Playing the Field

"In society the homosexual's life must be discreetly concealed. As material for drama, that life must be even more intensely concealed. If [a homosexual playwright] is to write of his experience, he must invent a two-sex version of the one-sex experience that he really knows."

Though many realized that Stanley Kauffmann was writing about Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and William Inge when he brandished those controversial words in the New York Times, he didn't dare cite the playwrights by name. The year was 1966, and to paraphrase the opening lines of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, we all did things somewhat differently back then.

Of course, Kauffmann had no idea that a landmark gay drama called The Boys in the Band would open Off Broadway in only two years, and help spark a gay revolution the following summer. And like the theater itself, we've come a long way in the intervening decades. The voice that dared not speak its name has been shouting ever since, not least in the theater, where the countless openly gay plays that followed The Boys in the Band have continued to fuel the gay movement, while tracing its trajectory.

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