Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1988

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Lorraine S. Burghardt

Committee Members

William H. Shurr, Charles J. Maland, Albert J. Harris

Abstract

Prior to the 1960's, American drama's treatment of homosexuality was marked by evasion and condemnation. Most homosexual characters in serious drama, beginning with Henry Blake Fuller's At St. Judas'(1896) and continuing through plays by Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, and others, died or rejected their homosexuality before the final curtain. Beginning in the 1960's, most notably with Lanford Wilson's The Madness of Lady Bright (1964), however, several plays have portrayed gay men in a more positive light.

The gay drama movement has been linked, in some ways, with the emergence of the gay rights movement, and dramatic developments have frequently paralleled sociopolitical changes. In the tumultuous political atmosphere of the later sixties and early seventies, gay dramatists questioned the place of politics in art. American gays developed a minority culture during the late seventies and early eighties, at the same time as they were achieving increased acceptance within the larger society. During this period, some playwrights, such as Doric Wilson and Richard Hall, chose to write for specifically gay audiences while others, like Harvey Fierstein and Martin Sherman, brought gay drama to mainstream audiences. The plays of the former -IV- assumed a common field of knowledge and interest among their readers that the others could not; all of these plays, however, are gay in that they speak from a gay central consciousness on gay issues, unlike plays such as David Rate's Streamers (1976), which examines homosexuality from a heterosexual perspective, or Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July (1978), which contains gay central characters but does not explore their being gay.

The sociopolitical event which has had the greatest impact on gay drama has been the AIDS crisis. Several plays about AIDS have appeared, and, for a while, even an established playwright, Eric Bentley, was unable to publish a gay play which did not mention the disease. Some AIDS plays have treated sociopolitical implications of the crisis, while at least one, Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex, has used the disease as a metaphor. The future of gay drama is unknowable, but the continued influence of AIDS and related sociopolitical concerns seems certain.

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