Finding Community and Joy in Sharing Lost Queer Plays

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.

Queer plays from the eighties, nineties, and aughts are often more recognizable; some, like Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, and Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, might even be considered fully canonized. But alongside these known quantities live a cadre of under-appreciated queer plays, from Jim Grimsley’s Mr. Universe to Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Say You Love Satan. These more recent texts illustrate Alan Bennett’s dictum that “there is no period so remote as the recent past,” and offer us as much fodder for discussion as their similarly lost brethren from earlier in the century.

From February until August of 2024, we met six times at the Drama League to read “lost” queer plays, including Martin Sherman’s Passing By, Miguel Piñero’s Irving, Robert Patrick’sT-Shirts, Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, Doric Wilson’s Street Theater, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasas’s Based on a Totally True Story. My intention in scheduling these readings was to learn more about these plays and their place in the queer historical narrative. I knew that gathering actors together to read the plays aloud and discuss them would teach me more about their historical reverberations than simply reading them alone ever could. I gathered the ensembles to see what we would learn about our shared histories. But like any good experiment, our conclusions were far removed from my original question.

These plays reverberated in surprising and meaningful ways, especially when we engaged them with contemporary praxes. Jane Chambers’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, for example, resonated as very much of our moment when cast with a broader spectrum of races, ethnicities, and gender identities than the play had originally imagined. Doric Wilson’s Street Theater led to a conversation about Brecht, anti-capitalism, and pinkwashing. Martin Sherman’s Passing By found us talking about that most ephemeral of queer qualities: sweetness. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Based on a Totally True Story crackled joyously in the room and led to a fascinating discussion of how the decades since Stonewall have and have not changed the centers of power within the queer community. Reading these plays, we found queer joy through the process of delving into our shared histories together as much as we found joy in their content.

The excavation of this lost queer content—even if it is painful content—can actually be a joyful endeavor when we focus on the plays’ stories of queer people grouping together to create communities of mutual aid.

Some of the plays were brutal. T-Shirts and Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, for example, paint historically accurate pictures of queers facing loneliness and isolation. But despite the melancholy these plays elicited, these readings taught me a lesson that expanded what I’d learned with my students about about smashing the joyful/traumatic binary when teaching queer theatre: the excavation of this lost queer content—even if it is painful content—can actually be a joyful endeavor when we focus on the plays’ stories of queer people grouping together to create communities of mutual aid. In reading these plays, we strove to both honor the past and forge a clear path forward. We learned that often these endeavors are in conflict; amplifying the lost voices of our queer ancestors can involve amplifying a version of queerness that doesn’t match our vision for the future. But reading these plays and untangling their complications became an effective exercise in queer community building, especially when these plays were read by a cast that had a more capacious gender, racial, and ethnic identity than the playwrights had originally imagined.

Across the decades, the mechanism of queer resilience remains the same: queer-community building. In these plays, we see a queer constant through time: societies of mutual aid. In Stagestruck, Sarah Schulman explains this as “gay people [building] a world of services, advocacy organizations, and personal relationships.” We created a small, fleeting manifestation of this ethos with our readings. By letting these plays remind us of what we’ve been through as queers, we allowed them to create joy by acknowledging the magnitude of queer liberation that solidarity has created. That solidarity existed on stage in the distant alcove of Bluefish Cove, where lesbians gathered to live authentically. And it existed in the rehearsal rooms and theatres that brought these plays to life in unsafe times. In our small readings, we were able to create that solidarity together by resurfacing and discussing these plays. That united feeling created a joy that overpowered the residual trauma that existed on the page.

We also found in the room that we often disagreed. Irving, a bombastic comedy about a closeted Jewish gay man coming out to his family, read to some as a hilarious satire of punching-up written by a marginalized queer Chicano on parole, while to others it was a messy farce that managed to be little more than antisemitic. T-Shirts, a play about the ways in which elder queers pass culture and knowledge down to younger generations in ways that would today be considered both appropriate and inappropriate, created discomfort amongst the Gen Zs and nostalgia amongst the Gen Xs. Exploring these discrepancies fostered a culture of bonding, not of conflict, within the context of our roundtables. Even in disagreement, we found ourselves filled with gratitude for our queer ancestors who had sacrificed so that we could be together discussing their plays; this sense of appreciation grounded the room in mutual respect and care.

It is important in considering this project to acknowledge that gay white men like me have hegemonized the queer theatre canon since Stonewall. (I would also argue that an even more egregious coopting has come from straight white men who have taken our queer stories and attempted to tell them for us—I’m looking at you, Rent.) As we began this project, I acknowledged that some of these plays, both by white and non-white gay men, offer uncomfortable depictions of race, ethnicity, and gender. One of the initial goals of this project was to evaluate whether this work could be done in a way that aimed to critique this hegemony; the participants bravely endeavored to try, even though we knew that some of these plays might ultimately read as untenable in our time. But again, these plays proved to exist outside of a yes/no binary. Despite its arguably antisemitic gestures, Irving also resonates as unique amongst the work of Piñero, a formerly incarcerated gay Chicano man, because it represents a playwright of color creating space for himself within the historically white locus of the living room comedy. T-Shirts forced everyone in the room to reckon with how sexual harassment, especially between gay men, continues to flourish in our industry today; again, the conversation and the community building that resulted from the reading allowed us to metabolize rather than relive some of the inherent trauma of queerness, creating an even stronger community in the room.

When we metabolize our traumatic queer history into contemporary queer joy, we do more than heal ourselves; we also build a bridge to the future for the queer visionaries yet to emerge.

The creation of queer drama in the United States over the past century has been one in which intersectional, holistic, mutually-aiding queer societies were built when productions were intentional about creating community. Paula Vogel explains this phenomenon in Indecent: “We gather together to sing songs we know and love, to dance, to escape.” This ethos lived historically in Doric Wilson’s The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS) theatre and in the work of Wow Café Theater; more recently, this summer’s reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as a queer ballroom extravaganza showed that this ethos could find oxygen even in commercial contemporary theatre. All these loci, despite their different historical moments, economic scales, and intended audiences, demonstrate that when productions leave space for queer joy, strong communities flourish. In sharing the experience we had this summer communally rediscovering queer history in these roundtable readings, I learned that one doesn’t need an entire theatre company or a first-class production for this sort of community to form and for this joy to grow. Gathering strangers to digest lost queer plays that have been unfairly overlooked creates real queer pride, and even queer joy. When we metabolize our traumatic queer history into contemporary queer joy, we do more than heal ourselves; we also build a bridge to the future for the queer visionaries yet to emerge.