Visions and Revisions by Dale Peck

Author:Dale Peck [Peck, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61695-442-0
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2015-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

11

Tony Kushner, no stranger to Brechtian dialectics, is fighting the same cathartic entropy I mentioned earlier when, at the end of Angels in America, Prior shoos the audience from the theater with the words, “The Great Work Begins.” But of course the great work had already begun when Perestroika, the second part of Angels, premiered in 1992 (in London), and ’93 (New York). The work had begun in the fifties, sixties, and seventies when gay men created a subculture in the shadows and on the margins of the straight world, a limited but libidinous demimonde within whose borders most gay men—which is to say, the mostly white and mostly middle-class gay men who managed to find their way there—were perfectly comfortable. Certainly there was much to love about that world, and much to lament as well, although the latter had more to do with the ways in which the gay minority mimicked the hetero majority’s hierarchies of race, class, beauty, etc., rather than its own (real or enviously imagined) adolescent excesses.

But regardless of its strengths and failures, this world’s continued existence was made untenable by the outbreak of AIDS in 1981, which dragged gay men into the spotlight. No, that’s not quite right: AIDS gave gay men no choice but to step into the spotlight or die in the wings; and in the late eighties, when the gay community recovered its strength and its voice, if not its physical health, the work of building a new culture began. It was, at least marginally, a more diverse group this time around, in terms of race and gender and indeed sexual identity, a time when the word “gay” in many organizations’ names was replaced (although often only nominally) with “gay and lesbian,” then “gay, lesbian, and bisexual,” then “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender,” then “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex,” an all-inclusive mouthful that was increasingly, in everyday speech if not official communications, replaced with “queer” (or with “gay,” although now “gay” was supposed to mean “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex,” and whatever new or as-yet undeclared sexual identity might reveal itself next). But no matter what they called themselves, late eighties’ queers weren’t content with second-class status. Whether they would rattle their cups against the gates of the heterosexual palace and demand, in Bruce Bawer’s puling phrase, “a place at the table,” or carve out a separate but equal sphere was still up for grabs. For a hot minute, in fact, it looked like the Liberian vision would win out, and I’ve often wondered where we would have ended up if combination therapy hadn’t come along, not to mention the tech boom, which lured both the left and right into throwing over their ideals for the sake of easy money. But if, physically, the improvement was immediately apparent, the cultural gains were measured in smaller increments. In, say, a shift in vocabulary: in 1991, for example, when Millennium Approaches premiered and gay men were still railing at newspapers and magazines for not acknowledging the true status of same-sex relationships (c.

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