The roots of queer theater are complex and inherently obscure (and I’m no expert in the history). But it’s fair to say that LGBTQ+ communities have faced unequal and unsafe (see: violent) treatment for a long time. And it’s clear that the stage has provided a space to reflect queer issues of the day — though often it’s been a reflection constrained by law. Case in point: During the Pansy Craze of the late 1920s and mid-1930s, which was a period of increased queer visibility in American culture, the controversial movie star Mae West wrote a play called The Drag, which argued for sympathetic treatment of homosexuals. It opened in 1927 at out-of-town venues with the idea that it would eventually make its way to Broadway.
The Drag earned lots of money, but was panned by critics (for being too gay — go figure). And its honest portrayal of the gay underground of the time — lots of partying, lots of drugs — didn’t help. The grim-sounding New York Society for the Suppression of Vice shut down the play two weeks into its run, before it ever hit Broadway. Then they had West arrested. Later that year, NYC passed the “padlock bill” prohibiting homosexual subject matter on the stage. A few years later, the Hays Code of 1934 — a self-imposed set of guidelines for Hollywood studios — banned images of homosexuality on the screen.
That was kind of the beginning of the end. At least, for a while.
Censorship — along with mob violence and Nazism — affected queer storytelling in theater for the rest of the 1930s through the 1960s. But it didn’t quash it. Playwrights like Tennessee Williams continued to write queer stories for the stage despite bans, it’s just that queer characters had to be essentially closeted. Queerness might be implied or coded, but never conspicuous. Anything overt would have to be performed in underground spaces.
One of those figurative “underground” spaces was above ground and in plain sight — a Greenwich Village Off-Off Broadway theater called Caffe Cino, which ended up being the venue for the staging of two notable plays in 1964: Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright and Robert Patrick’s The Haunted Host, both of which stood out because they featured gay characters set in the present time who were openly gay — and defiantly so. These one-act plays were distinctive in a few other ways, according to a 2014 article in The Gay & Lesbian Review: They were written from the point of view of the queer characters, who were the main characters (rather than sidekicks), and fully conscious of their sexuality and gender identity. And the characters didn’t automatically meet a tragic end — a fate for queer characters that, up until very recently, has been a maddening cliche. That’s why, even though its roots can be traced way back, the birth of gay theater — theater by, for and about uncloseted gay people — is often linked to these plays at 1964 Caffe Cino.
I just took you down a rabbit hole! I don’t have the time nor am I qualified to dig into what happened between 1964 and now. Let’s just transport to the present day so I can get to the matter at hand: the Say Gay Plays. This collection of short plays — raw, tender, and often blisteringly funny — explores queer identity through an array of intimate and unexpected stories, some set in our time and some in the past. And not unlike other queer theater throughout the decades, Say Gay Plays were born from and shaped by anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and laws. They were conceived in 2022 after the passage of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which became known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Since then, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has become a thing.
The path for queer theater has never been a straight line. It’s more of a cycle — reflecting the cycles of broader LGBTQ+ movements — with periods of openness and progress followed by backlash and repression.
In 2023, 510 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation were introduced across the country and 75 of those have become law, according to the ACLU. It counted 533 such bills, of which 49 became law, last year. It was within this context that Voyage Theater Company out of New York City commissioned 10 established and emerging playwrights to write short plays on LGBTQ+ themes that would help offer a counternarrative to the rhetoric around the legislation. For example, one piece follows a gay high school teacher navigating the impossible contradictions of a law that forbids him from acknowledging his own husband. Another reimagines a middle school history lesson where long-erased LGBTQ+ figures finally get to tell their own stories. A third follows two childhood best friends — one queer, one not — who reconnect as adults and untangle their past.
The Say Gay Plays catalog, which is provided royalty-free to nonprofits and educational institutions, has inspired several performances (fully produced or as staged readings) across the country, serving as a form of theater activism by providing LGBTQ+ education while also helping local nonprofits raise money. That’s the case in Missoula, too, when the Montana Repertory Theater joins forces with the Western Montana LGBTQ+ Center to produce staged readings of some of the Say Gay Plays (I don’t know which ones, but we’ll find out!).
Anyway, it got me thinking about how the path for queer theater has never been a straight line (pun intended). It’s more of a cycle — reflecting the cycles of broader LGBTQ+ movements — with periods of openness and progress followed by backlash and repression. The Pansy Craze saw an explosion of queer characters on vaudeville stages before a pretty swift backlash forced queer culture underground. But even in that long period of repression between the 1930s and 1960s, queer theater operated in direct defiance of explicit legal bans, produced in secrecy or through coded language, existing in the literal and figurative shadows.
The laws prohibiting homosexuality in theater and film were repealed in 1968, which feels both long ago and like it was yesterday. Either way, queer theater is no longer illegal (for now), but it still exists in a precarious space — one where legal recognition and visibility don’t necessarily equate to full safety or acceptance.
Despite the precariousness, queer theater serves as a counterforce to oppression and a space for expression, community, and political defiance. It always has in one way or another. If illegal queer theater of the past was an act of survival in the face of erasure, contemporary queer theater is an act of vigilance. They are really just two sides of the same coin: one covert, one overt, but both insisting on telling stories that those in power would often rather silence.
Say Gay Plays: A Benefit Reading for the Western Montana LGBTQ+ Community Center. Sat., Feb. 1, with doors at 7 PM and staged reading at 7:30 PM @ the Montana Theater in UM’s PARTV Center. $20 suggested, pay what you can. Tickets.
