The Party’s Over
Recounting the Past in American AIDS Plays
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2023.i27.7Palabras clave:
aids, sexual culture, obituary plays, memory plays, Jerker, Tell, intimaciesResumen
ABSTRACT: This article discusses the use of the past in regard to the gay sexual culture of the 1970s in three AIDS plays: Robert Chesley’s Jerker (1986), Victor Bumbalo’s Tell (1993) and Michael Kearns’s intimacies (1989). The themes explored—celebrating the sexual freedom of the past against contemporary criticism, commemorating places where gay men could meet for sexual encounters, and a sex continuum joining the busy nightlife of the past to the stern “here and now” of AIDS—stem from memory. Sex is only possible as a past activity and narrated as such in these plays, making them at the same time “obituary plays,” because they mourn sexual culture along with specific people, but also “memory plays,” because the memory that permeates them also omits some details, all the while magnifying others, in ways different from the plays of Tennessee Williams, who invented the term.
Descargas
Métricas
Citas
BUMBALO, Victor. “Tell.” Gay and Lesbian Plays Today, edited by Terry Helbing, Heinemann, 1993, pp. 213-234.
CHESLEY, Robert. “Dog Plays.” Hard Plays/Stiff Parts: The Homoerotic Plays of Robert Chesley. Alamo Square Press, 1990, pp. 121-157.
—-. “Jerker or the Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of Them Dirty.” Hard Plays/Stiff Parts: The Homoerotic Plays of Robert Chesley. Alamo Square Press, 1990, pp. 71-118.
—-. “Night Sweat.” Hard Plays/Stiff Parts: The Homoerotic Plays of Robert Chesley. Alamo Square Press, 1990, pp. 9-69.
CLUM, John M.. Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
FIERSTEIN, Harvey. Safe Sex. Atheneum, 1987.
FOUCAULT, Michel. “Michel Foucault, une interview : sexe, pouvoir et la politique de l’identité.” Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988. Gallimard, 2001, pp. 1554-1565.
GIBSON, Chris. “Cowboy Masculinities: Relationally and Rural Identity.” Masculinities and Place, edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Peter Hopkins, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 125-139.
HOFFMAN, William M. As Is. Dramatists Play Service, 1990.
KEARNS, Michael. “intimacies/more intimacies.” Gay and Lesbian Plays Today, edited by Terry Helbing, Heinemann, 1993, pp. 237-269.
KONDOLEON, Harry. “Zero Positive.” The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis, edited by M. Elizabeth Osborn, Theatre Communications Group, 1990, pp. 205-279.
KRAMER, Larry. “The Normal Heart.” The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me. Grove Press, 2000, pp. 1-118.
KUSHNER, Tony. “Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika.” Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Theatre Communications Group, 2003, pp. 126-280.
MOORE, Patrick. Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality. Beacon Press, 2004.
NANCY, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney. Minnesota UP, 1991.
ROMÁN, David. Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture and AIDS. Indiana UP, 1998.
RUDNICK, Paul. Jeffrey. Dramatists Play Service, 1995.
SAVRAN, David. “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How ‘Angels in America’ Reconstructs the Nation.” Theatre Journal vol. 47, no. 2, 1995, pp. 207-227.
SAROTTE, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin, translated by Richard Miller. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978.
SHILTS, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic. 1987. Souvenir Press, 2011.
SINFIELD, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. Yale UP, 1999.
WILLIAMS, Tennessee. “The Glass Menagerie.” Plays 1937-1955, edited by Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch, Library of America, 2000, pp. 393-465.
Descargas
Publicado
Cómo citar
Número
Sección
Aceptado 2023-11-09
Publicado 2023-12-20
- Resumen 69
- pdf (English) 104
