Gay and Lesbian Theater Analysis

In the first twenty-five years of the 1900’s, Britain and the United States were shaking loose from the moral strictures that had pervaded and inhibited public life during the long reign of Great Britain’s Queen Victoria, who was monarch from 1837 until her death in 1901. In the United States, an increasing bohemianism was sweeping avant-garde artistic circles. In New York, this bohemianism was centered in Greenwich Village and in Harlem, where the Harlem Renaissance was taking shape.

A tolerance for sexual freedom began to replace the Victorian restraints that had contributed to the downfall of Oscar Wilde toward the end of Victoria’s reign. The Bloomsbury Group , which flourished in London, was peppered with male homosexuals and lesbians, among them some of the most gifted writers, artists, and intellectuals of that period.

The plays of Noël Coward, particularly The Vortex (pr. 1924) and Design for Living (pr. 1933)—while they did not deal explicitly with homosexuality—skated close to the edge in implying the subject in ways that homosexuals in Coward’s audiences could scarcely miss. Among straight people, his naughtiness passed as “high camp” rather than out-and-out homosexuality. Throughout Coward’s career, his plays were peppered with homosexual lyrics, such as “Mad About the Boy” in Words and Music (pr. 1932) and “Matelot” in the revue Sigh No More (pr. 1945). British...

Early twentieth century society was somewhat more accepting of lesbianism than it was of male homosexuality. Closeness between two women was not considered unusual. Nevertheless, the subject was clearly controversial and probably resulted in Lillian Hellman’s not receiving the 1935 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for The Children’s Hour (pr. 1934), which is generally conceded to be her best play. Because only one Pulitzer Prize in Drama can be awarded in a given year, the Pulitzer drama jury, which had several excellent plays to choose from in 1935, sidestepped the issue and awarded the 1935 prize to Zoë Atkins for The Old Maid (pr. 1934).

The Children’s Hour focuses on two teachers, Karen and Martha, who have been close since college. They teach together in a school, where Mary, an emotionally disturbed student, accuses the two of having an “indecent” relationship. Karen, having a deep and genuine concern for Mary, recognizes her emotional problems. In the end, it is proved that the girl’s accusations are false, but the veil of suspicion that has descended upon the two teachers has utterly destroyed them. The thorny ethical questions with which the play deals are compelling, but the taint of lesbianism made the play a controversial offering in its time and resulted in its being banned in Britain, although it was performed on Broadway in the United States.

Predating The Children’s Hour by fifteen...

Much of the prominent drama between the 1920’s and the 1960’s made veiled allusions to homosexuality but dealt with latency rather than with the overtly homosexual characters that were to occur in later plays. In The Unknown (pr. 1920), W. Somerset Maugham speaks lovingly of a friend lost in the war, but this sort of love more nearly reflects veneration than homosexuality. J. R. Ackerley in The Prisoners of War (pr. 1925), set in an internment camp in Switzerland, presents Conrad, whose complicated emotions are almost certainly linked to homosexuality. However, this is not the story of a love affair between two men. It is an account of the emotions that Conrad feels for the handsome young Grayle, who, presumably having no sexual interest in Conrad, shuns him.

Eugene O’Neill ’s plays were notably devoid of gay characters, although in Strange Interlude (pr. 1928), the presentation of Charles Marsden, a confirmed bachelor, suggests he might be gay. Likewise, in Ah, Wilderness! (pr. 1933), young Richard is extremely sensitive and is given to voluminous reading in works not only by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw but also by Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, suggesting at least his exposure to and interest in gay elements in what he chooses to read.

Much more directly homosexual were Coward’s Post Mortem (pb. 1931), which, significantly, was not produced, and Keith Winter’s The Rats of Norway (pr. 1933), which is set in an isolated boys’ school in Northumbria, where Chetwood, one of the masters, is obviously gay and notably effeminate. The play, however, does not center on him so much as it focuses on Stevan, a new teacher in the school, who treats Chetwood badly, presumably because of his obviousness, and falls in love with a female colleague.

Among the most sensitive pre-Stonewall plays that deal with homosexuality is Robert Anderson ’s Tea and Sympathy (pr. 1953). This play deals with latency rather than with any fully developed manifestations of homosexuality. A sensitive youth, Tom, the play’s protagonist, is a student at a boys’ boarding school. He has twice played female roles in the school’s dramatic productions. Now gossip is swirling around him because he was seen bathing nude with one of the school’s junior masters, who is thought to be gay. His housemaster, Bill, calls him to account for this, but Bill’s wife, Laura, in an attempt to help Tom prove to himself that he is “normal,” has sex with him. She also quite presciently speculates that her husband’s homophobia probably stems from fears about his own sexual identity.

In Tea and Sympathy, as in many of the plays of this period, homosexuality is presented as an abnormality but as...

No single element affected contemporary gay drama as much as the onset of the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) epidemic in the early 1980’s. This widespread illness that claimed the lives of so many gay men became the stuff of which compelling drama had to be made. Perhaps no American playwright approached the topic more effectively than Tony Kushner in his pair of plays, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part One: Millennium Approaches), first produced in 1991, and Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part Two: Perestroika), produced in 1992. These plays reached wide audiences throughout the Western world and served to enlighten straight society...