Not in Front of the Audience

Homosexuality On Stage

Nicholas de Jongh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1992
• eBook ISBN: 9781134967292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Not in Front of the Audience is a pioneering and important study of a neglected terrain, examining the way in which the theatres of London and New York have reflected contemporary social and cultural attitudes to 'gay men' and homosexuality.In the 1920s and 1930s the theatre represented homosexuals as either corrupt, or morally pitiful. During the Cold War, under the influence of McCarthyism, homosexuality was perceived as not only morally reprehensible but also politically dangerous and the theatre dutifully reflected such perceptions. Until 1958, direct discussion or depiction of homosexuality was banned from the stage in Britain. But by the late 1960s the theatres of London and New York had begun to confront the issue of heterosexual prejudice and its devastating impact upon the lives of gay men and lesbians. In the wake of the AIDS epidemic, the author concludes, the representation of homosexuality in the theatre has again become an urgent and highly charged issue.

1
FROM THE PLAYHOUSE TO THE OLD BAILEY

INTRODUCTION

A young man, ostensibly in search of a cure for his addiction to drugs, breaks down in a doctor’s consulting room. High on guilt and shame, he confesses that he is really a victim of homosexual desires which he cannot control. ‘I’m one of those damned creatures who are called degenerates and moral lepers for a thing they cannot help,’ he helpfully explains.¹ An affected, middle-aged bachelor dons a pair of gardening gloves to arrange a bouquet of irises and tulips in a vase.² A long-haired, sensitive 18-year-old schoolboy, who acts female roles in the school plays and is nicknamed ‘Grace’, attempts suicide with a kitchen knife, after failing to rise to the challenge posed by the local prostitute.³ A colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army, who has been blackmailed to spy for the enemy, drags his boy-friend out of bed and warns the young man that he has nothing to look forward to except a future of ‘dyed, whispy hair …disease…rolling thighs and a big bottom’.⁴ A ‘shamefully beautiful’, young man lies happily in bed in the arms of his older lover.⁵ An enraged, middle-aged man demands that the homosexuals of New York fight for recognition of and pride in a’gay culture that isn’t just sexual. Being defined by our cocks is literally killing us,’ he shouts.⁶

We are considering revelatory scenes and images. An enormous gulf separates the first, taken from a 1927 play written by that early camp sex-symbol, Mae West, and banned before it reached Broadway, and the last, from Larry Kramer’s theatrical polemic about AIDS, The Normal Heart (Plate 8), which succeeded on both sides of the Atlantic. Within this period a process of social change takes place which helps transform the nineteenth-century form of theatre bequeathed to the twentieth. This change is most dramatic and negotiated at speed; the theatrical images to which I refer are symptoms, although small ones, of this process. In these sixty years, negative myths—those traditional notions of what homosexuality entailed and the ways in which it was represented on stage—were challenged, discredited and lost much of their authority. Medical, religious and social injunctions, anathematising and repressing homosexuals, were losing their potency. The stage reflected these changes.

In 1925, where this book begins, homosexuality was, in Britain and America, sin, crime and illness. Homosexuals were pariahs and outcasts, scarcely fit to be depicted upon the stage. The slang, the jargon, by which they were described—‘queens’ and ‘queers’, ‘fairies’ and ‘faggots’, ‘poofs’, ‘pansies’ and ‘puffs’, ‘sissies’ to a man—echoed from the real world on to the stage. But there was no consistent interpretation of what supposed threat the homosexual was thought to pose to the heterosexual male. He might be depicted on stage as the epitome of effeminacy, an object of scorn and contempt. He was also reckoned a sinister and potent agent of the devil, a proselytiser, who encouraged young men to that dangerous addiction, homosexuality. The homosexual as he emerged in theatrical form was therefore pathetic, introjecting society’s view of him and succumbing to guilt and self-pity. He was also threatening. By 1985, when The Normal Heart was seen, homosexuals were still depicted as unorthodox, subjected to the stress that may be induced when your sexuality causes problems of self-acceptance. But homosexuality was no longer regarded as illness or disease, and not inevitably as crime.

This book is a survey of the change as refracted, principally, through the commercial theatre of London and New York. It is a partial and limited account, since it deals with male homosexuality and not with lesbianism, which deserves and merits independent scrutiny. It seeks to trace the way in which a monolithic, commercial theatre, redolent of orthodoxy and conservatism, came to mirror the new attitudes to homosexuality. Not until the 1960s did this theatre begin to be affected by the theatrical revolution of the 1950s, which broke out at the Royal Court in the London of 1956, and whose social, political and aesthetic values were affected by Bertolt Brecht and a new generation of European writers: John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, a tirade and battle-cry on behalf of a new generation, set the new wave pounding against the old theatrical order. New York’s off-off-Broadway theatre, created in the later 1950s, in lofts and studios, was partially influenced by the Royal Court’s example.

The principal plays, with which I deal, have an identifying theme in common. They describe situations and pose moral dilemmas where homosexual desire, whether latent or manifest, precipitates a crisis. Until the 1960s they tend to be plays of orthodoxy and conformity. They reflect the myths and assumptions by which homosexuality was defined and derogated. There is usually a tension between the unorthodox desire and the orthodoxy which the dramatist endorses. The homosexual character is seen as a man in revolt from family, from marriage, from the approved fixtures and fittings of life.

In the period 1925–58, since homosexuality is reckoned the archetype of evil, the triumphalism of the Christian ethic, so beloved of the commercial theatre, is ensured. Suicide, alcoholism, murder, mental breakdown, death, imprisonment, ostracism, blackmail or mere misery are the ends to which homosexuals are brought at a play’s lysis. Most of the protagonists are victims of negative emotions engendered by shame, fear, guilt, bewilderment, depression or hysteria. Since in this thirty-three-year period depiction of homosexuals on stage was prohibited, dramatists, directors and actors collaborated to fashion a homosexual iconography, a series of signifiers and codes that corroborate what the play texts could only imply. Since the stereotype of homosexuality was generally reckoned to be synonymous with effeminacy, a series of signs and words alerted audiences to a character’s true sexuality. The homosexual character might be signified by appearance, manner, diction and behaviour. These signifiers would all be aspects of effeminacy or femininity, the polar opposite of the archetypal masculine. So the homosexual character on stage would usually be slim, slender or willowy, not broad, athletic or powerful. He would have paid exaggerated attention to his clothes. In the 1920s, in particular, the over-dressed man was synonymous with the homosexual, and his concern with how he looked would be taken as a sign of narcissism, which was supposed to be a signifier of homosexuality.

In manner the character would manifest significant signs which in a woman would be admired. He would be gentle or poetic, nervous and artistic, emotional and loquacious. His diction, rather than his deportment, would be camp, which in Susan Sontag’s appealing definition was founded upon ‘love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration, something of a private code, a badge of identity’.⁷

Oscar Wilde’s verbal camping enabled him to subject the world to the discipline of his transforming skills, to hold authentic emotion at an arm’s length, to exalt style (though not at content’s expense), to outlaw spontaneity. And in plays of the period camp speech, camp design, camp costume became in their mannered, consciously wrought extravagances a mode of dissociation from the conventional and mundane.

In this period the homosexual characters, smuggled on stage with the light camouflage of innuendo, circumlocution, and allusion, would be tellingly ranged against various celebrations of an idealised male archetype: the authoritative and unemotional male, who was liable to be athletic, muscular, clean-cut. The male theatrical stars of the popular and classical theatre were variants on this type: Gerald du Maurier and Ronald Squire, on the West End stage of the 1920s, epitomised the suave and sophisticated, without ever decking themselves in camp. John Gielgud broke the supremacy of these actors within the decade. But his personality and his style—the temperament bowed by overwhelming emotion, the body stiffly slim, elegant—were reckoned suitably in the service of Shakespearean heroes who could be written down as neurotics. And Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Michael Redgrave, in the 1930s, reaffirmed the salience of the male archetype, both on stage and on screen. In America a similar pattern was apparent.

The commercial theatre responded to the incitements of the Cold War and to McCarthyism. Senator McCarthy was notoriously influential in urging that the Communist and homosexual alike were potential spies and traitors.⁸ They were invisible betrayers. The homosexual was no longer defined in terms of the pre-war stereotype. He might pass as heterosexual. And in the mid-1950s the highly popular Tea and Sympathy on Broadway and Serious Charge in London are typifying plays. They respond to the new alarums by dealing with the growing pains of the heterosexual, who is accused of homosexuality on the basis of circumstantial evidence and suffers mightily, before being reaffirmed in the ranks of the sexual majority. These plays seemed to provide a critique of McCarthyism but they did little to contradict the idea that it was wrong to subject homosexuals to the persecution meted out to falsely accused heterosexuals.

In the later Cold War phase, between 1958 and 1967, before the veto upon portraying homosexuals on stage was lifted, the theatre began to be affected by the shock of the new. It was subject to structural change, to the transforming vitality of new-wave playwrights who both appealed to a new generation and wished to give the theatre a social and political function it lacked. Plays about homosexuality no longer accepted the notion of the homosexual as archetypically evil or dangerous. As the first tentative steps towards gay identity and community were taken, the stage began to depict the homosexual as the model of the pathetic-unfortunate.

In the final period, between 1968 and 1985, plays about homosexuality changed utterly. The negative myths, by which homosexuals were judged, began to be eroded. Gay dramatists and gay or gay-sympathising actors were reluctant to represent homosexuals in terms of the old stereotypes. The major plays began to recover or reconstruct history from a new perspective—to consider the damage done, the destruction caused by the persecutions meted out to homosexuals. The gay hero was born, just as a gay theatre, created by gay writers, companies and audiences, was being sought both in America and in Britain. And in the long emergency of the AIDS epidemic, when homosexuality had once more begun to be seen as the archetype of evil and danger, a few rare plays like Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart attempted to impart a radical potential function to the drama.

THE ORIGINS OF HATRED

The theatre, in its depiction of homosexuals, reflected the values and beliefs of the world beyond it. The Judaeo-Christian tradition of characterising sodomy as inherently evil and the cause of social downfall finds its earliest known expression in the biblical curses upon Sodom and Gomorrah. In the England of Henry VIII sodomy, whether practised between two males, or male and female, or with animals, was regarded as a crime against nature, and also a form of debauchery to which anyone might succumb, a potential for wickedness in mankind.⁹ In such theorising may be detected the germs of the Freudian postulate that a bisexual component or potential exists in us all.

The idea of the homosexual as a category of person did not exist. The very word ‘homosexual’ was not created until the late nineteenth century. Acts of buggery were not only regarded as wicked, but thought to inspire divine retribution. As man was a microcosm of the universe, so one man’s sodomitical fall from grace threatened the whole community.¹⁰ The sodomite, diagnosed as a man outside nature’s frame, with no fixed abode in heaven or hell, became one of the plausible scapegoats for catastrophes befalling communities. ‘Famine, plague, flood, and fire’ were ‘acts of God directly provoked by the moral condition of those upon whom they fell’.¹¹ Settlers in the North America of the seventeenth and eighteenth century imported the same theories.

The contemporary gay historian, Arthur Gilbert, has provided an amplifying reason for this fear of buggery. The anal, he suggests, was evil. Hell had been pictured from Dante to Van Eyck as a privy teeming with excrement. Defecation was a symbolic and literal reminder to man of his similarity to animals, of the decaying process to which all living matter was subject after death. Buggery was thus emblematic of an unholy trinity-evil itself, death and bestiality.¹²

While there were religious and cultural reasons for stigmatising sodomy, the process by which the sodomite, and later the homosexual, was demonised or categorised as monstrous still survives. The Jungian theory of Shadow Projection offers an explanation of the psychic system by which we scapegoat. Jung diagnosed humanity’s aggressive and cruel drives as the ‘dark side or shadow of the psyche’. The superego, that complex of coercive agents in the self, ensured that we would observe the controls of our culture and that these drives would usually be repressed in the unconscious. The shadow itself could be regarded as an aspect of our collective nature, though not a clearly articulated archetype. Shadow Projection, the device by which we unconsciously attribute to others those negative characteristics denied or repressed in ourselves, offloads those instincts. The archetype of evil, rather than the individual’s own shadow, is projected upon those we are schooled to fear or regard as our enemies. Contemporary Jungians have argued that Shadow Projection is a motor force for ‘all racist and international prejudice and for our facility for turning opponents into devils. It explains the readiness with which we can convince ourselves that our enemies are not men or women like us, but monsters unworthy of all humane consideration.’ And it is just such Shadow Projection that had helped to depict homosexuals as characters on stage as emblems of the wicked and dangerous.¹³

There are interrelated traditions by which the homosexual came to be characterised as effeminate and the actor ranked as homosexual. The process is subtle. The translators of the 1611 Authorised Version of the Bible rendered the Greek word ‘which could be associated with homosexuality’ as ‘effeminate’. Effeminacy had no specific association with sodomy. The figure of the perfumed Elizabethan city gallant, elegantly attired in expensive clothes, who appeared in late-sixteenth-century satires, could be transported to the stage of London in 1929, where he would be naturally accepted as a contemporary stereotype of the homosexual. But for the Elizabethans effeminacy was redolent of a generalised debauchery and of ‘luxurious living’.¹⁴

The London playhouse of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period was branded as ‘a prelude to the brothel’. The theatre and the bawdy house were liable to be in close proximity; the impresario of the stage also functioned as the keeper of the brothel. The Curtain theatre, opened in 1576, was within three years being described as a pulling parlour for ‘every knave and his quean’.¹⁵ In Puritan eyes and minds the drama was an incitement to fornication and adultery, and often led to the horrors of sexually transmitted disease.

But there was a more specific accusation made against the playhouses and the actors performing in them. And the charges were not only levelled by Puritans. Theatres were condemned as the haunts of the sodomite—the sodomite defined quite literally as a passionate theatre-goer ‘who is at every play and every night sups with his ingles [catamites]’.¹⁶ Phillip Stubbes, the fierce Puritan, even characterised the playhouse as an almost exclusive resort for males seeking out males for sexual purposes: ‘Everyone brings another homeward of their way, very friendly, and in their secret conclaves covertly they play the Sodomites or worse’.¹⁷ The actor, engaged in an occupation which had scant respectability, was reckoned likely to be engaged in a relationship with his patron which today would be understood in terms of homosexual prostitution. The tradition characterising the theatre as immoral, and its players liable to be sexual outlaws, endured. Clement Scott, the late-Victorian critic, suggested it was ‘nearly impossible for a woman to remain pure’ once she put a foot upon the stage.¹⁸ And when, in 1990, Britain’s mass-circulation newspapers stirred a malicious controversy about the sexuality of the monarch’s youngest son, they suggested that the theatrical circles in which he worked were predominantly homosexual.¹⁹

By the end of the seventeenth century the molly houses of London were attracting a clientele who were males sexually attracted to males.²⁰ They were clearly effeminate in a sense which would, in the twentieth century, be regarded as stereotypically homosexual. ‘They rather fancy themselves women, imitating all the little vanities that custom has reconciled to the female sex.’ At the drag ball at the molly house the men ‘were a mixture of wanton males and females, assuming effeminate voices and airs… their faces patched and painted…’.²¹

It looks as if, at a time before the word ‘homosexual’ even existed, there was beginning to exist what we would term a nascent homosexual subculture and identity. These people were defined according to their ‘ways of dressing, of talking, distinctive gestures and distinctive acts’.²² They were categorised (or could be) by that way of identifying and assigning to a category on the basis of a series of behaviourial signs—the stereotype.

This stereotype was elaborated and refined. In the eighteenth century effeminacy, a lack of physical strength and, sometimes though not invariably, a dandy-like attention to costume and appearance, were taken as symptoms of the male attracted erotically to males. The late-Victorians, when the medical profession was beginning its categorising business, used the new word ‘homosexual’ and rated it as illness and disease, a threat to that fount of respectability and uniformity, the family unit, which in its working-class and petit-bourgeois form was reckoned the suitable vehicle for maintaining the labour force, harnessed to burgeoning capitalistic enterprise.²³

The three trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 gave great and lurid public manifestation to what fresh statutory legislation and medical stipulation regarded as the increasingly prevalent vice of homosexuality. When he arrived at the Old Bailey for a date that hubris had arranged, Wilde was artistry and fame writ both large and flamboyant. He had flouted convention, and high society had put up with the flouting. Supercilious, disingenuous and lethal in the witness box, he exuded confidence from a great height, only to fall mightily in the end upon a prison sentence. Wilde, aesthete, dandy and hedonist, gave the homosexual a recognisable face. He had been accused of effeminacy in the past; now he was proved to be so. He was the first of the flaunters. Plump, unmuscular, languid, affected and upper-middle-class, though from the alien territory of Ireland, he was the antithesis of the manly virtues, the utter repudiation of the masculine archetype as it was defined. In his public life he had made a bonfire of the masculinities, as freshly celebrated and cultivated by the country’s sporting, adventuring man of action (and sometimes of not too much intellig...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: From the Playhouse to the Old Bailey
• 2: The Deviant, the Damned and the Dandified: 1925–1939
• 3: The Enemy Within: 1949–1958
• 4: Out of Bondage Towards Being: 1958–1969
• 5: ‘Simply the Thing I am Shall Make Me Live’: 1969–1981
• 6: The Return of the Outcast: 1981–1985
• NOTES
• Bibliography