens their attentiveness, and at the same time makes them recall important things in their personal lives. For a moment the food and sex are forgotten, and the toilet jokes get put on hold, while all four experience the power of aesthetic contemplation.