I hear it from my students, my audiences, my colleagues, and my friends: give us queer joy! Give us queer narratives that transcend the typical tragedies of historical queer dramas! Give us queer plays without suicide, without AIDS-related death, without concentration camps, without bashing, without familial rejection. Give us unadulterated joy!
My feelings on these demands are mixed.
In an article I wrote for HowlRound last year, I explored from my perspective as a theatre professor how juxtaposing queer theatre history as either traumatic or joyful, with no room for queer storytelling outside of that binary, is pedagogically limiting. Attempting to infuse my queer theatre history syllabus with manifestations of queer joy while honoring the reality that queer people’s lives have been disproportionately traumatic was a nuanced and complicated endeavor. The students and I agreed at the end of that semester that a contemporary queer imagination must think beyond the binary of “joyful/traumatic” and embrace queer theatremakers like Harvey Fierstein, George C. Wolfe, and the Five Lesbian Brothers who created liminal spaces where the lived reality of queer trauma could be metabolized into joy in plays like Torch Song Trilogy, Angels in America, and The Secretaries.
Teaching queer theatre history helped me answer the question “Can the process of reckoning with the legacy of queer trauma in a classroom be joyful in and of itself?” with a resounding, “Yes! Yes, it can!” As the semester of teaching gave way to a research sabbatical, I longed to channel the energy I’d found with my students towards a manifestable project with professional colleagues. It wasn’t enough to know that metabolizing historical queer trauma into queer joy was possible; I wanted to make more of that joy! I wanted to channel the ethos of my homespun, low-fi queer ancestors who made theatre at Caffe Cino and TOSOS theatre: low-budget, community affairs that amplified queer voices with limited resources.
The hard reality of our time, though, is that income stratification, soaring costs, and disappearing performance spaces make these kinds of frugal productions in New York City much more challenging than they were in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, when queer Off-Off-Broadway flourished in basement theatres, makeshift spaces, and leather bars. Today, even the barest bones of productions require huge capitalizations (and the inevitable GoFundMe that comes with it). So again, I turned to the lessons of our queer predecessors like María Irene Fornés and Paula Vogel: focus on process, prioritize learning, and centralize community.
Starting in February of 2024, with the support of the Drama League’s low-cost studio rental for alumni and a grant from Skidmore College, I began exploring the liminal space between queer trauma and queer joy by leading a series of roundtable readings of queer plays from the last half of the twentieth century. My goal was to explore the possibilities and complications that arose when we read period plays—some of which might be considered “lost”—out loud, together, in the same room. I invited friends and colleagues, brought some baked goods and coffee, and encouraged the actors to “go before you know” to make big, bold choices. We did not shy away from the more traumatic elements of some of these plays. We also didn’t hide from the ways in which some of their depictions of race, ethnicity, and gender are what my students would call “problematic” today. We read them out loud without an audience in the hope of learning more about our shared queer history.
A canon of underappreciated plays from the second half of the twentieth century catalyzed queer community building. Their productions were places where queers not privileged with “outness” could find each other at performances, at the bar after the show, or even in rehearsal. These plays, often (though not always) sex farces or low-brow comedies, echo in strange, fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes upsetting ways in our contemporary queer society. Queer playwrights like Miguel Piñero, Robert Patrick, Jerry Douglas, Jane Chambers, and their contemporaries allowed not only queer expression in their moment, but also provided a model of “outness” that was rarely found in pop culture.
The earlier plays are often depressing from our contemporary lens. Many of them—even the comedies—reinforce outdated queer tropes of suicidality, sexual exploitation, self-loathing, overt racism, and the inevitable mental and emotional anguish that defined queerness in their time. They also reveal the schisms between gay and lesbian communities pre-epidemic, and the ways in which the strictures of the gender binary made it difficult for cisgender queer playwrights to respectfully draw trans and genderqueer characters—even when they were writing depictions of some of their closest friends.
