Staging Gay Lives

An Anthology Of Contemporary Gay Theater

John M Clum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429976834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A collection of ten contemporary plays, by writers who reflect a range of cultural origins, about male homosexuality.

The Harvey Milk Show

DAN ΡRUIΤT AND PATRICK HUTCHISON

Editor's Introduction

AS OPENLY GAY CULTURE has emerged in the past century, it has, like all cultures developed a history and a mythology codifying centuries of oppression and resistance. As the riots around the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969 have become our Boston Tea Party, so Harvey Milk has become our Martin Luther King, our hero-martyr. Milk's life and murder have been recounted in print in the late Randy Shilts's superb history The Mayor of Castro Street, which was turned into a gripping film documentary. Emily Mann's docudrama The Execution of Justice which focuses on the trial of Dan White for the murder of Harvey Milk, has been performed all over America. In 1995 an opera titled Harvey Milk was performed by the Houston, New York City, and San Francisco Operas.

Milk's life and death sum up the 1960s and gay liberation. A successful New York stockbroker drops out and moves to San Francisco to live the gay life. He is the first openly gay person to be elected to the San Francisco City Council. He and George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, are murdered by disgruntled excouncilman Dan White. White receives a ridiculous seven-year jail sentence for his double murder, and the gay community of San Francisco, enraged at the injustice and the homophobia underlying the verdict, goes on a rampage. The story remains horribly relevant as verbal and physical gay-bashing is still authorized by the powers that be and the radical Christian Right continues to use homophobia as a way to keep its flock in line and take their minds off more pertinent issues.

As Harvey Milk is in one sense a story of San Francisco and the 1960s and in another, figurative sense, the story of all gay men in America, so The Harvey Milk Show is the story of theater in Atlanta and also the story of gay theater in America in the 1990s. Writer-lyricist Dan Pruitt and composer Patrick Hutchison put together a little revue that had some success in Atlanta and then decided to try a book musical on Harvey Milk. Young Chris Coleman, an ambitious actor-director-impressario who had begun a small theater called Actor's Express, decided to mount The Harvey Milk Show in his theater, which was tucked away in a group of warehouses near Atlanta's bohemian Little Five Points. The production was a smash hit and put Actor's Express on the map. The next season Actor's Express doubled its seating capacity and revived the production for another successful three-month run. The Harvey Milk Show will be remounted in a larger, more elaborate production for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, an irony and a bit of a victory after the official gay-bashing in neighboring Cobb County. The story of Actor's Express and The Harvey Milk Show demonstrates how hungry gay audiences are for work about them and how a theater can flourish by being adventurous enough to offer new, gay work. The repertoire of Actor's Express ranges from the Greeks to the present. It is not a gay theater, but it now has a devoted gay audience.

One reason for gay mythology and gay theater is to create a sense of solidarity in their audience by recounting a common history, articulating common problems, and galvanizing the audience to continued unification and resistance. Another is to educate nongays so that they understand their complicity in gay problems and cooperate in their solution. Gay theater also shows nongays that gays will not go away. This can be done only by a popular theater that bridges gay and straight audiences. The Harvey Milk Show achieves all this. It may not play as well in places more cynical than Atlanta, but there it has served important artistic and political functions. The Harvey Milk Show demonstrates another important aspect of contemporary American theater, straight or gay: There is no longer a New York-based American theater. As this collection attests, theater, straight or gay, is everywhere, from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Durham, North Carolina.

The Harvey Milk Show is, as writer Dan Pruitt puts it, "a southern boy's version of the story." Pruitt and Hutchison take liberties with history (so did Shakespeare). Their version of Harvey Milk's life and death is partly a history of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, partly a love story. The central character is Jamey, a young man from East Texas who has been thrown out of his home for being gay and has come to San Francisco, where he ekes out a life as a cowboy hustler. After he has been bashed, he is taken in by Harvey Milk and becomes Sancho Panza to Harvey's Don Quixote. Jamey is motivated by his love for Harvey; Harvey, by his sense of the Tightness of his cause. After Harvey is killed, Jamey moves from rage and self-destructive behavior to a dedication to constructive action. Harvey's Christlike postdeath appearance to Jamey reminds the young man that there's "so very, very much left undone."

The relationship of Harvey and Jamey is the spine of the musical, the fictional bridge of historical past and its continuing pertinence. It is one of a number of effective theatrical devices, including Mr. Jones, the nemesis who represents all the people who oppose Harvey (even Anita Bryant), and the Milk Duds, a trio of multiracial gay men who are a combination of Greek chorus and backup singers.

In recounting in unabashedly romantic fashion the history of a gay martyr, The Harvey Milk Show offers its audience an almost religious experience, from the angry chorus at the candlelight vigil, to the Christlike reappearance of Harvey to his disciple, Jamey, in the Epilogue. Yet it is this old-time religious quality that made this musical of a 1960s San Francisco politician written by a small town boy from South Carolina into a smash hit in the gayest and most gay-friendly city in the South.

Authors' Introduction

"The wolves, Harve—they just keep acomin'."

—Jamey, Epilogue, The Harvey Milk Show

We first started writing together in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan was in office, and some new "gay disease" was a whispered threat on the horizon of the gay community. We wrote songs to keep our spirits up. We wrote to write about our lives, to remind ourselves...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• The Harvey Milk Show
• What's Wrong with Angry?
• Randy's House
• Mean Tears
• A Madhouse in Goa
• Kissing Marianne
• Dark Fruit
• Porcelain
• Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown
• In the Heart of America
• About the Book and Editor