Gay Theatre A Microcosm Of The Contemporary Homosexual...

Gay Theatre: A Microcosm of the Contemporary Homosexual Landscape When you hear the term ‘gay theatre’ the first thought that may come to mind is that it describes theatre written for and by homosexuals. If this is true, then before the decriminalization of male homosexual sex in 1967, there was no ‘gay theatre’ in existence due to the political and social landscape of that time. Spanning as far back as Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, themes of homosexuality have been rampant within theatrical content, but because theatre always reflects the social conditions of its time period, the theatre’s behavior toward homosexuality was a microcosm of its contemporary governing attitudes. Before the 1960s, theatre was subject to†¦show more content†¦In the 1920s, being gay in the United States and Great Britain was a crime, illness, and a sin, and it was depicted, as such, on the stage. In much of the theatrical content of the time, the homosexual character was portrayed as very effeminate, pitiful an d sinister. In 1737, an act of Parliament in Britain orchestrated that all licensing and censorship of plays were to be subject to the transgression of the Lord Chamberlain, and similarly in New York, stage legislature outlawed anything that dealt with ‘sexual perversion’. Because of this, homosexuality was not even discussed outwardly on stage until 1958. With this censorship in place, theatre had to be very oblique when dealing with homosexual content. For example, in 1924, Noel Coward’s play The Vortex included a character with an intense cocaine habit that was a metaphor for his repressed homosexuality. Even in metaphor, we are given a very dark, self-loathing view of homosexually that is most likely a product of Coward’s own existence as a closeted homosexual. Oscar Wilde, the most famously homosexual playwright of the time, never wrote a single gay character, but instead expressed his sexual deviance through other kinds of social relations with in his writing. Critics have said A Picture of